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Always a Bloody Nose. Tough words. Tough man. He has to be, growing up as he did in East St. Louis, Ill., the youngest of nine children born to John Bauer, an Austrian immigrant who turned to bartending after he lost a leg working in an aluminum mill. Money was scarce around the Bauer household: he wore baby clothes made out of old feed sacks. In junior high school, Hank weighed only 102 Ibs., and his sister Mary begged him to give up smoking: "That's the reason you're not growing," she insisted. Hank kept right on smoking—and wading into street fights. "He was a real dead-end kid," says Brother Joe, 58. "Always going around with a bloody nose."
At Central Catholic High School, Bauer won his Cs in baseball and basketball—plus a permanently misshapen nose (the result of a collision with an opponent's elbow under the basket). After graduation, Hank worked for a while repairing furnaces in a beer-bottling plant. In 1941 his older brother Herman, a White Sox farm hand, wangled him a pro tryout. Hank landed with Oshkosh in the Class D Wisconsin State League. But he hardly burned up the bushes. Alternating between infield and outfield, he batted a measly .262. The manager thought he might be a pitcher. Earned-run average in three games: 5.03. "I tried a curve once," grins Bauer, "but nothing happened."
"I Can Swim." Bauer never went back to Oshkosh. One day in January 1942, he stopped by the local court house and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. Boot camp was a breeze ("I never had to scrub a barracks with a toothbrush or anything"), and there was even a baseball team at Mare Island, Calif., where Hank was awaiting shipment to the Pacific. But the easy life came to an abrupt halt. "One morning," says Hank, "this sergeant came up to me and said, 'Why don't you volunteer for the Raider battalion?' I said okay. But the first thing they told me was, 'You've got to swim a mile with a full pack on your back.' I said, 'Hell, I can't even swim,' and they turned me down. I told the sergeant what happened. He said, 'You gutless s.o.b., go back down there.' So I told them I knew how to swim. They took me."
Bauer came down with malaria almost as soon as he hit the South Pacific. "My weight dropped from 190 Ibs. to 160 Ibs.," he says. "I was eating atabrine tablets like candy." Temporarily recovered (over the next four years, Bauer had 24 malarial attacks), he fought on New Georgia, was hit in the back by shrapnel on Guam. (Years later in New York, Yankee Relief Pitcher Joe Page delighted in picking small pieces of debris out of Bauer's back.) Next came Emirau off New Guinea, then Okinawa. Sixty-four men were in Platoon Sergeant Bauer's landing group on Okinawa; six got out alive. Hank himself was wounded again. "I saw this reflection of sunshine on something coming down. It was an artillery shell, and it hit right behind me." A piece of shrapnel tore a jagged hole in Bauer's left thigh. His part of the war was over —after 32 months of combat, eleven campaign ribbons, two Bronze Stars, two Purple Hearts.