“…I cannot stand this constant reference to Europe…America writhes in anguish at the fate of a distant cousin, Europe, while a daughter, the Philippines, is being raped in the back room…”

Arizona GHQ – The above words were uttered – blazing forth, in all probability, like a whooshing gush of blistering napalm from a flamethrower – by Manuel Quezon, the President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, on the embattled island of Corregidor in early 1942. Quezon, racked by tuberculosis, breathed those flammable words between violent coughing spasms after tuning in via shortwave radio to one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famed “Fireside Chats.”

Roosevelt’s broadcast singled out the war in Europe and boasted of America’s industrial potential, potential that would ultimately turn the tide of that conflict. Yet despite the fact that the only location on the globe where American forces were actively engaging an Axis enemy was the Pacific, there was surprisingly little mention of the fighting there, hence Quezon’s rightful indignation.

The other day, I finally had my Quezon moment, an emotional eruption that’s been building inside of me for quite some time. But wasn’t a radio broadcast from the President that ignited me (though any type of speech from our current president usually makes me angry) – it was mainly the Internet, e-mails and Facebook posts.

It started in May: there was a notice on the Military Channel’s Facebook feed about a new doc/show called “Surviving D-Day.” My first thought, Seriously, another show on D-Day? The war was fought around the globe, on every continent except for Antarctica, and I believe that we still haven’t discovered, let alone told every tale of the conflict (and likely never will), and some short-sighted suit is still greenlighting shows on D-Day? But I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Every June 6, my Facebook feed is filled with posts and memorial references to the Normandy landings, or links to stories about the same. Of course, it’s understandable due to the media brainwashing: every first week of June for the past several decades, the nation’s producers wrangle a few aging veterans in front of a camera, splice in the same grainy black and white combat footage and b-roll of the American cemetery in Normandy. Likewise, the print folks type up the same patriotic and usually purple prose and cookie-cutter columns. All that really needs to be changed is the year.

I’ve long wondered: why doesn’t this happen every August 15 (V-J Day)? Every September 2 (the official end of the war)? Or February 23 – the day the most iconic American image of the entire war (the Joe Rosenthal photo of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima) was captured? Few Americans, and especially those in the media, seem to be aware of any significant Pacific war dates other than December 7. Likewise, the much larger American military cemeteries in Manila and at Hawaii’s Punchbowl are never accorded the same treatment. And every American has at least a basic understanding of the significance of the word Auschwitz, but I’m willing to bet barely a handful could probably tell you why the words Cabanatuan or Davao are similarly significant.

Thanks to my inbox, my blood began to simmer in the following weeks. My friend Capt. Wilbur Jones, USN (Ret.), a fellow author/historian, regularly sends out a series of missives on the topic of WWII history. These notes usually include reviews of new books, feature stories in various publications, photo slideshows and other war-related information. It seemed like every e-mail contained a story or book review that demonstrated a clear European Theater bias. The most shocking was a Wall St. Journal review of a new, all-encompassing book that attempts to tell the entire story of the war, from its 1931 beginning to its 1945 end. The reviewer mentions, however, that something like only four of the book’s seventeen chapters concern the Pacific portion of the conflict. I’ve never been good at math, but less than 25% deals with the Pacific? That’s utterly ridiculous. It’s akin to writing a book about the Civil War and devoting the bulk of the chapters to what happened in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Ignoring the Pacific war makes about as much sense as glossing over Civil War battles in Pennsylvania (Gettysburg), Mississippi (Vicksburg), Maryland (Antietam) or Tennessee (Shiloh).

Then there was a series of Facebook posts this past weekend alerting me that after a brief layoff, Hollywood is at it again – as in trying to use the swastika to cash in at the box office. This summer’s big blockbuster action film, “Captain America,” features a patriotic fight against – who else – Nazis bent on world domination. But the one that really raised my ire was the newly-released trailer for “Red Tails,” an SFX-laden release from Lucasfilms that will, presumably – between all the CGI dogfight sequences – also attempt to tell the stirring story of the legendary unit of black fighter pilots who flew combat missions in Europe during World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen. But more on this later.

After lamenting that Hollywood hasn’t produced nor adequately promoted a quality big-budget film about the Pacific war since perhaps “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, it finally hit me: like Quezon, I cannot stand this constant reference to the European war by our nation’s media and entertainment industries – and the continued, converse ignorance of the war that took place on the other side of the globe. And I can’t figure out why it’s always been this way.

Maybe it’s because of the bloody Brits…again. It was Prime Minister Winston Churchill, after all, who traveled to Washington, D.C. with his top-ranking brass shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack for the Arcadia Conference to charm, cajol and convince F.D.R. and the Americans of the necessity of a “Germany First” strategy. Today, Britain’s preoccupation with the Nazis is just as powerful, if not more so than in the 1940s. According to a recent brief in World War II Magazine, the BBC reported that 850 books about the Third Reich were published in the U.K. in 2010, up from 350 in 2000. British fascination with the Third Reich has likely crossed the Atlantic.

