The Major League season ended a month early, but baseball continued elsewhere into the fall. The shipyard leagues even staged a championship series that overlapped the World Series. The Harlan & Hollingsworth team from Wilmington won a one-game playoff with Chester Ship for the right to represent the Delaware River Shipbuilding League in this best-of-five series. Harlan’s star in both the playoff and championship was Joe Jackson.
The former White Sox outfielder played the entire season for Harlan’s nine in the Steel League before shifting to the Delaware River team for the championship run, no doubt at the company’s request. It was one more cause for outrage. “Just what the eligibility rules of the Shipyard League are we do not know,” sputtered Philadelphia sportswriter Edgar Wolfe, “but Chester must have committed murder if . . . the acts of Harlan in reinforcing its team with players from another league solely for the decisive championship contest can be considered innocent.”1
Jackson played center field and went three-for-three in the playoff victory. Harlan’s opponent in the championship series was Standard Shipbuilding of Staten Island, winner of the New York Shipyard League pennant. The series began September 7 at the Phillies’ ballpark. Jackson came off the bench to spark a ninth-inning rally and 3–2 victory. The series then shifted north to the Polo Grounds for Game 2. Harlan won again, 2–0, as Jackson sat out the game with a foot injury. Harlan went for the sweep September 14 before forty-five hundred fans in Philadelphia. Jackson doubled and homered twice off former Cardinal and Dodger Dan Griner in a 4–0 shutout.
“When Jackson hit his second home run, which virtually clinched the game and series for Harlan, the Wilmington fans went money mad and showered him with greenbacks,” the New York Sun reported. “For more than five minutes he was kept busy walking to the boxes and pulling in bills. After he had his fist full he walked over to a box directly behind home plate and handed them to his wife.”2 Mrs. Jackson pocketed about sixty dollars amid the raucous scene.
Military teams were still playing baseball as well. The Brooklyn Navy Yard and Camp Merritt, New Jersey, played one game September 15 at the Polo Grounds to decide the metropolitan service championship. “Since the beginning of the baseball season great rivalry has existed among the baseball teams at the various army and navy camps,” declared the New York Times. “Although there has been no league, the consensus of opinion is that Camp Merritt has the strongest team in the military end of the service and that the nine at the receiving station of the Brooklyn Navy Yard is the best of the seamen teams.”3
Former Brooklyn pitcher Jeff Pfeffer pitched a 1–0, three-hit shutout for the navy over Rube Bressler of the Cincinnati Reds for the army. “Had it not been for Casey Stengel, another well-known Brooklynite, Bressler might have been staving off defeat yet, but Casey broke up the pastime in the third inning with a timely single which sent Gene Sheridan, who, by the way, is one more former Robin, over the plate with the only run of the game,” the Times reported. “More than 7,000 persons wildly greeted the effort of Stengel, and even then acclaimed the Navy supreme.”4
Service nines had developed several regional rivalries across the country. Teams from the Fourth and Fifth Naval Districts, headquartered in Philadelphia and Norfolk, respectively, played a short series to determine which squad would meet Great Lakes later in a navy championship. The districts split a pair of games at the Athletics’ park that coincided with the start of the Major League World Series. One Fourth Naval District player prowled Shibe Park at the same moment that his brother was playing in the big contest at Comiskey Park. “‘Brick’ McInnis made the hit that won the game in the same fashion that his brother, ‘Stuffy’ McInnis, made the hit that won to-day’s game for the Boston Red Sox in Chicago.”5
The Norfolk nine ultimately went to Chicago for three scheduled games at Great Lakes. Both clubs were loaded with Major Leaguers. Great Lakes won the two opening games, September 23 and 24, before large crowds of sailors at the big lakeside station. The commandant was then forced to cancel Game 3 amid an influenza epidemic sweeping army bases and navy stations nationwide. Three thousand new cases had been reported in just twenty-four hours, and sixty-eight men had already died at Great Lakes.
Just when the fans were getting interested in Army and Navy baseball along comes that Spanish influenza thing to call off most of the schedules arranged. More than 25 camps have been put under quarantine because of the influenza outbreak and on one day last week more than 20,000 cases were reported. Up to that time there had been several hundred deaths in the camps, the Great Lakes naval training station showing the heaviest list of victims.6
The navy consequently disbanded the talented Great Lakes team, news that gave some satisfaction to a Sporting News correspondent. The influenza epidemic, he wrote, “has caused the Great Lakes naval training station all star baseball team to disband and the players, some of whom according to reports never handled anything more deadly than a baseball bat, are being assigned to real service that scatters them to various other stations. Some of them even may go to sea.”7
Far from being a poor joke in the Sporting News, the Spanish flu with its attendant pneumonia was extremely deadly. The epidemic was even worse overseas. The American Expeditionary Forces reported seventy thousand cases by the first week of October, many among troops fresh off the transports from America. “The death rate from influenza rose to 32 per cent of cases for the AEF and was as high as 80 per cent in some groups,” General Pershing wrote later.8 In the United States, the disease killed several Major and Minor Leaguers in less than a month, including civilians and servicemen alike.
