by Tim Townsend
Arnold’s letter to Gerecke at Harvard began: “With hearty congratulations and best wishes we welcome you to active duty with the Regular Army.” This might have been a form letter, but it also served as a pep talk from the top chaplain in the country, and it gave Gerecke a good sense of what the chaplaincy expected of him and what he could expect from the army in return.
“Inconveniences, difficulties and hardships will be your portion,” Arnold continued. “Military life is a life of discipline, and the essential military virtues of courage, loyalty, obedience, devotion, and self-sacrifice are also religious virtues.”
Arnold spoke of “the alarming increase” in the number of young soldiers unfamiliar with God or religious worship. “How shall they know if they are not taught, and by whom shall they be taught if not by an able and zealous chaplain?” he asked.
Each chaplain’s responsibility was tremendous, he wrote, and each chaplain’s own salvation would be determined “by the efforts and sacrifices you make to teach and train men.”
“Your earnest words, pregnant with Divine wisdom and power, will establish convictions and train consciences in these young men that will strengthen and comfort them every hour of every day,” Arnold wrote, “in daylight or in darkness . . .”
EARLY IN THE FOURTH century, probably in 316, a boy named for Mars, the god of war, was born to a soldier and his wife in the village of Sabaria in modern-day Hungary. Only a few years before the birth of the boy, who would later be known as Martin of Tours, Constantine freed the Christians from two centuries of secret meetings, persecution, and murder. By declaring the Edict of Milan, Constantine—the leader of the Roman Empire—had allowed Christians to practice their faith openly.
While his parents worshipped and offered sacrifices to the Roman gods and the emperor himself, Martin, even as a child, was drawn to Christianity, specifically to its followers who had so recently been killed by Constantine’s slaughterous predecessor Diocletian, and the ascetics—hermits who adopted a form of martyrdom by living a life of prayer, alone in the woods or the desert.
When Martin was fifteen years old, a decree was sent down from the emperor that required all sons of veterans to join the army, changing Martin’s plans of a solitary life for Christ. Instead, Martin found himself a member of the extravagantly uniformed imperial guard, one of five hundred cavalrymen protecting the emperor himself during military campaigns.
The imperial guard was stationed in Amiens, a city in Gaul near the Roman frontier. During a particularly cold Amiens winter, in 335, many of the city’s poor were freezing to death. One day, as Martin came through the city gates, he saw a beggar sitting on the ground, shivering. Martin had no money to give the man, so instead, he cut his cape in two with his sword and gave one half to the beggar. The white cape, lined with lambskin and fastened at the right shoulder with a broach, was distinct to the elite corps that protected the emperor.
The cape, or chlamys, gave the men their name—the candidate—or men clothed in white. Those watching the scene between the soldier and the beggar laughed as Martin put the other half of the white cape back around his own shoulders. That night Martin, who was still not baptized, dreamed that he saw Christ wearing the half of his cape he’d given to the beggar.
It was a scene straight out of the Gospels, when Matthew predicted that at the Second Coming, Christ will say, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
Martin became a Christian, then a bishop, and he founded a monastery. After his death, he became France’s patron saint, and his cape became an object of veneration, preserved in the city of Tours. For centuries, French kings carried the cape into battle in a portable shrine called the capella. The priest who cared for the shrine was called the capellani, or chapelains in French. In English it became “chaplain.”
The relationship between war and the divine is ancient, and chaplains—though called something else—have been around a lot longer than the cape of St. Martin of Tours. It is said that soldier-priests once carried maces into battle to avoid spilling blood. The priests of Amun-Ra worked among the ancient Egyptian armies, and the priests of Joshua’s forces carried the Ark of the Covenant, blowing rams’ horns before the assault on Jericho.
In the United States, chaplains have been ministering for more than 230 years to the fifty-five million Americans who have served in the military. In the colonial period, civilian pastors simply volunteered their services to commanders in times of war. During the Pequot Wars, beginning in 1637, Samuel Stone of Hartford was the first military chaplain to begin his service in the New World. During King Philip’s War in 1675, seven chaplains served in military units fighting Native Americans.
At the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which set off the Revolutionary War, four ministers were among the minutemen facing British general Thomas Gage’s British troops on Lexington Green. Other pastors went to the battlefield to support their flocks fighting the British. Two hundred and twenty army and navy chaplains served during the Revolutionary War, but they received no military training and had no uniforms. At regimental inspections, when other soldiers raised their muskets at “present arms,” chaplains often raised their Bibles.
In northern colonies, where Congregationalists were accustomed to choosing their own ministers, militias held boisterous elections to choose a chaplain from among many choices in the community. Chaplains counseled soldiers, led daily prayer services and Sunday worship services, and visited the sick and wounded, helping doctors where they could.
On July 29, 1775, the Continental Congress recognized chaplains as a distinct branch of the army and authorized one chaplain for every two regiments, setting pay at $20 per month, the same amount received by captains. On November 28, 1775, the Continental Navy adopted regulations allowing divine services on ships, and Congress appointed chaplains to serve in hospitals.
