For Europe, and ultimately the rest of the world, 1938 was the tipping point. Hitler declared Anschluss in Austria and incorporated his country of birth into the Third Reich. In Spain the civil war had shifted decisively in favour of Franco’s nationalist forces. Government-organised ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations erupted in Italy demanding that France hand over Nice, Corsica and Tunisia to Mussolini. In Romania, King Carol II dismissed parliament and established his own authoritarian dictatorship. The question was no longer if there would be war, but when.
In March 1938, a crowd of 20,000 gathered in Frankfurt to watch the German national rugby union team play France. In 1934 France and Germany, supported by Italy, had established the Fédération Internationale de Rugby Amateur (FIRA) to organise rugby in Europe as an alternative to the International Rugby Football Board. Although France was the dominant power, the Germans played a central role in FIRA, so much so that German was the new organisation’s official language.1
France had played Germany in friendly internationals every year since 1927. In just their second meeting, the Germans had pulled off a shock 17-16 win in Frankfurt. The French did not make the same mistake again and it would be another six years before Germany would score another try against them.
But from 1933 the margins of victory began to grow smaller. In 1934 France had won by a mere four points and at the 1936 final of the European tournament held in Berlin just before the Olympic Games, the French had carried off the title by a converted try. This wasn’t just a story of declining French standards. The Germans lost only two matches against other countries in the 1930s and were clearly Europe’s second rugby power. Now, in 1938, the margin between the two national teams had never been narrower. The match was tight and dominated by forwards. Early in the game the French conceded a penalty in their own half and the experienced German full-back, Hannover’s Georg Isenberg, stepped up and slotted the ball between the posts: 3-0 to Germany.
As the game wore on, the Germans became increasingly confident. Even France’s outstanding centre and captain Joseph Desclaux could not crack the German defence. The French became more desperate, unwilling to concede defeat to a nation that had been playing international rugby for barely a decade. Nothing they tried could break through the German wall of defenders. When referee Herr Krembs finally blew his whistle for no-side, the Germans were exuberant. They were now a European rugby power.
Two months later, the two sides met again in Bucharest in the deciding match of FIRA’s 1938 European Championship. Both had previously defeated the hosts Romania by just three points and the decider was just as close.
At half-time another upset looked to be on the cards as the Germans led 5-3, thanks to a converted try to the German scrum-half and captain Karl Loos. But the French were determined to atone for their earlier shame and a try to Stade Bordelais’ winger Robert Caunegre that was converted by Desclaux gave France an 8-5 victory and their third successive European Championship.
Barely 15 months later, Europe was at war. And once again, many of the stars of international rugby would not return to play when peace was finally restored. Eight French rugby union internationals were killed, the same number of Irish caps who died. Ten Australians, 14 Englishmen and 15 Scots lost their lives. But the country that lost the most rugby union internationals in the Second World War was the nation that had been playing the international game for the shortest time: Germany. Sixteen German internationals would perish.
Rugby’s European axis
It was Germany that staged the last international rugby union match before war put a stop to it all. On Sunday 5 May 1940, just five days before Hitler’s forces invaded France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Italy narrowly defeated the Germans 4-0 in Stuttgart thanks to a solitary drop goal from Roma’s Francesco Vinci.
Germany and Italy had been two of rugby union’s biggest success stories in the 1930s, despite the fact that the IRB had little time for anyone outside the British Empire. A 1933 RFU meeting expressed the view that it ‘should confine its activities to the English-speaking peoples’, and in 1935 the RFU stopped accepting overseas members, preferring instead to focus its attention on ‘the British Commonwealth of nations’.2 France itself would not be accepted as a member of the IRB until 1978.
But France’s expulsion from the Five Nations and the creation of FIRA galvanised the development of European rugby. Rugby, as we have seen, was first played in Germany in Heidelberg in the mid-19th century by British expatriates and was then taken up by German Anglophiles. It was also played in the early 1880s by members of DFV 1878 Hannover, the first football club of any type to be formed in Germany.
Inspired by watching British expatriates playing the game, the initiative for the Hannover club came from 15-year-old Ferdinand-Wilhelm Fricke, who attended one of the city’s elite schools. The sport’s popularity spread among elite German schools and in 1899 19 rugby clubs formed a German rugby union. In 1900 an annual North versus South match was played for the first time and in 1909 Hannover and Stuttgart fought out the first club championship final.
