What was Hugh Nibbley thinking about when he landed his Jeep on the beach on D-Day?

This is one of six episodes in our podcast series based on the book entitled Hugh Nibbley observed.

On the dawn of one of the most daring and dangerous events of World War II, the typical soldier would hardly be thinking deep thoughts about puzzling intellectual

problems. But then again, Hugh Nibbley was not the typical World War II soldier. In the book

Hugh Nibbley observed, Jack Welch recounts the story as follows. At first light on June 6th,

1944, the first of many Allied landing craft began hitting the beaches of Normandy.

At Utah Beach, 12 men dangling from one of the emerging jeeps, cheered their driver on as they surged up from beneath the surface of the chilly English Channel waters.

That driver, an Army intelligence officer with a PhD in ancient history from the University

of California at Berkeley, was none other than Hugh W. Nibbley at age 34.

While preparing for the invasion, Hugh had visited several antiquarian bookstores in London,

walking out with armloads of Arabic and Greek literary treasures.

He had also, on the sly, slipped a copy of the Book of Mormon into one of the 55 pockets in his regimental intelligence core fatigues.

It was right there at Utah Beach, Hugh still vividly recalls, as we were a couple of feet underwater

that it really hit me. How astonishing the Book of Mormon truly is. It had never occurred to me

before, but all I could think of all that day was how wonderful this Book of Mormon was.

Judged by any standard, the Book of Mormon is nothing ordinary. So it seems only

right that possibly the most illustrious scholar yet to have investigated the Book of Mormon

should have become fascinated with it in no ordinary way. Since Utah Beach, Hugh Nibbley was

never again the same, nor was Book of Mormon scholarship.

A few years later, Nibley published Lehigh in the Desert, the first of many books he would write on the Book of Mormon.

His next book, an approach to the Book of Mormon, was written for the church as the lesson manual for adult priested quorums. The trajectory described by Hugh Nbley in Lehigh in the desert takes us from Jerusalem

southward through the Arabian Peninsula, then eastward through the desert to Bountiful,

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