People serving in the United States military often seem to find a way to get together or be involved in a favorite sports pastime. For many, that means American football. The teams can be official or unofficial; it makes little difference. Service members will find time for football, under fire or in peacetime.

Some service people played on official teams, while others served as coaches, board members, fans, or on the sidelines. Football games happened at all levels of the military, service branch versus service branch, like Army vs. Navy, or at the divisional level, ship vs. ship, wing vs. wing, down to the smallest unit. One of the repeating themes in these stories is naming the famous player or coach with whom they played.

In his oral history interview, John D. Winner, World War II Army veteran, remembers his experiences with football and the military:

“The first time that we went to Berlin was in the fall of 1945. One of the interesting things about the 3rd Infantry Regiment was that when they were at Fort Benning, they sent a lot of the star football players down to join the 3rd Infantry Regiment so they could put on good football games between the 3rd Infantry and the 4th Infantry at Fort Benning for all the generals there.”

“So we had guys on our football team who were All-Americans like Billy Hillenbrand who played for Indiana, our quarterback was Lou Saban who you may recall ended up as the coach of the Buffalo Bills, and he was coach of our team. So we had some pretty good football players. So when we went over, another one of our great claims to fame was we had a good football team. So we joined the Seventh Army Football League and saw some great football games. We were the only individual regiment. Everybody else was a division in the thing.”

Interviewer: How well did you do?

Winner: We ended up undefeated, I think it was until we played for the ETO [European Theater of Operations] Championship, and we lost in the final game for the ETO Championship.

Interviewer: Now, I suspect, there was probably some familiar people who wouldn’t become familiar names except for playing in those leagues.

Winner: Oh, yeah.

Interviewer: It’s before my time, obviously.

Winner: Well, Billy Hillenbrand was an All-American from Indiana who played with us. Of course, Lou Saban continued in football and his son is now the coach of one of the teams. I can’t remember which one. We had some linemen. Tommy Mock was an All-American. We did pretty well. That was our first experience of Berlin. Because in the fall, we went up to Berlin to play the 82nd Airborne. We played in the Olympic Stadium.

The Football Military Connection was written by Luke Sprague, Oral Historian at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum.

The article was first published in the Fall 2022 issue of The Bugle.