In Philadelphia, current or former Phillies Sherwood Magee, Bradley Hogg, Joe Oeschger, and Dave Bancroft (plus three of their wives) fell seriously ill in early October. The four ballplayers were working in area shipyards following the early end to the baseball season. All recovered from the illness. Babe Ruth fell ill at home in Baltimore, but likewise recovered. Former St. Louis Cardinal catcher Harry Glenn died October 12 at the army aviation mechanics school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Former White Sox, Indians, and Braves outfielder LaVerne “Larry” Chappell, who had enlisted in the hospital corps with several teammates from the Salt Lake club of the Pacific Coast League, died November 8 at Letterman Army Hospital in San Francisco.9
The epidemic also killed several Minor Leaguers. John W. Inglis, a New York State League catcher and outfielder, succumbed October 7 at the navy’s Pelham Bay training station. Pitcher Dave Roth, a veteran of the International and three other leagues who had gone undefeated over the summer for Sparrows Point in the Steel League, died October 11 in Baltimore. Pitcher Harry Acton, another former New York State player, died October 12 at Camp Sherman. All these men earned gold stars on baseball’s figurative service flag.
The flu epidemic only compounded the dangers that soldiers and sailors faced during the war. Baseball’s first rank of fighters had now worn khaki for nearly eighteen months. Yankees co-owner T. L. Huston, the earliest of them all, had been in France with the Sixteenth Engineers (Railway) for more than a year. The regiment was a support unit, but saw plenty of action.
“The latter part of March we left the middle east part of France for the British front and stayed there about two months,” Huston wrote in a censored letter to Tom Rice in late September. “We saw all the spectacular part of the big drive, especially the push in Flanders, where the Hun was trying to get a hold of the big coal fields of France, near ––. Had they done so this war might have been different. While we were not right in the front line trenches, we were building light railways in the rear, and were subject to shell fire and many airplane raids.”
Huston no longer commanded a company, having been promoted twice, most recently to lieutenant colonel, “but half of the men in the regiment still call me captain.” His old outfit, Company A, was scattered across southern France, while Huston had taken charge of building a massive hospital at Mesves, “possibly the largest one in the world. Our regiment has just received orders to prepare for service with the [American] First Army, which very likely means we will soon be on the go back to the front, at the prospect of which we are all delighted, because when you get a taste of the excitement at the front it has a fascination for you, in spite of war’s horrors.”10
Hank Gowdy and the Forty-Second Rainbow Division had been in France almost as long as Huston’s engineers. The catcher’s 166th Regiment had seen action at Luneville, Baccarat, Esperance-Soulain, Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, St. Mihiel, Essey, and Pannes, and soon would be engaged in the great Meuse-Argonne offensive. “Lank Hank” had penned a few lines about the war in July to former big-league pitcher Ed Reulbach. “We have been kept busy and have been at the front now just about four months,” Gowdy wrote. “Just returned from gas school. Am acting as regular gas non-commissioned officer and it’s very interesting. A Boche plane was brought down here yesterday. It was on fire and two Germans just about burned up. One of them jumped out.” Gowdy asked Reulbach to visit his family if he ever got to Columbus. “I surely did miss the Florida trip this spring. About the time the boys were going South we were getting a little polite hell.”11
Stars and Stripes had published a breezy interview with the army’s best-known color sergeant later in the summer. “I don’t mind admitting I’ll be ready to change the gas mask for the catcher’s mask and to take my chance against Walter Johnson’s fast one rather than one of the fast ones from Fritz,” Gowdy said. “At that, Fritz hasn’t got much more speed than Walter has and no better control. But he’s noisier and meaner, and I guess we’ll have to drive him from the box, or help in doing it.” “Lank Hank looks just as he did in the old days,” the army paper added. “His uniform isn’t the same color or shape and neither is the mask he wears, but the change hasn’t affected that world-embracing grin nor the cheery call along the road.”12
Gowdy also ran into Johnny Evers during the summer. Evers was overseas working for the Knights of Columbus. The Ohioan likely wasn’t aware of the compliment the Trojan had paid him in the spring, shortly before his retirement from baseball. “When the train carrying the Boston Red Sox east stopped at Columbus, O, the home of ‘Hank’ Gowdy, . . . the players, headed by Johnny Evers, Gowdy’s old teammate, stood up and gave the world’s series hero a silent toast.”13 Now the former Braves teammates were reunited in a Paris café.
“When I met Gowdy he just had come out of Chateau Thierry,” said Evers. “He had been sent along with the rest of his outfit to Paris to recover from the strain.”