In the field, chaplains often had their own quarters or bunked with the commanding officer. Unlike the way the Chaplain Corps sees itself today—as a force that stands for free expression of religion—Revolutionary War chaplains were enforcers of religious responsibility among their troops. On August 23, 1776, Rev. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister, endorsed Rev. Christian Streit for the Eighth Regiment of Regulars of Virginia, certifying that Streit was “an ordained Minister of the Gospel, sound in Protestant Principles and sober in life, desirous and virtuous to promote the Glory of God and Welfare of the State and therefore recommended to all Friends and Well-wishers of Religion and State.”
Benjamin Franklin told the story of a “zealous Presbyterian” chaplain who was part of a militia guarding Pennsylvania’s northwest frontier and who complained that too few of the militiamen attended worship services. Franklin suggested a creative solution. “It is, perhaps, below the dignity of your profession to act as steward of the rum,” Franklin advised the chaplain. “But if you were to deal it out and only just after prayers, you would have them all about you.” The chaplain liked the idea. “[N]ever were prayers more generally and punctually attended,” Franklin reported.
When George Washington was desperate for a chaplain to minister to his drunken Virginia backcountry troops, he asked the governor to provide one, writing that the absence of a chaplain reflected “dishonor on the regiment.” Some of Washington’s soldiers told him they’d pay a chaplain’s salary from their own pockets, but Washington said he’d rather have a chaplain appointed as an officer because that would have “a more graceful appearance.” A chaplain, Washington wrote, “ought to be provided, that we may at least have the show if we are said to want the substance of Godliness.” When Washington became commander of the Continental Army on July 2, 1775, he found fifteen chaplains among the army’s twenty-three regiments. He encouraged the chaplains to lead weekly worship services, and he eventually admitted ministers of eight denominations into the chaplaincy and urged his commanders to facilitate the free exercise of religion among their troops.
No Catholic chaplains served in the Revolutionary War or the War of 1812, but in 1846, President James Polk called together several bishops to discuss the Catholic chaplaincy and suggested they name two priests as chaplains. The bishops did so, and Polk appointed them. In 1850, the government put together a “Board of Clergymen” made up of chaplains and civilian clergy, whose job it was to screen army and navy chaplain candidates.
But looming war killed that church-state debate and by the beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, the military employed nearly four thousand chaplains of twelve denominations and multiple ethnic backgrounds. In 1862, Congress changed legislative language from “Christian denomination” to “religious denomination,” allowing the first Jewish chaplain—Rabbi Jacob Frankel—to enter the army. Henry M. Turner, the first black army chaplain, served only black soldiers in the United States Colored Troops. Ella E. Gibson, an ordained minister of the Religion-Philosophical Society of St. Charles, Illinois, received President Abraham Lincoln’s somewhat reluctant approval as the first female chaplain, serving with the First Wisconsin Heavy Artillery. Among the thirteen hundred chaplains in the Confederate army was the first Native American chaplain, Unaguskee, who served with a Cherokee battalion in North Carolina.
In May 1861, the army ordered its commanders to appoint chaplains approved by their state governors. But soon complaints of uneducated, unprepared, or unethical chaplains surfaced, prompting Congress to create legislation requiring chaplains to be ordained. It also barred anyone “who does not present testimonials of his present good standing with recommendations . . . from some authorized ecclesiastical body.” It was the first step toward ecclesiastical endorsement so central to today’s Chaplain Corps.
When the War Department issued General Order 126 on September 6, 1862, requiring chaplains to be mustered into service by an officer of the Regular Army, it did not address age limits. Chaplain Charles McCabe of the 122nd Ohio Volunteers referred to a colleague, then sharing his prison cell, as “Father” Brown, not because the chaplain was a Catholic priest, but because he was eighty years old.
Americans fought the Civil War in the midst of the Second Great Awakening, the Christian revival movement that began in the late eighteenth century and set the stage for the evangelicalism that dominated war chaplaincy. “Evangelism [was] more than ever before the chaplain’s first responsibility,” according to one historian.
The misery of the war was surely a factor, too. After the Battle of Chancellorsville, which lasted one week in the spring of 1863 and resulted in thirty thousand dead, the chaplain of the Twenty-Sixth Alabama Regiment reported “100 converts a week for several weeks.” That kind of carnage, perhaps, contributed to a softer evangelical sell by chaplains in tune with men traumatized by constant violence. Their sermons were less animated than those of the revivalists of the past. Less “emotional,” according to historian Herman Norton. “Holy barks, shouts, jerks and other such accomplishments which had typed American revivals since Jonathan Edwards were virtually absent.” Chaplains were preaching to men fighting a harrowing war “who could not be scared into religion.”
