COMMENTARY : Greenberg Didn’t Shirk His Duties During War

By the end of World War II, the 50th anniversary of which will be marked Monday and Tuesday, Hank Greenberg had been back swatting baseballs for the Detroit Tigers for about six weeks.

The typical reaction to this might be, it figures, a ballplayer getting preferential treatment. Nothing could be further from the truth in the case of Greenberg and scores of others of the 442 big-league ballplayers who served during the Big War.

It was in October of 1940, more than a year before our entry into the global conflict, that more than 16 million American men between the ages of 21 and 35 were ordered to register for the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.

The draft was conducted lottery style. Greenberg had an early number, was a bachelor and, despite being 30 years old, his day-to-day uniform by May of 1941 was Army fatigues, not the baseball uniform of the Tigers. He was the first ballplayer to be drafted.

The commissioner of baseball, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, much to his credit, was determined that there would be no special treatment for players. Later, after we were officially involved in the European and Pacific Theaters of Operations, Landis would seek the counsel of President Franklin D. Roosevelt concerning the maintenance of the game.

During the 1940 season, Greenberg had hit 41 homers, knocked in 150 runs and was the American League’s MVP as he led Detroit to a pennant. He was the premier slugger in the game, so it stopped the presses when he was called to service, even though possessing flat feet he had a reason for deferment.

“I want no favors,” Greenberg said as the ballclub pushed for a reporting delay of one day so he could be around for the pennant-raising ceremony by the team. The player would have none of it: “I have been ordered to report May 7 and will do so.”

At the induction center, Greenberg signed at least a thousand autographs. In the afternoon, a third of the 15,000-man 5th Division, training in nearby Battle Creek, greeted their new recruit at the train depot.

Greenberg started out as an anti-tank gunner, rose to the rank of sergeant in six months and was separated from the service in 180 days, the rule for draftees over the age of 28. It was Dec. 5, two days before Pearl Harbor and, without waiting for an official summons, Greenberg jumped right back into the Army.

Switching to the Army Air Corps, Greenberg was commander of a headquarters squadron in China in 1944 when a B-29, starting out on a bombing run to Japan, exploded on the runway. He was running to help rescue the crew when the plane’s bomb load exploded. Hank was thrown half the length of a football field. “That was one time when I didn’t even think about returning to baseball. I was satisfied to be alive,” he recalls. He rotated out of the Army in mid-1945.

While it’s true not one man on a big league roster at the time of Pearl Harbor would die in action, two men who had appeared in major league games did and more than 50 minor leaguers ended up dying in combat.

The stories of close calls and heroics abound. For instance, Phil Marchildon, a pitcher for the Philadelphia A’s, was shot down off the coast of Nazi-occupied Denmark. He swam for four hours before being picked up by a Danish fisherman, only to fall into the hands of the Germans. He was a prisoner of war for nine months.

Buddy Lewis of the Senators won the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal and Earl Johnson of the Red Sox won a Silver Star and a Bronze Star. Pitcher Lou Brissie absorbed shrapnel in his feet, legs, hands and shoulders, but plowed through 23 operations before returning to the Philadelphia Athletics and winning 30 games during the 1948-49 seasons.

Harry Walker of the Cardinals, in a recon outfit 70 miles behind enemy lines, shot his way out of a couple of tough situations and “captured a bunch of soldiers and some big guns (88s).” His actions were worth a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

Bob Feller could have spent the war teaching recruits how to do calisthenics, but he volunteered for overseas duty and spent 27 months shooting battleship guns in the Gilbert and Marshall islands and at Truk, the Japanese supply center for the western Pacific.

Larry French, a pitcher with 197 victories, never got a chance for three more after taking part in the Normandy Invasion, switching to the Pacific Theater and leaving the Navy in the fall of 1945 as a lieutenant commander at age 38.

Less than 10% of the ballplayers serving were released during the 1945 season, even though Europe was wrapped up and, come Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Rising Sun had set.

Earlier, back home, President Roosevelt issued his “Green Light” letter in reply to commissioner Landis’ inquiry about possibly shutting down the game. In part, FDR wrote, “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going. There will be fewer people unemployed and everybody will work longer hours and harder than ever before . . . [the game] is a definite recreational asset to at least 20 million of its fellow citizens, and that, in my judgment, is thoroughly worthwhile.”

The rest, as they say, is history as baseball did its part on two fronts, turning in a class job on both.