Photographs

Foley’s youngest brother, Lt. Edward C. Foley, U.S., Army, who was posted to Guadalcanal for much of the war and whom John visited as often as the Clymer weighed anchor off the island. John supplied his brother with such valuables as steaks, oranges, ice cream, and cigars from the Clymer larder. Edward Foley would graduate from Boston College in 1966. Left to right: Foley, his sister Mary, his mother Catherine, and his brothers Francis and Joseph in the backyard of their home in Somerville, Massachusetts.

John Foley with his father Francis Foley, Sr., at “Shadowbrook,” the Jesuit novitiate in Lenox, Massachusetts, c. 1923.

Photo credits: Pages 233 and 234, Foley Family. Pages 235 and 236, United States Navy. Page 237, Foley Family (top) and United States Navy.

Fr. Foley, in late April or early May 1943, with three French missionaries and two of their wards who’d been rescued from Bougainville by a an American ship and then transferred to the Clymer. The women’s names, which Foley recorded at the bottom of the photo, are Sr. Martian, Sr. Ignatius, and Sr. Adelberta. The children are identified as Dorothea Solutu and Aloysius Chinyung. Charmed by the children—particularly the indefatigable Aloysius—the Clymer crew presented Foley with “a bomb helmet full of bills and change” to be given to the sisters for the benefit of their charges.

Fr. Foley saying Mass on the deck of the Clymer while anchored off the island of Espirtu Santo just prior to the Bougainville invasion on November 1, 1942. The men before him are mostly Marines. On the night before the invasion Foley heard confessions until past midnight, and on the next morning “distributed Holy Communion as Viaticum for 25 minutes immediately after Reveille.” The landing took place at 7:30 a.m. By late morning, Foley was offering Last Sacraments to the gravely wounded who’d been returned from the beach and whose confessions he’d heard the previous evening. The battle for the island eventually engaged 144,000 American troops and would not conclude until Japan surrendered.

A 1952 photograph of Foley at a ceremony in New York City, where he was presented with a print of a painting, commissioned by the Navy, that draws on Navy photographs of Foley saying Mass on the Clymer. (See photo above)

The USS George Clymer, an attack transport, on which Foley served from June 1942 to April 1944.

Foley presides at a memorial service on the lower deck of the Vella Gulf in memory of Marine Lt. Edward C. Grove, a pilot who died in a take-off accident on May 12, 1945. Grove, the ship’s first casualty, is represented by an empty chair in the front row, and his fellow pilots are seated in the first four rows. In one of his interviews with Steve O’Brien, Foley recalls that he said a Mass for Groves, who was a Protestant.

The USS Vella Gulf, an aircraft carrier on which Foley served from April 1945 until war’s end. His note at the bottom edge of the photograph reads “Our ship — spanking new.”