It’s been 75 years since the U.S. Army Transport Dorchester was hit by German submarine U-223 while transporting 902 servicemen, merchant seamen and civilian workers to Greenland. On Feb. 3, 1943. four Army chaplains on board gave their lives to save others....Almost seven hundred men died in that one incident. We think of 'the Long War' as grinding and brutal, but as this Foreign Policy piece points out, we've had there were fewer war deaths in the first decade of the Long War than in any decade of the 20th century.
The ship was hit below the water line with a torpedo, initially killing and wounding many men on board.... When they ran out of life jackets, the four chaplains removed their own and gave them away as well. As the ship sank, the chaplains could be seen, arms linked, on the deck, and heard, singing hymns and offering prayers.
Four Chaplins' Day
I had not heard this story before.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Why do we call it the Long War? The Spanish Reconquista was longer; so was the Russian version. So, closer to home, was the Amer-Indian vs Anglo war. During those long contests there were little bits of cease-fire, and there were shifting alliances, but they still seem to have had consistent-enough hostilities to call them single long wars.
Even the current campaign of resurgent Islam against the West dates back before 9/11.
My friend Bill Roggio adopted the name for his journal when the war was more than a decade shorter and younger. I think the name was chosen in anticipation of how long it is expected to go on, rather than how long it has. A warning more than a description.
It must be a terrible thing to be on a ship in battle. Nowhere to hide.
No earth to hug. Splinters everywhere, the sea filled with fire and sharks. May the dead find eternal peace and mercy.
I remember hearing about these men sometime ago. One was a Dutch Reformed pastor, and there is a strong Dutch Reformed community in Pella, Iowa which is probably why. We have a hard time understanding how intense some past wars were.
"Wars between big national armies all but disappeared along with the Cold War,..."
Why do they never state the obvious? Nuclear weapons have, at least for a time, made us safer. Well, that and intertwined markets.
As for understanding the extent of the carnage of WWII, this is pretty good scale-wise (I have a few small issues with the script):
The Fallen
My fear is that it is our very detachment from the carnage of the past that will end up driving us back toward that sort of destruction.
Post a Comment