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cover of episode World War II Military Chaplains

World War II Military Chaplains

2025/5/22
logo of podcast First Person with Wayne Shepherd

First Person with Wayne Shepherd

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This chapter recounts the bravery and selflessness of military chaplains during World War II, highlighting their unwavering commitment to supporting troops in the midst of battle. It features stories of chaplains risking their lives to deliver messages, provide comfort, and offer spiritual guidance.
  • Over 12,000 chaplains served in WWII across various fronts.
  • Chaplains often risked their lives to minister to soldiers.
  • Stories illustrate the chaplains' dedication to providing spiritual support regardless of soldiers' background.

Shownotes Transcript

First Person is produced in cooperation with the Far East Broadcasting Company, who rejoice in the stories of changed lives through the power of Jesus Christ. Learn more at febc.org. Welcome to First Person on this Memorial Day weekend. I'm Wayne Shepard.

Over the past many years, we have featured a guest each week on this program who has told their story in their own words. Occasionally, we've told the stories of people through their biographers. But in this program, something different. As we reflect on the freedoms gained for us by men and women who have given their lives in battles through the years, we're going to pay special tribute to the chaplains of World War II.

Dr. Lyle Dorsett has written a history of World War II chaplains titled Serving God and Country. I contacted the author to join me in conversation today, but circumstances prevent him from doing so. However, Dr. Dorsett has given his permission for me to read select accounts from his book.

While we'll only have time for brief readings from the longer book, it should give you a perspective on the ministry of the chaplains who serve their country often in the heat of the battle. At FirstPersonInterview.com, we'll place a link to the print version of this book, which you can purchase online. With that introduction, listen now to excerpts of Serving God and Country by Lyle W. Dorsett.

Through fog, smoke, and scream, Sergeant Bob Slaughter charged into a storm of bullets and shrapnel, and, as he phrased it, somehow survived the bloody first wave of the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944. A month later, after he and fellow soldiers of the 29th Infantry Division had battled their way about 20 miles southward, they were pinned down near the heavily fortified French city Saint-Lôme.

Well-dug-in Germans rained a barrage of mortar and artillery shells down on what remained of Slaughter's battle-decimated company. In the confusion of blinding smoke, flying debris, cursing and yelling, frantic soldiers dug foxholes and listened for orders from battle-weary platoon leaders. Bob Slaughter and another member of his squad hastily dug a hole for cover until American artillery support could weaken the German fortifications.

He and his comrade had no sooner scooped out their shallow shelter than a third man plunged in with them. Slaughter looked up and saw a white cross painted on the uninvited guest's helmet. The intruder immediately asked if they, by any chance, knew where he might find Sergeant Bob Slaughter. Astonished by the coincidence, Slaughter confessed he was the man.

Without wasting time on introductions, the chaplain apologized for not finding him sooner, but explained that locating anyone in the confusion of invasion preparation had been almost impossible. The chaplain quickly informed Slaughter that his father had died a few weeks earlier at home in Roanoke, Virginia. Slaughter's mother had sought the assistance of her Presbyterian pastor to get the news overseas to her son.

The pastor had managed to get the message moving through channels until it reached the chaplain assigned to Slaughter's battalion and, finally, its destination near Sanlo.

In 2009, Bob Slaughter was still in awe of that battlefield chaplain. Although he neither learned the clergyman's name nor saw him again, 65 years later the combat veteran remained deeply grateful to the clergyman who had risked his life to carry the message in the midst of harrowing enemy fire.

Furthermore, the courageous news carrier took time to express condolences and to apologize because, under the circumstances, he could not ask the sergeant's commanding officer to grant him an emergency leave to comfort his grieving mother. Six months later, a young combat infantry officer along the Belgian-German border, engulfed in another deafening episode of war, crawled out of the Ardennes forest holding a compress on his wounded leg.

Falling off the front line to get stitched up, Lieutenant Henry Cobb looked up to see a chaplain rushing into the woods where the Germans were raining down a storm of artillery shells on their battered Americans who had been caught by surprise in the Battle of the Bulge.

Cobb recalled that he recognized the chaplain as the priest who had given him and some other soldiers Holy Communion several hours earlier. The Catholic priest was charging full speed toward the woods into an inferno of fire, smoke, deafening explosions, and splintering trees. The wounded officer yelled, "'Where in the devil do you think you're going, Father? All hell is breaking loose up there!' The chaplain ran past Cobb, muttering, "'That is why I need to be there!'

Henry Cobb never learned the chaplain's name, and he never saw him again. But more than 60 years later, the aging World War II veteran still marveled at the priest's disregard for his own safety in a quest to comfort and encourage beleaguered and dying men. A year earlier, on the Pacific island of Saipan, Jewish chaplain Milton Rosenbaum hunkered down in a slit trench with 12 Marines.