“What, Johnny Evers!” was Hank’s greeting to me. “You here! You darned fool! Go back!”
“Yep,” says Johnny, “Hank advised me to get right out of there and go home.”
“Yet three weeks later,” said Evers, “I got a letter from Hank in which he told me about being right in the thick of the fighting and the whole tone of the letter showed how he enjoyed it. The strain of battle can’t long affect the courage of a fellow as nervy as Gowdy.”14
But soldiers experience combat differently, and few were as seemingly unchanged as the Boston catcher. Lt. Harry McCormick had also fought with the Rainbow Division in the spring and summer, but had come away far more emotionally damaged than Gowdy. Sportswriters were surprised to see the former Giant back in New York in August, when he took in a Yankees game at the Polo Grounds. “Two weeks ago Monday Lieutenant McCormick was in action ‘somewhere in France’ in a town mentioned in the big headlines every day,” a Philadelphia newspaper reported. “He is here under orders, the nature of which is secret, but he hopes and expects to go back to the front as soon as his duty on this side of the ocean is finished.”15 “A Hun shell fell close enough to ‘Moose’ to muss him up a little,” Dan Daniel added in his New York Sun column. “Lieut. McCormick just radiated optimism and enthusiasm. He has been assigned to duty on this side for a while.”16
McCormick told the scribes little about the war except that soldiers were unhappy with Major League Baseball. “The talk of the soldiers is that the ball players should have volunteered in a body and made up one big organization and gone into the country’s service to fight right at the start,” the lieutenant said. McCormick pointed out that Stars and Stripes had dropped its sports page for the duration. “The soldiers like to play ball. They are interested in baseball, but it’s in their own organization. You can’t get enough baseballs to go around over there. Governor Tener sent me two every week, and they were worth their weight in gold. The soldiers get plenty of chance to play, but they want to play it themselves. They don’t take any interest in men playing it here any more.”17
Writers were vague about what McCormick was doing in the United States. Some said he was on leave and intended to rejoin his unit. Others mentioned his so-called secret orders. Fred Lieb came closer to the truth than many. “A shell exploded near him and impaired his sight. He was sent home and arrived in New York last week. He also has suffered from shock,” the sportswriter wrote in the Sun. “McCormick wears a chevron on his sleeve, indicating that he was wounded, but looks tanned, hearty and hard as nails. For the present he will be on duty on this side of the water.” In fact McCormick was suffering from shell shock, what is known today as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He never returned to France, to combat, or to the infantry. The army promoted him to captain and quietly reassigned him to the supply department at Camp Kearny, California, where he assembled a good baseball team. While the Rainbow Division fought on, McCormick largely dropped from public view. “His New York friends were of the opinion that McCormick was still in France,” Bill Macbeth wrote shortly before the war’s end.18
Six months after the armistice, Hugh Fullerton chatted with Hank Gowdy about serving in France. Their talk turned to what the sportswriter (but not Gowdy) termed “yellowness.” The catcher mentioned a ballplayer whom he either didn’t identify or whose name Fullerton purposely withheld, although clearly it was McCormick.
He was one of the greatest pinch-hitters that ever stepped to a plate. He kept himself in perfect physical condition, went to bed by the clock, took his exercise the same way, ate regularly and carefully and as a result he had no nerves. He could walk to the plate in the tightest game in the world and seem as cool as if he was batting fungoes and his hitting was wonderful, especially in the tight places. We all admired his nerve and his coolness. He was one of the first to get into the war and that proved his courage.
But almost as soon as our troops got into action he blew all to pieces, with the thing they call shell shock. How do you account for that?19
Neither man could account for it in 1919, but our understanding of PTSD has greatly expanded during the wars and decades since. During World War II, McCormick deflected a question about his combat service with a quip: “Just say that I was the bravest guy in the whole Army when I had some of my own men along with me—and the biggest coward in the world when I was out in No Man’s Land alone.”20
Baseball’s greatest combat hero during the war was Pvt. Hugh S. “Hughie” Miller, a former first baseman whose name was familiar only to the most diehard fans. He had appeared in one game for the Philadelphia Phillies as a pinch-runner in 1911. Afterward, Miller had bounced around the Minors until signing with the new Federal League club in his hometown of St. Louis. He played for the Terriers throughout 1914 and in seven games during 1915. Sportswriter J. B. Sheridan wrote that Miller was “a very quiet player. Indeed, it was held against him that he always kept his head down, never said a word, and while he played good ball, he also played ‘dead’ ball. His friends are wont to hold that Miller would have been a very successful player had he shown any ‘life.’”21
Miller began to show that life by enlisting in the Marines two months after America entered the war in 1917. A year later he was at Chateau-Thierry, one of nearly eight thousand marines attached to the army’s Second Division, fighting to stop a dangerous German push toward Paris. Suffering from a high fever, Miller sneaked out of a hospital June 6 to rejoin his company at a place called Belleau Wood. The battle there soon entered Marine Corps lore. “The fighting during most of this period was intense,” Pershing wrote. “The German lines were favorably located on commanding ground and were made more formidable by the extensive use of machine guns, especially in Belleau Wood. The success of this division against an enemy determined to crush it was obtained with but little assistance from the tired French divisions on its flanks.”22
“They thought the Germans were going to Paris sure, but were willing to let the marines block ’em off the home plate if they could,” Miller wrote home to a friend. “Did they? Well, about 5,000 leathernecks held up 50,000 Boches and made them face toward Germany in no time.”23 His actions earned Miller the Distinguished Service Cross.
