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Discussion of "Cloudbuster Nine"
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Lance
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Dec 30, 2018 08:18AM
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This book was fantastic! I hadn't heard of it, but saw it in my library last month and read it. I am excited for everyone else to read it too. A fascinating piece of history.
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Review:
While the New York Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals were the opponents in the 1943 World Series, neither of them are considered to be the best baseball team that took the field that year. That honor was bestowed to a team composed of Navy pilots who were in training before being sent overseas for combat. This team was based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and was dubbed the “Cloudbuster Nine.” This wonderful book by Anne Keene tells the story about this little known team and some of the men on the team.
The author’s father was a nine year old batboy for this team and when she discovered pictures and articles about the team in her father’s belonging, she set out to tell the story of this team. The book starts with a story from the highlight of that year for the Cloudbuster Nine – an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium in which the opponents were a team composed of the best players from the Yankees and the Cleveland Indians. This team was called the “Yanklands” and their star was their manager, Babe Ruth.
However, the Cloudbusters had some star power of their own. There were several major league players on the team – players who were going to be soon off to war, but still had the chance to play some baseball on the team before being shipped overseas. Their biggest star was Ted Williams, and two others on the team are very familiar to many fans – Johnny Pesky and Johnny Sain. The book shares some wonderful stories about all three of them as well as other players on the Cloudbusters. These stories concentrate on their time on this team and in the training program more than their major league careers. That makes the book a wonderful look into life as a military member at that time.
The book is not limited to baseball. Indeed, the book dedicates many pages to the training facility, the curriculum the students endure in order to be trained pilots and some of the other graduates of the program. These include future Presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford, John Glenn and Paul “Bear” Bryant. The makeover of a portion of the University of North Carolina campus into a Naval training facility makes for very interesting reading as does the story of Tom Hamilton, the brains behind the curriculum. He wanted to include competitive sports, especially football and baseball, as part of the training. The reasoning for this was that to keep in shape for these sports, a trainee would be fit for his duties as a pilot and some of the skills needed to succeed in these games would be useful should the pilot be shot down and he needed to have good survival skills in either the ocean or in enemy territory.
No matter how much this review talks about the book, it can’t do justice to the quality of the stories and material. This book should be read by anyone who enjoys reading about baseball, military stories, World War II history – or even just good stories. It is truly a wonderful piece of work that began with someone wanting to tell the stories her father stored inside himself for many years.
https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...
Nice review!! I really enjoyed this book. One of my favorite baseball books of all-time.
Nice review lance. I recently listened to the audio version of this book. I really enjoyed it. I loved that it wasn’t only focused on baseball. Seeing how they developed the program was very interesting. I also thought the background of the author, her dad as batboy, was a great hook to the story. Well worth a read.
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