For lacrosse aficionados, the 2025 NCAA Division 1 men’s lacrosse championship and final was played Monday at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, and the winner of the prestigious Jack Turnbull Award for the top collegiate attackman for 2025 will soon be announced.
Lacrosse historians who have described Turnbull, a Hopkins alumnus and an Olympic phenom, as the “greatest attackman ever to play lacrosse” and the “Babe Ruth of lacrosse,” was only 34 when he was killed during World War II.
John Iglehart Turnbull was born in Baltimore and raised on Sulgrave Avenue in Mount Washington.
His older brother was Douglas Clayland Turnbull Jr., himself an outstanding athlete and four-time All-American in both football and lacrosse, was a memorable force as he thrilled spectators with his ferocious style of play during the early 1920s while a student at Johns Hopkins University.
Jack Turnbull established records in both football and lacrosse during his student days at Polytechnic Institute, and entered Hopkins in 1929 as a scholar-athlete.
He was captain of the lacrosse team during his four years at Poly, where he also played football and basketball.
In addition to his athletic prowess, Turnbull was interested in aviation and learned to fly and earned his pilot’s license at the old Curtiss-Wright Field on Smith Avenue in Northwest Baltimore.
During his three years at Hopkins, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1932, he was First Team All-American in lacrosse for 1930, 1931 and 1932.
He also played Blue Jays football and established an ice hockey team.
Turnbull competed as a member of the 1928 Olympic playoff team and in 1932 was named captain of the 1932 Olympic lacrosse team.
Before a crowd of 145,000 spectators at the games that were held in Los Angeles, he helped the team beat Canada two out of three games.
When lacrosse was stricken as an Olympic event, he joined the U.S. field hockey team as a halfback, and traveled to Berlin for the games.
After a U.S. victory at the Berlin Olympics, [Turnbull] was invited to Hitler’s box and witnessed first-hand the infamous snubbing of Jesse Owens,” wrote James J. Mahoney, an Army Air Force buddy, in his memoir, “Reluctant Witness: Memories of the Last Year of the European Air War 1944-1945.”
“Jack once mused over our warm beer in a cold Nissen hut, ‘I could have reached over and strangled the sonovabich then, and we wouldn’t be here now!'”
Professionally, Turnbull worked during the 1930s for the American Radiator Co. in Baltimore while continuing to play lacrosse for eight years with Mount Washington. In 1937, he toured England as a member of the USA All-Star Lacrosse Team.
In 1940, he joined the 104th Observation Squadron of the Maryland National Guard, which was mobilized in early 1941, before the war broke out after the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
Turnbull quickly rose through the ranks and in 1944 made lieutenant-colonel.
He went overseas and after arriving in England, he was assigned as operations officer for the 492nd Bombardment Group in East Anglia, where he was responsible for planning combat missions over Germany.
“I lead many of these missions as a command pilot, or in other words, I become the pilot on the lead ship to take care of command decisions en route to and from the target,” he wrote in a letter to his mother.
“The training that the various crews have received and their ability to handle successfully situations which may arise are of great importance to me. Beyond this, I am concerned about the welfare and spirit of our team.”
Ever the team player, it was Turnbull’s habit when he flew as command pilot in the first bomber, he refused to assert his rank, choosing to sit on a makeshift seat in the cockpit behind the pilot or co-pilot instead of taking the co-pilot’s seat because he believed it was important to maintain the integrity of the cockpit team.
His friend, Mahoney, took a different view of this arrangement and thought it had problems.
“Whenever we met at divisional meetings or Officer’s Club gatherings, we continued to needle each other on this subject, eash insisting the other’s way of riding command pilot would one day be his undoing. Little did I realize how sadly right I would be,” Mahoney wrote.
On Oct. 18, 1944, Turnbull was onboard Flying Ginny, on a bombing run to Leverkusen, Germany, and while returning to England, the B-24 Liberator Bomber ran into a severe storm at 24,000 feet.
Unable to maneuver up or around, the squadron flew into the turbulent storm when suddenly the Flying Ginny went into a sharp bank to the left.
“The engines were then throttled back. Now it became apparent the airplane was in some trouble,” wrote Robert Turnbull, a nephew, in a family memoir.
Turnbull was heard on the radio instructing the pilot, “Center the needle! Center the needle!”
“Very soon thereafter the plane flipped on its back. Now, obviously, completely out of control, the plane began to fall,” wrote the nephew, a retired Army major and West Point graduate.
As the Flying Ginny spiraled toward the ground it collided with another B-24 mid-air, as the crew desperately tried to save their plane, it finally crashed nine miles south of Ghent, Belgium.
Two crewmen bailed out of the ill-fated plane while all of the others perished on impact, which was near a convent.
The nuns came to the aid of the Americans, and in a report filed afterward, one of the surviving crewmen wrote, “It should be noted that Colonel Turnbull was not killed immediatley, but died two days later.”
Old men in a nearby village assembled caskets for the dead who were temporarily buried at the convent before being moved and reinterred in the Henri-Chappelle American Cemetery in Plombieres, Belgium.
“Had Jack been in the co-pilot’s seat where he could have taken over the controls, it’s unlikely a spin would ever have happened in the first place, and if it did, with 20,000 feet under him, I’m certain Jack could have recovered from it,” Mahoney wrote.
In his honor, the Mannheim Airport was renamed Turnbull Field.
His decorations included the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with Two Oak Leaf Clusters and the Purple Heart.
In 1947, his remains were taken to New York City and then placed aboard a B & O passenger train for Baltimore.
After a funeral at the now-closed St. John’s Episcopal Church in Mount Washington where he been a communicant, and where 12 P-47s flew over the church in formation as a final tribute, Turnbull, who had never married, was buried near his father in the churchyard of All Hallows Episcoapl Church in Davidsonville, Anne Arundel County, which dates to the 18th century.
“Jack Turnbull is what I call the complete athlete,” said radio commentator Billy Shriver in 1947. “By that I mean when he played a game, he gave it everything he had — spiritually, mentally and physically. Although he was an individual standout, he was always the team player, always playing for the best interests of the sport.”
Throughout his life, his brother Doug always insisted that Jack was the more accomplished and talented lacrosse player, and deferred to him.
On a dreary rainy November day in 1984, this reporter had been invited by Doug Turnbull to attend a breakfast gathering of the ancient South River Club, of which he was a member, in their clubhouse which dates to 1742.
On the way there, Turnbull pulled the car to the side of the road at All Hallows.
“Let’s go say hello to Jack,” said Turnbull, a retired B & O executive, who was 80.
Years had not dimmed his athletic gait as he walked across the cemetery with his full-cut tweed overcoat swinging to and fro, and finally reaching his brother’s tombstone, removed his hat, laid his hand on the stone and reverentially spoke his brother’s name.
“Hello, Jack,” and in an emotional minute it was over, and we were back on our way to the car.
