That Great Man

Remembering Chaplain Moody, Who Was Always There for His Men

BY RAYMOND J. BROWN

Let us now praise famous men . . . but I’ll just remember a faithful servant who once went to war against powers and principalities, both seen and unseen.

On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, more than 1,300 ships, four Army divisions, and three Marine divisions would invade the Japanese home islands in a brutal 82-day campaign. But getting to Okinawa for the amphibious landings and desperate engagement with the Divine Wind (Japan’s kamikaze pilots) was no simple task.

THE U.S. NAVY AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS YORKTOWN (CV-10)

Two weeks earlier, on March 18, the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown—The Fighting Lady— was proceeding toward Okinawa. Though aircraft carriers were surrounded by battleships, cruisers, and destroyers afloat, and Combat Air Patrol aloft, the protective screen was not impenetrable. On that Sunday, the 18th, Japanese aircraft did break through and attacked Yorktown. A 500-pound bomb exploded in the air just off the port side of the carrier. That fifth Sunday of Lent was promptly renamed “Bomb Sunday” by the ship’s company.

Yorktown kept maneuvering to confuse the inbound targeting aircraft and to launch and land her own. The gun crews kept firing rapid continuous. And the damage control teams worked feverishly to put out fires, free compartments of gas, and de-smoke the black air. There were 23 casualties, both sailors and Marines, in three locations—one area topside in a gun mount, and two spaces just inside the skin of the ship and on different decks—not to mention damaged aircraft.

Running immediately toward the explosion from Repair Locker 3 and arriving on the scene, without orders, was Lieutenant Commander Joe Moody, a Catholic priest and senior chaplain. Two men had been blinded, another man’s entrails were spread out on the deck about him, and two other shipmates were now without their legs. Amid blood flowing on deck and flames overheating the spaces, Father Moody organized stretcher teams, himself first assisting a wounded sailor to safety. Barking orders like a line officer, he gave clear direction to the Protestant chaplain, Lieutenant George Wright, on where and how they would split responsibilities.

The assigned Hospital Corpsmen and stretcher bearers, some drafted by Moody, responded well. Order was restored on mayhem. The makeshift stretcher teams transported the wounded to battle dressing stations and then up deck via ladders to sick bay, laboriously opening and dogging Quick Acting Watertight Doors and advising Damage Control Central of routes. All the while the sprinkler system annoyingly hosed the sailors down. There was triage knowingly ignored, last rites administered, and even a deathbed conversion. It was a hard day and a long night of prayer and action.

No medal was ever conferred on Father Joe Moody. But his shipmates knew what he had done that day and never forgot it. And the historian Dr. Clark G. Reynolds, in his otherwise even-handed, warts-and-all account of Yorktown 1943–1945 (published in 1968), would refer to him as “that great man.” But the crew had known that reality long before Bomb Sunday. And long after.

AN EPOCH FAST FADING

I am a baby boomer, one of that voluminous tribe born between 1946 and 1962. In my suburban boyhood there existed a vague and ill-informed neighborhood hierarchy concerning fathers and

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their roles in wartime. But rightly atop that local pyramid was my own father, Jake. He was a once-aMarine-always-a-Marine for sure —14 battle stars, a ship sunk from under him, shrapnel in his head, and malaria three times. Dad served in the Marine Detachment of USS Yorktown, in both the first ship of that name, sunk at Midway, and the second one, bound and victorious on namesake retribution. He also made two amphibious landings. I have lived most of my life in the giant shadow of that Greatest Generation, perhaps the more so as I chose a career in uniform. Abiding in that giant shadow was all I had ever known, and it seemed normal. Now that the bastions of that generation have almost all passed on, I realize that having been in their long-enduring presence was a privilege. Their like we will not see again.

I have a memory of encountering only one of my father’s shipmates before Dad died when I was twelve years old. That was Yorktown’s wartime chaplain, Father Joseph Moody. And at that one time I was perhaps eleven years old. But the memory somehow stuck. I am glad it did, as in recent years I have learned the story of, among other things, a most remarkable seagoing officer who happened to be a chaplain.

