Ducky and The Lip in Italy

At the end of the 1940 baseball season, all of the baseball men knew they would soon be facing the war’s demands. Shortly after the last game of the 1940 World Series, the order went out from Washington that all men ages 21-35 had to register with their local draft boards. Some men probably would not be called immediately: Joe Medwick, for instance, was married and had two children of whom he was the sole support; Pitcher Red Ruffing was missing toes.

Nevertheless, on October 29, 1940, capsules were drawn from a fishbowl to determine draft order. Those men whose numbers were picked first were about to be asked for twelve months’ service, though men over 28 could be released after 180 days of service. Hank Greenberg, 29-year-old Detroit outfielder, for instance, had one of the low—that is, sure to be called—numbers.

Now that men were called to duty in large numbers, President Roosevelt asked six organizations to band together to handle the recreation needs for the armed forces. The six—the YMCA, YWCA, National Catholic Community Service, National Jewish Welfare Board, Traveler’s Aid, and the Salvation Army—were confederated as the United Services Organization (USO) on February 4, 1941, in New York. Soon after incorporation, according to the USO, “entertainment industry professionals helped the USO to begin ‘Camp Shows’ with the entertainers waiving pay and working conditions to bring live entertainment to the troops at bases within the United States.”

This is one of the stories of one of six groups of men, all baseball men, who were willing to put themselves in the kind of danger that soldiers had to endure. These baseballers sailed on the Bering Sea, rode half-tracks across the Sahara, sat on coral in the jungles of New Guinea; they traveled into the Battle of the Bulge, climbed the mountains of Burma, and bounced through the ruts of the frozen mud of Italy.

Most of them were not scheduled to serve in the Army for many different reasons, age, for most of them, being the primary reason. They did their USO work quietly, they did it bravely, they did it unselfishly. They did not have to do it, but they did anyway.

Pirates manager Frankie Frisch, after his return from the first USO tour, a 1943 trip to the Aleutians, was called to the office of the commissioner, and the Pirates manager suggested more trips by baseball men. Frisch believed the trips were very effective in raising the morale of servicemen. Landis agreed.

So in early summer of 1944, Commissioner Landis’s office in Chicago again asked for volunteers from baseball to travel overseas after the World Series, this time under the aegis of the USO.

*****

The last USO group to leave, the Medwick group bound for Italy, finally got their alert when a sergeant came up the stairs and called the four names very early on Thanksgiving Day in 1944. The group dressed in their uniforms and excitedly finished packing their bags.

Driven to headquarters, their bags were weighed and Joe Medwick, Leo Durocher, Nick Etten and Tom Meany were shown to the bus that took the unit the seven miles to LaGuardia Airport. Once they passed through customs, they moved quickly to a final briefing room, for the lectures of water landings, the use of Mae West inflatable life vests and the use of a raft and a signal generator. A giant plane awaited them on the LaGuardia runway.

The plane often used for these sorts of trips was a Skymaster. This DC-4 passenger plane in wartime became a Douglas C-54/ R5D Skymaster just as the DC-3 became a C-47 Skytrain. The plane held space for around thirty passengers and a crew of six. With cruising speed of 239 mph at a ceiling of 20,000 feet, the big plane had a range of 3,900 miles.

Getting into the plane, Medwick’s troupe was sure to have aboard with them two hundred dozen autographed baseballs and the twenty-two minute movie of the 1944 World Series. The USO unit called “Here’s the Pitch” was airborne. Stockton’s column later said that “Flying the ocean in years to come may be a commonplace week end lark. It was a thrill to us.”

Once out over the ocean, they ate their Thanksgiving meal—baloney sandwiches—in the noisy chilly compartment of the plane. They probably landed once in Bermuda to refuel. For the most part, the plane ride was spent napping, going to the cockpit for a smoke, signing the “short snorters,” the taped-together collection of currency from countries visited, sort of autograph pads that air crews favored so much. Out over the Atlantic, the men must have realized that their uniforms that looked so good in Manhattan might not be all that comfortable, or that serviceable, or that warm. They were clearly worried, as Tom Meany wrote, “how able-bodied men such as themselves would be welcomed—or vice versa—by a bunch of guys fighting for their lives,” particularly since both Etten and Medwick were under thirty-five.