Or maybe it’s geography. Each year, Americans learn how increasingly ignorant their school children are when it comes to geography. I guess that halfwits who can’t locate Manhattan or Omaha are unlikely to find Manila or Okinawa on a map. But that’s only part of it. Americans have always been geographically predisposed to Europe given the fact that the vast majority of us have roots there. It’s no surprise, then, that people during the war could better identify with and comprehend news reports of events taking place in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Eastern European countries, the Balkans and other familiar locations. When it came to the Pacific war, there was just no frame of reference for the often times difficult to pronounce or spell islands, atolls, straits and seas where most of the fighting took place.

In any event, for various and sundry reasons, the U.S. government’s wartime “Europe First” strategic mandate has seemingly lingered all the way into the 21st century, 70 years since the start of the war, and I believe it’s time to alter that perception.

In my opinion, just about the only area that the Nazis had the Japanese beat was in evil “style” points. I have to admit that the uniforms of the Third Reich were hardcore. The death’s head on SS officers’ caps. The Iron Cross. Those long, slick leather coats and shiny, polished knee-high boots. The Nazis goosestepped and clicked their heels better. Japanese Army soldiers and officers, meanwhile, often looked rumpled and disheveled; I had once heard them described as resembling “poorly-wrapped brown paper parcels.”

But that’s all the ground I’m going to give. In fact, I’ve got some news for people, namely the editorial dictators that run our nation’s media, the suits and green eye-shades at the television networks and Hollywood studios that decide our viewing choices: the war in the Pacific was worse. Inconceivably worse. And I truly believe that the Japanese were greater villains than even the Nazis. Let me explain.

My first point of argument is to assail the belief that the D-Day landings and subsequent battles were some sort of great liberation, a “Great Crusade,” as General Eisenhower called it. Of course, the Allied victory in Europe was a monumental acheivement. But while we’re on the subject of monumental acheivements, what then can we call the much larger fight in the Pacific? The Greatest Crusade? After all, the Pacific Theater dwarfed the ETO, MTO and North Africa in terms of logistics and sheer size. Japan’s Imperial march across the vast expanses of the Far East and Pacific well surpassed the size and scope of Hitler’s astounding early successes. Upon the conclusion of the war-opening Centrifugal Offensive, Emperor Hirohito reigned over nearly ONE-SEVENTH OF THE GLOBE by mid-1942, an area larger than the United States and the whole of Europe combined. As a result, three long, bloody, difficult years later, Allied victory in the Pacific meant the liberation of more territory and tens of millions more people.

And it was a much more difficult fight. Not only because the Americans, Australians, British and Chinese had more territory to deal with, but they had less war materiel to work with, too. According to Admiral Ernest King, Europe received nearly 85% of the prodigious output from America’s assembly lines. What did the Pacific receive? A paltry 15%.

And Europe was essentially an Army show; in other words, there was no interservice rivalry to obstruct operational progress. A lot is made of Ike’s political savvy, his skill at manipulating and harnessing all of the various European allies and political entities for a greater good, but the Pacific was just as messy and overflowing a melting pot of commands, egos, strategies and rivalries. MacArthur. Nimitz. Halsey. Stilwell. Mountbatten. Blamey. The Generalissimo. While the rivalries weren’t nearly as disastrously dysfunctional as those which characterized Imperial Japan’s armed forces, from the get-go the Pacific had to be divided up into separate, well-defined bailiwicks, SOPAC, SWPA, etc., to keep the Marines from chop-blocking the Army, the Army Air Force from stiff-arming Naval aviators, and so forth. To continue the football comparison, the Pacific war was like a massive Army-Navy game played every day for nearly four years by two all-star studded teams. Besides beating the Japanese, each American side wanted to one-up the other and gain greater glory.

And what of climatic differences? While those who fought the Battle of the Bulge endured the worst winter in 50 years in Europe, that was just about the worst of it. They didn’t experience the full fury of Mother Nature’s meteorological arsenal like those who fought in the Pacific. The men and women who won the Pacific war not only conquered an implacable enemy, they conquered the arctic cold of the Aleutians, the relentless heat and humidity that pervaded the impenetrable jungles of Burma, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands and New Guinea, the torrential rains of Cape Gloucester, and the massive waves of Typhoon Cobra. And with the tropical climate came tropical diseases. Allied personnel in Europe did not have to deal with malaria, dengue fever and a slew of other bizarre and debilitating maladies.

