World Net Daily ... A 20th-century hobby for young baseball fans was collecting and trading cards of star players. Back then, little value was attached to the cards, evidenced as some were placed between the wheel spokes of children's bicycles as noise-makers or otherwise abused. Only later was it determined money could be made in card collections as investments.

 

Obviously, cards of better-known players held greater value. But one player among professional baseball's lesser-knowns did much more than entertain fans on the baseball field. Unbeknownst to them, he silently risked his life for his country, unable to talk about what he was doing. 

This week marks the 48th anniversary of his death, on May 29, 1972. Appropriately, he should be remembered this Memorial Day week – not as an unexceptional baseball player but as an exceptionally courageous warrior.

 

Moe Berger played catcher when a team of baseball's greats was assembled in 1934 to make a tour to pre-war Japan – a country caught up in the craze of the sport. Berg had bounced from team to team, thus, many fans failed to understand why, as a mediocre player, he was included in a group boasting baseball giants like Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.

 

Berg graduated magna cum laude from Princeton. He would read 10 newspapers daily. Casey Stengel, a later Baseball Hall of Famer, described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball." 

Stengel's description was a compliment for a man who had mastered 15 languages, including Japanese.

 

Soon after the all-star team's arrival in Tokyo, Berg exchanged his baseball uniform for a kimono. He purchased flowers, allegedly for an American patient at St. Luke's hospital – the tallest building in downtown Tokyo – but the flowers were never delivered. 

Instead, Berg used the ruse to head up to the building's rooftop. There, he pulled out a camera from underneath his komono and took pictures of the city's key military facilities and other potential targets. 

Eight years later, those photographs would be closely studied by Col. Jimmy Doolittle prior to his famous bombing raid over Tokyo. 

While the raid was not much of a military success, it was an immense psychological one as the Japanese came to realize America could bring the war home to them.

 

This was but the first of a number of secret missions for which Berg would prove that while his talents as a baseball player might be limited, his talents as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services – the precursor of the CIA – were not.

 

By World War II's outbreak, Berg's skills made him a treasured intelligence asset. Thus, when the need arose to determine between two groups of Yugoslavian partisans which the Allies should support, Berg got the call. He parachuted into the country to assess the situation. Determining the Allies would be better served supporting Marshall Josip Broz Tito's forces, Berg was then extracted. 

His intelligence report resulted in Tito's group immediately receiving British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's support.

 

That same year, Berg was again tapped for a secret assignment, entering German-held Norway to meet with members of the underground. They briefed him about a heretofore unknown Nazi facility – a secret heavy-water plant Germany was building as part of its atomic bomb program. 

Berg reported its location to Western intelligence, leading to its ultimate destruction. But news about the heavy-water plant raised a lingering question demanding a quick answer. An atomic bomb would be game-changing technology in the war, obviously benefiting whomever developed it first. It had to be determined how advanced the Nazi program was. 

Once again, Berg became the go-to guy.

 

Sent to Switzerland in time to sit in on a lecture by Nobel Laureate and leading German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Berg managed to slip by SS guards, posing as a Swiss graduate student. As he queried Heisenberg, little did the physicist realize, with his response, two lives hung in the balance. Berg had brought two items with him – a pistol hidden in his pocket and a cyanide pill. 

His orders were, if Heisenberg indicated the Nazis were close to completion, Berg was to shoot him and take the pill. However, as Heisenberg's answer indicated development was a long way off, Berg simply complimented him on his speech, forwarding his answer to eagerly awaiting U.S. and British intelligence sources.

 

In 1945, President Harry Truman awarded Berg the nation's highest civilian medal – the Presidential Medal of Freedom – which he refused to accept. 

Never disclosing why, it may be an ever humble Berg – who never spoke about his exploits – felt he had risked no more during wartime than millions of others did. It was only after his death that his sister accepted the medal on his behalf.

 

Berg spent the post-war years of his life without gainful employment. 

Too old to play baseball, he was even turned down for employment by the CIA. Sadly, a great American hero and the brainiest baseball player in history died in obscurity, living with his siblings. 

Today, while a baseball card collector might find a Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig card of tremendous value, Berg's courage and patriotism was priceless. His service to country is memorialized as his card is on display at CIA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

 

Not having died on a World War II battlefield, Berg, technically, does not qualify as one Memorial Day seeks to honor. But his major contribution to the war effort at the tremendous risk of his own life was typical of so many of those of his generation who failed to return, it, therefore, needs to be shared.

 

In 1918, Georgia teacher Moina Belle Michael was touched by the famous poem "In Flanders Fields," honoring World War I's dead whose memory would forever be seeded by the red poppies flourishing in those fields. 

Michael never forget those who made the ultimate sacrifice.  She wrote her own poem and memorialized a promise in its last verse:

 

And now the Torch and Poppy Red

We wear in honor of our dead.

Fear not that ye have died for naught;

We'll teach the lesson that ye wrought

In Flanders Fields.

 

It is deeply unfortunate that 21st-century America has failed to follow through on Moina Belle Michael's promise as so many of our war heroes, like Moe Berg, have been long forgotten.

 

On behalf of a grateful nation, "Thanks, Moe!"