At exactly 4:00 p.m., Hitler entered the western end of the stadium. A massive orchestra—the Berlin Philharmonic merged with the national orchestra and supplemented by half a dozen military bands—launched into Wagner’s Huldigungsmarsch, the March of Homage. As they saw Hitler descending the Marathon steps toward field level, 110,000 people rose to their feet, thrust out their right hands, and began to roar rhythmically, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”
Flanked now by gray-uniformed Nazi officers and trailed by the Olympic officials in silk hats, Hitler made his way along the red-clay running track, the Heils pulsating through the stadium. A five-year-old girl, Gudrun Diem, dressed in a light blue frock and wearing a flower chaplet in her hair, stepped forward, said, “Heil, mein Führer!” and presented him with a small, delicate bouquet of flowers. Hitler beamed at her, took the flowers, and then climbed the steps to his wide viewing platform, where he strode to his place of honor and gazed out over the crowd as the massed orchestra, conducted by Richard Strauss, began to play the “Deutschlandlied,” with its refrain of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” followed immediately by the Nazi Party anthem, the “Horst-Wessel-Lied.”
As the last strident strains of the latter song faded away, there was a moment of silence. Then the enormous bell out beyond the Maifeld began to toll, slowly and softly at first, then growing louder, more insistent, and more sonorous as the athletes began to parade into the stadium, led, as always, by the Greek national team. As each team passed Hitler, it dipped its flag. Most also rendered some form of salute to him. Some offered the Olympic salute, which bore an unfortunate resemblance to the Nazi salute—the right arm extended, palm down, but held off to the right side of the body rather than straight ahead as in the Nazi version. Some offered the straightforward Nazi version. Many, including the French, offered various ambiguous versions somewhere between the two. A few offered no salute at all. In response to each of them, the crowd responded by applauding enthusiastically or unenthusiastically, depending on how closely the gesture matched the Nazi salute.
Out on the Maifeld, the Americans finally mustered themselves into proper columns, straightened their ties or smoothed their skirts, adjusted their hats, and began to stroll toward the tunnel through which they were to enter the stadium. Marching was not their strong suit, certainly not compared to the Germans. But as they entered the tunnel, hearing a flurry of Heils inside the stadium, they threw back their shoulders, picked up the pace, and started to sing spontaneously, belting it out:
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here
What the deuce do we care?
What the deuce do we care?
Hail, hail, we’re full of cheer
What the heck do we care . . . ?
Lead by gymnast Alfred Joachim, the American flag bearer, they emerged singing from the darkness of the tunnel and marched out into the vast interior of the stadium. It was a world of sights and sounds that few of them would ever forget, even when they were old men and women. As the orchestra played a light, airy tune, they marched eight abreast out onto the track. Coming even with Hitler, they turned their heads to the right, gazed expressionless up at him on his high platform, removed their straw hats, placed them over their hearts, and walked on by as Joachim held the Stars and Stripes defiantly aloft. For the most part, the crowd applauded politely. Mixed in with the applause, though, was a spattering of whistles and the stamping of feet, the European equivalents of catcalls and boos.
But the sounds of dissent were quickly drowned out. Even as the last Americans were still passing Hitler, the first German athletes began to emerge from the tunnel, dressed in crisp white linen suits and sporting white yachting caps. Immediately, an enormous, rumbling roar went up from the crowd. Virtually all of the 110,000 spectators again leapt to their feet and raised their right arms in the Nazi salute. The orchestra shifted abruptly from the light march tune it had been playing to another swelling rendition of the “Deutschlandlied.” The crowd, frozen in place, their thousands of arms outstretched, sang along lustily. On the dais, Hitler’s eyes glistened. As the German flag bearer carried the swastika past him, he saluted and then touched his heart with his right hand, as Riefenstahl’s cameras rolled. The Americans marched awkwardly on around the track and onto the infield to the strains of the “Deutschlandlied.” George Pocock would later say that when they heard the strains of the German anthem they began to march deliberately out of step with the music.