While the Allied bomber and fighter pilots flew through the worst flak/fighter interceptor storms of the war in raids over occupied Europe (Ploesti, for example), when they bailed out, more often than not they ended up, in best-case scenarios, hiding in the hayloft of a sympathetic farmer or in the hands of the local resistance or partisan units. Worst-case, they landed inside the barbed wire confines of a spartan, yet reasonably safe Stalag. In the Pacific, there was no best-case scenario. Many airmen were machine-gunned by Japanese pilots minutes after hitting the silk, something that rarely happened in Europe, where the notion of combat chivalry was largely maintained by both sides. In the Pacific, the notion of crashing down to friendly territory was rare. Pilots could end up in dense, primordial jungle hundreds of miles from civilization or smack in the middle of the ocean, where death from dehydration or drowning was more likely than rescue. They could be set upon by sharks, tigers, massive pythons and tribes of primitive cannibals. They could even be eaten by the Japanese. Don’t believe me? Read James Bradley’s Flyboys. They could undergo the living hells of vivisection by sadistic Japanese “doctors.” Or they could be chained naked in a Tokyo zoo for civilians to gawk at. I’ve never read nor heard of any such things happening to Allied fliers in German hands. As for Army troops and Marines fighting on the ground in the Pacific, well, after the nightmare first-hand accounts of Japanese atrocities from ten escaped American POWs from the Philippines were finally released to the American public in early 1944, none would even consider the thought of surrender. For those who are unaware of what is perhaps the war’s most staggering statistic, I’ll repeat it: 37% of all Allied POWs held by the Japanese perished in captivity. Only 1% of Allied prisoners (not including Russians) held by Germany did not survive the war.

And while the History Channel constantly celebrates everything from Germany’s advanced superweapons and secret spy programs to its attempts at taking the war to America’s shores, let’s not forget that the Japanese actually pulled off such feats. Japanese spies infiltrated American military installations in Hawaii and the Philippines. The Imperial Navy not only stealthily traversed the entire Pacific to execute the sneak attack upon Pearl Harbor, their submarines also shelled California. They even succeeded in landing a handful of long-distance hydrogen-filled balloon bombs in remote areas of our West Coast. The Japanese also occupied American soil – the Aleutians – however briefly. The Germans, on the other hand, despite all of their fearsome technical know-how and espionage expertise, could manage only the überfailure known as Operation Pastorius.

Most of all, I cannot fathom the absurd, though widely accepted notion of the Nazis being the purest personification of “evil,” their Hollywood-anointed role as America’s greatest historical villains/antagonists, while the notion of the Japanese being some kind of bumbling inferior enemy, an amateur Axis sidekick, persists.

The Nazis, everyone knows, had a special affinity for killing Jews, Communists, Soviet POWs, gypsies, mental patients and others labeled by the Third Reich as “undesirable.” The Japanese, on the other hand, didn’t practice any such discrimination. Equal opportunity torturers and killers, the Japanese killed captured combatants and civilians with the same fanatical zeal. Innocent babies were skewered on bayonets about as often as samurai swords chopped the heads off downed aviators. White, Asian, or native islander, American, Australian, British, Chinese, Dutch, Filipino, Indian, Jews, Catholics, Protestants or atheists, generals or privates, pilots or cooks – it didn’t matter. And I’m certain most people don’t know that the Japanese even killed their allies. The German Club massacre, which took place in the midst of the Battle for Manila in 1945, is one of the most unbelievably revolting atrocities that I’ve ever researched.

And there was no official method to Japan’s madness. While Imperial functionaries did occasionally put their horrific policies in writing – such as the notorious “Kill All Prisoners” order issued in 1944 – they did not hold a secret Wannsee Conference to plan their extermination programs. They didn’t waste military resources transporting civilian via trains, or building crematoriums. They simply marched their captives to death on foot, withheld food and medicine from both civilian and POW camps to accelerate death by malnutrition and disease, and, easiest of all, simply loosed drunken, heavily armed hordes on densely populated civilian areas – perhaps you’ve heard of what happened at Nanking, Hong Kong and Manila?

While the Germans had Dr. Josef Mengele, aka. the “Angel of Death” who performed ghastly experiments on Jews and political prisoners under the guise of medical research, the Japanese had an entire outfit dedicated to similar grisly pursuits, a staff of Mengeles called Unit 731 which endeavored to poison entire villages, reportedly even Chinese cities, as well as experimented with anthrax, typhus and cholera on live human subjects, mostly Chinese peasants, but also Allied POWs.

The Gestapo had nothing on the Kempei Tai, the Japanese secret police. Ask anyone who spent any amount of time in the Kempei Tai torture chambers known as the Cathay Building in Singapore, or Fort Santiago in Manila – and lived to tell about it. And while I’m sure the Nazis introduced sexual slavery in various forms in their conquered territories, but I’ve never read about any officially sanctioned scheme of kidnapping, brothels and legalized rape as sickening and as extensive as that which has come to be known as the Japanese “comfort women” system.

