The Mosquito Bowl by Buzz Bissinger
This book is about the Battle of Okinawa which took place between April and June of 1945. It was the last military confrontation of WWII and was probably the toughest fight of the Pacific Campaign. Okinawa was close to the mainland and was Japan’s last chance to forestall defeat. The book opens with the author telling us that his father, Harry, was a Marine at Okinawa. Mr. Bissinger never talked much about the fight. The author writes that “He was a hero because he was in the war. He was not a war hero.”
The 6th Marine Division was the tip of the spear that would invade Okinawa in the spring of 1945. In late 1944, the troops trained at Guadalcanal, the site of another epic Pacific battle, but after a few months of practicing things, the men got bored. The 6th Marine Division was a microcosm of the USA in the early 1940s, with men from every part of the country. Of course, anyone who wasn’t Caucasian wasn’t part of the division, but that’s how it was back then.
Marines thought that they were the elite of America’s fighting forces and that was probably right. They hated waiting around to get into action, and a lot of fights broke out at Guadalcanal because the soldiers needed something to do. When they weren't fighting, they talked about football. The Marine Corps attracted star college football athletes from elite colleges. These young men were smart, in great physical shape, and supremely confident of their ability to do anything.
Between fights, some former college football players came up with the idea of having a football game between the 29th Regiment and the 4th Regiment of the 6th Marine Division. Buzz Bissinger, who wrote the iconic Friday Night Lights about Texas high school football, writes that if you combined the players from the two regiments you'd have a team that could beat a lot of professional American NFL teams. The game would be played on Christmas Eve, 1944, and would be called the Mosquito Bowl.
Sixty-five players competed for the two teams. Despite lots of rules having been agreed to, the game soon devolved into a bar fight without the military police getting involved. The game became a symbol for what freedom meant to the Marines who were about to mount the invasion of Okinawa. That battle would cost 50,000 casualties, with another 20,000 men being taken off the battlefield for combat fatigue, which today we would call PTSD. Over half of the 65 players in the Mosquito Bowl were killed or injured in the battle, with 15 dead. The catastrophic human losses at Okinawa convinced President Harry Truman to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, which shortened the war.
The book follows the paths of several men as they moved from college or civilian life to the Marine Corps. The June 1940 graduation at Brown University in Providence, RI, was a gala affair, with Louis Armstrong the headliner at the promenade dance. John McLaughry was a Big Man on Campus, to use a dated term. He was president of his fraternity, captain of the football team, and a record-holding hammer thrower who almost made the 1940 US Olympic squad. That he was one of the last cuts was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that the war put a stop to the 1940 Olympic games. J
ohn McLaughry came from a wealthy family that traced its roots to the Revolutionary War. He went to posh schools including Phillips Exeter Academy where he excelled at everything. John was handsome and was six feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. He was a solid guy in so many ways. McLaughry’s father, Tuss, was a very successful football coach at Brown, a major football power of the times.
Tuss and his son, John, came to Brown when the once-great team was struggling in the mid-1930s. They turned the team around and it had become a national football powerhouse by 1940. After college, John signed a contract to play for the professional New York Giants. In late 1941, just after Pearl Harbor, he changed his mind and joined the US Army Air Corps.
In December of 1942, David Schreiner was a twenty-year old All American football player at the University of Wisconsin. He was very serious, with a twenty-item to-do list that started with "More thoughtful of God” and ended with “Date nice girls.” Unlike McLaughry, Schreiner’s family wasn’t born rich but they became very successful in their adopted land. The Schreiners were German immigrants who worked hard and started what we would call a department store in rural Wisconsin. It thrived and expanded to the point where David’s father was elected mayor of Lancaster, the town where they lived.
Tony Butkovich was the son of Croatian immigrants who settled in rural Illinois where coal mining was the job of choice. He was a great high school football player who received a scholarship to the University of Illinois where he wasn’t a great football player. His family had come to this country in 1904 to escape an unstable political situation and to find a better life. In the racist/ethnocentric-judging days of yore, Croatians weren’t considered valued immigrants so they tended to settle where other ethnics chose not to go, Fulton County IL, coal country. Anyone could be a coal miner. It was a dirty, disgusting, dangerous job but it paid pretty well.
Two of the three men described above were from immigrant families, as were the overwhelming majority of soldiers who fought in WWII and the Marines who fought and died at Okinawa. Author Bissinger spends some time describing America’s relationship with immigrants, to wit: “The United States was a country of immigrants who hated each new wave of immigrants. Southern Italians were filthy dagos. Croats and those from other eastern European countries were dumb hunkies. Jews were kikes and believed to have a heightened capacity for insanity.”
