[ Sound Effects ] [ Music ] [ Newsreel announcer ] New Year's Day.

Americans get ready to enjoy the traditional college football bowl games.

In the biggest contest, Southern Cal plays Alabama in the Rose Bowl.

A dozen other games draw wide attention.

But the most unique bowl game was played that day across the Pacific in Japan.

It featured U.S. Marines who were part of the hundreds of thousands of American forces occupying the country since Japan's surrender in September.

Among the stars in the game was a quarterback who had recently won the Heisman Trophy and a legendary pro football running back.

But it was the site of the game would prove disturbing.

On a makeshift gridiron near Ground Zero in Nagasaki, where tens of thousands had been killed by the atomic bomb, less than five months earlier.

Many of the players and other U.S. servicemen in Nagasaki had been exposed to lingering levels of radiation for months.

Some would later complain of cancer or other diseases that can be caused by radiation.

Why was this game played at this site and then disappeared from history for decades?

And why does the story of the atomic attack on Nagasaki provide so many warnings and lessons for today?

[Music] September 1945.

Thousands of U.S. Army troops and Marines land near the port city of Nagasaki in southern Japan as part of a military force that will occupy the area shortly after the enemy's formal surrender ended World War II.

They witness a city and countles survivors still devastated by the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki six weeks earlier.

The Americans come from all walks of life.

Doctors, teachers, factory workers, farmers.

Some are former college or professional football players.

[Music] William W. Watt, a Navy lieutenant, described his response to the ruins of Nagasaki in letters to his wife back in eastern Pennsylvania.

It looks like a brickyard in which some giant vandal has gone about smashing the bricks for the hell of it.

I feel sorry for the women and the little kids break my heart, some of them with burned faces.

The ravaging of Nagasaki had been set in motion back in May 1945.

Germany had surrendered, but work continued at Los Alamos and other U.S. sites on the atomic bomb, now aiming for use against Japan U.S. military officials urged troops in the Pacific to organize sports teams, even as they fought one bloody battle after another.

One of the Marines baseball squads featured college football Heisman trophy winner Angelo Bertelli and Brooklyn Dodgers shortstop Pee-Wee Reese.

The Marines asked the former Notre Dame quarterback to pose for a publicity photo.

Bertelli's son would recall.

A target list for potential use of the bomb was assembled, with key input from Los Alamos directors J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves.

Hiroshima tops the list.

The aiming point, its very center, not a military base or factory, guaranteeing massive civilian casualties.

Nagasaki to the south in Kyushu only gets added to the list at the last minute.

Nagasaki, if you will recall your history, was the gateway to Japan in medieval times.

Through it flowed into Japan the world civilizations, before Japan secluded herself from the outside world for nearly three centuries.

By 1945 Nagasaki had become a major site for making weapons of war, but few Japanese soldiers were stationed there.

Christianity had come to Japan near Nagasaki in the 16th century, via Jesuits from Portugal.

It was still the Christian center of the country, with more than 15,000 Catholics in its Urakami district, where a cathedral the largest in the Far East had been built.

[Music] The city of Kokura was listed as the primary target for the second bomb, with Nagasaki as the alternate if weather conditions required it.

There was no directive from Washington ordering its use.

The atomic weapons were to come off the assembly line as soon as ready, and the second bomb was ready three days after Hiroshima Nagasaki thus became the first and only victim of automated atomic warfare.

[Music] The so-called fat man bomb carried on its nose several messages.

One was a second kiss for Emperor Hirohito.

Another was simply the letters J-A-N-C-F-U, which stood for Joint Army Navy Civilian ****up.

Indeed on August 9th nearly everything went wrong, much of it reflecting General Groves' desperate push to use the second bomb as soon as possible.

The B-29 carrying the bomb took off in poor weather and with a broken fuel pump.

The pilot stayed over Kokura searching for a break in the clouds far too long.

Arriving over Nagasaki, now low on fuel, he found the same conditions.

He had been ordered not to drop the bomb using radar if the target could not be spotted visually, but in the end the bombardier may have relied mainly on radar anyway.

The plutonium bomb was detonated almost directly over Urukami, more than a mile off target.

Some 30,000 perished that day, mainly women and children with thousands more doomed to die.

It exploded with a force far greater than the uranium bomb's blast in Hiroshima.

If the weapon had exploded over the center of Nagasaki as planned, nothing would have escaped.