The game remained very much the preserve of the Anglophile elite of Germany and, unlike soccer, never appealed to the masses. Frick became the first chairman of the Deutsche Rugby Verband (German Rugby Federation) in 1901 but, although the Frankfurt club played in the 1900 Olympic rugby competition, it wasn’t until the year of his death in 1927 that Germany played its first international match.
When Hitler came to power in 1933 rugby, like all sports, was incorporated into the Nazi Reich Federation for Physical Education. With the support of Hitler’s future munitions minister Albert Speer, the game became a small component of the Nazis’ use of sport as a tool of diplomacy, hence the enthusiastic role it played within FIRA. On the eve of the Second World War the game had 52 clubs and 1,925 registered players. The German club championship would continue until 1942.
Germany’s rival for the title of second power of European rugby throughout the 1930s was Italy. Rugby had been played in 1893 in Genoa by English expatriates but only emerged as a sport played by Italians in the late 1900s. Games were also regularly played by the visiting ships from the Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet. In 1910 Racing Club de France played a Turin side and the following year the first Italian rugby club was formed by Piero Mariani as part of US Milanese, the Milan multi-sport club.
Until the late 1920s rugby remained a niche sport confined to aficionados in northern Italy. Its major role in the rugby world was as host to touring clubs from France. But in 1927 Mussolini’s Fascist regime began to use sport as a vehicle for its ideology both domestically and internationally.
A ‘Comitato di Propaganda’ to promote and organise rugby union was set up by the regime under the leadership of Piero Mariani. It renamed itself the Federazione Italiana Rugby (FIR) the following year with 16 founding clubs based in Bologna, Milan, Naples, Padua, Rome, Turin and Udine. In 1929, after trial matches against a French side, Italy played its first international match, losing 9-0 to Spain.
As with other Italian sports, rugby was tightly integrated into the Fascist system. Mariani’s successor as president of the FIR was Giorgio Vaccaro, a general in the Fascist Militia and one of Mussolini’s leading sports administrators, and its longest serving president was Ettore Rossi, who would also become head of sport in Mussolini’s short-lived Italian Social Republic, established after the Allies had seized control of most of Italy in 1943.
As well as its physicality, rugby union appealed to the Fascists because of its amateur philosophy, as The Times noted in 1929: ‘the promoters of Rugby football, such as Signor Giorgio Vaccaro and Signor Turati, secretary of the Fascist Party, have realised that the game must be strictly confined, as in Great Britain, to amateurs who can be trusted to play it in the right spirit of sportsmanship’.3
Mussolini’s press secretary and member of the Grand Fascist Council, Lando Ferretti, wrote the introduction to the regime’s guide to rugby, Il Gioco del Rugby, published in 1928. And in 1932 Mussolini’s office wrote to the RFU asking them to organise a congress of European rugby federations to create a FIFA-style federation to encourage the spread of the sport, a suggestion curtly dismissed by Twickenham as being ‘neither workable nor desirable’.4
The Fascists gradually lost interest in rugby from the mid-1930s due to the phenomenal success of the national soccer side – which won the 1934 and 1938 World Cups – but the Italian rugby team continued to play regular internationals. However, unlike Germany, they were no match for France and would only defeat the Germans twice in their six meetings.
The Italians did not go to the 1938 European Championships, which were staged in Romania’s capital Bucharest. Romania had deep cultural ties with France and it was common for the children of the Romanian elite to be educated in Paris. In 1913 returning students established the first Romanian club, Stadiul Roman, modelled on Stade Français. Two years later, the Paris-educated Gregore Caracostea, who had played for Racing Club de France while a student, set up the Central Commission for Rugby Football.
A Romanian side played in the rugby tournament of the 1919 Inter-Allied Games held in Paris but lost heavily to France 48-5 and then 23-0 to the United States. In 1924, as we have seen, they joined France and the USA as the only sides competing in the 1924 Olympic rugby competition but once again found themselves out of their depth, losing 37-0 to the Americans and by an even more embarrassing 61-3 to the French. Nevertheless, the bronze medal was theirs by virtue of finishing third out of the three entrants.
This was perhaps the highlight of Romania’s international adventures in the interwar years. The Federaţia Română de Rugby was formed in 1931, but the national side’s only other successes were against lowly Czechoslovakia in 1927 and the even weaker Netherlands in 1937.
Their fortunes began to turn in the late 1930s. The game expanded beyond Bucharest in 1939 with the creation of a club in Braşov and in April 1940 the national side recorded its most significant victory when scrum-half Eugen Marculescu landed a solitary penalty to defeat Italy for the first time. Little more than six months later, Romania entered the war alongside Italy and Germany.
