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| Baseball goes to war- By LondonTribe |
| Posted by leemarlin87 on Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - 02:50 |
 
With the sixtieth anniversary of the outbreak of World War Two fast approaching, and survivors of the twentieth century’s first global conflict sadly almost all no longer with us, I thought I’d write an article highlighting some of impacts these conflicts had on Major League Baseball. If nothing else, hopefully this article will provide a dose of much-needed perspective at a time when the concept of “war” and “battles” in baseball are casually used to describe competition for the signatures of marquee free agents courtships, verbal spats between Yankee and Red Sox fans and the seemingly neverending steroid and HGH controversies.
Baseball and World War One
The United States' involvement in World War One was fairly brief; nevertheless, there are a couple of interesting stories to tell.
The use of poisonous gas, so-called chemical warfare, was widespread during the First World War. Following the ultimately brief entry of the US into the conflict in April 1917, the American military planning command and the general public alike were greatly concerned about the threat this weaponry posed to troop safety. One response was the establishment of an elite Chemical Warfare Service division, composed of hand-picked ‘elite physical specimens’ whose specific job on the battlefield would be to anticipate and combat German gas attacks in support of Allied tank and infantry units. Given the stiff entry criteria and high public profile of this so-called “gas and flame division”, professional athletes were actively canvassed to swell its ranks. Three of baseball’s most famous names – including two of the five original inductees into the sport’s Hall of Fame - trained with the division in France during the course of 1918, preparing for active service but never actually seeing action due to the armistice declared fairly suddenly in November of that year. Ty Cobb, widely recognised as amongst the greatest of all the sport’s heroes, went on to play eight more seasons in the Majors before retiring with his extraordinary .367 lifetime batting average. Branch Rickey, “the Mahatma”, who had already retired as a player by the start of the war, then embarked upon a glorious managerial career whose highlight perhaps was helping Jackie Robinson break the sport’s colour barrier in 1947. A third, Christy Mathewson (below) – the dominant right-hander who won 373 games, achieved 79 shutouts and ended with a career ERA of 2.13 – was not so lucky. Exposed to poisonous vapours during a tragic training ground accident in France, “the Great Matty” never regained his pre-war health and died of gas-related tuberculosis in 1925 at the tender age of 45.
 Christy Mathewson (L); Ty Cobb in military uniform (R)
Some baseball players did see active service in World War One. Perhaps most famous amongst them was the MVP of the 1914 World Series-winning Boston Braves infielder Hank Gowdy. Gowdy (below) saw repeated action in the trenches of France as a member of the 166th Infantry Regiment’s famous “Rainbow Division”, one of the first US army units to reach the infamous Western Front, with the baseball star carrying its colours in regular encounters with the German forces. Returning from the war, Gowdy moved to the New York Giants where he won another World Series in 1923. He later became a coach for the Braves, Giants and Cincinnati Reds before unbelievably returning to military service again in World War Two at the age of 53 as a commissioned major.
Sergeant Hank Gowdy
Baseball and World War Two
The United States’ involvement in the Second World War was much more profound, and baseball mirrored this deeper involvement. In his famous ‘green light’ letter to then-MLB Commissioner Landis only weeks after the Pearl Harbour attacks which catalysed the country’s entry into the conflict, President Franklin Roosevelt expressed the opinion that keeping baseball going during the conflict would be “thoroughly worthwhile” in terms of its impact on employment and public morale. Reflecting the commander-in-chief’s wishes, the sport managed to keep going throughout the War – maintaining a full schedule by tapping teenagers, veterans and the physically impaired to fill its rosters. Most famous amongst these was probably Pete Gray, a one-armed outfielder for the St. Louis Browns. The wartime years also proved the heyday for professional women’s baseball, the All American Girls Professional Baseball League celebrated in the Hollywood movie A League of Their Own.
<Roosevelt's famous "green light" letter to Landis
As Roosevelt’s letter implied, players of serving age were expected to participate in the war effort. All told, over 500 Major League and more than 2,000 minor league baseball players joined the armed forces during World War Two. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of these players served their time running military conditioning programmes on the Home Front as “recreation specialists”. In the spring of 1944, there was a media scandal when reports emerged that nearly 300 of the 350-plus major leaguers who had completed basic military training were still stationed in the United States. Throughout conflict sites in Europe and the Far East as well as back home, famous baseball faces served alongside ordinary military men – and made as much time as possible to arrange informal games during downtime. Hundreds of Brits starved of more traditional UK sports during the war years attended such matches staged by the more than 1.5m US military personnel based in Britain during the war years and a GI’s World Series in Europe held shortly after Germany’s surrender in Nuremberg attracted a crowd of 50,000; perhaps the most famous wartime competition was a “Pacific World Series” held between Army and Navy “All-Star” line-ups in Hawai’i.
