I was watching a “Hawaii Five-O” episode entitled “To Hell with Babe Ruth.” Later in the ep, McGarrett explains that that was a rallying cry when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. While I didn’t find any corroboration of that specifically, ESPN’s blurb on Babe Ruth does mention it, though not specifically about Pearl Harbor.
The question: Is there any corroboration of the WWII era Japanese using that phrase?
I heard it was better than that second runner up phrase “Oh Yeah?”, but I can not find a cite for that either.
I don’t think this was a rallying cry at Pearl Harbor. But it certainly was used in WWII. The word “Banzai” literally means “ten thousand years” but the idiom means “may you live 10,00 years”. If a Japanese unit was in an impossible situation, they would wish for the Emperor to live 10,000 years and make a suicide charge on the enemy rather than allow themselves to be captured. American GIs learned that if they heard Japanese soldiers yelling “Banzai” they were about to face an all-out attack, although they usually didn’t know what the word meant or even that the attack was meant to be suicidal.
Lemur, I think he’s asking about “to hell with Babe Ruth” being used as a war cry, not “Banzai”. I can’t imagine that “to hell with Babe Ruth” was used at Pearl Harbor, for the simple reason that there was no close combat and not much opportunity to yell anything at the enemy.
I believe it was used at later times, however. Babe Ruth and baseball were quite well known in Japan; and Ruth made a heavily publicized tour of the Far East in 1934. I know I’ve read of GI’s quoting Japanese war cries to that effect, although I can’t find a cite just now.
I doubt it was a battle cry, but it certainly was a taunt.
Oh. That would make sense. Nevermind, then. :smack:
My WAG is that it’s an urban legend. You would be surprised at the silly stories about the Japanese that abounded in WWII.
One example, from Readers’ Digest if I remember right, was based on the UL that the Japanese couldn’t design anything on their own but had to copy the work of others. Knowing this our clever navy guys drew up a set of plans for a superbattleship that was proportioned so as to capsize immediately upon launch. And then they allowed the Japanese to steal the plans. You can take it from there. And people bought it and repeated it as a fact.
Another was that all Japanese had weak eyes and as a result wore thick glasses. One time, post WWII, I was in a group of maybe a dozen Americans with a Japanese friend. She was one of two or three not wearing glasses.
Of course the Japanese had an equal number of misconceptions about us. In war, the first casualty is truth, and I might add, common sense runs a close second.
I remember reading (way back in 4th grade, mind you) a WWII book called, IIRC, ‘Guadacanal Diary’ about the experiences of a Marine infantryman. I seem to recall a scene where American and Japanese forces are close enough to Yell back and forth, but dug in at night, neither wanting to charge forward. The Marines have a Japanese interpreter, and start asking him stuff like, “how do you say MTE*FKER in Japanese?" They start yelling stuff at the Japanese in the darkness, and an answering voice comes back "FK Babe Ruth!!”
The Babe Ruth slogan may have been because Americans were known overseas as Yankees.
True. One of my former students, who had served near the end of the war, was very surprised when I told him there were no monkeys native to the U.S. He had always assumed there were based on the rhyming slogans he and his schoolmates/fellow soldiers would always shout about Yankees.
Bob Costas mentioned something like this in Ken Burn’s baseball documentary, describing Babe Ruth’s status worldwide. He told a story of an American and an Englishman having an argument. The American said, “Screw the queen!” and the Englishman retorted, “Well screw Babe Ruth!” He was pointing out that denigrating Babe Ruth was more insulting to an American than insulting the President.
Well, whether the stories are true or not, it’s certainly true that soldiers from opposing armies will taunt each other, using what few words they know of each other’s languages, and what little they know about the other side’s values and culture.
A young Japanese soldier in 1942 probably didn’t know much English and probably didn’t know much about America beyond what he saw in an occasional movie. If Babe Ruth or Clark Gable were the only Americans he knew of, it would make sense for him to yell obscenities about them.
The way I heard it when I was a youngster during WWII…
In the Pacific theater, during lulls in the battles with the Japanese, our guys would yell obsenities to the enemy about Hirohito. “Hirohito fucks chickens!” and stuff like that, which an English-speaking Japanese soldier would translate for his cohorts.