I remain convinced that the Nazis will never relinquish their undisputed No. 1 ranking as history’s most evil empire for one reason – actually, six million of them. That number, 6,000,000, which is invariably a part of any discussion of this type, is the number of Jewish people killed by the Third Reich in the Holocaust. It’s because of that number that the Nazis have the reputation that they have today. I’m not attempting to marginalize those victims, either. The Holocaust – because of both the scale of the crimes perpetrated and the ignorance of “good” nations that allowed the event to happen – remains one of the biggest black marks on humanity’s historical record. But it wasn’t the only holocaust. Some believe that the Holocaust in Europe, when compared to the numbers of deaths and wanton destruction of the “Far East Holocaust,” as some historians called the 14-year dark age ushered in throughout Asia and across the Pacific Rim by the expansionist Imperial Japanese armed forces, pales in comparison. But we’ll never know for sure.

With the exception of rare circumstances – such as an astounding newspaper series detailing a beheading contest between two Japanese officers during the Sino-Japanese War – the Japanese were not as skilled, nor as dedicated as their Nazi counterparts when it came to recording the efficiency of their killing machine. Resultantly, there was no extensive postwar documentation of Japanese atrocities, no long paperwork trail. The Japanese kept few incriminating records and what they did keep was consciously and expediently destroyed in the time period from V-J Day to the official surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945. By the time Allied occupation forces finally landed on Japanese soil, incriminating documents were smoldering ashes, witnesses erased from existence, the locations of mass graves expertly concealed for eternity. Other than photos of recently liberated skeletal Allied POWs – which eerily resembled their comrades in captivity who had survived Nazi concentration camps – the world saw and knew little of the horrors that had transpired behind Japan’s bamboo curtain in the Pacific.

And there would be little to no effort in the ensuing decades to educate the world about such horrors. The Tokyo and Manila War Crimes trials received but a fraction of the media attention that accompanied the famed proceedings in Nuremberg. One notable example of the bias shown towards the publicizing of Nazi atrocities is what I like to call the “Tale of Two Reprisals.” Thanks to Euro-centric media, before war’s end practically the entire world was aware that in the spring of 1942 the Nazis had slaughtered the 503 inhabitants of the Czech village of Lidice as a reprisal operation following the assassination of SS General Reinhard Heydrich by British-trained Czech commandos. The Germans even went so far as to divert streams that passed through the town and dig up the village cemetery and relocate corpses so as to literally wipe the village from the map. At the same time, few know of what has been called the “Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign.” Following the famed Doolittle Raid in April 1942, the Imperial Japanese Army launched a reprisal operation of its own, one that would make the Lidice liquidation look like a field exercise. In retaliation for their rendering assistance to crashed Raiders, the Japanese tore up all airfields in a 20,000-square mile radius near the Chinese coast and employed germ warfare against all Chinese civilians living in the area, eventually killing an estimated 250,000 men, women and children.

One of my favorite lines from HBO’s Band of Brothers occurred in an early episode, during a discussion between several members of Easy Company who were en route to Europe aboard a jam-packed troopship. “Right now,” said Muck, “some lucky bastard’s headed for the Pacific, get put on some tropical island, surrounded by six naked native girls, helping him cut up coconuts so he can hand feed them to the flamingos.” While there was no way guys in Europe could have known what reality was in the Pacific, I found that line amusing. It was probably representative of a lot of servicemen’s thoughts at the time, and a myth that probably morphed into truth after Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific” became a hit and once close-lipped Pacific war veterans returned home and silently went about the rest of their lives. Little did they know.

As bad as D-Day was from a bitter fighting/high casualty perspective, there were multiple Omaha Beaches in the Pacific – places called Tarawa, Peleliu and Iwo Jima – smaller-scale, but perhaps more hellacious amphibious nightmares. I recall reading memoirs from Europe veterans that discuss the difference between fighting against regular Wehrmacht troops and the SS. The regular German Army troops could be coerced into surrendering and, upon later personal interaction, were usually found to be regular human beings – not the evil supermen the media had made them out to be. The despised SS troopers, on the other hand, would never surrender and were never taken prisoner – every encounter with an SS unit was a grueling fight to the death. The moral of the story: the Pacific was like going up against the SS in every single action, be it a small-scale skirmish or full-fledged campaign. And the Germans didn’t send wave upon wave of kamikaze suicide pilots against Allied ships or planes, too.

