Soldiers of a Different Cloth by John F. Wukovits

Author:John F. Wukovits
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2018-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

“The ‘Jeep Ridin Padre’”

Four thousand miles southwest of Hawaii, in New Caledonia off Australia’s northeast coast, Father Thomas Hewitt attended another Notre Dame gathering. Assigned as chaplain on the island, Hewitt celebrated Mass, had supper, and shared news from home with the SOPAC (South Pacific) Notre Dame Club. “The evening was complete with song and story of Notre Dame,” he wrote to Steiner.

Like every chaplain, Hewitt explained, he “must be everything from a Master of Ceremonies to a good ball player.” He traveled so often about the island, used as both training and rest facilities for troops and headquarters for senior navy commanders, that the troops nicknamed him the “Jeep Ridin Padre.” Each day he heard confessions and celebrated Mass for a different unit. When holding services for Protestants, Hewitt asked them to select their songs, and he chose as subjects for his sermons only those areas in which Protestants and Catholics agreed. When conducting services for Jewish troops, he focused entirely on Old Testament themes.

Hewitt credited his Holy Cross training, especially his involvement in conducting religious retreats about the nation, with helping him convey meaningful messages to the soldiers, including one service attended by two thousand men. He asked Father Steiner to urge everyone on campus to keep him and his soldiers in their prayers, which Hewitt contended meant a great deal. “You know the cost out here. Nothing grips these fellows so dramatically as the simple statement that all of you are down on your knees for them when they are trying to stand on their feet.”

Later in the war Father Hewitt moved to the thick jungle terrain of Dutch New Guinea, north of Australia. While his location remained behind the front lines, he related to Steiner that “the jungle is a mass of twisted, tapering tentacles of vines which seem to form a barrier around this prison of parrots, strange beaked birds who inhabit this natural zoo.” He added that the jungle “is alive with alarming noises at night. The eeriest squeals, animal calls and sudden noises rise in a symphony that can raise goose pimples on a healthy body.”

Two of nature’s smallest creatures posed Hewitt’s largest dilemma. He described New Guinea as “a land of crawling, slippery, slimy, slender spidery insects. The fearsome black widow seems to thrive in the dampness.” He mentioned that ants swarmed everywhere: “They crawl into ones [sic] clothes. At night the regions of ones bed does not possess immunity.”25

THIRTY-THREE YEARS old when the war started, navy chaplain Father Patrick Duffy, ironically, rarely boarded a ship. He instead worked with naval units stationed in the bases and repair facilities at Nouméa, New Caledonia, where Father Hewitt was posted for a time, and two thousand miles further northwest at Emirau, an island one degree below the equator, north of New Guinea.

He arrived in Nouméa in late 1943 to serve with a construction battalion unit, a force comprised largely of civil engineers who worked with the heavy equipment required to build airfields and other military installations.

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