Bissinger observes that the 1924 federal legislation that virtually cut off immigration to Asians was a factor in Japan’s deciding to go to war with the US. The first world war, which really didn’t need the US to join, convinced a lot of Americans that Europeans were sketchy and best to be avoided. Despite being Croatian and probably despised by most of his countrymen, Tony Butkovich’s father, Blaz, played by the rules and became an American citizen as he worked in the mines to support his family that had nine children. The kids thrived. They were all good athletes and smart but Tony was the star.
December 7, 1941, was a major demarcation point in history. (“Duh…” says Bob) The USA was in no shape to fight even a small war, much less a big war. In 1940 we had the 19th largest army in the world and our ships and planes were lame compared to what Germany and Japan had. The draft was instituted days after Pearl Harbor but there was a problem in drafting soldiers. Over half of the age-eligible men were either physically or mentally unqualified for military service. That’s sort of like today, when a huge percentage of people eligible for service can’t serve because of weight, health and mental issues.
McLaughry wrote to his parents and told them how much fun he was having in flight school. The guys partied every night and his unit was known for having the best partiers. In Japan, military training was a different story. Physical fighting was the glue that held training sessions together. Many men were really hurt along the way, but that made them tough. The Japanese believed themselves to be the superior race and they needed to have the best combat-ready fighting force in the history of the world. They left little room for partying. Many American states and cities had passed strict anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese legislation that kept Asians out of mainstream America. While the US had possessions all over the Pacific Ocean, our country did not accept Japan’s right to territorial hegemony. The Japanese knew that Americans saw them as inferior little yellow men, a great motivator to kick Caucasian ass.
Back in flight school in Alabama, John McLaughry had no clue how to fly a plane. He freaked out in the cockpit simulator and, for the first time in his life, flunked out of something that he wanted. While he could have been a bombardier or a navigator, he wanted nothing to do with flying. He joined the Marines in December of 1942.
In the fall of 1942, David Schreiner was having trouble in pre-med at Wisconsin. The science was a bit overwhelming, so he changed his major to economics, which, unlike pre-med, was not draft-deferrable. He notified his draft board of his major change and played football as he waited to be called up. He had a great season, the best ever for his team.
George Murphy was captain of the 1942 Notre Dame football team. He lived in South Bend, IN, home to ND. The school had been a perennial football powerhouse but had stumbled a bit. Frank Leary took over as coach in 1941. He revamped the team just as the university was broadening its horizons by developing a graduate school and trying to stay Catholic without being too Catholic. Traditionally students had been browbeaten into frequent confession and daily Mass attendance. A campus poll in the 1940s showed that the overwhelming majority of students didn’t go to confession because of shame, fear of being yelled at, and cowardice. The rigid sectarian mandates did not sit well with students in the pre-war years, so the school grudgingly changed and became more of an academic institution. The football team also got better. George Murphy was a key to the Irish’s football comeback.
Both David Schreiner and George Murphy excelled at football in the fall of 1942 and enlisted in the Marines in early 1943. David’s mother, Anne, wrote a weekly newsletter about what was going on in his hometown, Lancaster, Wisconsin. The publication was sent to the hometown boys who were in the service. It brought them closer to their family and friends no matter where they were stationed in the world. David was having trouble in Marine boot camp. Despite being a fine athlete, he found it physically demanding, but the academic work on how to be a good officer was challenging also.
Schreiner graduated from officer training school in Quantico and was given leave to go home before he was sent off to battle. In November of 1943, his mother organized an Easter egg hunt/Thanksgiving celebration. The family loved Easter but they knew that David would not be home for Easter, 1944.
The military thought that football was good preparation for military duty so there were various programs designed to train young football players to be officers while letting them play the game in college. Several campuses were sites of this V-12 program, including the University of Illinois, Tony Butkovich’s school. One offshoot of this was that a few schools had a lot of great football players, at least until they finished officer training. Those schools were very successful at becoming national powerhouses. The biggest beneficiary of this type of program was West Point. Between 1944 and 1946, Army football had a record of 27-0-1. One guy played for eight years. Playing football beat getting shot at.
John McLaughry found Marine officer training tough but he thrived. There were constant physical challenges. The did long winter maneuvers in snowy mountains, which was strange since the men would be fighting in the South Pacific. He finished the program and was looking forward to going overseas. Instead, he was assigned to a North Carolina post where Black Marines were trained to be essentially servants. There was rampant racism in the US military, with the Marines probably being the worst at diversity, equity, and inclusion. When US troops were working in Europe, the locals were aghast at how racist our troops were. That’s saying a lot since in the 1940s Europe and England were not big on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Late in the war, when our military was desperate for fresh troops, Blacks were integrated into regular fighting forces. Based on extensive polling, white troops praised their Black colleagues as being loyal and effective fighters.
