Ministering to men in battle

Piehler, G. Kurt. A Religious History of the American GI in World War II. Studies in War, Society, and the Military. Lincoln (Neb.): University of Nebraska Press, 2021.

In A Religious History of The American GI in World War II G. Kurt Piehler offers a tour of the ways that the U.S. provided for the religious needs of men and women mobilized for war. But he gives us much more. Kurt brings to life the needs, above all the spiritual needs, of the American soldiers, sailors, and Marines who went to war against the Axis. While peace affords us the luxuries of moderation and agnosticism, the terror of war demanded speedy resolution of the most compelling questions of life and death. Some men carried New Testaments in their breast pockets and attended services before going ashore in the Pacific, where even Presbyterian boys might take communion from a Catholic priest. And some men traded cigarettes and chocolate for sex and drank so much they blacked out. Often enough, these were the same men.

 In the opening chapters Kurt explains how the government and military conceived the religious meaning of the war and recruited the ministers, priests, and rabbis who would care for the souls of the American forces. President Roosevelt and others in the administration, as well as many of the highest officers in the military, understood the struggle with the Axis powers as a battle between good and evil. And within this Manichaean conflict the U.S. also stood for the freedom of religion against the repressive anti-Semitic fanaticism of the Nazis. Yet even within this moral context, chaplains served much more than a symbolic role. They comforted the confused, the frightened, and the wounded. They held services that gave men going into battle some glimmer of transcendent hope. They buried the dead. 

After his opening few chapters, which deal with issues of organization and tend to be chaplain-centric, Kurt turns to extended considerations of a range of issues, all with a religious dimension but each of them a fundamental question about America, and Americans, in the greater world. Many, if not all, of these chapters could stand on their own. Several of these chapters, on their own, are worth the price of the book. How did Americans conceive of the enemy? How did young men, leaving their homes for the first time, engage with the new people and culture of the world they were sent to redeem by force? What role did ethics, if any, play in the conduct of war? How, ultimately, should Americans conceive of justice after the liberation of the camps and the inferno leading to Japanese surrender?

This short review cannot do justice to each of these chapters, and certainly not the book as a whole. But I will mention only two chapters that should provoke your interest in learning more. The chapter on “The Religious Life of Military Women” should be quickly optioned as the background story for a movie, perhaps even for a TV series. The stutter steps of military organizers in making room for women in the war lend themselves to easy comedy. Female purity was, inevitably, a dominant theme. “Only prostitutes become WACS,” one father told his daughter (193). Cases of discipline and expulsion from the military for homosexuality affected men and women, but the proportion of allegations for lesbianism was much higher than for gay sex. The danger, and reality, of rape was real, but received no consistent action from military leaders. Yet at the same time women’s sexual needs and interests attracted no attention at all, except in the negative. Women at one base in New Guinea “were held as virtual prisoners in their barracks” to protect them from the men at the base (194).

All of these confusing ideals and missteps around women’s sexuality necessarily involved the chaplains, whose remit included encouraging sexual morality. The all male chaplain’s service ministered to the needs of women in the service as best it could, which was often not very well. One episode of the mini-series based on this chapter would have to cover the  conflict between the chaplain to the only African American WAC unit deployed in Europe. While Lt. Col. Charity Earley, the unit commander, encouraged chapel attendance and choir performances, she also  organized dances and made room for other leisure activities. The chaplain assigned to Earley’s command went immediately into opposition, culminating in a chapel prayer that began “Guide our commanding officer because she needs it.” And it went on, ever further downhill. Following chapel, he was immediately transferred. (198)

And, since I’m guiding the careers of future writers, let me also recommend to some young historian out there that you start now on writing the biography of Katherine Keene. Every line that Kurt wrote about her made me think, “I need to know more about this woman.” Bored while waiting for deployment, she watched training films on latrines and venereal disease. She wrote of enjoying one Bible study she attended (none of the Gis stayed for it except the prisoners who had no choice) but she also went with a friend to listen to what must have been a hellfire revival sermon. The preacher urged listeners to repent their sins since their death might be imminent. “The preacher had apparently been to Hell.” (202) There is even more on Keene, on her reflections about religion, which I leave to you to discover when you read this great book. But just one more scene must go here. She recalled the variety of reactions among the women she sheltered with during a German bombardment of London. “Keene wanted to watch what was happening and sought a better view to take in the spectacle. One WAC resorted to prayer for comfort, while another WAC rearranged furniture, obsessively putting things in order.  Her sergeant refused to use the latrine during an attack out of fear that she would be killed sitting on the toilet; she did not want an obituary announcing such an unfortunate incident in her church newsletter at home.” (207)

