He long ago passed from distinguished professional athlete to cultural icon. You don’t have to be a baseball fan to know a little bit about Yogi Berra. Never saw the former Yankees great swing a bat? Don’t remember that he was a three-time American League Most Valuable Player, a 10-time World Series champion, a player Bill James rates as the greatest catcher of all time? That he led two different teams to the World Series as a manager? Doesn’t really matter. You know he’s an archetype – the wise catcher dispensing memorable advice through unorthodox grammar. “It ‘aint over ‘til it’s over” translates well beyond the sports world.
But before he became a baseball legend, Berra was just a 19-year-old kid on a Landing Craft Support Small (LCSS) rocket boat. Berra’s boat, with just six crewmen and one officer, took part in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. A 36-foot craft with six machine guns and 12 rockets, its task was to support the troops landing on the beaches. Many of those boats went in ahead of the initial landing waves.
“It was like Fourth of July to see all them planes and ships on Normandy, my gosh. You couldn’t see anything,” Berra said. “I stood up on the deck of our boat, looked up and my officer tells me ‘You better get your head down here before it gets blown off.’ I said ‘I like it up here.’ He said ‘You better get down here [or] you wont have it. You wont look at anything.’ Being a kid, ‘What the heck,’ I said. ‘Nothing can kill me.’ I found out later on.”
One of four panelists at Nationals Park earlier this month for a 90-minute panel discussion hosted in conjunction with the American Veterans Center and the Washington Nationals, Berra spoke before an audience of about 500 in the PNC Diamond Club. Examiner columnist Phil Wood served as moderator.
Berra told of having orders to shoot down any plane that dropped below the clouds. The Luftwaffe wasn’t the force it had been in the early years of World War II, but planners certainly felt it posed a threat to the D-Day invasion. Instead, one of the rocket boats shot down an American pilot by accident and Berra’s crew motored over to pick him out of the water.
“We were the closest to him. I’ve never heard a man cuss so much in my life,” Berra said. “He said ‘Damn you guys, if you shoot down as many [German] planes as you shoot ours down, boy the war would have been over a long time ago.’ He was an officer and we got him out of the plane. But he was mad as heck.”
Berra later took part in landings in southern France. Before that his unit was stationed in Italy, where he got permission to visit his extended family near Rome – Berra’s father was born in Italy. But there was a condition: Get back in time or face the consequences. Berra’s unit was scheduled any day to sail for Africa, where preparations for the landings in southern France would begin. He improbably hooked up with a jeep driver who also grew up in The Hill – Berra’s home neighborhood in St. Louis – and got a ride. He met his extended family and arrived back in time.
Berra spent part of his time in the military doing what he did best – playing baseball. The Navy sent him to a submarine base in New London, Conn. where Tim Gleason – an old Cincinnati Reds outfielder – was a lieutenant commander and had started a base baseball team. Gleason initially thought the stout, 5-foot-7 Berra was a boxer. He let the future Hall-of-Famer play anyway – though it wasn’t until Berra crushed a pinch-hit homer in a game that he earned a full-time spot. ‘You’re the catcher from now on,’ Gleason said. And that helped Berra, who earned the chance to play exhibition games against big-league clubs like the Giants, Senators and Browns.
“And that was like Triple-A for me. That helped me a lot,” Berra said. “I hit up there and then I went to [Triple-A] Newark when I came out [of the service] and played half a year there before I got up to the big leagues. I was only 22 then.”
Even at 85, Berra watches as many baseball games as he can on television during the summer, sometimes three in a day. He’s an all-around sports fan, too, catching football games. Berra said he even played soccer when he was growing up. He first heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor returning from a soccer game. Basketball was off limits, though. Kids who have to grow to get to 5-7 generally don’t see the appeal, Berra cracked. No, it was baseball that gave him a sense of purpose. And Berra always knew what the sport had saved him from.
“I still love baseball. That’s how I made my living,” Berra said. “But I had to go to work when I was a kid. I never went to high school. I only went to eighth grade. I had to go to work. I worked in a shoe factory. I worked in a Coca-Cola truck. I did everything. It was the depression time.”
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