The Boys in the Boat: Chapter 16-Epilogue

When the foreigners arrived, all would be pleasant. Berlin would become a sort of benign amusement park for adults.

If foreign journalists attempted to interview German Jews or investigate “the Jewish question,” they were to be politely directed to the nearest gestapo office, so that they could be questioned as to their intentions, and then trailed secretly.

For a boy who had worn the same rumpled sweater to rowing practice for a year, this was an astonishing collection of sartorial treasure.

There was a formal debate on the always contentious proposition that “the East is a better place to live than the West.”

The Washington boys didn’t think much of the class business, though, and they flouted it.

The Manhattan’s crew had trained floodlights on the enormous white Olympic flag flying from the after mast, on the American flag on the foremast, and on the ship’s red, white, and blue funnels. As the ship made its way up the river, throngs of Germans rushed to docks and quays along the way to watch her pass.

Eager German longshoremen tried to help, but Pocock chased them off, employing nearly the full extent of his German vocabulary, shouting, “Nein! No thanks! Danke!” afraid the longshoremen would put a hand or foot through the delicate skin of the shell.

Rowing was, after all, a quintessentially British sport, and the 1936 British Olympic eight-man crew hailed from the venerable old Leander Club.

Riefenstahl had been there since 6:00 a.m., rushing about, deploying some thirty cameras and sixty cameramen, setting up sound equipment, alternately hectoring and tearfully beseeching IOC officials to allow her to place equipment where she wanted, ordering international newsreel camera crews out of her way, relentlessly seeking and ruthlessly claiming the best possible positions from which to film the day’s events.

The platform was to be so crowded with members of the top echelons of the party that Riefenstahl had been compelled to station her cameraman outside the railing, tying him and the camera to the railing for safety’s sake.

High-ranking guests began to arrive and take their seats around the rostrum, staring at Riefenstahl, who was, by her own account, now in tears and shaking with anger as she clung tenaciously to the edge of the balcony.

As the last strident strains of the latter song faded away, there was a moment of silence.

Mixed in with the applause, though, was a spattering of whistles and the stamping of feet, the European equivalents of catcalls and boos.

The crowd, frozen in place, their thousands of arms outstretched, sang along lustily. On the dais, Hitler’s eyes glistened.

When all the athletes were assembled in ranks on the infield, Theodor Lewald, president of the German Olympic Organizing Committee, stepped to a bank of microphones on the dais and launched into what soon turned into an interminable speech.

A hush fell over the crowd as he loped gracefully down the eastern steps, around the red-clay track, and up the western steps, where he paused again, silhouetted against the sky, holding the torch high over his head.

As the athletes began to march out of the stadium that evening, nearly everyone on the field and off felt more or less stunned. Nobody had ever witnessed anything quite like what had just transpired.

International journalists rushed to their Teletypes and flooded the wires, and by the next morning newspapers around the world carried rapturous headlines.

Earlier that day, in fact, Ulbrickson had canceled a workout rather than have his boys risk drowning out in the far lanes. Lanes one through three, on the other hand, came in so close to the southern shore of the lake that they were almost entirely protected through much of the course. The disparity made for a very uneven playing field.

Ulbrickson’s concern ratcheted up another level when he started taking a good look at the British crew.

Duckworth was, as someone would later say about him, “Short of stature, great of heart.” The stature part was obvious just by looking at him. The heart part he showed every time he took to the water. He would also show it a few years later in the South Pacific when, against orders, he stayed behind with wounded British soldiers as Japanese troops surrounded them.

The boys from Washington, in particular, fell into an easy comradeship with the all-police crew from Australia, with whom they shared not only a more or less common language but also a kind of easy, confident, and swaggering approach to life.

Boys shoved other boys. A few more fists flew. Everyone was yelling again, and again nobody could understand what anybody else was saying. Finally the Dutch national crew dove into the melee, separating boys, pulling them back to their tables, smoothing out their feelings in crisp, perfect, diplomatic English.

A boat carrying an announcer and a shortwave-radio transmitter idled behind the line, ready to trail the shells down the course, broadcasting a stroke-by-stroke account of each heat directly to loudspeakers at the finish line, so spectators and reporters could be apprised of the progress of each boat before any of them came into view.

In the last twenty strokes, and particularly in the final twelve gorgeous strokes, they simply powered past the British boat, decisively and unambiguously.

They could see the sprawling yellow clinker-brick complex of the AEG Kabelwerk factory just outside town, but they could not see the thousands of slave laborers that would soon be put to work there, manufacturing electric cables, laboring twelve hours a day, living in squalid camps nearby until they died of typhus or malnutrition.

The Italians were wearing silky light blue uniforms, and they had tied white bandanas rakishly around their heads, pirate-style.

The Germans were resplendent in white shorts and crisp white jerseys, each emblazoned with a black eagle and swastika.

The Jesse Owens story had already galvanized much of the nation, driving home what exactly was at stake in these Olympic Games.

In a daze, believing they were finally bearing down on the line, the boys threw their long bodies into each stroke, rowing furiously, flawlessly, and with uncanny elegance.

It would go on to win plaudits around the world as Riefenstahl launched herself into a giddy European tour, followed by an American tour that took her all the way to Hollywood.

He hiked deep into the northwest woods, climbed up steep mountain inclines, and scrambled over jumbles of fallen trees, hauling with him a chainsaw, a peavey, a splitting maul, and assorted iron wedges jammed into his pockets, in search of salvageable wood.

Standing there, watching them, it occurred to me that when Hitler watched Joe and the boys fight their way back from the rear of the field to sweep ahead of Italy and Germany seventy-five years ago, he saw, but did not recognize, heralds of his doom.

He could not have known that one day hundreds of thousands of boys just like them, boys who shared their essential natures—decent and unassuming, not privileged or favored by anything in particular, just loyal, committed, and perseverant—would return to Germany dressed in olive drab, hunting him down.

But that afternoon, standing on the balcony of Haus West, I was swept with gratitude for their goodness and their grace, their humility and their honor, their simple civility and all the things they taught us before they flitted across the evening water and finally vanished into the night.