Sports Poets Society

https://gregmitchell.substack.com/p/the-atomic-bowl-football-on-a-killing Greg Mitchell Jan 01, 2024 Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “ Hiroshima in America ,” “ Atomic Cover-up ” (on sale now for $1.99 as an ebook) and the recent award-winning “ The Beginning or the End : How Hollywood—and America—Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” He has directed three documentary films since 2021 for PBS (including “ Atomic Cover-up” ) . He has written about the atomic bombings for over forty years.  The famed biologist Jacob Bronowski revealed in 1964 that his classic study Science and Human Values was born at the moment he arrived in Nagasaki in November 1945, three months after the atomic bombing (which killed at least 75,000 civilians ) with a British military mission sent to study the effects of the new weapon. Arriving by jeep after dark, he found a landscape as desolate as the craters of the moon. That moment, he wrote, “is present to me as I write, as ...

Feature photo courtesy of the National Archives. https://lithub.com/the-poet-who-watched-a-football-game-on-nagasakis-atomic-killing-field/ Greg Mitchell on William W. Watt’s Experience in the Aftermath of Nuclear Devastation “Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.”    – Don DeLillo, End Zone Via PBS Greg Mitchell  - August 8, 2025 One of the most disturbing sporting events in history took place on January 1, 1946, when the US military staged an all-star football game on a field in Nagasaki, Japan—less than five months after an atomic bomb killed over 70,000 in that city , nearly all of them civilians . The game, dubbed “The Atomic Bowl,” was played on the same day that college football bowl games were being played in the US. Today, nearly 80 years to the day after the bombings, the first vivid letters about the game and its aftermath, along with several previously unpublished images, have emerged from an unexpected source: William W. Watt , a revered English li...

Mother Jones illustration; National Archives https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/nuclear-football-in-nagasaki/ The Atomic Bowl was a football game that was played in the ruins of Nagasaki on January 1, 1946. Politics August 4, 2025 Greg Mitchell Bio Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. On New Year’s Day, 1946, one of the most surreal and disturbing sporting events in US history was held in the Japanese city of Nagasaki, less than five months after an atomic bomb on August 9 destroyed half the city and killed at least 75,000 people. The all-star football game, staged by the occupying forces of the US military, received wide coverage in the American media at the time and was dubbed the Atomic Bowl. Then it became largely forgotten, almost lost to history. As we approach the 80th anniversary of this attack, this game remains an appropriate metaphor for the Nagasaki bomb, the second nuclear weapon dropped on a large Japanese city by the United ...