JDD

Scheduled to pitch for, '55th Fighter Group' in England during WWII, but as his plane was shot down, he radioed his fellow pilots: "Tell the boys I won’t be back for the game." After his plane crashed, he was captured, held in a POW camp and had his right leg amputated by a POW doctor. Bert Shepard’s recovery and running so impressed a POW camp doctor, that he asked Shepard to demonstrate his mobility for the hospital staff. After WWII, on the day that he officially signed with the Washington Senators, Bert Shepard caught a cab and returned to 'Ward 49' at Walter Reed, where he was fitted for a new artificial leg; His, “Baseball leg". "I got an awful lot of publicity right away. That sort of helped me to stay with the ball club until I could prove myself. I pitched several exhibition games and got ‘em out each time." His first MLB game box score after the war..... 5 1/3 innings, three hits, one walk, one hit batter, two strikeouts and one earned run. The Boston Globe called it: "By far the most inspiring performance by a limbless veteran of WWII." Bert Shepard remains the only player to have ever played in the major leagues on an artificial leg. Late in his life, when Bert Shepard was in his 70's, he said he often wondered: "Who carried me from the wreck?”, and “Who saved my life?" Little did he know that around the same time a British businessman, who knew of Bert Shepard's legend, went on a hunting trip to Hungary. There he met a fellow hunter, a retired doctor named Ladislaus Loidl, who told a story of how he had once rescued a wounded American flier from his downed plane. Loidl recalled that his wife had made a dress out of the airman’s parachute, and remembered reading the name Bert Shepard on the pilot’s dog tags. The British hunter suggested Loidl contact Shepard. He did! In May of 1993, the two men met at the doctor’s home in Austria, 49 years after their first meeting on a German battlefield. "I prayed for this. And after half a century, my dream has incredibly come true." Bert Sheppard.