EDITOR’S NOTE: Every day until Aug. 29, Creg Stephenson is counting down significant numbers in Alabama football history, both in the lead-up to the 2025 football season and in commemoration of the Crimson Tide’s first national championship 100 years ago. The number could be attached to a year, a uniform number or even a football-specific statistic. We hope you enjoy.

Alabama has fielded a football team in all but two seasons since the program’s founding in 1892, and both times a world war played a role in the sport’s absence from campus.

In 1918, a combination of the United States’ entry into World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic made football an afterthought at Alabama and on dozens of other college campuses around the country. In 1943, the second full year of American involvement in World War II resulted in the depletion — or redirection — of manpower and the temporary (at least official) disbandment of the Crimson Tide.

Alabama was founded as a military school in 1831, though much of that legacy was gone by the 1940s. However, scores of former and future Alabama students — including several directly or indirectly involved with the football team — joined the war effort.

Perhaps the most notable of those is Hugh Miller, a part-time starting quarterback on Alabama’s 1930 Rose Bowl championship team who went on to become a decorated U.S. Navy officer during the war. Lt. Miller — a Tuscaloosa native known as “Rose Bowl” by fellow Navy men due to his football background — was shipwrecked when the U.S.S. Strong was sunk by a Japanese submarine on the night of July 4-5, 1943.

Miller and three others eventually swam ashore in the Solomon Islands, and hid from Japanese troops for several days while recovering from wounds suffered during their ordeal. The most severely injured, Miller eventually convinced the other three to leave him behind, and they were never heard from again.

Miller survived, recovering a grenade, a bayonet and some rice from a dead Japanese soldier who had washed ashore, and also eating coconuts to sustain himself. According to accounts, he killed as many as 15 enemy soldiers before being reunited with American forces 39 days later.

Miller was awarded a total of 38 medals and other citations for his war service, including the Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, six Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts. He remained in the Navy after the war, retiring as a captain before dying at age 68 in 1978.

Miller’s story is one of dozens documented in the 2012 book All of Us Fought the War, written by Delbert Reed and published by the Paul W. Bryant Museum. Also featured is Don Salls, starting fullback and team captain of Alabama’s 1941 national championship and Orange Bowl-winning team.

Salls served in the Army during the war, receiving a Purple Heart after being wounded during combat in France. After returning to Alabama, he was a teacher and head football coach for several decades at Jacksonville State, which named its athletics dorm after him in 1966.

Salls was inducted into the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame in 1992. He died in 2021 at age 101, making him the longest-lived letterman in Crimson Tide football history.

Cary Cox and Holt Rast were teammates at Alabama in the late 1930s, and later served with distinction in the U.S. Army during the war. Cox was part of the Allied campaign in North Africa in 1942, and earned the Bronze Star for bravery during the invasion of Sicily the following year.

Rast — an All-America end at Alabama in 1941 — served in North Africa, Sicily, France and Germany, and was twice wounded during combat, earning the Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster among many other accolades. After returning to Alabama, he became one of Birmingham’s most-prominent businessmen and helped found the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame.

Bill Cadenhead had enrolled at Alabama and played on the Crimson Tide freshman team in 1942, but left school to join the Navy the following year and served on the three different submarines in the Pacific. He returned to Alabama in 1946 and re-joined the football team, and was elected team captain as a senior in 1949.

(Former Alabama end and future head football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant served in the U.S. Navy during the war, though he did not see combat action. In one of college football history’s great “what ifs,” Bryant had been offered the head-coaching job at the University of Arkansas in early December 1941, but turned down the job and joined the Navy after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor a few days later.)

Bert Bank never played football at Alabama, but was producer of the team’s games on the radio for decades and in 1953 founded what is now the Crimson Tide Sports Network. His war story is perhaps even more harrowing than of Miller.

A second lieutenant in the 27th Bombing Group of the U.S. Army Air Force, Bank was captured by Japanese troops during the Battle of Bataan in the Philippines and survived 33 months as a prisoner of war. In April 1942, he lived through the infamous Bataan Death March — a nine-day forced transfer of U.S. and Filipino prisoners some 65 miles along a jungle peninsula, during which an estimated 18,000 died of disease, starvation or exhaustion.

Banks spent nearly three years in a number of Japanese prison camps under the harshest of conditions — given only minimal food and often forced to drink water from mudholes — until he was finally rescued by U.S. Army Rangers in January 1945. Bank himself lost more than 50 pounds, and fewer than half of the men in his unit survived the ordeal.

“Men were skin and bones,” Bank later recalled. “The average weight was 85 to 90 pounds. A lot of men didn’t want to live; they just gave up.”

Bank retired from the Air Force — which became a separate branch of the military in 1947 — with the rank of major after the war, and lived to age 94. In addition to his radio work, he also served in both the Alabama Senate and House of Representatives.

Alabama did field an unofficial football team in 1943, with tackle Mitch Olenski serving as head coach. With a roster made up of 17-year-olds and draft-deferred students, the Alabama Informals, as they were called, went 2-1 in a schedule featuring one game vs. Birmingham’s Howard College (now Samford) and two vs. Marion Military Institute (the Informals are not considered a varsity Crimson Tide team and their records are not counted by the school).

The war had turned in the Allies’ favor by late 1943, and the following year Alabama football returned to the field along with most of its SEC rivals. Many former and future U.S. servicemen have played for the Crimson Tide in the years since, but the football team has continued on uninterrupted.

Special thanks to Brad Green of the Paul W. Bryant Museum for research and photo assistance. In addition, thanks to reader Tim Ferguson for suggesting Hugh Miller as one of this story’s subjects.

Coming Saturday: Our countdown to kickoff continues with No. 42, the number worn by two great Alabama running backs from different eras.