The situational and contingent nature of religious belief and practice lies at the heart of one of the best known clichés of modern military life- namely, that ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’. In ‘Christendom-type’ societies of the first half of the twentieth century, where Christian values and frames of reference remained normative and churchgoing was still commonplace,Footnote ¹ the capacity of combat, its prospect and its aftermath, to stimulate remarkable manifestations of religious belief and practice among soldiers, sailors and airmen was the source of recurrent attention and comment. When, as in Great Britain and much of Western Europe, this phenomenon occurred – and, crucially, was observed – within the context of an overarching narrative of inexorable, long-term secularisation, the often fleeting religiosity of predominantly young, adult males (never, in any western Christian society, the churches’ core constituency) provoked mixed reactions and conflicting verdicts. For example, and in the case of Great Britain, the apparent resurgence of religion in a growing citizen army during the early months of the First World War was widely seen as a symptom and harbinger of a greater revival of religion in the nation at large. As William Ewing, a Scottish Presbyterian chaplain, wrote of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915–16:

However, and as the war went on, such manifestations of wartime religiosity were increasingly viewed with scepticism and even scorn. As the celebrated Anglican chaplain G.A. Studdert Kennedy fumed in 1918:

As Studdert Kennedy saw it, this was not prayer because it was ‘purely selfish prayer, and selfish prayer is not prayer at all…. The words without the spirit are as useless and as vain as the mumbo-jumbo of a conjuror before he does the trick’.Footnote ⁴ Such harsh verdicts were passed even in subcultures that were thought to be relatively devout. As a Catholic army chaplain stated in 1919, ‘Speaking roughly, the fervour of the men's Catholicity was at any moment proportioned to the amount of danger that was to be faced.’Footnote ⁵

Nevertheless, the fact remains that, when confronted with the same evidence of faith – often nominal, and even residual – raised to a new pitch of intensity by the proximity of danger, different British churchmen evinced different reactions at different stages of the war. However, given the dominance of the contemporary, liberal Protestant commentary on religion in the British army during the First World War, a commentary that has inhered in the historiography of the subject, manifestations of ‘the emergency religion of the trenches’,Footnote ⁶ or ‘funk religion’, as it was more dismissively known,Footnote ⁷ were never going to be a source of celebration. For those whose pre-eminent concerns were the social gospel, the revision of public worship, ecumenism and the role of the established churches in national life, such individual bursts of personal religiosity were minor and even spurious distractions from the more compelling business of root and branch reform of church and society. However, the purpose of this paper is to look at combat religion from a rather different angle, namely that of the American experience of the Second World War. This perspective is illuminating for a number of reasons. Firstly, there can be no doubt that the master narrative of secularisation and its underlying assumptions had much less purchase on the minds of American religious commentators in the 1940s than it had on their contemporaries, or near contemporaries, in Great Britain and Europe. Secondly, these commentators were not, unlike many of their British equivalents, preoccupied – even blinkered – by the concerns and imperatives of national religious establishments in relation to the state and wider society. Thirdly, and despite the influence and pretensions of the progressive Protestant ‘mainline’, American Christianity was theologically and denominationally much more diverse than even Great Britain's religious landscape (which was, by the standards of the ‘Old World’, remarkable for its plurality). Fourthly, there is the potential for enquiry and comparison that is offered by the scale and complexity of the US armed forces in the Second World War; more than 16 million Americans served in the course of the conflict, in theatres of war ranging from Alaska to New Guinea, and in roles ranging from construction engineers in the jungles of West Africa to aerial gunners in the skies above Germany. Fifthly, and perhaps most importantly, the issue of combat religion was the subject of unprecedented enquiry and discussion on the part of American churchmen, giving rise to some of the most famous and tendentious assertions as to the nature, ubiquity and similarity of combatant faith.