Joe told no one, though Durocher knew, about his punctured eardrum, a puncture that probably happened when he was beaned in June 1940. It was that punctured eardrum that led to his 4-F classification, lower than the 2-B he had been classified for a while, a slot for men over thirty and with two children.

Roy Stockton remembered the particular frustration of the newspapermen: “We were told we couldn’t keep diaries or any record showing places we had visited, army units or individuals. We couldn’t carry cameras. We couldn’t carry written messages.” (This prohibition, combined with sensitivity to military secrets, led to the kind of disjointed narratives that appeared in newspapers when the men returned.)

But these men were doing what they considered to be their patriotic duty and accepted the hardships as they know all the service men and women must accept their hardships.

As the plane droned through the November skies, Medwick’s thoughts might have drifted back to his family’s war map, pinned up in the home. It was a practice among many Americans to keep track of the war on newspaper maps.

In this way Medwick would know of the invasion at Salerno, with 9,000 Allied casualties, in September of 1943, and know about the fall of Naples to the Allies a month later. He would know about the successive defensive lines the Germans had set up as they retreated north: the Winter Line, The Gustav Line. He would be horrified to read about the five month stalemate developed on the beaches at Anzio in murderous trench warfare. Equally terrible was the murderous fire the British and Americans and their Allies took from the Germans who seemed to be dug in on every mountaintop and hill surrounding the many Italian valleys. By the end of 1943, the American Fifth Army in Italy had 40,000 casualties and 50,000 sick.

Yet Rome fell on June 4, 1944 and from that point on it was the landings in France that received most of the attention and most of the manpower, including most of the veteran troops in Italy.

As the veteran units were withdrawn, the British Lady Astor, stupidly even for her, called the British Eighth Army, carrying much of the burden in the Italian campaign, “D-Day Dodgers.” It was unlikely the American Fifth Army in Italy liked her label either. The fighting had been muddy and murderous, with Nazis often having the high ground. Whatever successes were gained in Italy were due largely to the individual soldier’s valor, resilience, and determination.

This determination and valor prevented the Nazis from sending units to France, and even though fighting on the Gothic line north of Florence has caused there to be 29,000 Allied causalities between September 10 and October 26 of 1944, still that terrible sacrifice went undervalued it seemed. Losses were so heavy that Churchill requested that the United States send at least two additional divisions to the Italian front, but he was turned down. The U.S. Army preferred to send new U.S. combat units to France rather than to Italy for “an increasingly bloody and stalemated campaign in a secondary theater.”

A secondary theater. Like much of Medwick’s career. Though Joe, in Ted Williams’ phrase, “owned the National League for five years,” yet he was not in the American League, the clouting league, the league of the World Series winners. Unlike his rival Joe DiMaggio, Medwick had played on but two pennant winners since 1932. Now he was a soldier in greasepaint.

Nick Etten, the American League leader in both homers and walks in 1944, was the thirty-one year old first baseman for the Yankees. Leo Durocher was the smooth-fielding shortstop for the Gas House Gang Cardinals and current Dodger manager.

At the end of a twenty-four hour flight, the group landed, probably in Naples.

Once greeted by their special services officer and off the runway, the mud on their dress shoes made Joe and the rest find out quickly about field shoes and canvas leggings, items they quickly purchased at a Post Exchange. After that shopping, their Special Services officer introduced them to their driver who showed them to their vehicle, a converted weapons carrier towing a trailer, to carry their supplied. They were reminded, yet again, about wearing their steel helmets.

