Streak

by Seidel, Michael; Siegel, George ;

  Among those on the St. Louis Browns squad agape at the day’s festive events but probably none too happy with the day’s score was their starting shortstop, who was nursing a leg injury, a slick fielder by the name of John Berardino. With the second of two r’s taken out of his name, he now appears on television five days a week as Dr. Steve Hardy on the immensely popular soap opera General Hospital. In another fitting “I Am an American Day” show business note, a young Hollywood couple appeared in the Sunday Chicago Tribune magazine supplement feature on movieland marriages. The two looked confident and copy, in masculine-feminine order, climbing out of their movieland pool: a lovely Jane Wyman and an ex-lifeguard, ex-radio announcer, Ronald “Dutch” Reagan. The stars, parents of a brand-new baby daughter, Maureen, had just been voted Hollywood’s happiest in a Los Angeles poll.

  GAME 5: May 19

  New York citizens and fans were exhausted after Sunday’s all-day extravaganza, and only 5,388 showed up at Yankee Stadium on Monday afternoon to watch the lowly Browns rear up and beat the Yankees 5–1. While the nation celebrated everything American at the expense of everything Axis on Sunday, on Monday news reached the land of a disaster at sea perpetrated by the very Nazis who had been vilified so roundly the day before. An Egyptian steamer, the Zamzam, with 138 Americans on board (including 35 children), had been out of contact for about a month somewhere between Brazil and Africa. The State Department in Washington and the Foreign Office in London had feared the worst for some time, but the worst became clear only on this day. The Berlin command boasted that a Nazi surface raider had shelled the ship and blown it to pieces because it was carrying a small American ambulance corps headed circuitously for east Africa, where, ironically, its services would no longer be needed. This day the aristocratic, humane, and terribly sensible duke of Aosta, commander of Italian forces for the east African Ethiopia campaign, surrendered Mussolini’s Africa corps of 38,000 men to the British. Mussolini’s troops found the British tank forces more formidable than they had Haile Selassie’s spearmen.

  In boasting of their action against the Zamzam, the Germans declared that transporting an ambulance corps was a violation of the U.S. wartime Neutrality Act. Roosevelt was furious; he felt we ought to be the ones to determine when the Neutrality Act was violated. Although “Remember the Zamzam” was never to have the resonance in American history of “Remember the Alamo” or “Remember the Lusitania,” the fate of this sorry steamer remained on Roosevelt’s mind for his famous “unlimited emergency” speech in a few days, one of the most galvanizing of his entire presidency and a watershed in readying America for war. DiMaggio and the Yankees would be playing in Washington, D.C., at the time of the speech, where the streak’s progress would first be picked up by the media right after Roosevelt’s stirring words about efforts and increments. In one way or another, everyone in 1941 was either tracking or counting or doing both.

  At the Stadium on Monday, May 19, St. Louis pitcher Dennis Galehouse, who in his previous outing against the Washington Senators had pitched a one-hitter, stifled the Yankees on four hits. One of them was Joe DiMaggio’s two-out double to left in the seventh inning. DiMaggio mustered just enough energy to extend the streak on his last time at bat, but the Yankees could not muster enough to pick him up from second, where he remained at the inning’s end. On his other trips against Galehouse, DiMaggio flied out twice and walked.

  Marius Russo, the quick Yankee left-hander, pitched well against the Browns, but his teammates made life difficult behind him. The new double play combination of veterans Crosetti and Gordon started doing what the old double play combination of rookies Rizzuto and Priddy had been doing before McCarthy benched them: dropping balls. Gordon fumbled a double play ball in the first, and Crosetti did the same in the fourth. On each occasion the Browns scored clumps of runs on doubles by Heffner and Cullenbine, respectively. Bill Dickey was the only Yankee who made an afternoon of it. He homered in the fifth inning for the one Yank run and extended his substantial hitting streak to 20 straight. By losing this day, the Yanks followed a pattern they had sustained for over 2 weeks. They had not won two ball games in a row since beating Cleveland twice earlier in the season.