‘I thank God I'm still alive. I prayed…if you don't pray to God and you get into a war, you believe in him. I didn't see an atheist.’ So spoke Joe Baldwin, a veteran of the 4^th Infantry Division, whose campaign in Northwest Europe commenced at Utah Beach on 6 June 1944.Footnote ⁸ These words, of course, encapsulate the most famous commentary on soldiers’ religion in the Second World War, namely that ‘There are no atheists in foxholes’ – an echo of the British chaplains’ maxim of 1914–18 that ‘there are no atheists in the trenches’.Footnote ⁹ Attributed to William T. Cummings, an American Catholic missionary who took part in the defence of the Philippines in 1942 and who later died in Japanese captivity,Footnote ¹⁰ this axiom became one of the best known clichés of the war, still cited by American veterans decades later.Footnote ¹¹ His assertion, and the assumptions and sentiments that lay behind it, inspired local variants more suitable to other arms of service. Echoing the title of a 1943 autobiography by the veteran army aviator Colonel Robert L. Scott, a bestseller that was duly adapted for the big screen, the conviction that ‘God Is My Co-Pilot’ was often expressed by American airmen. After making the fearsome mistake of releasing his B-29's bomb load onto his own runway before even taking off on one bombing mission, Gordon Bennett Robertson wrote to his wife: ‘Well, I know now that God is my co-pilot, and he gets on board before I take off’.Footnote ¹² Similarly, Norman Wesley Achen, a P-51 pilot who was shot down over Germany in 1944, recollected passing his controls to God as his plane crash-landed. Recalling the crash, and his later captivity and escape, Achen maintained that ‘He's a good co-pilot. They don't come any better.’Footnote ¹³ Significantly, American chaplains appealed directly to this wartime commonplace among aviators. One article in The Link, a widely-circulated Protestant magazine for servicemen, advised fliers to ‘Avoid Crack-Ups’ by using their conscience as their compass, the Bible as their octant, God's purpose as their radio beam, and Christ as their co-pilot- one who ‘can fly us on through – through even the Valley of the Shadow of Death – and make for us a happy landing’.Footnote ¹⁴

Cummings’ adage also resonated among American sailors. As Douglas E. Leach, who served on a destroyer in the Pacific, put it: ‘Somebody once remarked that there were no atheists in the foxholes…. But it was equally true that there were few atheists among those Americans who went down to the sea in ships.’Footnote ¹⁵ For those sailors who saw action, and survived, the reality of God's protection could be no less apparent than for the infantry who survived the proverbial foxhole. Reviewing the wartime adventures of the light cruiser USS Montpelier, James J. Fahey wrote:

The perils of the oceans themselves, and the fear of being cast adrift on millions of square miles of the Pacific or the Atlantic, cast a long shadow over those who served on, above or beneath them, even evoking the sentiments of the psalmist, ‘They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep.’Footnote ¹⁷ As Samuel Hynes put it, for Marine Corps aviators ‘The thought of being lost at sea became a new nightmare, the worst form of dying.’Footnote ¹⁸ In view of this widespread fear, and the seemingly miraculous survival of some who found themselves in that dread predicament,Footnote ¹⁹ ‘life-raft religion’ duly evolved as a sub-species of emergency religion, alongside that of the foxhole and belief in the divine co-pilot.Footnote ²⁰

Still, Cummings’ dictum did not go uncontested, becoming stale and disputed even before the Second World War had ended. There were, of course, several grounds on which to take issue with this statement. Despite the extraordinary religious stimuli provided by combat, public opinion polls (to say nothing of the vast majority of American service personnel who expressed a religious preference on their induction) showed that atheists were a rarity in American society at large. Although that point was rarely made during the Second World War, there was also the salutary fact that not every soldier, sailor, airman or marine turned to the Almighty in times of danger. While this was sometimes due to the practical demands of a particular combat role, it could also arise from sheer indifference or hostility towards religion. Lester Atwell, a practising Catholic whose wartime milieu was that of the religiously susceptible combat infantryman, maintained that, ‘Even in our own small group there were several Catholics in name only, and there had been many in C Company. I often wondered how the comfortable expression grew up: “There are no atheists in the foxholes.”’Footnote ²¹ Early in the Guadalcanal campaign of 1942–43, and in an incident that prompted a rare moment of self-doubt, navy chaplain Warren Wyeth Willard (a Northern Baptist, and a fundamentalist) encountered a marine who remained resistant to the consolations of religion in the face of death itself:

