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"Football! Navy! War!"
Not coincidentally, football employs military terms associated with war, such as “aerial attack,” “blitz,” “field general,” and “trench warfare.” Beyond providing essential jargon, by necessity and choice the military linked with colleges during World War II to preserve the game and keep schools from closing, and utilized football’s rugged physical, mental, and competitive conditioning to prepare men for combat, boost morale, and help win the war.
The impact of this overlooked story is told in Wilbur D. Jones, Jr.’s book Football! Navy! War!: How Military ‘“Lend- Lease” Players Saved the College Game and Helped Win World War II.
Veteran ESPN college football historian and commentator Beano Cook writes about the book’s “forgotten yet fascinating era...expertly exhumed and chronicled. Simultaneously educational and entertaining, this book is as solid a play book as I’ve read. Jones’...meticulous research and storytelling style combine to form a potent pairing that rivals that of wartime football’s most famous duo, Army’s Doc Blanchard and Glenn Davis.”
“Exciting military games were a diversion from war’s horrors and sacrifices, and they helped boost bond sales and home front morale for civilians and the military,” Jones writes. His book, slated for a July release, covers such games as Great Lakes Navy’s final-minute 19-14 upset over perennial power Notre Dame in 1943 (though the Irish won the national championship anyway). The volume joins a series of sports history books issued by McFarland, one of the country’s leading publishers of scholarly and nonfiction books.
Through vision and leadership, the Department of the Navy sent colleges thousands of “Lend-Lease” and pre-flight officer candidates, including football All-Americas and professionals, for preliminary education. Many played on varsities. Legendary base teams sprouted overnight. The army fielded powerful air force teams, but did not allow candidates to play varsity football.
Cook recalls “perhaps the most important—if not interesting—era the game of football will ever see....Consider [the book] your ticket to the story of great games, greater names.”
Featured in previously unpublished detail is the sport’s wartime star, teenaged halfback Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice, a kid among the All-Americas and NFL players at Bainbridge Navy and a postwar superstar at North Carolina.
