[Editor's Note: This article is the second in a series on the theme “Being a Man of Love.” Click here to find the first article.]
“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command” (John 15:13-14).
Early on the morning of February 3, 1943, survivors from the torpedoed US troopship Dorchester shivered in lifeboats as they watched their ship slide slowly into the nerve-deadening cold of the North Atlantic. Peering through darkness occasionally lit by waving flashlights, they perceived four figures standing close together in a circle on deck.
None of the four wore life jackets. Each had handed his to one of the many young soldiers who — against the captain’s standing order — had shed them in the overheated sleeping quarters below. In the chaotic aftermath of the torpedo hit, sleeping men were startled awake and staggered up to the deck without grabbing their jackets. Launching the lifeboats had also proved a fiasco. Only a few of the boats were usable; the rest were thickly covered with ice that withstood desperate attempts to hack through to the pulleys designed to lower the boats. Some of the life-jacketed men bobbing in the oil-slicked swells made it to the few lifeboats. Most died of the cold.
From the four figures silhouetted on deck, snatches of a hymn reached the shuddering survivors:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,
Who bids the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep,
O hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea.
The rising waters lapped the four men’s feet, then crept up their legs, topping waists and then shoulders. The little group raised linked hands high above their heads. Then these too finally sank out of sight, as four chaplains from different faiths — a Catholic priest, a Jewish rabbi, a Methodist pastor, and a Dutch Reformed minister — set out to meet their common God.
The Courageous Quartet. The oldest of these four heroic chaplains was George Fox, the Methodist minister, who was born at the turn of the twentieth century. He grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, with a Sicilian father who would rage furiously at his family when he came home from work at the railroad shop. Soon after America entered World War I, seventeen-year-old George lied about his age to join the army, “escaping” from one kind of hell to experience the horrors of modern warfare in France. As a member of the ambulance corps, he saw young, healthy bodies chewed up by weapons of destruction and was himself severely injured one day before the Armistice.
Fox determined to become a minister and began an arduous schedule of day work and night study that culminated in a seminary degree from Boston University School of Theology. He married, fathered two children, and contentedly cared for his Methodist flocks in a series of Vermont churches. Forty-one when Pearl Harbor was bombed, Fox felt called to return to the army, but with different goals and in a different spirit from his first enlistment. Like his fellow chaplains on the Dorchester, he requested overseas duty so that he could help both his country and its fledgling soldiers, most of whom were leaving American shores for the first time, as he had done in 1917.
Rabbi Alexander David Goode differed from Fox in many ways, but shared his love of God, patriotism, and concern for the well-being of American troops. Alex was Brooklyn-born, though his rabbi-father moved the family to Washington, DC when he assumed responsibility for a Georgetown synagogue. Goode’s devotion to his country was linked to his love of Judaism and his lifelong outreach to the Christian churches around him. America was the country that had granted his people safe haven from the civil and religious persecutions of Europe, and he cherished the freedoms and religious tolerance it offered to successive generations of immigrants.
Though a member of the people God chose as His own thousands of years ago, Goode believed that the Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists, and Presbyterians around him worshipped the same God he did. In York, Pennsylvania, where he cared for the congregation of Temple Beth Israel, he hosted dinner parties at the local hotel for teachers, professors, ministers, priests and rabbis; he encouraged them to correct misconceptions about one another and find common ground by sharing their experiences and perspectives. He formally invited Christian churches in the area to celebrate the Jewish feast of Pentecost with His congregation.
By the late 1930s, many American Jews were painfully conscious of what their fellow Jews were undergoing in Hitler’s Germany and the neighboring countries that were falling to Nazi armies. Convinced that the United States would end up battling Hitler, Goode applied unsuccessfully for a Navy chaplaincy months before Pearl Harbor. Finally accepted as an Army chaplain after that “day of infamy,” he welcomed his orders to sail with the Dorchester in January 1943. His one regret was leaving behind his wife — his high-school sweetheart — and their preschooler, Rosalie.
Like Alex Goode, Clark Poling came from a “professional” religious family. His father, Daniel, was a nationally known preacher and New York City pastor. Clark grew up loving football and literature. Only gradually, during his college years at Rutgers, did he begin to respond to the tug of a calling to the ministry. He headed for Yale Divinity School and then undertook the challenge of turning around a declining Dutch Reformed church body in Schenectady, New York. A lover of peace and religious tolerance, Poling responded to news of Nazi persecution of the Jews by inviting a local rabbi to speak at his church.