The fervor of religious services among Confederate forces in the winter of 1863–64 earned the season a nickname: “The Great Revival.” The revival reached its height in the Army of Greater Virginia where soldiers were “converted by the thousands every week,” according to Norton. Revivals in Dalton, Georgia, were “glorious” and “had no parallel.” “In the coldest and darkest nights of the winter, the crude chapels were crowded and at the call for penitents, hundreds would come down in sorrow and tears.” Forty-five thousand were converted in the Confederate army over four years of war.
When the Civil War was over, the Chaplain Corps shrank. Some chaplains did missionary work within the army for their churches during this quiet period, and officials moved to make some changes to the evolving military chaplaincy. The Act of April 21, 1904, created a grade structure and promotion policy among army chaplains and determined that all chaplains, regardless of rank, would be referred to only as “Chaplain.” In 1909, the War Department created the position of chaplain assistant—an enlisted man who could help the chaplain with his duties.
A year before the United States entered the First World War, the National Defense Act authorized one army chaplain for each regiment of cavalry, infantry, field artillery, and engineers, a total of 85 chaplains. But by the time the country declared war on Germany in April 1917, there were still only 74 Regular Army chaplains on active duty. By the end of the war a year and a half later, the army had 2,217 chaplains. The army’s quota for Catholic chaplains was 24 percent before the war, but rose to 38 percent during the war. Twenty-five Catholic priests ministered to the Catholic soldiers among the three hundred thousand troops.
The structure of the Catholic Church—which is organized largely by geographical dioceses governed by a bishop, and diocesan priests who answer to that bishop—didn’t meld well with military structure. Priests serving in various parts of the country, or the world, were unsure if they were to report to their home bishop or the bishop of the geographical area they were serving as chaplain. The Vatican recognized the problem and just two weeks after the United States entered the war, Pope Benedict XV named a bishop who would solely oversee military chaplains, an arrangement that still exists today.
During the course of the war, which for the United States lasted nineteen months, regulations for chaplains were altered several times to allow for additional priests. The age limits, since set at forty for the army and thirty-one for the navy, were raised to forty-five and forty before the end of the war.
Even with a more professional Chaplain Corps, the army was not prepared to outfit its chaplains as they mobilized for war. Individual churches, not the government, provided army chaplains with most of the supplies they needed to conduct services during the First World War: religious books and literature, ecclesiastical garments, altar equipment, portable Communion sets, typewriters.
Typewriters in particular came in handy for chaplains who handled miscellaneous duties that had little to do with their ordination. Chaplains often collected the dead after battle, for instance, before performing burial services and registering each grave. Graves had to be marked with a full name and the soldier’s unit and date of death, and that information had to correspond with unit records. The grave location was then recorded with map coordinates. Chaplains also served as postal officers and censors during the war and were recruited as unit historians, librarians, mess officers, band directors, athletic officers, morale officers, venereal disease control officers, couriers, and rifle-range scorers.
The Second World War saw the largest military mobilization in American history. On December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there were only 140 Regular Army chaplains on active duty. Eventually, over the course of the war, 12,000 chaplains ministered to more than 16 million men and women in uniform in the United States and overseas.
The army required that each applicant for the chaplaincy be male, between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-four, ordained and in good standing with his denomination, a graduate of both a four-year college and a three-year theological seminary, and actively engaged in the ministry as his main job. The central organizing agency for the Chaplain Corps, the Ge
neral Commission on Army and Navy Chaplains, received 4,000 applications in the first nine months of the war. In June 1942, the Chief of Chaplains office asked the General Commission to recruit up to 5,000 chaplains between July 1 and the end of the year—or about 175 per week—for the army alone.
In 1920, the army had assigned chaplains by denominational quota, determined by the Religious Census of 1916, and decided that the corps should be 25 percent Roman Catholic, 70 percent Protestant, and 5 percent held “for final adjustment.” By 1940, the army was using the Yearbook of American Churches as its quota guide, attempting to better replicate the broader American religious population. Methodists had the largest quota of any Protestant church during the war. The army asked Methodist officials to contribute one thousand chaplains, and the Methodist Church considered four thousand applications.
The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod functioned separately from the General Commission. It had formed its own Army and Navy Commission in 1936 and sponsored its first conference on chaplaincy in January 1941 to teach newly commissioned chaplains military procedure and pastoral duties—a sort of prep course before shipping its pastors off to Chaplain School.
The War Department continued to ask the churches for more chaplains throughout the war. At its peak in 1943, it authorized a quota of nine thousand chaplains. At its height in August 1945, at the end of the war, the corps had more than eight thousand chaplains on active duty.
Wartime chaplains continued to wear many hats. They were busy men who often heard the refrain, “tell it to the chaplain” bandied around camp. In 1942, each chaplain had an average of fifty-three personal conferences a day. The most popular topics of conversation were homesickness, suicidal feelings, marriage, and alcohol.
The nature of war tested the creativity and flexibility of chaplains looking for appropriate places to hold prayer and worship services. Often they resorted to barns, stables, wine cellars, attics, railroad stations, palaces, caves, and vaults below castles. Besides the usual sacred duties, on ships transporting troops overseas chaplains also organized boxing matches, orchestras, and movies.