Cloudbuster Nine

During World War II, the U.S. Navy established Pre-Flight training schools on American university campuses to prepare fighter pilots through an unprecedented regimen of physical conditioning, academics, and competitive sports. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of four such regional campuses, nearly 25 major-league baseball players cycled through training between 1942 and 1945, forming a team called the Cloudbuster Nine that barnstormed the East Coast and boosted wartime morale. Author Anne R. Keene, the daughter of the team's batboy, tells this largely forgotten story by weaving together military history, baseball narrative, and personal memoir.

The book opens with its climactic event: a July 28, 1943, exhibition at Yankee Stadium between the Cloudbuster Nine and the "Yanklands," a combined squad of New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians players managed by Babe Ruth. Ruth viewed the game as the managerial audition he had long coveted. The Cloudbusters won 11–5, raising $35,000 for the Red Cross. Ruth pinch-hit in the sixth inning but drew a walk and left the field before the game ended, not realizing it was the last time he would bat in his number 3 pinstriped jersey at Yankee Stadium. He never received another serious managerial offer. The game also featured the surprise appearance of Ted Williams, the Red Sox slugger who had enlisted in the Navy's V-5 Naval Aviation Cadet Training Program a year earlier. Before the game, Williams asked Ruth to sign a ball, the only time he ever sought another person's autograph.

Keene frames her exploration through the story of her father, James Plummer Raugh Jr., who died of emphysema on New Year's Day 2014 at age 79. A few days earlier, while searching his basement for eulogy material, Keene opened a sealed metal trunk and discovered a World War II scrapbook containing photographs of the Cloudbuster Nine and their nine-year-old batboy, her father. Jimmy Raugh's father, Lieutenant Commander James P. Raugh Sr., served as second-in-command of the Chapel Hill base, and Jimmy grew up on campus among the players. Williams and his Red Sox teammate Johnny Pesky took Jimmy to the movies, gave him batting lessons, and ignited a lifelong obsession with baseball. After college, Jimmy signed with the Detroit Tigers organization and pitched in the minor leagues but quit in 1961 at age 26, unable to reach the majors. He spent the rest of his life haunted by the career he lost.

Keene's research leads her to archival materials at UNC and to Ivan Fleser, a 96-year-old pitcher from Michigan who turns out to be the last surviving member of the 1943 team. Fleser describes Pre-Flight as a "pressure cooker" and credits baseball as the diversion that helped him endure training.

The book traces the Pre-Flight program's origins to December 1941, when Captain Arthur Radford, head of naval aviation training, tasked Lieutenant Commander Tom Hamilton with designing the schools. Hamilton, a legendary Naval Academy athlete, reluctantly accepted the desk assignment and turned to his older brother Howard, an Ohio State professor, to help draft the syllabus. The brothers outlined a program using competitive sports as laboratories for combat skills: boxing for reflexes, football as an analog to war, swimming for water survival, and baseball for hand-eye coordination. At a coaching conference in Detroit, Hamilton recruited 300 coaches with a single speech, including a 29-year-old Vanderbilt line coach named Bear Bryant, who showed up at Hamilton's office, refused to leave, and lived in Hamilton's house for three weeks until hired.

UNC President Frank Porter Graham, the brother of one-game major-leaguer Archibald "Moonlight" Graham (whose story later inspired the movie Field of Dreams), lobbied Washington for nearly two years to secure the campus. Working with Raleigh News & Observer publisher Josephus Daniels, a former Secretary of the Navy, Graham overcame competition from Notre Dame, Ohio State, and other institutions. Chapel Hill was selected as the Eastern Seaboard campus on February 27, 1942, and the base was commissioned on May 23 before 5,000 spectators.

Williams arrived at Durham's train station on May 6, 1943, picked up by baseball coach Lieutenant Don Kepler, a minor-league veteran and survival training expert who had learned woodcraft from Civil War veterans near his Pennsylvania home. The two bonded over hunting and fishing, beginning a lifelong friendship. From dawn to dusk, cadets marched, drilled, studied navigation and the Theory of Flight, boxed, played football against former professionals, and learned hand-to-hand combat. Williams excelled in the classroom, earning a 3.28 GPA, and took extra batting practice with Kepler until his hands bled. The aviation courses, covering aerodynamics, wind velocity, and Bernoulli's law, shaped Williams's later understanding of hitting, teaching him to factor environmental conditions into his swing with the precision a pilot uses to adjust for weather.

The survival training program, developed by Kepler and twin brothers John and Frank Craighead, world-renowned falconers and National Geographic writers, taught cadets to live off the land and sea. The final exam dropped each cadet alone into the woods with only the materials a downed pilot would carry. These skills later saved real lives: George H. W. Bush, who trained at Chapel Hill at age 18, survived being shot down over the Pacific island of Chichi Jima in September 1944 using survival techniques learned at Pre-Flight.

During the 1943 season, the Cloudbusters played approximately 45 games, winning about 30 and losing six, against college teams, factory squads, military teams, and powerful Norfolk Naval squads. When Gene Tunney, director of physical education at the Bureau of Naval Personnel, tried to cancel Pre-Flight sports competitions as wasteful "boondoggling," Hamilton visited the White House. After a lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt, President Roosevelt signed an executive order lifting travel restrictions for V-5 cadets, enabling the Cloudbusters to continue their morale-boosting road games.

After the season, Williams earned his wings as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps at Pensacola in May 1944. Pesky, who struggled as a pilot and honestly requested reassignment, became an athletics officer instead. By 1944, military baseball was curtailed amid criticism that celebrity players received preferential treatment. The Chapel Hill Pre-Flight School was decommissioned on October 15, 1945, after training cadets from 75 battalions. About 80,000 cadets cycled through the four regional Pre-Flight campuses, with roughly 60,000 graduating as pilots.

The book traces the postwar fates of its central figures. Buddy Hassett, the Cloudbusters' team captain and former Yankees first baseman, was cut one year before the major-league pension was established and never received one; at 83, he worked at a trucking company to make ends meet. Williams returned to the Red Sox in 1946 but was recalled to Korea in 1952 as a Marine pilot, where John Glenn flew as his wingman and once saved his life by signaling him to climb when his jet caught fire. Hamilton served on the USS Enterprise, then returned to coach at the Naval Academy and later became athletic director at the University of Pittsburgh. Bryant became the most storied coach in college football history. The Craighead twins became conservationists who co-authored the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

Keene closes by reconstructing her father's career: his All-American pitching at UNC, his signing with the Tigers, his best season under Pesky's management at Victoria, Texas, and his collapse from pitcher's elbow. When Jimmy's father told him he was "not good enough for the majors, never was, never would be," the statement shattered him. At her father's hospice, a nurse named Vickie, who wore a pin honoring her own son who had died as a young pitcher, was the only person to answer the riddle Jimmy had posed for decades: "What are the nine ways a player gets on base?" After that exchange, Keene believes her father was ready to die in peace.