After Pearl Harbor, Poling was torn. Should he volunteer as a regular soldier and take on the civic duty of defending his country, or should he enter the military as a chaplain? His father, who had served as a chaplain during World War I, pointed out that chaplains in that conflict had had a higher mortality rate than any other military unit. Clark decided to follow his father’s example and serve God and country as a chaplain. After several months at an Army base in Mississippi, he said good-bye to his young son and pregnant wife and reported for duty on the Dorchester.
The final member of this unusual quartet — and its only unmarried member — was the one who was called “Father” by the largest collection of people: Catholic priest John Washington. John grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the oldest of seven children born to Irish immigrant parents. Bright, active, fast-moving, and quick-tempered as a boy, he wore glasses after a childhood accident with a BB gun, but let nothing keep him on life’s sidelines.
John heard God’s call to be a priest when he was in seventh grade. He responded and was ordained in 1935, serving several parishes in his New Jersey diocese. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he too felt compelled to sign up for the greatest moral and physical battle of his life. A year after applying for a chaplaincy, he found himself sailing toward Greenland on the Dorchester with his fellow chaplains and nine hundred other Americans.
Immortal Chaplains. George Fox, Clark Poling, Alex Goode, and John Washington spent only a few weeks together on that converted coastal steamer, but they left a deep impression of unity in God. According to a first sergeant on the ship, “They were always together, they carried their faith together.”
Only 230 of the Dorchester’s passengers lived through the disaster, making it the third largest loss at sea of its kind for the US in World War II. Many of these survivors said they were inspired and forever changed by seeing the love and dedication with which the four chaplains assisted the wounded, comforted the dying, and helped many to safety during the critical twenty-seven minutes between the torpedo strike and the Dorchester’s sinking.
The chaplains offered prayers for the dying and attempted to calm the panic-stricken and encourage the desperate, witnesses said. “I could hear men crying, pleading, praying,” recalls one young private, who was struggling to stay afloat in the icy water filled with corpses and debris. “I could also hear the chaplains preaching courage. Their voices were the only thing that kept me going.” Many onlookers who witnessed the four chaplains take off their own life jackets and hand them to others preserved this memory as one of the most significant of their lives. “It was the finest thing I’ve seen, or hope to see, this side of heaven,” said one.
The memory of the four chaplains did not die with them. Each one was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and Distinguished Service Cross. In 1960, Congress acknowledged their selfless courage, compassion, and faith by creating a “one of a kind” Congressional Medal of Valor, which was given to the chaplains’ families. Today, at least two “Four Chaplains” organizations sponsor projects designed to continue the men’s spirit of interfaith cooperation and selfless service (see www.fourchaplains.org and www.immortalchaplains.org).
The four chaplains’ final, dramatic witness to unity on the deck of the Dorchester was a continuation of the openness they had each been showing all of God’s children over the course of many years. George Fox, Clark Poling, Alex Goode, and John Washington were lovers of God and lovers of souls who saw past denominational controversies — however real the doctrinal differences that divided them — to our common relationship as children of our heavenly Father. Faithfully and heroically, they did their part to hasten the day when Christ’s eucharistic prayer for unity will be fulfilled.
(This article is part of NFCM's sponsorship of the Catholic Man channel and originally appeared in The Word Among Us, January 2003. Used with permission from The Word Among Us. It was also part of the Catholic Men’s E-zine, Being a Man of Love, (May-June 2003 issue) which is available on the NFCM website. You may e-mail them at info@nfcmusa.org.)
Reflection Questions on Page 2
Questions for Reflection/Discussion by Catholic Men
1. What aspects of the story of the “Four Immortal Chaplains” touched you the most as you read it?
2. What do you think was the bond that drew these men to such a close unity and love? How does this compare with your unity and love towards other Christians and towards those of the Jewish faith?
3. In what ways is this story a reflection of Christ’s love for us? In what ways is Christ’s love for us totally different than the love demonstrated by the four chaplains?
4. Why do you think that the acts of these four men are still remembered and are still having an impact on people’s lives, over 60 years after the event?
5. What does this story tell us about your own lives in terms of what will be remembered and what will have an impact on others' lives? What impact will your answers to this question have on how you live out your Christian life?
