Re: Baseball players in Wartime Britain
Dave Postles (pot@leicester.ac.uk)
Thu, 9 Mar 1995 15:48:28 +0000
The book by David Reynolds, _Rich Relations_, is outstanding, and well worth
reading by anyone interested in Anglo-American relations. However, it
says little about baseball in the Second World War. On Whitsun
Bank Holiday 1944 several thousand British watched two teams form the 82nd
Airborne play in Nottingham. The following day twenty thousand went to
the test match at Lords.
The Yanks never picked up a taste for cricket. There was a famous Giles
cartoon of a group of bored GI's surrounded by MPs sitting in the stands at
Lords. A Colonel Blimp figure says "glad to see you chaps have at last
developed an appreciation for the game."
"Heck, No," replies one of the Yanks, "We're here on punishment detail"
Charles Carlton,
N.C. State.
chchi@unity.ncsu.edu