Christmas in Nagasaki 1945

Before football on a killing field, voices lifted in song in a cathedral.

It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.— Charles Dickens

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” “Atomic Cover-up,” and the recent award-winning “The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed four documentary films since 2021, with the first three all aired over PBS (you can still watch “Atomic Cover-up”).

As some of you may know—since I posted about it not along ago—I have just completed my new film, and it is now going out to festivals. Below you will find the trailer “The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero & The Forgotten Bomb.” This is my fourth documentary in the past four years and the previous three all made it to PBS (Oppenheimer is in this one). It’s narrated by Peter Coyote and produced by Lyn Goldfarb. By coincidence, PBS.org after a lag has made free and easy for streaming again my award-winning “Atomic Cover-up,” so you can watch that here if wish. I’d be happy to read any comments or questions about either film.

But following the trailer below, let me focus briefly only on the “Christmas” angle in the new film.

With the Japanese surrender in September 1945, U.S. Army troops and Marines occupied the country, with tens of thousands pouring into the port city of Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb blast had killed 75,000 or more (even though it was off target), nearly all of them non-combatants, just weeks earlier. As elsewhere in occupied Europe and the Pacific, the American military staged numerous games of baseball or football, and invited soldiers and locals to attend. It was viewed by top brass as a way for bored troops to, as one put it, “blow off team” but also showcase the thrills and wonders of American sports for the native population.

Christmas card for members of Marines’ 2nd Division in Japan

As the holiday season approached, planning for sports contests intensified with worries about homesick GIs rising. So Gen. Leroy Hunt, commander of the occupying 2nd Marines Division, ordered that two teams be organized for an all-star football game on New Year’s Day, just as a dozen bowl games would be played back in the States.

So, a New Year’s Day game in Japan, no shocker. But the site of the game? In Nagasaki, of all places. And as you’ll see in the trailer: hosted on a field in front of a middle school where 162 students and thirteen teachers had perished due to our atomic bomb. A true killing field.

Well, I will leave it there for now. But here’s an amazing but true Christmas offering: During that holiday season in 1945, an elite U.S. military team, which had been shooting film in Nagasaki off and on for a few weeks, happened to be in the vicinity of the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral—the center of the largest Christian community in Asia, over which the plutonium bomb had exploded, dooming at least 10,000 Catholics to death. The director of the project, Lt. Daniel McGovern heard voices and arrived with his small crew to find survivors of the bombing singing “Silent Night,” and managed to capture it.

This, and other footage shot by McGovern and his team in the weeks before and after—the focus of “Atomic Cover-up” (which won the top film prize from the Organization of American historians this year) but only a very small part of the new film—would be hidden by the U.S. for decades.