Buzz Bissinger delivers a fantastic WW2 story that blends history and sports in The Mosquito Bowl.

Bissingser brings readers into the lives of these athletes and soldiers as they experience the horrors of war while they are fighting in the Battle of Okinawa. Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, knows just as much about football as he does history and delves deep into the time period and the impact both the war and sports had on America and the men who fought.

Overall The Mosquito Bowl is a phenomenal historical story that I believe will live on for a long time!

Bissinger scores a touchdown with an unexpectedly interesting pairing–World War II and football. Revered for their prewar skills playing college football, most players channeled their prowess into the armed forces, while others used their talents to avoid conflict entirely. Readers follow American athletes as they fight, die and (occasionally) play on the battlefield in this moving and deeply researched saga.

The Mosquito Bowl
by Buzz Bissinger
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
Harper
Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC of this book. 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.
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.
Excellent book! I am considering it for Book Club in 2023.
5 stars

Buzz Bissinger has researched a specific aspect of WWII not widely known. On Christmas Eve 1944 two Marine regiments find themselves on Guadalcanal as the war turns on invasions of islands close to Japan including Okinawa. Ultra-competitive, the Marines realize there are many former college football players in their ranks and a football game is organized. The contest is dubbed The Mosquito Bowl. The game itself falls by the wayside as Bissinger focuses on several of the college players, their early lives, their college careers plus decisions to join the Marines. Of the 64 players who played in The Mosquito Bowl, 15 of them will be killed on Okinawa. This is a work about sacrifice, revelations about the patriotic myth at home and of the hardships of warfare in jungles and coral islands. A great addition to narrative nonfiction about war.