Soon they learned how exhausting this trip would be and they learned that they would pretty much live in the clothes that they had on. Too, they began to learn the new slang, chiefly the phrase “sweating it out.” Italy, since D-Day called the Forgotten Front, still means “Jerry was always looking down your throat” whether it’s at Monte Cassino or Luxembourg. Another phrase of the time to describe talking to GIs was to call the chats Walkie-Talkie Fanning Bees. The servicemen had been alerted only that some players might come to Europe but as was usual the various papers— Yank, Army Talks as well as local unit papers and the daily Stars and Stripes—kept silent about exactly where the shows would be. (Twice in December in the Naples edition of Stars and Stripes there were interviews with Durocher. But the questions were very general, very vague.)

For the USO troupe traveling first around the Amalfi Coast area, the show really started as soon as the weapons carrier pulled into the unit area. Soldiers swarmed around the truck, tossing questions at each of the group. Manager Durocher was the most well-known, having been on radio shows and having some dialogue in the movie Whistling in Brooklyn.

For Medwick’s group, the rehearsals proved that the shows ought to work like this: Tom Meany served as the Master of Ceremonies, first introducing the ballplayers. Next, the World Series film of 22 minutes was shown and then each player would talk a bit and answer questions. Sometimes the audiences would be unusual for the movie. British soldiers, for example, hearing that an American movie was about to be shown, would arrive, and then quickly groan and leave, finding out the movie was not cowboys and Indians. A ten-minute quiz program served as the show’s finale. Ten or twelve GIs would be asked up to the front of the building (often a tent or barn) and Meany would ask true or false questions until there would be three winners left, all of whom would be given autographed baseballs.

That would have been the end of the show for Medwick and the others except afterwards, many soldiers, hungry for baseball news, hungry for life back home, would come up to the stage and ask for autographs and ask about their favorite players and how their favorite teams might do in 1945. They might ask about a favorite bar in Brooklyn, too. In this way, the group might do four shows a day, traveling some distances over rough terrain between shows, terrain strewn with destroyed German armor.

The shows, Tom Meany wrote later in his New York City newspaper PM, were “most unusual. Any time four guys with a twenty-five minute film can hold a soldier audience for two hours just by talking. …it was a defiance of all theatrical theories and the law of gravity. Neither Etten, Medwick nor I hold any illusion about our talent…but the stories of Medwick and Etten always were well-received and in the bull sessions afterward they were quite as well received as Leo” who often spoke for forty five minutes of the one hundred twenty.

Traveling north from Naples, they performed, for one, in the Aldorado Playhouse in Caserta, and the troupe acted in a radio show, with Medwick taking the role of an umpire. By Christmas they “entertained on a hill north of Rome and fell to, with all the others, on a real turkey dinner with all the trimmings.” The troupe also filled the Red Cross theater in Rome, the Barbarini, which no other entertaining group had been able to do.

As the troupe traveled to perform at another unit, the group certainly saw enough of blown-out buildings, wrecked railroad yards, bomb craters. They learned there were three signs you needed to pay close attention to: “Road and ditches cleared of mines.” Then “Road to ditches cleared of mines.” Lastly, “This road not swept for mines.” They learned to remember and to give passwords and they did not hesitate to show their dog tags to sentries. They learned to eat and like powdered eggs and grapefruit juice, a G.I. staple, as well as lots of Spam and canned chocolate pudding. The troupe members all learned to live by candlelight, and learned, too, not to break down at the sight of terribly wounded soldiers in hospitals but to try to cheer them up. As the draft regulations were changing as the war was winding down, Medwick learned to talk to GIs interested in the proposed work or fight policy.

The days of their shows frequently lasted from 5 AM to 11 PM. Performing more than those four shows a day and often to small groups, the majority of their shows were so close to the front lines that their audiences were limited to small groups, the officers not wanting to risk larger units within range of enemy artillery.

Once they set up for a show but the scheduled audience was mud bound and there was no show, not with a crowd of zero. At the end of the day’s work, “Here’s The Pitch” was billeted with some unit and was expected to talk to all hours there as well. They were glad to do so, seeing how happy all the GIs were to see them there. Before television, few fans had ever seen the players this close and Joe’s group had players and managers from the Giants, the Phillies, the Yankees, the Pirates and the Dodgers.

