A couple years ago, when the Army-Navy Game was not played at a neutral site for first time since World War II, a blog post talked about the 1942 and 1943 games when Annapolis and West Point took turns hosting the game. Wartime demands for transportation resources prevented all but a small contingent of the visiting student body (and in 1942, the visiting team's mascot) from attending the game and led to an assignment of some of the home student body to cheer for the visiting team. This year is the eightieth anniversary of the game played in Annapolis.
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| Navy's cheer squad leads the brigade during the pep rally. |
The festivities for that game commenced the night before when both teams and their leadership held a unified pep rally in T-Court. During the rally, Navy’s cheer squad and the Naval Academy Band led the Brigade of Midshipmen and their Army visitors through a series of cheers and patriotic tunes before a ceremonial dance around the USS Delaware figurehead.
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| Midshipmen dance around the figurehead of Tamanend |
As for the game itself played before a sparse crowd of 11,000 people (far cry from the nearly 100,000 spectators the previous year) in Navy's Thompson Stadium where Lejeune Hall now stands, Navy won by a score of 14-0, "upsetting all the pre-game 'dope,'" according to the Army and Navy Journal. The Cadets, with only two losses to the Midshipmen's four, were coming off a 40-7 victory over Princeton in which second-stringers scored all the points. However, with "unbelievable speed and drive, smashing blocks, unbreakable tackles, [and] magnificent team cohesion," Navy "seized command of the situation the moment the game began and never let go."
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| Thompson Stadium during the 1942 Army-Navy football game. |
The Army and Navy Journal also noted that the experiment of midshipmen cheering for Army was not completely successful. The game account indicated "these pseudo-Cadets forgot these arrangements when Navy pushed across touchdowns and the West Pointers listening at radios probably wondered where their representatives were." Regardless, the arrangements were reversed the following year when cadets cheered on midshipmen.
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| Team captains shake hands on the field at Thompson Stadium. |
President Franklin Roosevelt sent telegrams to both teams, reminding them that, “the graduates of the two academies are engaged, shoulder to shoulder, in the grim game of war. Throughout the world, they are knitting … the ties of comradeship which they first formed on the playing fields of the homeland.”
Three national radio networks broadcasted the game, while shortwave radio sent the game’s narration to servicemen stationed worldwide. The Baltimore Sun commented on the event’s media success which “proved that the Army-Navy game is an elastic enterprise which can fit into almost any set of restrictions without being obliterated.”
References
"Army/Navy Football." Naval Academy Archives Reference Files, Special Collections & Archives Department, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy.
"Army/Navy Football, 1941." Naval Academy Archives Reference Files, Special Collections & Archives Department, Nimitz Library, United States Naval Academy.
"Army-Navy Game." Army and Navy Journal, November 28, 1942, 363.
"Navy defeats Army." Army and Navy Journal, December 5, 1942, 397.
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