What’s in it for me? Learn about some of America’s most famous athletes of the 1940s who sacrificed their fame, sport, and lives during World War II.
College football was at a peak of popularity when it was interrupted by war in the 1940s.
Some players got drafted, others were transferred to new schools as part of a military training program.
By 1944, a bizarre twist of fate put more than 50 former college football players in two Marine regiments and landed them on the same Pacific island.
It didn’t take long for the trash-talking and bickering to begin – which regiment would win in a football game?
Improbably, the argument was resolved in an actual game, the eponymous Mosquito Bowl.
It was played on a field of dirt and coral with the grim prospect of war looming over all, but it was a chance for these young men to bask in the joy of their favorite game before facing the horrors of battle.
Buzz Bissinger’s The Mosquito Bowl details the lives, and deaths, of dozens of athletes, soldiers, and their families.
They came from all over the United States – from Midwestern immigrants to the New England elite – to navigate the traumas and trials of World War II.
This Blink focuses on four of the young men who star in this gripping story of football, war, and America.
A note before we begin: This Blink contains some graphic descriptions of war.
Please take care while reading.
It was 1904 when Blaz Butkovich left Croatia and his tiny hometown in the rolling forests, a place of fables and faeries.
He crossed the Atlantic, passed through the dizzying turnstile of Ellis Island, and continued on to Illinois coal country.
That’s where his own fable, a classic tale of immigrants in America, takes root.
Blaz worked in the brutal conditions of the coal mines.
He faced America’s hatred of new immigrants.
Fables and Football
The country was so opposed to newcomers it banned most of them with 1924’s Immigration Act.
But Blaz and his wife had the support of others enduring the same experience.
Their neighborhood in St.
David, Illinois, had families from Italy, Ireland, Poland, and Croatia.
Their seven sons all took up sports, the three youngest were even good enough to earn scholarships at major universities.
Tony, second from the youngest, was the best athlete among the Butkovich brothers.
He was a three-sport legend at Lewiston High School and went to the University of Illinois to play football.
His first two years there were a struggle, but in 1943 the college football landscape was turned on its head as players in the V-12 Navy College Training Program moved from school to school.
Other military branches thought football should be put on hold as the country prepared for World War II, but the Navy believed the sport was ideal preparation for combat.
Butkovich was part of the V-12 program which also included Marine Reserves.
He was transferred from Illinois to Purdue University where he finally lived up to his potential.
A speedy running back, Butkovich led the team in scoring and yards.
Purdue was 6-0 and ranked No.
4 in the country when Butkovich was called into service by the Marines.
He was such a star that the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Baltimore Sun all carried the news.
He played one last game before leaving Purdue for basic training.
On the final carry of his college career, Tony Butkovich scored a touchdown to break the Big 10 conference scoring record.
He was the No.
11 overall pick in the April 1944 NFL Draft, but Butkovich was already doing push-ups on Parris Island by then.
He failed the academic portion of his officer exams but that didn’t stop the Corps from using him as a recruiting tool.
Before shipping off to action in the Pacific, Butkovich and 10 other college football stars turned Marines posed in uniform for a public relations photo titled, “Grid Greats on Uncle Sam’s Team.
Virtue in Wisconsin, Racism in the Military
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.
Schreiner and Bob Bauman both entered the Marines after graduating in the spring of 1943, and the former football teammates wound up in the same officer training class at Quantico.
John McLaughry had already finished his football career when World War II arrived on American shores.
He led a privileged life growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, and was a football captain at Brown University, where he played for the legendary coach Tuss McLaughry, who was also his father.
The father-son story was a national hit, and John played a season for the New York Giants after graduating from Brown in 1940.
He was actually in New York watching the Giants and some of his old teammates on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked.
Six days later, he signed up for the Army Air Corps to become a fighter pilot.
McLaughry’s enthusiastic patriotism faded in the Army.
He was shuffled around in bureaucracy, wasted time gambling and drinking, and didn’t fly a plane until six months into his training.
Frustrated with the disorganized “Army Way,” McLaughry left after eight months and joined the Marines in late 1942.
He felt a renewed sense of purpose and was commissioned as a second lieutenant on February 10, 1943.
His first choice of assignment was combat with the elite Marine Raiders.
Instead, he was sent to the least wanted post in the Corps – Montford Point in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
Montford was where Black marines were sent to train, essentially segregated from the rest of the Marines.
There were roughly one million Black people in the US Military at the time, and almost all of their duties centered around serving white soldiers.
They were systematically trained to be inferior.
They were abused by their fellow American soldiers, and in some cases murdered, like the two Black privates, Robert Stafford and William Walton, killed by two white Military Police while they were in England.
