Last Team Standing (30 page)

Around the world, America's ten million servicemen marked the holiday much less extravagantly. The Office of the Quartermaster General had promised every soldier, sailor, and marine “at least a pound of turkey” on Thanksgiving. Nearly two million birds were procured to keep that promise. On battleships and in submarines, on battlefields and in boot camps, America's troops—“the best fed fighters in the world,” as the War Department liked to brag—enjoyed roasted turkey with all the trimmings, including cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie (though the side dishes were often of the canned or dehydrated variety).

Even on the central Pacific island of Tarawa, which had been captured just two days earlier after four days of brutal combat and at the cost of 1,000 American lives (and more than 4,000 Japanese and Korean lives), the exhausted and bedraggled troops were fed turkey dinners, which were ferried ashore on landing boats.

“We even got ice cream,” marveled one marine.

The turkey promise was impossible to fulfill absolutely, of course. On board the U.S.S.
Wake Island,
newly commissioned and docked for supplying at Astoria, Oregon, sailors had to settle for Virginia baked ham. But, in a remarkable and commendable logistical achievement, practically every serviceman was served a special meal.

Back home, turkeys were almost impossible to find. The OPA had banned all sales of the birds in August to allow the military to stock up for Thanksgiving. The ban was lifted in late October, but by then all supplies were depleted. Turkeys, the
Philadelphia Inquirer
reported on the day before Thanksgiving, simply “weren't to be had.” Across the country homemakers descended on meat and poultry markets, vainly searching for the birds. The owner of a Philadelphia market said he had put in an order for 500 turkeys. He received just 12, which he reserved for family and friends. On the black market turkeys in the city were selling for up to 85 cents a pound, well above the OPA ceiling of 53 cents. In Pittsburgh, black market birds were fetching 78 cents a pound and the OPA was powerless to stop the sales, since the city's federal judges
had gone home early for the holiday and temporary injunctions were unobtainable.

Lacking turkey, most families substituted chicken or ham. To conserve ration coupons, the trimmings were frequently the product of Victory Gardens, assiduously preserved in Mason jars for the occasion. In that respect, it was much like the first Thanksgiving, in that much of what was consumed was produced by the people who consumed it.

Around the table, the talk inevitably turned to General George Patton. It had recently been reported that Patton had slapped three hospitalized soldiers in August, saying to one suffering from a severe case of shell shock, “You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot.” Public opinion was fiercely divided. One congressman called for Patton's dismissal, saying the “despicable incident” had “destroyed the general's usefulness as commander of the Seventh Army or any other division.” But others said Congress should “let the Army handle its own problems.” In the end, Eisenhower reprimanded Patton and ordered him to apologize.

Many Thanksgiving dinners were served later than usual in 1943, since most factories were operating at full capacity at the behest of the War Production Board. (Workers were paid time and a half.) In observance of the holiday, however, no men were drafted and those scheduled to depart for induction centers were allowed to delay their leaving one day to spend Thanksgiving with their families. There was no pro football either. The Detroit Lions, who had started the tradition of playing a home game on the holiday when they moved from Portsmouth in 1934, had suspended the practice for the duration.

Although the country was engaged in history's bloodiest war, Americans still had many reasons to give thanks in the fall of 1943. For one thing, despite persistent fear and paranoia, the war had not touched the homeland directly. American advances since the last Thanksgiving instilled confidence that the war would be won, sooner or later.

“Things have come a long way in a year,” said an editorial in the
Pittsburgh Press
on the day before the holiday.

And while it cannot be said too often that the war is far from won, the tide has turned…. Africa has been freed of Nazis, the Mediterranean is under our control, the submarine menace has been greatly diminished, the continent of Europe has been invaded, the Russians have gained their greatest victories and air raids on Germany are taking a tremendous toll on the enemy.

We can see daylight ahead.

