Free 56: Joe DiMaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports by Kostya Kennedy

of blackened debris.
    To many Americans this news, and the photographs of the wreckage, was somehow more galling than even the tragic raids that had earlier leveled scores of London’s small storefronts, put craters in Charing Cross, wiped out hospitals and sent up in flames the factories, railway lines and slums of London’s benighted East End. In the view of a late-May editorial in New York’s Journal American , these latest bombings widened the fight: “Long since, Westminster ceased to be a part of London and became a symbol beloved by all the world.”
    The Allies, which in effect meant Great Britain, battled gamely. Its Navy had just sunk the Bismarck , one of Germany’s most lethal ships. The British Army was making gains in Baghdad, having overturned a pro-Nazi coup that had seized control of Iraq. The slender silver lining in that most recent raid on London was that the German bombers had then been shot down. But these were small victories that scarcely stanched the relentless onslaught of the Nazis, the Italians, the Japanese. Germany had an iron grip on the continent, was staging the ground for an attack on Russia and was taking territory at every instance. Now German paratroopers were alighting with clear intentions on the shores of Crete. It had become evident that the Allies were not going to be able to sustain the fight without America’s help.
    Nor was the U.S. standing idly by. America’s cloak of neutrality, publicly donned in 1939 two days after Britain (and Australia) had declared war on Germany and less than 12 months after the last of the New Deal programs had gone into effect, had since been plainly shucked off. If there was concern over what the U.S. government could reasonably afford, having been tapped by the years of assistance spending during the Depression, any reluctance was gradually being overwhelmed by fear of what the country stood to lose. In March of 1941 President Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, an agreement by which the U.S. would send war materials to the Allies in exchange for the lease of military bases in the West Indies, Newfoundland and elsewhere. Already 50 of the U.S.’s largest naval destroyers had been dispatched to aid Britain and Canada. Roosevelt had then gotten workers at tool factories and defense plants across the nation to agree to keep operations active seven days a week and around the clock, hoping to ensure that military supplies would be delivered at a rate nearer to meeting the demand.
    Even with the war’s engagements far from home soil, the U.S. Army began playing what it billed as war games crucial to the nation’s safety. Foot soldiers had been scattered along the coast of New Jersey to prepare in case of an unexpected attack. The government had twice ordered trial blackouts: for 15 minutes one night in Newark—lights out in the Vittorio Castle—and on another night for several hours across Oahu and the whole of the Hawaiian Islands. In late May, some 700 miles from a British port on the coast of Sierra Leone, the Nazis sank a U.S. merchant ship.
    Major league baseball players knew that a rifle might soon replace the bat in their hands. Greenberg and Hugh Mulcahy had been called to service and other players appeared on the verge, those who were unmarried and classified as I-A by their draft board. The All-Star quality outfielder Buddy Lewis and the .381-hitting shortstop Cecil Travis were among them, both players integral to the Washington Senators who, on the afternoon of May 27, were hosting the Yankees at Griffith Stadium.
    It was here in Washington six weeks earlier that the 1941 season had begun for DiMaggio and the Yanks, an Opening Day memorable not for New York’s 3–0 win but for the presence of the popular Roosevelt. He was determined, he’d said, to keep baseball going through the war and, with a happy overhand toss from his box behind home plate, threw out the season’s ceremonial first pitch. Senators owner Clark Griffith had