His citation read, “Hugh S. Miller, private, Company K, 6th Regiment, United States Marine Corps. In the Bois de Belleau, France, on June 6, 1918, he captured two of the enemy single-handed. Although ordered to the rear twice because of illness, he returned to his command voluntarily and continued to fight with it vigorously throughout the advance.”24 General Pershing personally pinned the medal on Miller’s chest. “Hail Hugh Miller, Hero with Marines,” Sporting News trumpeted.25
Sports pages across America heaped headlines and praise on the warrior they had barely noted as a ballplayer. Miller wouldn’t have known much about his new fame. After recovering from his illness, he rejoined his company and was wounded in action July 18: “I was hit by a machine gun bullet, which entered my shoulder, and was laid up in the base hospital almost a month.” He recovered and again returned to his company. He then received a second, far more serious wound September 12. “A Boche airplane which was flying high, almost out of sight to the naked eye, dropped a bomb down on us and it exploded near to where I was,” Miller wrote. “Part of the steel struck me in the leg below the hip and tore the flesh away and broke the bone.”26 The explosion felled several other marines, including Miller’s officer.
The severe injury kept Miller in a military hospital until well past the armistice. Surgeons saved his leg, but he had limited mobility the rest of his life. With the Distinguished Service Cross (later changed to a Navy Cross, an equivalent decoration for marines), a medal from the French, and a citation for gallantry in action, Hughie Miller “after all is said and done is about the greatest living hero in the war that baseball has produced.”
Brooklyn pitcher Leon Cadore also fought in France. He was a first lieutenant, one of the white officers commanding the African American 369th Infantry Regiment. Nicknamed the Harlem Rattlers or Hellfighters, the outfit earned a fine combat reputation fighting beside French troops, and they “spent more time on the front lines than any other AEF unit.”27 “On occasions too numerous to count we were in the thick of the fighting and the noble work done by these Negro troops was wonderful,” Cadore later wrote. “Every man in my regiment fought with the courage of a lion.”28
“Several times I thought it was all over with me” the pitcher once admitted to a sportswriter. “One day, while resting in a trench, a hand grenade dropped at my feet. But luckily it failed to explode.”29 Cadore led nighttime sorties out through the wire. “Oh, a couple of us went out in No Man’s Land one night and bagged a few prisoners that gave us a little valuable information,” he recalled of one raid. “None of us were wounded or killed. It wasn’t much, you know.” (“Cutting through the barbed wire an’ squirmin’ right into the German trenches an’ bringing back a squad of Heinies—wasn’t anythin’!” one of his men added.)30
A few soldiers in Cadore’s outfit had played professional ball before the war with independent African American teams. “Needless to say when we were in the thick of the fighting in the Vosges and the Champaign we got mighty little time for baseball,” Cadore said. “We had to play it with hand grenades.”31
Dozens of other big-leaguers fought in France as well. Grover Alexander of the Cubs and several other big-league ballplayers in the 342nd Field Artillery all saw combat with their batteries. Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Elmer Ponder flew as an Air Service pilot and became an ace shortly before the armistice. Outfielder “Leaping Mike” Menosky of Washington, pitcher Hal Carlson of Pittsburgh, and pitchers Sherrod “Sherry” Smith and Johnny Miljus of Brooklyn all fought in France. Cleveland Indians outfielders Joe Harris and Elmer Smith and pitcher Ed Klepfer also saw combat; Harris was nearly killed when caught between American and German shellfire. When Klepfer earned a commission in France, Harris plaintively asked, “Can you imagine me having to salute Big Ed?”32
Even Frank “Brownie” Burke, a diminutive vaudeville performer and former mascot for the Cincinnati Reds, served in the AEF. Despite standing just four feet six inches tall, far below regulation height, Burke talked his way into uniform to become the “smallest man in the armies of the United States.”33 He was a corporal, a clerk attached to the headquarters of the Ninetieth Division, which went into action in the St. Mihiel sector.
