• • •
By July 9, New York City was baking in the greatest heat wave in American history. For a month, unheard-of temperatures had been searing the West and Midwest. Even the terrible summer of 1934 hadn’t been this bad. Now the dome of heat extended from coast to coast and far north into Canada. Three thousand Americans would die of the heat that week, forty of them in New York City.
The U.S. Olympic eight-oared crew was as cool as could be, though. Every afternoon they boarded a boat and made their way out to the New York Athletic Club’s private retreat, Huckleberry Island, a mile off Travers Island, out in the cool waters of Long Island Sound. The island was twelve acres of paradise, and the boys fell in love with it the moment they stepped out of their launch and onto a beach in one of its many small granite coves, wearing the Indian headbands with turkey feathers that club members donned whenever they visited the island. They leapt off stone ledges, plunged into the cool green water of the sound, swam, horsed around, then stretched out on warm flat slabs of granite, toasting themselves brown before plunging back into the water again.
Chuck Day smoked Lucky Strikes and cracked jokes. Roger Morris lay about looking sleepy, making gruff observations about Day’s smoking habit. Gordy Adam was content to bask quietly in the sun wearing his Indian headband. Joe wandered off to study the geology of the island, discovering glacial striations etched in the granite. Bobby Moch tried to organize activities, hustled the boys about, and got unceremoniously tackled and tossed in the water three or four times for his trouble. All of them were at their ease there, comfortable in their skins. With the sea and woods at hand, they were in their element in a way they could never be in Manhattan for all its glitter and glamour.
On the third day, Al Ulbrickson put the kibosh on their swimming. He was firmly of a mind that any kind of exercise other than rowing was bad for rowers—it developed the wrong sets of muscles.
Finally, it came time to pack and prepare for Germany. On July 13, Pocock supervised the boys as they carefully loaded the sixty-two-foot Husky Clipper onto a long truck and—with a police escort—drove it through the heart of New York City to Pier 60 on the Hudson River, where the SS Manhattan was being readied for its departure two days later. Pocock had spent his days at Travers Island carefully sanding down the shell’s hull and then applying coat after coat of marine varnish, buffing each coat until the shell glistened. It wasn’t just a matter of aesthetics. Pocock wanted the shell to have the fastest possible racing bottom he could impart to it. Fractions of a second might well tell the story in Berlin.
When they pulled up alongside the Manhattan, Pocock found that the dock was a jumble of offices, storage sheds, stacks of cargo, and canopied gangways for passengers. He and the boys were responsible for loading the boat onto the ship themselves, and they quickly discovered that there wasn’t any place where they could maneuver the long shell into a position to get her aboard. They were all wearing ties, for a reception to be followed by dinner at the Lincoln Hotel later that day. Carrying the shell over their heads in the stifling, humid heat, they walked carefully but wearily up and down the dock for nearly an hour, staring up at the great red hull of the ship, trying everything they could think of.
Finally, far up the dock, someone spotted a baggage chute descending at a sixty-degree angle to street level. Gingerly, they inserted the prow end of the shell into the chute. Then, crawling on hands and knees, they snaked it up the chute to the promenade deck. From there, holding it high over their heads again, they angled it all the way up to the boat deck, tied it down, covered it with a tarp, and hoped and prayed that no one would mistake it for a bench and sit on it. Then they hurried off to their reception, massively late and soaked in sweat.
At the Lincoln Hotel, they signed in officially with the AOC, then mingled for the first time with their fellow Olympians in the lobby. Glenn Cunningham was there, dressed in a sharp gray suit and a bright yellow tie. In a corner of the room, photographers had cornered Jesse Owens, dressed in an ice-cream-white suit, and talked him into posing with a saxophone. “When I give the word,” said one of the photographers, “blow on that thing.” On command, Jesse blew. The instrument emitted a long, wheezing sigh. “Better look at your tires, Jesse, that sounded like a puncture,” someone joked.
