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The Armed Services YMCA could mark the month of April as its 144th birthday. Although historians can trace the Y's history with the armed services back further, it was in April 1861 that the YMCA's broader volunteer service to the armed services began when a handful of volunteers offered assistance to the men in uniform.
Seven months later in November 1861, representatives of 15 YMCAs came together to coordinate the YMCA's overall efforts to alleviate the suffering of the sick and wounded soldiers from both the Union and Confederate armies. The organization created by this meeting was called The United States Christian Commission. During its four years of operation, the Commission recruited 5,000 volunteers who provided spiritual and physical comfort to soldiers and served in every theater of the Civil War. This was the nation's first large-scale civilian volunteer service corps.
Relief agencies such as the Red Cross had not yet been created and the military chaplaincy was in its infancy, so volunteers were needed from many fields to fill the ranks of the Commission. Those who were recruited served as surgeons, nurses, chaplains and chaplains' assistants. Others distributed emergency medical supplies, food and clothing. They served on the battleground with horse-drawn canteens, built and operated special diet kitchens in hospitals, brought books and prefabricated chapels to soldiers and sailors, taught enlisted men how to read and write, maintained a hotel for soldiers on furlough and provided free meals. YMCA prisoner-of-war work, which would be undertaken on a massive scale in the following century during World Wars I and II, began during the Civil Was when the U.S. Christian Commission ministered to the needs of Confederate and Union soldiers.
In the three decades of peace following the Civil...