Instant New York Times Bestseller - Winner of the General Wallace M.
Greene Jr. Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation
"Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is an American classic. With
The Mosquito Bowl, he is back with a true story even more colorful and
profound. This book too is destined to become a classic. I devoured
it." -- John Grisham
An extraordinary, untold story of the Second World War in the vein of
Unbroken and The Boys in the Boat, from the author of Friday Night
Lights and Three Nights in August.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, college football was at the
height of its popularity. As the nation geared up for total war, one
branch of the service dominated the aspirations of college football
stars: the United States Marine Corps. Which is why, on Christmas Eve of
1944, when the 4th and 29th Marine regiments found themselves in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean training for what would be the bloodiest
battle of the war - the invasion of Okinawa--their ranks included one of
the greatest pools of football talent ever assembled: Former All
Americans, captains from Wisconsin and Brown and Notre Dame, and nearly
twenty men who were either drafted or would ultimately play in the NFL.
When the trash-talking between the 4th and 29th over who had the better
football team reached a fever pitch, it was decided: The two regiments
would play each other in a football game as close to the real thing as
you could get in the dirt and coral of Guadalcanal. The bruising and
bloody game that followed became known as "The Mosquito Bowl."
Within a matter of months, 15 of the 65 players in "The Mosquito Bowl"
would be killed at Okinawa, by far the largest number of American
athletes ever to die in a single battle. The Mosquito Bowl is the
story of these brave and beautiful young men, those who survived and
those who did not. It is the story of the families and the landscape
that shaped them. It is a story of a far more innocent time in both
college athletics and the life of the country, and of the loss of that
innocence.
Writing with the style and rigor that won him a Pulitzer Prize and have
made several of his books modern classics, Buzz Bissinger takes us from
the playing fields of America's campuses where boys played at being
Marines, to the final time they were allowed to still be boys on that
field of dirt and coral, to the darkest and deadliest days that followed
at Okinawa.
