1941--The Greatest Year In Sports by Mike Vaccaro

Author:Mike Vaccaro [Vaccaro,Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385521413
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Good thing, too. If people weren’t able to lose themselves in the daily dramas revolving around DiMaggio’s four or five daily trips to the plate, they may have been forced to ponder some other realities more closely. That wasn’t an appealing alternative at any time during 1941, but during June the front pages started to bark ever louder, blaring news that was ever more unsettling.

June 9 was one of those days when the country could certainly have used the distraction, and it happened that June 9 was one of the slowest sporting days of summer: Joe DiMaggio had the day off, so did Ted Williams (whose own hitting streak had been snapped at twenty-two the day before, cooling his batting average to .416), and it was an unusually quiet training day at the boxing camps in Pompton Lakes and Greenwood Lake. So when the war in the Atlantic touched the United States, quite literally, for the first time, people had little choice but to follow every bulletin, absorb every report of Nazi aggression, and ponder what it would all mean.

Early in the day, Jefferson Caffery, the U.S. ambassador to Brazil, announced that an American freighter, the Robin Moor, had been sunk just north of the equator on May 21. A Brazilian merchant vessel had spotted a lonely lifeboat bobbing in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, with eleven passengers aboard who had a shocking tale to tell. They’d been adrift for eighteen days, ever since their ship, containing twenty-eight crewmen and seven civilians, had been confronted by a German U-boat. The Nazi commander had stopped the Moor even though an American flag was clearly flying from her mast and told the thirty-five people on board—including one two-year-old boy and one couple in their late sixties—that they had exactly thirty minutes to lower themselves into the ship’s four lifeboats before the Moor would be destroyed.

Melvin Mundy, the ship’s chief officer, tried to reason with the German. “Your country has no issue with my country,” he argued. “We are not at war with each other.” But the commander was unbowed.

“You have supplies for my country’s enemy,” he said, “and I must sink you.”

Half an hour later, right on schedule, the U-boat fired a torpedo at point-blank range right into the Moor, then left the four lifeboats to fend for themselves in the angry waters of the Atlantic, ignoring a promise to tow the rafts to safety. The eleven men rescued by the Brazilian boat feared that the others had been lost, since they hadn’t had contact with the other three lifeboats in nearly a week. When this news reached the United States, it was met with outrage, even as President Roosevelt tried to head off a national panic by urging, “Let us not start screaming ‘Remember the Maine’ just yet,” during one of his fireside chats.

Still, the prospect of all those Americans—including two-year-old Robin McCullough—drowning in the vast sea was almost too much for the nation to bear. This wasn’t helped on

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