This is an outstanding article in The Athletic about college football during World War II. What I found most interesting is the purposeful link between war and football. Many used football to "toughen up" the boys knowing they would be needed for war.
When the world went to war, college football adapted to play its own role
By Michael Weinreb May 6, 2019
25
Throughout the offseason, The Athletic is celebrating the 150th anniversary of college football, one decade at a time. For more on the 1940s, read Matt Brown on the decade’s best players, teams, games and coaches.
On a late November afternoon in 1941, Army and Navy played a football game at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium. This was not unusual, as the Army-Navy game had taken place at the end of nearly every college football season since 1890. Yet this particular meeting felt, to all involved, like the culmination of an era. War was looming overseas; it appeared to be only a matter of time before it came home.
The attendance for the Army-Navy game was upward of 100,000, with a waiting list of several thousand more who watched in pay-per-view spots located throughout the city. The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, showed up to watch Navy’s 14-6 victory, along with virtually all of her husband’s cabinet members (Franklin Roosevelt himself was en route to his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.) “There probably never was a time when interest in the game was greater than it is today,” wrote one Philadelphia newspaper, “the international situation being as it is.”
Eight days later, on Dec. 7, 1941, the 28 members of the Willamette University football team woke up at a hotel in Honolulu. The day before, after a protracted journey by train and luxury liner from Salem, Oregon, they had lost a game to the University of Hawaii, 20-6. They were preparing for a day of sightseeing and a picnic when they saw fighter planes dodging bursts of smoke in the sky and saw what looked like splashing in the water. A waiter at the hotel told them it was “whale spouts”; it wasn’t until they turned on the radio that they realized that roughly a dozen miles from where they stood, at a naval base called Pearl Harbor, the World War the nation had been girding for was officially underway.
Some 5,000 miles to the east, as the Navy football team attended a banquet, the superintendent of the Naval Academy, Rear Admiral Russell Wilson, shut the door to the ballroom and declared, “Gentlemen, we are at war. Return to your quarters.”
The next morning, the Willamette football players gathered outside the hotel, were handed loaded rifles and were assigned to guard a nearby ammunitions depot. Some of them had never handled a weapon in their life. But everything was different now. A few weeks later, as the college football season wound to its end, the Rose Bowl was played in Durham, North Carolina, to keep it out of harm’s way from Japanese bombers. And in the months and years to come, the national mission would become entwined with the ethos of college football in ways it hadn’t been before, and hasn’t been since.
The first question to be addressed was whether a nation at war should be playing football at all.
Diversions were good, President Roosevelt declared; people on the home front needed to keep their morale up. But for college football in particular, something else was at work. This was a sport that, from the days of Walter Camp, had long been associated with metaphors about war. Its popularity had grown in the aftermath of the Civil War expressly because it was viewed as a way to keep men of a civilized society from growing soft. Baseball may have been the national pastime, but in the wake of Pearl Harbor, football felt, to many, less like a sport and more like an imperative for nation that, before the war, once again felt that its youth had grown complacent.
“Democracy makes us a pacific people,” Chicago Cardinals coach Jimmy Conzelman. “The young man must be toughened not only physically but mentally. He must be accustomed to violence.”
So amid these aberrant circumstances, college football went on. But for the next few years, its firmament would be fundamentally overturned. Out of necessity, the rules were altered in ways that are the norm now. Freshmen were permitted to play with the varsity, and substitution rules were changed so that players could return to a game freely after being removed, facilitating what became known as “two-platoon football.”
Even then, a number of colleges couldn’t sustain their numbers. The manpower drain was simply too severe: By 1943, hundreds of colleges, many of them fielding rosters full of 16-year-olds (or in the case of Utah State, a 35-year-old offensive lineman), had abandoned the sport. Others opted to play six-man football. Some powerhouses, like Fordham, dropped out and never recovered to the same level.
At the same time, military leaders began to emphasize the purported link between college football and military preparation. A Navy commander named Thomas J. Hamilton, according to author Wilbur D. Jones, even turned it into a chant: Football! Navy! War! And this spiritual link between football and war, whether real or apocryphal, would prove the salvation of the sport.
