Remembering our veterans

As we recall those men and women who sacrificied their time and more in the service of our country, I wanted to take a moment to say, “Thank you.”

World War II began after the end of the 1941 baseball season, but owners were concerned how they should procede as spring training approached in 1942. In what has become known as the “Green Light Letter,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, that the game should go on for the good of the nation.

Perhaps the most famous Jewish athlete to go into the service was Hank Greenberg of the Detroit Tigers. In his autobiography (Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life, with Ira Berkow, Triumph 2001) Greenberg had said, “I came to feel that if I, as a Jew, hit a home run I was hitting one against Hitler.”

Legend has it that Greenberg was initially rejected by the Draft Board because of flat feet but he was concerned that he might be perceived as a shirker and requested another examination. He was eventually drafted in 1940 and honorably discharged two days beforethe Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but re-upped immediately after the attack and served in the U.S. Army Air Force.

“We are in trouble and there is only one thing to do — return to the service,” he wrote. “I have not been called back. I am going of my own accord. Baseball is out the window as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know if I’ll ever be back.”

Greenberg served gallantly in the Twentieth Bomber Command in the China-Burma-India Campaign. All told, he spent almost five years in the military, losing — as did many athletes who served — prime playing time.

He did return to the ballfield. In his first game back — July 1, 1945 — he hit a home run against the Philadelphia Athletics.

For more on Greenberg’s war-time service, visit Gary Bodenfield’s extensive site on baseball during the war.

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Moe Berg was one of the most interesting characters to don flannel. A mediocre ballplayer for several teams, Berg visited Tokyo as part of an All-Star team in 1934. He sneaked away from the group and surreptitiously took home movies of the city’s skyline that were latter used to plan the Doolittle Raid.

After he retired from baseball, Berg joined the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. He was sent on a mission to assassinate German physicist Werner Heisenberg if he determined the Nazis were close to building an atomic bomb. For more on this fascinating individual, read Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Catcher Was a Spy.

Among several books chronicling (primarily) the World War II era and the athletes who were part of that “greatest generation”:

• Richard Goldstein, who writes such eloquent obituaries for The New York Times, published Spartan Seasons: How Baseball Survived the Second World War (Macmillan) in 1980. He also collaborated on An American Journey : My Life on the Field, in the Air, and on the Air, with former Yankee second baseman Jerry Colman, who, like Ted Williams, served in World War Two and the Korean War.
• They Also Served: Baseball and the Home Front, 1941-1945, by Bill Gilbert (Crown 1992)
• Baseball in ’41, by Robert W. Creamer (Viking 1991; reprinted as Baseball and Other Matters in 1941 by Bison Books in 2000).
• Duty, Honor, Victory: American Athletes in World War II, by Gary Bloomfield (Lyons Press 2003). Of course, baseball players weren’t the only athletes involved, as Bloomfield points out. Among the most well-known Jewish sports figures to join up were boxers Benny Leonard and Barney Ross and football star Sid Luckman.

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Kaplan’s Korner on Jews and Sports © 2008 New Jersey Jewish News

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