Father Joseph N. Moody (right) on the Yorktown, 1947 UNRAVELING A LONG FORGOTTEN PAST

My dad stayed in touch with Father Moody after both had detached from The Fighting

Lady and returned to civilian life. Indeed, Father Moody solemnized my parents’ wedding in 1948. And my father stayed in touch with him more than I knew. I now surmise that there were letters, phone calls, and visits I did not know about.

Piecing together some painful clues from my boyhood, I eventually came to understand that the war never actually ended for my father. That truth is perhaps best demonstrated by an occasion when my mother abruptly stopped him from looking at certain Yorktown photos from the Pacific war. He asked why, and she abruptly chastised him, “You know why.” I asked Mom later about that brief discussion, and she just said that when Dad started to think about those who did not come back, he became saddened. As an adult, I came to realize that at such times he waxed truly morose and would seek solace in alcohol. Back then no one called it PTSD.

As for the one time I recall seeing Father Moody, it was when my brothers and I accompanied our father on a trip some 50 miles from our New Jersey home to Highlands, New York. Father Moody was then a professor at Ladycliff College (a Catholic women’s college that is no more, the grounds now part of the U.S. Military Academy). The cover story for the trip was taking us kids to visit the West Point museum, which we did do. But first Dad would have a visit with Father Moody (“my friend”), while we three gradeschoolers played with the priest’s Irish setter. I do recall wondering what a former Navy chaplain was doing at West Point. In retrospect, I realize that my father was meeting with his trusted chaplain and shipmate for counseling and prayer about a personal battle that was tougher for him than Okinawa’s 96 consecutive days of GQ calls.

While I was growing up, my dad told absolutely no stories of battle horror, fears, and carnage. But one recurring theme in his talk was the courage and seeming omnipresence of Chaplain Moody. I also have come to think that my father’s occasional dictum, “Some

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people say you need a psychiatrist; all you need is a priest,” may have been more self-reassurance than general social comment. Within two years of that visit with Father Moody, whose appearance and demeanor seemed that of a genial Gregory Peck, the former Sergeant John M. Brown went the way of all flesh at age 41. After his passing, my mother made one final trip to see her deceased husband’s chaplain. Our diminished family then moved seven states away. And I seldom thought about what I have just recounted.

UNEXPECTED LINKS TO THE PAST

After my own long seagoing career ended, I happened upon a website remembrance concerning a Marine who had served in Yorktown during the great central Pacific offensive. One Ed Sarkisian had been wounded on that Bomb Sunday in March 1945, yet still assisted in the evacuation of others. After being treated, he returned to skyward watch duties. Ed later received the Navy Commendation Medal,

recommended by one Chaplain Moody, a name I had seldom recalled.

I contacted Ed through the internet, saying I was somewhat familiar with his past, and that I was quite

aware that Commendation Medals to seagoing enlisted men were not just handed out with the midnight rations. Ed Sarkisian answered— only it was Ed Junior, a captain

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No medal was ever conferred on Father Moody. But his shipmates knew what he had done that day and never forgot it. And the historian Dr. Clark G. Reynolds, in his otherwise even-handed, warts-and-all account of Yorktown 1943–1945, would refer to him as “that great man.”

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for United Airlines, for he had written the piece about his father. Over several email and phone conversations, I asked Ed Junior if his father had ever come across my dad. It turned out that his father had known mine quite well and wished to speak with me.

The senior Ed was approaching 90 years of age and had severe Parkinson’s challenges. But he remembered his sea duty as if it were yesterday. And, as is often the case with war veterans, he spoke little of combat and much of his shipmates—both their prowess and their humorous foibles. He complained sardonically about one officer, whose indelicate nickname I will not disclose. And he told me specifically about my father’s seaward persona, a description that my wife said was remarkably akin to mine.