Naturally, the Japanese soldiers were scandalized, as they should be: Hirohito was a
god. So they chose to yell back something equally outrageous - compliments of their Engrish-speakers. And what could be more blasphemous than, “To hell with Babe Ruth!”?
Might be an urban legend, but it was funny as hell to this 9-10 year-old American kid.
And Japanese soldiers yelling “Banzai!!!” during a suicidal charge into 50 caliber machine gun fire seemed to be a real favorite of the B war movies in the 40’s.
In case anyone was wondering, the Japanese code used during the attack on Pearl Harbour was “Tora, Tora, Tora”.
“BANZAI!” was also used as a cheer (A Japanese form of “Hurrah!”, if you will).
There is something odd, I think, in wartime reporting about these alleged incidents: it’s tough to find anything contemporaneous with WWII suggesting that these incidents actually took place during that Pacific campaign.
The earliest (and only, as far as I can tell) report presented as an actual news piece seems to have appeared in early March, 1944. This brief Associated Press article was printed in papers across the country within the first two weeks of that month. (By the way, the combat correspondent named in the piece had been a civilian reporter before the war and went on to have a solid wartime reputation, earning himself in the process a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.)
(A month later, Arch Ward, columnist for The Chicago Tribune, reported that “Babe Ruth’s reaction to the Japs’ new battle cry ‘To hell with Babe Ruth’ is as follows: ‘Sort of thing you’d expect from the itty-bittys.’” [From “In the Wake of the News,” 10 April 1944, Pg. 21.])
I think a problem with this “Babe Ruth” combat story from early 1944, however, is that it harkens back a bit to an anecdote that circulated before the war, something that Phase42 has already mentioned.
Moreover, even before O’Leary’s news account made it into print in March of 1944 a combat joke featuring a similar line had been circulating at least since the spring of 1943.
(A similar gag, this time alluding to the New Deal itself, was also told during the summer of 1943.)
In October, 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt repeated this humorous anecdote in a government-produced newsreel filmed with U.S. troops. In the news piece below, datelined “Washington, D.C., Oct. 1.,” the Chicago Tribune Press Service reports on a controversy surrounding the filming of Mrs. Roosevelt relating the following.
(A columnist for The Los Angeles Times who reported on this perceived Republican-bashing a few days later complained that this joke was ‘pretty ancient,’ having been told in Hollywood circles at least six months earlier.)
A follow-up in The Daily Tribune indicates that some studios had chosen to edit the short for showings to theater audiences, even to the extent of lopping off the final punchline.
Finally, and while it may be hard to believe, at least within four years after the end of the war that Grand Ole Opry favorite Ray Acuff’s name is included with those of FDR and the Babe.
So, where before 1943 are news reports that Japanese were taunting troops in the Pacific with “To hell with Roosevelt!” or “To hell with Babe Ruth!” and similar? (As others have suggested, “To hell with” may have been a sanitized version of any number of other ways of expressing the sentiment. Such alternate taunts would not have made it into family newspapers. Still, it would’ve been pretty easy to print an expletive-deleted version.)
I guess it’s possible that a handful of veterans of early Pacific-island campaigns may have been witness to a “To hell with” taunting incident on the battlefield and that these war stories had just never made it to the papers by the time O’Leary’s “‘To hell with Babe Ruth’ at Cape Gloucester” report was inked. Perhaps these incidents morphed into jokes. I’m certainly open to that possibility; news reporting of day, however, doesn’t seem to bear out this scenario.
I rather suspect that “To hell with” stories, even when circulating among troops in the Pacific, were just narratives that were either told in joke form or at the least as second- or thirdhand accounts. Along this line, it would be interesting to see what appears in any oral histories collected from veterans of the war in the Pacific.
In the end, I think it’s impossible to completely rule out that a true-life episode sometime before the spring of 1943 may have inspired the creation of the “To hell with” (and variants) anecdotes featuring Japanese soldiers, but I’ll go out on a limb and speculate that it’s more likely that a pre-existing joke inspired the reporting in 1944 of an episode as if it truly happened.
– Tammi Terrell