A Look at “The Game Must Go On”

In his introduction, John Klima cautions that The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII — published by Thomas Dunne Books earlier this year — is conceptualized with a “cohesive, narrative style” and thus is “not a textbook or a reference book.” However, Klima’s work is nothing short of exhaustively researched, as he draws from interviews, personal letters, and newspaper archives to breathe life into an intimately detailed tapestry rich with colorful, poignant exploits.

In as much, Klima’s sports journalism experiences (as well as his earlier books) lend a palpable authority to this history of wartime baseball and the heavy tolls World War II wrought upon players, fans, the game, and the country. Despite what otherwise might be an almost overwhelming wealth of information, The Game manages to dexterously weave through the wartime sprawl of historical events and figures with apparent ease, as the reader follows three distinctive central characters whose lives are forever changed by war: Hank Greenberg, Billy Southworth Jr., and Pete Gray.

Hank Greenberg is by far the biggest name in baseball featured at length here; ironically, though, Greenberg may not afterwards resonate any more than those lesser-known names. That’s not a dig at either Greenberg or Klima’s efforts. Instead, this lingering sense about the utter importance of rank—or, rather, the lack of such importance—appears to be all the more of a testament to baseball’s comparatively minor players who in Klima’s narrative get equal attention—if not billing, as in the case of Pete Gray (again, see the book’s complete title).

Surely there is plenty for fans of Greenberg or anyone interested in learning about his earnest efforts to sacrifice and participate beyond merely exhibition games for the sake of troop entertainment. And as far as a likable protagonist, Greenberg’s gentlemanly, humble nature comes across remarkably well. For example, when commended by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in Manhattan with a plaque “for being the first professional baseball player from the city to enlist in the armed services,” Hank’s response “personified why he was the model soldier for baseball’s war.” He graciously accepted but notably qualified that he had “yet to earn [the] right to this honor.”

Another such prominent moment of humility occurs later when Greenberg is overseas and temporarily in India. There he meets a fellow soldier—a fan well acquainted with the Detroit slugger who proudly hailed from the Bronx. Doubtless, it was such a memorable occasion for this young GI named Mort Reichek that he probably literally wrote home about it:

During my travels across India I got to see more of the country than most natives. I visited the Taj Mahal . . . ; the Hindu temples outside Madras; . . . the Towers of Silence outside Bombay. . . . But the most startling sighting for me occurred in Calcutta one day as I strolled down Chowringhee, the city’s main boulevard, while on a weekend pass. Walking alone on a street ahead of me was a tall Air Force officer. From a distance, he looked vaguely familiar. As he approached me, I was stunned to see that the officer was Hank Greenberg.

He was visiting Calcutta on a furlough. . . . The weather was brutally hot. In front of us as we talked was the Grand Hotel, which housed a club for British and American military officers. Greenberg was about to invite me in . . . when he suddenly realized that I would be barred from entering because I was a mere staff sergeant and not an officer. He was clearly embarrassed by the matter of military rank and apologized. . . . I said that the Bronx, our mutual hometown, would have been a better setting than Chowringhee. We exchanged salutes again, shook hands, and said our good-byes. ‘It was a pleasure to meet you,’ he said as we parted. During three years in the Army, no officer had ever said that to me. But then I had never met an officer who had been my boyhood idol.”

Of course episodes such as this were by no means the extent of Greenberg’s wartime experiences. Greenberg flew on his share of uneasy (if not terrifying) flights, such as several trips “over the Hump” near Kwanghan, one of his stations in China. The Hump was an at-times treacherous route complete with cloud-covered mountain peaks hidden from pilots’ view, Japanese fighters that “hunted B-29s like wild boar,” and below on the ground a telltale “cemetery [of wreckage known as] Aluminum Alley.”

But it was actually back at the Kwanghan airfield where Greenberg nearly met with fatal disaster on June 14, 1944, when a B-29 failed to get airborne upon takeoff and “skidded into a ditch, then into the rice paddies.” As Klima explains earlier, the B-29s when loaded “weighed 141,000 pounds and carried up to 20,000 pounds of bombs.” Not surprisingly, in light of this heavy cargo and a highly “volatile fuel,” the bombers were prone to engine trouble. So that was roughly the situation when Greenberg rushed from his station in the control tower and with others took off in jeeps, “racing out to help the crew escape.” He was not prepared for what happened next:

The bombs exploded, consuming the plane and producing a tremendous fireball. Hank and the other rescuers, who were now running to the crash scene, were blown off their feet. The heat roared over them. Hank had been knocked down by a fastball many times, but this was something else. He thought he was a dead man, and he was almost killed.

In addition to these episodes, Klima satisfies other interests as well. Greenberg’s CBI tour exhibition games are given due space, as are the games played by other ballplayers in the armed forces. Moreover, accounts of both the exhibition games and the longer sections dedicated to the goings-on of pennant races provide the reader a pleasant reprieve, and thus begin to suggest the therapeutic effect the game must have had on troops and citizens alike.

