Streak
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GAME 8: May 22
The Yankees closed out their two-game series with the Tigers at the Stadium on May 22 by holding on to win a squeaker 6–5. DiMaggio got but one hit in the soggy, rain-interrupted game, a clean single off lefty Archie McKain in the seventh. He tried to stretch it into a double, saw that he was about to get thrown out by 20 feet, and reversed course back to first. There Rudy York waited for him with ball in hand, but DiMaggio slickered the less than acrobatic York and slid around him to the bag. Rookie Steve Peek got the win for the Yankees, the third rookie in a row to do so—Norman Branch and Charlie Stanceu had won the previous two. It was Peek’s first major league win. Bobo Newsom took the loss for Detroit.
On Crete, the day’s action got more desperate for the British defenders. The Germans began moving in enough troops to even out the odds, though they held but one airstrip while the British, mostly troops from New Zealand and Australia, still held much better tactical positions on the rest of the island. Churchill desperately wanted Crete kept in British hands for strategic access to North Africa and for home front morale. A year before he had ordered Crete heavily fortified, but the man Churchill called his “muddle east” commander, General Archibald Wavell, had virtually ignored the prime minister. Instead, Wavell concentrated on defeating the duke of Aosta’s Italian forces in east Africa. With the commanding officer on Crete begging for military supplies 5 days before the Germans attacked, Wavell sent an emergency shipment of tablecloths and veterinary kits for sick mules.
May 22, 1941, in America turned out to be a black day for another fervent isolationist, a staunch supporter of Lindbergh’s efforts and one of the few who would employ the aviator after war broke out, the elder Henry Ford. Workers at the Ford Motor Company voted for the first time ever to allow union representation, selecting Walter Reuther’s recently, formed UAW affiliate of the CIO. Henry Ford tried to stave off the union vote by beating Reuther’s mid-May GM settlement with a 15-cents-per-hour across-the-board raise for his workers, but the tactic failed. Ford called the union vote a miserable mistake for his company and for the American automobile business.
Reuther’s contract with General Motors called for the lowest paid worker in the plant, a janitor, to receive 86 cents an hour and the highest paid, a master welder, $1.60. The president of General Motors, Charles E. Wilson, did a bit better at $278,324 a year, but not as well as Louis B. Mayer of Loews Corporation, the highest paid executive of the year at $697,048. Bob Hope and Gary Cooper that year pulled in about $600,000 and $500,000, respectively. By these comparative standards, as astronomical as Joe DiMaggio’s $37,500 salary for 1941 looked to some, it looked modest to others. Moreover, when DiMaggio tried to negotiate a few thousand more during spring training he was under the eagle eye of the commissioner’s office because the year before Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis had had his suspicions that several unsavory types hanging around Toots Shor’s on Broadway were acting as DiMaggio’s agents. The notion of a ballplayer in 1941 negotiating through and cutting in an agent was anathema to both leagues. One gambler friend of DiMaggio’s in particular, Joe Gould, was on the commissioner’s hit list, and Landis threatened to stomp all over Gould’s zoot suit if he ever tried to influence DiMaggio’s salary dealings with the Yankees. In a private chat with DiMaggio, Landis advised the Yankee center fielder to lose some of his flashier New York friends.
With the first week of DiMaggio’s streak rounding out, two mildly memorable films opened in New York City: Penny Serenade, with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne; and Blood and Sand, a Technicolor remake of an old Valentino bullfight extravaganza with Tyrone Power, the rising starlet Rita Hayworth, and the lovely Linda Darnell. But a more notable piece of coming attractions news slipped into the entertainment section of the New York Herald Tribune. John Huston, a young screenwriter, reportedly began work this week on his first project as a director, something called The Knights of Malta. The information proved to be slightly distorted; the correct title had a little more mystery to it, and the actual movie had Humphrey Bogart in it: The Maltese Falcon.