During his time at Montford Point, McLaughry saw past the stereotypes.
He saw Black men with intelligence, talent, and ambition, and he realized those traits weren’t being given a fair chance to flourish in the United States.
Learning Hard Lessons from Island to Island
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.
In the end, the US claimed Tarawa.
The cost was staggering.
There were more than 3,100 American casualties and nearly 1,000 killed in less than 72 hours of fighting.
Lessons learned from Tarawa improved the Marines’ amphibious assault technique and helped them hop from island to island with fewer casualties.
One of those islands was Bougainville, where John McLaughry crossed into enemy territory.
By then, McLaughry was a second lieutenant with the Marine Raiders and in charge of a 45-man platoon.
When the time came for a 12-mile, 3-day reconnaissance mission behind Japanese lines on Bougainville, McLaughry drew the short straw.
On January 9, 1944, he led a group of seven men through jungle thick with sharp grass, thorny vines, and boot-sucking mud.
They wore caps instead of helmets and carried padded canteens to keep quiet.
They were jittery after an unexpected run-in with another group of Marines.
They were even more tense when they heard gunfire in the jungle and found a well-used enemy trail.
They ducked for cover from their own planes, worried about friendly fire.
Their gear was falling apart by the time they returned to camp, where they were greeted like heroes.
The planes had actually been sent to locate McLaughry and his men, and when they weren’t spotted, they were presumed dead.
After Bougainville, McLaughry was shipped off to another island, Guadalcanal.
He was reassigned to the 4th Regiment and prepared for more Pacific invasions.
Schreiner and Bauman also arrived and were assigned to the 4th – Schreiner and McLaughry even shared a tent.
The arrival of his new tent mate prompted McLaughry to write a letter home to Tuss bragging about the football team his regiment could field, and the seeds of the Mosquito Bowl were planted.
It’s 1944.
The 29th Regiment is also on Guadalcanal and loaded with former college football players, including Tony Butkovich.
The Mosquito Bowl
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.
The network is part of the Armed Forces Radio Service and broadcasts the football game live to military bases across the Pacific.
The station promotes the game with ads, a schedule of events, and rosters.
Of the 65 men listed on the two teams, 56 have played college football, 22 of them were starters, five were team captains and three were All-Americans – Butkovich, Schreiner, and Bob Herwig from Cal – and 16 had either been drafted by the pros or received offers.
Marching bands perform before the game and the players are introduced over loudspeakers.
A rowdy crowd of 1,500 circles the field of coral and dirt, cheering for their regiments – and the thousands of dollars they’ve wagered on the game.
The 29th is the favorite due to its depth – five of its players who haven’t made the starting lineup were starters in college.
But the 4th has the strategic mind of McLaughry.
He designs all the plays and constantly shuttles players in and out to prevent fatigue in the heat and humidity.
The game is supposed to be two-hand touch, but it quickly devolves into tackle.
Few of the details are remembered, although the game does get mentioned in the Chicago Tribune, Wisconsin State Journal, and Salt Lake Tribune.
John Genis, a tackle who was Butkovich’s teammate at Illinois, Purdue, and in the Mosquito Bowl, reports the game as being like an alley fight in Chicago.
The final score: 0-0.
The Battle for Okinawa
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.
Butkovich, Genis, and the rest of the 29th Regiment make their way north on April 9.
Nine days later, Butkovich and the group of Marines he’s with are ordered to move up from the foxholes they’ve dug for the night.
Facing little resistance from the Japanese, Butkovich doesn’t dig a new foxhole.
Instead, he wraps himself in a poncho, which makes enough noise for a sniper to hear.
It takes two weeks for word of his death to reach Blaz in St.
David.
The fighting on Okinawa lasts for months.
It’s bloodiest around three key hills in the south where the Japanese have set up a killing zone.
That’s where Schreiner’s platoon gets pinned down and exposed to fire from too many sides.
Bauman rushes in to save his friend, but he’s the one who’s killed by a bullet to the skull on June 6, 1945.
Two weeks later, Schreiner and McLaughry are part of the attack on the last Japanese stronghold on the island.
Schreiner could have sent someone else, but always the humble leader, he goes himself.
He survives 81 days on Okinawa, but he can’t survive day 82, the day the island is declared secure.
Schreiner is shot by a sniper, the 15th player from the Mosquito Bowl to die on Okinawa.
Final Summary
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.
After he retired, McLaughry earned recognition as a painter.
He also wrote an 80-page account of his experience on Bougainville.
He was 90 years old when he died on November 28, 2007.