It’s hardly surprising, then, to understand that those who fought in the Pacific were much more reluctant to talk about their experiences than their European counterparts. In my experience as a historian, I’ve noticed a profound distinction after conducting interviews with Europe and Pacific veterans. The guys who fought in Europe were mostly happy-go-lucky types and very conversational. The guys who survived the Pacific were very quiet, often suspect, introverted. I recall one Sunday afternoon drinking beers at the White Valley Club with a vet called Tucker while he rehashed his experiences in Italy during the war. Geno, an Army medic who saw plenty of action in Europe not long after D-Day, spoke guardedly, but answered some of my questions, too. Another veteran known as P.K. had no problem communicating his experiences as an artilleryman in North Africa to me during another memorable conversation that took place on fall break during my senior year in college. But some of the most vivid memories I have of growing up around WWII veterans are those of my mother’s Uncle Lou, who served in the Army in the Pacific and was severely wounded (he spent many months in a Stateside hospital and would wear a brace on his leg for the rest of his life) when a Japanese plane – perhaps a kamikaze – attacked his Navy transport just off the Philippines. But these memories are vivid not for what I was told, but rather for what Lou did not tell me. In fact, he never told me anything. He never spoke of the war or his experiences – to anyone, as far I know. When I was a youngster, my grandmother showed me a photograph that Lou had sent home from sometime earlier in the war. It featured a happier young G.I., along with a half-dozen other smiling guys standing in a row on some unnamed tropic island, holding in their outstretched arms a giant dead snake that had to be at least 15-feet long. I was mesmerized. The next time I saw Uncle Lou, I brought up the snake photo. Unfortunately, that seemingly innocuous topic, too, was forbidden. I’ll never forget seeing him sit off by himself at family reunions, seemingly content in his own isolation or silence. Tragically, there were and still are Uncle Lous out there. But not as many as there once was, and that’s another developing tragedy.

It’s sad that few of these men talk, and that few publish memoirs (Thankfully, Pacific war veterans like Robert Leckie, William Manchester and Eugene Sledge put their thoughts and feelings down on paper), but I believe that some surviving vets could potentially be enticed to speak and write if they thought the country cared. While our nation’s publishers seem to be sincerely working to balance bookshelves with Pacific war titles, they’re getting little help from Hollywood and the nation’s media.

Hollywood is by far the worst offender. There are so many fantastic, untold true World War II stories that would make outstanding films, yet instead of developing this material, we are force-fed a steady diet of Nazi and European war flicks, melodramas and movies from new genres that I can’t classify (see the fictionalized war stories using the ETO as a back drop – Quentin Tarentino’s “Inglorious Bastards” and Spike Lee’s “Miracle at St. Anna,” for example) as well as regurgitated remakes. Which brings us back to “Red Tails.” This movie is essentially a remake of a quality film from way back in – get this – 1996. The movie, which starred Laurence Fishburne and Cuba Gooding, Jr, was called “The Tuskegee Airmen.” From what I’ve read, Lucas has been infatuated with the story of the Tuskegee fliers for nearly 20 years, but that interest aside, I still don’t see the reason for the need for a redux so soon. My guess is that George Lucas wanted to use all of the recent advances in SFX technology to make Star Wars in 1944. Depressingly, this remake resurgence is scheduled to get worse. Although I’m happy that a Pacific war story is being made, it’s yet another rehashing of a long-known story; there are reports that coming to a theater near you sometime soon is a redux of the 1976 Heston/Fonda blockbuster, “Midway,” only this time with 3-D special effects.

It’s a sad state of affairs. Instead of spending tens of millions on remakes, why not employ this technological wizardry to tell previously unknown stories? Why not finally do the Bataan Death March? If the opening sequence of “Saving Private Ryan” and the battlefield realism brought to “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” is any indication of what Hollywood is capable of, the capability finally exists to portray the war’s most well-known “brand-name” atrocity with stunning realness.

Hollywood has attempted to make some inroads in regards to Pacific war movies in recent years, but the results have been less than commendable. The individuals helming and publicizing these flicks deserve an honorable discharge from the entertainment industry, if not a court-martial. “Pearl Harbor” was a sappy love story propped up by wooden actors and special effects. “The Thin Red Line” had a strong cast, but like “Pearl Harbor,” was a wishy-washy melodrama that did not capture the essence of the Pacific war in any way, shape or form. “The Great Raid,” the story of the liberation of American POWs from Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines in early 1945 that was released in 2005 after many false-starts, is another example of the story of an incredible victory that became a lost battle once Hollywood got a hold of it. I really enjoyed the film, and believed that the screenplay stayed reasonably accurate and realistic, but I thought the casting was poor and that the film received no publicity or support from the studio whatsoever. I recently learned that Hampton Sides, whose book Ghost Soldiers was the basis for the film, was so displeased with the way the project was run and the finished product that he called the film “The So-So Raid.” It’s no surprise, then, that these Pacific war films were not critically-acclaimed nor box office successes.