McLaughry finally got his wish to get into actual combat. In September of 1943, he was assigned to the 2nd Marine Raider battalion, where the action was. The leader of the unit, Lt. Alan Shipley, had been a Naval Academy football legend so football players comprised most of the unit.
The US military had developed a plan to defeat the Japanese by landing Marines on every island that Japan held. This was a new approach to war that had never succeeded before. The first time a major assault was launched was Tarawa in late 1943. It was a disaster. The brass in Washington, DC, drew up the battle plans and insisted that nothing be changed. Once the Navy ships and the Marines got to Tarawa, they realized that the tides would make it very difficult to bring the transports close enough to the beach for the troops to land quickly and attack the entrenched Japanese.
The battle began when the ships shot 3,000 artillery shells to drive the Japanese out of their secure emplacements. That sounded good in theory but it didn’t work. The Americans didn't know exactly where the Japanese were hunkered down so all the shelling did was blow up a lot of coconut trees.
The assault began when hundreds of Higgins boats carried Marines to the shore. The boats needed 4 feet of water clearance to float. Due to having incorrect tidal charts, many only had three feet. That meant that the troops had to wade in the water for hundreds of yards to begin fighting. Many were killed in the water as the Japanese mowed them down. Almost 1,000 men died in the first wave.
As it turned out, some military planners had pushed to use a different boat for the landing - the Alligator - which could navigate shallower water. After horrendous losses at Tarawa, the Alligator became the workhorse in shallow sea landings.
The United States won the battle at a huge cost. The after-action report found dozens of screw-ups in the planning and execution of the battle. The higher-ups got almost nothing right. They didn’t have accurate tidal charts. The shelling wasn’t targeted where it needed to be. There was no coordination of the air attacks. The landing schedule was too tight so that hundreds of boats got in each other’s way and had to stop. The medical facilities were woefully inadequate. The good news was that there was a total overhaul of the planning for the Pacific campaign, so subsequent landings went much better.
The next campaign was Bougainville in early 1944 where John McLaughry was leading his platoon in a three-day reconnaissance of the island to figure out where Japanese troops were lurking. The battle had gone well but it took time to mop up and neutralize the enemy, so McLaughry’s unit went to work. They got lost several times along the way. They also were attacked by mosquitoes and other critters that caused painful, pus-filled blisters. It was 90 degrees out during the day with 100% humidity. They came across one Japanese patrol but managed to avoid confrontation. They returned to their home base where John got to briefly meet with his brother, Bob, who was a Navy pilot. Soon after John McLaughry’s men returned, reconnaissance patrols were eliminated. They never found much, so there was no point to them.
In November, 1943, David Butkovich finished playing football and set a Big Ten record for points scored in a season. He reported to Marine boot camp at Parris Island. Butkovich was drafted by the NFL’s Cleveland Rams, but he would have to put football on hold until after the war. He had trouble with some of the officer training material so he ended up an enlisted man which was fine with him. He was a national celebrity because of his football prowess and the military showcased him in recruitment campaigns.
McLaughry was sent to Guadalcanal to get ready for the invasion of Guam. He was joined by Dave Schreiner, another football star that had joined the Marines.
In July of 1944, the Japanese were defeated at Saipan, with many of their ships sunk. The government resigned in disgrace. There was no way Japan could win the war after that, but they would fight to the death. Had the Japanese negotiated a surrender then, 600,000 of their civilians would not have died in the firebombing of their cities. Tens of thousands of soldiers, mostly Japanese, would have been spared. But the Japanese credo would not allow surrendering. They thought of themselves as the chosen people, so they couldn’t lose.
Guam was secured in August, 1944, with 1,700 Americans and 20,000 Japanese deaths. Next, McLaughry, Schreiner and many other former collegiate football players were off to Guadalcanal to get ready for the next battle, whatever that would be. They spent a lot of time there, not doing much except drinking beer. During that deployment, the Sixth Marine Division was formed which included all of the troops on the island. By the end of 1944, a lot of soldiers became bored, which led to hijinks and fights.