  There is no charity in the hearts of rival borough fans. Only on one occasion this day did the Yankee crowd roar its approval—when the scoreboard operator posted nine runs for the Chicago Cubs in the second inning of a game against the Dodgers. The Cubs went on to win 14–1, knocking the Dodgers out of first place half a game behind the Cardinals. But the Dodgers weren’t ready to take the loss or a 7–6 loss the day before lying down. An ever-vigilant Larry MacPhail protested that the Cubs had exceeded their roster limit of 25 because an extra outfielder was in the hospital when he should have been optioned to Montreal. Here’s the way MacPhail finagled. Three days earlier he had traded minor leaguer Charlie Gilbert to the Cubs in exchange for second baseman Billy Herman. But Gilbert had a bum leg, and the Cubs had him checked out at a hospital before sending him on his way to Montreal. MacPhail and the Dodgers protested that picking up Gilbert’s hospital tab was tantamount to exceeding their roster limit. He demanded that Chicago’s last two wins over the Dodgers be forfeited. The National League president, Ford Frick, listened to MacPhail with even less charity in his heart for the Dodger cause than the Yankee fans displayed when Chicago posted all those runs: “Baloney, the violation is merely technical.” He fined the Cubs $500. “Well,” said MacPhail, “it was worth a try.”

  GAME 6: May 20

  Several hours before the Yankees and Browns slugged it out in a donnybrook at the Stadium on Tuesday, news poured over the wire services about the launching of one of the most daring and, it turned out, excruciating campaigns of the war. At 8 A.M. on the morning of May 20, an aerial shock force of German paratroopers 10,000 strong, Fallschirmjäger, or “hunters from the sky,” appeared in transports and glider planes over the northwest horizon of Crete. Coincidentally, an article in the Sunday magazine section of The New York Times, “Invasion from the Sky,” had the week before reviewed the tactics and risks of just such an aerial invasion, claiming that the Germans planned to send paratroopers onto the island of Great Britain.

  On Crete, following incessant and violent Stuka dive-bombing attacks at daylight, German paratroopers, mostly former Hitler Youth, descended in wave after wave of multicolored parachutes from hundreds of silent gliders. British defenders on Crete watched in awe as an armed invasionary force dotted the skies over the island, the ancient home of the Minoans and the exilic place of the fabulous artificer Daedalus, the inventor of manned flight. The official British history of the campaign recalled the almost deadly elegance of the battle’s opening moments as the paratroopers descended: “Each man dangling carried a death; his own, if not another’s.” British forces commenced firing as soon as they had taken in the haunting spectacle, and hundreds of German chutists died literally before setting foot on Crete.

  Project Mercury, as the Germans dubbed the battle, naming it after the messenger of winged flight, was not a foregone conclusion. The British had a sound chance of winning with a 3 to 1 advantage in troop strength, with control of key landing strips and tactical positions, and with excellent intelligence information on the German invasion plan from deciphered codes. If the Germans failed to capture the landing strip for reinforcements, their first wave of paratroopers would be slaughtered on the ground. As it was, their first wave casualty rate was an extraordinary 40 percent; the Germans had experienced nothing like this kind of resistance in any other ground campaign so far in the war.

  The sheer intensity and high drama of the Cretan invasion all but obscured another bit of Nazi action this day that would generate the monstrous shape of things to come in the war. The General Office of Emigration in Berlin sent a circular letter to key Nazi officials banning emigration of Jews from all German-occupied territories because of what Göring referred to as the “doubtless imminent final solution” (Endlösung). This was the first time Göring had employed
such phrasing for what the Germans had in mind, though he was so vague about what the solution entailed that even those victimized failed to recognize the horrific scope of the Nazi project for the Jews of Europe.

  On this historic day for World War II in the Mediterranean and in the consular offices of German-held territory, the Yankees and Browns slapped each other around at the Stadium with little mercy. When the dust settled, the Yankees came out on top 10–9. Despite the buzz of activity around him, DiMaggio went hitless until the eighth inning, when with none out he singled sharply to center off submariner Eldon Auker. Later, in game 38 of the streak, Auker would figure again in another eighth inning at bat, one of the most desperate moments of the record for DiMaggio. But now there was no streak pressure to speak of, just game opportunity. Earlier in the fifth inning DiMaggio had ripped one down the line toward Harland Clift, only to have the Brown third baseman make a spinning, backhanded stab and a fine throw to force Henrich at second. If DiMaggio was robbed early, he was mortified later. An odd baseball occurrence in the ninth inning involved a would-be DiMaggio hit that became a freak DiMaggio out. Fortunately, the streak was already locked in—it would have been a heartless way to lose it. With Rolfe on second and Henrich on first, DiMaggio looped one behind second. But Lucadello and Heffner were moving a little in on the dirt for a double play, and neither made much of a gesture toward the short fly, assuming Walt Judnich could come in to field it. Wrong. Judnich came in, all right, but the ball dropped untouched at his feet. Where was Rolfe? Not on third, where he might have wished. Instead, he lingered at second because he was sure Judnich was going to get the short fly. Judnich picked up DiMaggio’s would-be single, fired a strike to third, and hung Rolfe out to dry. No hit for DiMaggio—just a complicated force-out.