Another of Captain Jones’s e-mail communiques contained a link to a fascinating Washington Post feature story about two elderly women living in the Metro DC area that served overseas with the O.S.S. – the forerunner of the C.I.A. – during the war. It was an educational read; I was unaware that women served in theater, and so near the front in some cases, and these heroines served in the Pacific no less. The WaPo story, I later learned, was likely the reactive result of an outstanding feature on these same women that just appeared in World War II Magazine. After all, our nation’s newspapers are rarely active, instead they’re reactive (unless, of course, there’s an award, such as Pulitzer, to be gained) and usually chase stories only after some other publication or entity has already found it. But this story is yet another prime example of the media and Hollywood dropping the ball. If these women had been working to thwart the Nazis, TMZ would be reporting a major catfight among Hollywood’s female A-listers for the leading role today. Hell, who am I kidding – if the story was Euro- or Nazi-centric, the flick would be in post-production by now.

Long blog post short, it’s 2011, high time for the editors, producers, screenwriters and studio heads in the nation’s media and entertainment industries to take a refresher history course – maybe a geography lesson, too – and learn that World War II truly was a global conflict. It’s the least they can do for those who fought the Pacific war, those who did not survive it and for the ever-dwindling numbers of those who did.

Arizona GHQ – In an effort to conduct myself through a quick refresher course before commencing work on a “Time Travel” piece on Hong Kong for an upcoming issue of World War II Magazine, I was re-reading the late military historian Oliver Lindsay’s outstanding work, The Battle for Hong Kong: 1941-1945 – Hostage to Fortune, today and came across an interesting passage approximately halfway through the book:

“Virtually all the critics have another thing in common (In the previous paragraph, Lindsay was discussing the severe criticism of British Generals Maltby and Wallis for deciding to allow the Japanese forces to penetrate between Hong Kong’s two defending brigades, a common failing shared by many of the authors who wrote accounts of the battle throughout the past 70 years): they have not visited Hong Kong, let alone ‘walked the ground’ to appreciate the difficulties which exhausted, ill-trained troops, unfit after a long sea voyage from Vancouver, with no communications, would have had in moving west across rugged, mountainous terrain split by precipitous valleys, nullahs and gullies. May I express the hope, with genuine humility, that those who plan to write about the battle for Hong Kong in the future first visit all the battlefields, as I have done on over a dozen occasions? (The military cemeteries should be visited, too.).

Needless to say, Lindsay’s complaint resonated with this writer. It still amazes me to know that even in this millennial era when nearly any place on the globe can be reached in a matter of hours that many stories and books – even celebrated bestsellers – are written without the author ever once having set eyes on the locations and places they are writing about.

Somewhere, Colonel Lindsay will be happy to know that that is not how this writer operates. True to form, yours truly “walked the ground” in Hong Kong, including the “rugged, mountainous terrain split by precipitous valleys, nullahs and gullies” of the Wong Nei Chong Gap that Lindsay described and I did so through the same sort of humidity and misty drizzle that most of the fighting took place in, dodging countless squadrons of dive-bombing mosquitoes, with the equivalent of about 25 lbs. of clothes, books, toiletries and other gear (the equivalent of a small rollerboard suitcase) on my back, and with a fierce, banzai charge of a hangover and a soon-to-be revealed gestating stomach illness to boot!

Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) has been a stalwart friend of POWs of the Japanese for as long as I can remember. I can’t tell you his voting record on items of legislation, if he’s a liberal or conservative, a Hawk or a Dove, if he’s had dalliances with interns, sends half-nude photos of himself via cellphone or if he voted for Obamacare or the war in Iraq, but if only for this constant, unwavering support of WWII Pacific POWs he is perhaps one of the few remaining American politicians deserving of the title “Honorable” U.S. Representative.

WASHINGTON DC – Today, Representative Michael Honda (CA-15), Chairman Emeritus of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, introduced a bipartisan resolution honoring United States veterans who were held as prisoners of war during World War II.

NGAUS strongly supports Congressman Honda’s Resolution which dutifully reminds us that the service and extended suffering of our POWs in the Pacific theater during WWII must never be forgotten,” said Deputy Director of Legislation Peter J. Duffy, Colonel US Army (Ret.). “We are thankful for the apology from the government of Japan as a welcomed and healing gesture from a true friend whose population also suffered mightily from the war.”

Via telegraph, wireless, signal flag, plane, ship, rail, jeep, courier, horse, mule, camel, coconut shell and floating bottle, the cover “blurbs” for the new paperback version of Escape From Davao are arriving from the various war fronts around the globe. Enjoy!

