3 - The Faithful in Arms

Summary

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’.