GAME 9: May 23
The orchestrated sea hunt for the Bismarck was still top secret when the Boston Red Sox came to New York on Friday for an afternoon game at the Stadium. Though the German battleship was locked in on the radar systems of the cruiser Suffolk, the British Admiralty was frightened of losing it in fog-shrouded northern waters. The Yankees and Red Sox were also stymied this day by a kind of invisibility. They stayed until dark and pounded each other into moot submission 9–9 before the umpires called it a day because there was no light left to call it anything else. DiMaggio garnered a simple single off Dick Newsome in the eighth inning of a slugfest in which a total of 47 men on both teams reached base. The game would not count in the standings, but the statistics from it remained on the books. DiMaggio’s streak single therefore stood, as did a two-run single by Ted Williams that kept him even with DiMaggio through the first 9 games of the streak. This debacle would be replayed as the second game of a doubleheader on the day DiMaggio chased Wee Willie Keeler’s all-time hitting streak record of 44. DiMaggio would get a chance to make the same game count twice in his streak, though the hits registered in them counted only once each.
The Red Sox used virtually their entire roster in the 3-hour game, which was plagued by ineptitude and miserable weather throughout. At least one team scored in every inning as nine weary pitchers misapplied their skills. The Red Sox player-manager, Joe Cronin, drawing upon the dregs, had to resort to a pitcher to pinch-hit in the seventh inning. Lefty Tom Judd stroked a single through the box and drove in two runs to tie the game at 9–9. King Kong Charlie Keller did most of the damage for the Yankees with a triple and two doubles. In 1939, when Keller had first come to the Yanks, Lefty Gomez took one look at his mug and said, “That’s the first ballplayer Frank Buck ever brought back alive.” But a simple piece of advice in regard to Keller floated from clubhouse to press room for the benefit of everyone’s general good health in the late ’30s and early ’40s: “Don’t call him King Kong to his face.”
On this Friday night a much greater sports spectacle than the sorry affair at Yankee Stadium took place under the brand-new lights at Griffith Stadium in the nation’s capital: Joe Louis defended his title against Buddy Baer. When the two men stepped into the ring, Baer looked like an affable square-shouldered cardboard cutout next to the supple Louis. The champ was an odds-on favorite to retain his title in his seventeenth defense, and the odds seemed perfectly reasonable. But in round 1 Baer caught Louis with a stunning left hook and knocked him through the ropes onto the ring’s apron. Long before the count approached 10, Louis stepped back into the ring, and Baer’s best moment of the night was history.
For the rest of the evening the big, cumbersome Baer took a savage beating round after round. At one point near the end of the sixth, Louis hit him so hard that Baer slowly corkscrewed to a sitting position in the center of the ring. When he got to his feet, Louis stalked him and put him down again, this time leaving Baer lying supine in the corner. He haltingly raised his tottering body, winchlike, before Louis came on at the referee’s signal and drove him to the canvas for a third time with a smashing right. The blow came after the bell ending the round, which no one could hear in the din and which Baer might not have been able to distinguish from the hundreds of others ringing in his head.
Two of Baer’s corner men jumped into the ring to drag their unconscious hulk back to his seat; another Baer attendee, all done up in a white suit and Panama hat, headed for the champion’s corner and began berating Louis for hitting after the bell. Meanwhile, Baer’s manager, Ancil Hoffman, took off after the referee, Art Donovan, and refused to leave the ring at the start of the seventh round. Donovan had no choice but to forfeit the bout against Hoffman’s fighter. Baer all the while sat slumped in a state of semiconsciousness on his stool; he couldn’t have risen for a replay of the national anthem. Next on Louis’s agenda: Billy Conn. This heavyweight title defense during DiMag
gio’s streak would turn out to be one of the greatest fights of the century.
On the same night as the Louis-Baer fight, but back in New York City, 20,000 people showed up inside Madison Square Garden and another 14,000 listened to loudspeakers outside as Charles A. Lindbergh and Senator Burton K. Wheeler led an America First Committee rally, one of several during the days of the hitting streak. Tonight’s was crucial because it marked the beginning of a schism within the isolationist movement. John T. Flynn, liberal politician, author, and leader of the New York chapter of America First, was appalled at the profascist and anti-Semitic support that America First was receiving nationwide, though he thought his organization was being set up by warmongers. The problem was one that haunts many large organizations: the strange bedfellow syndrome. In this instance, a hooligan, one Joe McWilliams, showed up at Madison Square Garden with his racist and pro-Nazi thugs.
