The Mosquito Bowl summary

A year before Tony Butkovich was called into marine service, two other college football stars from the Midwest traveled to Quantico, Virginia, to begin Marine Corps officer training – Dave Schreiner and Bob Bauman from the University of Wisconsin.

Schreiner was from a family of German immigrants who found prosperity in Lancaster, Wisconsin. He was humble and unfailingly honest. As a pre-med major, he wasn’t eligible to be drafted until the spring of 1943, but when he changed his major in the summer of 1942, he dutifully reported the switch to the Selective Service. Miraculously, he still didn’t get drafted, and that fall was named a First Team All-American after leading Wisconsin to its best-ever record, 8-1-1. Bauman, whose brother Frank played with Butkovich at Illinois, was a starting tackle and the punter on that great 1942 Wisconsin team.

Disorganized bureaucracy and institutional racism weren’t the only problems for the US Military during World War II. There was also the strategic dilemma of reaching Japan via the “island hopping” technique. The Marines’ very survival depended on amphibious assault, but their methods were untested and unsound.

Thousands of American Marines discovered that the hard way on November 20, 1943, when the Marines attacked the tiny islet of Betio in the Tarawa atoll. The operation had flaws from start to finish. Leaders misjudged unpredictable tides. Poorly designed landing vehicles got stuck on the coral. Marines wading through chest-deep water were pulled down by their equipment and became easy targets. The naval and aerial bombing was late and inadequate. The Japanese soldiers and their defenses were more sophisticated and effective than expected.

It’s 1944. The 29th Regiment is also on Guadalcanal and loaded with former college football players, including Tony Butkovich. They have lots of downtime on the island and that leads to wild boar hunts, distilling moonshine, and arguing over which regiment would win in a football game, McLaughry’s 4th or Butkovich’s 29th.

The drunken debates are organized into a plan for an actual game between the two regiments on December 24, 1944. Originally they name it the All-Star Classic, but it’s dubbed the Mosquito Bowl thanks to the Guadalcanal radio station, which is called the Mosquito Network.

It’s three months after the Mosquito Bowl and the 6th Marine Division, which includes both the 4th and 29th Regiments, leaves Guadalcanal for Okinawa, the final island before the Japanese homeland. McLaughry and Schreiner are in the first landing parties when the Marines arrive on April 1, 1945. It feels like an April Fool’s joke when they find the Okinawan beaches undefended, but the Japanese are there. A force of 100,000 is hiding in a network of tunnels and pillboxes further inland, and they’re preparing hell for the Marines.

The Americans use flamethrowers and flame-throwing tanks to burn the Japanese out of their caves. The weapons spray a mixture of napalm and gasoline that bounces off walls and around corners, sticks to skin, and burns through muscle and bone. The Japanese launch kamikaze attacks, sinking 26 ships on April 6 and 7 alone. Both sides commit atrocities against each other and the 300,000 native Okinawans still on the island. Rape, torture, dead children, and mangled bodies are the norm. Maggots breed in the corpses littered everywhere.

As many as 250,000 people were killed in the 82 days of fighting at Okinawa. One thousand, six hundred and twenty-two Marines from the 6th Division were killed in the action, including 551 from the 29th Regiment, the most from any Marine regiment in a single operation in World War II.

The same day Dave Schreiner was killed, John McLaughry had a late-night encounter with Japanese soldiers. He took grenade fragments in his leg and his jaw, but he survived. To no one’s surprise, he became a football coach when he returned to the US, at Union College, Amherst College, and eventually back home at Brown University.