Understandably, though, these sporting events hold a diminished significance in comparison to the wartime drama. And despite Greenberg’s strong character traits, his curious encounters with compatriot soldiers, and certainly the occasional peripheral (if not direct) perils of war, readers may yet find the trials and tribulations of less famous—though no less important—individuals to be equally or even more memorable. Clearly, this could well be a key point of such a spanning history.

Admittedly, the name Billy Southworth may sound familiar in the context of baseball, especially during WWII. After all, Southworth managed his St. Louis Cardinals to two World Series championships (1942 and 1944). However, Billy Southworth Jr. probably will be a relative unknown to many.

At the time, though, Billy Jr. was known as the son of the Cardinals manager and for being “the first notable future minor leaguer to quit playing baseball to join the military.” Yes, while it’s almost inconceivable in today’s cultural climate, there was a time when a probable future major leaguer would voluntarily (i.e. before being drafted) enlist. Consider also that while Billy Jr. was the first to do so among his peers, he clearly would not be the last.

So when Klima’s book details Billy’s short-lived baseball, and then eventual wartime, journeys—his progress through Army Air Corps training, his station overseas where he flew B-17s and survived 25 largely harrowing bomber missions, and his indulgence in what little escapism was permissible to relish whatever delayed baseball reports of his beloved Cardinals (led by Dad) he could find—young Billy stands in as well for the many others in his position whom we do not know. And as it did for Billy, the pastime of baseball and all that it recalled surely offered those in service some respite, some piece of home to hold onto:

Billy kept his baseball rituals alive. He kept a ball and a glove with him on his missions so just in case he was shot down and interned in a POW camp, he would have something to do to pass the time.

Billy…had a baseball in his pocket when the curtain was pulled back on the big target board in the briefing room on the early morning of January 17, 1943…The flight plan showed that for the first time in the war, the target was Germany itself.

Billy wore the lucky Cardinals hat his dad had given him during the 1942 World Series. When he was over Germany, Billy reached into his pocket and pulled out a baseball. He slid open the pilot-side cockpit window…Then [to his copilot] he smirked with that cowboy Cardinals grin of his and dropped his personal payload on the Third Reich, a Spalding baseball bearing the signature of National League president Ford Frick.

Yet perhaps as significant as any of Billy’s B-17 piloting feats with the front-mounted “puny 30mm machine gun the crews called a peashooter” or his stateside flights with the dangerously lumbering B-29 transports, Klima presents a likewise compelling account of the strained though powerful bond between father and son. For as fate ultimately has it, Billy Jr. and Billy Sr. each experience their share of wartime hardship.

Meanwhile, Pete Gray’s battles are of a different though not any easier kind. An amputee (his right arm lost in a horrific childhood accident when he was run over by a truck), Gray takes his own fight to the baseball field. Developing his skills from an early age, Gray becomes an exceptional fielder who climbs his way up through the minor leagues.

It also doesn’t hurt Gray’s prospects—or gate sales—that his fielding mechanics prove to be an utter spectacle to watch. When he wore his glove “at his fingertips with his pinkie sticking out, he could catch the ball, move the glove under his armpit, squeeze the ball out, then bare hand and throw…all in one fluid motion.” Despite his love of baseball, he still felt willing to sacrifice all in order to serve. But with a 4-F classification and rejection by the Army, Gray’s fight is relegated to the diamond. No matter. During his rise through the minors—and as a public relations and propaganda focal point briefly in the majors with the St. Louis Browns in 1945—Gray serves in other valuable ways.

Indeed, Gray is used “for publicity and propaganda, which overshadowed anything he could do on a baseball field.” And when compared to the skilled talent on clubs’ normal rosters, wartime ball may well have been “a joke”—as Gray and other lower caliber players were brought in temporarily to replace professionals like Greenberg who were fighting overseas. Nevertheless, these replacement ballplayers carried another kind of worth. Klima explains one of Gray’s visits to Walter Reed Army Hospital:

Pete received a tremendous ovation from the wounded veterans…His value as a major league ballplayer could never be measured by his batting average…[but to] amputees just like him…[Gray] made them feel as if they could still achieve their dreams, too…To the boys who’d nearly lost everything during the war, Pete Gray was as large and as powerful as Hank Greenberg.

While the war forever changed young men like Gray, Southworth, and Greenberg, it also changed the face of baseball. These stories are emblematic of some of those changes, others of which Klima knowledgably elaborates. In fact, these central characters are but a few parts of a much larger cast. Phil Marchildon, Warren Spahn, Bob Feller, Hank Bauer, Ted Williams, Joe and Dom DiMaggio, Enos Slaughter, and Pee Wee Reese are just some of the many others The Game also manages to touch on.

Likewise, Klima concludes in the acknowledgements that this wartime baseball history is also just a piece of a whole—part of a trilogy “spanning 1941 to 1957, telling both the story of baseball at war and postwar America and baseball.” For the uninitiated, Willie’s Boys (published in 2009) and Bushville Wins! (2012) may also be worth checking out.