A Moment of Ecumenical Grace

The story of the “Four Immortal Chaplains”

By Eileen Wilson Fielding

“As the Dorchester sank God held out His hand”

Early on the morning of February 3, 1943, survivors from the torpedoed U.S. troopship “Dorchester” shivered in lifeboats as they watched their ship slide slowly in to the nerve-deadening cold of the North Atlantic. Peering through darkness occasionally lit by flashlights, they perceived four figures standing close together in a circle on deck.

None of four wore life jackets. Each had handed his to one of the many 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 been 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 creeping up their legs, topping waists and then shoulders. The little group 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.

George Fox (Methodist), Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed), Alex Goode (Jewish Rabbi) and John Washington (Catholic) spent only a few weeks together on that converted coastal steamer, but they left a deep impression of the unity of Christ. According to the First Sergeant on the ship, “There 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 U.S. in WW2. Many of the survivors said they were inspired and forever changed by seeing the love and dedication with which the four chaplains assisted the woundered, comforted the dying, 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 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,” he said.

The memory of the four chaplains did not die with them. Each was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart and the Distinguished Service Cross.

In 1960, Congress acknowledged their selfless courage, compassion and faith by creating a “one of a kind” Congressional Medal of Valour, which was given to the chaplain’s families. Today as least two “four chaplains” organisations sponsor projects designed to continue the men’s spirit of interfaith cooperation and selfless service.

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 their churches – to a common relationship as children of our heavenly Father. Faithfully, heroically, they did their part to hasten the day when Christ’s Eucharistic prayer for unity will be fulfilled.

Postscript:

George Fox, the oldest of the quartet, lied about his age to join in the First WW, married with 2 children served as a Methodist minister in Vermont until volunteering for overseas service as a chaplain at 41 when Pearl Harbour was bombed.

Rabbi Alexander David Goode was Brooklyn born. America was a country that offered his people a safe haven from the civil persecutions of Europe – and believed that Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists etc worshipped the same God he did. Convinced that the US would end up battling Hitler who was persecuting the Jews, he volunteered for chaplaincy after Pearl Harbour.

Clark Poling became a minister, while loving football and literature. He took the challenge of turning around a declining Dutch Reformed church in NY – as a lover of peace and tolerance, he responded to the news of Nazi persecution of the Jews, by inviting the local Rabbi to speak at his church. He left at home his young son and a pregnant wife to be become an Army chaplain.

John Washington was the only unmarried member of the quartet. Born to Irish immigrant parents, he grew up in Newark, New Jersey, wore glasses as a boy after a childhood accident with a BB gun – but let nothing keep him on the sidelines. He heard the call of God and in 1935 was ordained a priest. After the attack on Pearl Harbour he too felt constrained to sign up for the great moral and physical battle of his life. A year later he found himself sailing toward Greenland on the “Dorchester” with his fellow chaplains and 900 other Americans.

This true story was included in a Daily Devotional booklet “The Word among us”

www.ImmortalChaplains.org