When all the athletes were assembled in ranks on the infield, Theodor Lewald, president of the German Olympic Organizing Committee, stepped to a bank of microphones on the dais and launched into what soon turned into an interminable speech. As it went on and on, a British radio announcer broadcasting it back home struggled to keep his audience entertained: “We’ll have Herr Hitler in just a moment. . . . There’s the cheering. I believe Dr. Lewald has finished. No, he’s going on again.” Lewald’s voice echoed in the background as the announcer labored to fill the air, describing the uniforms of various teams, the platform on which the speakers stood, the Hindenburg circling overhead like a near moon.
Finally Lewald broke off. Hitler, who had been chatting with Leni Riefenstahl, stepped to the microphone and pronounced the games open in one brief sentence. The British announcer, caught unawares, broke back in, excited and relieved, “That was Herr Hitler! The games are open!”
The ceremony rose to a crescendo. Ranks of trumpeters on the Marathon Gate sounded a fanfare. The Olympic flag was hoisted. Richard Strauss conducted the enormous orchestra in the debut of his Olympic Hymn. The artillery outside the stadium thundered. Thousands of white pigeons suddenly rose from cages on the field, swirling through the stadium in a white whirlwind. Another fanfare sounded and a slender, blond young man dressed in white and holding aloft a torch appeared at the eastern gate of the stadium. A hush fell over the crowd as he loped gracefully down the eastern steps, around the red-clay track, and up the western steps, where he paused again, silhouetted against the sky, holding the torch high over his head. Then, with the Olympic bell tolling in the background, he turned, rose on his toes, and touched the torch to an enormous bronze cauldron on a tripod. Flames leapt from the cauldron. Finally, with the sun beginning to decline behind the Olympic flame, a choir of thousands dressed in white rose en masse and began to sing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. The spectators stood and joined in. The music and the voices rose and melded and surged through the vast interior of the stadium, filling it with light and love and joy.
As the athletes began to march out of the stadium that evening, nearly everyone on the field and off felt more or less stunned. Nobody had ever witnessed anything quite like what had just transpired. International journalists rushed to their Teletypes and flooded the wires, and by the next morning newspapers around the world carried rapturous headlines. The boys from Washington were impressed too. It was “the most impressive sight I have ever seen,” said Roger Morris. Johnny White said, “It gave you a grand feeling.” And that was precisely what it had been carefully crafted to do—give you a grand feeling. It had begun the process of determining the world’s opinion about the new Germany. It had hung out a sign for all to see: “Welcome to the Third Reich. We are not what they say we are.”
Ulbrickson’s final advice
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
To see a winning crew in action is to witness a perfect harmony in which everything is right. . . . That is the formula for endurance and success: rowing with the heart and head as well as physical strength.
—George Yeoman Pocock
The weather on the Langer See turned positively wintry in early August. A cold, cutting wind blew relentlessly down the racecourse at Grünau. The boys rowed into the wind dressed in sweat shirts, their legs slathered in goose grease. With the preliminary races less than two weeks away, they still hadn’t regained their form. The boat checked on the catches and bounced in the rough water rathe
r than slicing efficiently through it. Their timing was off. They caught crabs. Their bodies were still not in condition. They littered their journals with self-deprecating commentary. “We went lousy,” Johnny White noted simply.
All the boys were worried, but off the water they continued to exult in the heady atmosphere that enveloped Berlin that summer, and to revel in one another’s company, meandering through the city, eating schnitzel, drinking beer, hoisting steins, and singing “Bow Down to Washington.” When the athletic director from Stanford, Jack Rice, invited them to dinner at the posh Adlon hotel, they jumped at the chance. Wearing everyday trousers and their crew sweaters with big Ws on the front, they made their way through a police cordon and into the hotel’s ornate lobby, where the scents of leather and malt whisky mingled with gales of laughter, the clinking of glasses, and the tinkling of soft, slow piano music. In the high-ceilinged dining room, a waiter in coattails led them to a table with ivory candles and a white linen tablecloth. They sat wide-eyed, gazing around the room at the other diners—international Olympic officials; well-heeled Americans and Brits; elegant German women in flowing evening gowns of silk or chiffon, sleek lamé, or satin studded with sequins. Here and there SS officers sat apart, at their own tables, chatting, laughing, drinking French wine, and attacking beefsteaks or sauerbraten with knives and forks. In their gray-and-black dress uniforms, their peaked hats adorned with silver skulls and crossbones sitting on their tables, they stood out from the rest of the crowd—neat, severe, and ominous. But no one seemed to mind their presence.
