Top Photo: Jack Sanders (left), sitting with Jimmy Wilson, who became a quadruple amputee from frostbite after a plane crash. 2020. 029.029, Gift of Marilyn Gushner

Starting in 1940, rookie Jack Sanders played left guard for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Born in Texas in 1917, he attended Southern Methodist University before entering the National Football League’s 1939 draft. Less than a year after Sanders was selected as the 160th pick in the 17th round, Adolf Hitler’s forces rolled into Poland, throwing Europe into turmoil. With war clouds on the horizon, America would soon enter the global conflict. While the implications were dire—and worldwide—the coming conflict also threatened Sanders’s burgeoning career as a professional athlete.

In the last game of the 1942 season, 25-year-old Sanders was anchoring the Steelers’ front line and kicking the team’s extra points to boot. But soon after that hard-fought final game concluded, Sanders caught a train to the US Marine Corps Recruit Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina. He was off to fight bigger battles.

While Sanders was making his sacrifice for the war effort, on the Home Front Americans from all sectors did the same. Civilians carried forward with less in the way of necessities to give the soldiers and sailors fighting overseas more. Those at home saved food, shoes, metal, paper, and rubber. This tightening of belts reached nearly every aspect of American home life—even the NFL.

A multitude of veterans join civilians to watch a football game at Philadelphia Municipal Stadium in 1945. 2020. 029.164, Gift of Marilyn Gushner
 

As 1943 dawned, Pennsylvania’s pair of NFL teams were gutted by dozens of departures similar to Sanders’s. Some Eagles and Steelers players volunteered for the military while other young men, considered perfect for war service in terms of age and ability, were selected in a draft more important than the NFL’s. Hundreds of players across the league would put their football careers on hold for military service. To keep the decimated squads up and running, the cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh joined forces. Though officially called the Phil-Pitt Combine, nearly everyone dubbed the conglomerated football team the “Steagles”—portmanteau of Steelers and Eagles.

Many of the players assembled from the combined rosters had medical issues or obligations that precluded them from military service in 1943. Quarterback Allie Sherman was draft status 4-F—playing with perforated ear drums. Running back Jack Hinkle suffered from serious ulcers. And end Tony Bova had poor eyesight. In addition, many young men on the Steagles were recent fathers. Utility player Roy Zimmerman Jr. was held out of the military partly because he was a food-producing farmer in the off season. The Steagles finished the 10-week season with a record of five wins, four losses, and one tie.

Meanwhile, after training at Parris Island, Sanders was first stationed at Camp LeJeune before eventually being sent to Quantico, where he received his Marine Corps commission in June 1943. Soon he was deployed to the Pacific. Making his way to the Bonin Island chain, in March 1945 the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported that Sanders “suffered a severe wound in action.” First Lieutenant Sanders had part of his left arm amputated after an explosion while testing underwater demolitions at Iwo Jima. The blast also broke his leg in three places, riddled him with shrapnel, and damaged his hearing.

Eagles halfback Steve Van Buren visits with wheelchair bound servicemen during a football game in 1945. 2020. 029.021, Gift of Marilyn Gushner
 

Amazingly, just a few months later, he was recovering at a naval hospital in Philadelphia in August 1945. During his time there, Sanders became the first-ever disabled WWII veteran to join a professional football team when he agreed to a contract with the Eagles. Protecting his left arm stump, he wore a heavy steel and cowhide guard. The custom-made apparatus could also be used as a club in those brutal exchanges in the “trenches” of the NFL line.

At hospitals across the nation, thousands of men were preparing to leave amputee wards and embark on a new and decidedly different life as disabled veterans. Morale among these wounded young servicemembers was dismal. In an effort to instill hope, the US Armed Forces paid to send 22,000 veterans, including thousands of amputees, to watch Sanders return to the NFL in a preseason charity game against the Green Bay Packers in Philly.

The Philadelphia Inquirer related: “The thunderous crescendo rolled from one side of Municipal Stadium and back again as Lieutenant Jack Sanders of the Marine Corps ran onto the field to take his place in the Eagles’ starting lineup. … Every eye was focused on the courageous athlete. … The sincere wishes of every man, woman, and child in the huge stadium went with him as he stepped forward to make his comeback—a personal ambition for him as well as a shining example for other fighting men who have returned from the battlefronts wounded.”

A crowd of wounded veterans attend a sporting event, circa 1945. 2020. 029.146, Gift of Marilyn Gushner        
 

Sanders’s return to the pros was brief but inspirational to thousands of men severely scarred from their wartime experiences. After three regular-season NFL games, he went on to coach college football before eventually becoming a construction foreman. In the 1960s, Sanders was a member of one of several groups bidding to bring professional football to the City of New Orleans. But Jack Sanders is most famous for those brief weeks in 1945, when an NFL lineman and wounded Marine showed that those forever changed by war could still embark on a fulfilling future.