Buzz Bissinger’s latest effort is intense. Very intense.
At first glance, The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II (Harper; hardback; $32.50; 463 pages) appears to be about college football players blowing off steam while waiting for more action as soldiers in the Pacific Theater.
Then you open the book and start reading.
Only 10 pages actually deal with the game, which was played on Dec. 24, 1944, and ended in a scoreless tie.
Sixty five men played in that Christmas Eve contest, with Marines from the 6th Division’s 4th and 26th regiments squaring off in front of approximately 1,500 soldiers at Pritchard Field’s parade ground in Guadalcanal. Fifty-six of them had played college football and several others played in high school. Sixteen players on the roster had been drafted by NFL teams, five had been team captains and three were All-Americans.
“The remaining handful just wanted in on the mayhem,” Bissinger writes.
The real mayhem would come soon enough. Horrifyingly so. Disturbingly so.
Every richly detailed chapter in The Mosquito Bowl was nevertheless stark in its description of life and death during World War II. It reminded me of the comments uttered by Col. Walter Kurtz, the off-the-rails officer played by Marlon Brando in the 1979 film, “Apocalypse Now.”
“The horror. The horror,” Kurtz said just before he was killed by Capt. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen).
The horror was real in The Mosquito Bowl. And the participants were not actors, but established football stars transformed into soldiers. Failure was never an option in their minds, and if victory could be attained through their deaths, then so be it.
Bissinger, 68, has riveted readers before. There was 1990’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, about the Permian High School Panthers and the culture in Odessa, Texas. The book would inspire a film and television series of the same name. In 2005, 3 Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and the Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager, focused on a three-game series two years earlier between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, and specifically through the eyes of Cardinals manager (and Tampa native) Tony La Russa.
As a journalist, Bissinger won a Pulitzer Prize while writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He won the prize in investigative reporting for writing about corruption in Philadelphia's court system.
Bissinger explores the fates of several of the game’s key players. These men had offers to play in the NFL, although some of their coaches cautioned them about the pro league’s unsavory reputation at the time. Some men were torn between marrying their girlfriends and starting families, or waiting to see how the war played out.
These were not easy decisions. But, as Bissinger points out, these men were willing to sacrifice their futures. Their heroism and devotion to the American cause in World War II magnifies what the U.S. calls its greatest generation.
The Marines stationed in Guadalcanal waiting for the anticipated invasion of Okinawa were not a patient bunch.
“The wait,” Bissinger writes. “The interminable wait.
“Marines did not like to wait; it was better to know you were going to die than play it over and over in your head. … Semper Fi, Semper Die.”
Here are some of the heroes that Bissinger writes about. All had compelling stories, and Bissinger provides detailed family histories and gives the reader a sense about what made each player special.
- John McLaughry was a football captain who starred at Brown University on the gridiron and in the boxing ring. He was also an artist, where the “lighter side of his personality” was revealed in his drawings and caricatures, “a side of whimsy and cleverness and affection that was not in his personal demeanor.” A drawing McLaughry made of the jungle on the island of Bougainville in 1944 graces the book’s endpapers.
- David Schreiner was an All-American end at the University of Wisconsin. Schreiner’s family in Lancaster was well-to-do, but that did not stop him from clearing tables at breakfast and dinner at the women’s common area at the university to make extra money. His prowess on the field won accolades, but Schreiner confessed to his mother that he “wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible.”
- Tony Butkovich, an All-American at Purdie University, had six brothers and was the son of a Croatian coal miner in Illinois. Nicknamed “Blondie” because of his hair color, Butkovich sent photos to his parents of a parrot perched on his shoulder at Guadalcanal. “Innately big-hearted, a kid in many ways,” Butkovich played with blood and dirt on his face, Bissinger writes.
- George Murphy was team captain for the University of Notre Dame and was the son of a clerk in South Bend, Indiana. He took on more responsibilities with the Fighting Irish when second-year coach Frank Leahy was hospitalized with spinal arthritis. After one victory, Murphy presented Leahy with a football autographed by team members.
