Who were the four chaplains of Four Chaplains Day?

On February 3rd, the U.S. military and countless faith-based organizations marked Four Chaplains Day. The man behind GBH’s Curiosity Desk, Edgar B. Herwick III, joined host Arun Rath on GBH’s All Things Considered to explain the history behind the holiday and its local ties.

The following interview has been edited for clarity.

Arun Rath: Hey, Edgar.

Edgar B. Herwick III: Hey, Arun.

Rath: So I love the story. I'm just going to get out of your way as much as possible and let you tell it. Tell us about these four chaplains.

Herwick: Well, the four chaplains in four chaplains, they are exactly as it sounds. They are four — or were four — army chaplains. It was a Methodist minister, the Reverend George L. Fox — now, he had gone to Boston University. There was a Jewish Rabbi, Alexander Goode, a Catholic priest named Father Washington and a Reformed Church in America Minister, the Reverend Clark Poling. Now, Poling was born in Ohio, but he had roots in New Hampshire and he grew up in Auburndale, Massachusetts.

They are four chaplains of different faith denominations, and they're remembered for their acts of bravery and heroism on Feb. 3, 1943. These four men, they met each other where they received their army chaplain training at the Army Chaplain School at Harvard University.

Rath: And tell us a bit about that, because people might not know about the Army Chaplain School. If you’re an army chaplain — like, this is a diverse group — you might be a rabbi who has to provide comfort to a Catholic or vice versa? So tell us about that, how that comes together.

Herwick: Exactly. Yeah, so the Army Chaplain School is something that's been around since World War I, and it's been housed in a lot of different locations. But during the World War II years, it was housed at Harvard.

Now, during that time, as you might expect, enrollment swelled. It went from 75 prior to World War II, and then when we got involved in the war, more than 450 chaplains enlisted and so they were they were trained at Harvard.

As for why and what the chaplains were about? Well, you know, the army sort of learned quickly during World War I that, you know, it was important to have these chaplains of various faiths for the enlisted men. I spoke with Bill Kaemmer, who is himself a retired army chaplain. He's the head of the Four Chaplains Memorial Foundation. Here's what he had to say about the work of a chaplain.

[previously recorded]

Bill Kaemmer: Like they always say, there's no atheists in a foxhole. A lot of people don't, you know, think about their faith. But when you're going off to war, then they have questions. And a lot of the chaplain's role is to, in some ways, get people's minds right to go off and fight.

[recording ends]

Rath: Wow, and they're also going to be in the line of fire, right, and these four chaplains are remembered for heroism. Tell us about that.

Herwick: These four men were assigned to a ship called the SS Dorchester. Again, it wasn't an accident that they were of these different denominations. During World War II, you had men enlisting from all over the country of different backgrounds. So they are the four men on the SS Dorchester. This was a passenger ship. It had been requisitioned by the army and it was transporting troops to Greenland. This ship was on its way with 900-plus troops, and on its way — it was part of a convoy — was this ship, a couple of other ships like it and some Coast Guard escorts.

It was torpedoed by a German U-boat. So it was a direct hit. And this ship went down in less than 30 minutes. As you can imagine, Arun, the water and the air temperature was barely above freezing, and it was, by all accounts, chaos on the ship. There were not enough lifeboats, there were not enough life jackets and men were scrambling.

And what happened was these chaplains, they helped organize the abandoning-ship effort. And they distributed lifejackets, they got as many men as they could into lifeboats. And then, when the lifejackets ran out, they famously each gave up their lifejackets to men, and they were urging and helping men get into the water. In fact, one survivor says they remember seeing one of the chaplains literally sort of putting a lifejacket on a man who was sort of frozen with fear and just kind of pushing him into the water because they knew the ship was going down.

So they gave up their own lifejackets, and as the story goes, when they were last seen, they were linked arm in arm — the four of them — by some accounts, singing and by other accounts, praying on the deck of the ship as it went down. As I said, there were more than 900 men aboard the ship — 904 — and 674 of them died, and 230 survived.

Rath: Damn, Edgar, that image of those those interfaith group arms locked, singing, that just feels like everything that's great about America.

Herwick: Yeah, it's incredibly powerful. And then there's this other hero, as well. And he's often remembered as sort of part of this story: A man named Charles Walter David Jr. He was a Black American serving aboard the Comanche, which was one of those escort ships from the Coast Guard. But he was a cook on this ship, which is all he could be as a Black man at the time. Segregation was still happening.

When the SS Dorchester went down, he volunteered to help with the rescue effort. He's a cook, and he's pulling men from the lifeboats. And when his commanding officer fell overboard as part of this rescue effort, he jumps into the icy waters, pulls his commanding officer back on deck. Another man had fallen off the ship. He pulled him aboard. All told, about 100 men get pulled to safety into the Comanche from lifeboats in the water, thanks in large part to the effort of this man, Charles Walter David.

He comes down with pneumonia, and a little over a month later, he dies.

Rath: It's such an amazing story, it almost sounds literally incredible. Well, you know better than anybody, sometimes when you scrutinize this history, it doesn't hold up. Is this just mythology? Do we know?

Herwick: Yeah. I mean, I had the same question, Arun, as I sort of was digging into this. So did Reverend Kaemmer, who I spoke with. Now, as you might suspect, the army obviously interviewed the survivors of this event pretty thoroughly, and they were considering giving the four chaplains the Medal of Honor. I guess when they do that, they really got to dig in and say, you know, are they deserving of it? Well, as it turns out, they were not eligible for the Medal of Honor because they were noncombatants.

But Kaemmer has read all of these accounts. He said the army has determined there was enough corroboration of the basics of this story that they deemed it true, and in 1961, Congress created a special medal for them, called the Four Chaplains Medal. And they said it's the equivalent of the Medal of Honor, and it was given to the next of kin of the four chaplains. As for Charles Walter David, he was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal posthumously.

Rath: Wow. And how else are these heroes remembered?

Herwick: Well, they were featured on a U.S. stamp, actually not long after the event. February 3rd is remembered as Four Chaplains Day. As you said, it's celebrated to varying degrees by military and civilian groups all over the place.

The biggest part of their legacy is this story of the Interfaith Peace, and there's an interfaith chapel in Philadelphia. It was established at a church in Temple University in Philly and dedicated by President Eisenhower in 1951. Now that actual church has moved to the Navy Yard in Philadelphia since, but that’s where the foundation’s run out of. And Kaemmer, Reverend Kaemmer, who heads up that foundation, he noted to me the mission is: to further the cause of — what has become the sort of tagline of this event — which is unity without uniformity, and encourage goodwill among people. Here's Kaemmer talking about their legacy.

Kaemmer: Where they really made their legacy wasn't so much, even, when the ship went down, it was the 11 days where they sailed together. Because they're in very close quarters, they would see the priest come down and help the rabbi set up for his service, and he would encourage people to stay for that service. They’d have kind of like, you know, show nights where they played the piano. And all the four chaplains could sing, you know, and they would do that. And what the soldiers remembered was the fact how well these guys got along and that when they preach, they seemed to be in some ways more united than separate.

Rath: Edgar, this has just been great to to think about. Right now, more than ever. Thank you.

Herwick: Thanks.

Rath: That's Edgar B. Herwick III of the Curiosity Desk. This is GBH's All Things Considered.