Japanese mortar shells exploded all around and enemy fighter bombers strafed the entrenched Americans. One of the men bellowed, Chaplain, what about a prayer? Rosenbaum cried out over the battle noise, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. A dozen voices joined the chaplain in reciting the ancient psalm.

The young man who remembered the incident said the chaplain was the only Jewish man in the trench. In combat, discrimination because of creed simply did not exist. Such encounters were common throughout the war.

Similar stories involving Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant chaplains across North Africa, Europe, and Asia, on every island in the Pacific, and aboard numerous ships in combat on the high seas, testify to the heroism of ministers, priests, and rabbis who serve God and the United States of America.

These unsung heroes continually ignored their own safety to minister to the spiritual needs of the men and women who were serving their country during World War II, regardless of race or creed. To find clues as to what inspired these quietly courageous chaplains in the 1940s, it is instructive to ponder the words of one of America's most famous preachers and pastors during World War II.

Peter Marshall, a native of Scotland who had come to America as an impoverished young man in his twenties, eventually made his way to seminary, gained a well-deserved reputation as a powerful preacher, and was called before his 34th birthday to the pastorate of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, one of Washington, D.C.'s most prestigious churches. Soon after assuming his pastorate in Washington,

Peter Marshall was invited to speak at a Christmas service attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his family. In a sermon titled, The Tap on the Shoulder, delivered during the anxious days of World War II, Reverend Marshall said, By what right does a man stand before his fellows, Bible in hand, and claim their attention? Not because he is better than they are. Not because he has attended a theological seminary and studied Hebrew, Greek, and theology.

but primarily because he is obeying a tap on the shoulder, because God has whispered to him in the ear and conscripted him for the glorious company of those voices crying in the wilderness of life. The preacher is conscious of being called, as we say, and that means that he is responding to an inward urge that could not be resisted.

An urge that grew out of a providential arrangement of his life and his circumstances to the great end that he should become an ambassador of the chief. An urge that grew into a conviction that only by obeying could he ever find that joy and satisfaction of a life lived according to the plan of God. God brought Moses from minding the sheep. He took Amos from the herds of Tekoa. He beckoned Peter, James, and John from the fishing boats and their nets.

The true minister is in his pulpit, not because he has chosen that profession as an easy means of livelihood, but because he could not help it, because he has obeyed an imperious summons that will not be denied. Chaplains receive their baptisms by fire the same way as medics and combatants. It was a Marine Corps general who insisted that chaplains must be permitted to minister in harm's way if they are to carry out their combat role effectively.

And this role, to be truly effective, must be executed in forward combat areas because men's concern for their souls, God, and life hereafter grow with each step closer to the front lines of combat.

chaplains from all branches of the armed forces unflinchingly took their places alongside the men in the areas of fiercest fighting indeed by war's end twenty-four of the navy's two thousand seven hundred forty two chaplains had been killed in action and forty-six purple hearts were awarded to chaplains serving with the navy and the marines

Army chaplains had it even worse. Except for the Army Air Corps, the chaplains' corps sustained the highest per capita casualty rate in the Army, with 77 killed and 275 wounded out of the approximately 9,000 active-duty men of the cloth. That America's military chaplains would always be found with the most vulnerable combatants in harm's way during World War II was clearly manifested during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Among the 2,335 soldiers, sailors, and Marines killed that morning of December 7, 1941, were two chaplains. Father Aloysius Smith, a Catholic, died when the USS Oklahoma capsized after three torpedoes ripped her underside. And almost simultaneously, Protestant chaplain Thomas Kirkpatrick, a Presbyterian serving on the USS Arizona, perished when the battleship he served was sunk.

Survivors of the battleship Oklahoma reported that Chaplain Schmidt assisted several sailors to get through a porthole before he drowned. No one lived to disclose Kirkpatrick's last minutes.

Men rescued from the Oklahoma and the Arizona could not recall seeing their chaplains before the attack, but it is likely that the ministers on those ships were preparing for Sunday morning worship services in the hold of their vessels. Indeed, chaplains on other ships were setting up for worship, as were chaplains on shore.

Army Chaplain Terrence G. Finnegan, the senior chaplain of the chapel on Oahu, recalled looking outside the little chapel while his assistants set up for mass. He was thinking, what a bright, peaceful morning, and how beautiful are the formations of planes coming in from the sea. No more than five minutes later, those planes began raining down a firestorm of bombs, torpedoes, and machine gun bullets on unsuspecting and unprepared American civilians and military personnel.