Former sportswriters saw plenty of action, too. Among the youngest was Lt. James Saunders O’Neale, twenty-six, formerly of the New York Tribune. He had played football and captained the baseball team at Columbia University and was a nephew of U.S. Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo. O’Neale was wounded in action August 25 while fighting with the 305th Infantry Regiment, Seventy-Seventh Division. He sent a cheerful letter from a base hospital, assuring his wife that he wasn’t seriously hurt. “He wrote that the 305th went ‘over the top’ at 4:30 a.m., the morning of the 25th, and that he was crawling toward the German lines when a bullet struck him in the lower left side. He added that he lay for thirty hours in ‘No Man’s Land’ before he was rescued.”34
New York newspapers reported O’Neale’s death a month later. After the armistice, a captain from the same regiment told the Brooklyn Eagle in Paris that only 35 of 250 men had returned safely from the August attack. “Poor Jimmie O’Neale unexpectedly died,” he said. “He was on the road to recovery when complications set in. Isn’t it too bad.”35
Even civilian Johnny Evers came under fire in France while in uniform for the Knights of Columbus. The “Crab” had gone over to teach and talk about baseball with doughboys behind the front at American camps and bases. Later he instructed French poilus in the national pastime as well. One day Evers visited Lt. Joe Jenkins, a White Sox catcher in 1917, in a line of trenches recently captured from the Germans outside Verdun. A large German shell exploded about 150 yards away, sending a young soldier leaping like a rabbit for the safety of a dugout. “I followed just like that rabbit’s brother,” Evers recalled. “I was picking myself up from the bottom of the dugout when Jenkins stuck his head in the doorway and laughed, ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! Johnny! What’re you afraid of! Don’t you know that shell is gone! You never see the one that hits you!’”36
Once he returned home, Evers spoke movingly of meeting an army chaplain who had found a soiled baseball in a dead doughboy’s overcoat pocket while searching him for personal effects. “I’d like to have that ball,” Evers said. “Not for a million dollars,” the chaplain replied. “I’m too big a fan, and this is too precious to me. It will be more precious to others. If I can find them when we get back that boy’s baseball belongs to them. If not, then I’ll keep it as one of the biggest prizes of my life.”37
American troops flooded into France at a frantic pace. Troop transports unloaded masses of soldiers onto French docks and immediately reversed course and steamed back to the United States to embark more. By September 1918 some 1.7 million doughboys formed the AEF. There were nearly 2 million by the armistice two months later. Several of the biggest names from the Major Leagues made it “over there” near the end of the fighting, arriving with a quickness that would have amazed ordinary officers and doughboys.
With ten days to go in the regular season, Cardinals president Branch Rickey and Reds manager Christy Mathewson received commissions in the army’s Chemical Warfare Service, also commonly called the Gas and Flame Division. Boston Braves president Percy Haughton was already a major in the same branch. Rickey became a major and Mathewson a captain. Tigers slugger Ty Cobb also received a captaincy once the regular season ended on Labor Day. All of these men had families and likely could have avoided military service had they wanted.
“The men were not commissioned because they were ballplayers, but because they were healthy, live specimens of American manhood and the type of leaders we need in the service,” Maj. Gen. William Sibert, chief of the gas service, assured the newspapers. “They were not selected because of any knowledge of chemistry, but will be used solely as leaders with gas troops or with organizations having gas administering units.”38 Louis Lee Arms explained their duties:
All of these men will go into the lines to fight, for there is no hint of ‘swivel chair’ luxury in the offensive and defensive branches of this service, and these are the ends with which the non-chemists, such as Cobb, Mathewson, et al., will be identified. They will go to school in France, and school will be conducted in the shadows of the trenches, where big guns constantly roar. Completing their courses they will become staff officers, and their actual work of fending off gas attacks and planning chemical onslaughts will begin.39
Arms’s account was correct. All but one of baseball’s Gas and Flame officers arrived for duty in France before the armistice, earlier than others who had enlisted or were drafted at the same time. The exception was St. Louis Browns first baseman George Sisler, who had a rocky transition from baseball into the armed forces. Following the season, numerous sports pages reported that Sisler, a University of Michigan engineering graduate, had turned down Rickey’s offer of an immediate lieutenant’s commission to work instead in either Bethlehem’s Lebanon plant or an unnamed shipyard.