Many Negro League players were denied the chance to serve on equal terms with their Major League counterparts in the military, just as they continued to be excluded and degraded in the sport they’d left behind. Segregated units and demeaning supply and menial duties were a humiliating reality for many black volunteers during World War Two. A number of chroniclers of pioneer Jackie Robinson’s life and career place the origins of his willingness to challenge the racial status quo in baseball as a Brooklyn Dodger in 1947 to a confrontation he endured on a supposedly segregated bus during cavalry training in Texas in 1944. Robinson’s refusal to heed the bus-driver’s demands to move to the rear of the vehicle on which he was travelling was deemed sufficiently insubordinate to merit a court martial.
Warren Spahn, Ted Williams and Bob Feller
Some baseball players did see genuine action during the War, and distinguished themselves in the process. Warren Spahn, the winningest left-handed pitcher in Major League history, fought in both the battle of the Hurtgin Forest and the Battle of the Bulge as a combat engineer in Europe before resuming his Hall of Fame career. Spahn (right) received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star for bravery, and received a battlefield commission. Legendary Red Sox slugger Ted Williams, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra and Indians flame-thrower Bob Feller all also received this honour as a reflection of their heroism in the services; the legendary Bronx Bombers shortstop, still a minor leaguer at the time, actually participated in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 as Seaman 2nd Class Lawrence Berra. Two major league players never came home at all: Washington Senators outfielder Elmer Gedeon and Philadelphia Athletics catcher Harry O’Neill were both killed in combat.
What might have been?
Many baseball fans speculate what some of the sport’s wartime stars could have achieved in their careers if military service hadn’t interrupted proceedings. Spahn missed three whole seasons during the War and with them potentially a chance to win 400 games and finish behind only Cy Young on the all-time wins list disappeared. Cleveland hero Bob Feller (right) was perhaps the most distinguished of all baseball’s military men, signing up to the Navy on 8 December 1941 within hours of Pearl Harbour – the first man in the entire sport to volunteer for the conflict that lay ahead ahead; he missed four seasons whilst serving as a Gun Captain on the USS Alabama and was decorated with five campaign ribbons and eight battle stars. Most historians agree that Feller could have won as many as 350 games and racked up over 3,000 strikeouts had the conflict never taken place.
Ted Williams (below) served as a Marine Corps pilot during both World War II (as an instructor based in the US) and as a called-up reservist during the Korean War (during which he flew 39 combat missions), in total losing five years from his incredible career. Korea could have been worse than a career interruption: during a mission in February 1953, Williams’ ‘plane was hit by ground fire and lost its hydraulics, necessitating a swift withdrawal and an emergency landing at a nearby airbase. Historian Bill Gilbert has estimated Williams would have become baseball’s all-time RBI champion, and possibly hit another 222 home runs (thus overtaking Babe Ruth), without these interruptions. The careers of other star sluggers, including Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Mize and Hank Greenberg, were also interrupted by the conflict; all three may have gone on to hit over 500 home runs had things worked out differently, giving the all-time home runs league table a decidedly different look.
Perhaps more sad was the fate of other players who hadn’t yet become timeless superstars, and were subsequently unable to replicate their pre-war form once the War had ended. Promising Washington Senators infielder Cecil Travis was only 28 and on the back of a 1941 season in which he hit .359 and led his league with 218 hits when the war broke out. Another Bronze Star recipient, Travis fought with the 76th Infantry Division in some of the US forces’ most arduous battles in snow-bound central Europe during the winter of 1944/1945 – at one stage advancing more than 400 miles, by foot, against hostile resistance in 110 days of combat. His body never really recovered as he hit only .252 in 1946 and was benched the following year; his career average of .314 still outperforms 19 of the 21 shortstops enshrined in a Hall of Fame in Cooperstown whose ranks he is unlikely ever to join.
Cecil Travis
It’s probably a futile exercise speculating too closely or at too much length about “what might have been” for all of these players, from those whose names still reached the sport’s pinnacle like Williams to those like Travis whose legacy the conflict essentially ruined completely. I’m sure most would have been grateful simply to have had careers in both baseball and the military, and to have survived and made a living from both. For me, Feller’s own words sum it up best. He said: “I’m very proud of my war record, just like my baseball record. I would never have been able to face anybody and talk about my baseball record if I hadn’t spent time in the service”. Ted Williams’ thoughts were very similar: “The two things I’m proudest of in my life, is that I became a Marine pilot and that I became a member of Baseball’s Hall of Fame”.
The sport of baseball and all its genuine fans should share Bob’s and Ted’s pride in all the sacrifices the sport’s employees made during the wars of the twentieth century.
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