Jun. 6—It may have been 80 years ago, but Alex Vasselo can distinctly recall the news broadcasts from June 6, 1944. As an 11-year-old in McKees Rocks, he listened to them all day.
"I still remember how they explained the actual leaving from England, with all the ships and everything. And how they landed on Omaha Beach," Vasselo said of D-Day.
Vasselo is the grandfather of former Pittsburgh Penguins player Ryan Malone. Last month, the 91-year-old Korean War veteran dropped the opening puck at a charity hockey game organized by the Malone Family Foundation to raise funds and awareness about the need to promote mental health and wellness, particularly for military vets and first responders.
------
Related:
—Dwindling number of D-Day veterans mark anniversary with plea to recall WWII lessons in today's wars
—Photo gallery: Here are some historical D-Day images
—Remembering D-Day: Key facts and figures about the invasion that changed the course of World War II
—Hour by hour: A brief timeline of the Allies' June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion of occupied France
—Greg Fulton: Recognizing one last hero from D-Day
------
The night before the event, Vasselo discussed his own service overseas as a member of the Second Infantry in Korea. After returning to Pittsburgh from the 38th parallel, through bowling and golf leagues around the city, Vasselo got to be friends with some of those World War II veterans who landed in France 80 years ago on this day.
"They told me it was brutal. A lot of their buddies drowned just coming through the water," Vasselo said.
A day later, 3,700 miles away in Pittsburgh on June 7, 1944, the Pirates beat the Cincinnati Reds, 4-2.
As nearly 160,000 Allied troops were advancing into occupied France as part of the most important military operation of the 20th century, a crowd of 17,161 gathered at Forbes Field to watch baseball.
Rip Sewell won his eighth game, and Vince DiMaggio had a pair of RBIs.
Even at the height of World War II, Major League Baseball kept playing. Eight decades later, the ties that bind the sport to that era resonate as deeply as ever.
------
Baseball's 'Green Light'
In his famous 1942 "Green Light Letter" to commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis five weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt deemed baseball to be a "definite recreational asset" and "thoroughly worthwhile" to Americans as the nation entered the war.
"It's become a touchstone."
That's how Craig Britcher of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum characterized the letter.
"Baseball is that important. Even when we are at war, we have to have fun. We have to have our recreation," Britcher said of the letter's message.
Landis had just written to Roosevelt a day earlier, seeking his advice as to whether the sport should continue with America entering the conflicts against the Axis powers.
"If you believe we ought to close down for the duration of the war, we are ready to do so immediately," Landis wrote. "If you feel we ought to continue, we would be delighted to do so. We await your order."
The exchange was a wise strategy after some public missteps about players leaving to fight a few decades earlier during World War I.
"Major League Baseball really advocated for exemptions for their ballplayers. That did not sit well with the American public or with the government. So they took a very conscientious stance during World War II," said Anne Madarasz, also of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum. "They took a very thoughtful stance, emphasizing the patriotic nature of baseball and the American nature of baseball while taking action that didn't exempt any player from the draft or from volunteering."
Major League Baseball historian John Thorn said the continuation of baseball during the war served an important psychological purpose.
"It turned out that (Roosevelt) was right," Thorn said in a recent email exchange. "Baseball's continuity, even with rosters depleted by men who would go to war, gave assurance to Americans at home and abroad that normalcy was at hand."
It provided the same for men serving overseas.
"They were connected to the game through radio broadcasts, film of important games. There was a high level of support, through polls that they took during the war, among servicemen for keeping baseball alive," Madarasz said. "Major League Baseball raised over a billion dollars in war bond sales. The sense of putting the nation and our collective cause in the forefront of how they market baseball was an astute public relations behavior by baseball owners in that time period that kept the game alive."
The Sporting News, which at the time was a baseball-only publication, was distributed regularly to servicemen and aided in raising funds for baseball equipment to be sent to soldiers all over the world so they could play the game while away from home.
The publication itself chronicled how it was the American League practice to send foul balls from games over to troops as souvenirs and how Chicago White Sox notorious foul ball specialist Luke Appling (who would eventually serve overseas himself) might abuse the practice and foul off pitches on purpose so the soldiers would get more balls.
The Sporting News also waded into the waters of some healthy, good old-fashioned, pro-patriotic flag-waving, using baseball as a fulcrum. An editorial from publisher J.G.T. Spink referred to the '42 Green Light season as "the product of the gods" in September of that year.