“The reason ascribed by St. Louis correspondents to Sisler’s refusal of a commission sounds unbelievable,” Arms wrote. “It is that he balked when informed that he would have to withstand the cost of his uniform, the same as all army officers.”40 Louis A. Dougher defended the ballplayer in the Washington Times, insisting that Sisler had been “placed in a wrong light by some unknown masquerading under his name” in the shipyard. “He denied ever playing with a shipyard team and rightly scorned to reply to the second rumor [about the uniform]. . . . It’s really too bad!”41
But the reports held an atom of truth. Sisler had hesitated accepting the offer from Rickey, his friend and mentor. The opportunity passed before he made up his mind. Sisler then turned down an offer to work and play Steel League ball in Lebanon and enlisted on his own in the chemical service. He earned a second lieutenant’s bar after training at Camp Humphries, Virginia, and was designated for overseas service. The war ended before he could sail for France. “And now that I look back upon my experience,” Sisler wrote the next spring, “I regret that I failed to act a little quicker, before luck broke against me.”42
Christy Mathewson, in contrast, reached France the last week of September. He was soon hospitalized with influenza. To a Brooklyn Eagle writer who slipped in to see him, the stricken Reds manager looked like “a big boy in bed for punishment. . . . I cannot tell you of his work, or anything like that, but he seems on edge to get to it again. He is a hero among the sick and wounded officers here, and for that matter, the boys are pretty much excited about having him around.”43
Captains Mathewson and Cobb were later involved in a deadly training accident near AEF Headquarters at Chaumont. Soldiers marched into a sealed chamber, where they were supposed to don their gas masks upon seeing a hand signal. Unbelievably, the exercise involved real poison gas. Most of the men missed the vital signal, including Cobb and Mathewson. In his 1961 autobiography, Cobb described a frantic struggle to pull on their masks and scramble to safety. Both ballplayers inhaled gas, and eight men died.
“Ty, when we were in there, I got a good dose of that stuff,” Mathewson wheezed. “I feel terrible.” Cobb suffered from a hacking cough and a colorless discharge from his chest for weeks afterward, but suffered no lasting damage. Mathewson’s lungs were permanently weakened, a fact not generally known during the war. The gas exposure likely contributed to his early death from tuberculosis in 1925. “I saw Christy Mathewson doomed to die,” Cobb remembered.44
Having repulsed the dangerous German offensives during the spring, the Allies were now poised to counterattack and pierce the enemy’s weakened defenses. The push began the day after the World Series with an attack by Pershing’s First Army on the German salient at St. Mihiel, France. Hank Gowdy’s Forty-Second Rainbow Division was one of six Yank divisions in the battle, which ended in victory September 16. First Army then shifted fifty miles to the northwest for a larger offensive, the Meuse-Argonne, named for a river on the right and a forest on the left of the Americans’ line. General Pershing vividly recalled the pivotal moment in his memoirs:
The Meuse-Argonne offensive opened on the morning of September 26th. To call it a battle may be a misnomer, yet it was a battle, the greatest, most prolonged in American history. Through forty-seven days we were engaged in a persistent struggle with the enemy to smash through his defenses. The attack started on a front of twenty-four miles, which gradually extended until the enemy was being assailed from the Argonne Forest to the Moselle River, a distance of about ninety miles.45
Allied divisions also launched a massive offensive, sometimes called the Fifth Battle of Ypres, two days after the Yanks. The Germans slowly began to give way. “The first four days of October saw the Allied armies advancing on all sectors of the Western Front.”46 Lieutenant Colonel Huston and his Sixteenth Engineers supported the American push.
“In October we were ordered to the American First Army and were a short time on the light railways in the general neighborhood of Varenness and Montfaucon,” Huston wrote. “During the battle of the Meuse the regiment reconstructed the standard gauge line down the Meuse from Verdun to Sedan as far north as Stenay. It was still engaged in this work when the armistice was signed. The men were under shellfire by day and were bombed and made the subject of machine gun fire from airplanes constantly during the nights. Again low visibility reduced the efficiency of the Hun planes, but they appeared to have pretty well located us when the armistice occurred.”47
Gabby Street was also in the big push. Walter Johnson’s old catcher had seen his first action with the First Gas Regiment in the spring near Amiens and Luneville. By September he was near St. Mihiel. At zero hour, 5:30 on the morning of the twenty-sixth, he and his men were at the base of Hill 267, just outside the Argonne. Street blew a blast on his whistle and shouted, “C’mon, men! Let ’er go!”
Adverse winds prevented the gas barrage, but Sergt. Street and his men laid down a smoke screen for the 138th (St. Louis) Infantry of the 35th Division, and a few moments after 5 a.m., the gallant 138th plunged into the Battle of the Argonne. On and on, ahead of the artillery calculations at times, and without artillery support, they moved forward, Street and his men with them.48
The regiment fought through the day and those that followed. October 2, Street and his men dragged a gun into a shell hole. A German pilot strafed them with a machine gun, wounding the old catcher. “He lay on the field fourteen hours before the stretcher-bearers reached him, and while helpless the enemy put over a gas attack, the effects of which are discernible on his neck and chin, which he no longer has to shave.”49
Sergeant Street passed through an evacuation hospital and two base hospitals before the armistice was signed. With his wounds and gassing, Street had legitimately earned the nickname that St. Louis fans would use for him when he managed the Cardinals from 1929 through 1933: “Old Sarge.”
