In the early hours of February 3, 1943, four Army chaplains stood arm in arm on the slanting deck of the torpedoed SS Dorchester, praying in Latin, Hebrew and English, having just given their life jackets to other soldiers. This episode explores who those men were: George L. Fox, a Methodist minister and decorated World War I medic; Alexander D. Goode, a rabbi with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins; Clark V. Poling, a Yale Divinity graduate following his father's example; and John P. Washington, a Catholic priest from working-class Newark. It traces how the moral mobilization after Pearl Harbor drew them through the chaplain school at Harvard and onto a converted luxury liner bound for Greenland.

The episode examines the physical reality of the Dorchester, a 1920s coastal liner built for around 400 people but packed with over 900, and why many sol ...