Quickly, chaplains appeared among the wounded and dying, doing all they could to assist nurses, doctors, army medics, and navy corpsmen who began to descend on the most war-torn areas. And then after nearly two hours of bombing and strafing, the yellowish planes with the blood-red balls painted on the wings and fuselage turned away and then began the tortuous task of identifying the dead.

Chaplain Albin L. Fortney remembered the morbid work this way. It was not an easy task. We had to use every means possible to determine the identity of bodies, clothes, letters, contents of pockets, billfolds, laundry marks, organization insignia, fingerprints, personal identification. In many cases, there was so little remaining of a body that only our own resourcefulness would make an identification possible.

Identifying the dead did not end the heartaches experienced by military chaplains at Pearl Harbor. Next came the painful task of writing personal letters of condolence to families of those killed, as well as letters of assurance and hope dictated to chaplains by wounded soldiers and sailors who were too disabled to write.

Experiences of chaplains at Pearl Harbor proved to be a prelude to four years of similar activities. Until the cessation of hostilities in August 1945, chaplains scattered throughout the Pacific would attempt to conduct their so-called normal duties, such as worship services, administering sacraments and ordinances, offering religious instruction, counseling troubled souls, providing athletic and entertainment activities, visiting the sick, and performing endless administrative chores.

At the same time, all over the Great Pacific, whether aboard ships or in the jungles or sands of the land, these ordinary tasks were frequently interrupted by the chaos of combat. Certainly, the most famous and celebrated event in the history of the chaplaincy in World War II is the case of four Army chaplains who served the soldiers and seamen on the troop carrier Dorchester in early February 1943.

This story is replete with unusual gallantry and self-sacrifice involving four courageous chaplains, including a rabbi, a priest, and two Protestant ministers, one a sacramentalist and the other a low churchman.

The Dorchester, an Army troop transport of 5,252 tons, was en route from Newfoundland to Greenland. She carried 751 Army passengers, 1,000 tons of cargo, and a merchant marine crew of 130 men, plus a Navy armed guard of 23.

During the late hours of February 2nd, the ship encountered such severe weather that Captain Hans Danielsen ordered all passengers to fully dress in their warmest clothes, put on their life jackets or belts, lie on their bunks, and be prepared to abandon ship if necessary. Before midnight, the Dorchester sailed into calmer waters, and the captain urged everyone to keep life belts and jackets on because this will be the most dangerous part of our mission.

The German submarines can really spot us out there.

Some survivors of the imminent disaster remembered that the Catholic chaplain, Fr. John Washington, held services in the mess hall for men of all faiths, and all four chaplains followed up with visits to the staterooms to raise the spirits of the men. At just a few minutes past midnight on February 3, only 100 miles from Greenland, a torpedo ripped through the hull of the ship, which sank within 20 minutes in near-freezing water and air temperatures.

Of the 904 men on board, 678 perished. Among the lost were the four chaplains, Alexander D. Goode, Jewish, John P. Washington, Catholic, George Fox, Methodist, and Clark V. Poling, Dutch Reformed. The four chaplains, men from three faith traditions yet united in a holy mission, came from strikingly different backgrounds.

George Lansing Fox, born in 1900 in Lewiston, Pennsylvania, attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago and Illinois Wesleyan University. A highly decorated World War I medic, he married and fathered two children and received ordination in the Methodist Church.

The birthplace and early home of Alexander David Good was New York, where he was born in 1911. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati and next went to Hebrew Union University, where he studied for the rabbinate. Good eventually earned a Ph.D. in 1940 from John Hopkins University. He and his wife had one child, and he became a chaplain early in the war, applying to serve before Pearl Harbor.

The Catholic chaplain, Fr. John Patrick Washington, was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1908. A New Jersey man most of his life, he attended Seton Hall as well as seminary in his home state, where he was ordained in 1935.

Clark Vandersall Poling, a Dutch Reformed church pastor, grew up in the home of a well-known pastor and writer. Born in Columbus, Ohio in 1910, he received his undergraduate education at his denominational school, Hope College, and his divinity schooling at Yale. Like Goode and Fox, he was a family man blessed with a wife and one child. Forty men from among the 226 survivors provided testimony that outdid any legend.

According to an official Army historian, they told of the round-the-clock ministry of faithful shepherds who visited the sick, led worship, and sang with men aboard ship in informal gatherings before that fateful night. Quoting a Red Cross source, historian Robert Gushua wrote,

They also told how, with utter disregard for self, having given away their life jackets to four men with them, the chaplains stood hand in hand praying to the God they served for the safety of those men who were leaving the stricken ship on all sides of them. Survivors told how all four chaplains not only gave away their life jackets, they quietly panicked men by offering words of encouragement and prayers while they distributed life belts from a box.