By the fall of 1942, the realities of the war had sunk in: More than 50 colleges dropped football that year alone, and due to gas rationing and other transportation issues, attendance dropped 19 percent. But at the same time, the Navy knew it needed junior officers to man ships and planes and lead infantry platoons. This led to the establishment of the “V” programs designed to offer a college education to those officers. Several pre-flight schools had been established, and a number of high-profile coaches were hired to handle physical conditioning at those schools. This was the express purpose of these programs; the secondary purpose was that they wound up sustaining college football.
At Iowa Pre-Flight, former Minnesota coach Bernie Bierman, who had forged a dynasty in the previous decade, required every cadet to participate in football training “climaxed by a full scrimmage session,” wrote Sports Illustrated. From those sessions, he put together a team that defeated a handful of Big Ten teams in 1942. In Georgia and North Carolina, pre-flight teams defeated ranked college programs like Alabama and William & Mary. But it wasn’t just those military programs that benefitted. At dozens of other colleges, training programs were established, and trainees played on varsity football teams. And this led to the wildest golden era in the history of college sports.
In his book “Football! Navy! War!” Jones refers to those college trainees as “lend-lease” officers. It’s a fitting term, as these trainees were often leased from moment to moment, depending on where their military orders took them. A Duke player transferred to North Carolina just in time to play against his former team; a Minnesota fullback named Bill Daley transferred to Michigan’s V-12 team in 1943, thereby becoming the first player to compete on opposite sides for the Little Brown Jug in consecutive years. And then there was Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, the future NFL Hall of Fame halfback who played football at Wisconsin in 1941 and 1942, transferred to Michigan in 1943 and helped the Wolverines defeat Wisconsin, and then played for a pair of military-base teams in 1944 and 1945.
In 1943, generally considered the nadir for wartime football, more than 200 colleges dropped their football teams. Penn State lost 24 varsity players over the course of a single season. Entire conferences, like the SEC, were essentially wiped out. In the Big Ten, the teams with military training programs — Michigan, Purdue and Northwestern among them — largely overwhelmed the remainder of the conference (though Ohio State, devoid of military trainees, somehow managed to rebound and finish 9-0 in 1944 behind Heisman winner Les Horvath).
The balance of power in the sport reached peak weirdness in these years. In 1943, four military teams in addition to Army and Navy finished in the AP top 10, including Iowa Pre-Flight, which went 9-1 and lost to No. 1 Notre Dame (which had its own Naval training center on campus) on the road by a single point. The following week, Notre Dame suffered its only loss, to a team from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station (whose team would be coached by a former Ohio State coach and newly commissioned lieutenant, Paul Brown, in 1944).
And then there were the programs at Army and Navy, which both thrived in the midst of the war. In 1943, Navy went 8-1, with only a single loss to Notre Dame. The next year, in 1944, Army — led by halfback Glenn Davis and fullback Doc Blanchard — went 9-0, blew out Notre Dame 59-0 and outscored its opponents by a combined score of 504-35 in the first of back-to-back undefeated national championship seasons. By then, college football had begun a slow rebound, as the war turned in the Allies’ favor. In the fall of 1945, as the war ended, attendance increased, and football emerged into a new era dominated by a fad offense known as the T-formation.
The last of the great military football contests occurred that fall, when a pair of a California-based teams, El Toro and Fleet City, met before 60,000 fans in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. By then, it had become clear: In the minds of many of America’s leaders, war and football had developed a near-inextricable symbiosis. “The closest thing to war in times of peace is football,” said former Navy athletic director Jonas H. Ingram.
The truth was far more complicated. As Columbia football coach Lou Little noted, the Russians, Chinese and British — all American allies in World War II — didn’t play football, and they acquitted themselves just fine. But mere association with the cause had already changed football; it had bred a new generation of coaches who, in coaching those V-program teams, adopted a style that dovetailed with military training techniques.
College football, wrote author Kurt Edward Kemper, had been imbued by military elites “with a high-minded ideological justification,” and as war gave way to peace, it was poised for yet another boom.
