Alexander D. Goode

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Four Chaplains

Alexander D. Goode (10 May 1911 - 3 February 1943) was a chaplain in the United States Army during the Second World War who was killed in action when the troopship USAT Dorchester was sunk by the German submarine U-223 during the battle of the Atlantic.

[edit] Life

Born in 1911, one of four children to a Brooklyn Rabbi, Goode excelled at sports at high school in Washington D.C. before following his father and becoming a Rabbi, graduating from the University of Cincinnati and subsequently the Hebrew Union College in 1937. In 1940 he received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University. He was married in 1935 to Teresa Flax, niece of Al Jolson with whom he had one daughter, Rosalie, and served as Rabbi in Marion, Indiana and York, Pennsylvania.

In 1941 he applied to become a navy chaplain but was turned down. The following year he was accepted into the army, being posted to Harvard where he studied at the chaplain's school in preparation for deployment to Europe followed by brief service at an airbase in Goldsboro, North Carolina. In October 1942 he joined the other members of the Four Chaplains and was detailed to embark on the Dorchester a few months later.

[edit] Death

In the early morning of the 3 February 1943 the Dorchester was torpedoed and sunk, killing 672 of the 900 men aboard. The four chaplains on the boat gathered together and organised survivors into life rafts, gave up their own life vests to men who had lost their own and said prayers with men who had not managed to escape. The last that was seen of Goode and his companions was the group linking arms on the deck and praying together as the ship went under. All four drowned and were posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart. In 1961, a new medal, the Chaplain's Medal for Heroism was specially created for the four chaplains lost in this incident and awarded to surviving family members.