time they were new Americans and sons of immigrants, as
young as 19, and they were awed by the resident celebrity.
As one Ritchie Boy, Burton Hastings, would later put it:
“[Leavitt] was the hero of our era. We all knew about him.”
As part of his work, Leavitt taught these admirers,
among other things, hand-to-hand combat. Lang-Slattery
quotes one Ritchie Boy, Gerd Grombacher, recalling that
Man Mountain taught him how to kill an enemy with
a stiletto knife—“and how to make it so clean that it
wouldn’t even hurt.”
Leavitt also put his acting chops to good use. As part
of the training, Camp Ritchie featured an ersatz German
village, replete with enemy tanks made out of cardboard.
And, according to military historian Beverley Eddy, one
of Leavitt’s jobs was to play the role of Hermann Göring,
commander of the German Luftwaffe, in mock “Hitler
rallies” that were meant to introduce enlistees “to the
fanaticism of the Nazi party.”
Not everything was so dark. Lang-Slattery recounts
an exchange between two Ritchie Boys at the PX, or
post exchange. At one point Leavitt sauntered by the on-
base retail store, and one G.I. dared another to challenge
Man Mountain to a f ight. Leavitt didn’t even need to stand
up. From a sitting position he lifted the brave soldier up
by the collar and threw him to the ground. The man was
so humiliated and angry about the dare—and so clearly
unable to retaliate—that he slugged his friend instead.
Dan Peterson, a longtime BYU professor whose father
passed through Camp Ritchie, recalls another tale that
his dad used to tell of soldiers sleeping in the barracks,
awoken to high-decibel snoring. As the story goes: One
of those soldiers demanded to know who was breath-
ing “like a damned freight train.” And a booming voice
responded, “That was me.” Says Peterson: “[Leav it t ’s]
answer fully satisfied the curiosity of the angry com-
plainer, and Father recalled with amusement that nobody
else in the barracks ever complained thereafter.”
In 1944, most of the Ritchie Boys headed off to
Normandy, where one of Leavitt’s charges, now 98-year-
old Victor Brombert, a retired professor and dean at Yale
and Princeton, remembers the terror of being strafed at
night: “I never calculated that there is such a thing as
terror, fear,” he says. “So I experienced, viscerally, fear.”
The Ritchie Boys would go on to help liberate France,
fight in the Battle of the Bulge and then help liberate
the concentration camps. Overall, they were responsible
for an unquantifiable trove of valuable battlefield intel-
ligence, critical to the Allies’ victory.
After the war, many stayed in Europe to help denazify
Germany and work as translators at the Nuremberg
trials. Many, too, used their Camp Ritchie training and
went on to become spies and CIA agents.
“We look at this group and we see true heroes. We see
the greatest of the Greatest Generation,” says Frey, the
West Point professor. “These are people who made massive
contributions, who helped shape—who stretched—the ideaof what it meant to be American. We should recognize the
great diversity of those who played a role in the American
army, and continue to do so.”A
FTER THE WAR, Frank Leavitt returned to his
estate outside of Atlanta. On May 29, 1953, when
he was 62, he finished up some yard work outside his
home. He sat on the couch to listen to a baseball game
on t he radio. A nd t hen he compla ined t hat his chest hur t.
Within minutes he had suffered a fatal heart attack.
Edwin Pope, then a cub reporter at the Constitution—
and later a towering figure in U.S. sports journalism—
was assigned to write the obituary. He called Leavitt
“the most fabulous wrestler of his time.” Few, though,
would know the whole of it.
Leavitt did not, by all accounts, speak much about his
time at Camp Ritchie. That intelligence was classified.
Long after his death, even family members had no idea
that the contributions Uncle Frank made to the national
fabric were, well, truly mountainous.
So, of course, was the irony of it all. An American
archetype spends decades following the crafted chore-
ography of early professional wrestling and the scripts
of early Hollywood. Meanwhile the unscripted version
of the life story he authored himself was richer and
more meaningful.SPORTS
ILLUSTRATED
SI.COM
JUNE 2022
79LEAVITT TAUGHT SOLDIERS HOW TO
KILL AN ENEMY WITH A KNIFE,
“AND HOW TO MAKE IT SO CLEAN THAT
IT WOULDN’T EVEN HURT.”