The Victory Season Read online

  To the Providence Journal, Johnson added, “I’m proud that I served my country, but prouder still to have made it home alive. What General Patton said is true: war isn’t about dying for your country; it’s about making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country. I was one of the lucky dumb bastards who made it home safely.”

  Johnson was given the job of bullpen fireman, ready to leap in whenever the starter got in trouble. He figured to be a busy man.

  On April 12, four days before the season began, a pitcher named Clem “Icicles” Dreisewerd reported to the Sox after a brief stint in the navy. Thus, Boston became the last AL team to “clear its service list,” or have all its players (thirty at the high-water mark, well below the forty-four of the A’s or forty-two of the Yankees and Tigers) returned from service and playing ball for the organization. It was the “first time in five seasons the American League did not have players farmed out to Uncle Sam,” according to the Associated Press.

  But two AL teams, Washington and Philadelphia, could never fully clear their service lists. The only two major leaguers to die in combat in World War II represented those clubs.

  Chapter 2

  The Fallen

  Elmer Gedeon wasn’t really supposed to be in the pilot’s seat. He was the operations officer for the 394th Bomb Group, the “Bridge Busters,” and thus, his duties kept him mainly deskbound, in England, planning the attacks his group of B-26 bombers would carry out on bridges in Germany and Occupied France. But Captain Gedeon wanted to maintain flying proficiency, and he didn’t like the idea that he planned missions that others would fly. So, on April 20, 1944, the twenty-seven-year-old from Cleveland took to the air from Boreham Field in Chesterfield, England. The destination was a construction site in the woods outside Esquerdes, France, near the country’s southwest coast. The target was a launchpad for the V-1 rocket, aka the “Buzz Bomb,” the first of Hitler’s terror weapons that would be launched against England in the coming months. Elmer’s B-26 and thirty-five other Marauders were being sent to destroy the area, part of a concerted effort to attack V-1 launch sites, known collectively as “Operation Crossbow.”

  Gedeon had been a three-sport star at the University of Michigan, one of the best athletes to grace the playing fields of Ann Arbor in the 1930s. He was ticketed for the 1940 Olympics in track and field, but the Summer Games, slated for Tokyo, were canceled. Elmer turned to baseball instead and signed with the Washington Senators. He got 17 plate appearances in 1939, with 3 singles, a single run, and 1 RBI in five games. Elmer spent the 1940 season in the minors and was drafted in January 1941, almost a year before Pearl Harbor.

  He transferred to the Army Air Corps in October, barely scraping under the two-hundred-pound weight limit for fliers. Elmer was assigned to bombers, and he began flight training in North Carolina in 1942. One August morning, Elmer was the navigator aboard a B-25 that had difficulty lifting off. The plane scraped the pine trees at the end of the runway and plunged into a nearby swamp. Suddenly, the aircraft burst into flames. Elmer groped desperately at his restraints, managing to free himself and crawl out, despite three broken ribs.

  As he gasped at the fetid swamp air, Elmer heard a call from inside the plane. It was crewmate and friend Corporal John Rarrat, who had broken his leg and was unable to move. Without hesitation, Elmer went back into the burning wreckage and pulled Rarrat free. Sadly, his bravery was for naught—Rarrat died from his injuries, as did two others from the flight. Gedeon spent twelve weeks in a hospital in Raleigh, recovering from severe burns, some of which required skin grafts.

  Elmer lost fifty pounds while recovering, got a medal, and returned to the air. He told his cousin afterward, “I had my accident. It’s going to be good flying from now on.”

  Elmer was assigned to the 394th Bomb Group and given a new bomber to master—the B-26 Marauder. Its unfortunate nickname, “The Widowmaker,” gives some idea of the dangers in flying the plane. Its wings were so short and heavily laden by engines that it was also called the “Flying Prostitute,” as it had no visible means of support. Gedeon and the 394th’s ladies of the evening arrived in England in February 1944.

