The Atomic Bowl was a football game that was played in the ruins of Nagasaki on January 1, 1946.Mother Jones illustration; National Archives
On New Year’s Day, 1946, one of the most surreal and disturbing sporting events in US history was held in the Japanese city of Nagasaki, less than five months after an atomic bomb on August 9 destroyed half the city and killed at least 75,000 people. The all-star football game, staged by the occupying forces of the US military, received wide coverage in the American media at the time and was dubbed the Atomic Bowl. Then it became largely forgotten, almost lost to history.
As we approach the 80th anniversary of this attack, this game remains an appropriate metaphor for the Nagasaki bomb, the second nuclear weapon dropped on a large Japanese city by the United States at the end of World War II. This horrific bombing and its aftermath has long been overshadowed by the first atomic blast three days earlier at Hiroshima.
In late September 1945, shortly after the Japanese surrender that ended the war, tens of thousands of US Army troops and Marines landed near Nagasaki in southern Japan. They found the city decimated—the bomb had exploded a mile off target over a suburb where 15,000 Catholics had lived—with countless survivors injured or suffering from radiation disease. Many of the Americans were exposed to lingering (and poorly monitored) levels of radiation in the ruins.
“What were we doing here, happily celebrating an American holiday…on a grotesque golgotha so recently hallowed by horror? The question had no answer.”
Since the end of hostilities, US commanders had looked for ways to normalize the American occupation in the Pacific and Europe. A military orientation film, Our Job in Japan, (written by Theodore Geisel, who later became Dr. Seuss) was shown to arriving members of the occupying forces. It told them their main job was “to be ourselves” and show that “the American way…was a pretty good way to live.” This included mounting baseball and football games in which US soldiers could compete. Military officials believed this was also a way for servicemen, as one put it, to “blow off steam” and impress the locals with the glory of American sports.
In December, a Marine commander ordered that a football game be held in Japan for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Why did the military choose Nagaskai of all places as the site for this game, on a field so close to ground zero? No written records documenting the reasons exist. Additionally, later in 1946, US servicemen helped organize—and served as judges for—a Miss Atom Bomb beauty pageant in Nagasaki for local women.
One of the organizers of the Atomic Bowl football contest, Lt. Gerald Sanders later noted that the game was a kind of tribute to fallen colleagues. “We thought it would be totally appropriate,” he said. “It was certainly not to look like there was a joyful glee in what had happened there… We were there, yet we had many buddies that didn’t make it through the war.”
A gridiron was cleared in front of a middle school which had lost 162 students and 13 teachers to the atomic bomb. Angelo Bertelli, who had won the Heisman Trophy in 1943 as quarterback for Notre Dame, and “Bullet Bill” Osmanski, the Chicago Bears’ star running back, were selected as captains. A top officer wrote a press release promising that the game would have “all the color—and more” of the bowl games to be played that day back in the States. On hand would be a Marine band and Japanese girl cheerleaders.
But they would have to play touch, not tackle, football because shards from the atomic blast still littered the field.
On an unusually chilly day in Nagasaki, about 1,500 servicemen gathered to watch the spectacle. “Here and there were isolated Japanese—a father and his boy, a group of giggly girls, two old men—all looking small and lost and bewildered by it all,” one observer, a Naval officer, wrote in a letter to his wife.
The result was hardly important—Osmanski scored a late touchdown and kicked the extra point for the 14-13 win—but for two days the game was covered widely in the US. Then no one wrote about it. At all. No photos and no footage emerged. This lack of subsequent attention reflected Nagasaki’s second-class atomic status. In coming decades, American journalists and notables frequently visited Hiroshima, but they rarely trekked to Nagasaki, which the locals referred to as “the inferior A-bomb city.”
Even the players in the briefly celebrated game were reluctant to discuss it. Growing up, Robert Bertelli never once heard his father talk about playing in an all-star football match in Japan in 1946. Angelo would die in 1999 at the age of 78, and his son—by then known as Bob Bert, a drummer who was a member of the influential rock group Sonic Youth—never heard him mention the game. The former quarterback never spoke about it in interviews. Neither did Osmanski.
As I conducted research for a book and the recently released PBS documentary, The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today, I found this was a common experience. The offspring of other players in this game had not been told anything about it by their fathers. This sports stunt disappeared from journalism and history for decades.
Finally, in 1984, one of the Atomic Bowl’s attendees, William Watt, a Navy officer, poet, and literature professor, wrote a short piece for the New York Times’ sports section describing the game and his reaction at the time: “What were we doing here, happily celebrating an American holiday…on a grotesque golgotha so recently hallowed by horror? The question had no answer.”
While a large segment of the American public continues to support the use of the first atomic bomb at Hiroshima, historians have debated that decision. Some have especially questioned the second bombing. For example, Martin Sherwin, a Pulitzer Prize winner for co-authoring, with Kai Bird, the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, called the Nagasaki attack “gratuitous at best…and genocidal at worst.”
The disappearance of the Atomic Bowl and the relegation of Nagasaki to an afterthought of Hiroshima raises the question of whether there are lessons from the second atomic attack that extend beyond those prompted by the Hiroshima bombing.
Nearly all of the victims of the Nagasaki bombing were non-combatants, mainly women and children and the elderly, as well as many foreign workers who had been seized and sent to Japan to work in arms factories. Hiroshima did host a major military base—a fact long used to justify the tremendous loss of civilian life there. The bombing of Nagasaki, which was added as a target at nearly the last-minute, showed that civilian casualties could be completely ignored. So much so that a football game could even be played by Americans on one of the killing fields.
The Nagasaki bombing is a reminder, perhaps more so than Hiroshima, that a military attack on a large city, killing tens of thousands of civilians, can become morally accepted not just by civilian and military leaders, but by the public. Some polls in the past have showed that many if not most Americans would today support a US nuclear strike that might kill massive numbers of civilians in, for instance, North Korea.
As we currently witness massive civilian casualties in wars from Africa to Ukarine to Gaza—more kids dead than soldiers in some cases—there’s good reason for the second atomic bombing to receive as much attention as the first.