For most of the Steagles, Thanksgiving Day was no different from any other. They put in a full day at the factories and shipyards, then reported for practice at Shibe Park at 6:00 p.m. After practice, however, Greasy Neale dispensed with his usual “skull session” and hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for the team at the Hotel Philadelphian. Afterwards, Neale and the Steagles played bridge while Genevieve and the wives listened to a star-studded holiday special on the CBS radio network featuring, among others, George Burns and Gracie Allen.

The players had much to be thankful for. The Steagles had already exceeded all expectations. If they won one of their last two games, they would clinch a winning season. If they won both, there was still an outside chance they could end up tied for first place. Not least of all, though, the players were thankful for having escaped the front lines. Tens of thousands of Americans were already dead or wounded. Four NFL veterans had been killed in the service of their country so far:

• Keith Birlem, an end for the Redskins and Cardinals in 1939, was killed attempting to land a crippled bomber returning to England after an air raid on May 7, 1943. (Birlem was a teammate of Steagles quarterback Roy Zimmerman at San Jose State.)
  
• Eddie Doyle, an end for Frankford and Pottsville in the 1920s, was killed in the invasion of North Africa, November 8, 1942.
  
• Len Supulski, an end for the Eagles in 1942, died when
  his plane crashed during a training mission outside Kearney, Nebraska, on August 31, 1943. Several Steagles had been Supulski's teammate in 1942, and his death hit them especially hard. “It was very sad because he meant a lot to the club,” said halfback Ernie Steele.
  
• Don Wemple, a Brooklyn end in 1941, was killed in the crash of an Army transport plane in India on June 23, 1943. (Wemple was a teammate of Steagles end Larry Cabrelli at Colgate.)
  

The carnage was not invisible on the home front. That fall the Office of War Information permitted for the first time the publication of photographs depicting dead U.S. troops. This was done partly to placate Americans who had grown skeptical and weary of relentlessly upbeat coverage of the war. But it was also done to combat growing apathy on the home front. After two years of war, the government believed Americans needed to be reminded of its cost. The pictures of the dead, it was hoped in a kind of perverse logic, would renew enthusiasm for the war. It would also prepare Americans for the heavy casualties sure to come. The images, however, were carefully screened. The bodies were to appear whole. There was to be no gore.

In its September 20 issue,
Life
magazine published a full-page photograph of three Americans gunned down on a beach on the Pacific island of Buna. Their bodies are sprawled in the sand, their faces not visible. Their wounds are not apparent. A half-submerged Japanese landing craft is visible in the water nearby.

“And so here it is,” reads an accompanying editorial. “This is the reality that lies behind the names that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares of busy American towns.” In the photograph, the editorial continues, “We can still sense the high optimism of men who have never known oppression—who, however scared, have never had to base their decisions upon fear. We are still aware of the relaxed self-confidence with which the leading
boy ran into the sudden burst of fire—almost like a halfback carrying the ball down a football field.”

“When photographs of dead servicemen were printed,” writes Christina S. Jarvis in
The Male Body at War,
“their bodies became privileged symbols of sacrifice from which the goals of nation and the war could be discerned.”

The photographs and their implicit messages were especially poignant to the millions of American men who could not fight. Of the 22 million men who registered for the draft between September 1940 and August 1945, five million were rejected as physically or mentally unfit. Many (if not most) of those classified 4-F felt deep guilt and even shame at having been denied the opportunity to serve and spared the horrors of war. They were also subjected to ridicule and scorn.

There were stories of men committing suicide after being classified 4-F (suicidal tendencies, however, were a disqualifying condition; the overall suicide rate in fact plummeted during the war). On college campuses, women often refused to date them since there was obviously “something wrong with them.” They were mocked. A popular song among GIs was “Four-F Charlie,” in which the protagonist is “a complete physical wreck” who is both cowardly and impotent:

Men won't sing of his wild daring

Girls won't praise his marital daring …

And his blood is thin as water

He can never be a father.

The Steagles were not immune to this kind of derision. On the contrary, as professional athletes, they were sometimes the targets of bitter vitriol. At games, fans often wondered, loudly and profanely, what the hell they were doing on a football field instead of a battlefield.