Of the religiosity of US airmen in India, and that of the 341^st Bombardment Group in particular, Chaplain Thomas H. Clare of the Evangelical and Reformed Church concluded that the picture was distinctly mixed: ‘Do these boys think of religion when they get into tight spots? Some of them do; others do not.’Footnote ²³ To illustrate his point, Clare cited the different reactions evinced among a crew whose aircraft had got into trouble, their pilot telling him that:

Nevertheless, and according to the April 1944 edition of What the Soldier Thinks, the self-proclaimed ‘Monthly Digest of War Department Studies on the Attitudes of American Troops’:

Five years later, a compendious post-war study of The American Soldier by America's Social Science Research Council confirmed these findings, concluding that ‘the fact that such an overwhelming majority of combat men said that prayer helped them a lot certainly means that they almost universally had recourse to prayer and probably found relief, distraction, or consolation in the process’.Footnote ²⁵ If social scientists were content to confirm the prevalence of ‘foxhole religion’, as in Great Britain during the First World War its symptoms had the effect of markedly dividing religious commentators. To some, who shared the views of Studdert Kennedy, fevered supplications for personal deliverance born of sheer physical terror were practically worthless, being the acme of the so-called ‘gimme-prayer’, and their opinions could come into conflict with more positive appraisals.Footnote ²⁶ In 1943, and drawing on his experiences in the First World War, former army Chief of Chaplains Alva J. Brasted, a Northern Baptist, published an article in the journal Religious Education in which he compared the religion of America's Doughboys in the First World War to that of its GIs in the Second. In particular, Brasted recalled his experiences on board a troopship that had nearly gone down in a severe tropical storm, a situation that had triggered a welter of prayer among those on board and which produced large services of thanksgiving after the storm abated. For Brasted the lesson was clear: ‘In the first World War, in this, and invariably when men are face to face with death they look Godward – the help of religion is sought.’Footnote ²⁷ However, in the very next issue of the journal Brasted's claims met with an angry response from Dr. J. Hutton Hynd of the rationalist and ultra-liberal Ethical Society of St. Louis, who deplored the crude assumptions that underlay Brasted's story, claiming that his article merely confirmed ‘the view that religion…is a matter of calling for help in a predicament – a peculiarly popular yet pernicious view of religion’. Revolted by the claim that ‘There are no atheists in fox-holes’ (which, Hynd wearily noted, was ‘quoted far and wide, and with general assent and relish’)Footnote ²⁸ he harked back to his own experiences as a Royal Air Force mechanic in the First World War, claiming to be grimly familiar with the worthlessness of such situational faith in the British armed forces:

Others, however, were disposed to view symptoms of foxhole religion more favourably, as early signs of religious awakening and even as proofs of the veracity of Proverbs 9:10 – ‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom’. In fact, the evangelical and conversionist traditions of American Protestantism, still very much alive in this generation despite the agendas and preoccupations of more progressive opinion, seem to have nurtured a common and instinctive sympathy with the oft-touted maxim of the seventeenth-century Puritan divine, John Flavel, who averred that ‘Man's extremity is God's opportunity’.Footnote ³⁰ As one army chaplain declared, ‘I say that it is better for a man to be exposed to the way of salvation in an hour of crisis than to fail to have any knowledge of it at all. One never knows when the salvation of his God will break through upon his needy soul.’Footnote ³¹ The divergence between transatlantic perspectives on this phenomenon had been illustrated in the wake of the First World War, when committees of British and American churchmen had published parallel reports on the religious condition of their armies. For the British, who were largely concerned with remodelling English and Scottish Christianity in the post-war era, the importance of ‘funk religion’ (so called) could be too easily downplayed or too readily exaggerated; essentially, it reflected the existence of an elemental belief in ‘an Unseen Power, inaccessible to the senses, which is yet mightier than high explosives, which knows all and which hears prayer’.Footnote ³² For the Americans, however, the existence of ‘the emergency religion of the trenches’ was much more encouraging:

