The Victory Season Read online

  Just before 9:30 p.m. on August 17, 1944, Marchildon took off on mission number twenty-six. It was to be a “gardening expedition,” Bomber Command slang for mine-dropping, to the entrance of the harbor at Kiel, close to the Danish border. Six Group, Marchildon’s command, were considered experts at “dropping vegetables,” and were thus flying over the Baltic Sea, far from the main thrust of the bombing over the city of Kiel. Marchildon’s plane was fifty miles from the city, over water, when a German fighter appeared from nowhere, far from any action. Marchildon never saw him until the bullets shredded the wing.

  Protocol called for Marchildon to don his chute, then try to help other crewmen with theirs, but his turret was far too small for him to maneuver the chute over his shoulders, and the plane had only a few seconds of airtime before it plummeted into the Baltic. So Marchildon pushed himself free of the turret, got the chute on, and leapt out a hole in the airframe.

  He fell from seventeen thousand feet. The wind immediately blew off his boots and hat. It was pitch-black, just before one a.m., and he had no idea if he was coming down over land or sea. Drifting through the Stygian blackness, he thought back to movies he had seen growing up. The unlucky ones forced to bail out on celluloid always seemed to control descent by pulling on the strings of the chute, so he tried it. His velocity increased so rapidly that it “scared the hell out of me,” and he quickly let go.

  Without warning, Marchildon splashed into the water. He worked his harness and heavy electrical pants off, so they wouldn’t pull him under. It was summertime, so hypothermia wasn’t an immediate worry, but the current was against him, pulling him further from shore.

  He heard a shout. It was another crewman, the navigator, George Gill. He was the only other man to escape the stricken plane. The two joined up, but there wasn’t much of a plan to be formed. They were at the mercy of the sea, and whoever happened to be on it.

  After several hours, Marchildon and Gill began to resign themselves to facing the inevitable. They would be lost at sea. Just then, a light flashed on the horizon. It was a boat, coming straight for them. It could well have been a German patrol boat, but it mattered little to the fliers.

  As it happened, the boat was a Danish fishing vessel, and the crew pulled the two men aboard. Amazingly, they had seen the plane go down and were cruising about looking for survivors. Even more unlikely, they claimed to be members of the resistance, and they outlined in broken but understandable English a plan to smuggle Marchildon and Gill to neutral Sweden.

  Unfortunately, the plot lasted only until the boat returned to the dock. A squad of German soldiers was waiting there for transport, and they challenged the fishermen about their shivering new friends. The Danes had little choice but to tell the soldiers the truth, at least their version of it—these were Allied fliers, and they were planning to turn them in all along!

  Marchildon and Gill were split up, and the A’s pitcher was sent to a POW camp in Sagan, southeast of Berlin, in an area that is now Poland. It was the infamous Stalag Luft III, only six months before the site of “the great escape” on March 24, 1944. Years later, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson would dramatize the event, when seventy-six prisoners escaped through an enormous tunnel they had painstakingly dug under the wires. Only three made it to safety in England—fifty were executed upon recapture.

  By the time Marchildon reached the camp, such desperate lunges for freedom were pointless. The Allies were homing in on the Third Reich from east and west, and the smart play was simply to ride things out until liberation. Ten thousand Allied airmen were imprisoned at the camp. Marchildon was POW number 7741.

  Stalag Luft III was set in a black forest with ugly, scrawny fir trees. There was a main wire enclosing the camp, then a second a hundred meters farther into the forest. The area in between the two was a no-man’s-land, and anyone who encroached would be immediately shot. It was bleak terrain, and as the calendar turned closer to 1945, frigid as well. The Kriegies (short for Kriegsgefangenen, the German word for prisoners of war) traded with the guards, cigarettes for radio parts, and built ham sets that kept them abreast of the Allied advance.

  The large majority of the Kriegies were Americans, so there was plenty of baseball and softball playing at Stalag Luft III. There were formal leagues in the warmer months, but by the time Marchildon arrived, ball games were mostly played just to kill time and prevent muscle atrophy. There were more severe risks than strained hamstrings. One day, Marchildon was playing softball when a ball got away and rolled under the wire. The nearest Kriegie yelled out to the guard on duty, “nicht schiessen, posten!” (“sentry, don’t shoot!”), and was waved in. As he bent to pick up the ball, the guard, a particularly sadistic one hated by the prisoners, shot dead the Kriegie he had invited into the no-man’s-land.

