IN THE YEAR the NFL’s international programme expanded to include Ireland, American documentary maker Greg Mitchell has excavated an altogether more chilling and bizarre game of American football played abroad.
On 1 January 1946, in a nod to the college football bowl games played traditionally played on New Year’s Day in America, the US military organised a game of football among the troops occupying Japan.
The teams were named the Isahaya Tigers – captained by Bill Osmanski of the Chicago Bears – and the Nagasaki Bears, who were led by Notre Dame’s Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Angelo Bertelli.
The venue? Ground zero in Nagasaki.
The US dropped an atomic bomb on the port city of Nagasaki two days after they bombed Hiroshima, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Afterwards, having had their troops go in and clear some of the wreckage, the US military had them play a football game on the radiation-laced killing field.
To be more precise about the venue: it was held on ‘Athletic Field 2′, outside the shell of a school in which 162 children and 13 teachers had been killed by the bomb. The walls of the hollowed-out school still bore some students’ final messages to their parents, written in their own blood.
The troops had initially planned a full-tackle game, but having found shards of glass and other debris still jammed into the ground, they switched to game of touch football. There were around 1500 people in the crowd, the vast majority of whom were American military personnel, along with a few baffled and uneasy locals, one of whom was a journalist, Shunichi Mori, whose two children were killed by the bomb.
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“To have this game, and to have it in Nagasaki of all places, shows a certain callousness and cluelessness,” Mitchell tells The 42. Games of football among troops were nothing new, he explains, and several games were staged across the UK and France following America’s entry to the war. Following the bombs, American troops in Japan were handed a softer power exercise, summed up by an instructional film titled ‘Our Job in Japan’ written by children’s author, Dr Seuss.
“These people will judge America and all Americans by us,” reads the script. “This means we have another job to do – that job is to be ourselves. We can teach what we call The American way, or democracy, or good old common sense, is a good way to live.”
As to whether a football game on a nuclear killing field was another means of exhibiting the American way of life, Mitchell is unsure. “I’m not sure that we were expressing a message to Japan’s leaders,” he says, “but there certainly was triumphalism involved, sort of as an example of ‘We can do what the hell we want.’” It may more simply have been designed as a means of allowing American troops blow off some steam.
(The Atomic Bowl was not the only curious event of that time: some US marines served as judges in a local beauty contest they called Miss Atom Bomb.)
For Mitchell, more instructive than the motivation for the game was the reaction to it.
“Hardly anyone knew about it,” he says. “It disappeared into a black hole in our history.” The news reports featuring the game were brief and bland, while there was no film reel or photos released. “It was almost like the minute the game happened, there were second thoughts”, he says.
The Atomic Bowl was forgotten to history until 1984 when, William W Watt, a navy lieutenant present at the game who became a poet regularly published by the New Yorker magazine, recalled the whole episode in the New York Times. “What was I doing here?” he asked, “happily celebrating an American holiday 6,000 miles from Pasadena on a grotesque golgotha so recently hollowed by horror?”
Mitchell filed away the piece, vowing eventually to return to it. Once he did so for this film, his researcher contacted Watt’s estate, who granted access to his letters. They also held photos from the game, sent to Watt by the aforementioned Japanese journalist, Shunichi Mori, which allowed him better illustrate the documentary.
Mitchell is a former editor of The Nuclear Times, a magazine dedicated to disarmament, and has written books about America’s nuclear use, including Hiroshima in America, Atomic Cover-up. While the Atomic Bowl had been completely forgotten, little has generally been said about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in general.
“Although it’s changing somewhat, polls show that Americans see it as a good thing, in the abstract or just in the fact that we used the atomic bomb to end the war,” says Mitchell.
“But when you get face to face with what those weapons did in the two cities, then it gets a little queasy, and so the general direction has always been ‘Don’t concentrate much on what happened in the cities, the fact that it happened and they surrendered shortly after. Don’t concentrate on the victims.’”
And whenever the bombings are addressed, nagasaki is generally forgotten. When Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima in 2016, for instance, he didn’t travel to Nagasaki. Mitchell sees the Nagasaki bomb as the more terrifying episode. First of all it was ham-fisted, missing its target by about two miles, while the leaflet drop warning civilians of an imminent bomb came afterwards.
But beyond that, Mitchell reveals, President Harry Truman did not give the order to drop the Nagasaki bomb, as he had done with Hiroshima three days earlier. It was instead authorised by the military chain of command.
“The second bomb rolled off the assembly line, and Truman was surprised it happened,” says Mitchell. “And so it shows the warnings of the automated nature of nuclear policy today, where one could easily imagine, via the chain of command – or with no chain of command – a nuclear weapon rolling off the assembly line or rolling out based on misinformation, or a rogue general, or whatever.
“There are also a lot more dangers today with AI. There’s always been dangers of accidental nuclear war. There’s even more today.
“Hiroshima will always be the historical focus because it was number one. In this case, the number two example is more revealing and has more lessons for today than the first bomb.”
It was decided in advance, by the way, that it would be appropriate for The Atomic Bowl to end in a tie. A late touchdown by the Tigers levelled the game at 13-13, but Bill Omanski, faced with a final kick to add on an extra point, converted it to win 14-13.
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The Atomic Bowl: The untold story of the American football game played at Ground Zero in Nagasaki
IN THE YEAR the NFL’s international programme expanded to include Ireland, American documentary maker Greg Mitchell has excavated an altogether more chilling and bizarre game of American football played abroad.
