The Wops remembered Ted Drake from scoring the 3rd when Eng {with 7 AFC players} beat the Italian world champions 3-2 at the "Battle of Highbury." Ted scored the 3rd. So Benito claimed they'd captured him a Crete:
"The war intervened when he was only 27. He was excused war service for failing the army hearing test, and served as an ARP Warden at the Highbury Stadium. His film appearance in 1939 was not his last ? in 1942, Cliff Bastin played a footballer in the classic British war film ?One of our aircraft is missing?. He continued to play football in the war-time league that was instituted for raising civilian morale.
Bizarrely, Mussolini?s Fascist Italian Radio claimed in 1941 that he had been captured in the Battle for Crete."
https://bergkampesque.com/2020/05/08...-for-58-years/
Did we have anyone from the first war? {WW1 was my MA so would be interested to know.}
Sperz had Walter Tull, who in 1917 became the first black officer in the British Army, despite army regulations of 1914 saying men of non-European descent couldn't be officers. After fighting at the Somme in 1916, he died near the start of Operation Michael that started the German Spring "Ludendorf Offensive" in March 1918.
{Though a few weeks before Tull was commissioned, Hardit Singh Malik, the flying Sikh, was commissioned as a 2nd Lt pilot in the Royal Flying Corps. He'd studied history at Balliol and when, in 1917 he offered to fly for the French air force, his Balliol tutor wrote to a general and got him a cadetship for a commission in the RFC. He had a special helmet made to fit over his turban. He played FC cricket for Oxford and Sussex as a middle order batsman. "In 1927, he became deputy commissioner in Punjab for six years, and after a period working in New York, he was recalled to India in 1944 to become Prime Minister of the predominantly Sikh state of Patiala.
He later became India's first High Commissioner to Canada and then Ambassador to Paris. In 1952 he was awarded the Legion D'Honneur."}
So did any Gooners fight in WW1?
Just looked. 19 current players of whom 2 were killed. 45 former players of whom 3 were killed.
https://www.footballandthefirstworld...rst-world-war/
Pat Flanagan was an inside forward for us. Scored 12 in 24 games in 1913-14 in Div 2. He worked as an artillery shell machinist at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. Died in German East Africa in 1917.
https://www.footballandthefirstworld.../pat-flanagan/
And it was artillery that won WW1. So to have actually made the shells while banging in 1 in 2 playing inside forward {like ?din} and then giving his life fighting the Hun on their own imperial turf. Hero.
