In the third week of August, just 15 days after the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, I went on inactive duty. In March 1945, I was sent to Great Lakes Naval Training Center and managed the baseball team there. The people we had on the gun crews were very good shots. The Alabama never lost a man to enemy action. Two enemy bombs hit the ship during the Marianas Turkey Shoot, and we survived a typhoon that pummeled us with 80-knot gusts off the Philippine coast. We bombarded beaches to support amphibious assaults, served as escorts for aircraft carriers and fended off kamikaze attacks. Over the next two years, we saw action off Tarawa, and in the Marshalls, the Carolines and the Philippines. The Alabama spent six months escorting convoys in the North Atlantic, and then - in August 1943 - went through the Panama Canal and headed for the central Pacific. Action in the North Atlantic - and the Pacific After four months of naval gunnery school in Newport, Rhode Island, I was assigned to a battleship, the USS Alabama (BB-60), as a gun-captain on a 40-mm anti-aircraft mount that had a crew of 24. I'd had a lot of experience with guns as a kid, so I applied for gunnery school and sea duty. It was valuable in its way, but I wanted to go into combat. He flew out from Washington and swore me in on Tuesday, 9 December.Īfter my basic training, the Navy made me a chief petty officer and assigned me as a physical training instructor. A commander, Gene was in charge of the Navy's physical training program.
I then phoned Gene Tunney, the former world heavyweight boxing champion and an old friend. I arrived in Chicago late that afternoon to meet Cy Slapnicka, the Indians' general manager who had come there to talk about my contract for 1942, and told him about my decision. I'd spent almost six full seasons in the major leagues by then, with a record of 107 victories and 54 losses, and I had a family-related draft exemption, but I knew right then that I had to answer the call.
0 kommentar(er)