French manoeuvres
Despite the unsavoury nature of many of the European regimes that supported rugby in the 1930s, FIRA did more to promote the international spread of the game than the IRB. This was similar to what had happened in soccer. The English had invented association football, but it was French administrators who created FIFA and took the round-ball game to the non-English speaking world.
So it was in rugby. The French influence saw the game established in Catalonia, where it sprang to life thanks to a visiting Toulouse team in 1923. This was also the case in Czechoslovakia, thanks to the writer Ondřej Sekora taking a rugby ball and a copy of the rules of the game home with him when he returned to Brno from Paris. Former Stade Français player Jean Rey was the driving force behind the formation of the Belgian Rugby Federation in 1931. Rugby in Spain was kick-started by a visit of a French team containing the iconic fly-half Yves du Manoir.
Even those countries in which the British influence had been decisive, such as Portugal, where the Associação de Rugby de Lisboa had been founded in 1926, the Netherlands, which had established a national federation in 1932, and Sweden, where rugby began after a successful exhibition match between the crews of HMS Dorsetshire and HMS Norfolk in 1931, quickly joined FIRA.
Concern over FIRA’s growing influence may well have been a factor that caused the British to invite France back into in the Five Nations. Certainly, the rapid growth and international success of French rugby league played a major part. But the exclusion of France after 1931 had also diminished the tournament and in July 1939 the British nations extended an olive branch.
But there was a condition: internationals could only be resumed if France abandoned its club championship. Delighted to be thrown a lifeline to help them against the relentless tide of rugby league, French clubs voted to abolish the championship – but had not the slightest intention of doing so. Other than the vote, not a single step was made to disband the championship.
As it turned out, Biarritz’s extra-time victory over Perpignan in the 1939 championship final was the last time the Bouclier would be played for until 1943. The FFR suspended the competition when war broke out, although unofficial regional competitions continued despite the division of France into Nazi-Occupied and Vichy collaborationist zones. In June 1942, six months after the government decree banning rugby league, the FFR decided that the championship could restart.
Ninety-five clubs entered, 40 in the occupied zone and the remainder in Vichy France. Eventually Aviron Bayonnais and Agen reached the final, held at the Parc des Princes in Paris. It was 0-0 until three minutes from time, when former rugby league scrum-half Jean Dubalen broke down the right, slipped the ball to Louis Bisauta who fed it to Pierre Larre who touched down just inside the right corner flag: 3-0 to Aviron and the first Bouclier of the war was theirs.
Dubalen was not the only rugby league player to appear in the final. Alongside him was league international Jean Dauger and hooker René Arotça, while Agen had the veteran league internationals Maurice Brunetaud and Marius Guiral, plus hooker Jean-Londaits Béhère. Vichy’s ban on league had had the desired effect of revitalising rugby union.
Aviron returned to the final the following year with Dubalen and Dauger, who had now been given a job with the club that would keep him there for the rest of his career. Their opponents were a young Perpignan side that not only featured Jean Desclaux, who had switched to league in 1938, but four future league internationals, including the greatest of them all, the full-back Puig Aubert. The Perpignanais cut the Bayonnais to shreds, running in six tries to a solitary Dauger touchdown.
By the end of 1944, Aubert and his fellow Treizistes were back in their own game. As the Allies advanced across France, rugby league revived and was formally reconstituted in September 1944. A number of its players had been members of the Resistance. Charles Mathon and René Barnoud were active participants in the Sport-Libre movement, an underground organisation that fought against forced labour conscription and opposed the use of sport by the collaborationists.5 François Récaborde, one of the pioneers on Jean Galia’s 1934 tour to England and a founder of Pau rugby league club, was deported to Buchenwald in 1943. Galia himself used his cinema business to help Jews escape to Spain. Paul Barrière, who would become president of the French Rugby League in 1947 at just 27, played a central role in the Maquis in the Aude region in the French rugby heartland.
On the union side, Gilbert Brutus, the coach of the Perpignan side that won the championship in 1925 and then moved to Quillan to guide them to three successive finals from 1928 to 1930, was one of the first to join the Resistance in September 1940 and died at the hands of the Gestapo in June 1944. Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who played for France in 1945 and became prime minister in 1969, was awarded the Légion d’honneur for his work in the Resistance.6
Rugby united?