  In late January, the entire camp was told to pack whatever possessions prisoners could carry—they were going to be marched northwest, away from advancing Russian forces. Snow was piled several feet deep in the forest, and fell in intense bursts. Marchildon, who knew from winter weather, built a sleigh to carry his food and extra clothing. That proved prescient. Many of his fellow prisoners staggered through the drifts under the weight of their goods and were forced to throw away vital provisions, or collapsed from the effort and were left behind.

  There were destinations in mind for the men of Stalag Luft III, but they were usually deemed unsafe for the Nazis to venture before the forced march arrived. So the tramp just kept going. For three months the men marched, eventually covering hundreds of miles of snow-covered Silesia. Men died in myriad ways. Sometimes, an American dive-bomber would appear from the clouds and strafe the column, unwittingly killing friendly prisoners. They were pounded by stray artillery, attacked by wolves in the forest, shot or clubbed to death by the guards for the smallest of offenses. Many died of disease, or exposure, or simply exhaustion. They were all acutely aware that the war was near an end. To see so many die so pointlessly weighed heavily on the Kriegies.

  Those who survived learned to love the sight of rural farmhouses, where they could barter smokes for food, beer, and baths. One woman offered soap to Marchildon. It was a dirty hunk, obviously several years old. Marchildon gave her a fresh bar he had received in a Red Cross package. The woman deeply inhaled its aroma and nearly fainted with pleasure.

  By spring, Marchildon was on his last legs. He had dysentery and had lost thirty pounds. The forced march had mercifully stopped, and the pitcher was camping in an abandoned farmhouse, barely able to muster the energy to rise. Then, on May 2, someone noticed that the guards had simply disappeared. That got Marchildon to his feet. There was movement in the nearby trees. It was a British artillery unit. Liberation was finally at hand.

  All the German guards were captured. Marchildon and some other softball players pointed out the scowling guard that had shot the Kriegie in no-man’s-land. He was promptly marched out in a nearby field and executed.

  Marchildon returned to Canada to recuperate and put on some weight. It was difficult to adjust. On his first night home, he was unable to sleep in his bed, choosing the ground instead. The quiet and tranquility of a nation untouched by war unnerved him. Sudden sounds sent him jumping in shock. There were so many people around he couldn’t focus on any one of them.

  Salvation came from baseball. Connie Mack phoned him up and asked him to return to the A’s. The two had an uneasy relationship, based, unsurprisingly, on the idea that Mack, the owner/operator of the team, never paid Marchildon what the player felt was a fair salary. But the pitcher went back to what he did best. Mack had a point when he told Marchildon, “Even if you don’t pitch this season, it will do you good to be back with your teammates.” He didn’t mention that he had already scheduled a “Phil Marchildon Night” at Shibe Park and needed the man himself on hand to boost attendance.

  Even as he welcomed the normalcy of being with the guys, Marchildon was slow to adjust to his old life. His hands shook, and he couldn’t shake a feeling of drea
d that something terrible was about to happen, like a friendly airplane screaming out of the sun to fire on him. A reporter who chatted with him wrote, “Yesterday as I sat beside him on the A’s bench he brushed his hands over his forehead, pulled at his fingernails, scratched his chin, rubbed his eyes, constantly shifted from one leg to another, squirmed in his seat and stopped and started conversations.” Phil admitted to him, “I was on my way to the ballpark and suddenly something gripped my nerves. I wanted to pick up a brick and toss it through a window.” Marchildon was clearly, in retrospect, suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. But PTSD and other forms of combat fatigue were little understood at the time.

  His teammates didn’t help much. They were always asking him to relive the night he was shot down. Once, fellow hurler Bobo Newsom asked Marchildon the date he was sent into the Baltic. When told it was August 17, 1944, Newsom replied, “Right, Connie Mack Night in Philadelphia. The night the Yankees shot me down.” The brash Bobo, who once offered his autograph to President Roosevelt, was a particular source of irritation, and Marchildon had to threaten to shut him up by force to end the barbs.

