5 - Global Encounters

Summary

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 was a unique event: it took place in an Italian Roman Catholic church converted for the time into an American aid station; the pastor was a German American and the new believers were Japanese Americans; one of the witnesses, Sergeant Akinaka, was a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormon); the other witness, Doc Kometani, told the converts that this was the most important decision they had ever made.… That evening two of the medics sang Hawaiian songs to guitar accompaniment; they included two hymns in Hawaiian, ‘Leaning on the Everlasting Arms’ and ‘Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me’.

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:

During World War II and the subsequent military occupation, American soldiers were dispersed to every corner of the globe. Perhaps eight million [sic] were at one time or another engaged in foreign service. No continent, few countries, and few islands failed to receive at least some military or naval representatives of the United States.

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.