WWII vet and former baseball player speaks of D-Day one last time
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Xuan Thai, ESPN Senior Writer
WITH A ROPE tied around his waist and bullets whizzing past, Jack Hamlin jumped from his Coast Guard cutter and into the frigid waters just off the coast of Normandy. His job on June 6, 1944: to rescue wounded Allied troops before they drowned or bled out. He still remembers the orders from that day.
“‘We don’t want the dead ones. Just the ones we can save,'” Hamlin says his commanders told him. They could recover the bodies later.
Just hours earlier, under the cover of darkness, Hamlin and his crew had set sail from Poole, England, and crossed the English Channel toward their assignment at Omaha Beach. They had no inkling of the magnitude of death and devastation that would unfold. Omaha would become the bloodiest of the five Allied landing zones on D-Day, one of the largest military assaults in history and a pivot point in World War II.
“Can you just imagine 5,000 ships going to the five beaches?” he says. “I was scared. I was scared to death.”
Hamlin was just 22 and thousands of miles from his home in Springfield, Mo., and a budding career as a minor league infielder with dreams of playing Major League Baseball.
Today, eight decades later, Hamlin is 102 and spending his days in an assisted-living center in Springfield, where he was born and raised. He is one of hundreds, or maybe thousands, of D-Day veterans still alive — there are no official records, and the youngest would be well into their 90s. Historians say he is possibly the last surviving professional athlete to have served at Normandy.
On a gray and dreary morning, he sits with a reporter in his living room, perched on a couch in pressed khakis and a checkered button-down shirt. His oldest daughter, Jacqueline, sits in a corner. Hamlin is feeling unusually weary on this day, after a weekend visit to an urgent care center, but after a nurse checks in and they banter back and forth, the twinkle returns to Hamlin’s eyes.
He’s ready for what Jacqueline later reveals will be the last interview he ever wants to give on this subject, about what he saw that day 80 years ago and about the baseball career he gave up while serving others.
FAMILY LORE HAS it that Hamlin’s grandfather, one in a long line of Hamlin lawyers, once threw an inkwell fast and hard at a judge’s head after an unfavorable ruling. The bottle missed, but Hamlin muses that the moment foreshadowed his passion for baseball.
Born on Oct. 15, 1921, Hamlin was raised in the age of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio. While he played basketball and football growing up, it was baseball that was his passion, and he dreamed of the big leagues.
The opportunity of a lifetime came as he was mowing his front yard in the summer of 1939, just after high school graduation. A scout for the Joplin Miners drove up and said the team’s second baseman was hurt. Hamlin’s coach had mentioned him as a possible replacement.
He told the scout he was all-in, just as soon as he asked his mother. With her permission, Hamlin signed a three-day contract with the Miners, then in the Class C Western Association and part of the New York Yankees’ farm system. The Miners, also affiliated with the St. Louis Browns and Boston Red Sox over the decades, produced scores of major leaguers, including Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle and manager Whitey Herzog.
According to the local Springfield, Mo., history museum and various news accounts, Hamlin signed three, three-day contracts with the Miners. (The Yankees were unable to confirm Hamlin’s stint with the team, as they do not maintain extensive records from that era.)
But shortly after joining the Miners, Hamlin was diagnosed with Rheumatic fever, a common infection at the time that could cause inflammation of tissues and organs. Hamlin spent two months in the hospital and left with an enlarged heart.
After he recovered, and not wanting to give up on his big league aspirations, Hamlin tried out for the Ban Johnson league based in Manhattan, Kan., an amateur baseball system that many players successfully used as a springboard to the majors, Stuart Goldman, author of the book “Diamond Connections,” a history of the Kansas City Ban Johnson league, says.
Hamlin made the Ban Johnson team as a second baseman and shortstop. But he played in just the 1941 season, as the United States would soon be drawn into World War II. Hamlin’s baseball dreams would have to wait.
ON DEC. 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, and Hamlin was among the many young Americans who immediately felt compelled to enlist. He says he first tried to join the Navy with his high school friend Bob Barker — yes, the Bob Barker, of eventual game show “The Price is Right” fame, who went to high school and college in Springfield. “We used to double date,” Hamlin says of their friendship.
Barker eventually became a Naval aviator (though never saw combat), but Hamlin was rejected because his enlarged heart from Rheumatic fever rendered him ineligible to serve. He was then rejected by the Marine Corps, which he tried to join alongside four of his friends — all of whom were accepted.
“All four ended up on Iwo Jima,” Hamlin says. “Three of them came back, and one was killed.”
Finally, one of Hamlin’s baseball teammates joined the Coast Guard and suggested he try the same.