(Top photo from the 1941 Army-Navy game: Getty Images)
When the world went to war, college football adapted to play its own role
By Michael Weinreb May 6, 2019
Throughout the offseason, The Athletic is celebrating the 150th anniversary of college football, one decade at a time. For more on the 1940s, read Matt Brown on the decade’s best players, teams, games and coaches.
On a late November afternoon in 1941, Army and Navy played a football game at Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium. This was not unusual, as the Army-Navy game had taken place at the end of nearly every college football season since 1890. Yet this particular meeting felt, to all involved, like the culmination of an era. War was looming overseas; it appeared to be only a matter of time before it came home.
The attendance for the Army-Navy game was upward of 100,000, with a waiting list of several thousand more who watched in pay-per-view spots located throughout the city. The first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, showed up to watch Navy’s 14-6 victory, along with virtually all of her husband’s cabinet members (Franklin Roosevelt himself was en route to his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.) “There probably never was a time when interest in the game was greater than it is today,” wrote one Philadelphia newspaper, “the international situation being as it is.”
Eight days later, on Dec. 7, 1941, the 28 members of the Willamette University football team woke up at a hotel in Honolulu. The day before, after a protracted journey by train and luxury liner from Salem, Oregon, they had lost a game to the University of Hawaii, 20-6. They were preparing for a day of sightseeing and a picnic when they saw fighter planes dodging bursts of smoke in the sky and saw what looked like splashing in the water. A waiter at the hotel told them it was “whale spouts”; it wasn’t until they turned on the radio that they realized that roughly a dozen miles from where they stood, at a naval base called Pearl Harbor, the World War the nation had been girding for was officially underway.
Some 5,000 miles to the east, as the Navy football team attended a banquet, the superintendent of the Naval Academy, Rear Admiral Russell Wilson, shut the door to the ballroom and declared, “Gentlemen, we are at war. Return to your quarters.”
The next morning, the Willamette football players gathered outside the hotel, were handed loaded rifles and were assigned to guard a nearby ammunitions depot. Some of them had never handled a weapon in their life. But everything was different now. A few weeks later, as the college football season wound to its end, the Rose Bowl was played in Durham, North Carolina, to keep it out of harm’s way from Japanese bombers. And in the months and years to come, the national mission would become entwined with the ethos of college football in ways it hadn’t been before, and hasn’t been since.
The first question to be addressed was whether a nation at war should be playing football at all.
Diversions were good, President Roosevelt declared; people on the home front needed to keep their morale up. But for college football in particular, something else was at work. This was a sport that, from the days of Walter Camp, had long been associated with metaphors about war. Its popularity had grown in the aftermath of the Civil War expressly because it was viewed as a way to keep men of a civilized society from growing soft. Baseball may have been the national pastime, but in the wake of Pearl Harbor, football felt, to many, less like a sport and more like an imperative for nation that, before the war, once again felt that its youth had grown complacent.
“Democracy makes us a pacific people,” Chicago Cardinals coach Jimmy Conzelman. “The young man must be toughened not only physically but mentally. He must be accustomed to violence.”
So amid these aberrant circumstances, college football went on. But for the next few years, its firmament would be fundamentally overturned. Out of necessity, the rules were altered in ways that are the norm now. Freshmen were permitted to play with the varsity, and substitution rules were changed so that players could return to a game freely after being removed, facilitating what became known as “two-platoon football.”
Even then, a number of colleges couldn’t sustain their numbers. The manpower drain was simply too severe: By 1943, hundreds of colleges, many of them fielding rosters full of 16-year-olds (or in the case of Utah State, a 35-year-old offensive lineman), had abandoned the sport. Others opted to play six-man football. Some powerhouses, like Fordham, dropped out and never recovered to the same level.
At the same time, military leaders began to emphasize the purported link between college football and military preparation. A Navy commander named Thomas J. Hamilton, according to author Wilbur D. Jones, even turned it into a chant: Football! Navy! War! And this spiritual link between football and war, whether real or apocryphal, would prove the salvation of the sport.
