Bert Shepard, 87; pilot lost part of leg in WWII, then was signed to MLB team
Bert Shepard, a pilot who lost part of his right leg in a World War II mission over Germany but returned home to pitch one game in the major leagues, has died. He was 87.
Shepard died in his sleep Monday at a nursing home in Highland in San Bernardino County, his daughter Karen said.
A minor league baseball player who was born in Dana, Ind., in 1920, Shepard joined the Army Air Forces in 1942 and was stationed in England. On May 21, 1944, having flown 33 missions in P-38 fighter planes, Lt. Shepard took off for another, hoping to be back in time to pitch for his air base team that afternoon. He never made it.
On his way back from a strafing run about 70 miles northwest of Berlin, Shepard heard radio chatter warning of enemy fire. Flying low, just above a clump of trees, he felt the first shot hit his right foot -- "like a sledgehammer," he said later -- and the plane soon crashed into a field.
Shepard woke up in a German hospital, where doctors had amputated his right leg several inches below the knee and treated a serious head wound.
"I pull the sheet back and there's the leg," he told The Times in 1995. "I looked up at them and said, 'Thank you for saving my life.' "
He spent several months in a prisoner-of-war camp, where a fellow detainee made him a crude artificial leg from scrap metal.
In early 1945, back in the States after a POW exchange, Shepard met Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Asked what he wanted to do next, an undeterred Shepard said that if he couldn't fly combat missions, he wanted to play baseball again.
"Being a left-handed pitcher and a left-handed hitter," Shepard told The Times years later, "the right leg was the ideal one to lose."
Patterson persuaded Clark Griffith, then owner of the Washington Senators, to arrange a tryout for Shepard.
"I think Mr. Clark Griffith did it out of sympathy more than anything," Shepard told The Times in 1973. "You know, 'Give him a uniform and a ball to play with over in the corner.' "
Shepard had played in the minors with the Chicago White Sox organization. Now, wearing a prosthetic device, he impressed the Senators enough that they signed him to the team. In between touring hospitals and visiting wounded veterans, he pitched batting practice and exhibitions and coached with the Senators.