Tom Meany told the story of being asked by one soldier, “‘How’s Smitty,’” referring to a fanatical Brooklyn fan, an undertaker who closed down his shop so the could travel on the road trips. Joe has solved the question he and Durocher knew would be asked. Tom Meany wrote about it this way: “One of the questions invariably asked of Joe Medwick was why he was traded from Brooklyn to the Giants. …it was really an attempt to embarrass Leo Durocher. Joe finally came up with an answer that pleased everybody, ‘Rickey came and I went.’”

The baseball entertainers worried about how they as healthy men not in service might be treated was dispelled early in their tour. During a show at the Fifth Army Rest Center, Durocher spotted forty-one year old former Cubs outfielder Mule Haas, now a $60 a month corporal. Haas told Meany that “morale was an overworked word. Every civilian enterprise from manufacturers to night clubs professes to be maintained for the purpose of the serviceman’s morale [but] I know that the kids tonight got a kick out of the show. They were talking about it for days in advance. …’ I asked Haas how he felt about ball players who were not in the Army. ‘Being in the Army or being in baseball was a matter of luck. There was nothing more democratic than the draft. When your number was called you go.’”

While the Third Army of Patton rapidly advanced through southern Europe, the Fifth Army in Italy was still slowly slugging it out and taking a pounding. But, as Meany pointed out, war doesn’t have to be spectacular to be dangerous. So “Here’s the Pitch” was greatly appreciated simply because the soldiers in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations knew what they were doing wasn’t glamorous.

One of those soldiers, a soon-to-be-named Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Red Shea, so selected because of his capture of three German machine gun emplacements in one battle, was riding in the weapons carrier with the troupe. The hero asked Meany “if I could spare one of the autographed baseballs signed by Durocher, Etten and Medwick. When I gave him the ball, Red thanked me profusely and said, ‘This was the biggest thrill I ever had—getting a baseball and riding in the same vehicle with Durocher, Etten and Medwick.’ There was nothing for us to do but look out the window and pretend we hadn’t heard.” Meany claimed that “Shea’s reactions were like those of practically all the soldiers. …The war went out the window when they had a chance to talk about home life. It wasn’t just baseball, although that was the principal medium in our case. It was anything about home.”

One thing about home and baseball was the bright colors. Here the colors were either white or brown. Brown was the mud everyone in Italy dealt with—mud on the lines before the mess tents and barracks; mud in waves as you traveled or mud frozen into hard ruts and frozen into waves; mud caught up in the wheels of trucks and the treads of tanks; mud to have to yank each foot out of. Brown too was the color of everyone’s clothing. Medwick, like the others in “Here’s the Pitch,” wore a brown top thigh coat over a brown vest over a brown shirt and light brown tie, the whole uniform being splattered and caked over with brown mud. White in some of the hospitals; white too of the snow that winter in Italy as the troupe moved up the Italian peninsula.

In the cold there, Durocher talked to Yank Magazine about Beans Reardon, the umpire on tour in the Pacific. “’My only regret,’ he told GIs, ‘was that I can’t see how Beans Reardon, the umpire, was taking it on his trip. …No self-respecting foxhole would take him.’”

At one performance the troupe was told there would be no film because the Germans had recently captured the Special Services projector and the generator. Once they did a show for 9,500 at a Naples race track. Along the way they met Herman Besse, Phils pitcher, among the wounded in Italy and Shirley Cobb, daughter of Ty Cobb, now a nurse in Italy. They kept moving north toward the Gothic Line, a line at which the Allied offensive had stalled due to the rain and even more mud. That German defensive line proved to be a killer.

By New Year’s Day 1945, after being in Italy a month, the troupe had moved south again and from Naples, Medwick’s unit flew north to Peretola airfield in Florence and were billeted on the Arno River in the Hotel Excelsior, liberated four months earlier. “The Excelsior has been taken over by the British but it was also used by war correspondents, visiting USO Camp Shows units and ENSA troupes…the British equivalent of USO. The resulting welter of uniforms in the lobby gives it the appearance of a cafeteria on an MGM lot during the filming of a war picture—Scotsmen in plaids and kilts, British officers with swagger sticks and monocles, turbaned and bearded Sikhs from India and Americans.” The claim was that there were twenty-six nations fighting in Italy.