Walking around the room, the Washington boys figured they might not be the most famous people there, or the fastest afoot, or even the strongest, but—with the exception of Bobby Moch—they were probably the tallest. Then they met six-foot-eight Joe Fortenberry and six-foot-nine Willard Schmidt from the first-ever U.S. Olympic basketball team. When he went to shake their hands and tried to look Schmidt in the eye, even Stub McMillin found that he risked getting a crick in his neck. Bobby Moch didn’t even try. He figured he would have needed a ladder.
The next day was a whirl of activity—picking up their Olympic credentials and their German visas, stocking up on a few last-minute sundries, buying travelers’ checks. Johnny White didn’t know what he was going to do for money in Europe. He still had most of the fourteen dollars he’d left home with, but that wasn’t going to last long. Then, at the last minute, an envelope with a hundred dollars arrived from Seattle. His sister, Mary Helen, had sent it—nearly all her savings—saying she’d take his old violin in exchange. Johnny knew full well she had no interest at all in the violin.
Joe’s Olympic passport
They capped off their tour of New York that evening with a trip to Loew’s State Theatre, where Duke Ellington and his orchestra were finishing up a weeklong engagement. For Joe and Roger especially, it was the highlight of the stay in New York. Under the theater’s huge Czech-crystal chandelier, sitting in red-plush theater seats and surrounded by gilded woodwork, they listened entranced as Ellington and his orchestra lilted through “Mood Indigo,” “Accent on Youth,” “In a Sentimental Mood,” “Uptown Downbeat,” and a dozen and a half more tunes. Joe basked in the bright, brassy music, soaking it in as it washed over him, feeling it swing him.
Late that night they settled in at the Alpha Delta Phi Club for one last night’s sleep before their even grander adventure commenced the following morning. As they turned out the lights, fifty miles to the south of them, the zeppelin Hindenburg cast off from its mooring place in Lakehurst, New Jersey, and lumbered out over the Atlantic on its way home to Germany and its own small role in the 1936 Olympics, looming dark against the night sky, large black swastikas emblazoned on its tail fins.
• • •
With newsreel cameras rolling and flashbulbs popping, the boys bounded up the gangplank and onto the Manhattan at ten thirty the next morning. Like the 325 other members of the U.S. Olympic team boarding this ship, they were giddy, charged with earnest excitement. None of them had ever been on a boat any larger than the ferries back in Seattle, and the SS Manhattan—668 feet long, weighing in at 24,289 tons, with eight passenger decks, and able to accommodate 1,239 passengers—was no ferry. She was in fact a full-fledged luxury liner. Just five years old, she and her sister ship, the SS Washington, were the first large North Atlantic liners to be built in America since 1905 and the largest that Americans had ever built.
Lying at berth on the Hudson that morning, the Manhattan was about as all-American a sight as one could imagine, her red hull and gleaming white superstructure topped by twin funnels, each swept jauntily back and painted with red, white, and blue horizontal stripes. As the athletes piled gleefully on board, each was given a small American flag, and soon the rails were crowded with bright-faced young people waving the flags and calling out to family and well-wishers gathered on the dock below.
The boys found their quarters down in tourist class and stowed their gear. They met and shook hands with the other oarsmen who would represent the United States in Berlin: Dan Barrow, a single sculler from the Pennsylvania Athletic Club; two pairs, one with and one without a coxswain, also from the Pennsylvania Athletic Club; a double sculls crew from the Undin
e Barge Club in Philadelphia; and two four-oared crews, one made up of Harvard boys from the Riverside Boat Club in Massachusetts, with a coxswain, and one from the West Side Rowing Club in Buffalo, New York, without a coxswain.
Then, with the formalities over, they joined the flag wavers up on deck. As the noon sailing time approached, more than ten thousand spectators crowded onto Pier 60. Blimps and airplanes circled overhead. Newsreel photographers shot a few more feet of film on deck and then scampered off the ship to set up their cameras for shots of it leaving. Black smoke began to billow out of the red, white, and blue funnels. Nautical pennants fluttered from rigging on the fore and after masts in a light, hot breeze.
