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Uncle Fester Was a WWII Aerial Commando, and Other Celebrities in Wartime

Khalid Elhassan April 15, 2024 27 min

WWII - Uncle Fester — Uncle Fester. Wikimedia

Before He Became a Baseball Legend, Yogi Bera Lobbed Rockets at the Nazis

18-time All Star Yogi Berra won 10 World Series, more than any other player in MLB history. He is one of only five players to have ever won the American League MVP three times. After his playing days were over, Berra became a coach and manager. Between 1947 and 1981, Berra was a player, coach, or manager, in every New York team that made it to the World Series. All in all, Berra appeared in 22 World Series, and won 13 of them. Less known is that he took a break from baseball to fight in WWII. Signed up by the Yankees in 1942, Berra interrupted his career to serve in the US Navy. He became a gunner’s mate aboard the USS Bayfield, an attack transport. On D-Day, June 6^th, 1944, Berra served on detached duty aboard a Navy rocket boat that lobbed missiles and fired machine guns at Nazis on Omaha Beach. He was also sent to Utah Beach, to support the GIs there. Berra’s craft came under enemy fire, but luckily for him and for baseball, he escaped injury. He was nineteen, and relished the adventure. As he described it decades later:

Yogi Berra’s rocket boat. Yogi Berra Museum

“Being a young guy, you didn’t think nothing of it until you got in it. And so we went off 300 yards off beach. We protect the troops. If they ran into any trouble, we would fire the rockets over. We had a lead boat that would fire one rocket. If it hits the beach, then everybody opens up. We could fire one rocket if we wanted to, or we could fire off 24 or them, 12 on each side. We stretched out 50 yards apart. And that was the invasion. Nothing happened to us. That’s one good thing. Our boat could go anywhere, though. We were pretty good, flat bottom, 36-footer“. Berra’s craft lingered off Normandy after D-Day, and further supported the Allied beachhead there. The Luftwaffe could do little to disrupt the Allied effort, but what little it did was enough to make people jumpy. Naval vessels off the beachhead were instructed to fire on any airplane that flew below a certain height. Accordingly, Berra and his crew mates shot down a plane that appeared suddenly below the clouds. Unfortunately, it turned out to be American. Luckily for the pilot, he bailed out, and was fished out of the water by Berra’s boat.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.