When
baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan
in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Moe Berg was
included.
Ruth and Gehrig
The answer
was simple: Berg was a US spy.
Speaking 15
languages - including Japanese - Moe Berg had two loves: baseball and spying.
In Tokyo,
garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an American diplomat
being treated in St. Luke's Hospital - the tallest building in the Japanese
capital.
He never
delivered the flowers. The ball-player ascended to the hospital roof and
filmed key features: the harbor, military installations, railway yards, etc.
Eight
years later, General Jimmy Doolittle studied Berg's films in planning his
spectacular raid on Tokyo.
Catcher Moe Berg
Berg's
father, Bernard Berg, a pharmacist in Newark, New Jersey, taught his son Hebrew
and Yiddish. Moe, against his wishes, began playing baseball on the
street aged four.
His father
disapproved and never once watched his son play. In Barringer High
School, Moe learned Latin, Greek and French.
He
graduated magna cum laude from Princeton - having added Spanish, Italian,
German and Sanskrit to his linguistic quiver.
During
further studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and Columbia Law School, he picked
up Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Portuguese and Hungarian - 15
languages in all, plus some regional dialects.
While
playing baseball for Princeton University, Moe Berg would describe plays in
Latin or Sanskrit.
Tito's Partisans
During
World War II, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess the value to the war
effort of the two groups of partisans there.
He
reported back that Marshall Tito's forces were widely supported by the people
and Winston Churchill ordered all-out support for the Yugoslav underground
fighter, rather than Mihajlovic's Serbians.
The
parachute jump at age 41 undoubtedly was a challenge. But there was more to
come in that same year.
Berg
penetrated German-held Norway, met with members of the underground and located
a secret heavy water plant -
part of the Nazis' effort to build
an atomic bomb.
His
information guided the Royal Air Force in a bombing raid to destroy the plant.
There
still remained the question of how far had the Nazis progressed in the race to
build the first Atomic bomb.
If the Nazis
were successful, they would win the war. Berg (under the code name
"Remus") was sent to Switzerland to hear leading German physicist
Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Laureate, lecture and determine if the Nazis were
close to building an A-bomb.
Moe managed
to slip past the SS guards at the auditorium, posing as a Swiss graduate
student. The spy carried in his pocket a pistol and a cyanide
pill.
If the
German indicated the Nazis were close to building a weapon, Berg was to shoot
him - and then swallow the cyanide pill.
Moe, sitting in the front row, determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech and walked him back to his hotel.
Moe Berg's
report was distributed to Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and key figures in the team developing the
Atomic Bomb. Roosevelt responded: "Give my regards to the
catcher."
Most of
Germany's leading physicists had been Jewish and had fled the Nazis mainly to
Britain and the United States.
After the
war, Moe Berg was awarded the Medal of Merit - America's highest honor for a
civilian in wartime. But Berg refused to accept, as he couldn't tell
people about his exploits.
After his
death, his sister accepted the Medal and it hangs in the Baseball Hall of Fame,
in Cooperstown,
March 2,1902-----May 29, 1972
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