  Marchildon wasn’t actually scheduled to pitch on “Phil Marchildon Night,” August 17, 1945, one year to the day after he was shot down. He was just supposed to make a speech and wave to the crowd. But Newsom, that night’s starter, got sick, so Marchildon took the ball. He was rusty and still not back to full health, and it showed. He pitched two innings, giving up four hits, four walks, and two runs. The stats weren’t great, but Marchildon was encouraged by one thing—his arm felt surprisingly good. Once he got the kinks out, he felt, he would be okay.

  Fast-forward to spring training, 1946. True to form, Mack underpaid his war hero and past ace. “I want Marchildon to show me he is the same pitcher he was before the war,” Mack told the press. Understandable in context, perhaps, but it further embittered Marchildon. Mack finally agreed to pay $7,500, with a promise of another $1,000 in June if Marchildon pitched well enough to earn it.

  Two days after signing, Marchildon was accidentally sliced open by a teammate, a crazy busher from the Deep South who liked to play with knives. The gash on his hand didn’t heal until May, when he finally made his debut. He pitched well, lost some tough ones, started 0–5, and was 4–7 at the All-Star break, when his wife, Irene, gave birth to their first child. After a two-hit victory over Chicago in July, Mack gave him his bonus.

  The win over Boston evened his record at 13–13 on the year. After the victory, Marchildon said he thought the Sox seemed “listless.”

  Indeed, Boston had saved its worst for last. The celebratory champagne was being carried across half the American League, from Washington to Philly to Detroit to Cleveland, without being cracked open. There was no thought of an epic collapse (they still led the AL by fourteen games), but the wait at the precipice was getting on the nerves of everyone in Boston.

  Williams was getting on people’s nerves himself. Throughout his career, he would often wear down toward the end of the season due to illness. Even as a kid in San Diego, late-summer fevers plagued him, though he never did figure out why. Now he spent many a ball game in a fog, from either a head cold or the medication he took to treat it. “He practically had pneumonia, he was so sick,” remembers Bobby Doerr. “He was real run down.” “I’m tired physically,” Williams admitted to the press late in the season. “I’m on the go all the time and I wish it were all over.”

  Meanwhile, his Triple Crown hopes had dissipated like a sneeze in the air. Once the leader in all three categories, he fell behind Mickey Vernon of the Senators in the batting chase, and Hank Greenberg, Detroit’s slugging star in the twilight of his fabled career, in home runs and RBIs.

  Greenberg had suffered through a miserable 1946. He had been the first major league star to be called up for service, way back in 1940. He was honorably discharged on December 5, 1941. Two days later, he was back in the military, volunteering (the first major leaguer to do so after Pearl Harbor) for the Army Air Corps. “We are in trouble,” he told the Sporting News, “and there is only one thing for me to do—return to the service. This doubtless means I am finished with baseball and it would be silly for me to say I do not leave it without a pang. But all of us are confronted with a terrible task—the defense of our country and the fight for our lives.”

  He saw duty in the China-Burma-India theater, scouting terrain for potential B-29 bases. One day, as the bombers were taking off for a mission to Japan, one of the planes faltered. Greenberg remembered later, “The pilot saw he wasn’t going to clear the runway, tried to throttle down, but the plane went over on its nose at the end of the field. Father Stack, our padre, and myself raced over to the burning plane to see if we could help rescue anyone. As we were running, there was a blast when the gas tanks blew and we were only about 30 yards away when a bomb went off. It knocked us right into a drainage ditch alongside the rice paddies while pieces of metal floated down out of the air.”

  Greenberg was stunned and couldn’t talk or hear for a couple of days, but otherwise he wasn’t hurt. “The miraculous part of it all was that the entire crew escaped,” Greenberg continued. “Some of them were pretty well banged up but no one was killed. That was an occasion, I can assure you, when I didn’t wonder whether or not I’d be able to return to baseball. I was quite satisfied just to be alive.”

  He came home in mid-’45 and proved he was far from “finished with baseball.” Greenberg walloped a homer “on a line as flat as old beer,” in Red Smith’s phrase, during his first game back, and hit a grand slam to clinch the pennant. Hebrew Hank then slugged a memorable three-run shot to win Game Two of the World Series, as the Tigers bested Chicago in seven.