Captain Eddie Grant was in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, too. His Seventy-Seventh Division had taken over a quiet sector in Lorraine from Hank Gowdy’s Forty-Second Division in mid-July, the first step toward serious action. “I look forward to staying here to the end,” Grant wrote in his diary July 30. “All I hope is that I am lucky enough to do that.”50 The New Yorkers moved in August into a position along the Vesle River near Reims, where they experienced their first heavy shellfire. In September the division advanced to the Aisne River as “a feeling of confidence swept through its ranks; the knowledge of might and will to exercise it properly had sprung into being.”51
In early October Grant was fighting in the Argonne Forest. On the third, the Seventy-seventh division was furiously trying to reach a small mixed force commanded by Maj. Charles S. Whittlesey, Grant’s classmate and friend at Plattsburg and Harvard Law School. Whittlesey and his men were surrounded by the Germans; Americans would soon know them as the Lost Battalion. “The history of the next three days covers one of the most heroic periods in the story of the 77th Division. There was no such thing as rest or relief, no concern for food and water, no regard on the part of anyone for the wet, the cold, and the exhaustions that all were suffering from. . . . The heart of King Richard had been thrown far into the enemy lines and way must be won to it.”52
Captain Grant and Company H of the 307th Infantry Regiment fought to reach Whittlesey on the morning of October 5. “‘Just put your head down and batter your way through’ was about the only order that could be followed,” the divisional history states.53 Utterly exhausted, Grant could barely lift a tin cup of coffee to his lips. Sportswriter Damon Runyon, then a correspondent with the First Army, described the scene:
Finally with a terrific effort, he gulped down the coffee, when the command came to move.
He stepped off at the head of his company as briskly as ever. On the way through the forest, fighting at every step, Grant came upon stretcher bearers carrying back the major commanding the battalion, who had been wounded. The major called to Grant:
“Take command of the battalion!”
Eddie Grant was then one of the few officers left. The major had hardly spoken when a shell came through the trees, dropping two lieutenants in Grant’s company. Eddie shouted:
“Everybody down,” to his men, without hunting cover for himself. He called for more stretcher bearers for the two lieutenants. He was calling and waving his hands when a shell struck him. It was a direct hit.
Officers and men say Eddie’s conduct during the fight was marvelous. He never slept while the drive for Whittlesey’s position was on.54
In a Stars and Stripes article that ran without a byline, Sgt. Alexander Woollcott offered a slightly different version. Woollcott put the captain’s death late in the afternoon and added that men in Grant’s company had tried to send him back to an aid station to rest an hour earlier.
But he had paid no heed to them.
Now, with the whole battalion under his command, he was moving forward when a big shell exploded, killing several men in the company just ahead and badly wounding his own adjutant.
“Flop, everybody!” the captain called out to the men of Company H, but because his lieutenant had been hurt, he himself remained standing so that he could shout down the forest path. “Stretcher, stretcher, stretcher!” That was the last word he said, for there came a second shell and a piece of it tore its way into his side and killed him instantly.55
A sergeant crawled to the captain’s body but couldn’t remove it from the field under the heavy fire. He and three other soldiers later crept out and retrieved the corpse under the cover of darkness.
“We buried him in a place where several of his fellow officers lie buried, which had been prepared by the Germans in the Argonne Forest as a small cemetery for their dead,” an army chaplain wrote to Grant’s old manager, John McGraw. “Captain Grant was the most popular man in the 307th Infantry, well beloved by his men, who would follow him wherever he led the way. He had no fear of death, going where duty and honor called him. Now he lies near the spot where he poured out his life’s blood that liberty and justice may prevail.”56
Whittlesey and his battalion held out until relief broke through October 8. “I can just see and hear that boy when he heard that my battalion was trapped in the woods, saying, ‘Well, if there is any chance to get my old friend “Whit” out of that hole, I want to be the man to do it,’” Whittlesey said later of Grant. “When that shell burst and killed that boy, America lost one of the finest types of manhood I have ever known.”57 “His is the first gold star on baseball’s service flag,” a newspaper wrote of the former Giant. “He died for his country and for the world. No greater epitaph awaits any man.”58 Grant’s body was later reinterred in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery under a soldier’s simple white cross.
It was an especially deadly week for the American army in France and for the ballplayers serving in it. German-born Sgt. Robert Gustave Troy died two days after Grant, on October 7, of wounds received in action with the 319th Infantry Regiment, Eightieth Division. “Bun” Troy had pitched in one game for the Tigers in 1912, his only game in the Majors, which he lost to Washington’s Walter Johnson. Troy’s body was returned to the United States in 1921 for burial with full military honors in his hometown of McDonald, Pennsylvania.
