The Cloudbuster Nine

by Anne R Keene, Claudia Williams (Foreword)

In 1943, while the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were winning pennants and meeting in that year's World Series, one of the nation's strongest baseball teams practiced on a skinned-out college field in the heart of North Carolina. Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Johnny Sain were among a cadre of fighter-pilot cadets who wore the Cloudbuster Nine baseball jersey at an elite Navy training school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In this spirited Field of Dreams -like father-daughter account, author Anne R. Keene opens with a story about her father, Jim Raugh, who suited up as the team batboy and mascot. He got to know his baseball heroes personally, watching players hit the road on cramped, tin-can buses, dazzling factory workers, kids, and service members at dozens of games, including a war-bond exhibition against Babe Ruth's team at Yankee Stadium. Jimmy followed his baseball dreams as a college All-American, but was crushed later in life by a failed major-league bid with the Detroit Tigers. He would have carried this story to his grave had Anne not discovered his scrapbook from a Navy school that shaped America's greatest heroes including George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, John Glenn, Paul "Bear" Bryant, and John Wooden. With the help of rare images and insights from World War II baseball veterans such as Dr. Bobby Brown and Eddie Robinson, the story of this remarkable team is brought to life for the first time in The Cloudbuster The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win World War II.

Genres: Sports

Hardcover

Published February 1, 2021

Reviews

[Davis O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book needed more teddy ballgame! His name is mentioned on the cover after all. Some cool stories in here nonetheless

[Gareld Butler · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was expecting an in-depth baseball book with tales of the war heroics by all-time great baseball players. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case. Instead it was a repetitive naming of the great baseball players who joined the military to fight in World War II but seemed to spend most of their time (based on what is talked about in this book) playing baseball and drumming up headlines for the war effort. The author admits to not knowing all the much about baseball (in spite of a father who hung out with these all stars when he was a kid while they were at pre-flight school/baseball camp). Unfortunately, this shows. Most of the stories mention the great baseball players (especially Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky) repeatedly as well as where they played games while in flight training, but you never get the smell of pine tar, the grid of the dirt infield, the pop of a ball into a glove, or the crack of the bat that might make this interesting. Also, if you are interesting in their active duty heroics in battle, you learn very little of that either.
Without any of those things to keep me interested, she mentioned that her father had hung out with these players when he was a kid but, when he didn't make the majors, had retreated into a shell for the rest of his life. I had hoped she would have further explanation of why so many of the men that had been in the pre-flight training had succeeded - if not in baseball then in business or other pursuits, and why her father had not. Unfortunately, she did not address this until the very end of the book and then in a way that indicated she really didn't know her father at all. Very disappointing.