  One of Gedeon’s duties as operations officer was to assign crews to planes, so it was easy to put himself in the pilot’s seat for the sortie against the V-1 site, in charge of six other crewmen. The flight lifted off in a hazy dusk. Elmer assumed the number two position in the flight, behind the leader as they formed up over the English Channel.

  At around 7:30 p.m., the bombers arrived over the target site and encountered intense—and accurate—antiaircraft fire. Gedeon’s Marauder had just dropped its bombs (most of which were determined to have missed the target) when flak ripped through the undercarriage. The plane burst into flames.

  Normal procedure called for the crew to bail out through the bomb bay doors, but they wouldn’t open. So the crew rushed forward to the cockpit to eject through the hatches above Elmer and his copilot, James Taaffe. Taaffe noticed that Gedeon was motionless, slumped forward over his controls. His clothes on fire, Taaffe had no time to check on Elmer, who may have been already dead, though Taaffe speculated later that he might have gone into shock, overcome by the trauma of once again being in a burning bomber.

  Taaffe bailed out, blacked out, and came to on the ground, where he was surrounded by German soldiers. He exchanged fire for several hours before surrendering. After thirteen months as a prisoner of war, he was set free as the Allies overran his prison camp.

  In the prison, Taaffe was told by his captors that his six other crewmates, including Gedeon, were dead.

  Elmer Gedeon is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

  They had already been on Iwo Jima, as hellish a stretch of ground as existed in all of World War II, for fifteen days. Eleven days earlier, he had watched as the American flag was raised on the summit of Mount Suribachi, an image that stirred the world when the photograph of the moment was published.

  But Harry O’Neill, once of the Philadelphia A’s and now a platoon commander of the Regimental Weapons Company, 25th Marine Division, was still fighting a vicious, uncompromising enemy. The Japanese had forgone a standard defense of the volcanic island in favor of going underground, blasting an extraordinary system of tunnels, trenches, and gun positions out of the rock. Upon landing on the black sand beach, O’Neill and his fellow marines were on the far right flank of the assault, exposed to murderous fire from the front and sides. Now, they were slogging their way inland on an offensive, burning and shooting the Japanese out of their caves. It was nasty, incredibly dangerous work. The Japanese warrior code of Bushido held that surrender was not to be considered. So the remainder of the eighteen thousand Nipponese garrisoned at Iwo were fighting to the end. Only 216 would be captured alive—the rest were dead, many of them suicides.

  O’Neill was no stranger to the epic savagery of the Pacific Theater. He had enlisted in the US Marines after Pearl Harbor, like so many of his fellow citizens. In the years of combat that followed, O’Neill had waded ashore and fought the Japanese at Kwajalein, Saipan, and Tinian. He had been wounded at Saipan when he caught shrapnel in the shoulder, getting a month at a San Francisco hospital for his trouble. It was nothing that would keep him from throwing out runners trying to steal on him when he got back home.

  Harry Mink O’Neill was born in Philadelphia in 1917. He was a gifted athlete and went on to be one of the greatest sports stars ever at Gettysburg College. He led the school to Eastern Pennsylvania Intercollegiate championships in baseball, football, and basketball.

  After graduation, a bidding war for his services broke out between the Washington Senators and his hometown Philadelphia A’s. The grizzled Philly manager, Connie Mack, won out with an offer of $500 a month. O’Neill signed in June 1939. On July 23, the moribund A’s, en route to finishing 51½ games behind the Yankees, were playing Detroit on a sweltering afternoon in the Motor City. The Tigers were winning 16–3. The game couldn’t end soon enough. In the seventh inning, Ma
ck gave starting catcher Frankie Hayes the rest of the day off and sent Harry in. Harry caught the final two innings but never got a chance to hit.

  It was Harry’s only game in the big leagues.

  He spent the next two seasons in the minors, first with Allentown and then Harrisburg. He was still in Connie Mack’s plans, but had taken a teaching and coaching job at Upper Darby Junior High School, just in case. Basketball season had just begun when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

  On March 6, 1945, First Lieutenant O’Neill and his company were slugging their way across a narrow valley pockmarked by caves and small openings in the rock wall. It was a terribly exposed place, and sniper fire soon ravaged the company. O’Neill’s men opened up with heavy machine guns and flamethrowers. One by one, the Japanese were flushed from their hiding spots and executed, or buried in place by explosives, or doused with flame and left to burn. But there were still plenty of the enemy about, well armed with mortars and machine guns.

