Baseball and the American Military During World War II

Home , Billy Herman, Gene Woodling, Schoolboy Rowe, Willard Brown

Growing Up With Baseball: How We Loved and Played the Game Edited by Gary Land. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. (194 pp., $25.00 US)

Playing for Their Nation: Baseball and the American Military during World War II. By Steven Bullock. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. (184 pp., $30.00 US)

Reviewed by Tim Morris, University of Texas at Arlington.

Both Growing Up With Baseball and Playing for Their Nation are slightly offbeat—just enough to find their niche within the field of baseball history, where almost everything has a book unto itself and almost every event of the mid-twentieth century has been narrated in print countless times. Grow- ing Up With Baseball resembles oral histories in presenting the lives of ordi- nary people as they were touched by the sport, but it’s not oral history; it’s a collection of brief personal essays in the vein of oral history. (And it’s not all about baseball; at its most interesting, it’s about things that resemble baseball.) Playing for Their Nation is about baseball during the Second World War. But unlike Bill Gilbert’s They Also Served (1992), William C. Kashatus’s One-Armed Wonder (1995), or David Finoli’s For the Good of the Country (2002), it’s not about baseball as it was played in professional leagues during the War. Playing for Their Nation is about the baseball played in the service, and there was a lot of it. Supplies for U.S. forces included “one hundred thousand baseballs, forty thousand bats, thirty thousand gloves, thirty- seven hundred body protectors, eleven hundred sets of uniforms, and seven hundred bases” (70) just in the Mediterranean theatre in the year 1942 alone. The cornucopia of American industry was not limited to shells and air- planes and Liberty ships. It included consumer goods of all kinds, includ- ing leisure products. And the preferred form of leisure for GIs was baseball. Bullock’s Playing for Their Nation is modestly successful as a book. It’s more like a collection of articles on subjects loosely related by their connec- tion to the War. The first three chapters, all of which survey military ball

76 BOOK REVIEWS 77 playing, are repetitive and lack a strong narrative or expository line. But they are very informative. Bullock assembles lots of little-known material about organizers of military teams, such as Zeke Bonura, the slugging first baseman who became an Army sports entrepreneur. Bullock’s next three chapters are largely list-driven. He looks first at great military ball clubs of the 1940s. Such teams were drawn from a talent pool actually greater than that of Major League Baseball (since the military was multiracial though not completely integrated). Though military coaches enjoyed a dream labor situation, their efforts were ephemeral because their talent would be together for at most one season before being dispersed to other duties. The 1944 Great Lakes Naval Training Station team, however, would have held its own in the non-war major leagues, with Billy Herman and Gene Woodling in the lineup, Virgil Trucks and Schoolboy Rowe in the rotation. World War II appears to have seen the first great integrated baseball clubs. Negro League stars like Leon Day and Willard Brown played a great deal of baseball and played on some integrated teams overseas, where state- side prejudices were less in force. The integration of professional baseball really started in these settings, though Bullock doesn’t explore the point as much as he might. Bullock’s last two chapters are frankly disappointing, retelling sto- ries of big-league stars’ war experiences and speculating on what great stars like Ted Williams and Bob Feller might have achieved had they not lost playing time to military service. More than they did, obviously. Apart from the occasional intriguing anecdote (such as the story of pitcher Larry French, who not only entered the Navy but stayed there as a career officer after the War), the last half of Bullock’s book is unenlightening. In order to assemble Growing Up with Baseball, Gary Land asked a range of people, mostly older middle-class white men, to send him their early memories of the sport. The resulting edited collection is the reverse of Bullock’s in structure. The brief nonfiction pieces that Land collects start out unremarkable and then, as the subject matter shifts, become quite com- pelling. Land divides the memoirs he collected into three sections. The first section contains anecdotes about how people became fans. These short essays suffer not only from a local sameness, but also from a global familiar- ity; they are things that have been written many times before. Several of the pieces mention the experience of walking into the seats of a ballpark and seeing the great splash of the green field: an experience impressive but apparently universal, somewhat dulling its impact as prose. A second section recounts playing experiences, none of which is par- ticularly fascinating. In fact, the monotony of the accounts is in itself cul- turally significant, as so many people from so many regions of the United States played the same kind of baseball (or semi-baseball games like Work- Up).