Off the Diamond

In the months following the Pearl Harbor attacks, the United States military branches mobilized thousands and thousands of men for fighting on the land, sea and air. Before its new pilots could take to the air and begin learning how to fly their deadly machines, the different military branches knew they had to make sure they were in fighting shape, both mentally and physically. So at several different locations around the country they instituted their Pre-Flight Training schools to shape their recruits into fighters. Interestingly, sports competitions were part of the regiment of training in addition to survival and outdoor living skills.

Among those recruits were well-known athletes and celebrities, many of whom took to that part of their training well. The curious coincidence led to "all-star" teams of athletes playing against each other for morale-boosting public relations events as well as meeting training goals. The Chapel Hill Pre-Flight Training School hosted, among others, Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky and employed a local youngster named Jimmy Raugh as a ball boy. Raugh's daughter, writer Anne R. Keene, discovered a trunk full of Pre-Flight School memorabilia following his death and it launched her on a mission to tell the nearly forgotten tale of teams like the one on which Williams himself played, the Cloudbuster Nine.

Keene weaves parts of her own story with her father into the pair of stories about how Pre-Flight was developed and planned, and how Williams and his class went through the training regimen. It jars the flow on a couple of occasions. Since the mystery of why her father quit baseball as a young man and why that choice caused him such misery is at the core of this part of the memoir, wanting to know how it will wind up distracts from the other storylines. Keene was able to interview some surviving members of the school to learn how it affected their lives, and uses those stories in line with the way Williams used the knowledge of physics and aeronautics he gained during the training to improve his hitting when the war ended.

Some might wish that Keene had stuck to one narrative frame or another -- her father's story, the history of how Pre-Flight was developed or Williams' own time in the program. Realistically, though no one of the three offers more than a long magazine article's worth of material and after so long it may not be possible to recover enough information to fill a whole book. If another attic somewhere houses a trunk of dusty records of one or another of the Pre-Flight schools, then Keene's book will be an excellent foundation on which to build a fuller picture of this fascinating corner of the story of World War II.

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The memorabilia cases of a spy agency are intentionally cryptic, displaying items that will almost certainly have far more back story buried in classified files. One case in the Office of Strategic Services section of the Central Intelligence Agency museum displays two baseball cards, those for a journeyman catcher for five major-league and two minor-league teams during the 1930s named Moe Berg.

In addition to his rather undistinguished baseball career, Berg worked for the OSS -- the CIA's predecessor agency -- during World War II, playing a role in identifying some potential resistance groups in Axis-controlled territory and assessing how far along Germany's atomic weapons program had advanced. After starting college at New York University, he finished his undergraduate studies at Princeton and later earned a law degree from Columbia University.

The usual gloss on Berg's life hits these high points, but writer Nicholas Dawidoff's 1994 debut biography The Catcher Was a Spy digs deeper. He seemed to have a gift for picking up languages, which led him to be included on some off-season baseball tours of Japan. Filming the trip for the MovieTone news company gave him access to areas that more official agencies didn't have, and military planners later used some of his footage in outlining bombing runs and strategic capabilities of Japanese defense forces.

Dawidoff outlines Berg's relatively successful missions for the OSS during WWII, as well as a much less successful stint with the successor CIA in the Cold War period. More than most other sketches of Berg's life, he also unreels the former spy's semi-nomadic later years, spent living with family and friends and supported largely by the kindness of friends. Some of these later sections sag, as similar events reoccur, only with different people. Berg's eccentricities grew with time, to the point that some people were uncomfortable with him and his brother threw him out of his house. Through interviews with people remembering their time with Berg, Dawidoff shows how Berg's calculated and crafted persona became so deeply rooted in him that he sometimes wondered if anything about him or about others was real or faked.

There's the quick-hit profile of Moe Berg, the intellectual ballplayer with Princeton diploma and a law degree, who undertook secret missions for his country during the years of WWII. And there's the more layered picture of a man who shaped himself to what others expected of him in order to get what he wanted. Dawidoff shows both. Even though there's not a lot more to learn, The Catcher Was a Spy offers enough to peek behind the public projection of a man who might have been a secret even to himself.