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Phil Marchildon

 

Date and Place of Birth: October 13, 1913 Penetanguishene, Ontario, Canada

Died: January 10, 1997 Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Baseball Experience: Major League

Position: Pitcher

Rank: Flying Officer

Military Unit: 433 Squadron RCAF

Area Served: European Theater of Operations

 

 

The 5-foot-11, 190-pound right-hander a pro contract with Toronto of the International League in 1939. He was 5-7 in his rookie year with a 4.50 ERA. In 1940, Marchildon was 10-13 with a 3.18 ERA, and earned a late-season promotion to the Philadelphia Athletics. He joined the Athletics' starting rotation in 1941 and was 10-15, winning 17 games the following year for a team that finished 48 games out of first place.

 

Marchildon entered military service with the Royal Canadian Air Force following the 1942 season. Initially, he took gunnery training at Souris in Manitoba. He was later stationed at Trenton, Ontario, where he pitched for the Trenton Air Force team.  He was commissioned a pilot officer with No 2 Training Command at Winnipeg on July 23, 1943, and graduated as an air gunner with No 3 Bombing and Gunnery School at MacDonald, Manitoba. Marchildon was stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia – where he briefly pitched for the Halifax Force team - before leaving for England in August 1943.

 

Flying Officer Marchildon was initially stationed at Bournemouth, before joining the 82^nd Operational Training Unit at Ossington. Ready for active duty he joined 433 Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force at RAF Skipton-on-Swayle, Yorkshire. Marchildon served as a tail-gunner in a Handley Page Halifax bomber, flying night time missions that were treacherous and uncomfortable to say the least. In conditions that were so cold his guns would often freeze, he returned from one mission with 30 shrapnel holes made by anti-aircraft guns, including one that had come perilously close to the fuel tanks in the wings.

 

"Some Americans went over with us one night," Marchildon recalled in The Sporting News on July 12, 1945, "and after that they said 'Never again at night' [all American bomber missions were flown during the day]. In the daytime you can't see the stuff shooting up at you. But at night, wow! It's tracers and rockets all around that scare you to death."

 

Active duty offered little time for Marchildon to play baseball, but his brother-in-law, Adam McKenzie, who played for the DeHavilland Comets, persuaded him to make a handful of appearances for the team. "I only played a few games over there and was not in very good condition to do so," he later recalled.

 

 

During the night of August 16, 1944, Flying Officer Marchildon flew his 26th mission laying mines in Kiel Bay - he was four away from going home. As the bomber flew through the darkness above the Baltic Sea on the way to its target, it was attacked and set ablaze by a German night fighter. In the spiralling chaos, the bomber's pilot immediately gave orders for the crew to bail out - only the navigator and Marchildon survived.

 

Stranded in the icy water, both crew members were eventually picked up by a Danish fishing boat and handed over to the German authorities. Marchildon spent the following year at Stalag Luft III in Poland, where 350 prisoners were involved in a softball league. "I was a heavy-hitting outfielder for the squad that won the camp championship," he later said.

 

Later on as the Russians were advancing, the prisoners were marched to Bremen. Then as the British and Americans got close the prisoners moved again. As they marched on to a new prison site, the prisoners were periled by their own Allies as planes swooped down in strafing attacks.

 

May 2, 1945, was the happy day Marchildon was finally liberated. "We were sleeping in a field when I woke up suddenly and heard troops passing," he recalled. "I thought they were Germans, but learned next day that the British had us surrounded. Our guards stacked their guns in a building and locked the door then surrendered to the British."

 

By the time he was liberated, he was severely malnourished and had lost 30 pounds. He was flown back to England to recuperate then returned to Canada by boat.

 

Marchildon was suffering recurring nightmares, his nerves were in tatters and, not surprisingly, he had no interest in returning to baseball. "When I came home, my nerves came all loose," he remembered. "First night home I took my blankets out in the yard and slept on the ground. Couldn't sleep in a bed."

 

The persuasive Athletics' owner, Connie Mack, eventually talked Marchildon into joining the team. On July 6, 1945, he worked out with the team in Chicago. "A new nervousness of speech and gesture suggests something of what he went through," wrote Red Smith in The Sporting News on July 12, 1945."

 

Marchildon found it difficult, however, to focus on baseball. “I’d kind of drift away from concentration,” he said. “I’d think about how lucky I was to get out of it all.”  He also found himself thinking about the other five crew members who perished with the plane when it was shot down. Marchildon didn't know of their fate until after the war ended.

 

Marchildon made three brief appearances for the Athletics before the 1945 season ended. But by 1947, he had regained his pre-war form, winning 19 games with a 3.22 ERA.

 

He continued to pitch in the majors until 1950, and then pitched for a couple of years in the Intercounty League in Ontario.

 

Marchildon then went to work for A V Roe in Malton, Ontario. The CF-105 Avro Arrow jet fighter which Marchildon worked on, was Canada's greatest aeronautical achievement, and the subsequent cancellation of the project in 1959 still remains a story of political intrigue and controversy.
 

Phil Marchildon was inducted in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983. He passed away in January 1997, at age 83.

 

Thanks to the late Phil Marchildon for help with his biography.

 

Created August 2, 2006. Updated April 21, 2007.

 

Copyright © 2007 Gary Bedingfield (Baseball in Wartime). All Rights Reserved.