At the Garden rally Flynn publicly fumed at McWilliams and his assortment of yahoos: “Just because some misguided fool in Manhattan who happens to be a Nazi gets a few tickets to this rally, this meeting of American citizens is called a Nazi meeting. And right here, not many places from me, is sitting a man named McWilliams. What he is doing here, whose stooge he is, I do not know, but I know the photographers of these war-mongering newspapers can always find him when they want him.” Life magazine was more balanced on the issue in a profile of Burton Wheeler and America First: “To suppose that all isolationists are pro-Nazi or pro-Communist is as naive as to suppose that none of them are.”
Lindbergh said in his diary on this occasion that he wished Flynn had acted with dignity in these matters, but he kept his own counsel on the likes of McWilliams. In his speech, the aviator argued that Roosevelt would have to become a dictator to confront one. “If we go to war to preserve democracy abroad, we are likely to end by losing it at home.” Noninterventionists at this time were apprehensive about new moves planned by Roosevelt for his upcoming “unlimited emergency” broadcast. Presidential aide Stephen T. Early had just provided a blunt forecast of the speech whose prospect made Lindbergh so nervous: “The foes of democracy abroad or at home are not going to like it.”
Roosevelt had been so irritated by the Germans’ sinking of the Zamzam with hundreds of Americans on board that the isolationists feared he was ready to use the incident as a pretext for convoys or, worse, open naval hostilities. One isolationist who lately had been keeping a low profile, the former United States ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in England, Joseph Kennedy, Sr., resurfaced to volunteer advice to the President. Kennedy did not want Roosevelt to talk the nation into war over the Zamzam incident or any other. He dreaded the thought of a European engagement and did not wish to contribute any of his sons to an Axis bloodbath. On May 24 he spoke out in a way that friends like Burton Wheeler wished he would have done more often. Kennedy warned that we “cannot divert the tides of the mighty revolution now sweeping Asia and Europe.” Any attempt to do so “would end in failure and disgrace abroad, in disillusionment and bankruptcy at home.”
These remarks were a much less subtle version of a brilliant little tract, Why England Slept, written in 1940 by Kennedy’s then 23-year-old son, Jack. Jack Kennedy argued in 1940 that democracies could not hope to confront fascist states with tactics reserved for and in fact fashioned for democracies. But by May 1941 Jack and his older brother, Joe, Jr., had second and different thoughts. Both volunteered for active military duty, though Jack’s bad back would delay his actual service until late summer. The Kennedy sons tried to mollify their father’s antagonism to Roosevelt or, at the very least, to have the elder Kennedy keep his distance from Burton Wheeler and America First.
Wheeler, the model for Jimmy Stewart’s character in the 1939 Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, had directed his ample energies against Roosevelt in the early months of 1941 just as he had against the Harding administration and its king-maker attorney general, Harry M. Daugherty, in the 1920s. He was under something of a national cloud at present for incurring Roosevelt’s wrath by describing lend-lease as the “New Deal’s Triple-A foreign policy to plow under every fourth American boy.” Roosevelt said of the senator’s remark that “it was the rottenest thing said in public life in my generation.” This is the man from whom the Kennedy sons wanted their father to cut bait. In a notorious incident, Wheeler came to visit Joe Kennedy and almost sensed his presence in the vestibule as the maid insisted that the elder Mr. Kennedy was not at home. Kennedy later chortled to friends how he had stood out of sight and watched Wheeler come to a slow boil before stalking out.