And throughout our conversation, the older Ed, not a Roman Catholic, told me about how Chaplain Moody was always available for everybody, seemingly omnipresent. He served as a reminder that there was something and Someone bigger and beyond the arduous shipboard routines occasionally interrupted by terror.

A few years later, Ed Junior called me. He had just given his recently deceased father’s car to Herbert Feldman, who had been a Hospital Corpsman in Yorktown, and he was, in fact, right then riding in the car with Herb. Somehow Herb heard me mention Father Moody to Ed, and he started spouting loud and animated compliments, which I could hear at my end. So they pulled over, and Ed handed Herb the phone. The old shipmate, who had to be at least 90 by then, spoke effusively about his chaplain of some 70 years past: “He was always there for us, on the flight deck, in the hangar, in sick bay— always!” And he related that, after the Bomb Sunday attack on March 18, 1945, Father Moody had prayed with and for the wounded well into the wee hours of the 19th. And there had been a deathbed conversion shortly before 4:00 in the morning.

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DOING MORE THAN DUTIES ASSIGNED

This greatly interested me, this adulation for a man not seen for so long, for Father Moody had passed away in 1994, at age 89. So I began digging through people and papers associated with USS Yorktown—now for many years a floating museum at Patriot’s Point in Charleston, South Carolina— and I could find nothing but good things recorded about Father Moody. Slowly, and over several years, I became acutely aware of his singular shipboard influence, ever remembered by those who witnessed his leadership and ministry. Among the many things I discovered are the following:

• On December 22, 1944, early in his assignment to Yorktown, Father Moody tripped and fell off a moving aircraft elevator, breaking his wrist. Undeterred by the pain and limited use of one hand, he carried on with preparing for and conducting a number of Christmas services, and even some holiday entertainments. • Aboard any ship, there is generally inaccurate, rumor-mill knowledge about operational plans and destinations, course changes, alterations in readiness levels, and the like. However, almost immediately upon reporting aboard, Lieutenant Commander Moody requested permission to provide daily broadcasts to the crew on current events and, to the extent possible, operational plans. This permission was— surprisingly to anyone who has served in a commissioned ship— granted, and the addresses were enormously well received. Admiral Arthur Radford commented on their morale-building utility, and enlisted men sarcastically surmised that this was how officers themselves found out what was really going on.

• Although seamen have a deserved reputation for using scurrilous language, Father Moody could routinely advise, “Watch your French,” and his respectful shipmates would promptly clean up their act. It is a rare officer who has that effect on those around him.

• Upon arriving in San Francisco after Japan’s surrender, Father Moody arranged a huge dance party for the 3,000 Yorktown sailors. He got 1,000 young ladies to attend, though how he did that is lost to memory. But then he was advised that the black stewards of Yorktown would not be allowed in the civic center. Chaplain Joe Moody would have none of that. He went straight to the top, with the result that the entire ship’s company of 3,000 men was invited to the gala.

ENVOI

Father Moody mustered out of the Navy after the war to an outstanding academic career. He authored some ten books and taught at several colleges and seminaries, including Boston College and the Catholic University of America. The accolades from that world are as laudatory as those from Yorktown. Yet the considerable esteem in which he was held in each of the two camps was virtually unknown to denizens of the other. His academic curriculum vitae might make mention of Monsignor Joseph N. Moody, Ph.D., having been a Navy chaplain, but contain no more details than that. Nor does Father Moody seem often to have mentioned his naval experience to his clerical or academic colleagues. Sometimes he might have referred to the floor as a deck or express a wish for things to be squared away, but that is about all he seems to have provided as clues to his heroic past.

Perhaps that is not surprising, because he never made things about him. Rather, as Herb Feldma said, “He was always there for us!" V

B Article originally published in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity www.touchstonemag.com Raymond J. Brown is Secretary of the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau, a retired U.S. Coast Guard captain, and a security consultant living in New Hampshire. He and his wife Susan, a librarian, have three grown children. Spring 2021 | 21