As we have seen in the exchange between Brasted and Hynd, this unresolved debate was revived in the crucible of the Second World War. Reflecting on the ‘Lessons of Guadalcanal’ in the distinctly secular Marine Corps Gazette of August 1943, Captain Gerald H. Shea announced that ‘as on Bataan there are no atheists on Guadalcanal. Religion plays a large part in men's lives during war everywhere; many a man wears his cross or Saint Christopher medal right along with his dog tags.’Footnote ³⁴ However, Arthur F. Glasser, one of the few separatist fundamentalists among the chaplains of the US Navy, had very different ideas. According to Glasser, the essential baseness of foxhole religion meant that it was positively obstructive to the growth of real faith; conscious of how they had broken promises made to God in moments of sheer terror, backsliders were too ashamed to be receptive to the Gospel thereafter. After conducting his own interviews with veterans of Guadalcanal, Glasser averred that:

A more nuanced opinion could be taken by others. Rather than condemning foxhole religion as a source of scandal for ‘the cause of Christ’,Footnote ³⁶ Roy B. Anderson, another navy chaplain and Northern Baptist, was inclined to see both sides of the argument in reflecting on his own experience of a navy Construction Battalion in the Pacific. According to Anderson, ‘As superficial as some of these experiences might have been, today some men are Christians because a bomb or shell landed too close for comfort.’Footnote ³⁷ Typically bullish, Anderson's fellow Northern Baptist, Warren Wyeth Willard, was much less equivocal: ‘It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes. It may be added that there are no unbelievers when the big guns open up. False philosophies dissolve before the reality of death. All becomes vain but the Christian hope.’Footnote ³⁸ Significantly, a fourth Navy chaplain, M.M. Tennessen, a Catholic, shared Willard's confidence, writing to Bishop Bergan of Des Moines:

A similar range of views was apparent in the US army. In June 1945, Time magazine reported that one army chaplain, Lewis A. Myers, had condemned foxhole religion as a mere sophism in the pages of the Arkansas Baptist. From his experience as a chaplain on board transport ships, Myers argued that most GIs were heading back to the United States hardened to the gospel message, heedless of religious services, and as inveterate cursers and gamblers. As Myers saw it, all of this pointed to the failure of their Christian training and the fatuity of foxhole faith:

Edward K. Rogers, a much-decorated United Lutheran chaplain who served with the 1^st Infantry Division in the Mediterranean and Northwest Europe, found it much harder to come to a fixed view of the subject. After hard fighting at Long Stop Hill in Tunisia, he found that ‘a great host of men came to church’ the following Sunday. Significantly, ‘Many had never bothered to do so before and many such were quite faithful thereafter.’Footnote ⁴¹ Later, in Normandy, Rogers had real difficulty in controlling the size of his congregations at impromptu field services:

As for the GIs he baptised, often as a direct result of an awakened religious consciousness, the high casualties and high turnover of manpower experienced by infantry regiments made it hard to judge: ‘I will say that most of the men whom I have instructed and baptized have been very sincere about their faith. Seventy-five percent of them have left us one way or another during the past two years so I can't speak of their present religious life.’Footnote ⁴³ All in all, however, Rogers was not unduly optimistic, concluding that ‘“combat religion” is soon forgotten by some men…. Often it does a lot of good, perhaps more often it rolls off like water off a duck's back’.Footnote ⁴⁴