France was not the only country in which rugby union found itself divided during the Second World War. In South Africa, significant sections of Afrikaner society were, if not pro-Nazi, at least ambivalent as to the outcome of the war, and rugby was split in two over the question of supporting the Allied war effort. English-speaking rugby supporters wanted to organise fund-raising matches for the Allies but many Afrikaner rugby supporters objected. They began to organise matches in aid of the Reddingsdaadbond, a charity for poor white Afrikaners.7
In the Western and Eastern Provinces, rugby split into pro- and anti-war organisations. Stellenbosch University, the powerhouse of Afrikaner rugby, resigned from the Western Province Rugby Union in 1943 in protest at the decision to raise money for the Allies. A. F. Markötter, the noted Stellenbosch coach who had popularised the 3-4-1 scrum formation, resigned from the Western Province Rugby Union claiming that its support for the Allies was politicising rugby and that it was attempting to stop Stellenbosch playing the game.
In contrast to South Africa and France, war brought a sense of unity to rugby in the rest of the English-speaking rugby world. Unlike the 1914–18 war, there was no controversy over whether sport should continue in wartime. The earlier conflict had demonstrated that sport had a positive effect on civilian and military morale. Both league and union club matches had continued during the First World War, albeit in reduced circumstances. Some clubs, such as union’s London Scottish or league’s Rochdale Hornets, closed for most of the war, while Blackheath and Richmond merged for the duration. County leagues were introduced by the RFL to reduce travel by clubs but the Rugby League Challenge Cup survived intact, although the final was now played over two legs in the north, rather than at Wembley.
Within weeks of war being declared in 1939, the RFU lifted its ban on rugby league players and allowed them to play rugby union while serving in the armed forces. The Welsh Rugby Union followed the RFU’s lead but the Scots remained unmoved. SRU secretary Harry Simson told the press that ‘his Union would not remove the ban on professionals in the Services playing for or against amateur teams’.8
In December 1939 a combined England/Wales side defeated Scotland/Ireland 17-3 at Richmond in aid of the Red Cross, signalling the start of a series of services-based encounters that brought together players from both codes. Nineteen forty-two saw the beginning of regular services internationals between England, Scotland and Wales, including an 8-5 Scottish win over England at Wembley Stadium in April.
As The Times rugby correspondent noted in 1944, the England and Wales international sides ‘were ready to make use of any available rugby league talent’ and consequently numerous league players turned out for the two nations in services rugby union internationals, most notably Gus Risman, who captained the Wales team twice, Roy Francis, who, despite being Welsh, was capped for England seven times, and Alan Edwards, who won six Welsh caps. Countless others turned out for a plethora of union representative teams across the armed forces.
Many rugby league players were taken aback by their experiences in the amateur code. After one match for Wales, Gus Risman claimed £4 travel expenses but ‘my heart stopped when the officials told me that my expenses couldn’t be right. But my heart started beating again when I was handed £8!’9
This intermingling of the codes reached its height in 1943 and 1944, when rugby league sides twice defeated rugby union sides under rugby union rules. In January 1943 the Northern Command Sports Board organised a union match between a Northern Command Rugby League XV and a Northern Command Rugby Union XV at Headingley. The league side overcame an 8-3 half-time deficit to win 18-11. The second game, between fully-fledged Combined Services League and Union sides, was staged at Bradford’s Odsal Stadium in April 1944 and proved to be a much tighter affair but was won by the league side 15-10. The RFU reimposed its ban on league players in 1946.
Overall, the death toll of rugby players was much lower than in 1914–18. Fourteen England internationals lost their lives, including Prince Obolensky, who died in a flying accident, and the captain of England’s 1913 Grand Slam side Norman Wodehouse, a vice admiral in the Royal Navy whose ship was torpedoed in July 1941. Six served in the RAF, five in the army and three in the Royal Navy. Three Welsh internationals were killed alongside the eight Irishman and 15 Scots. Fifteen Oxbridge rugby blues were killed. At club level, the absence of accurate records makes comparison difficult, but some sides suffered grievously, with Old Alleynians losing 49 members and Blackheath 24.10
In rugby league, Les ‘Juicy’ Adams, a veteran of the 1932 ‘Battle of Brisbane’ Test match, was killed when the aircraft in which he was a gunner was shot down in the Far East in April 1945. Among many others, Leeds lost at least three players: John Dixon, John Roper and the prodigiously talented stand-off Oliver Morris, who had signed from Hunslet in the summer of 1939 for £1,500. There was a clause in his contract that the full fee was only payable if he survived the war, but he died of his wounds in Italy in September 1944.11
The rest of the English-speaking rugby world followed the British lead. In New Zealand, rugby of both codes continued to be played throughout the war. League players were allowed into union sides and the game’s focus shifted to services’ rugby. Although the Ranfurly Shield was suspended for the duration of the war, there were more inter-provincial matches and other first class matches played in most of the wartime seasons than had taken place during the entire First World War. In Australia, the NSW Rugby Union continued its club competition, with Manly and Eastern Suburbs each winning the first grade premiership twice.
