A Christmas Eve to Remember
…it
looks like we’re going to get wet.
Bygone
Baseball
By
C. Philip Francis
Note: Regular readers of Chatter from the Dugout may recall this story. After ten years of writing 500 different Chatters, I have decided to print some “reruns” knowing there always will be new readers out there.
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This is a true Christmas story involving Harvey Riebe, a former catcher for the Detroit Tigers in the 1940’s, who received a very precious gift – his life. I first “met” Harvey when writing for an autograph about five years ago. We became good friends, and he was most pleased to share his baseball anecdotes from his playing time with Detroit Tiger players including Hank Greenberg, Hal Newhouser, and Rudy York, and the legendary Larry Doby, Ted Williams, and Joe DiMaggio among others. Many of them have appeared in Chatter from the Dugout throughout the past five years, and you may recall this one called “A Christmas Eve to Remember.” We lost Harvey last spring, and so this is in memory of Harvey Riebe - a man of class.
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Harvey
began his major league career in August of 1942 less than one year after the
United States entered World War II. Many
players from both the minor and major leagues had their careers interrupted by
the war, and Harvey was not exception. After spending some years in the Tiger farm system as a
catcher, he made his major league debut during a doubleheader in Philadelphia
with the A’s. In November he
changed the flannels to khaki, and served with the 66th Blank
Panthers Division until discharged in February, 1946.
By
the winter of 1944 Germany was losing on both the Eastern and Western Fronts.
Russian troops were smashing into German territory, and on the other side of Europe the Americans, British, Canadians, and French were hoping to end the war by Christmas. But as fierce battles in Holland and the Ardennes Forest in Belgium were slowing down the allied push, the many soldiers stationed in England were being moved across the English Channel. One of them was Harvey Riebe.
On
Christmas Eve 1944 Riebe and 2000 other GI’s were crossing the channel on the SS
Leopoldville, a Belgian troopship.
Harvey was on the last of a three-ship convoy that had left England and
on their way to Cherbourg, France. Unbeknown
to Harv and the other passengers on board they were being followed by a German
submarine, the U-486 commanded by Lieutenant Gernard Meyer who sent a salvo of
torpedoes at the Leopoldville.
The ship was fatally hit forcing the 2000 soldiers into the cold, dark
waters. As the ship continued to
sink the dying loudspeaker blared out, “The ship is sinking.
Every man for themselves!”
Mr.
Riebe described that horrible night, “Captain John Van Sickle and Sergeant Jim
Nokes were both friends of mine, and all three of us shook hands prior to our
exit from the ship.
“Sergeant
Nokes was a career army man and a prince of a guy from Corsica, Texas.
After we shook hands and wished each other “good luck”, Nokes said,
‘Well, Captain, it looks like we are going to get wet.’
The Captain unstrapped his carbine, laid it down carefully and gently on
the deck to the rear of us, and we then proceeded to jump.”
Wartime
censorship kept the public from learning of the Leopoldville tragedy for the next 53 years until a book on the
incident by Allan Andrae was published in 1997. In Andrate’s book, SS
Leopoldville December 24, 1944,
Van Sickle was mentioned. It is
noted that after the three men shook hands, the Captain started down the cargo
nets, but before letting go he lost his glasses when knocked off by the man
coming behind him.
The
water was a frigid 48 degrees, and Harvey remembers, “I have often relived
that night. When asked I told my
family that I had about five more minutes to survive in the icy waters before
hypothermia set in.”
Boats
came out from Cherbourg, and although Harvey was pulled from the water 800 of
the 2000 men lost their lives that night. Many
of the survivors were soon sent into battle as did Sergeant Riebe who was
awarded the Purple Heart after being hit by shrapnel.
He played some baseball in Europe before returning to the United States,
and spent three more seasons in professional baseball before retiring from the
game. Harvey was born in Cleveland,
Ohio where he continued to reside with his lovely wife, Mary, and where raised a
family.
Epilogue:
Not only did Sgt. Riebe live through that bleak and wet Christmas Eve,
both Captain Van Sickle and Sgt. Nokes were taken from the Channel alive.
On April 12, 1945, the same day as President Franklin D. Roosevelt died
in Warm Springs, Georgia, Lieutenant Meyer and his crew on U-486 were sent to
the bottom by an English submarine. The
war in Europe ended the following month.
Of
all of his Christmas Eves, the evening of December 24, 1944 was the one he
remembered the most and the greatest Christmas gift of all – his life.