“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”
This is a prayer which the late Derek Prince prayed during World War II when he was a British soldier in North Africa. At that point in time things looked bleak for the allied forces in Africa. The British army was forced on a 700 mile retreat, the longest retreat in the history of the British army. The stakes were high. Defeat at the British army's final stand near Cairo would open the way for the Nazis to move unhindered through Egypt into Palestine and to gain control of the Holy Land. It would mean certain annihilation of the Jewish community there.
Derek Prince describes the circumstances which led to the retreat, the result of lack of confidence in the leadership causing low morale among the troops in Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting.
If there was ever a time when our nation was in need of prayer for righteous leadership, it is now. I was encouraged by Derek Prince's accounts of three different times when prayer turned circumstances around, resulting in earth-changing victories. The first of the accounts took place at the North African front in World War II. Here it is:
From 1941 to 1943, I served as a hospital attendant with the British forces in North Africa. I was part of a small medical unit that worked with two British armored divisions—the First Armored Division and the Seventh Armored Division. It was this latter division that became celebrated as the “desert rats” with the emblem of the white jerboa.
At that time the morale of the British forces in the desert was very low. The basic problem was that the men did not have confidence in their officers. I myself am the son of an army officer, and many of the friends with whom I grew up were from the same background. I thus had some valid standards of judgment. As a group, the officers in the desert at that time were selfish, irresponsible, and undisciplined. Their main concern was not the well-being of the men, or even the effective prosecution of the war, but their own physical comfort.
I recall one officer who became sick with malaria and was evacuated to a vase hospital in Cairo. For his transportation to Cairo, he required on four-berth ambulance for himself, and a one-and-a-half-ton truck to carry his equipment and personal belongings. At the time, we were continually being reminded that trucks and gasoline were in very short supply, and that every effort must be made to economize in the use of both. From Cairo, this officer was than evacuated to Britain (a procedure that certainly was not necessitated by a mere bout of malaria). Some months later, we heard him on a radio broadcast relayed form Britain. He as giving a very vivid account of the hardships of campaigning in the desert!
At that period our greatest hardship was the shortage of water. Supplies were very strictly rationed. Our military water bottles were filled every other day. This was all the water that we were allowed for every purpose – washing, shaving, drinking, cooking, etc. Yet the officers in their mess each evening regularly consumed more water with their whisky than was allotted to the other ranks for all purposes combined.
The result of all this was the longest retreat in the history of the British army – about seven hundred miles in all – from a place in Tripoli called El Agheila to El Alamein, about fifty miles west of Cairo. Here the British forces dug in for one final stand. If El Alamein should fall, the way would be open for the Axis powers to gain control of Egypt, to cut the Suez Canal, and to move over into Palestine. The Jewish community there would then be subjected to the same treatment that was already being meted out to the Jews in every area of Europe that had come under Nazi control.
About eighteen months previously, in a military barrack room in Britain. I had received a very dramatic and powerful revelation of Christ. I thus knew in my own experience the reality of God’s power. In the desert, I had no church or minister to offer me fellowship or counsel. I was obliged to depend upon the two great basic provisions of God for every Christian: the Bible and the Holy Spirit. I early came to see that, by New Testament standards, fasting was a normal part of Christian discipline. During the whole period that I was in the desert, I regularly set aside Wednesday of each week as a special day for fasting and prayer.
During the long and demoralizing retreat to the gates of Cairo, God laid on my heart a burden of prayer, both for the British forces in the desert and for the whole situation in the Middle East. Yet I could not see how God could bless leadership that was so unworthy and inefficient. I searched in my heart for some form of prayer that I could pray with genuine faith and that would cover the needs of the situation. After a while, it seemed that the Holy Spirit gave me this prayer:
“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”
I continued praying this prayer every day. In due course, the British government decided to relieve the commander of their forces in the desert and to replace him with another man. The man whom they chose was a general named W.H.E. “Strafer”:Gott. He was flown to Cairo to take over command, but he was killed when his plane was shot down. At this critical juncture the British forces in this major theater of the war were left without a commander. Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister of Britain, proceeded to act largely on his own initiative. He appointed a more-or-less unknown officer, named B. L. Montgomery, who was hastily flown out from Britain.
Montgomery was the son of an evangelical Anglican bishop. He was a man who very definitely fulfilled god’s two requirements in a leader of men. He was just and god-fearing. He was also a man of tremendous discipline. Within two months, he had instilled a totally new sense of discipline into his officers and had thus restored the confidence of the men in their leaders.
Then the main battle of El Alamein was fought. It was the first major allied victory in the entire war up to that time. The threat to Egypt, the Suez Canal and Palestine was finally thrown back, and the course of the war changed in favor of the Allies. Without a doubt, the battle of El Alamein was the turning point of the war in North Africa.
Two or three days after the battle, I found myself in the desert a few miles behind the advancing Allied forces. A small portable radio beside me on the tailboard of a military truck was relaying a news commentator’s description of the scene at Montgomery’s headquarters as he had witnessed it on the eve of the battle. He recalled how Montgomery publicly called his officers and men to prayer, saying , “Let us ask the Lord, mighty in battle, to give us the victory.” As these words came through that portable radio, God spoke very clearly to my spirit, “That is the answer to your prayer.”
I believe that the prayer which God gave me at that time could well be applied to other situations, both military and political:
“Lord, give us leaders such that it will be for Your glory to give us victory through them.”
