Welcome

Welcome to my blog http://www.skegley.blogspot.com/ . CAVEAT LECTOR- Let the reader beware. This is a Christian Conservative blog. It is not meant to offend anyone. Please feel free to ignore this blog, but also feel free to browse and comment on my posts! You may also scroll down to respond to any post.

For Christian American readers of this blog:


I wish to incite all Christians to rise up and take back the United States of America with all of God's manifold blessings. We want the free allowance of the Bible and prayers allowed again in schools, halls of justice, and all governing bodies. We don't seek a theocracy until Jesus returns to earth because all men are weak and power corrupts the very best of them.
We want to be a kinder and gentler people without slavery or condescension to any.

The world seems to be in a time of discontent among the populace. Christians should not fear. God is Love, shown best through Jesus Christ. God is still in control. All Glory to our Creator and to our God!


A favorite quote from my good friend, Jack Plymale, which I appreciate:

"Wars are planned by old men,in council rooms apart. They plan for greater armament, they map the battle chart, but: where sightless eyes stare out, beyond life's vanished joys, I've noticed,somehow, all the dead and mamed are hardly more than boys(Grantland Rice per our mutual friend, Sarah Rapp)."

Thanks Jack!

I must admit that I do not check authenticity of my posts. If anyone can tell me of a non-biased arbitrator, I will attempt to do so more regularly. I know of no such arbitrator for the internet.











Monday, September 8, 2014

Baseball history & WW II ... Thx Clay V!

If you are not familiar with this story, I think that you will find it more than interesting.

       
Here is history few ever knew.
 
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.  Although he played with 5 major league teams from 1923 to 1939, he was a very mediocre ball player.  He was regarded as the brainiest ballplayer of all time.  In fact Casey Stengel once said:  “That is the strangest man ever to play baseball.”  When all the baseball stars went to Japan , Moe Berg went with them and many people wondered why he went with “the team”
 
Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth
 
The answer was simple: Moe Berg was a Unites States spy working undercover with the CIA.
Moe spoke 15 languages - including Japanese - Moe Berg had two loves: baseball & 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.  Moe read at least 10 newspapers every day.
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.
 
The R.A.F. destroys the Norwegian heavy water plant targeted by Moe Berg.
 
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.
 
Werner Heisenberg -  He blocked the Nazis from acquiring an atomic bomb.
 
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 Freedom – 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
Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest award to be awarded to civilians during wartime)
Moe Berg’s baseball card is the only card on display at the CIA Headquarters in Washington DC
 


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