The 4th and 29th Regiments were where the Marines put 65 great football players. There was a lot of talk about football which led to the idea of having an inter-regiment football game, the Mosquito Bowl, which took place on Christmas Eve, 1944. The game was supposed to be two-handed touch but it quickly became a tackle game, just like a real game back home. There was a formal program, with live music provided by the local Marine band. The game was broadcast throughout the Pacific on Armed Forces Radio. It was a big deal.
Of course, there was a lot of betting on the game. The 4th regiment didn’t have the star power of the 29th which had Butkovich and a lot of other great players. Schreiner and McLaughry were on the 4th Regiment team and expected a tough contest. The game was rough, with lots of hard blocking and tackling without pads. Fittingly, it ended up in a 0-0 tie. After the game there was a nice Christmas Eve service and the troops took it easy until New Year’s Eve when there was an open bar. It was the last New Year’s Eve for 1,622 6th Division Marines who would die on Okinawa.
As 1945 dawned, the troops got serious about their training. On March 15, the 6th Marine Division left Guadalcanal and headed to Okinawa, which would be the last battle of WWII. Okinawa was a Japanese protectorate because it was relatively close to the mainland and was important for security. The Okinawans were treated as subhuman by the Japanese, who literally enslaved many islanders and routinely raped their women.
Taking Okinawa was critical to America’s plans to end the war. With lots of harbors and airfields it was the perfect staging area to launch the invasion of the Japanese mainland.
The book gives us an insight into the letters that the men wrote home before the battle. Many of the soldiers seemed to have a sense that they were about to go through a very rough patch. All told, 200,000 Army and Marine troops would be involved in the effort to take Okinawa, the largest force ever assembled in the Pacific Ocean. Army General Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr., was in charge of the operation. He was not a star at West Point but he was commissioned. He had relatively little combat experience and he was a tad eccentric, not a great characteristic for a successful Army career. There was no supreme commander in the Pacific campaign. Service rivalry was intense, with each branch hating the other two. Marines thought that the Army was too cautious in trying to soften up targets by extensive artillery shelling, and the Army thought that Marines were foolhardy, always making risky decisions. Buckner had developed a reputation as someone who, despite being a little weird, got along with everyone, which was the key factor in putting him in charge of the Okinawa operation.
The invasion began on April Fool’s Day, 1945. What could go wrong?
The bombardment began earlier, with 45,000 shells launched. The first wave, with men carrying 60 pounds of equipment, hit the beach around 8 AM and there was very little resistance. This wasn’t a complete surprise because the Japanese had learned how to pull back and hide to confuse American attackers. American intelligence reports continued to be wrong. We thought that there were 50,000 troops defending the island. In fact, there were over 100,000 men who were very well hidden.
Early on, the Japanese commander General Ushijima, outfoxed General Buckner. Ushijima had deployed his troops along the Shuri line, a natural mountainous defense against attack. The Japanese commander was committed to a battle of attrition. He thought that by digging in and fighting to the end, he would kill so many Americans that the US would give up and broker a favorable peace treaty with Japan. Ushijima was wrong. Instead, President Harry Truman was so appalled at the loss of lives of American soldiers at Okinawa that he authorized the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan which ended the war.
The Americans fought hard and used everything they had to win. This included napalm, a new jelly-like flammable that wreaked havoc in clearing out fortified Japanese positions on the island. Napalm was nasty. It burned everything it touched and was used extensively in Vietnam twenty-five years later. Early on, things went well and the Americans advanced. That would change.
The Japanese were desperate so they turned to kamikaze suicide air attacks to beat the Americans. Over 200 kamikaze pilots crashed into American naval vessels at Okinawa, with 26 ships sinking, with the loss of 600 men. That didn’t change the course of the battle.
The Japanese were dug into the mountains and caves and waited for the Americans to find them. Early on, there were occasional skirmishes but no big battles. John McLaughry turned 28 on April 8. As he ate his lunch of canned turkey during a sweep of Mount Yaetake, he reflected that only a few years ago he had led the procession at the Brown University graduation. By then, two of the players in the Mosquito Bowl had been killed in action.
There were instances of Marine brutality and rape of the civilian population. Sometimes soldiers saw Okinawans as their enemies which most weren’t because of the horrible way the Japanese had treated the natives. Some Marines were out to shoot anyone, even non-combatants.
Over 400,000 Okinawans lived on the island. The Japanese routinely abused Okinawans and forced women to have sex. The Japanese threw civilians, even children, into action against the Marines. Between battle casualties and suicides, over 100,000 local residents died in the battle.
On April 18th Tony Butkovich was digging a foxhole near Mt. Yaetake. He had washed out of officer candidate school but he was happy to be in the Marine Corps. While he was taking a break, he was killed by a sniper. Word of his death didn’t reach his home for two weeks. He received a lot of press attention since he had been a celebrity college football player. He was the third person who played in the Mosquito Bowl to die on the island.
