Book Review: The Mosquito Bowl by Buzz Bissinger

Buzz Bissinger’s The Mosquito Bowl covers a forgotten part of WWII – when two teams of college football all-stars within two Marine regiments fought to a 0-0 tie on Christmas Eve 1944 on a coral-filled, dusty field on Guadalcanal.

And when more than a quarter of them died a few months later in the invasion of Okinawa.

To write this book, Bissinger needed to do a couple of things. The first was what we would expect from him – profiles of college football players from the 30s and 40s. The profiled players came from places like Brown, Illinois, and Notre Dame, although after the war started many of them were able to play for Marine training grounds like Great Lakes Marine Unit or Purdue (which had a team featuring mostly Illinois players who transferred over). Some were capable players on mediocre teams, many were excellent players on outstanding teams, a few were invited to play professional football (which had the popularity of roller derby at the time). And all of those profiled chose to join the Marines, the force promoting itself as the toughest of the tough, with guaranteed action on the front lines.

It’s here that Bissinger really stretches from what he typically does and talks about combat. Starting with the fact that by the start of WWII, with the fact that ships and planes could now carry the Army to combat sites, there was growing momentum to eliminate the Marine Corps. To fight this momentum, the Corps leaders decided to become the go-to force for amphibious combat. Their “test” mission was the battle of Tawara…which was a miserable failure (overwhelming forces won the day for the Marines, but there were way too many lives lost). The Marines improved on their amphibious strategies from battle to battle, but the Japanese countered much more effectively, which would have dire circumstances in Okinawa.

The profiled players bounced from station to station, some seeing a little bit of combat, most playing the waiting game, until coming together on captured Guadalcanal to train for the invasion of Okinawa. Rivalries formed between the former college players on the 4th Regiment and the 29th Regiment, and, knowing the morale-boost that a game would have for the troops, it was decided that the all-stars from each regiment would play each other on Christmas Day. This game, named the Mosquito Bowl, was broadcast on the local Marine radio station (the Mosquito Network), and even a few ships at sea, which were supposed to maintain radio silence tuned in for snippets of the broadcast.

A few months later, the invasion finally started. It’s here that Bissinger, normally a sports writer, really shines. After an hours-long barrage of heavy weaponry from the Navy ships, the Marines landed and established a beachhead with little resistance. They secured the airfield with little resistance either. They started to think that the Japanese had abandoned the island in order to secure the mainland. What they failed to see was that they were falling into a trap.

As Bissinger reports, the Japanese knew there was no way they would be able to win the Battle of Okinawa outright, so that was not the objective for the troops. Instead, the Japanese chose to draw out the battle for as long as possible and prioritize American casualties as much as possible, all to give them a taste of what they could expect if they invaded the mainland.

So the Japanese had built fortified bunkers mostly underground in order to resist the Naval barrage. And they had built a series of underground tunnels so they could move from place to place without attracting attention. And just when the Americans thought the fighting on Okinawa was done, they found themselves surrounded by the best fighters in the Japanese Army.

The fighting on Okinawa was intense, and like nothing the Americans had encountered before (although eerily similar to what they would find in Vietnam). A battle that was thought to be over in days instead dragged on for months, with the Marines having no idea if the end was in site because they had no idea what troops they were fighting. Bissinger does a great job here of taking you through not only the action, but the impact of those actions, described with graphic detail. As expected, with an overwhelming amount of troops on hand, the Americans eventually won, but the Japanese achieved their objective as well, although the consequences were dubious: the intensity of the fighting in Okinawa was a major reason Truman decided to end the war with atomic bombs.

With a book like this, the key will be how wrapped up the reader is in the college football players profiled. While not profiling every Mosquito Bowl player (there were 52 of them in total), the 10 or so of them that were profiled seemed like a lot to keep track of, and many of their backstories seemed to run together. But during the battle, whenever a player’s story was followed, I really hoped against hope that this would be a player that would make it home, see his parents, start a family. Not to give it away, but there’s really only one direction the profiled players’ lives could have gone in a book trying to capture the spirit of Okinawa.

This was a very good read that I wholeheartedly recommend. Eight out of ten hot dogs.