They even got hate mail, recalled end Tom Miller.

“We used to get letters from people who used to say, ‘You big husky guys are out there playin' football and my son is out there fightin' in the war!' We used to get a lot of that. I didn't feel bad about it because I'd been in the service. But I know it did bother some of the guys quite a bit.”

“It was weird,” said center Ray Graves. “It was just hard for the fans to realize they could go to a football game while we were fighting. It was rough.”

Professional athletes were also the object of special (and sometimes unfair) scrutiny by draft boards. Steagles tackle Vic Sears was called before his draft board in Eugene, Oregon, four times.

“The son of the head of the draft board was deferred,” Sears recalled. “I guess they felt that I'd fill the gap, so they kept asking me to go in.” Each time, Sears was rejected due to his stomach ulcers.

When Frank Sinkwich was honorably discharged from the Marines because of his flat feet, Senator Kenneth Spicer Wherry of Nebraska said he thought the armed forces ought to be able to “find a place” in which they could use Sinkwich.

“What's the matter with him?” the senator demanded. “Haven't we got a place for him? Can't he take the place of some man we can send across the water?”

Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight boxing champion who was a Navy commander overseeing recreation programs in the South Pacific, couldn't understand how a man deemed unfit for military service could play professional football.

“If a man is physically fit to play football,” Tunney growled, “then he is physically fit for this bigger game.”

Professional athletes had their defenders, too. In December 1943 the syndicated sports columnist Joe Williams published an interview with an unnamed doctor at a New York induction center. The doctor told Williams,

Your readers should bear in mind that a champion in civilian life might easily be a complete drawback in action. A punctured eardrum, for instance, may appear to be a trivial physical
defect, which, under ordinary circumstances, no one will question; but when the punctured eardrum is considered in terms of front line action, the medical approach must be different. If we could be certain the enemy would refrain from using poison gas, a punctured eardrum would not be looked upon as a serious defect—but how can our authorities be certain of the enemy's intentions? Subjected to a gas attack, a man with a punctured eardrum couldn't hope to survive serious and possibly fatal damage to his brain. Thus right off he would be a detriment to his outfit.

Grantland Rice also counseled his readers to go easy on 4-F athletes. He wrote,

It is only natural that a lot of non-athletes, clerks, filling station attendants, soda water jerkers, farm kids, etc., who can neither run nor jump, block or tackle … should gripe, after a fashion, because they are rated fit to be fighting men—with athletes left out, rated as unfit to fire a gun or work on a ship. But they should remember these are Army and Navy regulations through the draft. The individual has nothing to say about it.

Complicated emotions surrounded life as a 4-F athlete. While they were sometimes vilified, the public, paradoxically, consistently supported the continuation of sports. In a poll conducted by
Esquire
magazine, 80 percent of all respondents said they wanted to keep sports running during the war. When the magazine polled soldiers, the results were even more overwhelming: 96.5 percent supported sports. Servicemen were philosophical about 4-F athletes.

“One time I was having a couple drinks with a soldier,” said Vic Sears. “I said, ‘Do you wonder why I'm not in the service? Strong, healthy, plays football?' He says, ‘I know you got a helluva reason or you'd be in.'”

Although President Roosevelt never publicly proclaimed his support for professional football (as he had for major league
baseball), the sport had its defenders in the highest reaches of the government. On June 23, 1943, Senator James M. Mead of New York went on record in favor of continuing sports as “part of the American way of life and unless they affect the war effort adversely…. Both professional baseball and football furnish recreation and relaxation for thousands of war workers and servicemen and women…. From the spectator and the competitor standpoint they are an integral part of the war effort. In addition to the morale features, sports events of all kinds have stimulated the sales of war bonds and have raised funds for the Army and Navy relief societies and Red Cross.” (It should be noted that Mead held stock in the Buffalo Bisons minor league baseball team.)