  The assault bogged down multiple times throughout the day, and by early evening, the fighting still raged near the infamous “Turkey Knob” area of the Japanese defenses. O’Neill stood next to a fellow marine, PFC James Kontes, in a deep crater that seemed to provide some cover. “We were standing shoulder to shoulder,” Kontes recounted to the Bucks County Courier Times in 2009. “Harry was on my left. We were looking out at the terrain in front of us. And this shot came out of nowhere.” The sniper’s bullet pierced O’Neill’s throat and exited out his neck. His spinal cord was severed. He died instantly.

  “I think the guy must have been in a tree or something,” said Kontes. “That was their favorite place to shoot from. They got Harry. They took him out because he was taller. He didn’t suffer.”

  Harry’s wife and high school sweetheart, Ethel Mackay O’Neill, wasn’t told of Harry’s death in action for a month. A few weeks later, his sister, Susanna, wrote a letter to the athletic department at Gettysburg College, where Harry had been larger than life. “We are trying to keep our courage up, as Harry would want us to do,” she wrote. “But our hearts are very sad and as the days go on it seems to be getting worse. Harry was always so full of life, that it seems hard to think he is gone. But God knows best and perhaps someday, we will understand why all this sacrifice of so many fine young men.”

  Like Archibald “Moonlight” Graham, Harry O’Neill played in but a single game without coming to bat, but unlike Graham, O’Neill wasn’t immortalized in print or on film. In 1905, the Japanese fleet destroyed a Russian armada at the Battle of Tsushima Strait. The naval victory emboldened the secretive, insular island nation to embark down a decades-long path of militarism, one that was about to reach a sudden, violent conclusion. That same year, Graham played half an inning in the outfield as a defensive replacement with John McGraw’s New York Giants. He then quit the game, that half inning his sole contribution to baseball. He never came to bat or threw a pitch.

  Moonlight became legendary as a character in the novel Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella, and the resulting film, Field of Dreams, starring Burt Lancaster as the ballplayer-turned–country doctor. Moonlight’s poignant story of tasting the fantasy held by millions of American boys, to hit or pitch in the major leagues, yet being denied after that single swallow, hits a delicate nerve with anyone who dares to pursue his dearest aspirations.

  Harry O’Neill was one of those boys. And because of O’Neill, Gedeon, and so many others like them, future generations of American boys were able to chase that same dream.

  Chapter 3

  Kidnapping the Kaiser and Other Adventures

  Once, much earlier, Larry MacPhail had a dream too, one of his first—he thought he could kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  For any other man, that would have been a crazy fantasy. But the Roaring Redhead had shown an uncanny ability throughout his life to do exactly what he set out to do, regardless of difficulty.

  He was a man who contained multitudes; a success who had run three major league franchises and a “MacPhailure” who left all three in disgrace; an outstanding judge of talent and a master showman but also a drunken bully and brawler. In his lifetime, he made a living as a church organist, an attorney, a department store executive, an automobile dealer, a banker, a building contractor, a Big Ten football referee, a baseball impresario, and a racing-stable proprietor. He was a knowledgeable musician and a first-rate amateur chef. And, of course, he was an army officer with a sterling record in two world wars.

  Mac had been an artillery captain during the First World War, fighting the Hun in France. Appalled that Wilhelm II (a bombastic, hateful, mustachioed German leader whose dark place in history has been obscured by another bombastic, hateful, mustachioed German leader) had been given asylum after the armistice and allowed to live in Holland, MacPhail conjured an audacious plan to storm the Kaiser’s office and capture him, ostensibly to take him to trial for war crimes. Incredibly, Mac and his squad of eight men got into Wilhelm’s inner sanctum, but the deposed leader was not in. MacPhail swiped Wilhelm’s monogrammed ashtray as a keepsake and escaped the court-martial that seemed sure to follow.

