Before Enlisting:

In high school, my grandfather was admired for his athletic skills.  He held many basketball records and was scouted to play football for Yale.  His most impressive accomplishment started at age fifteen.  He and about a dozen other young baseball players were offered the chance to workout with the Brooklyn Dodgers.  It was a dream come true, and he grabbed it.  The experience not only furthered his baseball abilities, but the people he met gave him tips that ultimately helped him to play baseball, instead of fighting on the front lines during the War.

My grandfather was still in high school at the start of World War II.  His mother wanted him to go straight from high school into the armed forces.  She felt that those who enlisted on their own were given more lenience in the service, but my grandfather wanted to go to school.  Their compromise was that he would attend college for one year and then come back and enlist.  In 1944, at the end of his freshman year at Ithaca College, the US began action across the world in Saipan, where he would later be stationed.  As many baseball players had done a few years before him, my grandfather traded in his uniform and bat for fatigues and a gun.


Battle on Saipan:

While my grandfather enjoyed his last few weeks of school, Admiral Nimitz began “Operation Forager”.   The mission was to overtake the Marianas Islands, which were given to Japan by the League of Nations in 1920 after World War I.  The US correctly presumed they would be an asset in their fight against Japan.  The capture of the islands was one of the turning points in the War, allowing the US easier access to bomb Japan.  Saipan was the first of the three islands to be attacked.  The attacks were harsh, and out of the 31,629 Japanese people living on Saipan at that time, 29,500 were killed.  The death tolls were not as high on the American side, but 3,100 were killed and 13,100 were wounded or missing in action.

April 15, 1944, marked the first battle on Saipan.  505 ships and 127, 571 soldiers were deployed to the Marianas Islands, the largest force for naval engagement  to that point.  When the soldiers reached the island, they found Mt. Tapotchan, a volcanic mountain,  prohibiting them from going deeper into Saipan.  This did not deter them from their first Marianas victory.  The next morning, at around three a.m., the Japanese attacked with thirty six light tanks and one thousand soldiers.  The Americans held their position and killed seventy five percent of their Japanese attackers.  

June 26, 1944, about the time my grandfather enlisted, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US forces, creeping out of bushes, but their surprise did little to help them.  The battle was so brutal, and casualties so high that an exact number could not be counted.  It was agreed that the Japanese suffered 4,300 causalities.  Soldiers were not the only ones dying for the cause; Japanese women were killing themselves and their children.  Many mothers would first kill their babies, using the rocks of a cliff to smash their young ones heads and then proceed to jump off the cliff screaming, “Long live the emperor!”


Enlistment and Deployment:

As promised, my grandfather enlisted, choosing the Navy.  Boot camp he recalled, as many do, was not a pleasant experience.  The highlight was that while traveling across the country with the rest of his division to be shipped off to their respective destinations, they stopped and watched a baseball game between two of the armed forces divisions.  These games were often held to entertain the troops.  He noticed that one of his friends from working out with the Dodgers, Ed Yost, (who later went on to play with the Washington Senators,) was playing, and asked to speak with him before they continued.  “He told me that when I filled out my application, to make sure to write down everything I had done with the Dodgers.  ‘Make sure you write that you play baseball.  They like that,’” my grandfather recalled from their conversation.

My grandfather followed the advice, but did not see the benefits until he arrived in Saipan.  Once on the island in 1945, almost a year after the Battle of Saipan occurred, he remembers being one of the last to be given an assignment.  Each day, names would be posted in the rec hall of people heading to fight, but his was never there.  Instead, he worked odd jobs around the camp, cleaning, sweeping, often driving different military officers around the camp.  One day while he was sweeping out the games hall, “I remember one of the guys calling me, and telling me to go check the list.  I did.  I was assigned to play baseball.”

My grandfather was lucky.  The most fighting he saw was a few of the Japanese still on the island throwing rocks at the US soldiers while they showered.  They hoped to be captured so they would be given food and a place to sleep.  


Baseball Overseas:

Each military base had a team that would play others to divert soldiers’ attention from the war. “We played games Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, and sometimes with a double header,” recalled my grandfather.  The play culminated in a much anticipated championship  tournament in Hawaii with different bases competing from around the world.  “We won the Island championship twice, we won the inter-league thing, I think, maybe we tied.  We never got to go to Hawaii though, our plane couldn’t leave.  I still have never been there,” my grandfather said longingly.   With a smile and a little chuckle he recalled, “The umpires use to hold bet money in their pockets for the game.  And I remember one game, before we started, he [the umpire] called us over and said not to have any big plays at the plate cuz he had four thousand dollars in his pocket.  Sometimes people would get upset cuz of