Mission at Nuremberg
Page 7
To get from one place to the next in the field, they traveled by jeep, by truck, and on foot. As one historian put it, chaplains “climbed mountains, crossed rivers, lay for hours in foxholes, parachuted to safety when their planes were shot down and faced enemy fire in rescuing the wounded. All these were endured, that ‘the bond between man and his God and his home might be maintained and strengthened.’ ”
With 478 casualties in the Second World War, the chaplain branch suffered the third-most combat deaths by percentage behind the air corps and the infantry. Some historians attribute those losses to the chaplains’ “be there” philosophy. Many Catholic chaplains felt compelled to give last rites to dying troops and were killed as they did so. Others wanted to be on the front lines with their men to counsel them as much as they could and provide some sense of prayer and relief during battle.
Chaplains did, however, have help. A chaplain assistant was classified as a clerk-typist, but he often served as a chaplain’s driver, jeep mechanic, organist, choir leader, and—because he could carry a weapon and the chaplain could not—protector.
The army relaxed education requirements and age limits as the need for chaplains grew. By August 1942, a bachelor of divinity degree was no longer required, and the age limit rose from thirty-four in the Regular Army and forty-two in the Reserves to fifty. At the height of the war, the War Department also scratched denominational quotas. Quotas had been determined based on proportional U.S. membership in the various denominations, but with the August 1942 chaplain shortage the Chief of Chaplains office notified the General Commission that chaplains were being accepted “regardless of quota.” If a particular denomination couldn’t fill its space, the army filled it with a chaplain from a different denomination that could.
The military chaplaincy in the United States has always been caught between two worlds. As a branch of the armed forces, it is a government agency guided absolutely by the Constitution and its amendments, particularly the first one. As an extension of the Christian church for much of its history, it is necessarily an evangelical institution, governed by those instructions of Christ to his apostles at the end of the Gospel of Matthew—to “make disciples of all nations.”
Much of what chaplains have learned over the last century about how to incorporate their responsibilities as pastors into the duties as military officers has been taught at a version of the Chaplain School. In September 1940, the secretary of war asked the Chief of Chaplains office for “a brief study outlining the plans of the Chief of Chaplains for meeting the situation as regards the spiritual welfare of the Army.” The office responded that it was “now apparent that provision should be made for the reactivation of the Chaplain’s School.”
A school for army chaplains had been founded in 1919—a five-week course that included classes on military custom and discipline, military law, army regulations, drill, and first aid—but it had gone dark during peacetime ten years later. By the time the Chaplain School was reactivated in 1941, all that was left was its name, a fund of $101.92, fifteen library books, and ten framed pictures of past classes.
The implementation of a new Chaplain School was accelerated by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was reopened on December 9, 1941—two days after the attack.
The army’s goal was a student body of between fifty and seventy-five Reserve and National Guard chaplains who would take twenty-five days (two hundred academic hours) of instruction during a one-month session. Classes would include: Organization of the Army, Army Morale, Military Law, Military Discipline, Grave Registration, Rules of Land Warfare, Map Reading, Military Sanitation and First Aid, and Defense Against Chemicals.
The purpose of the newly reopened school was, according to Army Regulation 350-1500:
to give chaplains specific training in ministering to the moral and religious needs of the military personnel, to acquaint them with the methods of work which experience has shown to be the most effective and with the customs of the service, to instruct them regarding the organization and administration of the Army and to promote cooperation and a fraternal spirit among chaplains.
The school was set up at Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana, and the first class of 71 chaplains graduated on April 25, 1942. By the third class of students, school officials ignored the class size limit of 75 and brought in 148 chaplain candidates. Soon, classes of 300 made continuing at Fort Benjamin Harrison impossible, and the school moved to Harvard University. Duke University lost out because its classrooms were too small, and because the move there would have required the segregation of white and black students. By the end of the summer of 1942, classes at Harvard had grown to 450.
One year later, on August 18, 1943, Henry Gerecke walked onto the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, two weeks after his fiftieth birthday.
CHAPTER 4
This Too Shall Pass
When man thinks that his eyes are opened, and therefore that he knows what is good and evil, when man sets himself on the seat of judgment, or even imagines that he can do so, war cannot be prevented, but comes irresistibly.
—KARL BARTH
ABRAHAM LINCOLN FIRST BECAME a rising star in the Republican Party when he famously debated Stephen Douglas during the 1858 Illinois U.S. Senate race. A year later—the year before he was elected president—he spoke before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society in Milwaukee.
“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations,” Lincoln said. “They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction! ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ ”
This phrase would come in handy for Chaplain Henry Gerecke as he ministered to hundreds of wounded troops with the Ninety-Eighth General Hospital in 1944. “This too shall pass.” It became his mantra as wave after wave of battered GIs were flown into the huge temporary hospital the Allies had set up in Hermitage, a village sixty miles west of London in Berkshire.
Gerecke’s job encompassed more than simply ministering to the troops. His colleagues at the hospital also needed comfort and his motto helped them, too. He decided the Jewish doctors and nurses of the Ninety-Eighth would benefit from the services of a rabbi. Gerecke enjoyed his religious conversations with all his colleagues, but he also felt strongly that everyone in the unit should take part in the religious service particular to his or her own faith.