  But for most of the summer of ’46, he was considered washed-up at age thirty-five, his 28 homers, 88 RBIs, and .268 batting average through August far below his standard numbers. Then a fellow Tiger, an even older one named Roger “Doc” Cramer, who at forty was fortunately still extremely juvenile, slipped into the Sox clubhouse one afternoon at Fenway and stole one of Ted’s bats. Cramer presented it to Greenberg, and Hank duly, in his words, “embarked on his annual fall salary drive” with the new lumber. He smashed a dozen homers in three weeks with Splinter’s splinter, until it shattered one day. Undaunted, Hank hit 5 more with his own previously uninspiring ash, to give him 16 for the month of September and 44 in all, good for best in the league. His 39 RBIs during the exceptional month gave him that title as well. Grantland Rice opined, “Greenberg’s surge is one of baseball’s greatest achievements.” When the season ended, he gave Williams a fresh bat as a thank-you.

  Ted wasn’t too happy about the whole thing. He suspected, as did some others, that Greenberg and Vernon were getting grooved pitches in an effort to deny Williams the Triple Crown. As Austin Lake wrote, “Rival athletes gradually grew sour at Ted for his aloof swagger and chill hauteur toward his fellow craftsmen.” Pitchers, in the Williams worldview, were dubious characters who lacked morals. He could easily envision some of those snakes not coming high and hard at the popular Greenie so they could stick it to The Kid.

  Williams hit but .272 in August, and his power evaporated in September, hitting just 4 homers with 9 RBIs all month. The cumulative effect of the swoon was to once and for all undo all the talk of post-service maturity that was the common theme of ink spilled Williams’s way early in the season. Prewar style feuding with the press was again commonplace for the man who once grumbled, “Pour hot water over a sportswriter and you get instant shit.” One day he unloaded on his ghostwriter for the Globe, Hy Hurwitz. “I get tired of looking at a little squirt like you,” he grumbled. Hurwitz retorted, “That makes us even, for I get tired of looking at a big galoot like you.” The fans were turning on Ted once more as well, a twist Jimmy Cannon found insincere. “Ted’s harangues have offended the people of Boston,” he wrote, “who believe a guy should take their abuse with a counterfeit humility and cower before their scorn.”

  Willi
ams’s worst moment came after an A’s outfielder and Czechoslovakian immigrant named Elmer Valo robbed Ted of a home run by going over the low Fenway fence in right field to spear a screaming line drive. Valo landed awkwardly on the railing, and crumpled to the ground in agony. Williams savagely kicked first base in anger and screamed expletives on his way back to the dugout, indifferent to Valo’s plight even as he was stretchered off the field. The Boston fans booed him loudly, and the press gave him a good beating.

  Even the glad tidings of finally wrapping up the AL flag didn’t lift tensions—if anything, they were exacerbated by an incident that night. On September 13 in Cleveland, the Indians put on the shift when Williams came to bat in the first inning. Contrary to his usual method, the Splinter lined a rocket the other way, to deep left-center. Left fielder “Fat Pat” Seerey was way over toward center, and Williams cruised around the bags long before the portly outfielder could run it down. It was the only inside-the-park homer of Ted’s career. Hughson made it stand up with a three-hit shutout, and the 1–0 win at long last put the Sox in the World Series. After the game Williams laughed, “Someone said ‘is that the easiest homer you ever hit?’ And I said ‘hell no, it was the hardest. I had to run.’”

  Mayor James Curley ordered firehouses across Boston to sound gongs, sirens, and bells for fifteen full seconds to celebrate the victory. The champagne at last flowed in the Sox clubhouse. Harold Kaese, whose Saturday Evening Post piece had slammed Cronin and the Sox back in the spring, now magnanimously sent Cronin a telegram that read, “Congratulations to a champ who made me a chump.” Indeed, Cronin had done an excellent job skippering the Sox to a runaway pennant, especially given the pressure he was under in spring training.

  Yawkey was traveling with the team on the epic road trip and was staying with them at Cleveland’s Statler Hotel. He decided to throw a party for the boys that night. However, relations between the press and the Sox had deteriorated to the point where Yawkey feared a scene might break out when the hard stuff started to flow, so he arranged for a separate, press-only bash elsewhere in the hotel.