History tells us that baseball legends Christy Mathewson and Ty Cobb volunteered as Captains in the World War I Chemical Warfare Service. After the 1918 baseball season ended, both shipped out for France where they were exposed to poison gas during a training exercise. Mathewson got by far the worst of it, and died just a few years later, in 1925, of tuberculosis that was brought on by his exposure.
History has it wrong.
According to recently discovered and apparently genuine military records, Cobb, Mathewson, and other future Hall of Famers were together at Camp Hancock, Georgia, in June 1918, training on chemical weapons as part of a ‘show’ unit – a propaganda unit designed to attract young men into the newly created Chemical Warfare Service. But the unit disbanded early, and news accounts, even in the local press, make no mention of it whatsoever. Some of these players even appear on official MLB scorecards on the very days they were training in Georgia.
A propaganda unit, but no propaganda? A recruiting tool, but no recruiting? And that is just the beginning.
Something happened at Camp Hancock that first week of June 1918 that was not in the script, something that has been the subject of an elaborate coverup for more than a century.
This Never Happened is a fictional tale that might well solve this real-world mystery. Is it the true explanation? Perhaps we’ll never know. But if this never happened, what did?
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JB Manheim is Professor Emeritus at The George Washington University, where he developed the world’s first degree-granting program in political communication and was later founding director of the School of Media & Public Affairs. In 1995 he was named Professor of the Year for the District of Columbia. He learned his love of baseball watching Dizzy Dean broadcast the Game of the Week and huddling with his grandfather for warmth on July nights at The Mistake By The Lake, AKA, Cleveland Municipal Stadium, and renewed it when the National Pastime finally returned to the Nation’s Capital. Manheim brings to life his expertise in propaganda and strategic communication through his fictional stories of baseball behind the scenes. His writing will lead you to question whether what you think you know about the history of the game and about the powers who control it is real, or whether it’s just a carefully nurtured product of lies, deceptions, misdirection, and propaganda. JB Manheim is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America.
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