<em>The Atomic Bowl</em> Is an Urgent Reminder of the Terrors of Nuclear War

Journalist and filmmaker Greg Mitchell has been chronicling the history of the atomic bombing of Japan for years now. A lot of his work of necessity has been exposing the dreadful consequences of what the United States did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. His previous film, Atomic Cover-Up, which described how the U.S. government buried valuable filmed evidence of the immediate aftermath of the bombings, won a passel of awards.

(He also is a first-rate reporter and writer. His book Campaign of the Century, about Upton Sinclair’s doomed campaign for governor of California and the virulent attack on it by the state’s economic and social elite, is the urtext of the birth of modern American ratfcking.)

On Saturday, PBS will air his latest film, The Atomic Bowl. It is the story of a game of American football played on New Year’s Day in 1946 at or near ground zero in Nagasaki. This sounds absurd even today. Nevertheless, American gridiron stars who were serving in the Marines were dragooned into playing. It was something of a legend in my house because one of the players was Chicago Bears back “Bullet” Bill Osmanski, who had been central to Chicago’s monumental 73–0 pasting of the Washington Redskins in the 1940 NFL championship game. But Osmanski also had been an All-American at Holy Cross, which endeared him to my entire extended family. The two teams had to play two-hand touch since there still were too many glass shards littering the field from the bombing.

Osmanski captained the Isahaya Tigers in the game against the Nagasaki Bears led by former Notre Dame All-American Angelo Bertelli. The game was supposed to end in a tie, but Osmanski kicked a late extra point to give his team the win. This outraged Bertelli. Ha-ha. Suck it, Domer.

But Mitchell’s film uses the football game as a jumping-off point to examine the bombing of Nagasaki, the so-called “forgotten bombing,” a phenomenon popularly attributed to its being obscured by the destruction of Hiroshima. However, Mitchell’s film points out that Nagasaki’s annihilation was deliberately obscured by the United States government, probably because in the long view of history, it fits the definition of an unspeakable war crime. And it also is a warning aimed at all of us about the ongoing threat posed by nuclear weapons, especially in an age in which it seems like every free government is in danger of toppling into authoritarianism. And Greg is a master storyteller. Blog says check it out.