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Introduction They are there, small tributes scattered across the country. Time has worn them away, pushed them into the gray routine of everyday life. They can be found in chapels in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Washington, Massachusetts , and New York, at the Pentagon and National Cathedral in Washington , D.C., at an elementary school in York, Pennsylvania, at a veterans’ hospital in the Bronx, on a waterway in Ohio, and at a fountain in Virginia. They show up in the books of stamp collectors, on murals on buildings on unexpected corners, and in paintings on museum walls throughout the land. No less than two foundations carry on to honor their deeds, one housed in the Queen Mary, anchored in Long Beach, California. The Four Immortal Chaplains are there, faded reminders of a war and a time when America was a very different place. Their names were Clark Poling, Alexander Goode, George Fox, and John Washington, and they died together in the winter of 1943, in the bitter cold waters of the North Atlantic. Poling came from Ohio originally; he was a Dutch Reformed minister from a long line of pastors in the church. Goode was a native of New York, the son of a Brooklyn rabbi who followed his father ’s vocation to minister to his people. Fox was a Methodist from Pennsylvania who had lied about his age to serve in World War I and rejoined the army when World War II broke out. Washington was an Irish Catholic priest from New Jersey. The war brought them together; the U.S. Army needed men to look after the spiritual lives of soldiers who came from all walks of life and represented every religious creed. So it was that in January 1943 these four men found themselves in New York with nine hundred other Americans, boarding the transport ship Dorchester, bound for an army post in Greenland. They never made it. In the early morning of February 3, a German submarine spotted the ship and fired a torpedo into its hull. The explosion wrecked the Dorchester, and the ship immediately began to go under. In the melee that followed, the four chaplains made their way to the deck, helping the confused and wounded along the way. They passed out life jackets from a storage chest to troops who had forgotten to grab their own, and when the chest was empty, they took off their jackets and gave them to whoever was left. The chaplains never made Introduction 2 it off the Dorchester, but they counseled courage to the end. As the doomed transport sank beneath the waves, the four men linked arms and prayed. They were never seen again.1 In the years to come, Americans showed surprisingly little inclination to commemorate the greatest of all wars. With few exceptions, the Iwo Jima memorial being the most prominent, the country did not construct great monoliths or grand sculptures in honor of the sacrifices made. Until years later, they did not even ask for a place on the Mall in Washington. They were content to let movies or television tell the tale, to name living memorials such as community parks and swimming pools after the fallen, and to have small local ceremonies to remember what had been done. The outcome of the war seemed to stand for itself.2 But within these small commemorations, within this relative quiet, the story of the four chaplains made more than its share of noise. It began in December 1944, in a very public and widely reported ceremony, when each of the chaplains was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the U.S. Army’s second highest award. In the summer of 1947, the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital dedicated a $250,000 therapeutic pool in their honor.3 Later that year, a church in Philadelphia began work on the Chapel of the Four Chaplains, which was to minister to Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. The chapel opened in 1951 to an audience of twenty-five hundred, including President Harry Truman and Secretary of Defense George C. Marshall.4 In 1948 Congress waived a time restriction to allow the special issue of a stamp to commemorate the chaplains. The stamp read, “These Immortal Chaplains . . . Interfaith in Action,” and on the occasion of its release President Truman called the chaplains’ actions “the greatest sermon that ever was preached.”5 On Armistice Day in 1949, the Four Chaplains Memorial Viaduct, a massive engineering project, opened in Massillon, Ohio. A stained-glass...

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