GAME 10: May 24
The Yankees came from behind with four in the seventh to beat Boston 7–6 in Saturday’s game at the Stadium. They had now won four in a row—discounting the previous day’s tie—to match their longest winning streak of the young season. DiMaggio’s single off Boston lefty Earl Johnson, a line drive to left with two out in the seventh, drove in the last two Yankee runs. In the sixth inning Dominic DiMaggio had all sorts of trouble with a long fly Joe hit to center, perhaps sensing with brotherly intuition the birth of a streak no one else had yet noticed. But the official scorer, Dan Daniel, shook his head and signaled a big three-base error as DiMaggio’s fly ball dribbled out of his brother’s glove.
This play would muddle Joe DiMaggio’s later recollection of a long fly in the direction of right center on the day he tried to break Wee Willie Keeler’s record of 44 straight. Stan Spence got that one after momentarily misjudging it, but Joe DiMaggio later supplemented Spence’s catch with the invention of another made by his brother that robbed him of a hit in a tense moment. More than likely he superimposed the earlier image of a dropped ball—what he wanted—over a snagged one—what he dreaded—and credited Dominic with both.
Johnny Sturm, who had singled in the first two runs of the Yankee seventh, had now hit in 8 straight games since taking the collar the first day Joe McCarthy played him at first. Local reporters continued tracking Sturm’s streak but said nothing of DiMaggio’s or Williams’s longer ones. Williams singled twice in three trips this afternoon and remained even with DiMaggio at 10 straight, outhitting the Yankee center fielder for the course of the streak so far .447 to .350. Ted was now firecracker hot. He was in the middle of a run of games that would extend over 2 weeks in which he would hit only a few decimal points below .600. Without this spurt, Williams recalls, he could have kissed his .406 season good-bye.
On May 24 the British retreated eastward and southward in Crete as their positions deteriorated in the western sector of the island. Staff officers on the scene wanted to mount a counterattack against the Germans at Maleme but later reported that their commanders “were utterly without any offensive spirit.” Churchill cabled his command: “The whole world watches your splendid battle on which great things turn.” This cheery note came just as the only “turns” were by British regimental leaders—in the wrong direction. Infantry units began to trek over the central mountain range to Crete’s hazardous southern coast for naval evacuation. The king of Greece and his government in exile, harbored on Crete by the British, had already hiked over primitive mountain trails to a disembarkation point for Egypt.
As things grew worse for the British in Crete, they grew better in the north Atlantic pursuit of the battleship Bismarck. On May 24 the British announced publicly that the chase was on. The news thrilled the western democracies and electrified those who hoped for a naval victory this year as devastating to the Germans as the victory in the air at the Battle of Britain had been in 1940. Two British capital ships, the newly commissioned Prince of Wales and the much older Hood, finally caught up with the Bismarck and the Prinz Eugen in waters well off the coast of Greenland. Unfortunately for the Hood, the largest battle cruiser afloat at 42,000 tons, both German ships trained their guns on her. When the Bismarck finally put a shell directly into the Hood’s ammunition magazine, the huge British ship, whose hull was too lightly armored, went under in minutes, losing the entire cr
ew of over 1,400 men. Only three survivors remained afloat in the cold northern seas. The Prince of Wales, virtually unfired upon, managed to score a glancing hit on the Bismarck. But with the Hood sinking and the odds temporarily changed, the new British battleship scurried from the scene under a smoke screen. It signaled to Admiral Tovey the chilling news: “Hood has blown up.” The mission now took on new urgency: not merely to bag the Bismarck as the prize of the German navy but to avenge its first capital victim, the Hood.
Admiral Tovey called in his aircraft carrier, Victorious, and sent a squadron of Swordfish bombers up in the midnight sun on May 24 for a scouting mission. When the bombers sighted the Bismarck, they also sighted, to their amazement, an American Coast Guard cutter, the Modoc, steaming near the huge German ship but apparently unaware of any of the circumstances of the last few days, indeed, of the present moment. The bombers regrouped, primarily because of the confusion the Modoc posed, and under a tremendous barrage of antiaircraft fire from the Bismarck one of the Swordfish pilots snuck in a torpedo bomb. The torpedo dealt a glancing blow to the German battleship and caused a nasty, debilitating oil leak. Scores of British ships were now on their way from the Mediterranean to converge on the Bismarck, a wounded but still dangerous naval behemoth.