A special exhibit at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is using surviving artifacts to trace how American service members turned to Scripture for strength through generations of conflict. The display, titled «Bible in Times of War,» features Bibles carried from the Civil War to the frozen reaches of Antarctica, including some with heartfelt prayers written by family members hoping their loved ones would return home.
Wesley Viner, an early modern curator at the museum and a Marine veteran who curated the display, said some of the most powerful stories preserved in the collection belong not to famous generals but to ordinary Americans whose names might have otherwise disappeared from history. Among the most recognizable artifacts are so-called «Heart Shield Bibles,» small, pocket-sized Bibles with thin metal covers carried by some American service members during World War II and into the Korean War.
The Bibles were frequently purchased by relatives for departing service members and designed to fit into a breast pocket over the heart, helping fuel stories that the metal-covered books could theoretically stop a bullet. Viner, however, said the truth is less cinematic. The thin metal covers were unlikely to stop World War II-era ammunition traveling at high speed, he said, though he would not rule out the possibility that one could have protected a service member from shrapnel or flying debris.
«Many of the tales that surround the 'Heart Shield Bibles' are likely a bit exaggerated,» Viner said. But whether the books literally stopped bullets may obscure what they represented to the families who sent loved ones to war. «It was a source of protection. It was a source of strength. It would keep them safe,» Viner said, describing the metal shield as largely symbolic.
Some of the most affecting evidence of that hope survives in heartfelt handwriting inside the covers. Viner said small pocket Bibles were produced on a large scale during the first half of the 20th century, allowing families to purchase them for sons, brothers and husbands preparing to deploy. «To my dear boy, may God keep you safe,» one note reads. Another simply says, «praying for you at Christmas.» In many cases, Viner said, historians do not know who wrote the messages or who received them. He said the anonymity can make them even more powerful.
«As I read those, I think about how profound and serious and meaningful that was for the family members who sent their kids, their loved ones off to war and gave them this as they left,» Viner said.
More than 80 years before the «Heart Shield Bibles,» another now-tattered Bible traveled with a Union soldier whose life Viner was able to partially reconstruct because of the book he left behind. John Weissenheimer served in the 107th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a largely German-speaking unit that endured bloody Civil War battles, including Gettysburg, according to Viner. Weissenheimer was already in his late 40s when he enlisted, older than what was typical for a soldier.
Viner said enlistment records show Weissenheimer joined before many of the unit's major engagements. Years later, an inscription in his Bible places him at Lincoln Hospital in Washington, D.C., serving with the Invalid Corps, which was composed of injured, sick or otherwise disabled soldiers who could no longer perform regular front-line duty. The surviving evidence does not reveal exactly what happened to Weissenheimer, nor did he leave extensive notes explaining what the Bible meant to him. But the battered book establishes something perhaps even more interesting for historians in that Weissenheimer kept it.
«If not for this Bible,» Viner said, Weissenheimer would be «largely a forgotten name.» «This Bible allows us to take this anonymous person from history, this person who no historical textbook is ever going to talk about, and surface them and tell their story,» he said.
Not every Bible in the exhibit accompanied an American into battle. In the 1950s, Navy chaplain Peter Boal took part in Operation Deep Freeze, the umbrella term for U.S. military operations in Antarctica. During his time there, Boal gave a Bible to a man identified in its inscription only as «Bill.» Viner said the museum cannot definitively establish Bill's identity, though he believes one possibility is Petty Officer William Stroop, who helped lead an expedition to establish a smaller Antarctic station. What Boal wrote to the recipient of that Bible, however, survives.
The exhibit arrives as the United States marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, offering a window into the personal faith and family hopes that accompanied Americans into conflicts across centuries and continents.