Five days after Troy, army pilot Lt. Alexander Thomson Burr died in a training accident in southwestern France. The aviator was a former Williams College student who was “rated high as a pitcher but who was snatched up by the big leagues before he could represent the Purple on the diamond.”59 In 1914 Tom Burr had played two innings in center field for the Yankees without a plate appearance or the chance to make a play in the field. His plane collided October 12 with another during gunnery training and crashed in flames into Lac de Cazaux. The army recovered Burr’s body from the lake twelve days later, but the other pilot was never found.
Reports on the deaths from combat and disease of numerous Minor Leaguers appeared in Sporting News and local newspapers. No comprehensive list was kept, and many of Organized Baseball’s casualties went unnoticed except by their families. An exception was the battlefield deaths of two ballplayers mourned in their hometown of Lockport, New York, and still occasionally remembered today.
Lifelong friends Cpl. Leo Dolan and Sgt. Matt Lanighan were members of Company I, 309th Infantry Regiment, Seventy-Eighth Infantry Division. “Dolan and Lanighan are well known athletes. They formed a battery for the Fibre Industrials. Both left here in September 1917. They received their training at Camp Dix, New Jersey, before embarking overseas.”60 Lanighan, a catcher, had never advanced beyond industrial and semipro leagues, but Dolan had pitched for Columbus, Georgia, in the South Atlantic League in 1917. In the army, the pair played together on their regimental team at Camp Dix. “Dolan was a splendid type of young man, tall and powerful. His partner, Lanighan, was also of imposing physique,” their local newspaper recalled. “Their friends have no doubt that they distinguished themselves in action and fought with the same team work and determination that gave them fame on the baseball field.”61
The 309th fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Combat on October 16 was fierce. “Our company and in fact our whole division got shot up quite bad and lots of the boys are among the missing,” a wounded sergeant wrote home to Lockport. Dolan was mortally wounded in the stomach, and Lanighan killed outright. “It was hard when you looked around and saw your old friends lying all over the ground and among them were Leo Dolan and Matt Lanighan from my home town,” the sergeant wrote. “The rest of the boys are still alive and anxious to go back and get revenge.”62
“The two boys were inseparable pals,” the local newspaper recalled after the armistice. “They carried the companionship of the ball field into their social lives and were always together. In the army they were allotted places in ranks side by side and thus they went into the battles of France.”63
“I buried a private, Peter Dolan of Lockport, NY, in high honors and helped to lower him into the grave,” a Jewish army chaplain wrote to friends in Niagara Falls, not far from the doughboy’s hometown. “If any of my friends get to Lockport [it] would be doing me a favor to tell his people or the Knights of Columbus that there was a K of C card in his pocket. He died on the eve of victory.”64
Pvt. Thomas A. Quinlan, a former Major and Minor League outfielder, was at the front, too. A replacement in Company K, Twenty-Eighth Infantry Regiment, First Infantry Division, he had been overseas for less than two months.
“Finners” Quinlan was a good ballplayer. He had played eight seasons in the lower circuits, paying his dues for fifty-five games with the Cardinals and White Sox in 1913 and 1915, respectively. Quinlan nearly captured the Pacific Coast League batting title while with Salt Lake City in 1916. The Bees then traded him to Columbus in the American Association in spring 1918, in exchange for Larry Chappell. Quinlan didn’t report to Columbus, however. One article said he didn’t want to play ball anymore, and another said that he was simply awaiting his draft call. Instead, he enlisted that July. As night fell in the Argonne on November 9, Quinlan couldn’t have been aware of Chappell’s death a day earlier in San Francisco. It was only two days until the armistice, although the troops didn’t know it for sure.
As fighting continued, a high-explosive German artillery shell detonated near the southpaw outfielder. “I lasted only one inning in the big game,” Quinlan said ruefully later.65 “The shell that ‘got’ Quinlan not only tore off his throwing arm, but it put out his right eye and inflicted minor wounds on the head and face,” a wire service reported.66 He passed through casualty stations and field hospitals until he reached an American Red Cross military hospital in Paris. St. Louis Cardinals manager Jack Hendricks, now a K of C secretary, visited him there. “And there are a lot more ball players, many of them well known in the minors, who more than did their bit,” Hendricks said.67
“There isn’t much to tell about my being wounded,” Quinlan said weeks later. “A German shell just dropped near me, and you can see what it did. The doctors and nurses are taking good care of me, and the Red Cross is keeping me supplied with everything I want. So they needn’t worry about me at home.” Quinlan offered no complaints and said he would get along all right with a glass eye and a prosthetic arm. Another wounded doughboy said of the disabled ballplayer, “That Quinlan is game.”68
Despite thousands of dead and wounded, the U.S. Army pushed ahead in its great offensive for forty-seven days. In the end, the doughboys and the ballplayers prevailed.
“The battle of the Meuse-Argonne was not the sole reason the Allies won the war, but it was certainly the deciding factor,” states historian Mitchell Yockelson. “Pershing’s forces broke the back of the mighty German Army in the most heavily defended section of the western front.”69