In May 1944, a month after the Ninety-Eighth arrived in Hermitage, Gerecke made sure that one layman among the 8 percent of the hospital’s Jewish members led a weekly service. He searched for a local rabbi to visit the hospital, and that August a Rabbi Miller led two of the month’s four Friday evening services.
When the High Holidays approached in September, Gerecke made arrangements for his Jewish colleagues to visit a nearby synagogue for what he called “atonement services” on Yom Kippur. Eventually, Gerecke recruited another local rabbi to make the regular rounds for the Ninety-Eighth’s Jewish patients.
During the war, a company in the United States sold “GZY” rings for Americans at home to send to their loved ones fighting abroad. In Hebrew the letters were an abbreviation for “Gamzu ya’avor,” or “This too shall pass.” The rings referred to a story attributed to King Solomon.
In one version, the king, in search of a cure for sadness, assembled his wise men together. They discussed the issue for a long time, then advised him to engrave a ring with the letters GZY. King Solomon did so and wore the ring constantly. “Every time he felt sad and depressed, he looked at the ring, whereon his mood would change and he would feel cheerful.”
One of the Ninety-Eighth’s Jewish nurses, whose father was a jeweler in New York City, had a ring made for Gerecke. It was inscribed with his motto in Hebrew, and she gave it to him as a Christmas present. Gerecke was surprised and moved. He wore it for the rest of his life.
“To a unit closely knit by thirteen months of operation with relatively few changes in officer and key enlisted personnel, readjustment came as a shock,” Sullivan wrote. “Barring those physically disqualified, the vast majority of this organization would have desired to be committed as a unit, even for direct redeployment to the Pacific.”
The Ninety-Eighth General Hospital had been activated at Fort Jackson in June 1943, nine months before the unit landed in England. Sullivan was named commander and received one officer and twenty-eight enlisted men from the Twenty-Eighth General Hospital in Swannanoa, North Carolina. For the next five months, Sullivan built his administrative officer staff and requisitioned enlisted personnel from the army’s Medical Department Training Centers. Before shipping out in March 1944, Sullivan added professional and nursing staffs.
Throughout the war, the unit’s numbers remained unusually steady, with about 500 enlisted men and 150 officers. Sullivan, from Chevy Chase, Maryland, was thirty-five when he was handed the responsibility of building an army hospital from scratch in the summer of 1943. An officer with the Army Medical Corps and a graduate of the Army Medical School and the Army Field Service School, during his six-year army career to that point he’d been stationed at various hospitals around the country, including two years in Puerto Rico, where he gained an interest in his eventual specialty—tropical medicine.
Gerecke was assigned to the Ninety-Eighth on August 24, 1943. The assignment had come within a week of Gerecke’s arrival at Harvard and was an indication of how desperately the army needed to fill chaplain vacancies in units that were preparing to deploy overseas.
In his monthly reports for the army, Gerecke’s love of numbers—so evident from his City Mission newsletters—flourished. The report worksheets didn’t leave much space for commentary, but he told his story through meticulous counts of confessions heard, sex education classes given, or worship services led. The chaplain would file his second monthly report—after ninety-seven more classes and forty-nine more drill periods—less than a week after arriving at Fort Jackson on September 25, 1943.
Gerecke did not have a chapel where he could work when he arrived at Fort Jackson, so he held services in a classroom. His office, which lacked a typewriter, was in the barracks dayroom where soldiers in training gathered to relax and play Ping-Pong. The lack of appropriate space for services at Fort Jackson bothered Gerecke. He felt that worshipping God was a sacred activity, and that sacredness should be reflected in the worship venue. And as the months at Fort Jackson went by, he used his monthly reports to let his superiors in the Chaplain Corps know how he felt. For the next five months, until the unit was deployed, Gerecke was the only chaplain for its growing staff, about half of which was Protestant.
Gerecke participated in the unit’s overnight training bivouacs in the field, often addressing large groups of soldiers with a spiritual message. He took part in all the training exercises: obstacle course, infiltration crawl, and road marches. He used these early days to get to know the members of the unit as he would any congregation. Though he disapproved of dancing, he attended the dances on post and while there, he distributed Protestant New Testaments and “publicity cards” announcing the time and place of his Sunday worship services.
Gerecke was drawn to volunteering for wartime service, but his attitude toward the military before he joined had not been positive. His secretary at the St. Louis Lutheran City Mission, Dorothy Williams, had been married to a GI, and the soldier had not treated her well. One day when “Dot,” as Gerecke called her, came home from work, every item of furniture had disappeared. Her husband had sold it all and left town with a buddy. Gerecke had once visited Jefferson Barracks outside of St. Louis to perform services there and disapproved of the behavior he saw from some soldiers. He’d also inherited some aversion to the military from his father, who had yanked Gerecke from the First World War enlistment line. But that seemed to change once he came to know his colleagues at Fort Jackson and settled into army life. Its sense of order and discipline fit perfectly into the way Gerecke structured his own life and work.
