Last week, Payday presented at the Baseball Hall of Fame an article entitled "The 1945 GI World Series in Hitler's Nuremberg Stadium: Baseball's 'Double Victory' Against Segregation at Home and Abroad".
The article focused in two future Hall of Famers Leon Day and Willard Brown, who played extensively in the Negro Leagues. Here is an excerpt:
On D-Day, as Yogi Berra manned a machine gun on a boat off of Utah Beach, Willard Brown landed in the third wave with a quartermasters unit under enemy fire.
Six days after D-Day, Leon Day would land on Omaha Beach.
Day was part of the 818th Amphibious Battalion and drove a DUKW amphibious vehicle (known as ducks) that carried supplies from boats to land - a dangerous occupation. The night that he landed, the Luftwaffe strafed and bombed Omaha Beach.
“I’ll never forget June 12. I lost a lot of good friends,” Day told the Baltimore Sun in 1992.
Even as Day faced enemy fire from Germans on Omaha Beach for several weeks, he still faced mistreatment from white soldiers.
“I remember one night when I came out of the water with a load of ammunition and the Germans started dropping flares and lit the beach up so bright that you could have read a newspaper,” Day recounted to author James Riley for his 1987 book Dandy, Day, and the Devil.
“I heard the planes coming. So I jumped out of the duck and ran up the bank,” Day recounted to Riley. “An MP had a hole there, a sandbagged place. I couldn’t see him, but he said, ‘Soldier!’ I said, ‘Yeah?’ He said, ‘Come on in here.’”
“So I went in his hole and I got in there and we were trembling and the planes coming, strafing everything and shooting everything up on the beach. He said, ‘Who’s driving that duck out there?’ I said, ‘I am.’ He said, ‘What has it got on it?’ I said, ‘Ammunition.’
He said, ‘Move that duck out in front of this hole!’ I said, ‘Go out there and move it your own damn self!’”
Go read the full story "The 1945 GI World Series in Hitler's Nuremberg Stadium: Baseball's 'Double Victory' Against Segregation at Home and Abroad".
