Introduction

In the previous chapters, we have seen how religious life in America's armed forces in World War II was shaped and influenced by their chaplaincy systems, by their commanders, traditions and institutional cultures, by political imperatives surrounding the draft, and by a plethora of concerned civilian organisations. We now turn to the sixteen million men and women who served during the war, the overwhelming majority of whom were not military professionals and whose wartime religious outlook and experience owed at least as much to their civilian backgrounds as to the conditions of service life. Consequently, this chapter shows how key features of civilian religious life were reflected in the military, sometimes to a degree that belied the image of the US Army in particular as an all-American melting pot. Hence, this chapter will draw attention to such constant factors as the relative religiosity of Catholics, of African Americans and of women, the fundamental importance of home and family to American religious life, and the effects of inducting large numbers of the religiously committed into the army and navy. The chapter also examines how devotional tastes and religious traits – notably hymn-singing, scripture-reading and self-reliance – translated into military life and even flourished under wartime conditions. Finally, it illustrates the limits to which the military environment could influence civilian habits and preconceptions, showing that the insistent military rhetoric of religious tolerance was often much more in evidence than its reality, and that the cross-currents of religious conflict posed a persistent problem throughout the war years.

Civilian imprints

Despite the efforts of the chaplaincy services, the American armed forces in the interwar years had not been widely recognised for their piety and clean-living. While soldiering in particular, with its oppressive emphasis on conformity and subordination, was widely regarded as ‘a fundamentally un-American activity’, the mores of army life were hardly those of respectable society. Paydays at army posts were often marked by binges of gambling and drinking (the latter unchecked by Prohibition), and by the descent of droves of prostitutes. As if to highlight the army as a staging post to hell, at Clark Field an illicit gambling racket was even run by an erstwhile Franciscan who was known to his clients as ‘Padre’.

TEN years after the end of World War II, the Jewish theologian and sociologist Will Herberg published Protestant–Catholic–Jew, a seminal study of religion in contemporary America. As Herberg saw it, and although there had been no federal census of religious bodies since 1936, there was every indication that organised religion was booming by the mid-1950s. ‘That there has in recent years been an upswing of religion in the United States can hardly be doubted’, he wrote, ‘the evidence is diverse, converging, and unequivocal beyond all possibilities of error.’ With Protestantism, Catholicism and Judaism now functioning as ‘equi-legitimate’ expressions of American religion, a prime indicator of national religious vitality was the pervasiveness of religious self-identification. When requested to state a religious preference, ‘95 per cent of the American people’ chose to identify themselves as Protestants, Catholics or Jews; in other words, so Herberg explained, ‘virtually the entire body of the American people, in every part of the country and in every section of society, regard themselves as belonging to some religious community’. Nor did the irreligious – or simply reticent – pose any kind of threat to this strong religious consensus, for the dominant trend of religious belonging had ‘led to the virtual disappearance of anti-religious prejudice’; as Herberg put it: ‘The old-time “village atheist” is a thing of the past, a folk curiosity like the town crier.’

However, the key indicator of what Herberg billed as ‘The Contemporary Upswing in Religion’ was the growing number of Americans who were now deemed to be church members. By 1953, they amounted to 59.5 per cent of the population, ‘marking an all-time high in the nation's history’. However, even this landmark statistic failed to do justice to the true vitality of American religiosity for, as Herberg stressed, ‘considerably more Americans regard themselves as church members than the statistics of church affiliation would indicate’.

Introduction

CHAPLAINS and other interested parties could find much to reassure them concerning the religious state of the American serviceman or woman. Atheists were rare (even non-existent in military cemeteries) and, quite apart from combat and other experiences, the American military environment seemed to promote a greater religious consciousness. Furthermore, and in contrast to the brutal example set by other armed forces, America's soldiers and sailors could be admirable exponents of the Golden Rule, and even of the Christian missionary impulse, among Allied, liberated and even enemy civilians. Nevertheless, and as the experience of World War I had recently shown, military service in the context of a global war was inherently hazardous from a moral point of view, the path of the American serviceman and woman being strewn with perils and pitfalls of enormous variety and Bunyanesque proportions. As a result, the moral conduct of a great many service personnel gave considerable cause for concern, often falling disturbingly short of contemporary civilian norms and standards. With this in view, and when assessing the effects of war on faith and morals, John W. Early, the Lutheran senior chaplain of the 79th Infantry Division, wrote after VE day:

This chapter will consider the moral experience of military service, and consider its religious implications both in the shorter and the longer terms.