  The lead changed hands all day as the Yankees held out against the only team in the American League playing worse than they were at this time in the year. The Browns committed six errors. It was a mad day, including a bizarre play, also in the ninth inning, in which Tommy Henrich scored from second base on a ground ball back to pitcher George Caster. Henrich just kept motoring around third and so stunned Browns’ first baseman George McQuinn, who had grabbed the throw from Caster, that McQuinn took a header in the dirt before throwing home. His sorry humpbacked toss arrived too late to get the speeding Henrich. Bill Dickey’s three hits on the day put his average at .391 and his streak at 21. Roy Cullenbine of the Browns still led the league at .414. Ted Williams matched DiMaggio’s streak at 6 straight with a single off Hal Newhouser in Boston’s 4–2 win over the Tigers. His streak average was .348 to DiMaggio’s .409, but Williams was gearing up for a 3-week tear that in his view would make his season, and what a season it was.

  GAME 7: May 21

  The Detroit Tigers, American League pennant winners in 1940, came to town on Wednesday. They played a marvelous ball game against the Yankees, with New York winning it in the tenth inning 5–4 after scoring two to tie in a dramatic ninth inning rally. DiMaggio extended the young streak easily with a run-scoring single in the first off Schoolboy Rowe; he added another clutch base hit off reliever Al Benton to drive in a run during the rally in the ninth. The great Tiger left fielder, Hank Greenberg, also played a game this day, but not for Detroit. Warming up for a stint with his division’s hardball team, Greenberg starred in a recreational softball game with the antitank company sluggers. He was called out on strikes his first time at bat on a ball that was 6 feet over his head: “That’s no worse than some umps in the American League,” he grumbled.

  May 21 was one of those spring days when events all around the world crescendoed. Normal interludes at the ball park, even brilliant games like this afternoon’s, paled in the greater historical light. Hitler, prodded by his downtrodden Vichy allies and aware that Roosevelt intended reprisals for the sinking of the Zamzam, decided that the time was ripe to expel all American consular diplomats from declared war areas, including 2,000 officials in Paris. Roosevelt had been regularly deporting German aliens living in America all through the winter and spring of 1941. Before DiMaggio’s streak was over both the Axis powers and the western democracies would clear all diplomatic decks, so to speak, by expelling and counterexpelling every portfolio-carrying official of the wrong stripe in their rival spheres of influence.

  On Crete, May 21 was do or die day for the British. Because of strategic bungling, they died when they might have done. During the wee hours of the morning a few hundred German paratroopers moved into position around Hill 107 at the Maleme heights while the British, saving virtually all their troops for daylight, left positions around the airstrip vacant. When the German field commander probed the hill, he couldn’t believe it was unoccupied. In the dark the German paratroopers secured the hill, and by daylight they were dug in to cover the Maleme airstrip. The Germans could now gain reinforcements by flying in troop transports. Wave after wave of troops began landing on May 21, including the former heavyweight champion of the world, paratrooper Max Schmeling. His story would capture attention in the next several days.

  In a theater of action far from the Mediterranean, another climactic wartime adventure began this day. Through their Enigma decoder, stolen from the Germans without the Germans’ knowledge, the British had information that two large battleships were under way in the Kattegat Channel between Denmark and Sweden. One of these was the brand-new Bismarck, the newest, fastest, and most deadly ship in the German fleet, fresh from its shakedown cruise in the Baltic. With British naval superiority over the Germans at a 7 to 1 ratio, Hitler had put enormous energies and resources into a massive ship-building program. The Bismarck was the pride of that effort and the apple of his naval eye. The British Admiralty wanted to track it down and blow it out of the water before the Germans moved it into the open Atlantic, either to harass the convoy lines or to serve as support for an aerial invasion of the Hebrides akin to the attack on Crete.

