(bright music) (gentle music) - It gives me great pleasure to be present at this big event.

You bring back some very precious memories for me from the time that I was trying to serve as a manager and director of our Legion teams.

The teamwork and the relationships formed by those team members are something I'll not forget.

I cherish the friendships that were formed, and I love it when some of the former players come around and express how much fun they had.

After all, baseball is supposed to be fun.

I would add just a little bit to some of the things that were said before about the history of American Legion Baseball.

At one time, during the Great Depression years, the program fell on hard times, but through the efforts of a lot of people that were in a position to help, they managed to make it through those years.

And of course, during World War II, it was a struggle because so many of the young men at that time were starting to think about, well how am I gonna serve my country?

But they did manage to survive all of this.

And even though some of the teams had to survive on shoestring budgets, they did survive and kept going with it.

I'm not sure whether this was mentioned before, but of course, now all 50 states including Canada has teams that complete and there are, in its inception, countless numbers of Legion graduates have gone on to play college ball and professional ball.

82 have been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

And they say more than half of the Major Leaguers played Legion ball.

Now Legion Baseball's alumnus list includes the sport's most notable recognized names such as Yogi Berra, Ted Williams, Frank Robinson, Bob Feller, and many others.

Feller was the first of the Legion alumnus to be be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

And later he wrote, "Truthfully, I should have given a plaque to the American Legion rather than giving one to me."

A farm kid from rural Iowa, Feller got his first ball experience playing with Post 313.

And he says the playing taught him much about life as it did about baseball.

Legion Baseball gave him the chance to form lifetime friendships and learn to deal with athletic competition properly.

Frank Robinson led his Oakland, California team to the only back-to-back national championships in the program to this point.

Babe Ruth was too old to join the program when Legion Baseball started, but he spent final years of his life promoting the program as its Director of Operations.

Now going on from this, I've been asked to share just briefly some of the experiences that I have gone through in World War II.

Just basically, I'll not touch on my training except that the Navy came out with a V5 program that included 18 to 20 months of of flight instruction.

And so I completed that, and after I'd graduated from the program at Corpus Christi, Texas, we were presented our officers position and also our wings.

And already, my orders were cut already for Daytona Beach, Florida to fly the F6F Hellcat Fighter.

From there, we went to the Great Lakes Naval Air Station to check out and carrier landings, and then on to San Diego to ship out over to Oahu.

And there, I went aboard a troop transport.

I had been assigned to Air Group 83, which had trained in the east coast of United States.

And they sent them to Maui to finish their training.

And when I reported over there, I found out that they were through with their training and they were headed for combat the next day.

So I entered in combat in the Carolina Islands at Elithia Harbor, not knowing any of the guys arriving, not having flown with them.

So that was kind of a uptight situation.

I'm gonna touch just very briefly onto the things that I got into as far as combat.

And the first one happened, probably not over two, three, two weeks, I guess, after I had joined the the air group.

One or five division, the four divisions that I flew as we had been under attack by the Japanese.

Well they were called kamikazes, which actually, if you wanna put a name to it, it's probably more like a suicide group.

They were trained to take off a airplane and fly to their target and manually fly the bomb-loaded planes into ships or any other targets that they were assigned.

So they thought that some of those planes were coming from a small airport on a island by the name of Ikishima.

And so they sent our (indistinct) over there to tear that place up, but there were no airborne aircraft in the air.

So we proceeded to destroy what few were on the ground and hit their hangars and even tore up some of their landing tarmac so that they'd have trouble using it.

And then we decided it was time to get back to the ship before we ran out of gasoline in our Hellcats.

And so we were heading back probably not over 1,800 feet off the water.

And all of a sudden, I spotted two Japanese Val dive bombers.

They were real low on the water and they were coming on a converging force to us.

I didn't have time to do anything else except place the nose of the plane down, put my sight on the trajectory of the dive bomber and squeezed the trigger.

And I saw the pilot slump forward and he crashed into the ocean.

So the second one, I made a turnover then to see what happened to the other one and the other one was to this airfield that we had just destroyed.

And so I gave the Hellcat full throttle on that 2,000 horsepower engine relay spotted every well.

And I caught up with it.

And just as I was ready to pull the trigger, I heard my division later shouting at me over the radio.

He said, "Don, get out there.

They're shooting at you from the shore battery."

But I squeezed the trigger on the way and that one blew up.

And so then turned over a lot of evasive action and keep from shooting me down.

And I wondered, well, why didn't the other three guys jump onto that second one?

Well I found out there were two other Val dive bombers plus a twin engine plane that I didn't see.

And so the division leader shot down one of those, the section leader got one, and the last man in the division, they usually referred to him as tail end Charlie, he got the twin engine one.

So all four of us had our first air to air victories that day.

All the way through then the month of March and April, they were harassing our fleet just terribly.

In fact, we had never had any of our ships sunk, but we had several of the carriers get damaged.

In fact, we had two of the big carriers that were really damaged badly to the point that you almost think that they were going to sink but they managed to get the fires put out and managed to get them back to Pearl Harbor so they could be reconstructed.

And then when we were hitting the island of Okinawa, which was supposed to be the next island that would be invaded by our troops.

And so we helped with the invasion.

That was on April 1st, which happened to be Easter Sunday.

And we fighter pilots were sent over there to help with the napalm bombs, which is a fire bomb.

And so we helped to burn and scorch the beach while the landing crafts were approaching.

And I can't give you any figures, but I don't think that the invasion of Okinawa was all that terrible as far as casualty concerned because the Japanese had either guessed right or they had obtained some idea of when the invasion was going to happen.

So they had pulled a lot of their forces back from the the beaches into the mountainous, hilly areas.

And of course then the war was entirely different.

It was terrible.

We did do quite a bit of supporting our ground troops and our Marines as they fought in the mountainous areas.

But then about two weeks after the invasion, we were sent over to fly combat air patrol over some picket destroyers that had been placed between the island of Kyushu and the island Okinawa.

And when we got over there, the raid had already started.

There were Japanese everywhere They know now that there were over 300 in that raid.

And of course all the fighters from the Essex which would've been about 80 fighter planes and then the fighters from another carrier and I can't tell you what carrier that was.

But anyway, we tried to defend it then, it ended up then 250 Japanese planes were destroyed that day, which kind of diminished their air force to almost nothing at that point.

Well when we got there flying wing on the division major, we saw two of these float planes that were loaded with explosives heading for one of the destroyers.

We were probably at 1,200 feet and they were right low on the water.

And so we had to dive to get to them.

And we found out that they are flying so slow that we overshot the first one.

Neither one of us got a chance at it.

But I shot down the second one.

Then the division leader got on the radio and he said to us other three guys, "Guys, split up and get all these rascals that you can."

And so that's one of the times that we sped up and fought individually.

And when it was all said and done, our division of four guys had to shoot down 17 planes.

And each one of the four of us were lucky enough to get five or more, which then qualifies you as an ace pilot.

So I just thought I'd share a little bit about this so you young people can understand a little bit about what war's all about.

And just to end, and I would like in short, you young people someday when you are considered Legion-involved graduates, I hope you'll be proud contributors throughout our society.

We all look forward to each of you young men to be included among those graduates by your sportsmanship, your active citizenship.

And I say to you, good baseball this week, and much good fortune in your future.

Thank you.

(applause) (gentle music)