Perhaps not even the most untroubled conscience half a world away.

And in a final tragic error, American planes dropped thousands of leaflets over Nagasaki, warning of an atomic attack on the day after the bombing.

[Music] Hours before the Nagasaki bombing, the Soviet Union, as promised, declared war on Japan, which President Truman back in July had said, meant certain defeat for the enemy, even without use of an atomic bomb.

Truman was reportedly surprised to learn of the second bombing.

After Nagasaki, he ordered that no further atomic bombs be used without his expressed approval.

Truman warned that if he ordered a third atomic attack, another 100,000 would die, and he said he didn't want to kill, "all those kids."

When they learned of the Hiroshima attack scientists at Los Alamos generally expressed approval, but many of them, including Robert Oppenheimer, took the Nagasaki bombing quite badly.

Observers said that Oppenheimer appeared anxious, depressed, and even, one reported, a nervous wreck.

Less than a month after the atomic bombing, the first Americans, journalists and scientists, arrived in Nagasaki.

U.S. Army troops and Marines would occupy the city by the end of September [Music] Thousands of Nagasaki children had been killed by the atomic bomb, but now Americans befriended them.

[Music] These people are going to judge America and all Americans by us.

That means we've got another job to do.

That job is to be ourselves.

By being ourselves, we can prove that what we like to call the American way, or democracy, or just plain old golden rule common sense, is a pretty good way to live.

Here, Sergeant Hank Weaver hands out the usual chocolate and chewing gum.

Some of the servicemen were welcomed by Nagasaki women at local dance clubs, but attitudes below the surface were far more complicated.

One of the tasks handled by the occupiers was clearing rubble, but locals who had lost family members to the bomb criticized the Marines for showing little care as they bulldozed and buried the bones and bodies that remained.

While half of Nagasaki escaped the worst effects of the atomic blast, thousands of survivors were still dying from radiation disease, or remained hospitalized with burns and other injuries.

When reports of death from radiation disease emerged from Japan, General Leslie Groves called it "the hoax or propaganda."

Groves worried that the atomic bomb would be viewed as a chemical or biological weapon banned around the world.

He also claimed that he'd been told by doctors that radiation sickness was, "a very pleasant way to die."

Catholic leaders in the city told the victims they should accept their fate, because God had chosen Nagasaki to suffer as a way to end the Pacific War.

Some G.I.s were profoundly affected by what they witnessed in the Urukami Valley.

Few would talk about it later, but Paul Donat, a star high school athlete from New York City, described one haunting image, finding a single wall still standing in the ruins, with the shadow of a vaporized human burned into it.

The Marines' barracks were just outside the so-called "atomic area."

But many spent long hours working in the ruins and drinking the water.

Scientists claimed that test results showed that the elevated levels of radioactivity did not pose a serious danger.

But few Marines wore badges to detect radiation or considered them inaccurate and useless.

The Marines would soon search for acres of rubble-strewn land to convert into athletic fields.

One flat area that drew special attention was found in front of the concrete shell of a middle school in the Urukami Valley, less than a mile from the hypocenter of the atomic blast.

13 teachers and 162 pupils at this school had died on the day of the bombing or in the weeks since.

[Music] Bodies had been piled on the field to be cremated or retrieved by parents Rescue workers arriving at the school found walls covered with blood-stained messages, written to parents by dying students.

The only sound was water dripping from a crack in the concrete ceiling.

Two large athletic fields were soon cleared and graded by military work crews, as described in a confidential report that autumn.

Top U.S. military officers, meanwhile, often requested personal tours of the Nagasaki ruins.

Lieutenant William Watt, who was Communications Director of the Port of Nagasaki, was called on to conduct tours.

Lieutenant Watt held advanced degrees from Harvard and Yale and was teaching literature at Lafayette College when he joined the Navy in 1944.

That year, the New Yorker magazine published one of his poems.

Watt, unlike many, did not like viewing the ruins, and he hated giving tours.

One day, a visiting admiral ordered him to steal a sacred relic from a temple.

So Watt had a vest made that he would wear in protest.

During the past year, U.S. servicemen played numerous games in both the Pacific and in Europe.

These ranged from pickup games on aircraft carriers to contests between all-star marine or army units.

Many teams were organized by military units in Nagasaki.

They played local Japanese in baseball and taught them American football.