On 1 January 1946, in a nod to the college football bowl games played traditionally played on New Year’s Day in America, the US military organised a game of football among the troops occupying Japan.
And so, for one year only, taking its place along with the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl and the Orange Bowl was the Atomic Bowl. Mitchell’s film for PBS is titled the same.
The teams were named the Isahaya Tigers – captained by Bill Osmanski of the Chicago Bears – and the Nagasaki Bears, who were led by Notre Dame’s Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Angelo Bertelli.
The venue? Ground zero in Nagasaki.
The US dropped an atomic bomb on the port city of Nagasaki two days after they bombed Hiroshima, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Afterwards, having had their troops go in and clear some of the wreckage, the US military had them play a football game on the radiation-laced killing field.
To be more precise about the venue: it was held on ‘Athletic Field 2′, outside the shell of a school in which 162 children and 13 teachers had been killed by the bomb. The walls of the hollowed-out school still bore some students’ final messages to their parents, written in their own blood.
The troops had initially planned a full-tackle game, but having found shards of glass and other debris still jammed into the ground, they switched to game of touch football. There were around 1500 people in the crowd, the vast majority of whom were American military personnel, along with a few baffled and uneasy locals, one of whom was a journalist, Shunichi Mori, whose two children were killed by the bomb.
“To have this game, and to have it in Nagasaki of all places, shows a certain callousness and cluelessness,” Mitchell tells The 42. Games of football among troops were nothing new, he explains, and several games were staged across the UK and France following America’s entry to the war. Following the bombs, American troops in Japan were handed a softer power exercise, summed up by an instructional film titled ‘Our Job in Japan’ written by children’s author, Dr Seuss.
“These people will judge America and all Americans by us,” reads the script. “This means we have another job to do – that job is to be ourselves. We can teach what we call The American way, or democracy, or good old common sense, is a good way to live.”
As to whether a football game on a nuclear killing field was another means of exhibiting the American way of life, Mitchell is unsure. “I’m not sure that we were expressing a message to Japan’s leaders,” he says, “but there certainly was triumphalism involved, sort of as an example of ‘We can do what the hell we want.’” It may more simply have been designed as a means of allowing American troops blow off some steam.
(The Atomic Bowl was not the only curious event of that time: some US marines served as judges in a local beauty contest they called Miss Atom Bomb.)
For Mitchell, more instructive than the motivation for the game was the reaction to it.
“Hardly anyone knew about it,” he says. “It disappeared into a black hole in our history.” The news reports featuring the game were brief and bland, while there was no film reel or photos released. “It was almost like the minute the game happened, there were second thoughts”, he says.
The Atomic Bowl was forgotten to history until 1984 when, William W Watt, a navy lieutenant present at the game who became a poet regularly published by the New Yorker magazine, recalled the whole episode in the New York Times. “What was I doing here?” he asked, “happily celebrating an American holiday 6,000 miles from Pasadena on a grotesque golgotha so recently hollowed by horror?”
Mitchell filed away the piece, vowing eventually to return to it. Once he did so for this film, his researcher contacted Watt’s estate, who granted access to his letters. They also held photos from the game, sent to Watt by the aforementioned Japanese journalist, Shunichi Mori, which allowed him better illustrate the documentary.
Mitchell is a former editor of The Nuclear Times, a magazine dedicated to disarmament, and has written books about America’s nuclear use, including Hiroshima in America, Atomic Cover-up. While the Atomic Bowl had been completely forgotten, little has generally been said about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in general.
“Although it’s changing somewhat, polls show that Americans see it as a good thing, in the abstract or just in the fact that we used the atomic bomb to end the war,” says Mitchell.
“But when you get face to face with what those weapons did in the two cities, then it gets a little queasy, and so the general direction has always been ‘Don’t concentrate much on what happened in the cities, the fact that it happened and they surrendered shortly after. Don’t concentrate on the victims.’”
And whenever the bombings are addressed, nagasaki is generally forgotten. When Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to visit Hiroshima in 2016, for instance, he didn’t travel to Nagasaki. Mitchell sees the Nagasaki bomb as the more terrifying episode. First of all it was ham-fisted, missing its target by about two miles, while the leaflet drop warning civilians of an imminent bomb came afterwards.
But beyond that, Mitchell reveals, President Harry Truman did not give the order to drop the Nagasaki bomb, as he had done with Hiroshima three days earlier. It was instead authorised by the military chain of command.
“The second bomb rolled off the assembly line, and Truman was surprised it happened,” says Mitchell. “And so it shows the warnings of the automated nature of nuclear policy today, where one could easily imagine, via the chain of command – or with no chain of command – a nuclear weapon rolling off the assembly line or rolling out based on misinformation, or a rogue general, or whatever.
“There are also a lot more dangers today with AI. There’s always been dangers of accidental nuclear war. There’s even more today.
“Hiroshima will always be the historical focus because it was number one. In this case, the number two example is more revealing and has more lessons for today than the first bomb.”
It was decided in advance, by the way, that it would be appropriate for The Atomic Bowl to end in a tie. A late touchdown by the Tigers levelled the game at 13-13, but Bill Omanski, faced with a final kick to add on an extra point, converted it to win 14-13.
You can watch the full movie on the PBS website
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