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Book Review: Baseball in World War II Europe

Baseball in World War II Europe
By Gary Bedingfield
Arcadia Publishing
$18.99 list price
157 Pages

This book, which is part of the Images of Sports series by Arcadia Publishing, takes a look at a poorly chronicled time in baseball history and tackles a subject that few researchers, historians or fans have knowledge of. This book is a glimpse into the past of a time of which many of us have only a spotty knowledge. It tells a story that illustrates how ingrained and important baseball was for the American and Canadian soldiers who fought in and supported the war effort in Europe during that time.

Surprisingly, the author of the book, Gary Bedingfield, was not an American stationed in Europe, nor an American baseball historian searching to find out where the Major Leaguers went during the war. Bedingfield is an Englishman with a passion for American Baseball, who played the game for 20 years in Britain before discovering the history of WW II baseball in his own backyard.

In 1993 he stumbled upon a 50 year old program produced for an “all professional” baseball game staged in London in 1943. It caught his fancy and lead to his research of a time, when many of the best and brightest Major League, Negro League and Minor League stars played together with talented amateurs on the cricket and soccer fields of England and later elsewhere in Europe.

The book is mainly images. Snapshots and portraits that cemented a moment in time. The games were not just about friendly competition, but about morale, memories of home for those who were far away, and entertainment in countries which were starved for recreational activities during the war.

Though the book is focused on Americans who played the game, including hall of famers, and players whose names are still recognized today, the Americans were not the only ones playing American baseball. Canadian and British units formed teams and competed too and some of their history is contained within the pages too.

The book does not tell a coherent story, and I suspect there is no way any book ever could. There were no major world series with large audiences and a devout following in the way that we know baseball today, although there were leagues, and some were quite remarkable. As a fatter of fact, Queen Mary herself attended some games.

The games usually were fundraisers helping charities such as the Red Cross to raise money at a time when money was scarce. The games attracted crowds and many people that did not understand the game attended. The largest of these crowds took their seats on September 2, 1945 at Soldier Field in Nuremberg, Germany, months after the German surrender. Over 50,000 gathered to see the ETO (European Theater of Operations) World Series.

The book tells the story of many of the soldiers and ballplayers who fought in the war, and the stories of some of them who did not survive. The combat depicted on the pages is that of the ball and bat rather than the bullet and mortar, but the captions and chapters tell a story that no pictures can convey. At times the pictures and captions can be monotonous, but that can easily be forgiven as it was understandably an impossible task to tell this story all with pictures especially as they were limited to the baseball diamond.

This is a book that will not appeal to everyone and is not a wonderful read or a coherent story. It can’t be, but it is a powerful monument to a forgotten time, which most Americans and Europeans have forgotten and overlooked in the history of the modern game of baseball.

Give this book just two balls - although it has something powerful to say, its story is just too incomplete (through no fault of Mr. Bedingfield’s) to make you understand what wartime baseball meant to the soldiers and spectators in Europe - sadly that’s something we might never get the full sense of.

 

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