Top brass encouraged this as a way for bored servicemen to, as one put it, "blow off steam" and to show locals the glory of American sports.

So it was no surprise that Major General LeRoy P. Hunt, the 2nd Marine Division's commanding officer for the occupation, ordered that a game be held in Japan to coincide with the Christmas and New Year's holidays, when homesick soldiers would need it most.

One has to wonder, however, why Nagasaki, of all cities, would be selected as a site, and on a killing field so close to Ground Zero.

Gerald Sanders was asked to help organize the game selected as captains of the two squads, Notre Dame's Heisman-winning quarterback Angelo Bertelli, and pro football star Bullet Bill Osmanski.

These two big names would aid worldwide publicity, Gerald Sanders believed.

Osmanski had served in the Navy at Guam and Guadalcanal, but he was presently attached to Marines in nearby Isahaya as a dentist.

Osmanski had won a pro-rushing title with the Chicago Bears in 1939, and was a key part of three NFL championship teams.

The captain selected two squads of 11 starters and five reserves.

Many had played at top schools.

Christmas in Nagasaki.

Survivors of the atomic bombing gathered in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral.

[Music] The game was set for January 1st to coincide with the football bowl games back home, and New Year's Day had long been the most popular annual holiday for the Japanese.

The gridiron near Ground Zero was now known as Athletic Field Number Two.

Goal posts and bleachers were made out of scraps of wood found nearby.

Atomic Athletic Field Number Two is a horseshoe, open at one end and yawning across the naked plain where the A-bomb hit It's only a hundred yards from the remains of a middle school.

Its shell still standing, but the insides twisted and charred.

Out the open end one can see, not the hills of Pasadena, but the giant junkyard that the bomb left and the red ruin of the Roman Catholic Cathedral which once commanded the plain.

The Marines posted notices at barracks around Nagasaki.

A top officer wrote a press release promising that the game which he dubbed the first annual Atom Bowl classic would have all the color and more of the bowl games to be played back in the States.

Including a marine band and Japanese girl cheerleaders.

Bertelli and Osmanski staged at least one practice.

It was decided that this would be a game of two-handed touch football with no tackling after glass shards and other reminders of what happened here on August 9th were discovered on the field.

A souvenir program was prepared.

Paul Donat helped recruit two referees, a public address crew and announcers including Hank Weaver.

In his office at the Nagasaki Harbor, William Watt learned about the game around noon and rushed to the site in a jeep on this chilly New Year's Day.

He was happy to see his new friend, Shunichi Mori, covering the game for a local English language newspaper Mori was a pleasant fellow partly disguising the fact that his two children had been killed by the atomic bomb.

They had been thrown against a wall and crushed five miles from the explosion.

Watt would describe the game in a letter to his wife later that day.

I really celebrated New Year's.

I was one of the 1,500 enthusias customers at the Atom Bowl game.

In the long history of football classics, there has been nothing to quite compare with it.

The crowd was composed mostly of noisy Marines, including the two-star general himself.

Also, a handful of sailors and naval officers.

There were only two wooden bleachers, so we followed the play up and down the sidelines.

Here and there were isolated Japanese, a father and his boy, a group of giggly girls, two old men, all looking small and lost and bewildered by it all.

Off in the distance on the fringes of the hills were little groups of Japanese regarding the strange Western spectacle in quiet isolation.

The only locals who seemed in their element were three or four agile newspapermen.

They were leaping up and down the field, snapping everything with their cameras.

The band, the players, the spectators, and the little Japanese water boys, or sake boys, as they were announced over the PA.

Among them, I spotted my acquaintance, Mori Nagasaki correspondent for the Osaka Press Mainichi.

Mori was replete with patent leather shoes and alcohol bewilderment.

He had grown tired of snapping pictures.

He seemed thoroughly unimpressed by the game, so he started taking pictures of us.

His account of the game should be an event in sports writing history.

There was no organized cheering.

I guess it was because, in spite of everything, it didn't feel like home, and because everyone was wondering what the hell he was doing there, watching a touch football game in this bizarre inferno, and secretly hoping that the first Atom Bowl game would also be the last.

P.S.

The Tigers won 14-13 on a run by Bill Osmanski in the last two minutes of play.

The Bears scored on two passes by Angelo Bertelli.

Watt enclosed with the letter for his children, haunting reminders of what had happened at that site back in August.

The name tags of two former students at the middle school.

