CAPTAINS OF THE SOUL
By DR MICHAEL GLADWIN
Big Sky Publishing, 2015
Reviewed by Principal Chaplain Geoff Webb
In 1942 the Reverend Hugh Cunningham was serving as a chaplain with the elements of the Australian Army captured with the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. He went into captivity with the rest of that unhappy band finding his way to imprisonment on the notorious Burma Railway. There he was treated extremely badly by the guards until one of them gained an inkling into his special status among the men and gave him an arm band with green Japanese characters on it. It was only after the war that Hugh Cunningham found out that they said, “Captain of the souls of men”. With this anecdote Dr Gladwin begins his history of Australian Army Chaplaincy which he entitles in the light of this story “Captains of the Soul”. He sums up the story of Hugh Cunningham this way, “As I will attempt to show, Cunningham personified a model of practical service and religious and moral leadership that had been forged by the Australian Army Chaplains’ Department during the Great War, and by the generation of chaplains before them in South Africa”. So he summarises in his typically clear, winsome and succinct style his aim in writing a history of the Royal Australian Army Chaplains’ Department. The book was commissioned and published to coincide with the formal centenary of the RAAChD on the 1st of December 2013. As such it is part of the Army History Unit’s goal of having an official history of every corps in the Army. “Captains of the Soul” goes well beyond simply an official history to be a very accessible account of the courage and commitment of Australian clergy who left their parishes to bring the presence of God to men and women who had taken up the challenge of serving their country and as a result often faced, death, injury, privation, disease and all the other horrors attendant on armed conflict.