“I’m telling you, it’s a flight of B-17s from the States. Now let me finish this incredible book.”
– Lt. Kermit Tyler, Pearl Harbor

“Send us more Japs…and copies of Escape From Davao.”
- Wake Island

“I came through and I shall return for my copy.”
- General Douglas MacArthur

“AF freshwater condenser down. Also out of Escape From Davao.”
- Midway

“I fear we have awakened a sleeping author and filled him with a terrible resolve to write.”
- Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto

“Lukacs, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!”
– General George S. Patton

“I won’t trust a fighting man who doesn’t drink or smoke or like this book.”
- Admiral William F. Halsey

“SOS – marooned on raft in middle of Pacific. Please drop fresh water, food and Escape From Davao.”
- Eddie Rickenbacker

“We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender our copy of Escape From Davao.”
- Prime Minister Winston Churchill

“Oh, je suis désolée – we surrendered our copy. Puis-je avoir un verre de vin.”
- France

“NAURO ISL…COMMANDER
NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT
HE CAN PILOT…11 ALIVE
NEED SMALL BOAT…AND BOOK ESCAPE DAVAO.”
- KENNEDY

“Nuts…this is really good writing.”
- General Anthony McAuliffe, Bastogne

“In view of my services in Africa, I have the chance of dying by poison. Two generals have brought it with them. It is fatal in three seconds. If I take the poison, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family; that is, against you. They will also leave my staff alone, as well as my signed copy of Escape From Davao.”
-Field Marshal Erwin Rommel

“Lukacs should be highly-decorated for this act of conspicuous literary gallantry.”
- Lt. Audie Murphy

“Explosive.”
- Dr. Robert Oppenheimer

“Glorious book by Comrade Lukacs. All who chose not to read go to Siberian gulag.”
- Premier Josef Stalin

“Escape From Davao is mein second favorite book.”
- Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler

“A fiery, fist-shaking good read. And a great way to pass the time while hanging around.”
- Il Duce, Benito Mussolini

“Book NO good! Imperial Japanese Army VERY good; capture Chicago yesterday.”
- Tokyo’s Domei news service.

Aloha from Honolulu, Hawaii!

It’s hard to believe that my good friend Mario “Motts” Tonelli has been gone for nearly a decade now.  But I am not in the least bit surprised that his influence continues to live on – nothing could ever truly tackle No. 58.  And no one whose path crossed that of Motts was not in some way affected by the encounter.  Though he would go to great lengths to avoid being called such, Motts was a true American hero.  For more details on Motts’ incredible life story, follow this link.

Evidently, Motts had quite an effect on Dr. John Pandolfino, the Chicago-area gastroenterologist who treated Motts during the final, waning days of his extraordinary life. Late last year, in an effort to honor Motts, Pandolfino established The Motts58 Foundation, which “will provide scholarship and related awards to deserving medical students of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and nurses working at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.”

The Foundation “seeks to promote the qualities exemplified by Motts – courage, perseverance and dignity – in supporting the academic goals of students, investigators and healthcare providers.”

It certainly sounds like a worthy cause – and one worthy of Motts’ name and number.

Please log onto Motts58.org for more information.

I’m happy to help the spread word of a unique opportunity, thanks to an 11-year-old Pennsylvania boy, to memorialize the thousands of American soldiers who spearheaded the effort to wrest control of Europe from the Nazis at Normandy, France on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

In an effort to honor his hero – the late Major Dick Winters of “Band of Brothers” fame – Jordan Brown, a young WWII buff and history enthusiast, created a cause from scratch: Brown is raising money to help build a statue to American GIs in St. Marie Du-Mont, Normandy, France.

To raise the necessary funds, Brown, with the help of documentary filmmaker Tim Gray, is selling olive-drab rubber wristbands emblazoned with Winters’ famous motivational phrase, “hang tough.”

Fifth grader raises money to honor WWII heroes

For more information on Brown and his efforts, as well to donate to this worthy cause, log onto http://hangtough6644.org/.

Currahee, Jordan – and carry on!

It’s with great sadness that I report the recent passing on January 10 in Boulder, Colorado of Colonel William Bower, the last surviving pilot who participated in the famous “Doolittle Raid” over Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Bower was 93.

Bower joins two other recently deceased Raiders, Lt. Col. Frank A. Kappeler (June 23, 2010) and Captain Charles J. Ohuk (October 9, 2010) who recently got their “wings” and reported to that great bomber base in the sky.

With Bowers’ passing, there are now ONLY FIVE SURVIVING Doolittle Raiders left among us. A total of 80 men participated in the daring, legendary attack which served as a great morale booster to Americans during what was perhaps the darkest period of the entire war.

To learn more about the unique ceremony that surviving Raiders do when one of their own passes, check out this link:

http://doolittleraider.com/the_goblets.htm

Another good way to learn about the Doolittle Raid is to catch the new series “Missions that Changed the War” on the Military Channel. The Doolittle Raid is the first of many installments. Unlike the other “history” networks which glorify pawnbrokers, lumberjacks, truckers and Twinkie-makers, only the Military Channel seems willing to honor real heroes and produce top quality, real honest-to-goodness history programming nowadays.

