Buzz Bissinger On 'The Mosquito Bowl'

Fresh Air

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4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2022

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger tells the story of Marines in 1945 who, while waiting for the Battle of Okinawa to begin, staged a football game broadcast on Armed Services Radio throughout the Pacific. Bissinger's book is The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II.

TV critic David Bianculli reviews Ken Burns' new documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for this podcast comes from the New Bower Family Foundation, supporting
0:04.7	WHY Wise Fresh Air and its commitment to sharing ideas and encouraging meaningful conversation.
0:11.7	This is Fresh Air.
0:13.0	I'm Terry Gross.
0:14.4	Dave Davies has today's interview.
0:16.4	Here's Dave to introduce it.
0:18.5	My guest, Buzz Bissinger, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who's best known for Friday Night
0:23.3	Lights.
0:24.1	His book about Texas High School Football, which was a best seller and was adapted into a
0:28.8	movie and a TV series.
0:31.0	The title of Bissinger's latest book, The Mosquito Bowl, also refers to a football game,
0:36.2	but it's not really a sports story.
0:39.4	Bissinger writes about a group of young men who fought in the Pacific Theatre of World War
0:43.3	II assigned to the sixth Marine Division.
0:46.5	Two regiments of the division were studied with former college football stars and boasts
0:51.6	and trash talk in 1944 about which regiment had the better talent led to a one-of-a-kind
0:57.3	game played on a dirt and coral field on the island of Guadalcanal.
1:02.0	It was such a celebrated event within the military.
1:04.5	It was broadcast on the Armed Forces radio service.
1:08.2	But the Marines who dueled that day and those who rooted for them would soon be sent to
1:13.0	one of the bloodiest battles of the war, the invasion of Okinawa, where the casualty
1:18.0	rate among the two regiments was over 50%.
	...

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