Fooled Yuh
Before the 75th anniversary of D-Day begins to feel too much like ancient history, I wanted to mention a baseball game that may have played a small but important role in making that historic day successful. It was first described by Englishman Gary Bedingfield, author of “Baseball in Wartime”and “Baseball’s Greatest Sacrifice,” a website dedicated to players who served in WWII, as well as other conflicts.
The game took place on Sunday, May 28, 1944 in Meadow Lane soccer stadium in Nottingham and featured the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) Red Devils against the 505th PIR Panthers.
The Red Devils had been champs at Camp Mackall, North Carolina a year earlier and this was the first chance to play ball in nine months. “We had no uniforms,” recalled Bud Warnecke. “We had to wear remnants of military clothing and jump boots, so we didn’t look much like a ball team.”
The game was played before an enthusiastic crowd of 7,000, but it wasn’t much of a contest. The Red Devils walloped the Panthers 18–0. “I think most of the spectators enjoyed the game,” said one player, “but it must have been hard for them to make sense of it all.”
“I certainly enjoyed myself,” added Warnecke, “but little did I know that eight days later we would jump into Normandy.”
The big question — the one that still hangs — is why the game was staged in the first place. According to Bedingfield, the “official” story was that the Nottingham Anglo-American Committee had asked the Americans to stage a sporting event because the people of the city were desperate for some entertainment, something they’d not had since the war began.
However, because the game was arranged by Brigadier General James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, many believe it was designed to fool the Germans. If American paratroopers were playing baseball in England, how could an invasion be imminent?
At least that’s what the Allies hoped the Germans would think. To reinforce that, photographs were taken of each player and sent back to their hometown newspapers.
But the most convincing reason the contest was staged to hoodwink the Germans was the conspicuous absence of paratroopers in the stands. Only officers and players were on hand.
As the crowd cheered each crack of the bat, the rest of the regiment made a 40-mile journey to a local airfield where runways were packed with C-47 transport planes adorned with black and white stripes, fittingly the same as on the jerseys of the Nottingham soccer team who loaned its field for the baseball game. The baseball players would soon follow, and for some of them, it would be the last game they would ever play.
