A unique football game was played between the 4th and 29th Marine Regiments stationed on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal on Christmas Eve 1944.
The ranks of these regiments were filled by one of the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled. They were mostly college football players who enlisted in the Marines after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, including former all-Americans, captains from Brown, Notre Dame and Wisconsin, and nearly 20 players who would later play in the NFL.
In his book “The Mosquito Bowl,” Buzz Bissinger explains that “It was over a few beers that former collegiate football players in the 29th Regiment of the 6th Marine Division stood toe-to-toe with former collegiate football players of the 4th Regiment and made the emphatic claim that the 29th would kick the 4th’s ass if there was ever a football game between the two, which of course was preposterous in a place like Guadalcanal with a war going on.”
Sixty-five Marines from the two regiments wore cut-off dungarees and shorts while they played on a field that was carved out of the 29th Regiment parade grounds, dirt and pebbles and shards of coral. The 4th wore green T-shirts, the 29th white T-shirts. All the players wore Marine field shoes, since no football cleats were available.
At least 1,500 Marine spectators ringed the field. A lot of money or cigarettes were bet on the game’s outcome. The game was broadcast all over the Pacific and the score was flashed to American ships at sea.
Although it was supposed to be a game of two-handed touch football — commanders wanted to prevent injuries that would exempt anyone from future combat — “The game quickly devolved into semi-tackle, and some said it was tackle. It was a street fight without the military police trying to club the bejesus out of you and throw you into the brig on a diet of piss and punk. A footnote to the Pacific war — until it was forgotten like most everything is forgotten,” Bissinger explained.
During the months following the game, 15 of the 65 Mosquito Bowl players would be killed at the Battle of Okinawa, one of World War II’s bloodiest conflicts. Whatever their war experiences prior to and after the Mosquito Bowl game, “For roughly two hours the Mosquito Bowl wasn’t simply a reminder of what life had once been like for the players, but freedom and abandon, with the spectators captured in the same moment, screaming their heads off, whether drunk or sober. The beauty of sports, the ultimate power of it to carry you away, had never been stronger. Many of those who played in the Mosquito Bowl had been molded into officers during stateside training, told over and over to tear up every shred of their former lives. They were no longer college boys but men in their early and mid-twenties there to lead eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds of lesser ranks into battle and never let any decision be influenced by how many would die or be irreparably wounded physically and mentally,” Bissinger wrote.
There was a Christmas Eve service after the Mosquito Bowl, followed by a Christmas feast on Christmas day, followed by a return to combat training operations until New Year’s Eve, at which time the officers’ club bar would be open until 2 a.m., while the enlisted men would be issued beer and stateside whiskey. It would be the last New Year’s Eve that 1,622 members of the 6th Division and corpsmen would ever have the opportunity to celebrate.
Only one of the book’s 41 chapters is about the Mosquito Bowl game itself. Bissinger’s book is primarily a World War II drama as experienced by the game’s players before and after the game, ranging from inspiring stories of heroism to unforgettable accounts of combat. By the time you have finished reading “The Mosquito Bowl,” you will have gotten to really know all about the players at the Christmas Eve football game, how they lived and died before the end of the war, and how those who survived lived their lives after coming home.
One of the Mosquito Bowl players who survived the Okinawa campaign was John McLaughry.
Wrote Bissinger: “Of all the Marines who would play in the Mosquito Bowl on Guadalcanal before shipping out to Okinawa, no one had lived a more rarefied life. The McLaughry family in America went back to the Revolutionary War, when Richard McLaughry, who had emigrated to New York from Ireland, had served as a private soldier in the New York militia.”
Prior to college, McLaughry attended the finest high school in Providence, where he had been football captain. He served in the Army Air Corps for eight months prior to Dec. 2, 1942, when he boarded a train headed for Marine Corps Base Quantico in northern Virginia as an officer candidate. McLaughry was lucky to have survived Okinawa. And, as the author notes, he was brave enough despite grenade fragments in his leg and jaw to place a tourniquet around a platoon sergeant’s knee until help arrived. On Oct. 17, 1945, McLaughry sent his wife and his parents a telegram from San Francisco letting them know he would soon arrive home.
Among his other accomplishments, McLaughry went into college football coaching. He also wrote an 80-page account of a patrol he participated in at Bougaineville. Bissinger explains that McLaughry “expressed himself with clarity and meticulous detail in all his writings. He hated any kind of embellishments. To exaggerate the horror of war was to trivialize the men left behind.”
When you read about the Mosquito Bowl players who were killed in combat, and their legacy, you are likely to mourn their deaths all the more because you will have gotten to really know them by reading Bissinger’s haunting, beautifully written and insightful book.
Having read “the Mosquito Bowl,” I have now added two other Bissinger books, “3 Nights in August” and “Friday Night Lights,” to my lengthy “books to read” list.
This post was originally published on here