I want to include here special attention to Kurt’s chapter on prisoners of war. Historians of the era know that POWs experienced strikingly different fates depending on their theater of action. Prisoners of the Germans received punctiliously correct treatment as dictated by the Geneva Convention of 1929, and with some exceptions this held up until the last weeks of the war. Prisoners of the Japanese had a much wider range of fates. The death rate among American POWs in Asia was over 40%, and some who survived starved almost to death or  received beatings and other torture. Contrary to the Geneva convention, the Japanese made widespread use of POWs for war related constructions, as we know from Alec Guinness and The Bridge of the River Kwai (and I can’t go on without mentioning my cousin, Robert Charles, a POW in southeast Asia for most of the war). In the east, Kurt writes, the “experiences of army and naval chaplains held in captivity reads like a life of modern-day martyrs. Many strived to continue to hold religious services…counsel prisoners, and bury the dead.” (257) Often without enough to eat, let alone other resources, every part of the chaplain’s duties became a new challenge. The absence of adequate food made elements for the Eucharistic celebration impossible to find. Even baptism might hinge on the availability of water.

Kurt’s capture of these experiences makes a vital contribution to a proper appreciation of the heroism of military chaplains in these impossible situations. Yet the most interesting part of this consistently good chapter deals with Jewish POWs in German Stalags. Jewish POWs generally received the treatment of other, western POWs. But this statement covers a complex set of experiences, that included Jews hiding their identity (one airman kept different dog tales stamped with P, C, or J depending on what part of Europe he was flying over). Jewish GIs who were known as Jews often faced imprisonment and the strong possibility of mortal peril. Leonard Winograd, an airman captured by the Germans, at times during his imprisonment revealed that he was a Jew, at other times concealed it. By the end of his imprisonment he felt he could no longer repudiate his faith. He believed that God took a hand in his ultimate survival, and this encouraged him all the more to pursue the vocation of rabbi. He would later serve a congregation near Pittsburgh. 

This book contains much, much more. Like all good history, the Religious History prompts many more questions outside the scope of the work. What were the comparable conditions for religious observance in other combatant militaries? Did the experiences of war have long-lasting impacts on the spiritual lives of the men who fought? Military chaplains often engaged in an ecumenism of necessity. Did this shift their thinking about sectarian conflicts once they returned to peacetime pastoral care?  Find this book, read any chapter that offers a topic that interests you, and you will likely want to read much more.

Other reading

Charles, H. Robert. Last Man Out. Eakin Press: Austin, Texas, 1988. 

Remembering War the American Way

Piehler, Guenter Kurt. Remembering War the American Way. Paperback reissue. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1995.

Sometime in the first decade of the 21st century I was on a phone call with a young academic in the field of communication. He told me his area of research was in the rhetoric of memorials. I asked if he knew the work by Kurt Piehler. He did indeed know that work. That’s a standard work in the field, he said. That gave me a tingle of satisfaction, or a warm glow, or something. At least, I recall that conversion after all these years and feeling pleased at what he had said. Kurt and I had begun our graduate studies at Rutgers, on the same day in the late 20th century. We became good friends, and remained in contact over the years even though our careers have taken us to different parts of the U.S. Kurt is currently Associate Professor at Florida State University and Director of the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience. Before he left Rutgers to take his first tenure track position he was the founding researcher of the Rutgers Oral History Archive, which began as an archive of the experiences of Rutgers alums in World War II. Kurt and I discussed our research while we were still at Rutgers, and even later when I was still able to visit. But, I have to make a confession. Kurt, if you are reading this, I only got around to reading your entire book in the last few weeks. There are reasons for that, of course, but I’m sure no one in the Blue Monkey universe cares. 

How to remember war, how to memorialize the dead, provoked controversies even before the war of independence concluded. Many officers of the continental army began to ape the styles of their British counterparts, arrears in pay be damned. (Bouton, 65) The pipeline to a semi-aristocratic society of the Cincinnati had already taken shape, and from there into support for a nascent Federalist political movement. Admiration, in fact adulation, of George Washington played a key role in Federalist ritual, and equestrian statues memorializing the war already held a place in the Federalist iconography. Common soldiers had little role in Revolutionary memorials, an analog of Hamilton’s plan for funding the national debt without any anxiety about ordinary farmers and artisans. Even so, the commemoration of war assumed more and more of a republican form, including parades of veterans on the 4th of July and, eventually, pensions. 

By the time of the Civil War, recognition of the average soldier had become a settled part of war memorials and the rituals of memory, in the North as well as the South. The conflicts around memory of the war, in fact, tended to divide North and South. Southern memorials by the end of the 19th century were part of a larger project to erase slavery as the core conflict of the war. Rather, Johnny Reb became the same hometown hero as Billy Yank, and equestrian statues rose to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as well as to U.S. Grant. This surrender to the southern narrative that a bitter war had grown from theories of state sovereignty did not proceed in a straight line. But by the turn of the century, the Civil War battlefields acquired by the federal government would include memorials to southern insurrectionists as well as soldiers defending the United States.