Just before noon the athletes assembled on the sundeck, gathering around Avery Brundage and other AOC officials as they unfurled an enormous white flag with the five interlocking Olympic rings and began to raise it on the after mast. The crowd on the dock, doffing their hats and waving them over their heads, began a thunderous chant: “Ray! Ray! Ray! For the USA!” A band struck up a martial tune, the lines were cast off, and the Manhattan began to back slowly out into the Hudson.
Joe and the other boys rushed back to the rails, waving their flags now, unabashedly taking up the chant: “Ray! Ray! Ray! For the USA!” On the dock people shouted, “Bon voyage!” The whistles on tugs and ferries and nearby ships began to shriek. Out on the river, fireboats let loose with their sirens and shot white plumes of water high into the air. The planes overhead tipped to one side and circled in tight loops as photographers snapped aerial views.
Tugs pushed the bow of the Manhattan until she pointed down the river, and the ship began to power majestically down the west side of Manhattan. As she made her way past the Battery, Joe felt the first cooling breeze in days. When she passed Ellis Island and then the Statue of Liberty, he, like everyone, dashed to the starboard rail to watch her pass. He stayed on deck as the ship made her way through the narrows, with Staten Island on one side and Brooklyn on the other, and then progressed through the lower bay and out finally into the Atlantic, where she began to roll slightly as she made a long, slow, sweeping turn to port.
Still Joe stayed on deck, leaning on the rail, enjoying the cool air, watching Long Island pass by, trying to absorb everything, to remember everything, so he could tell Joyce all about it when he returned home. It was only hours later, when the sun had begun to decline in the west and Joe had finally grown downright chilly on deck, that he retreated into the bowels of the ship, starting to get his sea legs, looking for the rest of the boys and food.
As the Manhattan sailed northeast that night and darkness enveloped her, she was ablaze with lights and loud with music, alive with the laughter of young people at play, having the time of their lives, venturing out onto the black void of the North Atlantic, on their way to Hitler’s Germany.
The SS Manhattan
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Good thoughts have much to do with good rowing. It isn’t enough for the muscles of a crew to work in unison; their hearts and minds must also be as one.
—George Yeoman Pocock
As Joe drifted into sleep aboard the Manhattan, the first light of dawn crept over Berlin, revealing small groups of men, women, and children being marched through the streets at gunpoint. The arrests had begun hours earlier, under the veil of night, when police and SA storm troopers broke into the shanties and wagons that were home to Roma and Sinti families—Gypsies—and rousted them from their beds. Now they were on their way to a sewage-disposal site in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn, where they would be kept in a detention camp, well away from the eyes of foreigners arriving in Berlin for the Olympics. In time they would be sent east to death camps and murdered.
Their removal was just one more step in a process that had been unfolding for months as the Nazis transformed Berlin into something resembling a vast movie set—a place where illusion could be perfected, where the unreal could be made to seem real and the real could be hidden away. Already the signs prohibiting Jews from entering public facilities had been taken down and stored for later use. The fiercely anti-Semitic Der Stürmer newspaper—with its grotesque caricatures of Jews and its slogan, “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”—had been temporarily removed from newsstands. In Der Angriff, his principal propaganda publication, Joseph Goebbels had handed Berliners the script for their part in the performance, detailing how they should conduct themselves toward Jews and how they should welcome the foreigners when they arrived: “We must be more charming than the Parisians, more easygoing than the Viennese, more vivacious than the Romans, more cosmopolitan than London, more practical than New York.”