One soldier said he would never forget that Chaplain Good took off his gloves and gave them to him, saying not to worry because he had another pair. The last scene, a picture engraved forever in the minds of those who made it off the Dorchester and could see the chaplains just as the ship went down, was four men, hand in hand, praying to their God who had called them to serve.

Pictures of the four chaplains and the story of their ministry on the Dorchester became ubiquitous during the war and after. Chaplain H. H. Hoyer, in the office of the Chief of Chaplains, was instructed to make a big thing of it. But as Chaplain Gushua noted more than 30 years later, Howard did not need to do anything because the American public made a big thing of it for the story of the immortal four captured the imagination of the nation.

The news media understood what people on the home front hungered for, stories of heroism in combat undergirded by reverence for God and unity of purpose among the major religious traditions of the nation. So they kept the story alive. The military establishment also fanned the flame of this story because it reassured the folks at home that their loved ones were ministered to by faithful chaplains right up to the moment of death.

No doubt, there were other heroic actions by chaplains on troop ships, but their stories were never reported. Military chaplains, like everyone else who served, felt a need to assess their own overall contribution to the war effort. After all, they too had given up some of the best years of their lives, and they were coming home with mental and physical scars, as well as the deep-seated grief that came from praying with the wounded and dying, and overseeing the internment of countless valiant men.

Chaplain Ben L. Rose, a Presbyterian pastor from North Carolina who'd volunteered for the Army Chaplain Corps seven months before the Pearl Harbor attack, looked back on his service time when the historical office of the U.S. Army Chaplain Center and School asked him to give an account of his most significant contributions to the U.S. Army chaplaincy. He wrote from his Protestant point of view.

that for four and a half years during World War II, I preached the gospel of Jesus Christ to the men of the armed forces of my country and thereby offered them spiritual strength which they needed for living and dying and the courage to do their duty without shirking. I asked only for the opportunity to share my knowledge of Christ with them. I was given that opportunity. That was my most significant contribution.

A Kansas Baptist pastor who became a Navy chaplain, L.C. Lemons, expressed the chaplaincy's contribution this way.

The chaplain reaches men who would never darken the door of a church back home, but who, in the world of conflict, have suddenly become conscious of needing God. He is with them in their hours of supreme need. To me, it is most interesting to see young men waiting great distances through mud to attend services. It is interesting to see them sitting there before you, feet planted in the mud, using their helmets for seats, singing with all their hearts, and listening attentively to the message.

and then to have them come up afterwards and say, Chaplain, we have a unit about two miles from here. Won't you come over and hold a service for us so all our men can attend? War does things to young men, and it is a pastor's greatest opportunity to win them, and I might add, to indirectly win the hearts of their parents and loved ones at home.

Chaplains, like the other 12 million men and women who wore the uniform of the United States during World War II, began their homeward journeys in late 1945 and early 1946.

After the fashion of all veterans who, at a minimum, sacrificed some of the best years of their lives, they carried the satisfaction that they had been involved in a worthy enterprise. They were under none of the illusions veterans of World War I carried home that they had saved the world for democracy. They could already see the specter of future problems among liberated peoples and those nations who freed them.

Nevertheless, they knew their efforts had protected America and freed many nations and ethnic groups from the ravages of the Nazi and Japanese aggression and occupation. Both the U.S. Navy and Army urged chaplains to remain on active duty or at least serve as reservists after the war. America's occupation forces were all over the globe and these troops also needed spiritual care.

Chaplains like Rabbi Morris Kurtzer wanted to give back to family to get home and garner American support for the aid of Jewish refugees seeking to build a homeland in Palestine. Father William J. Leonard yearned to return to his students, many of them war veterans, at Boston College.

And while Carol Lemons admitted he loved the Navy and I had been in the right place at the right time, that was past. Now my place was with my family. Thus they returned, picked up the pieces as best as possible, and spent most of the remaining days at home doing what they did while in the war, ministering to the broken, hurting, guilt-ridden, and grieving.

Serving God and country was no mere slogan, but the underpinning of what drove these valiant men to serve regardless of location. As much as those who carried weapons, these spiritual warriors are heroes in the epic battle of World War II.

On this Memorial Day weekend, and with permission from the author, you've been listening to selected excerpts from the book, Serving God and Country, U.S. Military Chaplains in World War II by Lyle Dorsett. We'll have information about this book at our website, firstpersoninterview.com, by following the link provided, you can order the book online.

Just after World War II in 1945, the Far East Broadcasting Company was officially incorporated by Bob Bowman and John Broeger and was established with one goal in mind, broadcasting Christ to the world. Psalm 32.8 guided them, I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go. I will guide you with my eye. Today, you can learn the results of their faithfulness when you visit febc.org.

Now, with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Join us next time for First Person.