By the fall of 1942, the realities of the war had sunk in: More than 50 colleges dropped football that year alone, and due to gas rationing and other transportation issues, attendance dropped 19 percent. But at the same time, the Navy knew it needed junior officers to man ships and planes and lead infantry platoons. This led to the establishment of the “V” programs designed to offer a college education to those officers. Several pre-flight schools had been established, and a number of high-profile coaches were hired to handle physical conditioning at those schools. This was the express purpose of these programs; the secondary purpose was that they wound up sustaining college football.
At Iowa Pre-Flight, former Minnesota coach Bernie Bierman, who had forged a dynasty in the previous decade, required every cadet to participate in football training “climaxed by a full scrimmage session,” wrote Sports Illustrated. From those sessions, he put together a team that defeated a handful of Big Ten teams in 1942. In Georgia and North Carolina, pre-flight teams defeated ranked college programs like Alabama and William & Mary. But it wasn’t just those military programs that benefitted. At dozens of other colleges, training programs were established, and trainees played on varsity football teams. And this led to the wildest golden era in the history of college sports.
In his book “Football! Navy! War!” Jones refers to those college trainees as “lend-lease” officers. It’s a fitting term, as these trainees were often leased from moment to moment, depending on where their military orders took them. A Duke player transferred to North Carolina just in time to play against his former team; a Minnesota fullback named Bill Daley transferred to Michigan’s V-12 team in 1943, thereby becoming the first player to compete on opposite sides for the Little Brown Jug in consecutive years. And then there was Elroy “Crazy Legs” Hirsch, the future NFL Hall of Fame halfback who played football at Wisconsin in 1941 and 1942, transferred to Michigan in 1943 and helped the Wolverines defeat Wisconsin, and then played for a pair of military-base teams in 1944 and 1945.
In 1943, generally considered the nadir for wartime football, more than 200 colleges dropped their football teams. Penn State lost 24 varsity players over the course of a single season. Entire conferences, like the SEC, were essentially wiped out. In the Big Ten, the teams with military training programs — Michigan, Purdue and Northwestern among them — largely overwhelmed the remainder of the conference (though Ohio State, devoid of military trainees, somehow managed to rebound and finish 9-0 in 1944 behind Heisman winner Les Horvath).
The balance of power in the sport reached peak weirdness in these years. In 1943, four military teams in addition to Army and Navy finished in the AP top 10, including Iowa Pre-Flight, which went 9-1 and lost to No. 1 Notre Dame (which had its own Naval training center on campus) on the road by a single point. The following week, Notre Dame suffered its only loss, to a team from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station (whose team would be coached by a former Ohio State coach and newly commissioned lieutenant, Paul Brown, in 1944).
And then there were the programs at Army and Navy, which both thrived in the midst of the war. In 1943, Navy went 8-1, with only a single loss to Notre Dame. The next year, in 1944, Army — led by halfback Glenn Davis and fullback Doc Blanchard — went 9-0, blew out Notre Dame 59-0 and outscored its opponents by a combined score of 504-35 in the first of back-to-back undefeated national championship seasons. By then, college football had begun a slow rebound, as the war turned in the Allies’ favor. In the fall of 1945, as the war ended, attendance increased, and football emerged into a new era dominated by a fad offense known as the T-formation.
The last of the great military football contests occurred that fall, when a pair of a California-based teams, El Toro and Fleet City, met before 60,000 fans in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. By then, it had become clear: In the minds of many of America’s leaders, war and football had developed a near-inextricable symbiosis. “The closest thing to war in times of peace is football,” said former Navy athletic director Jonas H. Ingram.
The truth was far more complicated. As Columbia football coach Lou Little noted, the Russians, Chinese and British — all American allies in World War II — didn’t play football, and they acquitted themselves just fine. But mere association with the cause had already changed football; it had bred a new generation of coaches who, in coaching those V-program teams, adopted a style that dovetailed with military training techniques.
College football, wrote author Kurt Edward Kemper, had been imbued by military elites “with a high-minded ideological justification,” and as war gave way to peace, it was poised for yet another boom.
(Top photo from the 1941 Army-Navy game: Getty Images)
