The Bastard Brigade

by Sam Kean

  After that, Heisenberg knew that war would erupt sooner or later, and in late spring 1939 he bought a shabby mountain chalet in southern Germany (grandly named the Eagle’s Nest) where his wife and children could flee if necessary. He then left for a speaking tour of the United States. Ostensibly he was promoting a new theory about cosmic rays there; in reality he was saying goodbye to old friends, people he knew he wouldn’t see once the war began. This included Samuel Goudsmit in Michigan, where Heisenberg arrived exactly one year and one day after the SS had given him its official blessing. Heisenberg was no ideologue, but given his ties to Himmler, you can’t really blame the physicists in Ann Arbor for having a few questions.

  In some ways these questions were unfair. Heisenberg had no way of knowing how strong Germany’s military was, nor when the war would likely start. Yet he tried to answer anyway, and the only thing he succeeded in illuminating was his own muddled thinking. He told some people that Germany would crush the rest of Europe, while at other times he moaned about Germany’s inevitable defeat. He also fielded questions about science, of course, but with the discovery of uranium fission, it became increasingly hard to separate politics from physics. At one point, while watching Fermi and Heisenberg go at it, an onlooker whispered to a colleague, “Everyone in this room expects a big war, and the two of them to lead fission work on opposite sides, but nobody says so.”

  All the tension of that sweltering summer week in Ann Arbor finally culminated in a heated exchange at a party. A graduate student hired to mix drinks there remembers the discussion ranging widely, “but the crucial part of their argument,” he later wrote, “was whether a decent, honest scientist could function and maintain his scientific integrity and personal self-respect in a country where all standards of decency and humanity had been suspended.”

  Eventually Goudsmit, who could be blunt, cut to the chase. Given all the abuse you’ve suffered in the newspapers, he asked Heisenberg, given your disdain for Nazi leaders, given Kristallnacht and the political prisons and everything else—why not flee Germany?

  Heisenberg hesitated. He’d been hearing that question over and over during his American tour—in California, Indiana, New York, Chicago. He’d even received surreptitious job offers from Columbia and Princeton and the University of Chicago recently, meaning he could easily emigrate and leave Germany behind. But things weren’t so simple for him. Someone needs to stay behind and defend German science and German values, he told Goudsmit. And as a Nobel Prize winner and internationally renowned physicist, he felt he had enough prestige to influence German politicians. Sooner or later they would approach him for advice on technical matters, he argued, and when they did so, he’d set them straight.

  Fermi all but laughed in his face: “These people have no principles. They will kill anybody who might be a threat—and they won’t think twice about it. You have only the influence they grant you.” Heisenberg refused to believe that. Besides, he still felt loyal to his students back in Munich. “If I abandoned them now, I would feel like a traitor,” he said. Then he added, “People must learn to prevent catastrophes, not run away from them.”

  On and on they went, and the longer they argued, the more agitated Heisenberg got. Back in Germany, the Nazis had accused him of disloyalty for defending Jew physics. He was now being squeezed from the other side: accused of undue loyalty to the Reich for not leaving Germany. Secretly, too, Heisenberg feared that if he emigrated to the United States, the government would force him to work on atomic bombs for use against Germany, against his own people—and he simply couldn’t face that.

  Finally, somebody asked him again why he didn’t just leave Germany. His answer this time was brief: “Germany needs me.” He seemed to fancy himself a messiah.

  People eventually gave up on Heisenberg that night, and the science summer camp ended not long afterward. But before it did, Heisenberg and his old friend Goudsmit put aside their differences for a few minutes and—knowing they might not see each other ever again—posed for a picture in front of Goudsmit’s home. Each man put on a good face and smiled.

  On the voyage home, Heisenberg realized at some point that he was the sole person returning to Germania, the single one willing to go back. It felt incredibly lonely. So after arriving home, he put a copy of the photograph with Goudsmit on his desk—a reminder of the last, good, late-summer days before the inevitable fall.

  CHAPTER 7

  Banzai Berg

  The Washington Senators made the World Series in 1933, and while “Professor” Moe Berg never once stepped onto the field, he was perfectly content to watch from the bullpen and gab with teammates and reporters.