Morality and military service

Writing in The Link in March 1945, Congregational-Christian chaplain Lawrence D. Graves claimed that a certain proportion of service personnel had sought to place their consciences in a state of suspended animation for the duration of the war, claiming that:

So wrote Tom Brokaw, NBC journalist and broadcaster, in the first of three hugely successful paeans of praise to ‘the greatest generation’. Appealing to the ‘simple, shining legend of the Good War’, and to its sense of national unity and purpose undimmed by the doubts and traumas of Vietnam and even Korea, here Brokaw firmly identified a strong religious faith as one of the four distinguishing virtues of the peerless generation born around 1920, namely ‘personal responsibility, duty, honor, and faith’. Captured – with a touch of irony – in the title of Studs Terkel's pioneering oral history The Good War (1984) and celebrated by Stephen E. Ambrose in books such as Band of Brothers (1992) and Citizen Soldiers (1997); by Steven Spielberg in films and television productions such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010); and by the acclaimed documentary-maker Ken Burns in The War (2007) – the comfortable assumptions and abiding myths of ‘the good war’ and ‘the greatest generation’ have inevitably triggered a chorus of conflicting narratives and a lengthening list of gainsayers. Impelled by the deception and duplicity inherent in such myth-making, among its most notable and authoritative critics was the late Paul Fussell, an American infantry officer in North-West Europe in 1944–45 and a distinguished literary scholar and public intellectual in later life.

Introduction

As we have seen, a greatly enhanced form of military chaplaincy formed the centrepiece of religious provision for American service men and women in World War II. However, and although it seems hard to dispute Doris L. Bergen's assertion that ‘World War II marked the high point of the status of military chaplains in the United States’, it must be borne in mind that religious support went much further than formal military chaplaincy. This chapter will show that the American armed forces were, like American society in general, culturally and historically predisposed to support religion, and that this orientation had never been as emphatic as in the years of World War II. It will also demonstrate how chaplaincy was resourced and reinforced by unprecedented levels of material assistance, likewise provided by government, and how the sympathetic orientation of the armed forces also gave full rein to a massive and complementary civilian effort in support of their spiritual wellbeing. Overall, it will show how the underlying religiosity of America's armed forces, although sometimes well hidden, acted as the dominant factor in accounting for positive religious change among American veterans, a change that will be explored more fully in Chapter Four.

Religion and regulations

Religious life in America's armed forces was ultimately regulated by the Constitution and by the Bill of Rights. Article Six of the Constitution states that ‘no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States’; furthermore, and according to the First Amendment, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ Nonetheless, and in common with many other areas of American public life, religious values suffused American military culture. In their respective oaths of enlistment and oaths of office, enlisted and commissioned personnel routinely invoked the help of the Almighty. Furthermore, the free exercise clause of the First Amendment sanctioned military chaplaincy, and its many corollaries, while the historic Articles of War and Articles for the Government of the United States Navy (which remained in force until 1950) were derived from British models that predated the American Revolution and that were informed by a profound sense of religious obligation and Christian morality. However, given the unambiguous terms of Article Six of the Constitution, the army and navy treated issues of religious affiliation with circumspection.

Introduction

In November 1943, a Lutheran American army chaplain, Israel Yost, baptised seven Japanese-American soldiers in a ceremony in southern Italy. As Yost remembered:

This almost surreal vignette captures in vivid tones the often surprising corollaries of the wartime encounter between a wider world of faith and America's ethnic and religious melting pot. Citizens of a country that was highly regionalised and economically self-sufficient, David Reynolds has remarked that: ‘There was, revealingly, no national newspaper and most Americans had spent little time beyond their home state, let alone visited New York or Washington, D.C.’ Insular and isolationist attitudes had been reinforced in interwar America by the outlook of first- and second-generation immigrants from Europe, who had typically sought to leave the troubles of the Old World behind them. World War II, however, forced many of them to return, albeit temporarily, and created an American military diaspora of vast proportions. In overall terms, about 73 per cent of American servicemen served overseas between 1941 and 1945, with the average sojourn lasting sixteen months. As one veteran and academic commentator wrote in 1946:

Whether serving in Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia or the Pacific, these peregrinations often had a religious dimension. A few GIs, for example, went as Christian or as Jewish pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a great many more to early Christian sites in North Africa and Italy.