Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
It is often portrayed in war movies, especially films set in Europe during World War II. It was difficult for the Japanese to infiltrate U.S. Marine lines during battles in the Pacific, but Germans could easily pass for Americans. Since so many American soldiers were just first or second-generation European immigrants there weren’t the racial differences experienced in the Pacific War.
Sports, especially Major League Baseball, were one method used to identify friend or foe at checkpoints, crossroads, from cover, and especially in the darkness.
On the night of June 5, 1944, 13,000 American troops of the 101st and 82nd Airborne took flight from England on almost 1,100 twin-engine C-47 Skytrain transports. These men dropped behind the German Atlantic Wall a couple of hours before the largest amphibious assault in history began on Sword, Orange, Utah, and Omaha Beaches at Normandy.
The airborne attack was a typical American military plan, confused, disorganized, and under-equipped, and would have been doomed from the start without the ingenuity of the soldiers on the ground, or in this case, the sky.
Once the Germans opened fire on the C-47s carefully drawn-up plans, taking over a year for officers to design, literally flew out the window.
Planes dropped the troops miles from their planned zones. Others were shot down by German 88s, with many dropping from the sky with failed engines.
Once these men were on the ground, the 101st had an advantage over their rivals in the 82nd Airborne in the ACME Cricket. It was a small, brass noise maker that created a clicking sound similar to the noise a cricket makes on a summer evening.
By clicking the Cricket, soldiers were able to identify each other in the dark of the French countryside. Amazingly, it worked, preventing many friendly fire incidents with troops shooting and killing each other.
A few months later as the Armies marched across France, nearing the German border, the Crickets were long gone.
In December, the last German counterattack of the war, known as the Battle of the Bulge, was pulled off with accent-free, English-speaking Germans posing as Military Police advancing through the American lines to change road signs, set charges on bridges, and disrupt the U.S. Army.
By the time the Americans realized what was happening, it destroyed the confidence they had in their institutions and in each other. Sound familiar? The GIs came up with their own method of identifying friend from foe, baseball.
When units unfamiliar to each other met, they drew arms and proceeded to question each other.
“Who won the 39 World Series?” they might ask.
“What’s a round-tripper?” could be the reply.
“What’s a Texas Leaguer,” is often portrayed in films. If you don’t know, it’s a bloop single in front of the outfielders, just over the heads of the infielders, usually over first or second base, dropping in front of the right fielder.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of questions like these determined if it was a friendly force, or German infiltrators. Germans didn’t bother much with American baseball, or even with Hollywood actresses. Betty Grable, Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, and Greta Garbo saved many soldiers from an unfortunate firefight between friends when soldiers asked questions about them.
In the Pacific, very few Americans spoke Japanese, and an equally few Japanese spoke English. It was a war without mercy.
Whenever there was a lull in the action, Marines and soldiers quickly carved out a baseball diamond, and the games began. Most of the time, it was platoon versus platoon, but in rear areas, it could be a company team against another, or even a Navy team assembled from a ship anchored offshore against the land-based soldiers and Marines.
Most ships weren’t large enough to hold baseball games, but Essex Class aircraft carriers like the USS Enterprise, Bunker Hill, and Lexington were plenty big enough to hold ball games on the flight deck. Even the smaller USS Saratoga of the 1920s era Lexington Class could hold baseball games. They used a lot of baseballs since a long foul ball ended up floating away in the ocean.
In September 1944, Admiral Chest Nimitz and Army General Robert Richardson arranged a “Servicemen’s World Series,” at a ballpark in Honolulu. It pitted the best the Army could offer against the top 25 ball players in the U.S. Navy.
Both teams were filled with ringers. Of the 50 men that compromised both squads, 36 had played in the major leagues before entering the military.
It was a different time, professional athletes in football, baseball, and boxing either joined or were drafted into military service. Hollywood actors filled the ranks as well, frontline actors like Jimmy Stewart, who flew 20 combat missions over Germany as a command pilot of B-24, and other actors who would rise to prominence later like Lee Marvin who was a U.S. Marine fighting on Eniwetok and Saipan. He was severely wounded in the Battle of Saipan and finished the war in a U.S. Navy Hospital.
When it came to close combat, baseball gave Americans a decided edge in battle.
The Germans used “potato masher” style hand grenades in combat, long-handled heavy grenades that they threw overhand towards the enemy. It’s claimed they were more accurate than the American Mark II grenade, the standard since 1918, but it had a less effective range.
The average American could toss the one-pound, five-ounce Mark II 40 yards, a man with a good arm could toss it 60 or more yards.
The Japanese Type 97 grenade weighed just a pound, but the smaller Japanese soldier could throw it just 25 yards on average.
In an era when every American boy spent the weekend tinkering with his car or gathered in groups to work on friend’s cars, they were much more mechanically inclined than their Japanese or German counterparts, and light years ahead of the inept Italian Army.
Cultural differences made the American fighting man a tremendous force three generations ago.
Modern generations will never have that again as fewer American boys participate in sports or get their hands dirty working on cars. Perhaps there will be a place for joystick jockeys and video game dexterity in the future, but I doubt it.
Vestiges of athletics in the U.S. Military remain with squadron, fleet, and base boxing championships.
The Armed Forces Classic is an annual Division I Men’s College Basketball game played at American bases across the world, even a couple of times on the deck of an aircraft carrier.
The first Carrier Classic was held on the U.S.S Carl Vinson on November 11, 2011, between Michigan State and North Carolina. President Barack Obama was in the crowd attending the game.
Eleven years later, also on Veterans Day, Gonzaga and Michigan State squared off on November 11, 2022, on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.
Sports can take men’s minds off the carnage of war as did an impromptu soccer match between German, English, and French soldiers on Christmas Day 1914. This type of truce was quickly punished by the high command of all three nations, less the men lose the desire to kill each other and destroy the destruction of war.
If only.