The Civil War monument dominates the downtown crossroads of Bloomsburg, PA

Also, by the time of the Civil War, remembering the war had attracted new interest groups. Both professional sculptors and memorial companies added their contrary perspectives to the controversies of memory. Sculptors wanted classical memorials created by professionals with classical training. The memorial makers had less expensive wares to offer, often statues on pedestals, iconic drama substituting for artistic interest.

With World War I, another layer of controversies emerged. After the Civil War, national cemeteries for the war dead became an accepted element of American memorials of war. But with many dying overseas, the question arose whether the United States should support overseas cemeteries, burying American dead where they had fallen. This issue was settled with compromise, as it would be again in the second global war–-families could decide to repatriate their dead or to allow for burial in foreign lands. Stateside, a Progressive ideal provoked another controversy, claiming memorials in concrete and stone should be replaced by living memorials, structures that contributed to the lives of Americans, like libraries, playgrounds, even bridges. 

Debate over the proper memorials to war continue to the present. Most readers will know the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., clearly one of the most powerful testaments to service members. Yet when it was first proposed, opposition came from a range of groups that saw the memorial as too modernist, too simple, too somber. Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, opposed the memorial until additions were made to his taste (he was wrong about this, as he was about so much else). 

How, and whether, to remember war continues as a live issue among Americans. Even though the national media and political speeches tend toward some kind of rare unanimity in claiming that veterans are all heroes, there is palpable ambivalence both left and right as to the heroic nature of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Central Asia. Americans will unhesitatingly remember  service in the Persian Gulf states and Afghanistan, but seem inclined to forget those places for all other purposes.

An older example may lend us some ideas about American ambivalence toward remembering war. In 1846, soon after American troops crossing the Nueces River provoked an attack by the Mexican border patrol, U.S. volunteers quickly rallied round the flag. The war went relatively quickly, with a peace treaty forced upon the Mexican government by 1848. This was, apparently, a brilliant success both for President Polk and the U.S. military. U.S. territory grew by a third, with few battle losses. But by 1847 the work of Congress had already descended into chaos as a consequence of Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot whose funding amendment (proviso) sought to exclude slavery from any territory acquired in the war. Congress, and the government generally, would lurch from chaos to crisis for another 12 years (including terroristic violence in Kansas territory) until the Civil War broke out. Generals and senior officers from both north and south had seen service in Mexico, a war that U.S. Grant recalled in his memoirs as “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”  

      .

Buena Vista Furnace, Ghost Town Trail near Dilltown, PA

The Mexican War was far from our finest hour, and one that received little official recognition. I can only recall having seen one memorial to the war, in New York City, near Madison Square Park. (There are probably more official memorials to the Mexican War in Mexico City than in the entire United States.) And yet, on my travels along the rail trails of Pennsylvania I regularly pass Buena Vista furnace, built in 1847 and named for an early victory in the war. And I often go for coffee at a shop on Buena Vista street, part of a warren of streets in Pittsburgh known as the Mexican War Streets (including Monterrey, Jacksonia, Palo Alto streets,  Taylor and Sherman Avenues). And even a casual search will find more Buena Vistas, in places where the actual Spanish pronunciation seems to have never occurred to anyone (pronounced Byoona Vista in Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and also presumably in Virginia, Delaware, Minnesota). But this is less an insight than the raw material of a question. How are wars remembered outside the realm of public memorials and without the careful study required of history? 

Near the end of his work, Kurt notes that no memorial rose to the anti-war movement that opposed the Vietnam war. In fact, where are the memorials to peace? That may seem a ludicrous question for a country born in war, and that expanded by taking land from indigenous, often by force, and from the war against a sister republic noted above. Yet between major wars, the ideals of most Americans had consistently remained pacific if not pacifist. In both our wars with Great Britain (which, recall, was the most powerful state of the day), our leadership expected an easy victory once the British were denied American resources.* This was the view taken by Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, a historically influential tract that seemed to have had no influence at all in the British ministries that launched against the 13 rebel colonies the empire’s largest combined arms assault before World War II. Our army was so small in 1916 that the threat of American intervention earned the contempt of the German high command. Yet, since World War II, the belief that the U.S. must have the most powerful military in the world has become a bi-partisan orthodoxy. And even though the debacle in Vietnam seemed to cause some reevaluation of our militarized foreign policy, that pause quickly passed and made way for a growth of our military, and our trust in it, in time to prepare for endless wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. I’m fairly certain that a monument to peace would have changed little in recent U.S. policy. But memorializing peace, perhaps creating a national peace college, might prompt some needed study and reflection on how a super-power leads in a world where war seems endemic even as the stakes of losing the peace rise higher.

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*The American strategy of  “denial of resources” failed again in the War of 1812. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of Treasury until 1814, when he became a member of the delegation that negotiated the Treaty of Ghent that ended the war, wrote in frustration on the rampant smuggling his port collectors could not interdict, that if we didn’t feed them, the British couldn’t keep the war going.

References

Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy : “The People”, the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. New York ;;Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.