Ready Reference Files

Four Chaplains

The Four Chaplains were four U.S. Army chaplains--two Protestant, one Catholic, and one Jewish--who were aboard the Army transport ship U.S.S. Dorchester when it was torpedoed and sunk in the North Atlantic, off the coast of Greenland, on February 3, 1943. The four gave away their own life-jackets so others might live. Of the 904 men aboard, 605 were lost, including chaplains George Lansing Fox (Protestant), Alexander David Goode (Jewish Rabbi), John P. Washington (Roman Catholic priest), and Clark V. Poling (Protestant). Without their life jackets, their chance of survival, already slim, became nonexistent. A U.S. postage stamp was later issued in their honor. The book Sea of Glory: The Magnificent Story of the Four Chaplains, by Francis B. Thornton, tells the story of their heroic deed.

Sources:
Parrish, Thomas, ed. The Simon and Schuster Encyclopedia of World War II. Simon and Schuster, N.Y., 1978. p.112.
Elliott, L. "Legend of the Four Chaplains", Reader's Digest, June, 1989, p.65.
Morrison, Samuel Eliot. The Battle of the Atlantic, September 1939-May 1943. Vol I of History of United States Naval Operations in World War II. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948. pp. 331-34.

Verified by: GM, 6/98

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