{"id":55177,"date":"2025-09-18T09:37:36","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T17:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=55177"},"modified":"2025-09-18T09:37:36","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T17:37:36","slug":"my-atomic-bowl-in-the-new-yorker-this-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/18\/my-atomic-bowl-in-the-new-yorker-this-week\/","title":{"rendered":"My ‘Atomic Bowl’ in The New Yorker<\/I> This Week"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell\u2019s newsletter Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb<\/a>.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

My latest film, \u201cThe Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero \u2013 and Nuclear Peril Today\u201d has been airing over PBS stations this past month and streaming for free (key links to watch now and more here<\/a>). A companion book is now available, and you can read more or order here<\/a>. Thank you. And subscribing to this newsletter is still somehow FREE.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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Football in Nagasaki\u2026.on a killing field\u2026.<\/strong>Kind of a thrill to see this, as I have been a fan of The New Yorker<\/em> for over half a century. In this week\u2019s issue, and online today, I am the subject of one of their pieces in the venerable Talk of the Town section, with the focus on my new \u201cAtomic Bowl\u201d PBS film (see links above to watch or read mored), and even a Springsteen anecdote. And, of course, it appears in that magazine just a little over 79 years after the famous John Hersey \u201cHiroshima\u201d article\u2026.<\/p>\n

Here is the link to read now<\/a> (you may have to be a subscriber), and an excerpt below, an annotated version coming tomorrow. You can contact me via: epic1934@aol.com<\/p>\n

Mitchell\u2019s latest duck-and-cover project is a documentary, now airing on PBS, called \u201cThe Atomic Bowl<\/a>,\u201d which details a New Year\u2019s Day football game put on by the U.S. military in a killing field in Nagasaki, a few months after America dropped the atomic bombs. The makeshift stadium was outside the charred ruins of a middle school, where a hundred and fifty-two students and thirteen teachers had been killed; the walls had messages, from dying kids to their parents, written in blood. The military convened marching bands and appointed a Navy lieutenant, Bill Osmanski, a fullback for the Chicago Bears, to captain the Isahaya Tigers, and a Marine Corps lieutenant, Angelo Bertelli, a Heisman-winning quarterback at Notre Dame, to lead the Nagasaki Bears. A few locals attended and watched in baffled horror. The Tigers won, 14\u201313\u2026..<\/em><\/p>\n

No one talked about Hiroshima<\/a> or Nagasaki, and Mitchell has found himself drawn to stories that have been willfully forgotten. The Atomic Bowl was big news at the time, but, aside from a few accounts, including from the writings of William W. Watt, a soldier turned poet and professor, and the images of Shunichi Morii, a local newsman whose two children were killed in the blast, memory of the game disappeared. \u201cWas there a sense of shame?\u201d Mitchell said. \u201cOr was it simply the usual \u2018We don\u2019t care about Nagasaki\u2019?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Researching the film, he discovered a similar military event, also erased from memory: the Nagasaki Miss Atom Bomb beauty pageant.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Thanks for reading Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.<\/strong><\/div>\n
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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including \u201cHiroshima in America,\u201d and the recent award-winning <\/i>The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood \u2013 and America \u2013 Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb<\/a>, and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning \u201cAtomic Cover-up<\/a>\u201d). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years. He writes often at\u00a0Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell\u2019s newsletter Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb. My latest film, \u201cThe Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero \u2013 and Nuclear Peril Today\u201d has been airing over PBS stations this past month and streaming for free (key links to watch now and more here). A companion book is now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":466,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[812],"class_list":["post-55177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"0","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"Especially happy since it's the magazine that brought us John Hersey's Hiroshima<\/I> almost exactly 79 years ago."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/466"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55177"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55181,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55177\/revisions\/55181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55177"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=55177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}