Medal of Honor simply due to their faith. World War II Half a million Jewish soldiers During World War II, approximately 500,000 American Jews served in the various branches of the United States armed services. Roughly 52,000 of these received U.S. military awards. The historian Solomon Grayzel, in A History of the Jews: From the Babylonian Exile to the Present, records that more than a million Jews were officially enrolled in the fighting forces of the Allies and that the largest number were Jewish Americans. Grayzel gives a number of 550,000 Jews in military service in the United States during World War II out of a total population of 4,770,000 American Jews. Major General Maurice Rose Major General Maurice Rose (1899–1945) was a United States Army general during World War II and World War I veteran. The son and grandson of rabbis, General Rose was at the time the highest ranking Jew in the U.S. Army. The Third Armored Division official history of World War II, published after Rose had been killed in action states "He was over six feet tall, erect, dark haired, and had finely chiseled features. He was firm and prompt of decision, brooking no interference by man, events or conditions in order to destroy the enemy." Rose was the highest-ranking American killed by enemy fire in the European Theater of Operations during the war. Rabbi Goode and the "Immortal Chaplains" Chaplain Alexander D. Goode, a rabbi, was one of the "Four Chaplains" or "Immortal Chaplains", a name given to honor four US military chaplains who sacrificed their lives to save other soldiers during the sinking of the troop transport by a U-boat off the coast of Newfoundland in February 1943. Goode and the three other chaplains, Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Reformed Church in America, helped to evacuate the ship. When lifejackets ran out, they gave up their own to save more troops. The four sang and prayed as they went down with the ship. Jewish scientists and the Manhattan Project America's rise as a nuclear power resulted directly from the Manhattan Project, codename for a project during World War II to develop the first atomic bombs for wartime use. The project's roots began in 1939 when, at the urging of Leó Szilárd, Albert Einstein signed the Einstein–Szilárd letter to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt expressing his concerns that Nazi Germany may be trying to develop nuclear