Rugby league in Australia also continued. Huge crowds gathered for grand finals, not least because sport was seen as an important part of the bond with Britain. The popularity of wartime league led to it being accepted as an official military sport alongside rugby union, cricket and Australian Rules, a recognition denied British league until 1994. Welcoming the Normandy invasion in 1944, Harold Flegg declared: ‘I’m sure that league men from Wigan, Rochdale, Dewsbury, Halifax, Hull, Huddersfield, Barrow and the other northern English towns will fight as relentlessly and with the same skill they display in Tests.’12
Between the front line and the try line
Rugby became a prominent feature of Allied sporting life in the theatres of war around the world. As early as April 1940 a strong team representing the Australian forces played a French Army side in Beirut. In front of 7,000 spectators, the Australians defeated the French 11-5, thanks to the efforts of players such as Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, Victoria’s greatest ever rugby player who would become famous for his role in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, and Basil Travers, whose Australian birth would not prevent him from winning six England caps after the war.
The Middle East would become the most important arena for rugby, partly because of the number of Dominion troops stationed there, but also because the climate was kinder to sport. In the strategic port of Alexandria in 1942, more than 40 military teams took part in a sevens tournament. International military matches featuring stars from across the rugby-playing world were common. A match between New Zealand and ‘the Rest of Egypt’ attracted 30,000 to Alexandria’s Municipal Stadium. Five figure crowds were the norm for such ‘international’ games.13
Despite fighting on the same side, Springbok–All Black rivalry flourished and gave rise to the legend of ‘The Book’ for which the two sides would compete whenever they met. Each side accused the other of not knowing the rules of the game, giving rise to players taunting each other with the question ‘who wrote the book?’. The fact that the book of rules was written by the English RFU with no input whatsoever from South Africa or New Zealand did nothing to diminish the intensity of the rivalry.14
Each national army had its own regimental and battalion tournaments, such as the Freyberg Cup for New Zealand units fighting in Italy and named after Lieutenant General Bernard Freyberg, the commander of the New Zealand Expeditionary Forces, or the Interstate Rugby League Cup played for by Australian regiments on Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea. Wherever rugby players gathered, a game would take place.
In German prisoner-of-war camps, rugby competitions were a permanent feature of life. In Stalag IV-B in Brandenburg, an eight nations’ rugby union tournament took place featuring the seven major English-speaking nations plus an ‘Other Nationalities’ side. At Stalag XX-A in Toruń in Poland, a Springbok side featuring the great Jewish goal-kicking prop Okey Geffin defeated a New Zealand team. Both sides played in bare feet despite the freezing Polish winter. League, too, flourished, with rugby league players in Stalag 383 in Bavaria organising two England versus Australia matches and a Lancashire versus Yorkshire game in the spring of 1943 alone.15
The most famous of all the military sides was undoubtedly the 1945–46 Second New Zealand Expeditionary Force team, known at the time as the Kiwis but which came to be known as the Khaki All Blacks. Conceived by General Freyberg as a way of boosting morale and raising New Zealand’s profile at the end of the war, the side was selected from serving soldiers in Europe.
Captained and coached by scrum-half Charlie Saxton, the only All Black in the side, the team toured Britain, Ireland, France and Germany, playing a brand of fast, open rugby with the emphasis on handling rather than kicking. As a testimony to the wartime spirit of open rugby, the side included two rugby league players who later became All Blacks, forward Johnny Simpson and the superb full-back Bob Scott.
The side won its first 15 matches, including a 14-7 win over a Combined Services side, that included ten league players, and whitewashed Wales and the leading Welsh club sides. They remained unbeaten until three months into the tour, when they lost 11-6 to a determined Scotland. The New Zealanders went on to Paris, Toulouse and Bordeaux. Here, too, they attracted huge crowds, their open, exuberant style of play seemingly encapsulating the joie de vivre that came with the end of the war.
The New Zealanders also played two matches in Germany on the European leg of the tour, defeating both the Combined Services and the British Army of the Rhine. By now, however, there was no native German rugby – like culture and civilisation itself, the game had been swept away by Hitler’s Götterdämmerung. The war was finally over, but its legacy would shape the future of rugby.