The Gas and Flame Men
Baseball and the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I
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- 29,99 €
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- 29,99 €
Descripción editorial
When the United States officially entered World War I in 1917, it was woefully underprepared for chemical warfare, in which the British, French, and Germans had been engaged since 1915. In response, the U.S. Army created an entirely new branch: the Chemical Warfare Service. The army turned to trained chemists and engineers to lead the charge—and called on an array of others, including baseball players, to fill out the ranks.
The Gas and Flame Men is the first full account of Major League ballplayers who served in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I. Four players, two club executives, and a manager served in the small and hastily formed branch, six of them as gas officers. Remarkably, five of the seven—Christy Mathewson, Branch Rickey, Ty Cobb, George Sisler, and Eppa “Jeptha” Rixey—are now enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. The son of a sixth Hall of Famer, player and manager Ned Hanlon, was a young officer killed in action in France with the First Gas Regiment. Prominent chemical soldiers also included veteran Major League catcher and future manager George “Gabby” Street and Boston Braves president and former Harvard football coach Percy D. Haughton.
The Gas and Flame Men explores how these famous baseball men, along with an eclectic mix of polo players, collegiate baseball and football stars, professors, architects, and prominent social figures all came together in the Chemical Warfare Service. Jim Leeke examines their service and its long-term effects on their physical and mental health—and on Major League Baseball and the world of sports. The Gas and Flame Men also addresses historical inaccuracies and misperceptions surrounding Christy Mathewson’s early death from tuberculosis in 1925, long attributed to wartime gas exposure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Leeke (The Best Team Over There) offers a meticulous and informative account of the Chemical Warfare Service, an army unit hastily formed when the U.S. entered WWI to catch up to the conflict's extensive reliance on new weapons like flamethrowers and poison gas. Conscripting chemists and engineers to design the weapons, the government also widely advertised the need for men of daring to serve as the unit's foot soldiers. This recruitment effort (in what was most likely an intentional effort to spruce up chemical warfare's negative image) drew in a handful of prominent athletes, including Major League Baseball players Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, and Branch Rickey. With a strong focus on the backstories and careers of the Major Leaguers, Leeke follows the unit through a period of research and development at American University in Washington, D.C.—where weapons were tested on animals, some of them reportedly kidnapped local pets—and their deployment in France, where the soldiers laboriously and stealthily carried heavy projectors and mortars close enough to German lines to launch cannisters of gas into their trenches. While the narrative is somewhat waylaid by an unpersuasive closing argument that Mathewson's death from tuberculosis was not connected to gas exposure, the end result is nonetheless an enjoyable and distinctive blend of war story and sports chronicle. It will appeal especially to baseball history buffs.
