Man Mountain Dean - Wrassler and WW II Hero

[drave]

Long story, but pretty damn cool. Figured I'd post here for any other historical wrestling fans to post any additional info.



https://www.si.com/wrestling/2022/05...er-daily-cover

For a few days in 1943, the rumor rocketed around the Camp Ritchie military training center in the Maryland hinterlands. The scuttlebutt went something like this: A famous and cartoonishly muscled professional wrestler, who lately had been moonlighting as a movie star, would be giving the new soldiers a crash course in hand-to-hand combat before their dispatch to the Western Front. It was, of course, preposterous on its face—the World War II equivalent of, say, The Rock suddenly showing up at basic training as an instructor. Then again, the entire tableau was already a study in surrealism, a straight-out-of-Hollywood conceit. Camp Ritchie had been a vacation resort, framed by the Blue Ridge Mountains, just under the Pennsylvania state line. After the war broke out, though, it was quickly morphed into a military intelligence training center. The U.S. Army recognized the need for translators and interrogators who spoke fluent German and understood the culture of the enemy. What better location to train than this, nestled unassumingly in the countryside but easily accessible to D.C.’s decision makers? Camp Ritchie’s soldiers, such as they were, did not exactly cut the figure of G.I. Joe. Many of the recruits were not only new to the United States military, they were also new to the United States. And a large subset were German immigrants who now were preparing to fight in and against their country of origin.

The Ritchie Boys, as these outsiders were quickly shorthanded, were mostly intellectuals, more likely to have reported for duty equipped with musical instruments and books than with guns and knives. And now they were going to be trained by a pro wrestler? That rumor crossed the DMZ into truth one afternoon when a few cadets walked by the camp’s phone booth. There they saw a man, shorn of his famous beard, per Army rules, but instantly recognizable for his sheer girth. He was roughly the size of one of the bluffs that sprung up behind the camp, and here he was, on the exterior of the glass cube, extending one arm inside, yanking out the receiver. Unable to squeeze in his 320-pound frame, this was the only way that Frank Simmons Leavitt—Man Mountain Dean, as he was widely known outside of Camp Ritchie—could place a call. As the name implied, Man Mountain was a considerable physical specimen. He doubled many of the other soldiers in weight. Though he stood a modest six feet tall, he still had eight inches on the median Ritchie Boy. And while Leavitt’s precise age remains a source of debate, he likely arrived at Camp Ritchie in his early 50s, making him a full three decades older than many of his trainees. When World War II broke out, Man Mountain had been coming off the height of his popularity. Not much earlier, he was pinballing around the country—and then the world—as a bearded babyface, theatrically tossing opponents out of the ring, flattening them on the canvas. For this he could command upward of $1,500 a night, which was more than the annual per capita income in the U.S. at the time. And when Leavitt wasn’t inside the squared circle, he was on the silver screen, starring in movies and working as a stuntman. For all of these surface differences, though, Leavitt was, by all accounts, beloved by the Ritchie Boys. He had charisma to burn, and the kind that rarely intimidated. Soldiers listened raptly to his stories about wrestling romps through venues familiar to them across Europe. They gawked as he put on heroic eating displays. Here was an American celebrity dispensing Americanized nicknames—every Gustav became a Gus—and teaching them slang. Man Mountain, though, wasn’t just the equivalent of the cool camp counselor. He was also a brutally effective teacher. According to K. Lang-Slattery, who wrote about the Ritchie Boys in her book Immigrant Soldier, Leavitt’s charges “soon got over their awe of the huge and famous instructor. From him, they learned how to fight the enemy, individual against individual.” As U.S. military documents have been gradually declassified in recent years, the full effectiveness of the Ritchie Boys has come into sharp relief. This extraordinary unit was responsible for more than half of all combat intelligence gathered on the Western Front, their work pivotal to the Allies’ victory. They were fanned out into other military units abroad and proved the most improbable of war heroes. And the identity of their comically oversized mentor and instructor—well, that, too, was wildly unlikely.

I'll stop it there and just let y'all read if you want. It is a lengthy read.