On January 1st, 1946, the Isahaya Tigers, led by professional fullback Bill Osmanski, defeated the Nagasaki Bears, led by Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Angelo Bertelli, in a little-remembered football game known as the “Atomic Bowl.” At the time, all college football bowl games took place on the same day, January 1st, and this game was no different.
But this game was different in another remarkable aspect; it took place in Japan, in the ruins of perhaps one of the most tragic events in human history: the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. As one witness recalls, the field where the game took place was “only a hundred yards from the remains of a Middle School—the shell still standing, but the insides twisted and charred. Out the open end one can see—not the hills of Pasadena—but the giant junk yard that the bomb left—and the red ruin of the Roman Catholic Cathedral which once commanded the plain.”
A new documentary that began airing on PBS this month (The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero— and Nuclear Peril Today) highlights one of the most surreal stories from World War II. While the intention of the game may have been to create goodwill with the Japanese and share American culture in the aftermath of a deadly war, seeing photos of the game today feels brutal and cruel—a reminder of the extreme violence of nuclear weapons and the profound indifference that can accompany their use.
Two bombs. On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over Japan. The first, known as “Little Boy,” was a fission bomb that used enriched uranium 235 to power the explosion that occurred over Hiroshima. The second bomb, known as “Fat Man,” had a more complicated detonation design and relied on plutonium fuel; it was detonated using the same implosion technology as the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico.
The city of Kokura, home to an arsenal of military weapons, was the primary target for Fat Man. Heavy cloud cover, however, forced pilots to reroute to the secondary target, Nagasaki. Nagasaki had previously been a transit point for Portuguese and Dutch traders, who spread Catholicism to Japan. The bomb missed its intended target and detonated roughly a mile away, in the Urakami valley, 500 meters from the Urakami Cathedral. Hillsides prevented the explosion from traveling further. Had it been dropped in the city, the damage would have been far worse and the death toll much higher.
In his e-book companion to the documentary, the film’s director, Greg Mitchell, writes that Gen. Leslie Groves, who oversaw the production of the atomic bombs and the Manhattan Project, was “‘considerably relieved’ to learn the Nagasaki bomb had landed off target, meaning ‘a smaller number of casualties than we had expected.’” The implosion-style, plutonium-fueled bomb detonated over Nagasaki became the preferred weapon style of the U.S. military’s nuclear arsenal moving forward.
The Atomic Bowl. Throughout the war, American soldiers had been encouraged to organize team sports to keep morale high. Once the war ended, soldiers would organize games as entertainment and even teach locals how to play. In Japan, soldiers organized baseball and American football games “to show locals the glory of American sports.”
The United States occupied Japan from the country’s surrender in September 1945 to April 1952, and many cultural exchange activities proved to have a lasting impact. The most famous baseball player in the world today, after all, is currently Japanese dual-threat player, Shohei Ohtani of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Baseball had been introduced as a professional sport in Japan decades earlier, but during the American occupation, the sport took on an important role as a distraction for the Japanese.
The story of the Atomic Bowl feels both surreal and familiar because sports and military propaganda are often linked—like Hitler’s 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, or a B-2 bomber flying over an NFL playoff game—but the Atomic Bowl stands out for its uniquely callous attitude and moral indifference to the plight of the Japanese people.
The game took place on New Year’s Day, an important day of purification and renewal in Japan, on a large field in front of a middle school where 152 students and 13 teachers were killed during the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Originally intended as a game of tackle football, organizers switched to touch football after realizing the field was still littered with broken glass.
One of the Japanese reporters covering the event was Shunichi Morii, who worked for the Osaka Press Mainichi and whose wife and two children had been killed by the atomic bomb. Photographs from both cities in the aftermath of the bombing show shadows blazed into the sides of buildings and concrete from people who had been caught in the heat blast of the explosion, absorbing the heat of the blast in their skin and clothes.
The Atomic Bowl received attention in daily newspapers but was largely suppressed afterward. “The people involved almost never talked about it,” Mitchell told the Bulletin.
Nagasaki itself didn’t talk about it—it became this kind of black hole in a way. And I don’t know that that’s because once it was done, it seemed like a very bad idea, but they didn’t really distribute visuals.
Mitchell’s previous documentary, Atomic Cover-Up, explored post-war suppression of films and photographs that showed the damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whatever was released showed destroyed buildings, but almost never people. Mitchell was able to unearth photos and stories about the Atomic Bowl through the families of one of its attendees, William W. Watt. “The Watt family was really the key turning point that made the film possible,” Mitchell said.
So now there was enough there to have way beyond what had ever appeared before.
Watt, who would go on to teach and write poems for the New Yorker, had written letters to his wife about the destruction he witnessed in Nagasaki.
It looks like a brickyard in which some giant Vandal has gone about smashing the bricks for the Hell of it…. I feel sorry for the women, and the little kids break my heart, some of them with burned faces…
The forgotten bomb. Nagasaki never received as much attention as the first atomic bombing at Hiroshima. There was no Nagasaki equivalent of John Hersey’s famous New Yorker article and book, Hiroshima. However, Mitchell points out that privately, Hersey called the Nagasaki bombing “indefensible,” and “a totally criminal action.” The American author Kurt Vonnegut said in an interview with the Progressive in 2003, “The most racist, nastiest act by this country, after human slavery, was the bombing of Nagasaki.” Against this backdrop, the football game between the Isahaya Tigers and the Nagasaki Bears stands out as a macabre example of post-war efforts to end hostilities—and it is worth revisiting.
Significant information about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been suppressed since 1945, and the stories of those individuals who spent time in their aftermath shed light on the grim reality of their use—the fields of broken glass, the name tags of students found in a school, the “smell of sulfur and death.”
Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only instances of nuclear weapons being used in warfare, but ongoing conflicts have led to nuclear saber-rattling and a renewed sense that these weapons could potentially be used. Some Americans even support using nuclear weapons in preemptive strikes against other nations. Nuclear modernization programs will result in more accurate and far more destructive nuclear capabilities than existed at the end of World War II, and if assurances of an umbrella of protection are abandoned, other countries could seek their own arsenals.
As Mitchell points out, “nearly all of the victims of the Nagasaki bombing were non-combatants, mainly women, children, and the elderly, as well as many foreign workers seized and sent to Japan.” If today’s far more powerful nuclear weapons were ever unleashed, the death toll would be far greater than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—likely including you and everyone you know.
Erik English is an associate multimedia editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He has worked at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. African Development Foundation. Erik was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin from 2009 to 2011 and received his master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 2015.