80 Years Ago: Bizarre "Atomic Bowl" Football Game Near Ground Zero in Nagasaki

All-star U.S. game on January 1, 1946, in front of a school which lost 162 students to the atomic bomb just months before. From my current PBS film and book.

My latest film, “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero—and Nuclear Peril Today” aired over hundreds of PBS stations this past August and hundreds more coming next month, and now streaming for free (key links to watch now and more here). A companion book is now available, and you can read more or order here. And subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE.

This continues the story from previous posts on the first weeks of the U.S. occupation of atomic bomb-ravaged Nagasaki in the autumn of 1945 and plans for a U.S. military all-star game near ground zero in Nagasaki on January 1, 1946. It is adapted from the companion book to my current PBS film “The Atomic Bowl.”

The game was set for January first, to coincide with the football bowl games back home. And New Year’s Day had long been the one of the most popular annual holidays in Japan. The gridiron near ground zero, where 162 students had perished, among others, was now known as “Athletic Field #2.” Goal posts and bleachers were made out of scraps of wood found nearby.

Lt. William Watt, communications chief for the port of Nagasaki, would describe it this way: “Atomic Athletic Field No. 2 is a horseshoe, open at one end yawning across the naked plain where the A-bomb hit. It’s 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.”

The Marines posted notices at barracks around Nagasaki. A top officer wrote a press release promising that the game, which he dubbed “the first annual Atom Bowl classic,” would have “all the color—and more” of the bowl games to be played that day back in the States, including a Marine band and Japanese girl cheerleaders. He advised, “Follow the signs to the parking lot and the bleachers.”

Angelo Bertelli, the Notre Dame quarterback who had recently won the Heisman Award, and star Chicago Bears running back Bullet Bill Osmanski staged at least one practice. It was decided that this would be a game of two-handed touch football, with no tackling--after glass shards and other reminders of what happened here on August 9 were discovered on the field. “We practiced together, and in picking the teams it was just a case of you take this one, and I’ll take that one,” Bertelli later revealed. “It was a lot of fun, though.”

A souvenir program was prepared. Paul Donat helped recruit two referees, a public address crew and announcers--including Hank Weaver. With the U.S. Army and Marine Crops still largely segregated, not a single African-American player was included on the rosters.

In the days before the game, Gerald Sanders organized another morale-booster: a Christmas event featuring a Japanese children’s choir. American veterans of the Pacific carnage were skeptical, Sanders later said, but in the end “sat there and they cried and they just really found that all Japanese weren’t bad that night….People felt good and walked out, talking, arms around each other.”

Survivors of the atomic blast, meanwhile, congregated in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral for a Christmas service, where they sang “Silent Night.”

In his office over at the harbor, William Watt learned about the game around noon and rushed to the site in a jeep on this chilly New Year’s Day. He was happy to to see his new friend, Shunichi Morii, covering the game for a local English language newspaper. Morii was a pleasant fellow, partly disguising the fact he had lost his two children to the atomic bomb—they had been blown across a room and crushed, five miles from the explosion.

Watt soon heard a military band playing the pep song “On Wisconsin!” He would describe the game in a letter to his wife later that day: “I really celebrated New Year’s. I was one of the 1500 enthusiastic customers at the ATOM BOWL GAME. In the long history of football classics, there has been nothing to quite compare with it….

The crowd was composed mostly of noisy marines—including the two-star general himself. Also a handful of sailors and Naval Officers. There were only two wooden bleachers, so we followed the play up and down the sidelines. 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. Off in the distance on the fringes of the hills were little groups of Japanese regarding the strange Western spectacle in quiet isolation.

The only locals who seemed in their element were three or four agile newspapermen. They were leaping up and down the field snapping everything with their camera: the band, the players, the spectators,and the little Japanese water boys (or ‘sake boys’ as they were announced over the P.A. system).

Among them I spotted my acquaintance Morii—the Nagasaki correspondent for the Osaka Press Mainichi . Morii was replete with patent leather shoes and alcohol bewilderment. He had grown tired of snapping pictures—he seemed thoroughly unimpressed by the game—so he started taking pictures of us. His account of the game should be an event in sports-writing history.

There was no organized cheering. I guess it was because, in spite of everything, it didn’t feel like home—and because everyone was wondering what the Hell he was doing there watching a touch football game in this bizarre Inferno….and secretly hoping the first Atom Bowl Game would also be the last.

P.S. The Tigers won 14-13 on a run by Bill Osmanski in the last two minutes of play. The Bears scored on two passes by Angelo Bertelli.

Watt enclosed with the letter--for his children--haunting reminders of what had happened at that site back in August: the name tags of two former students at the middle school.

U.S. wire services and newspapers widely covered the game along with other college bowl games. But the report by William Watt’s friend Morii for his newspaper in Osaka, which was still subject to the U.S. censorship office in Tokyo--was extremely bland, with no description of the site near Ground Zero, and without any of his photos--all of that perhaps judged by the Americans as far too “sensitive” for Japanese readers.

Morii would later give William Watt some of his unpublished photos from the game, which accompany this post.