Sullivan assigned eighteen-year-old Private First Class Tommy Geist from Jamaica, Queens, to be Gerecke’s clerk. Geist had been drafted straight out of high school in April 1943, and after basic training at Camp Pickett, Virginia, that summer, he arrived at Fort Jackson in August, on the same day Gerecke started at Harvard. Someone had noticed in Geist’s paperwork that he played the organ, and Sullivan pointed Geist toward the musically minded Gerecke. Like so many of the staff of the Ninety-Eighth, Geist was young and he looked up to the relatively ancient Gerecke, whom he called “Chappie.” Geist said later that Gerecke “was like a father to me, all the way, straight through.” In his monthly reports, Gerecke called Geist “an excellent pianist and organist for all my services.”
In November, Gerecke presided over a devotion for thirteen German prisoners, using his language skills in the army for the first time. He preached outside the base, at Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Methodist civilian churches in Columbia, South Carolina, a practice he would continue at nearly every stop during his army career. Gerecke gave two Thanksgiving services that fall, and he came to believe there was a growing interest in his work among the hospital staff.
In December, he organized Christmas services for soldiers already missing home, and he performed his first baptism, of the daughter of one of the Ninety-Eighth’s sergeants. “I am happy and delightfully busy,” he wrote. “There is a growing spirit of cooperation among the men.” Appropriately enough for February, the chaplain performed his first wedding, marrying Captain Raymond T. Lathrem and his bride, Virginia Byrnside. Five months after leaving St. Louis, in the early days of 1944, Gerecke went home on a fifteen-day leave. He wouldn’t see Alma again until December 1946.
Five months into his assignment, Gerecke found that his promotional efforts had worked. Attendance at Sunday services had doubled, and he continued to take part in as much of the daily life of the unit as he could. He gave two more sex lectures for 500 soldiers and screened the War Department movie For God and Country for 180 more.
The short film, set in a Second World War foxhole, starred Ronald Reagan as a Catholic chaplain coming to terms with the dangers of war. “Oh, heavenly Father,” the chaplain prays at one point, “Grant us in this our time of peril the fullness of thy mercy. Forgive us who have sinned against thy holy name. Protect us from the dangers around us. And if it be thy will that we should die, bring us, oh Lord, to the shelter of thy heavenly gates.”
After one of his men is shot leaving the foxhole, the chaplain attempts to save him and they’re both killed by enemy fire. At the chaplain’s funeral, the film’s narrator says, “A soldier, unarmed, yet not unarmed. For what better weapons may a man carry with him into battle than those of courage, an unswerving devotion to his faith and to his fellow man?”
In March 1944, Sullivan received orders to move the hospital to England. Later that month, the Ninety-Eighth left Boston and sailed stormy seas to Bristol, where it arrived April 4. Gerecke proved seaworthy, holding noon deck services each of the unit’s twelve days afloat, and leading nine services on the two Sundays they sailed on the Atlantic.
The Ninety-Eighth’s assignment was to take over a crumbling station hospital in Hermitage. After arriving in Bristol in southeast England, the unit traveled sixty miles east to Tidworth in Wiltshire for two weeks of orientation, arriving at the hospital grounds on April 18.
The 834-bed hospital was a series of cantonment-type brick buildings with corrugated steel half-pipe Nissen huts f
or personnel quarters, and soon the Ninety-Eighth was operational and taking patients. While the medical personnel saw patients, the rest of the unit was renovating the hospital’s buildings and grounds, which were in poor physical condition, and increasing the hospital’s physical capacity to hold patients by 40 percent. Within a couple weeks, the unit had its first major activity when it received 281 “acute orthopedic cases” after a 101st Airborne Infantry Division practice jump went wrong.
To his surprise and delight, Gerecke found a dedicated hospital chapel, a small wooden structure set in the woods, somewhat removed from the main camp. It was better than worshipping in a classroom, but crucial chaplaincy tools were still missing. In theory, the army provided each chaplain with an “outfit” that included a chest for hymnals, the hymnals themselves, a field desk, a chaplain’s flag, a folding organ, and a portable typewriter. A Christian chaplain’s own denomination provided him with a folding altar and a brass Holy Communion kit.
In his first monthly report, Gerecke decided the “squeaky-wheel” approach might work with his superiors in the Chief of Chaplains office. “A fine chapel with office in rear,” he wrote. However, “chaplains outfit not complete. Our little organ is lent to us by the neighborhood vicar. We do not have our own organ or piano for the chapel. At the moment we have no hymnals. Hope to have at least a field organ and hymnals very soon.”
On May 16, he received a letter from a senior chaplain. “In Par. 6b, it is noted that your Chaplain’s Outfit is not complete. Will you advise this office what is being done to obtain these deficiencies?” When the appropriate gear arrived, Geist finally had an army-issue, GI field organ.
Inside, the chapel was surprisingly roomy and could seat two hundred. Gerecke and Geist set up a white altar with a black cross cut out of the center panel. Gerecke laid a white cloth on top of the altar and set a large wooden cross in the middle in front of the Bible. On either side of the cross, they kept either two candles or fresh flowers. Gerecke hung black drapes behind the altar and a large American flag above.