The Four Chaplains Gave Away Their Life Jackets When the Dorchester Went Down

A Methodist, a rabbi, a Catholic priest and a Reformed Church minister walk onto a sinking ship. There is no punchline. That is the whole reason the story has outlived almost everyone who was alive when it happened, because it is a joke setup that ends in the one way a joke never does.

The ship was the United States Army transport Dorchester. The date was February 3, 1943. The place was the North Atlantic, on the route to Greenland, in water cold enough to kill a man in minutes. And what the four chaplains did in the last twenty minutes of the ship's life is one of the things Americans of every belief, and of none, have agreed for more than eighty years to be proud of. I want to tell it plainly, give you the men by name, and then say what I think it proves about faith and duty, because it proves more than the usual greeting-card version admits.

The four men

Their names deserve to be learned.

• George L. Fox, a Methodist minister who had served a church in Vermont. He had served in the First World War in the ambulance corps, and when the Second World War came he went back in as a chaplain, at the age of forty-two.
• Alexander D. Goode, a rabbi, the son of a rabbi, from Brooklyn, who had been serving a congregation in York, Pennsylvania.
• Clark V. Poling, a minister of the Reformed Church in America. He was a minister's son who left his pulpit for the Army.
• John P. Washington, a Catholic priest from Newark, New Jersey, who had been a parish priest and had joined the Army as a chaplain.

They had met at the Army Chaplain School at Harvard in 1942. The Army had put men of different faiths in the same classroom and the same barracks. They became friends. Then they were assigned together to the same transport, a transport carrying about nine hundred men across a dangerous ocean. All four were in their thirties or early forties. It is a detail I would not invent, and it matters. They were not boys. They knew what the sea was.

The sinking

The Dorchester sailed in a convoy bound for Greenland, where American forces were building bases. The convoy was known to be hunted. German submarines were the great danger of the North Atlantic in the winter of 1943, and the convoy's escorts included Coast Guard cutters.

In the small hours of February 3, a German submarine, U-223, fired a torpedo that struck the Dorchester below the waterline. The ship lost power, her lights went out and she began to list. The accounts of the survivors agree on the broad outline and differ, as honest accounts do, on the details. There was darkness, panic, men in their bunks and men with their boots off who had gone to bed in their life jackets because they had been told to and then, in the heat of the engine spaces, had taken them off. There were men going over the side into water that was close to freezing.

About nine hundred men were aboard, and I will give you the figure as the historians do, as "about" and not as a fixed number, because sources give 902 or 904. Hundreds died. The Coast Guard cutters Comanche and Escanaba went in to rescue the survivors. The rescue is worth a story of its own.

What the survivors saw

Here is what the survivors reported, and what makes the story what it is. The chaplains were on deck. They moved among the men, calming them, helping them find their way, praying with the ones who wanted to pray and getting the wounded into the boats. When the supply of life jackets ran out, the chaplains took off their own and gave them to men who had none. By the accounts of survivors, they did this knowing exactly what it meant.

Then they stayed. As the ship went down, survivors in the boats and in the water saw the four of them standing together on the slanting deck, arms linked, praying. Some survivors recalled hearing them. The accounts are not identical, and I will not give you a quotation that I cannot source. What the accounts agree on is the picture: four men, four faiths, one deck, and a hand on a shoulder.

That is a fact of the record, and I would put it against any claim that heroism is a recent invention.

What the nation did

The country took a few years to catch up, and then it did.

In December 1944 the Army awarded the four chaplains the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart, posthumously. That was something, but not enough for people who believed that what happened on the Dorchester had no precedent, and the story spread through churches and synagogues, through veterans' groups, through the press.

In 1948 the Post Office issued a three-cent stamp in their honor. A postage stamp is not a trivial honor. It goes on mail, it goes into every town, and it was a way of putting four faces in front of the whole country.

Then in 1960 Congress acted, and the result is the part that I find most interesting. Congress authorized a special medal for the four chaplains, the Chaplain's Medal for Heroism, which was intended to rank with the Medal of Honor in dignity but could not be awarded under the Medal of Honor's rules, because their act had not been done in combat with the enemy in the sense that law required. So the legislature wrote a new honor to fit the deed. The bill became law in July 1960, and the medal was presented to the next of kin in January 1961. It has never been awarded again.

Pause on that. A Congress that wanted to honor four men found that the existing medals did not fit, and it did not decide that the men could not be honored. It made a medal. The republic can be generous when it chooses to be, and it did so through the ordinary legislative process, not by an executive shortcut. For a reader who likes the Constitution's design, that is worth a nod. The power to give honors in the name of the people sits with the people's representatives.

The strongest objection

There is an argument against telling this story the way I have, and it deserves a fair statement.

The objection comes from two directions. A skeptic of religion says that the story is being used to claim that faith makes people good, when men of no faith have died heroically too. A skeptic of sentimentality says that the Dorchester has been wrapped in so much legend that no one can tell what happened, and that survivors' memories were shaped by what they heard afterward.