  Much more memorable than the World Series for Berg was the chance to return to Japan in November 1934 with a team of Major League all-stars. No one knows why a schlub like Berg got tapped for the tour—the team included legends like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Lefty Gomez, and Jimmy Foxx, with Connie Mack managing—but his teammates loved having him around. So did the Japanese, who were mad for baseball and fondly remembered his workshops from two years earlier. A hundred thousand people reportedly greeted the players as they arrived in Tokyo, and Berg got as many cheers as anyone. “Banzai Babe Ruth!” the crowds roared. “Banzai the great Gehrig. Banzai catcher Berg, the linguist!” At one point Berg greeted a few people in Japanese, which drew an incredulous stare from Ruth. At the start of their sea voyage two weeks earlier, he’d asked Berg if the catcher spoke any Japanese; Berg claimed not to. So what gives? Ruth now asked. Berg shrugged. “That was two weeks ago.”

  The American all-stars played seventeen games in a dozen cities on the tour, including one at the base of Mount Fuji, drawing crowds of up to fifty thousand. One fan walked eighty miles just to see a game, lugging a samurai sword the whole way; he presented it to a Cleveland center fielder who homered that day. The Americans won all seventeen contests (most in lopsided fashion: they were playing Japanese college and semipro teams), and Ruth emerged as the tour’s undisputed star. Although thirty-nine years old and in the December of his career, Ruth clobbered thirteen home runs, and the trip made him as famous in Japan as he was in the United States. After one ovation he turned to Berg, choked up, and said, “Moe, this has to be one of the greatest days of my life.”

  Berg and the Babe actually became quite close on the trip—partly because they shared an eye for Japanese women and liked visiting geisha houses. One night, drunk and feeling his oats, Ruth began harassing one of the geisha, who clearly wasn’t enjoying the attention. Berg considered himself more chivalrous, so he scribbled out something for her to say, in phonetic Japanese characters, in case Ruth got handsy again. He did, and she smiled and let him have it: “Fuck you, Babe Ruth.”

  For his part, Berg didn’t play much on the tour. He got beaned in the hip his first at-bat (“Vicious clout, Moe,” his teammates razzed him), and after that he mostly lazed around the dugout, finishing with two hits total in the seventeen games, fewer than some pitchers on the team collected. Berg made a far greater impact off the field as a goodwill ambassador. In between games he donned kimonos (one had catcher’s mitts on it, another red baseballs) and attended several cultural events, chatting with Japanese movie stars and giving talks at universities. He also shot footage for a documentary about the trip, using movie cameras he’d borrowed from a company in New York. The one Berg incident that no one could forget occurred on a tour of the Japanese emperor Hirohito’s palace. Naturally, the tour called for strict decorum; some players remember being told that the emperor was a veritable god, and that they should avoid even looking at him. You can imagine their shock, then, during a reception afterward, when they glanced up to see old Moe Berg standing next to the man-god, shooting the breeze with him. Although amused, Hirohito seemed no less surprised.

  Despite the adoring crowds, there was an uneasy political undercurrent to the tour. The U.S. government had promoted the games as a diplomatic tool to smooth Japanese-American relations. Japan had recently seized Manchur
ia in China, and its military clearly had ambitions to take more territory, a policy the United States opposed. The Japanese government in turn opposed the upstart Americans’ meddling in Asian affairs, and a militant faction within the government began kicking scientists and other westerners off the island, denouncing them as spies.

  No wonder, then, that Japanese officials looked askance at the all-stars and monitored their activities; manager Connie Mack swore that his hotel telephone was bugged. It wasn’t just government officials who hated the Americans, either. After the tour finished, three young men representing the ultranationalist War God Society accosted a Japanese newspaper mogul who’d arranged for one game to take place inside a stadium dedicated to the emperor. The young men felt that the presence of filthy foreigners had defiled the shrine, and they ambushed the mogul at the gate of the newspaper building one morning, stabbing him in the neck with a sword and leaving him for dead. Only the quick action of a nearby witness saved his life.