• • •
On August 6, Al Ulbrickson grounded the boys. There would be no more trips into Berlin or anywhere else until after the games. With just six days to go now until their preliminary race, Ulbrickson wasn’t at all happy with their progress. He wasn’t happy, in fact, with any number of things. The cold, wet weather and the lack of heating in the police barracks were making it hard for Don Hume to throw off the cold—or whatever it was that was lingering in his chest. Since he’d first gotten sick at Princeton in early July, Hume had never really stopped coughing and dragging around. “Hume means everything to us. Unless he recovers quickly and regains condition we won’t have much chance,” Ulbrickson had griped to the Associated Press a week before. Hume was still at least as sick as he had been then.
And then there was the matter of the racecourse. On August 5, Ulbrickson had gotten in an argument—loud, multilingual, and largely incomprehensible to all involved—with officials from the Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Aviron and German Olympic officials. The course at Grünau was six lanes wide, but the outermost two lanes—lanes five and six—were so exposed to the prevailing winds on the Langer See that they were at times all but unrowable. Earlier that day, in fact, Ulbrickson had canceled a workout rather than have his boys risk drowning out in the far lanes. Lanes one through three, on the other hand, came in so close to the southern shore of the lake that they were almost entirely protected through much of the course. The disparity made for a very uneven playing field. If the wind was blowing on race day, whoever was assigned lanes five and six would likely start off with about a two-length handicap to overcome relative to the inside lanes. Ulbrickson wanted the two outside lanes ruled out of commission. In all previous Olympic rowing competitions, he pointed out, preliminary heats as well as finals had been limited to four boats. But after a long, heated exchange Ulbrickson lost the argument. All six lanes would be used.
Ulbrickson’s concern ratcheted up another level when he started taking a good look at the British crew. At the heart of the outfit were two Cambridge men in the rear of the boat: John Noel Duckworth, the coxswain, and William George Ranald Mundell Laurie, the stroke. Duckworth was, as someone would later say about him, “Short of stature, great of heart.” The stature part was obvious just by looking at him. The heart part he showed every time he took to the water. He would also show it a few years later in the South Pacific when, against orders, he stayed behind with wounded British soldiers as Japanese troops surrounded them. When the Japanese arrived and prepared to execute the wounded, Duckworth berated them so roundly that they beat him severely but spared his companions. They sent him to the infamous Changi POW camp in Singapore. Then they marched him and 1,679 other prisoners 220 miles through the jungle to the Songkurai No. 2 Camp in Thailand and put them to work as slave labor on the Thailand-Burma Railway. There, as they began to die of beriberi, diphtheria, smallpox, cholera, and torture, Duckworth ministered to them as chaplain even as he worked side by side with them. In the end, only 250 survived, and Duckworth was one of them.
Laurie, who went by Ran, was perhaps the best British stroke of his generation—188 pounds of power, grace, and keen intelligence. His son, Hugh, the actor, would also eventually row for Cambridge. Ran was, by all accounts, an unusually gracious young man. Together, Duckworth and Laurie had piloted Cambridge to three consecutive victories—adding on to a string of seven previous wins—over Oxford in the annual Boat Race, despite the fact that the Oxonians had recently switched from beer to milk at their training table in a desperate bid to reverse the trend. Ulbrickson figured that experience alone—racing in front of the half million to million fans who crowded the banks of the Thames for the Boat Race each year—had to give the British boys an edge in the confidence department.