Both points have something to them, and I will answer them in order.

1. Atheists and agnostics have been brave, and nobody here says otherwise. The claim is not that faith is necessary for courage. The claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: that these four men acted out of their faith, that they said so by what they were doing, and that the faith in question was not generic. Each man was a minister, a priest or a rabbi who understood his duty as a duty to the men in his care, and each of them believed in a God who would judge how he used his last minutes. That is a fact about their motive, and a motive is part of a story.
2. Memory is imperfect, and I have said so. I have not told you what any man said, because I do not have a reliable record of it. What I can tell you is what the survivors who were there said they saw, and that the accounts converge on the central act. A story can be embroidered at the edges and true at the center. Historians weigh testimony like that every day, and they weigh this testimony as sound.
3. The deed does not need the legend. If someone showed me that a detail had been added over the years, say a hymn or a phrase, the facts that remain would still be enough: life jackets given away, a ship going down, four men on the deck together.

What this says about faith and duty

I want to draw two conclusions, one for believers and one for the country.

For believers, the story says that faith, honestly held, is not an escape from duty but a source of it. It is easy to believe that religion makes men soft, and the Dorchester answers that. These men did not pray in place of acting. They acted, and they prayed while they did. The tradition that stands behind them, the tradition of Jerusalem that we inherit with Athens, teaches that a human being has a worth that does not depend on his usefulness, that a neighbor is owed love, and that the highest act of love is to give up your own life for another. The Four Chaplains took that teaching at its word.

For the country, the story says something about how a pluralistic republic works at its best. They were four faiths in one uniform. They did not argue about whose God had the better claim on the deck. They stood together because the men in the water needed them, and because each of them could see that the other three understood the job. The old charge against religious Americans, that a society with a strong faith life must be a society of sectarian quarrels, runs into this story and stops. This is the American arrangement working: each man free to believe as his conscience led him, and all of them free to serve a common cause.

That is not an accident. It is the design. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. The Founders did not take religion out of public life. They took the government out of the business of choosing one. What results, when it works, is four chaplains in the same classroom and the same barracks, and the same icy deck. Compare the vision of religious liberty in The conscience clause Madison wrote for the Bill of Rights and lost, and notice how closely the Founders' hope matches the Dorchester's reality.

Why it should be taught

There are people who would like the story retired. They say it is a relic of an age when religion had a larger place in American life, and that a modern school has no business teaching a story with so many prayers in it.

I disagree, and I will give you three reasons.

1. It is history. The deed happened, the nation honored it, and a student who has not heard of it is missing a piece of the record.
2. It is a model of the kind of unity that does not require anyone to pretend. A rabbi did not become a priest, and a priest did not become a Methodist. Each stayed what he was. That is a better lesson in tolerance than a slogan.
3. It is about sacrifice, and sacrifice is out of fashion. A country that cannot explain why a man would give away his life jacket will have trouble explaining why a soldier would hold a line.

The men are remembered in many places: in chapels dedicated to them, in memorials, in the annual observance each February. The idea behind those observances is that the story is a public inheritance, not the property of any one denomination.

A note on how to honor it

You do not have to be religious to honor these four, and you do not have to be a veteran. You do have to be willing to say that what they did was good, and that goodness of that kind has a source. If you want to see more of what the generation that fought the war was made of, read The Harlem Hellfighters Spent 191 Days Under Fire and Came Home Heroes, and The Doolittle Raid Hit Tokyo Four Months After Pearl Harbor From a Carrier Deck. For a modern account of what the country owes those who serve, read Seven Myths About Veterans That Shape Bad Policy, and the Facts.

There is also a lesson for the way we talk about public figures. The news often treats heroism as a thing you find in a trailer for a film. It is not. It is found on a cold deck in the dark, where a man decides in a matter of seconds whether he is going to be the kind of person he says he is. The Four Chaplains were. The rest of us are mostly spared the test. The least we can do is know the names.

The case in brief

1. On February 3, 1943, the transport Dorchester was torpedoed in the North Atlantic on the way to Greenland, and four chaplains, George Fox, Alexander Goode, Clark Poling and John Washington, gave their life jackets to soldiers who had none.
2. Survivors saw the four standing together on the deck, praying, as the ship went down, and the accounts converge on that central act even where the details differ.
3. The nation answered with the Distinguished Service Cross and Purple Heart in 1944, a stamp in 1948, and a special medal authorized by Congress in 1960 because no existing medal fit the deed.
4. The story shows faith as a source of duty, not a retreat from it, and it shows the American arrangement of religious liberty at its best: four faiths, one uniform, one cause.
5. It should be taught as history, as a model of unity without pretense, and as a reminder of what sacrifice is.

What you can do: look up your local veterans' or interfaith memorial observance of the Dorchester sinking, and if there is none, ask your church, synagogue or town council to hold one.