Clark Poling '36BD (1910-1943). While Poling’s name is not widely known, his courageous sacrifice during World War II has been honored across America (see Old Yale, May/June 2006). Poling, a minister ordained in the Reformed Church of America, was one of four chaplains who gave their lives to save others when the troop ship Dorchester, bound for Greenland, was torpedoed on February 3, 1943. There were not enough life jackets to go around, so Chaplain Poling, along with three other clergy—a rabbi, a priest, and a Methodist minister—handed theirs to four servicemen. Praying together, the four friends went down with the ship in the icy waters.

The chaplains were posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross and the Order of the Purple Heart and memorialized in many ways—in a chapel, foundations, novels, documentaries, and radio and television specials. Poling's family established the Clark Vandersall Poling Memorial Scholarship at Yale in 1945. In 1948, a three-cent stamp honored the “Immortal Chaplains.” Poling is second from the left.