When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Moe Berg was included.

When baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig went on tour in baseball-crazy Japan in 1934, some fans wondered why a third-string catcher named Moe Berg was included.  Although he played with 5 major league teams from 1923 to 1939, he was a very mediocre ball player.  He was regarded as the brainiest ballplayer of all time.  In fact Casey Stengel once said:  That is the strangest man ever to play baseball.  When all the baseball stars went to Japan, Moe Berg went with them and many people wondered why he went with the team

Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth

The answer was simple: Moe Berg was a United States spy working undercover with the OSS forerunner to the CIA .

Moe spoke 15 languages - including Japanese - Moe Berg had two loves: baseball and spying.

In Tokyo, garbed in a kimono, Berg took flowers to the daughter of an American diplomat being treated in St. Luke's Hospital - the tallest building in the Japanese capital.

He never delivered the flowers.  The ball-player ascended to the hospital roof and filmed key features: the harbor, military installations, railway yards, etc.

Eight years later, General Jimmy Doolittle studied Berg's films in planning his spectacular raid on Tokyo..

Catcher Moe Berg

Berg's father, Bernard Berg, a pharmacist in Newark, New Jersey, taught his son Hebrew and Yiddish.  Moe, against his wishes, began playing baseball on the street aged four.

His father disapproved and never once watched his son play.  In Barringer High School, Moe learned Latin, Greek and French.  Moe read at least 10 newspapers every day.

He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton - having added Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit to his linguistic quiver.

During further studies at the Sorbonne, in Paris, and Columbia Law School, he picked up Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Arabic, Portuguese and Hungarian - 15 languages in all, plus some regional dialects.

While playing baseball for Princeton University, Moe Berg would describe plays in Latin or Sanskrit.

Tito's partisans

During World War II, he was parachuted into Yugoslavia to assess the value to the war effort of the two groups of partisans there.  He reported back that Marshall Tito's forces were widely supported by the people and Winston Churchill ordered all-out support for the Yugoslav underground fighter, rather than Mihajlovic's Serbians.

The parachute jump at age 41 undoubtedly was a challenge. But there was more to come in that same year.

Berg penetrated German-held Norway, met with members of the underground and located a secret heavy water plant - part of the Nazis' effort to build an atomic bomb.

His information guided the Royal Air Force in a bombing raid to destroy the plant.

The R.A.F. destroys the Norwegian heavy water plant targeted by Moe Berg.

There still remained the question of how far had the Nazis progressed in the race to build the first Atomic bomb.  If the Nazis were successful, they would win the war.  Berg (under the code name "Remus") was sent to Switzerland to hear leading German physicist Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel Laureate, lecture and determine if the Nazis were close to building an A-bomb.  Moe managed to slip past the SS guards at the auditorium, posing as a Swiss graduate student.  The spy carried in his pocket a pistol and a cyanide pill.

If the German indicated the Nazis were close to building a weapon, Berg was to shoot him - and then swallow the cyanide pill.

Moe, sitting in the front row, determined that the Germans were nowhere near their goal, so he complimented Heisenberg on his speech and walked him back to his hotel.

Werner Heisenberg - he blocked

the Nazis from acquiring an atomic bomb.

Moe Berg's report was distributed to Britain's Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and key figures in the team developing the Atomic Bomb.  Roosevelt responded: "Give my regards to the catcher."

Most of Germanys leading physicists had been Jewish and had fled the Nazis mainly to Britain and the United States .  After the war, Moe Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom Americas highest honor for a civilian in wartime.  But Berg refused to accept, as he couldn't tell people about his exploits.

After his death, his sister accepted the Medal and it hangs in the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown ,

    

March 2,1902-----May 29, 1972

Presidential Medal of Freedom (the highest award to be awarded to civilians during wartime)

Moe Bergs baseball card is the only card on display at the CIA Headquarters in Washington DC

     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

53 Colorized Black & White Photos - HISTORY that Will Blow You Away

These 53 Colorized Photos From The Past Will Blow You Away. Especially The One Of Albert Einstein. Up until the 1970s, color photography was extremely rare, and so when we think about history prior to that time, we often envision it in black and white. Today's technology now enables us to colorize historical photos, giving us our only chance at seeing what the world really looked like back then. And it was truly spectacular. Take a trip back in time through these photos below. It's quite incredible to see Abraham Lincoln and Albert Einstein in living color.   1. Claude Monet in 1923. 2. Brigadier General and actor Jimmy Stewart. Stewart flew 20 combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, and even flew one mission during Vietnam. 3. Pablo Picasso. 4. Lou Gehrig, July 4, 1939. Photo taken right after his famous retirement speech. He would pass away just two years later from ALS. 5. Times Square 1947. Jordan J. Lloyd 6. Lee Harvey Oswald, 1963, being transported to questioning before his murder trial for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 7. Helen Keller meeting comedian Charlie Chaplin in 1918. 8. Girls delivering ice, 1918. 9. Burger Flipper 1938. Jordan J. Lloyd 10. Winston Churchill, 1941. 11. Albert Einstein, 1921. 12. Madison Square Park New York City around 1900. 13. Marilyn Monroe. 14. Samurai Training 1860. Jordan J. Lloyd 15. American Poet Walt Whitman, 1868. 16. Hindenburg Blimp crash. 17. British Soldiers Returning from the front in 1939. 18. Joan Crawford on the set of Letty Lynton, 1932. 19. Country store in July 1939. Gordonton, North Carolina. 20. Mark Twain in 1900. 21. Albert Einstein on a Long Island beach in 1939. 22. Audrey Hepburn. 23. Union Soldiers taking a break 1863. 24. Charles Darwin. 25. WWII soldiers on Easter. 26. Clint Eastwood, 1962. 27. W.H. Murphy testing the bulletproof vest in 1923. 28. Charlie Chaplin at 27 years old in 1916. 29. Elizabeth Taylor in 1956. 30. Big Jay McNeely, Olympic Auditorium, 1953. 31. Louis Armstrong practicing backstage in 1946. 32. Red Hawk of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on horseback, 1905. 33. Babe Ruth's 1920 MLB debut. 34. A Washington, D.C. filling station in 1924. Patty Allison 35. Boys buying flowers in 1908. 36. An Oklahoman farmer during the great dust bowl in 1939. 37. Louis Armstrong plays to his wife, Lucille, in Cairo, Egypt 1961. Jordan J. Lloyd 38. Brooklyn Bridge in 1904. 39. Two Boxers after a fight. 40. 1920s Australian mugshots from the New South Wales Police Dept. 41. Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield. 42. Brothers Robert Kennedy, Edward Ted Kennedy, and John F. Kennedy outside the Oval Office. 43. Clint Eastwood working on his 1958 Jag XK 120 in 1960. 44. Cornell Rowing Team 1907. 45. View from the Capitol in Nashville, 1864. 46. Baltimore Slums, 1938. Jordan J. Lloyd 47. Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels scowls at a Jewish photographer, 1933. 48. Henry Ford, 1919. 49. An RAF pilot getting a haircut while reading a book between missions. 50. Unemployed Lumber Worker and His Wife 1939. 51. Alfred Hitchcock. 52. A car crash in Washington D.C. around 1921. 53. President Lincoln with Major General McClernand and Allan Pinkerton at Antietam in 1862. Source: Reddit Seeing these photos in color for the first time makes it easy to imagine we could all have been part of a world that we've never even seen. It literally changes our perspective of history. Share these amazing photos with others. They're incredible.