Nick Etten, making history he said, lobbed a baseball from the fourth balcony to a military policeman below. Medwick ate in the opulent dining room, part of the twenty-five lira a day charge. While a string ensemble played, cups of consommé were served onto fine linen, the hot broth sipped with fine silver. The main course was served on a covered dish, and after the cover was removed with flourishes by one of the many waiters, what Medwick saw on his plate was Spam.

Up in his room, Joe listened to Armed Forces Radio as well as Berlin Sally. In Florence, the unit played the Apollo and watched the Spaghetti Bowl, a football game in the Stadio Communale between teams from the 5th Army and the 12th Air Force, before 25,000 soldiers and airmen, as well as WAC cheerleaders and seven generals.

Meany reported that “We were up and down [ Route 65] every day…and in the general direction of Bologna but not quite to Bologna because there was a guy named Von Kesserling and some of his associates between us and Bologna,” as they visited soldiers in Empoli and Sesto. It was in Sesto that someone not only slept but also snored through Medwick’s talk. “Backstage, Joe complained about the visitor’s manners” till he was told that the snorer was “an Eyetie who was supposed to be working for Capt. Tracy.” Many of the troupe’s performances were, in fact, north of Florence, in places very close to the Gothic Line. They were now doing many of the shows in tents, in the cold rains of January. Even when “Here’s The Pitch” played to combat units as in Fano to the east or in Via Reggio to the west, everyone in the audience carried his rifle, since Nazi soldiers from the Russian Front were reinforcing the German side of the Gothic line. In Gagliano and Monghidora and Loiano, all north of the Hotel Excelsior, everyone was well-armed. Medwick’s USO unit went to Porretta, inside the province of Bologna, where they were told that they were “within 700 yards of the front.”

As in many other places, a question heard there was repeated: “Was it true about the cigarette shortage at home?” When the answer was yes, “the boys seemed pleased.”

At another site, too close to combat to show the movie, the troupe found

itself performing in a tent’s semi-darkness. They could see, however, that the entire audience wore their steel helmets and carried their weapons. “All we had,” said Meany, “were those funny looking USO caps.” As Durocher was telling yet another umpire Magerkurth story, he was about to imitate the umpire’s boisterous “Yer out!” but as he did, he heard “CRR-UMP” as a giant artillery shell landed, then shook the canvas tent and showered it with dirt. Durocher looked at the officer in charge, whose holster was unbuckled.

“’Go right ahead,’ said the officer. ‘You don’t have to worry about a thing until you see the boys running out on you. Then you better follow ’em.’”

“’Follow ’em hell,’ said Leo. ‘I’ll be right behind the first guy that goes out the door.’”

That show ended in near darkness with the players signing autographs, many times on baseballs, and the darkness was so profound that even faces weren’t distinct. On their way back to their sleeping quarters, Nick Etten said, “You know Leo, I’m not sure but I think the last guy I handed out a ball to was Field Marshal Kesserling.”

One of the last places they did a show was Pistoia, at an evacuation hospital twenty-two miles northwest of Florence. There the troupe could see the armed partisans, including the gun-laden women, bandoleers hung around their necks.

After forty-two days in the Mediterranean, after playing to 70,000 men, after 20,000 miles, Joe and the rest of the troupe arrived back in the United States on January 15.

When they were in Rome, Medwick and Durocher were taken in an audience to visit the Pope. The Pope blessed a rosary for Leo, which he would bring to his mother. The Pope, the story goes, asked about Joe’s pre-war occupation. Joe answered, “Your Holiness, I’m Joseph Medwick. I, too, used to be a Cardinal.”

 

Author’s note

This revised and updated version of “Ducky and the Lip” appeared in Baseball Men Visit WWII Combat Areas: Walkie-Talkie Fanning Bees, 1943-1945, self-published by Thomas Barthel in 2019.