Introduction

In November 1943, a Lutheran American army chaplain, Israel Yost, baptised seven Japanese-American soldiers in a ceremony in southern Italy. As Yost remembered:

This almost surreal vignette captures in vivid tones the often surprising corollaries of the wartime encounter between a wider world of faith and America's ethnic and religious melting pot. Citizens of a country that was highly regionalised and economically self-sufficient, David Reynolds has remarked that: ‘There was, revealingly, no national newspaper and most Americans had spent little time beyond their home state, let alone visited New York or Washington, D.C.’ Insular and isolationist attitudes had been reinforced in interwar America by the outlook of first- and second-generation immigrants from Europe, who had typically sought to leave the troubles of the Old World behind them. World War II, however, forced many of them to return, albeit temporarily, and created an American military diaspora of vast proportions. In overall terms, about 73 per cent of American servicemen served overseas between 1941 and 1945, with the average sojourn lasting sixteen months. As one veteran and academic commentator wrote in 1946:

Whether serving in Europe, the Mediterranean, Asia or the Pacific, these peregrinations often had a religious dimension. A few GIs, for example, went as Christian or as Jewish pilgrims to the Holy Land, and a great many more to early Christian sites in North Africa and Italy.