“I hate to say it, but I really don’t ever remember taking a physical examination,” Hamlin says. He enlisted in February 1942, when he was 20 years old, becoming one of the 16.4 million Americans who would serve during the war.
Hamlin was first stationed stateside and didn’t think he would see any wartime action. Then in spring 1944, his unit was quickly and quietly sent to the United Kingdom — a last-minute decision by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the lead up to D-Day.
Stationed in Poole, England for weeks, Hamlin says initially he and his crew didn’t know why they were moved overseas. Finally, they received their orders shortly before the attack.
Just after midnight on June 6, approximately 160,000 troops attacked across five beaches — code names Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword — down a stretch of about 50 miles in northwest France. More were positioned on ships or aloft in warplanes for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy.
Almost from the start, however, the operation did not go according to plan. Initial naval and air bombardments missed their targets. German positions — grossly underestimated by military intelligence — held strong on steep, high bluffs, especially on Omaha Beach. Cloud cover made it difficult for paratroopers to land on target, and many were shot out of the sky or drowned once they landed in marshes. Others drowned while trying to swim from landing craft to the shore, weighed down by heavy equipment, says Jeremy Collins, a historian with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
Those that made it to the beach — many weakened by swimming — dodged landmines and were pinned down by German machine-gun fire. Amphibious tanks that did advance to shore were quickly destroyed.
At one point during the invasion, the U.S. general who led the operations on Omaha — which saw more than a quarter of the over 9,000 total Allied casualties that day, the most of any beach — considered abandoning operations, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Hamlin’s unit was positioned a couple miles off the coast of Omaha as part of Rescue Flotilla One. The fleet was comprised of 60 cutters spread out among the five beaches and nicknamed the Matchbox Fleet because the boats, 83 feet long, were made mostly of wood and operated gasoline-powered engines. A single hit could light up a cutter instantly. The unit was responsible for rescuing military personnel stranded in the water during the amphibious landing. Twice, Hamlin and his cutter motored to the shoreline to pull out any survivors they could find.
“I was a good swimmer, and I had a line tied around me,” he says. “There was no chance that they could lose me. But the idea that bullets all around you being shot, you don’t know what’s in the water or what you run into. You didn’t think about it then, but you do now.”
At the time, water rescue operations were fairly basic. Rescue swimmers tied one end of a rope around their waist, while the crew who remained onboard held on to the other end, pulling in any survivors. He remembers swimming to men and searching for signs of life. He’d grab them, and if they moved, he’d know there was a chance to save them. The still bodies, many with missing limbs, or worse, were left behind to be retrieved later.
Rescue Flotilla One saved nearly 500 lives that day, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Hamlin and his crew were credited with pulling up to 70 wounded men to safety and shuttling them to the hospital ships 10 miles away.
For Hamlin, an even more harrowing experience came months later, on Christmas Eve in the French town of Cherbourg.
Hamlin and many of his crewmates had the night off, and he was on a date, when his unit was urgently called back to action. A German submarine had torpedoed the SS Léopoldville, a converted steamboat ship that carried 2,235 American servicemen in the English Channel. The ship was just 5.5 miles from Cherbourg when it was hit.
The rescue operation was a chaotic disaster. Poor communications, language barriers and “badly executed abandon ship procedures” delayed rescue efforts, according to the U.S. Navy. More than 750 U.S. soldiers died, some in the torpedo hit but others because their lifejackets broke their necks when they jumped into the water or from hypothermia awaiting rescue.
Hamlin chokes up reliving it eight decades later.
“Every time I tell the story, it gets me,” he says. “I was in the water. I had a line tied around me about 30 yards long. … There’s another boy in the water crying, ‘Help me! Help me! Help me, God!’ Well, I couldn’t reach him because that’s the line … The tide took him away from me and I couldn’t save him. That’s the only thing I regret.”
The rest of the memory is impossible to decipher, swallowed by the emotion in his voice. Hamlin estimates he and his crew saved about 75 men that day.
BEFORE, DURING AND after the war, baseball was the marquee professional sport in the U.S.
“These were the rock stars, movie stars and sports stars combined,” says the historian Collins, who co-curated the exhibit “When Baseball Went to War” at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
More than 500 major league players served during World War II, including Hall of Famers DiMaggio, Ted Williams and Bob Feller, and more than 4,000 minor leaguers joined the war effort, too, according to the Department of Defense.
Despite the number of men who were away, baseball continued. President Roosevelt, realizing just how important baseball was to Americans’ morale, issued what would become known as the “Green Light Letter” in January 1942, just five weeks after Pearl Harbor.
