The Chaplain’s Conflict: Good and Evil in a War Hospital, 1943–1945 by Tennant McWilliams (review)

Father Francis Mulcahy was “too ecumenical,” and Dr. “Hawkeye” Pierce, while “in some ways realistic,” worried too much about “big issues of war” and too little about lost earnings at home (117). These verdicts on the authenticity of characters in the television series M*A*S*H came from a man who would know: Renwick C. Kennedy, a chaplain with the 102nd Evacuation Hospital in World War II.

In 1943, at age 43, Kennedy left his Presbyterian congregation in Camden, Alabama, and embarked on a two-year odyssey that carried him all the way to the Battle of the Bulge, where his hospital, overflowing with casualties, actually came under attack. The war affected him profoundly. Already an intellectual, Kennedy returned home with a more worldly perspective on matters of faith and a deepened appreciation for classic literature.

In the 1950s, he joined the faculty at Troy University, where he eventually became an unsuccessful contender for the institution’s presidency. Kennedy’s other claim to fame was a controversial article for Christian Century, in which, decades before so-called revisionist history became acceptable, he candidly described the rampant alcohol abuse and scattered acts of criminal violence that he had witnessed among American forces in Europe. Although he never wavered in his conviction that the Nazi regime had represented an absolute evil, this Alabama clergyman would likely have agreed, at least partially, with the acerbic appraisal of the “Good War” offered by Paul Fussell in Wartime (1989).

Kennedy lived into the mid-1980s, long enough to the see the television saga of the M*A*S*H 4077th reach its two-hour finale. Upon the former chaplain’s death, his wartime diary and his literally thousands of letters to his wife and siblings went to a close family friend, Professor Tennant McWilliams, a historian at the University of Alabama-Birmingham. In The Chaplain’s Conflict, McWilliams draws upon these extraordinary primary materials to tell the story of Kennedy’s two years in the U.S. Army Chaplain Corps. At the same time, the historian relates his own adventures as he retraced Kennedy’s journey across Western Europe.

McWilliams’s affection for Kennedy is palpable, and this quirky book–part biography, part travel memoir–might easily have been ruined by hero worship and self-indulgence. Fortunately, the author keeps the narrative under tight control, and his account of day-today life in a World-War-II evacuation hospital, as seen through the eyes of an exceptionally well-educated middle-aged observer, is never anything less than enthralling. Much of that account shatters the sentimental world of M*A*S*H. No Sherman Potter, the Regular-Army commander of the 102nd, for example, apparently tuned out legitimate complaints, drove off talented subordinates, and remained perpetually oblivious to the state of morale within his command. The chaplain liked him as a friend but rated his leadership ability as nearly non-existent. Kennedy also found the shallowness of the physicians distressing. Few of the surgeons in the 102nd read books of any kind or thought deeply about the war; most complained bitterly about the money they were losing at home.

And then there was the out-of-control drinking, which plagued the unit whenever the flow of casualties momentarily abated and the medical personnel looked for ways to decompress. Anything but prudish, Kennedy frequently joined his fellow officers in the generous consumption of high potency “bug juice”–medicinal spirits mixed with various other liquids (including cognac)–but he apparently knew when to stop. Such could not be said for many of the hospital’s surgeons, some of whom were pulled from the unit and shipped home in advanced stages of alcoholism. Booze flows throughout The Chaplain’s Conflict. Indeed, whenever the 102nd relocated, it became Kennedy’s duty to haul cases of hard liquor in...