The Mosquito Bowl

 

Buzz Bissinger, “The Mosquito Bowl: Life and Death in WWII in the Pacific,” Harper Large Print, 2022, 529 pp..plus 100 pages of notes.

Sixty-five young Marines in WWII’s Pacific Theater, many of them top-level college and professional football players in the waiting time before the Battle of Okinawa, play a brutal football game dubbed the “Mosquito Bowl.” Who they were, where they came from, those who survived the conflict and those who did not is an epic tale of football and war.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the height of its popularity.  As the nation geared up for total war, one branch of the service dominated the aspirations of college football stars: the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of 1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest battle of the war – the invasion of Okinawa—their ranks included one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled: Former All Americans, captains from Wisconsin and Brown and Notre Dame, and nearly twenty men who were either drafted or would ultimately play in the NFL.   

When the trash-talking between the 4th and 29th over who had the better football team reached a fever pitch, it was decided: The two regiments would play each other in a football game as close to the real thing as you could get in the dirt and coral of Guadalcanal.  The bruising and bloody game that followed became known as “The Mosquito Bowl.”  The final score: 0 to 0.

Within a matter of months, 15 of the 65 players in “The Mosquito Bowl” would be killed at Okinawa, by far the largest number of American athletes ever to die in a single battle. The Mosquito Bowl is the story of these brave young men, those who survived and those who did not

Personal Note:  I had a memorable introduction to the WWII Pacific War when I was seven years old, living in Madison Wisconsin.  On the third floor where we lived, was an ex-soldier, Joe; he fought in the Pacific battles.  He took it upon himself to take me with him to mass five days a week during the summer and make me an altar boy.  Up in his apartment I practiced Latin and also got to look at photo albums from his war years.  (He must have been a photographer). Anyway, I saw bodies of Japanese floating down rivers, hanging in trees, piled in heaps, etc.  Joe truly believed the Japanese were vermin.  My parents had no idea of the education I was receiving in addition to learning Latin for mass.

My Notes:

Pg. 65f:  Almost 16 million people emigrated to the US between 1903 and 1924, most from southern and eastern Europe, supposedly poisoning and polluting the country’s Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic bloodlines.  This late nineteenth century emigration created a hostility from self-referenced ‘pure Americans’ that would culminate in the banning of virtually all immigration from Europe in 1924 except for a tiny quota and became an impetus for the Japanese declaration of war. 

Pg. 78:  The Immigration Act of 1924 essentially closed US border to Europeans for forty-one years until the passage of a new immigration act by Lyndon Johnson as part of Great Society legislation.

Pg. 83:  The death rate for Western prisoners taken by the Japanese was 27.1 percent, seven times higher than the rate of Western prisoners taken by the Germans and Italians.  It is believed that the death rate for Chinese prisoners taken by the Japanese was close to 100 percent.

Pg. 96:  When the US in August 1941 said it would no longer trade with Japan and imposed an embargo on supplying it with aviation oil, war was only a matter of time.

Pg. 100:  The US armed forces grew from 334,500 in 1939 to more than 12 million by the end of the war.

Pg. 334:  The Battle of Iwo Jima, two months before Okinawa, was the only battle with more US casualties than Japanese.

Pg. 378f:  Jellied incendiaries made of napalm and gasoline changed the Pacific War more than any other invention.  Napalm bombs dropped on Tokyo killed nearly ninety thousand people during two nights in March of 1945.  Many people were killed when they jumped into Tokyo Bay, not knowing that the heat had caused it to boil.  Napalm was also used in nearly seventy other Japanese cities.

Pg. 524:  The total losses at Okinawa are beyond all imagination.  As many as 250,000 people were killed in eighty-two days, or more than 3,999 a day.  The number of US military killed or missing in action was 4,900 from the Navy, the highest of any battle in its history; 4,700 from the Army; and 3,250 from the Marines.  The total number of US casualties was roughly 50,000, and that did not include those from battle fatigue and other non-battle-related incidents.  Marine casualties (killed and wounded) were 20,000, 10 percent of the total number in combat, as opposed to 6.5 percent for the army ground forces.  The estimates of deaths among Japanese military personnel and Okinawan conscripts range from 60,000 to 100,000.  The roughly 10,000 who surrendered were the most in any battle during the Pacific War.  (The US commander, General Buckner, is killed on the last day: the author castigates Buckner as ignorant and arrogant).

* I don't know how accurately Bissinger's criticism of the tactics and strategy of generals and commanders, who are only backgrounded. But the authority of his storytelling and his research — listed in more than 100 pages of endnotes, and assembled from military records, correspondence, and interviews of nonagenarians — shows up everywhere, in the numbers, in battle accounts, in the homey letters home.