When the foreigners arrived, all would be pleasant. Berlin would become a sort of benign amusement park for adults. Strict controls would limit what visitors could be charged for everything—from rooms at luxury hotels like the Adlon to the bratwurst sold by street vendors all over town. To improve the scenery, not only the Gypsies but more than fourteen hundred homeless people had been collected and removed from the streets. Hundreds of prostitutes had been seized, forcibly examined for venereal disease, and then turned loose to ply their trade for the carnal satisfaction of the visitors.
Visiting journalists, who would convey their impressions of the new Germany to the rest of the world, would be given special accommodations, the finest equipment, the best vantage points for viewing the games, free secretarial services. There was one contingency, though, that would have to be handled delicately, should it arise. If foreign journalists attempted to interview German Jews or investigate “the Jewish question,” they were to be politely directed to the nearest gestapo office, so that they could be questioned as to their intentions, and then trailed secretly.
Along the railroad tracks on which the visitors would travel into Berlin, grimy buildings had been whitewashed, vacant apartment buildings had been rented out inexpensively, and identical window boxes full of red geraniums had been placed beneath windowsills of even the apartments that remained vacant. Virtually every home along the tracks now displayed the red, white, and black swastika flag. Many also flew the white Olympic flag. A few—mostly Jewish homes—flew only the Olympic banner. Thousands more swastika flags hung in railroad stations. Indeed all of Berlin was draped with swastikas. Along the central promenade on Unter den Linden, Berlin’s wide central boulevard, the hundreds of linden trees that had given the street its name had been replaced with regimented colonnades of flagpoles bearing enormous forty-five-foot red banners with swastikas. Equally tall banners hung from the Brandenburg Gate. At Adolf-Hitler-Platz, concentric rings of tall masts flying Olympic flags surrounded a central tower, sixty-two feet high, draped with twenty swastika flags, forming a dramatic, blood-red cylinder in the middle of the grassy square. On the pleasant, shady streets leading to the rowing course out in Grünau, strands of smaller flags with swastikas were strung from tree to tree.
The streets had been swept and reswept. Shop windows polished. Trains freshly painted. Broken windows replaced. Dozens of new courtesy Mercedes limousines had been parked in neat rows outside the Olympic Stadium, awaiting VIPs. Nearly everyone from taxi drivers to sanitation workers had been outfitted in some kind of smart new uniform. Foreign books, banned books, books that had escaped the bonfires of 1933, suddenly reappeared in bookshop windows.
Berlin decked out for the Olympics
With the set fully decorated, Leni Riefenstahl was busily at work mobilizing dozens of cameramen and sound technicians, putting scores of cameras in place. In the Olympic Stadium, out at the Reichssportfeld, she set up thirty cameras for the opening ceremony alone. She dug pits for low-angle shots and erected steel towers for high-angle shots. She constructed rails on which camera dollies could run alongside the red-clay track. She immersed cameras in waterproof housings in the Olympic swimming and diving pools. She attached cameras to saddles for equestrian events and floated them on pontoon boats for swimming events. In central Berlin sh
e set cameras on strategic buildings, mounted them on the tops of trucks, suspended them from blimps, and dug more pits—all to capture ground-level footage of the marathon runners and the torch-relay runners as they made their way through the city. Out at the rowing course at Grünau, she constructed a jetty in the Langer See, running parallel to the racecourse, and installed rails along which a dolly with a camera could follow the shells for the final hundred meters of the races. She borrowed an antiaircraft balloon from the Luftwaffe and tethered it near the finish so a cameraman could dangle from it for aerial shots.
Everywhere she set up cameras, Riefenstahl made sure she had the most flattering angles, generally cast upward, for filming the ultimate stars of the show, Adolf Hitler and his entourage. Then, with the cameras mostly in place, she and all of Berlin waited for the rest of the cast to arrive.
• • •
Don Hume and Roger Morris lay retching in their berths aboard the Manhattan that morning. Al Ulbrickson felt fine, but he was worried about Hume and Morris, laid low by seasickness. They were already the two lightest oarsmen in the boat, and he had planned to make sure they put on some weight during the voyage.