Osmanski would always claim he meant to miss that extra point, but somehow his winning kick went through the uprights.

It was just force of habit he would tell Bertelli, or possibly an act of God.

U.S wire services and newspapers widely covered the Nagasaki game, along with other college bowl games.

But the report by William Watt's friend, Mori, for his newspaper in Osaka, which was still subject to the U.S. censorship office in Tokyo, was extremely bland, with no description of the site near Ground Zero, and without any of the photos he took.

All of that, perhaps judged by the Americans, as far too sensitive for Japanese readers.

William Watt would attend another game at the field in front of the middle school, this time a soccer match between two British military teams.

They had planned to play a rugby match, but switched to soccer after discovering the field still studded with atomic debris.

And on a visit to Isahaya to get a tooth fixed, Lieutenant Watt found Bullet Bill Osmanski in his role as dentist.

To my disappointment, I was assigned to the operative at the adjoining chair I had wanted to ask Bullet Bill if it didn't seem strange playing such an unreasonable facsimile of football in the shadow of a shattered cathedral so remote from Chicago.

But I never got the chance.

[Music] Survivors of the atomic blast continued to expire in local hospitals, from burns or lingering radiation disease.

The death toll had now reached over 70,000.

By early 1946, thousands of U.S. Marines had served in Nagasaki for many months.

The Associated Press distributed one of the few articles about Nagasaki by any American that entire winter.

The story written not by a reporter, but by a Marine captain.

At first, no one seemed to suffer from radiation poisoning.

Since nothing was provided to protect us from the contaminated air or soil, we assumed that we were not in danger.

The first bizarre sign of illness that surfaced was sudden hair loss.

It came out in clumps.

Then the divisional dentist began to see teeth that came loose without apparent cause.

Nagasaki remained a kind of black hole for the U.S. media, which, like their Japanese counterparts, were still subject to a press code and censorship.

One disturbing story never reported by the media: A sailor went ashore from a U.S. Coast Guard ship claiming to seek revenge on the former enemy, and stabbed a random Nagasaki man to death and raped his daughter.

He and an accomplice were sentenced by a military court to 20 years in prison.

Photographs and hours of newsreel footage shot by the Japanese in the atomic cities would be seized and hidden by the U.S. for many years.

William Watt was still required to conduct tours of the ruins.

The area was haunted for me by silence and horror.

It was a desert of destruction.

To the body counters, of course, it took second place to Hiroshima.

The second atomic bomb was not the first, and 70,000 incinerated human beings, and many still dying, did not break the record.

When a group of 16 U.S. congressmen headed for Nagasaki, Watt was ordered to drive one of the jeeps for what was known as atomic tourism.

In one of his many lively and revealing letters to his wife in Pennsylvania, he described the plans.

At 0900, all port director officers were called together for a briefing, during which Lieutenant Smart, Lieutenant Peterson, and a Marine who had made a study of the roads of Nagasaki took turns enlightening the jeep drivers.

After all that, the congressmen inspected the ruins from the air and never landed.

Few if any US reporters visited Nagasaki.

The New York Times, for example, carried not a single report from the city for all of 1946 and 1947.

Nagasaki would be mentioned mainly as a statistic, even though the plutonium bomb tested there had become America's nuclear weapon of choice going forward.

At the same time, Hiroshima gained new attention, thanks to John Hersey's classic article and best-selling book.

Hersey never wrote about Nagasaki, but privately he referred to the second bombing as indefensible, calling it "a totally criminal action."

By the spring of 1946, most of the marine occupiers of Nagasaki had been sent home.

Before departing, some helped promote and served as judges for a Miss Nagasaki beauty pageant, which they took to calling the Miss Atom Bomb Contest.

Presenting roses to the winner was Marine Sergeant Robert McMenneman, who had earlier served as one of the referees at the Atomic Bowl.

Among those leaving for America was Lieutenant William Watt, who would soon resume teaching at Lafayette College and writing poems for The New Yorker In one poem for the magazine, he protested the US testing of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific.

"To split the ocean floor," he wrote, "and put an end to all things that live does not concern us much."

The US occupation of Japan would formally end in 1952.

Any mention of the once-celebrated Atomic Bowl had disappeared.

Then for several decades it drew very little notice in the press or in history books.

But once each year, Cro Duplonché, public information officer for the Atomic Bowl, later a newspaper editor in New Orleans, would talk to his son about the game.