"Look well at these heroes, for they go. They go to make a fairer, a brighter, a safer world," Spink wrote via SABR's Eric Moskowitz in "The National Pastime" Vol. 23. "They go, hoping to return. But if, on some distant shore, they meet their Maker — and so many doubtless will — baseball will do no less than canonize the spirit with which these combatants went from fields of peace to the charnel house."
The St. Louis Cardinals (1942, '44), New York Yankees (1943) and Detroit Tigers (1945) all won World Series titles while the United States was engaged in battle in both Europe and the South Pacific.
------
The game in Nottingham
According to some, baseball was even part of military strategy in advance of the D-Day invasion.
Baseball historian Gary Bedingfield of the "Baseball's Greatest Sacrifice" website outlined the story of a game in Nottingham, England, on May 28, just a few days before the invasion. It matched the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) Red Devils baseball team against the 505th PIR Panthers in front of 7,000 fans at a soccer stadium.
The stated reason for the game was that the Nottingham Anglo-American Committee asked the American forces to put on a sporting event because live entertainment had been absent from Nottingham for years. But, since the game was organized by the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, some have theorized that it was only staged to throw off German intelligence. The game was publicized to the point that even the hometown papers of troops participating in the event were sent photographs of players in the game.
However, despite the publicity and the crowd, there were no actual paratroopers in the stands at the game. Only officers and the players themselves were on hand. As it turns out, according to Bedington, "the rest of the regiment made a 40-mile journey to a local airfield where runways were packed with C-47 transport planes adorned with black and white stripes. Preparations for the invasion had begun."
------
The players who served
Back in Pittsburgh, the Pirates were enjoying a standout season in 1944. The Bucs finished 90-63, second place in the National League, but 14 1/2 games back of the 105-49 St. Louis Cardinals. The Cards went on to beat the St. Louis Browns in the "Streetcar" World Series, 4-2.
From 1930-1941, the Browns never finished better than fifth place in the American League. But the team was largely untouched by the draft and featured an "all-4F (potential draftees rejected by the military for physical, mental, or moral standards) infield." Nine players on the club were at least 34 years old.
Bedingfield estimates more than 500 Major League players served in some capacity or another during the war. The minor leagues, meanwhile, were decimated by departures of players who became soldiers. Bedingfield has that number in excess of 4,000. Forty-four minor leagues were in operation in 1940. That number dipped to as low as 12 coming out of the war.
Such minor league players who would eventually return from service and go on to star in the majors included the likes of Hall of Famer Warren Spahn and Pirates legend Ralph Kiner, who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor. He flew PBM Mariner flying boats on submarine patrols from a naval air station in Hawaii. Upon his return to the United States, Kiner would soon be teamed in Pittsburgh with former American League home run champion Hank Greenberg, who flew bomber missions in the India-China-Burma theater.
An 18-year-old Yogi Berra was drafted while playing ball in the minors. On D-Day, the future Yankees Hall of Famer served on an LCSS rocket ship as a Navy gunner, pounding German machine gun bunkers at Utah Beach 300 feet from shore.
"The English boats, they fired a thousand rockets. They fired the rockets over our heads. Sometimes ... they fired a little short," Berra said during an interview with the YES Network in 2009.
"We did run into a machine gun nest at a hotel on the beach. I was on the twin-50s (machine guns). So I start shooting over there. I think I got a few of them running out of there."
Berra returned home and began his MLB career in 1946, earning a Purple Heart for getting grazed on his hand during the invasion, a Distinguished Unit Citation, two battle stars and a European Theatre of Operations ribbon during the war. He was also given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015.
Gil Hodges, Ted Williams and Bob Feller were among the many Hall of Famers who saw combat before eventually returning to their careers back home.
------
A local hero
One of those killed in action on Omaha Beach was another McKees Rocks native, Joe Pinder. Pinder graduated from Butler High School and lived in Burgettstown. A former minor league pitcher, Pinder was a 17-game winner with Sanford (Chicago White Sox) of the Florida State League in 1939 and had been playing in the minors since 1935. He was a member of the 1st Infantry Division as a Technician Fifth Grade.
As accounted by "Baseball's Greatest Sacrifice," History.net and Soldiers and Sailors museum in Pittsburgh, Pinder's job on D-Day was to get radio equipment ashore so a line of communication could be established. He was clipped by a bullet once while wading through the water, then hit again as shrapnel tore off flesh from the left side of his face.