However, and highly conscious of the need to promote a positive image of army chaplains and their work among the American public, the Office of the Chief of Chaplains placed a distinctly positive gloss on these confusing symptoms of faith. In his introduction to the 1945 volume Soldiers of God, a study of army chaplaincy work, the army's astute Chief of Chaplains, William R. Arnold, a Catholic, declared that: ‘[T]his is not a book to glorify “foxhole religion.” The purpose of Soldiers of God is not to select a few dramatic conversions to faith and point to these as proof of a religious upsurge.’ Nonetheless, and as Arnold went on:

Basically, his assertions reprised a central theme in an earlier, 1944 anthology Faith of Our Fighters, in which numerous chaplains had insisted on the value, veracity and longevity of the kind of faith that was to be discovered in a foxhole. The very first chapter, by Chaplain Philip H. Oxnam, son of the Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam, was entitled ‘I Know They Believe!’ and began:

According to Oxnam, the first air raid his battalion experienced led to a doubling of church attendance and to ‘a thousandfold’ improvement in its language. He was certain, he insisted, ‘that when these men return to their homes, they will come back God-fearing men. They will be real men with their hearts and eyes opened.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, and in considering the question of ‘What War Does to Spiritual Sensibilities’, Richard H. Chase, a Christian Scientist army chaplain, thought that the answer was obvious:

It was, however, left to De Loss I. Marken, a Disciples of Christ chaplain with the 34^th Infantry Division, to summarise a central theme of this book: ‘These boys learn to know God. You know you don't need colored windows and a pipe organ to worship God. There's no better place in the world to learn to know God than a foxhole.’Footnote ⁴⁹

In fairness, and despite dissenting or ambivalent voices, the prevailing view among army chaplains does seem to have been that combat did serve as a positive stimulant to personal faith. As an unidentified chaplain of the 81^st Infantry Division emphasized:

A Presbyterian USA chaplain, Eben Cobb Brink, claimed from his experiences with the 1^st Armored Division in North Africa in 1942–43 that ‘The battlefield offers, to those who are able to listen amidst the turmoil of conflict, a stirring study of men's souls.’Footnote ⁵¹ The sincerity and potential of the kind of faith to be aroused on the battlefield was confirmed at some length by Chaplain Alvin O. Carlson in his book He Is Able: Faith Overcomes Fear in a Foxhole (1945). Here, Carlson, another Presbyterian, majored on the authenticity of many battlefield conversions, their long-term gestation in camp, at home, at church, and at Sunday school, and on the duty of the church to support converted veterans on their return to civilian society.Footnote ⁵² Nor did The Link magazine fail to deliver a positive verdict on the essential value of ‘foxhole religion’ and its several variants. In a 1944 article entitled ‘When the Chips Are Down’, Dr. William L. Stidger of Boston University's School of Theology pronounced that ‘Men don't kid when the chips are down’:

If most army chaplains were prepared to recognise some inherent value in ‘foxhole religion’, a few, anticipating Carlson's advice, took active steps to nurture it. In Italy in March 1944, for example, Chaplain Israel Yost, a United Lutheran, sought to prick the consciences of his own foxhole religionists in the Japanese-American 100^th Infantry Battalion by adding some comic verse to his church notices:

Later, Yost was gratified to hear ‘from some of the old-timers that my verse on the church notices was stirring up the consciences of some’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Significantly, the very first issue of The Chaplain magazine in October 1944 stressed the need for further discussion of ‘the after-results of religion that grows so luxuriantly in foxholes’. In particular, another United Lutheran chaplain, Albert W. Schumaker, was eager to establish ‘What happens to it when the men leave the frontlines and are no longer in need of any divine miracles to save their skins?’ Thus prodded, the magazine inquired, ‘Is there anyone present who can outline the best procedures for a chaplain's foxhole follow-up?’Footnote ⁵⁵ One chaplain who could was Chaplain F.H. Woyke, a Northern Baptist who served in Northwest Europe with the 279^th Station Hospital. In his case, Woyke sought to factor the effects of foxhole religion into his personal programme of preaching:

