Mitchell’s latest duck-and-cover project is a documentary, now airing on PBS, called “The Atomic Bowl,” which details a New Year’s Day football game put on by the U.S. military in a killing field in Nagasaki, a few months after America dropped the atomic bombs. The makeshift stadium was outside the charred ruins of a middle school, where a hundred and fifty-two students and thirteen teachers had been killed; the walls had messages, from dying kids to their parents, written in blood. The military convened marching bands and appointed a Navy lieutenant, Bill Osmanski, a fullback for the Chicago Bears, to captain the Isahaya Tigers, and a Marine Corps lieutenant, Angelo Bertelli, a Heisman-winning quarterback at Notre Dame, to lead the Nagasaki Bears. A few locals attended and watched in baffled horror. The Tigers won, 14–13.journey-inline-newsletterinline-newsletter