  A quarter-century later, the Roaring Redhead was back in the service. While he saw combat in the Great War, Mac only served as a PR man in the Good War, which was fortunate, as he was fifty-two years old at the time he enlisted.

  MacPhail needed to save his strength, for after the war, he would return to fighting against his greatest enemy—Branch Rickey. MacPhail and Rickey had a long history together—they were practically family. And, as with many family members, the years had torn them asunder.

  MacPhail’s first foray into baseball was owning a minor league team in Columbus, Ohio, which he sold to the Cardinals under Rickey’s stewardship in 1931. Recognizing a fellow unorthodox genius, Branch would powwow over new ideas all the time with Mac, likewise a University of Michigan Wolverine. Two of MacPhail’s pet projects, night baseball and air travel, were actually given soft opens in Columbus in the early 1930s. Later, Mac would bring both to the majors. He also invented the batting helmet, tried yellow baseballs (“stitched lemons”) to make the game easier to follow, pioneered radio broadcasts in New York, thought up Old-Timers’ Day, and even placed a microphone at home plate so fans could hear the arguments with umpires (an experiment that lasted exactly one game).

  But an alcohol-fueled incident would terminate Mac’s stay in Columbus and permanently stain his relationship with Rickey. Mac was closing down a hotel bar with the manager of the inn when drunken words were exchanged. Mac responded to some perceived insult by hammering on the doors of his players’ rooms and demanding they all pack up and move to the hotel across the street, which they did in the wee hours of the night. Rickey, embarrassed, persuaded Cards owner Sam Breadon to fire MacPhail.

  But Mac landed on his feet, taking over a destitute Cincinnati Reds franchise and turning it around, at least at the box office. His introduction of night baseball to the majors in 1935 helped mightily. But a few years later, the dark shadows reemerged. Mac got sauced and ended up wrestling at a board meeting with none other than Powel Crosley Jr., the owner of the Reds and the man for whom the team’s stadium was named. Unsurprisingly, Mac lost that gig too. But like many a troubled but talented ballplayer over the years, he was given yet another chance, this time with Brooklyn, another laughingstock. As the Reds had been, the Dodgers were in financial ruin when a bank, in this case Brooklyn Trust, approached MacPhail. The redhead had already earned a reputation as a quick-turnaround artist. “Every club I ever had,” he once said, “I had for a bank; it was always a down club, a club that was in the sheriff’s hands. My job has always been to get some bank out of the baseball business. I’ve always worked for a God-damn bank!”

  Mac spiffed up Ebbets Field as his first step toward legitimacy, painting the old park, resodding the grass and adding seats, and making the ushers wear flashy green-and-gold uniforms; he hired a drillmaster to train them to stay in step. He also hired Babe Ruth as a coach to goos
e attendance.

  Brooklyn’s love affair with baseball and the sui generis scene at Ebbets Field during the 1940s and ’50s date back to MacPhail’s efforts to popularize the game in the borough. Winning helped, of course—Mac took over in 1938, and by 1941, the Dodgers had won the pennant. A year later, he was gone, his endless drama causing too much tsuris for the Dodgers board of directors. He was replaced at the helm of the Bums by—wait for it—Branch Rickey. Rickey promised to win with class and decency in Flatbush, a flat rebuke of his old protégé’s boorishness. One of Rickey’s new colleagues was his son, Branch Jr.—hired by MacPhail as a scouting director in a sign that underneath the bluster, he still cared for his mentor.

  Mac’s peripatetic career was due in the main to drink. As one writer described MacPhail, “He was an impossible man—loud, belligerent, unsteady, alcoholic. With no drinks he was brilliant; with one he was a genius. With two he was insane. Rarely did he stop at two.” Red Barber owed his Hall of Fame broadcasting career to MacPhail, who first hired him in Cincy and brought Red to Brooklyn. Even he would duck Mac when the booze came out. “From then on I was always late for an appointment,” Barber said. MacPhail’s eyes were watery, and his freckled face blotched with red, sure signs of alcohol use and abuse.