- Robert Bauman, who played tackle and punted at Wisconsin, worked in onion fields south of Chicago. He and his brother would take home bruised onions so they could have onion sandwiches, using a stick of Wrigley’s chewing gum afterward to hide the odor. Bauman, Bissinger writes, had “a twinkle in his eye to suggest a little mischief,” who enjoyed beer and cigarettes. He was also obsessed with getting a tan no matter what the weather conditions happened to be.
One was about a reconnaissance patrol led by McLaughry on the island of Bougainville in the Solomons chain. Bissinger writes an hour-by-hour, “you are there” account, including McLaughry discovering that an irritating itch he got after sleeping on his poncho was caused by draping the garment over an anthill.
Schreiner agonized over whether to marry his girlfriend, Odette Hendrickson, before going overseas. That was a common cause for anxiety among young couples during World War II, and Schreiner decided to wait until his fighting days were over.
“Sometimes I think it’s unfair to have her wait for me,” Schreiner wrote to his parents. “After all there’s a chance I won’t come back and then where’ll she be? … We should have gotten married before I left and had one in the oven.
“If she’ll wait for me I’ll be plenty happy but I can’t blame her if she doesn’t.”
Another story revolves around a girl on Okinawa, probably no older than 7 years old.
Sgt. Raymond Gillespie was near Mount Yaetake when a platoon sergeant took aim and wounded the child. Gillespie reported the incident to a lieutenant, who told him to shut up or face a court martial.
“I’m not here to kill children,” Gillespie retorted.
Gillespie took the child to a main road and flagged down a jeep, which took the girl to a regimental hospital. When he returned to the platoon, Gillespie said the lieutenant never mentioned the incident.
“Which, in the way of the military, meant that it never happened,” Bissinger writes.
Butkovich had a pen pal during the war — Tom Milligan, a 9-year-old boy from the eastern Indiana city of Richmond. The two swapped letters while Butkovich was in boot camp and even when he went overseas.
While stationed in Guadalcanal, Butkovich met a naval coxswain who has headed home to Richmond. Butkovich asked if the man knew the Milligan family, and when he answered in the affirmative, the football star dashed off a few sentences to be hand-delivered to the child, 7,956 miles away, Bissinger writes.
Milligan sent a letter to Butkovich in early 1945, but it came back to him on May 24, stamped “return to sender.” You can guess why.
The first player to die in action at Okinawa was John Henry “Red” Anderson, on April 1. He was 22.
I am not going to reveal the other players who died at Okinawa — you can read about it — only because each incident has a dramatic story behind them.
After McLaughry learned of the death of his patrol commander, Lt. Col. Joseph McCaffery, he penned a poignant letter to his parents, Bissinger writes.
“Up ’til now, the war has just been something I read of, heard of, and talked about, back in a nice safe base,” McLaughry wrote. “It all seemed very objective, but now it is just really beginning to come home to me just what it all means.”
McLaughry would coach at several colleges, including an unsuccessful stint at Brown, his alma mater.
Like many war veterans, he returned “different, quieter, more inward,” Bissinger writes. McLaughry’s mother saw it in both of her sons, who served during World War II, “empty shells with empty eyes.”
Still, McLaughry lived a long life, dying in November 2007 at the age of 90. After returning from the Pacific Theater, he discovered that his mother kept almost all of his letters. He wrote an 80-page account of the patrol at Bougainville.
That is part of Bissinger’s exhaustive research. There is the added nugget that his father had been in the 6th Division at Guadalcanal when the Mosquito Bowl was played. Whether the elder Bissinger actually watched the game is a fact lost to posterity.
Bissinger documents his research with 111 pages of endnotes, which were culled from military records, correspondence and interviews with survivors.
“The final was 0-0 — a perfect score, really,” Bissinger writes. “No winners or losers.
“Just the two hours of life that turned into death several months later” at Okinawa.
“War is hell” is an overused cliché, but it is certainly appropriate in The Mosquito Bowl. It may not be sports book in the true sense of the word, but Bissinger writes about the hopes and dreams of young men — some of whom would never get the chance to realize them.
It is a stunning, eye-opening slice of history that should resonate every day — and especially on Veterans Day.