The News Coverage Camp Hancock was located just outside Augusta, Georgia. It opened in 1917 and closed shortly after the Armistice in 1918. While in operation, it was home to a floating population of up to 50,000 soldiers. Shown here is the front page from The Augusta Herald of Sunday, June 9, 1918 -- the very week the future Hall of Famers were in town. Even though the camp had been open for a year, the newspaper chose this day to run a Special Issue on Camp Hancock. Since the Army was interested in using these ballplayers as a recruitment magnet, that is, for purposes of propaganda, might the camp information officer not have encouraged the newspaper to run this issue in the expectation it could include celebrity coverage?

And might that same information officer not also schedule a special exhibition baseball game for the same week, perhaps against a nearby rival military base, to show off the company of players whom today we would label superstars? As it happens, there was such a game scheduled -- against the Charleston Navy Yard nine. Below, from the June 8 edition of the Herald, are the starting lineups. But there are a few names missing.

And now, one more anomaly. Remember that these were the days of hot type, not computer-generated pages. Pages set in hot type took a lot more planning, more lead time. So as editor of a newspaper that had been promised a big feature article on several famous ballplayers who were in town, or at least very nearby, one might reserve a large portion of the news hole in the Special Issue for such a story.

But if, for some reason, at the last minute, not only could the editor not run that story, but, perhaps on instructions from military censors, he could not mention a word about it, that would leave a very big gap to be filled on very short notice. Could that explain why, in it's June 9 Special Issue, the Herald devoted just such a space to a listing, by name and rank, of every one of the 250 military police officers in the camp? And why, when it ran out of names, the paper picked up with a list of some local churches? What might happen to cause such a change -- to cause the Army, which had gone to such great lengths to create a celebrity training unit as a recruitment tool for the Chemical Warfare Service, to turn from propaganda to censorship, to act as if... this never happened? This Never Happened offers one possible answer to that question as well.