“I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going,” Roosevelt wrote.
The game continued to be important after the war as various baseball leagues became a path for players who hoped to resume chasing their dreams.
“Through the rest of the ’40s, there were players who would go into [semi-pro] teams to try to get themselves back into major leagues,” University of Colorado professor Martin Babicz, who teaches a class on baseball and American history, said. “It was similar to minor league baseball on the lowest level.”
Hamlin returned to Missouri in November 1945 and tried to pick up where he left off. He started by playing semi-pro baseball, but at 24 years old, opportunities were harder to come by and his big league hopes were never realized. Eventually, he became a semi-pro manager and met his wife, Virginia, at a bar after one of the team’s games.
“I had just gotten done playing. I did smell, so I sat there, and I said, ‘May I buy you a beer?’ She turned her head side to side, ‘No,'” Hamlin said. So he ran home, took a shower, threw on some cologne “for good measure” and came back to ask again.
“She was still there. I sat down and said, ‘How about now, can I buy your beer?’ And that started the romance.”
Hamlin and his wife were together for 61 years and had three children, six grandchildren, and one great grandchild. Hamlin eventually earned a law degree, though he never passed the bar exam. When he was 30, he won a seat as a Missouri state representative. Several years later he ran and lost a bid for the Missouri Senate. By then, he owned an insurance business, which he ran until he retired.
FOR DECADES, HAMLIN’S memories of the war were just that. He left the war behind and tried to forget it. He didn’t go back to Normandy for 50 years.
“It never did bother me, till probably 50 years later,” he says. “I came home, they said ‘Do you have trauma? Could you sleep?’ Nothing bothered me. No, only till later in life, you started telling your story to children in schools. Then they get it all coming back to you.”
Hamlin finally went back to Normandy for the 50th Anniversary of D-Day in 1994, when he was 72. He had a formal dinner with 75 veterans who were honored by Queen Elizabeth II.
“Hell, I didn’t know what to do. I was the third one in line of the 75,” Hamlin laughs when he recalls meeting the Queen. “And I thought for sure somebody in front of me would know what to do. Well, I didn’t know whether to kiss her hand, hug her, talk to her or what? You don’t touch them. I just stood there like a dummy. But she was very nice.”
He has now traveled back to those beaches seven times; framed photos of his visits adorn the walls of his home. During one trip, Hamlin connected with a fellow athlete, former NFL Pro Bowler Donnie Edwards, who spent 13 seasons in the league playing for the Kansas City Chiefs and the then-San Diego Chargers in the 1990s and 2000s.
Edwards is the founder of Best Defense Foundation, a nonprofit that supports veterans by taking them to visit battlefields where they served. Edwards’ grandfather, who helped raise him, was a World War II veteran and a Pearl Harbor survivor. Edwards, with whom Hamlin has developed a friendship, says there’s an understanding between athletes and military personnel.
“There’s a common goal,” Edwards says. “And everybody kind of has to do their role and responsibility to make sure that everybody’s successful.”
Edwards says his most memorable experience at Normandy was with a veteran named Art Staymates, who was part of the first wave of men to storm Omaha.
“You think about what our boys had to go through in order to get off the beach. You’re looking at almost a thousand yards … nine or 10 football fields with no cover,” Edwards says. “And I hear [Staymates] saying, ‘I don’t know how we did it. I don’t know how we did it.’ And he’s mumbling to himself, ‘I don’t know how we did it.’
“He just starts to walk out by himself and he’s turning back and he’s looking. Turning back and looking at the cliffs, imagining the horror, the bullets, the sounds, the planes, the explosions, the dead. I just see him processing that whole deal and he keeps walking out.”
Sometime later, Staymates beckoned Edwards for a hug to say thank you.
The former Pro Bowler’s voice breaks with emotion as he recalls Staymates, who died in 2017, telling him: “This is the closure that I needed in my life.'”
Edwards still listens to the saved voicemails from his friend.
AS OF NOVEMBER 2023, fewer than 120,000 of the 16.4 million Americans who served in World War II are still alive, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and an estimated 131 of them die each day.
Hamlin had intended to go back to Normandy one more time for this year’s 80th anniversary, but health problems will keep him home this time. On a cloudy day, as he finishes telling his story one last time, he says he hopes future generations will remember all that was sacrificed.
“I don’t think they teach the history of the World War to our students,” he says. “You can ask students in college, and some of them don’t know what D-Day is. And the high school kids, they definitely don’t know.”
“But we did our part, and that’s all we have to worry about,” Hamlin says. “I’ve been very lucky. I really have.”