Similarly, in March 1945 The Chaplain carried a letter from Chaplain W.P. Smith, a Methodist, who reported on a pastoral programme that had been devised by another Northern Baptist, Chaplain William F. Shearin, to ensure that ‘religious experiences in the foxholes are lasting’:

Given its ubiquity and its potential promise for post-war religion, a preoccupation with foxhole religion was evident even beyond military circles. It was, for example, the subject of a lengthy radio debate by a panel of civilian churchmen in September 1944. Under the aegis of Northwestern University Reviewing Stand, a programme carried by the Chicago-based broadcaster WGN, the panel concluded that foxhole religion was not ‘a very high grade expression of faith’. Nevertheless, this consensus obscured a variety of personal opinions: Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky understood it as ‘a religion of crisis’, Charles W. Kegley, a Lutheran pastor and ‘chairman of the university's board of religion’, decried it as ‘scared stiff religion’, while John Huess, an Episcopalian, was inclined to think that it ‘may be the beginning’ of a ‘higher kind’ of religion.Footnote ⁵⁸ In April 1945, The Link published an essay entitled ‘Foxhole Religion’ in which Chaplain Oscar A. Withee took a close, if rather impressionistic, look at the subject. According to Withee, foxhole religion followed three general trajectories ‘depending upon the man concerned’. Firstly, there was the devout believer who prayed for moral support and that God's will be done; he would live, or die, in a laudable state of Christian resignation. Secondly, there was the soldier who prayed ‘for simple bodily deliverance’; he kept ‘his foxhole religion as a handy life-preserver for emergencies’ but was fundamentally indifferent to religion. In the safety of home especially, his combat experience was liable to be forgotten ‘and there is no practice of any Christian virtues or contribution to the things God is interested in’. Thirdly, however, there was the soldier who likewise prayed ‘to be delivered bodily’ but whose experience then led him ‘to further look into the part prayer plays in life and for what purpose God may have spared him. He senses an obligation and seeks to fulfil it as a useful Christian citizen’.Footnote ⁵⁹ More systematic, however, was a survey conducted by Wayne L. Hunter, a senior army chaplain in the Pacific, of the religious behaviour of the 1^st Cavalry Division from July 1943 to June 1944. Over this period of time, the division moved to Australia, where it trained before being sent to New Guinea, and then to the Admiralty Islands, where it saw combat from February to April 1944. Very significantly for those who stressed the importance of nurturing foxhole faith, Hunter identified the post-combat month of May 1944 as the peak period in terms of communions, confessions and general church attendance, easily exceeding those of the Christmas, Easter and pre-combat periods. Thus, Hunter arrived at the critical deduction that ‘men are as ready to express thanks as they are to ask for favors’; as Hunter concluded, ‘the increase during the month of May can be accounted for only by a change of attitude on the part of those who experienced combat’.Footnote ⁶⁰

However much ink was spilt, or debate was had, over the merits and demerits of ‘foxhole religion’, it is clear from the study of the US armed forces in the Second World War that this ubiquitous phenomenon was widely regarded as an authentic and legitimate expression of an often nascent and untutored personal faith. Significantly, and when compared with the British experience of the First World War, it seems very clear that different ‘christendom’ contexts, with their specific histories, priorities and assumptions, could produce highly divergent perspectives on the same phenomena. Uninhibited by a dominant assumption of religious decline, unfettered by the concerns of establishment, and still heavily influenced by an evangelical and conversionist heritage that placed a heavy onus on individual experience, for most American churchmen of the 1940s it would appear that ‘foxhole religion’ was something to be accepted, scrutinised and cultivated. Though its symptoms were essentially the same as the emergency religion of the trenches (or ‘funk religion’) of the British soldier in the First World War, it was not so easily or peremptorily dismissed as a desperate and even selfish expression of personal belief, one that had little to no bearing on a much more pressing agenda for wider societal and ecclesiastical change.