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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Steven R. Bullock. Playing for Their Nation: Baseball and the American Military during World War II. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 2004. Pp. xiii, 183. $30.00.
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| It was a different war, and in many ways the United States was a different country. During World War II, drawing from a national population less than half what it is today, the U.S. armed forces put into uniform some fifteen million men and women, who served their country in virtually every corner of the world. The approximately twelve million American males serving in the Army and Army Air Force, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Coast Guard came to include about nine out of every ten players who had held positions on major-league baseball rosters in the last pre–Pearl Harbor season, as well as thousands of men who had been pursuing professional careers in the forty-one minor leagues operating in 1941. |
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Most of the baseball players who entered military service were drafted in the most comprehensive conscription system ever put into place by the U.S. government. A considerable number, though, volunteered out of a genuine sense of patriotic duty. Undoubtedly the most illustrious volunteer was the Cleveland Indians' Bob Feller, who enlisted in the Navy within days of the Pearl Harbor attack, having barely turned twenty-three but having already won 107 major-league games. At the other end of the age range, forty-one-year-old Ted Lyons (three years past the maximum draft age), winner of 259 games for mostly poor Chicago White Sox teams, volunteered for the Marine Corps. (One tries to imagine a young pitcher such as Justin Verlander or elderly stalwarts—Kenny Rogers and Roger Clemens come to mind—behaving so improbably today.) |
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As Steven R. Bullock acknowledges, much has already been written about the way baseball carried on in World War II and the experiences of returning baseball veterans once the war ended. His book, however, is the first extended examination of the way baseball functioned within the military services, supposedly to promote physical fitness as well as entertain and boost morale for servicemen who found themselves far from home and enduring the monotony and unfamiliarity of tightly regimented duty. In six chapters, Bullock deals with the issue of morale-building in relation to military baseball; with baseball's role in helping to finance the war and to pay for baseball equipment for military personnel; with the efforts of various notables (especially Henry "Zeke" Bonura's work in North Africa) in organizing local service teams; with the outstanding military baseball outfits; with the wartime experiences of particular big-leaguers; and, in an especially valuable chapter, with the adverse effects of lost wartime seasons on particular big-league careers. |
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Most big-league players in the Armed Forces stayed close to baseball and out of harm's way, whether they remained stateside or (as most did) eventually spent some time overseas. Among the few who saw actual combat were Feller, who served on the battleship Alabama in both the northern Atlantic and the Pacific; Harry Walker, who fought in the last months of the war in Europe and received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star; and Cecil Travis, whose career was ruined by frostbite suffered in the Battle of the Bulge. |
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Professional baseball players, particularly if they had big-league experience, commonly received favorable treatment—sometimes, as in the case of Joe DiMaggio, simply because of who they were, but usually because base commanders considered using their unique experience and skills to be valuable assets in morale building. Military baseball featured intense rivalries and hot competition, especially when Army and Navy teams competed against each other, and some officers went to lengths bordering on the unethical to get star players assigned to their commands. The "top brass" often operated on the assumption—rarely questioned, it seems—that fielding winning baseball teams reflected favorably on themselves. Not a little money was spent flying ballplayers around the continental United States and to Hawaii and elsewhere in efforts to put together the best possible outfits for inter and sometimes intraservice competition. |
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