  In truth, though, the Japanese government was right to be suspicious of the all-stars. One of them was indeed spying on the island. Moe Berg.

  While devouring newspapers in Japan, Berg came across an interesting item one morning near the end of the tour. The daughter of the American ambassador had recently given birth to a child at St. Luke’s hospital in Tokyo. The all-stars had a game seventeen miles north of Tokyo that day, but Berg decided to skip it, feigning illness. None of his teammates believed him (he rarely got sick), but they were also familiar with Berg’s inscrutable moods, so they didn’t inquire too closely. As soon as the other players departed, Berg parted his hair Japanese-style and donned a kimono. Sneaking down to the street, he grabbed a bouquet for the ambassador’s daughter from a florist, then hopped a cab to St. Luke’s.

  In the hospital lobby he slipped past the security guards and caught the elevator for the fifth floor, where the ambassador’s daughter was staying. But instead of visiting her, he dumped the flowers when the coast was clear and ducked back into the elevator, now riding it to the seventh floor. There he found a spiral staircase and proceeded to the roof, where he scaled a bell tower. By tradition, no one in Japan could look down upon the emperor’s palace, so most buildings topped out at a few stories. St. Luke’s, at seven stories, was among the tallest. And as soon as he’d gained this vantage point, Berg reached into his baggy kimono and removed the lunchbox-sized movie camera strapped to his chest. He trained it on the cityscape around him, taking special care to linger over industrial sites: ammunition plants, railway lines, oil refineries, warships in the harbor. In all, he got twenty-three seconds of footage before packing up and scurrying down to the lobby. He never did meet the ambassador’s daughter.

  During the game that afternoon, the Americans briefly fell behind 5–4 before rallying and winning in a 23–5 laugher. They told Moe all about it back at the hotel. But he never reciprocated and told them what he’d been up to. Even today, no one knows why Berg engaged in this freelance espionage. A few people close to him swore that U.S. officials, including possibly the secretary of state, put him up to it. Or perhaps Berg simply fancied himself a spy and enjoyed the danger of going undercover. (Mastering new languages, visiting exotic cities, rendezvousing with mysterious strangers—this was already Berg’s life.) Regardless, when the United States and Japan went to war seven years later, Berg dug out that twenty-three seconds of film and sent it to U.S. intelligence agencies. It proved quite valuable, some of the only extant footage of the Japanese capital. American officials were so impressed, in fact, that they soon dreamed up a much more dangerous assignment for the catcher.

  Berg was washed up by the time he returned from Japan, slower than ever and running to fat. Yet he managed to hang around the majors for several more seasons, and an appearance on a national radio quiz show in early 1938, NBC’s Information, Please, made him a national sensation. In a virtuoso half-hour performance he answered questions about Halley’s comet, chop suey, Nero’s wives, poi, the Dreyfus Affair, and Kaiser Wilhelm, among other topics; he even got the trick question right. (What’s the brightest star in the sky? The sun.) NBC got twenty-four thousand letters in response, and baseball commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis later told Berg, “In thirty minutes you did more for baseball than I’ve done the entire time I’ve been commissioner.” The added attention did chafe Berg some. During his rare appearances on the field, fans in opposing stadiums would heckle him with questions. (“Hey, Berg, is it walruses or walri?”) But after Information, Please, Berg was a bona fide celebrity, palling around with the Marx brothers and Nelson Rockefeller and Will Rogers. Whenever FDR attended a Senators’ game, he waved to the catcher from the stands, and Berg’s teammates remember him keeping a tuxedo in his locker for postgame soirées at foreign embassies. (Given his linguistic skills, Berg proved quite popular at these events. According to one reporter, he “kissed the hands of more women than Valentino.”) It was the best life Berg could imagine: good pay, short hours, leisure time to lounge around hotels. As he once told an interviewer, “I’d rather be a ballplayer than a president of a bank or justice on the United States Supreme Court.”