  On the afternoon of May 21, a British Spitfire reconnaissance plane sent out to scout for German ships spotted the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen in the Grimstad Fjord south of Bergen. The British home admiral, Sir John Tovey, initiated the most sustained and exhaustive sea and air hunt in the history of naval warfare. He dispatched his battle cruiser Hood and his battleship the Prince of Wales, but miserable weather made it impossible to sight the German ships. Instead, the British Admiralty played its latest ace. One of its sleek cruisers, the Suffolk, was equipped with a sophisticated new radar system, as yet untested against such prize targets. In the next days the cruiser Suffolk would have more to tell Admiral Tovey about the movements of the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen than the Germans thought was technically possible in 1941.

  With all the action around the world on May 21, the ball game at the Stadium struggled to meet the competition. The Tigers almost iced this wonderful game in the eighth inning after Pat Mullin’s home run, but Rudy York ran them out of a big inning by getting hung up between first and second when Red Rolfe cut off a relay throw. After a rally, led by DiMaggio, to tie in the ninth, the Yankees pulled it out in the tenth when Red Rolfe, who had four hits on the day, contributed the gamer, a triple to drive in Johnny Sturm. Sturm had smashed six hits in the last two games, raised his average over 100 points, and worked his hitting streak up to 5 games. Every paper in New York City commented on Sturm’s performance since his insertion in the lineup, cynically wondering when the rookie would begin to fade.

  The best play of the game occurred in right when Tommy Henrich reached into the stands over the fence and pulled a Charlie Gehringer drive out of the collective clutches of several 2d Signal Corps trainees visiting the ball park from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. All the trainees in the right field seats, a contingent of 200, were delighted with the play, and Henrich became an adopted member of the corps for the rest of the ball game. Though the Yankees were able to put together a winning streak of two games in a row for the first time since May 8, Bill Dickey’s 21-game hitting streak ended this day. In Boston, Ted Williams was luc
kier. The Browns had come to town, and Williams had a chance to feed on St. Louis pitching. With four hits on May 21, the Red Sox star eased among the league’s leading hitters for the first time that year at .367. So far he had matched DiMaggio’s hitting streak at 7, shooting up to a .429 (12 for 28) average during the run, compared with DiMaggio’s .407 (11 for 27).

  In America on May 21, prominent isolationists across the land celebrated the fourteenth anniversary of Charles A. Lindbergh’s heroic and pioneering 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic, but the Philadelphia Municipal Transportation System picked the Lindbergh anniversary to announce its refusal to carry advertisements for the aviator’s upcoming appearance on behalf of the America First Committee in the City of Brotherly Love. Furthermore, John Fredrick Lewis, president of the Philadelphia Academy of Music, refused to allow the scheduling of Lindbergh’s appearance at the academy’s auditorium. Lewis said he intended no direct insult to Lindbergh, but he could not bear the thought of the fascist goons who so often attended these meetings showing up at his beloved hall. The New York Times took its almost daily shot at Lindbergh by printing text of a congratulatory telegram sent to the aviator on his flight’s anniversary by a shadowy group of South American Nazis, Afirmación Argentina.

  More than ever on this anniversary, false rumors circulated that Lindbergh and Rudolf Hess were collaborating to set up an Anglo-American-German alliance against Russia. Even the British papers were linking the two aviators, both of them former, if not present, Anglophiliacs: “Hess was—as good old Lindbergh was—a friend.” Lindbergh, of course, met Hess while being shepherded around Berlin by Hermann Göring in 1938, and the two had spoken about long-distance flying. With Lindbergh on his mind, Hess imagined a world capable of being moved and influenced by a single, precise heroic act. Indeed, the paranoid Hess shared with the gloomy Lindbergh the fear that world events were escaping the control of the truly gifted and the heroically blessed. Oblivious to the scorn of others, Hess took the burden of the historical moment upon himself when the historical moment had already passed him by. The parallel with Lindbergh in America was not exact, but that did not prevent Lindbergh’s enemies, especially in the Roosevelt administration, from making it. The famous aviator’s saga, at once glorious and immensely sad, fascinated everyone during the days of DiMaggio’s streak, and there were more twists before Lindbergh’s final turn prior to Pearl Harbor in 1941.