What most concerned Al Ulbrickson, though, as he watched the British crew working out at Grünau, was how much they reminded him of his own boys. Not that any of them particularly resembled his boys physically—they didn’t. And it wasn’t that their rowing styles were similar. In fact the British boys still rowed with the long layback that English prep schools and universities had taught for generations. Washington, of course, used the shorter, more upright stroke that George Pocock had adapted from the Thames watermen’s style and taught Hiram Conibear twenty years earlier.
Where the British boys resembled Ulbrickson’s was in strategy. They liked to do exactly what the Washington boys did so well. They excelled at sitting back but staying close, rowing hard but slow, pressuring their opponents into raising their stroke rates too high too soon, and then, when the other crews were good and fagged out, suddenly sprinting past them, catching them unawares, unnerving them, mowing them down. Except for the cricket cap and neck scarf that Duckworth wore in the coxswain’s seat, he coxed an awful lot like Bobby Moch. And Ran Laurie handled the stroke oar an awful lot like Don Hume. It was going to be interesting to see what happened when two crews playing the same game met on the Langer See.
• • •
As the Olympic preliminary heats approached and the gravity of what was coming settled on them, Ulbrickson’s boys began to get tense and fidgety again. Those who were keeping journals or writing letters home began to confide in them about nervousness as they had before the Olympic trials at Princeton. Chuck Day began to seek out Al Ulbrickson for confidence-building sessions. Between them, he chain-smoked Lucky Strikes and Camels, laughing off the other boys as they tried to get him to cut back.
The Americans weren’t alone in feeling edgy. Twenty-four international teams shared the same rowing and dining facilities in Grünau and Köpenick. All were composed of large, healthy, and highly competitive young men, each of whom was about to face a defining moment in his life. For the most part, the Olympic spirit prevailed among them, and many new friendships had emerged during the three weeks that they had lived and competed in Germany. The boys from Washington, in particular, fell into an easy comradeship with the all-police crew from Australia, with whom they shared not only a more or less common language but also a kind of easy, confident, and swaggering approach to life. They also hit it off well with the Swiss crew. They were “big devils,” Johnny White noted, but full of mirth and goodwill, and the boys got a kick out of riding with them in the bus between Köpenick and Grünau as the Swiss belted out full-throated yodeling songs.
But with the preliminaries approaching, nerves began to grow
raw among all the crews in Grünau and Köpenick. The Aussies made no effort to conceal their contempt for the Brits. The Brits could not look at the Germans without remembering the last war and worrying about a future one. And the boys from Washington were having a hard time sleeping. Almost every night there was some kind of disturbance in the cobblestoned street below their windows. One night it was brown-shirted storm troopers singing and parading past in hobnailed boots. Another it was military night maneuvers—roaring motorcycles with sidecars, trucks with glowing green night-lights in their cabs, caissons carrying field artillery—all rattling past under the streetlamps. Then it was police cadets drilling at odd hours. Then German oarsmen singing. Then a contingent of canoeists who had finished their races, and been badly beaten, and were bent on holding a consolation party downstairs.
Exasperated, the boys decided to do something about it. Six of them were engineering students, so they took an engineer’s approach to the problem. They contrived a device whereby they could, while lying in their bunks, yank on some strings, dump buckets of water on whoever happened to be down in the street annoying them, and retrieve and conceal the buckets quickly and without getting out of their beds. They got an opportunity to put it to use that night when the Yugoslavian team decided to raise a ruckus down in the street. The boys yanked their strings and water cascaded down, not only on the Yugoslavians but also on some German police cadets who were trying to quiet them down. Drenched, outraged athletes and police cadets stormed into the building hollering. More athletes poured from their rooms and into the stairwell. Everyone was yelling in a different language. Finally the boys from Washington emerged, looking sleepy, confused, and decidedly innocent. When someone demanded to know where the water had come from, they shrugged their shoulders and pointed meekly upstairs toward the Canadians.