Finally, in 1984, a guest column appeared in the sports section of The New York Times.

It was written by former Lafayette professor William W. Watt.

Meanwhile, many of the thousands of so-called atomic veterans who were exposed to radiation in Japan or at one of the dozens of US nuclear tests in Nevada and the Pacific continued to find that their medical claims, often involving cancer or leukemia, were rejected by the government.

One of them was Norman Thurston, a former Marine sergeant who served as a public address announcer for the Atomic Bowl in Nagasaki.

Finally in 1988, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to benefit many of the longtime claimants, the ones who the ones who had not already died.

As years passed, many historians major media and veterans groups continued to defend the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

But criticism grew over the second bombing.

Martin J. Sherwin, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of Robert Oppenheimer, called the Nagasaki attack "gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst."

He asserted that if Washington had kept closer control, the annihilation of Nagasaki could have been avoided.

In general, however, Nagasaki was ignored.

The Atomic Bowl forgotten.

In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting US president to pay his respects at Hiroshima, but he did not visit Nagasaki.

Hollywood movies about the atomic bomb, going back to the first in 1947 tended to end without any mention of Nagasaki.

This 1989 movie starring Paul Newman as General Groves included the Nagasaki bomb in its title but ended before that weapon was used.

Christopher Nolan's Academy Award-winning Oppenheimer proved little different, with just two references to Nagasaki lasting only about 15 seconds total.

And what of Nagasaki today?

It is a beautiful city, with a rebuilt cathedral and fewer visitors compared to Hiroshima.

The site of the middle school and the field where the Atomic Bowl was played in 1946 is now a sports center and park.

A small marker memorializes the 175 students and teachers from the school who died on the day of the bombing.

[Music] The famous writer and philosopher Jacob Bronowski was part of a British team sent to Japan in 1945 to study the effects of the atomic bomb.

His reaction on first viewing the ruins of Nagasaki would influence his thinking forever.

Nothing happened in 1945, he later wrote, except that we changed the scale of our indifference to man.

He called it civilization face to face with its own implications.

Ignoring the warnings and lessons of Nagasaki, as we again witness massive civilian casualties in wars today, only adds to the original tragedy.

Nearly all of the victims of the Nagasaki bombing were non-combatants.

If Hiroshima confirmed that civilians could earn little consideration, Nagasaki revealed that they could be ignored, completely.

Civilians accounted for nearly two-thirds of the deaths in World War II, that total surged to almost 90 percent in some recent conflicts, with children comprising a growing number of them, according to the United Nations.

More kids dead than soldiers.

And the decision to drop the Nagasaki bomb a nearly automated attack, and with poor control by a U.S. president, haunts our first strike nuclear policy, which is still in effect today.

Now experts warn that AI systems could raise the risk of a nuclear launch in the most dangerous way possible, without warning or delay.

And then there's this.

Paying so little attention to the Nagasaki bomb underlines how even an earth-shattering military attack on a large city, killing tens of thousands of civilans, can be morally justified and accepted by the public.

Perhaps the second atomic bombing over Nagasaki should receive as much attention as the first, if not more.

[MUSIC PLAYING] William W. Watt would collect his poems, write a highly popular textbook for English students, and complete several decades of teaching as Lafayette College's most revered professor.

In an article for his college's alumni magazine, he revisited his months in Nagasaki.

In leisure hours on the peaceful hilltop, gazing down on the harbor, we occasionally talked about the bomb.

Should it have been tested at Trinity in the first place, or even created in the name of science?

Was Truman right in approving the bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki three days later without giving the Japanese a longer time to surrender?

Considering the massive firebombing of the Japanese mainland, would they have given up soon anyway, perhaps after a demonstration of the bomb on some less populated target?

The same questions would be asked over and over by the media years later, after our scientists had invented even more monstrous bombs.

And the answers were often the same back on our hilltop in Nagasaki.

Don't you guys forget that the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor?

If we had to invade the mainland the casualties would have made Nagasaki look like a schoolgirl's picnic.

The bomb saved my life, buddy boy.

But those standard answers still struck me as simplistic or amoral, if not irrelevant.

I could take refuge in only two certainties.

Number one, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima was an immeasurable horror that would not only change the ways of warfare, but would also pervert the course of what we presume to call the history of civilization.

And number two, nothing like it must ever happen again.