The week of the annual Army-Navy football game does different things to different people.

For my mother, a proud veteran serving her peers behind the bar at the VFW, it meant Kenny Niumatalolo giving her bragging rights over her thirsty Army friends. Grantland Rice had his Four Horsemen. Kapolei will always have Kaipo- Noa Kaheaku-Enhada. Up in Wahiawa, it is the time the Army wore patches honoring the Tropical Lightning Division. For Punahou’s Geraldine Bartlett, it was when her engagement to Marine Everett Vyron Alward was announced in his Kahala home just before kickoff of the 1941 game just over a week before the Pearl Harbor attacks.

For me, though, it is one of the many things that bring to mind Joe DiMaggio and the grand old game of baseball.

Three days before D-Day, Hawaii was building up for its own decisive battle.

That was the day that DiMaggio landed on Oahu with a seabag on his shoulder and disappointment in the pit of his gut.

DiMaggio had no choice. He was the biggest weapon the Army Air Force could add to its baseball team, flying the Yankee Clipper in with 15 other ringers, including Walt Judnich, Ferris Fain and Charlie Silvera to bolster a scant one-game lead over the Tigers in the Hawaii League and mend a three-game deficit to Aiea Hospital in the Navy League.

With Rome falling to the allies and the Japanese on the run, winning baseball games became a priority. DiMaggio wanted nothing to do with it, telling the Army that if he was going to trade his $43,750 annual salary for $50 a month he wanted to see combat. There was no way Americans were going to read about a national treasure dying far from home, so even with 19-year-old Yogi Berra just off the beach at Normandy and Ted Williams learning to fly, DiMaggio was a show pony used to pick up funds.

There was nobody better for the job.

DiMaggio broke two records in his first hours on Oahu. When he walked into Honolulu Stadium he was greeted by a crowd of 21,000 that was the largest to see a baseball game there and netted $10,200. He was 0-for-2 with a walk in what he claimed was his first baseball game in six weeks when he broke a second mark. With his Fliers trailing 6-0 with one out in the ninth, DiMaggio ruined Bob Harris’ shutout for the Navy when he blasted his second pitch 435 feet across Isenberg Street. Both newspapers reported that it was the longest home run hit at the stadium.

“If Joe smacks ’em this way in his first game after a layoff of six weeks, St. Louis Alumni better start putting up a screen to protect their Dreier Manor of he’ll have it bombed full of holes in a month,” Honolulu Advertiser sports editor and island institution Red McQueen wrote.

DiMaggio’s time in Hawaii wasn’t the mai tais and hula girls he expected. He played few games for his team and suffered ulcers before being sent to a California hospital.

The 7th AAF hardly needed him, riding their professionals to a 31-4 record to win the league by 4 1/2 games over the Navy.

That didn’t go over very well with Admiral Chester Nimitz.

The Army won the annual Cartwright Series 7-5 over the Navy in the middle of September behind two homers from Judnich. Three days before the contest, a plane arrived from Australia with what the Navy called “sorely needed plumbing equipment” accompanied by two fellows very familiar to Joe DiMaggio: his brother Dom and future Hall of Famer Phil Rizzuto. More talent arrived after that, including pitching aces Walt Masterson and Johnny Vander Meer.

The loaded Navy team went on to steamroll the Army with the new additions, winning eight of 11 games played in Hawaii and dubbed the “Servicemen’s World Series.”

The Army countered by giving even more players orders to Hawaii, but the Navy had already scheduled its all-star team for a tour of the Pacific.

“The Navy was beating the hell out of the Army in Honolulu,” Hall of Famer Enos Slaughter said. “Larry MacPhail was working with the government then in Washington, and he got every major league player in the whole United States who was in the Army Air Corps. In seven days time I had my orders … there were 48 of us. When we got there it was too late, all the Navy was gone and the Marines were gone.”

By the time the buildup was over, more than 50 players with major league experience played in Hawaii in 1944, including seven Hall of Famers. The rosters were so stacked that newspapers across the country wrote that the Army-Navy clashes were the “real World Series” and the Navy challenged the St. Louis Cardinals for a true championship played half in Missouri and half on Oahu.

The Oahu service newspaper, the Midpacifician, put it ever so bluntly in October.

“The major leagues should abandon the title of ‘world champions’ for the duration — or come out here and prove their right to it.”

The Army-Navy football game will probably never be played in our midst, but we have already had the greatest Army-Navy contest ever played.

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Reach Jerry Campany at jcampany@staradvertiser.com.