Stephens: CSU football legend saw the horrors of World War II

Dale Dodrill was on a boat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean 70 years ago today.

He doesn’t know exactly where or what the ship was called. It was a smaller vessel, smaller than the U.S.S. West Point he first hopped on to head from Boston toward the Pacific Theater. What he does know was that he was tired. Ready for the fighting to be over. For three years he’d been a company man without reprieve.

He graduated from Loveland High School one day in May 1942. He was handed his diploma in the evening and the next morning was outfitted in the uniform of America’s Army, drafted as an infantryman. It wasn’t the uniform he’d hoped to wear. Dodrill wanted to join the Navy, the Air Force — any other branch — but never passed the physical. Doctors said he was flat-footed and color blind. He wasn’t, and his post-war accomplishments would later prove so, but that’s what they said, and desperate for foot soldiers, he was assigned to the Army and shipped off Germany to fight Adolf Hitler.

From Sigfried Line to Rhine, he fought the Nazis. There weren’t days off. No afternoons at his camp to toss a football with his squad mates or flirt with the nurse. This wasn’t HBO. This was war. And war is hell. When the Russians arrived at the Elbe River following his 30th Infantry Division’s capture of Magdeburg, it was clear Allied forces had put Germany in a chokehold and Dodrill’s services were needed elsewhere.

On the beaches of Japan, squaring off against an enemy that killed his brother Garrett at a prison camp in the Philippines.

Between the time he left Germany and was in transit to jungle warfare, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, another fell on Nagasaki. A month after that — 70 years ago today — Dodrill was on a boat in the Pacific when the Japanese officially surrendered. He remembers releasing a deep sigh. After three years, he could finally rest.

“I will tell you this, I was tremendously elated when we heard the conflict was through,” Dodrill said. “I don’t understand how people thought we were so cruel about the A-bomb. Short memories. They don’t remember how cruel the enemy was. There’s no cruelty worse than the death march of Bataan.

“The cruelty (that Americans and Filipinos) went through at Bataan – and then people say, ‘You shouldn’t have dropped the A-bomb,’ – I don’t know where they were coming from.”

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Reflecting on the events of 70 years ago didn’t come without grimace for Dodrill. His speech was slow reminiscing about what he saw – what he did – in World War II, and it wasn’t the rambling of an 89-year-old man. When memories of his time playing football at Colorado A&M (and later the NFL) were the topic of conversation, he was an auctioneer.

“Coach Bob Davis wouldn’t stand for inequality … and I played varsity as a freshman … and I signed my contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers for a $4,200 salary.”

Dodrill is known for what he did playing alongside Eddie Hanna, Jack Christiansen and Fum McGraw at Colorado Field. He played both sides of the ball for the Aggies, starred in the 1950 East-West Shrine Game star and was an inductee of the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame in 1993. He’s the familiar tale of a Kansas farm boy turned athletic icon.

But Dodrill couldn’t have become a CSU legend had he not been a veteran.

Furthermore, CSU’s first postseason appearance, the 1949 Raisin Bowl, wouldn’t have come to fruition without Dodrill’s service. Or that of McGraw, Tuffy Mullison and John Mosley.

Dodrill, who came to Colorado A&M as a 21-year-old freshman in 1947, said he never attributed his 28-11-1 career record to World War II. Frank Faucett, a fresh-out-of-high-school freshman half back in 1947, knows it to be true.

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Faucett didn’t have to ask his teammates if they served. The veterans were easy to spot. They didn’t treat the lucky bunch who got to stay home any differently, but they led and you were drawn to them. They were men among boys who’d lived more in the past five years than the rest of the team had in 18. They were stronger. Fearless. The personification of a better generation. They carved athletic tradition into the future classes at Colorado A&M, and later Colorado State University.

War changed them. War changed CSU.

It’s an odd parallel to draw in 2015. Today, military veteran and college athlete are mutually exclusive. They weren’t always.

Seventy years ago today, there was a football player on a boat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean praying he’d be able to play the game he loved one more time.

For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting.