World War II spared no one and nothing — even American football.
In 1943, the AP Top 20 college football rankings were littered with the usual names — Notre Dame, Michigan, Texas. Yet hovering at the No. 2 spot is a team long-forgotten, even by most football fanatics: the U.S. Navy’s Iowa Pre-Flight team.
During WWII, military training camps fielded their own teams, writes The New York Times. The war had shuttered many university programs as service-aged men swelled the ranks of the military.
As service academies like West Point and Annapolis benefited from the influx of talent, so, too, did the training camp teams.
Older players, some of them former professionals from the likes of the Chicago Bears and New York Giants, suited up for teams like Great Lakes Navy, Del Monte Pre-Flight and March Field. By 1943, four of those teams were in the AP Top 10, beating out storied football programs.
Among the standouts was Iowa Pre-Flight’s fullback, Dick Todd, a four-year veteran of the Washington Redskins (now Commanders) who would go on to play for the team four more years after the war. The team’s halfback Frank Maznicki had played for the Chicago Bears a year prior, and college athletes who had previously played for schools such as Marquette, Michigan State, Iowa, Pittsburg and Illinois also suited up.
The team was so stacked that Perry Schwartz, an end for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1938 to 1942, never started a game.
While based at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Navy’s Iowa Pre-Flight was a separate team from the university’s own Hawkeyes squad.
Known as the Seahawks, the team was coached by former Missouri coach Lt. Don Faurot, originator of the Split-T formation. Bud Wilkinson, who went on to become a coaching legend at Oklahoma, was his assistant, according to the New York Times.
Late in the 1943 college season only two teams remained undefeated: Iowa Pre-Flight and Notre Dame. And as their November matchup loomed, the eyes of a weary nation focused, just for a moment, on a battle playing out stateside.
On Nov. 20, 1943, as Col. David Shoup was reporting on Tarawa, “Casualties many; percentage of dead not known; combat efficiency: We are winning,” No. 1 Notre Dame was suiting up to play the second-ranked Iowa Pre-Flight team.
Although a weaker schedule, injuries and the last-minute transfer of six players, including its starting quarterback, Jack Williams, to other bases had the undefeated Seahawks heading into the game against the Fighting Irish a 20-point underdog, Notre Dame head coach, Frank Leahy, was rightfully skeptical.
“Even though recent personnel changes have ruined the Seahawk line-up,” reads a 1943 New York Times article, “Frank Leahy sees nothing except fiendish specters of defeat.”
In addition, the pair of undefeated teams would also solve, wrote famed sportswriter Allison Danzig, “whether a top-flight college football team is in the same class with a crack professional club.”
“The laboratory will be the Notre Dame stadium,” Danzig continued. “The guinea pigs will be the Fighting Irish and the Seahawks of the Iowa Navy Pre-Flight School.”
From the jump, Notre Dame fought from behind against what Danzig termed “a thunderous onslaught [from] a combination of former professional and Big Ten college players.”
In the opening two quarters, the Seahawks took a 7-0 lead over the undefeated Fighting Irish, with seven first downs to the latter’s two.
The score evened after a 65-yard touchdown run from the opening kickoff, but from there the game stalled until the fourth quarter when the Seahawks, despite its quarterback suffering from a broken jaw, cashed in on a Notre Dame fumble.
A missed kick, however, put the game back within Notre Dame’s reach and they quickly capitalized on it, with Creighton Miller, one of the “chief artisans” of the victory, sneaking in from the Seahawk’s 6-yard line for a tying touchdown.
Kicker Fred Earley knocked in the extra point, sealing a 14-13 victory for Notre Dame.
“Any doubts as to the majestic stature of the Notre Dame football team of 1943 melted today in the crucible of one of the great gridiron games of this or any other season,” Danzig concluded.
Yet Notre Dame’s storied season would suffer a defeat in its final game at the hands of another service team, the Great Lakes Bluejackets.
The Bluejackets would ultimately finish No. 6 in the AP rankings for the season, due to its two previous losses. Notre Dame, with its one, hung on to its No. 1 ranking and eked out a national championship.
Iowa Pre-Flight would finish second in the rankings and by the end of 1945, all service teams were disbanded.
The team has been largely forgotten, but perhaps that’s fitting for the men, writes Danzig, who played “for the sheer enjoyment of taking and giving someone a physical going-over.”
The 2025 Army-Navy game kicks off Saturday, Dec. 13, at 3 p.m. EST at M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, Maryland, and will be broadcast on CBS.
Claire Barrett is the Strategic Operations Editor for Sightline Media and a World War II researcher with an unparalleled affinity for Sir Winston Churchill and Michigan football.
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