  Paradoxically, fame only deepened the aura of mystery surrounding Moe. Not even friends knew where he lived during the off-season, and only one teammate ever got to see inside his home. (He reported that Berg had more newspapers lying around than the New York Times building did.) During this era Berg also developed a reputation, perhaps justly, for seducing married women—society types who wouldn’t entangle him in a real relationship. No one ever knew for sure, though, since he never spoke a word about his love affairs—or about anything private. Teammates used to rib him for being so secretive. Are you a spook, Moe? Is that it? He just smiled his enigmatic smile and slipped away.

  The last team Berg signed with was the Boston Red Sox, in part because he adored the city’s restaurants, theaters, and bookstores. Always savvy, he restricted himself to playing only on days when his knees didn’t ache and he was feeling spry. That way, he could make a decent showing and preserve the legend of Moe Berg. He’d developed a few parlor tricks over the years as well. He always tried to play on Ladies’ Day at the ballpark, and if someone hit a pop-up behind home plate, he’d hang onto his mask until the last second. Then he’d fling the mask into the air, catch the ball in his glove, and snag the mask with his other hand. The dolls swooned.

  Despite his popularity in Boston, Berg was long past his expiration date by 1939, his fifteenth season. He caught just fourteen games that year, and every time he got in, he’d feign confusion as he stepped onto the field: “It’s been a while, fellas,” he’d say to teammates. “Do they still get three strikes out here?” Boston happened to have a hotshot rookie named Ted Williams that season, and one time Berg got lucky and knocked the horsehide off the ball, bouncing it off the fence. After a teammate knocked the lumbering catcher home, Berg caught his breath, turned to Williams in the dugout, and said, “That’s the way you’re supposed to hit them, Ted. I hope you were watching.”

  On August 30 that year, the most popular journeyman in baseball history went out in style. The Sox faced pitcher Fred Hutchinson of the Detroit Tigers that day, and for his final Major League hit, Berg socked a fastball into the left-field bleachers—just the sixth home run of his career. “As Mighty Moe rounded the bases,” one reporter wrote, “some sarcastic observers in the press box remarked that poor Hutch had suffered the ultimate in humiliation. A loud foul by Prof. Berg, they said, was a batting streak for him, and now that he had made a home run—his first in several years—it was plain that Hutchinson should be hurried to safety.”

  Everyone enjoyed watching Moe chug around the bases one last time. But Berg couldn’t enjoy the moment much. Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia had signed their notorious nonaggression pact a week earlier, all but condemning Europe to war. Less than forty-eight hours after Berg’s unlikely homer, in fact, Germany invaded Poland and kicked off World War II. “Europe is in flames, withering in a fire se
t by Hitler,” Berg moaned that summer. “And what am I doing? Sitting in the bullpen, telling jokes to relief pitchers.” At long last he’d decided that his father had been right: there was more to life than playing baseball.

  CHAPTER 8

  On the Brink

  Because the United States didn’t enter World War II until late 1941, concerned Americans like Moe Berg could do little more than watch events unfold from afar. A few, though, got to see the panic of the war’s early days up close, including the son of the U.S. ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy Jr.

  This was actually Joe’s second European war. As a student at Harvard, Kennedy was exactly the kind of Ivy League hotshot that Moe Berg had despised in college: Joe had a full-time valet and private tutors in every subject, and received up to $150 in “pocket money” each month ($2,800 today). Still, he was a serious student, and after writing his senior thesis on the Spanish Civil War in 1938, he decided to pursue international politics. Attempts to land a job on his father’s staff in London ran afoul of U.S. nepotism laws, so as the next best thing, Kennedy Senior sent Joe on a tour of the Continent to gather intelligence—Warsaw, Leningrad, Copenhagen, Prague. Berlin made an especially strong impression: Joe found the strength of the German army both stirring and menacing, and he reported that the Nazis “have the most powerful propaganda I have seen anywhere.” At one point, while cruising through northern France in a Chrysler convertible with his sister Kick (Kathleen), Joe passed within a few miles of Mimoyecques, an obscure village of fifty people. Joe probably didn’t even notice the place, but Mimoyecques would soon become a cursed name for the Kennedy clan.