Yet Pinder made three trips to and from the water to unload the equipment before he was struck a third time through his upper body. Pinder succumbed to his injuries later that morning, the day after his 32nd birthday. In January 1945, Pinder was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor "for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty."
------
Normalcy back home
Just over a month after the invasion, Forbes Field hosted the 1944 All-Star Game. It was a 7-1 win for the National League on a day (July 11) when Russian forces made a significant push toward East Prussia and American tanks engaged in a heavy battle with Nazi Panzer units near Saint-Lo.
Four Pirates suited up. Sewell, DiMaggio, Bob Elliott and Frankie Zak were selected for the National League All-Star squad. So was Donora's Stan Musial.
Proceeds from the game were distributed to a fund that provided baseball equipment for use in leagues across various branches of the military, many of which kept detailed stats.
A year before, a 32-foot plywood image of a Marine in dress uniform was erected at Forbes Field in late June as a recruiting tool. A pair of 35-foot-tall telephone poles held it in place through the end of that 1943 season. Adjacent to the Marine was a sign that read "Buy War Bonds and Stamps."
As Britcher explained, before that Marine, Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss wanted no advertising in the stadium, and none was there except for a smaller war stamps ad in World War I.
It wasn't just Major League Baseball that continued play leading up to and after D-Day. The Negro Leagues did as well. The Homestead Grays won the Negro League World Series in 1944 over the Birmingham Black Barons, 4 — 1. Josh Gibson hit .335 that year.
In the years leading up to and shortly after that championship season, six Grays left the team to serve, including switch-hitting third baseman Howard Easterling. He batted behind Gibson and Buck Leonard in the Grays lineup and hit .316 lifetime.
Gibson's brother, Jerry, who played for both Homestead and the Cincinnati Tigers as an outfielder and pitcher, was drafted and deployed in the 92nd Infantry in Italy.
Johnny Wright was a Grays pitcher who went 18-3 in 1943. He enlisted in the Navy before returning to become the second player from the Negro Leagues to sign with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1946 after Jackie Robinson signed in '45 and before Robinson broke the MLB color barrier in '47.
"This is somebody who left a Pittsburgh team, served in the Navy, he never made the majors, but he was considered as a candidate (to break the color barrier)," Britcher said. "He's a great story that's not told enough locally."
Also, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (as portrayed in the movie "A League Of Their Own") launched in May 1943. The goal at the time was to put baseball into smaller venues and minor league parks throughout the Midwest to offset the loss of manpower to enlistment.
"They recruited female athletes from across the country and often brought in major leaguers to coach them. They put a very quality product on the field, though very managed in the image they project. It was, 'Be a talented athlete, but also be a woman,'" Madarasz said. "Rules of conduct. Chaperones. You weren't wearing a baseball uniform to play. You are wearing a tennis costume or an ice skating dress. This sense of femininity was at the core of it, while you are providing high-level athleticism and entertainment."
There were four teams at first (Kenosha, Racine, Rockford and South Bend). By 1948, there were 10 teams and the league drew more than a million fans. Fifteen women from Western Pennsylvania, including Troy Hill's Betty Jane Cornett, played with four of the teams in the early 1950s.
The AAGPBL lasted until 1954.
------
'The man next to you'
A year ago, a documentary about Berra's life was released. The Harris Theater in Downtown Pittsburgh was one of the movie houses that screened it. Berra's son, Dale, a former Pittsburgh Pirate, joined me on 105.9 The X to talk about it.
For as legendarily quotable as Yogi Berra was, the invasion wasn't something he talked about much.
"He spoke about it rarely. But he did speak about it," Dale Berra said before recounting his father's tale from the rocket ship.
Then, Berra added a few more details of his father's experience at Utah Beach.
"It also reminded him that baseball ain't that tough. As a matter of fact, coming back home and playing ball was going to be easy for him," Berra said. "What really got him was the second day. It was his job to pull bloated bodies out of the water. It made him sick. ... What kept them unafraid was the man next to you, doing what you had to do in service to your country.
"He told me he wasn't afraid."
Tim Benz is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tim at tbenz@triblive.com or via X. All tweets could be reposted. All emails are subject to publication unless specified otherwise.
(c)2024 The Tribune-Review (Greensburg, Pa.)
Visit The Tribune-Review (Greensburg, Pa.) at www.triblive.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Newsletter
What to Read Next
{{hammer}}
{{kicker}}
{{title}}{{subhead}}
- {{byline}}
Copyright 2024 Tribune Content Agency.