The Marines gradually took parts of the island. The plan was for Army troops to come in and take over the fighting for a while, but logistics got in the way and the Army was slow to arrive so the Marines kept going.
Their next target was Sugar Loaf, more of a hill than a mountain, but home to many dug-in Japanese soldiers. The 22nd Marines led the long, slow slog of taking the territory. George Murphy had been a star college football player who played in the Mosquito Bowl. He was part of the attack units that had to dislodge the enemy from caves, tunnels, and pillboxes along what was known as the Shuri Line.
The Japanese fought ferociously, often in hand-to-hand combat. Murphy’s platoon was among several that had reached the top of Sugar Loaf, but they were soon overwhelmed by the enemy. After tossing 350 grenades, Murphy’s platoon was told to retreat, but he was killed by a mortar round as he was leading his men to safety.
The book graphically describes the fighting which was horrible. It took seven days in May to cover the 520 yards to take Sugar Loaf, an average of 74 yards a day. By the time the battle for Okinawa had wound down, 2,662 Marines from the 6th Division had lost their lives. The Japanese commanders knew that they couldn’t defeat the Americans so they planned to string out the fight to kill as many of our soldiers as possible. The higher-ups believed that the United States, seeing such carnage, would sue for peace. Instead, our government responded by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan.
By May 18, Sugar Loaf was still controlled by Marines. New troops had come to the battle and the Japanese were driven away from the Shuri Line. The tide had turned but there were still 30,000 Japanese troops left out of the 100,000 that had begun the battle.
On June 12, Okinawa commander General Buckner sent a letter to Japanese General Ushijima pointing out that while the Japanese troops had fought bravely, they were severely outnumbered and there was no path to victory. Ushijima wrote back, assuring Buckner that his men would fight to the death.
A few days later, General Buckner went to the front lines to observe his troops. He was killed by an artillery round, making him the highest-ranking officer in WWII to be killed by enemy fire. He was fifty-eight years old.
By mid-June the Japanese senior commanders had committed suicide and instructed their men to fight on. While on a routine patrol on June 20, David Schreiner was killed by a random sniper who was fighting on. He was the 15th player of the 65 that played in the Mosquito Bowl to die on Okinawa.
Bob’s Take
Dad. My father, Earl, was at the Battle of Okinawa 78 years ago with the 22nd Raider Battalion of the 6th Marine Division. He kept several pictures from his military service, mostly of him goofing around with his mates. He had one picture from Okinawa that we saw after my mother died in 2008. It was of my father and two young and fit Marines in front of a hill, probably Sugar Loaf, the one that was so hard to take from the Japanese. The 22nd Battalion took the lead in that fight. Based on the descriptions of carnage in the book, it must have been awful.
My father didn’t talk much about his war service and he wasn’t a big VFW guy. His father, also named Earl, was the first person from Hyde Park, MA, to enlist in the Marines for WWI. My father was the first from Hyde Park to enlist in the Marines for WWII. They were great people and patriots.
All in. One thing that comes across in this book and others about pieces of history from the Second World War is how totally committed Americans were to defeating the enemy. The book talks a lot about how ordinary men did extraordinary things to win the war in Europe and the Pacific. The soldiers obviously were on the front lines, but the support at home from their families was extraordinary, even without smartphones. One mother sent food to her son. Needless to say, it wasn’t fit to eat by the time that it reached him, but it was a nice gesture. I wonder if today’s Americans could ever come together to work for the greater good. I just don’t know.
I have a signed first edition. Since this is a mass market book with tens of thousands of copies printed, it will never be rare or valuable, but it’s nice to have the author’s indecipherable scrawl on it.
Dropping the atom bomb. I have never had any doubts that we should have dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the first bomb was dropped, my father was on a ship heading to Japan for the invasion. Casualties were supposed to be around 80%. He said that as soon as there was news of the blast, the ship stopped. Three days later, after Nagasaki was bombed and Japan agreed to surrender, the ship turned around and began to head home. Had my father landed in Japan, there’s a good chance that he would have been killed and Bob would not be in the Basement in Boston or anywhere else. The other reason for using the atom bomb to end the war was that the Japanese were fanatical about never surrendering. Almost all of the 100,000 soldiers who fought for Japan on Okinawa ended up dead, killed in action or in suicidal banzai charges. Once President Truman saw what was going on in Okinawa, it was much easier for him to decide to drop the two atomic bombs.