Now excuse me, it’s time to have a brandy in honor of Col. Bowers.

On this solemn day of remembrance of the attack on Pearl Harbor, I think it’s appropriate to have a moment of silence – as well as a brief education lesson – for and regarding another group of Americans and allies who were attacked by the armed forces of Japan on that day which will forever ”live in infamy.”

Only for these individuals, serving on the other side of the International Dateline, their day of infamy came on December 8, 1941 – the day in the U.S. when President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered the famous speech before Congress.  Few regular Americans know that the Japanese launched near-simultaneous attacks on U.S. and Allied bases elsewhere in the Pacific and Far East areas as part of what would later be called the “Centrifugal Offensive.”

Approximately nine hours after the raids on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese launched particularly deadly attacks on the Philippines, attacks which would decimate American air and naval power and precipitate the fall of the Philippines in the spring of 1942.

That very same day, thirty-six Japanese bombers launched from the Marshall Islands would strike Wake Island. The results of this attack would be equally disastrous: eight of VMF 211′s complement of 12 F4F Wildcats would be destroyed, effectively emasculating the tiny central Pacific atoll’s defensive capabilities.  Wake Island would fall, but not before a gallant, spirited defense that would thrill the nation, on December 23. 

The U.S. garrison of Midway Island would also come under enemy fire for the first – and hardly the last – time on December 8.

At 0827 hours on December 8, Japanese aircraft from Saipan struck military and civilian facilities on Guam. Two days later, Japanese forces would storm ashore and overwhelm the small, outgunned garrison of U.S. Marines, Navy personnel and Insular Guards. Guam would be the first U.S. territory occupied by enemy forces in the war.

Elsewhere, Japanese forces attacked the garrison of the British crown colony of Hong Kong, British Malaya, Singapore, Kota Bharu and Thailand.

While the attack on Pearl Harbor and elsewhere on the Hawaiian island of Oahu literally struck home for America and thus will forever carry with it a special place in America’s national and historic consciousness, let’s take an additional moment to remember the sacrifices made by the forgotten men and women who also came under attack while manning America’s first of lines of defense on the other side of the International Dateline.

Remember December 8th!

Each November, when my mailboxes – both e-mail and U.S. Mail – begin to overflow with promotional materials from SIDs (sports information directors) plugging their players for award and All-America recognition, my thoughts inevitably turn to what will likely forever be the most deserving group of college football players to ever receive the honor of being called “All-Americans.”

This group, all from one school incredibly, might just be my favorite football team of all-time. But it’s a team that I have no real, substantive, easily explainable connection – geographic, family-related or otherwise – to. I didn’t go to school there. I knew no one who played on the team. The team was not a championship squad. In fact, far from it; this team was mediocre at best. It’s a team that I never saw play, either in person or on television. In fact, this team played its last game more than 35 years before I was born.

The team in question is the 1940-41 Montana State College Bobcats, a college football team that possesses a unique place in the lore of World War II history. That’s because the tragic, heart-rending story of the “Golden Bobcats” has more to do with the war than anything the team ever accomplished on the gridiron. This small western school lost an incredible amount of players, including the ENTIRE STARTING LINEUP of the 1940 and 1941 editions to the war. It truly was an unparalleled sacrifice.

I first learned of the Golden Bobcats in “The World War II Quiz and Fact Book,” a trivia volume that I picked up in a discount bookstore on a family vacation when I was about 12 years old. I was startled to learn that an entire team lost its starting line-up to the war, but it wasn’t for another decade, after I had graduated from college, that I re-read that book and decided to research the story further. Unemployed and with nothing really to do with my time, I decided to drive to Montana and start digging. It was a fateful decision. Several days and several thousand miles later, I set foot on the campus of Montana State in Bozeman and not long after my arrival in the athletic offices, made the acquaintance of Rob Stark, a Montana State track coach whose father, Max, played on the teams in question. Stark set up an interview with his father, then 83, and I was off.

I soon had enough material for what I believed would be a great book on the subject, but getting publishers – even small university presses – to green-light the project was proving difficult. And then, one year later, ESPN called. The network was putting together a special “Outside the Lines” presentation on sports and World War II and wanted to feature the Montana State story. Since I was pretty much the world’s foremost expert on the strange subject, I signed on to help the show’s producers tell the story. I graciously permitted my research to be used as the foundation of the script and also helped tell the story as a “talking head.” It would be my first national television appearance.

The ESPN special aired in December 2001, but outside of that documentary, the story has received precious little national coverage. Which, in my opinion, is a travesty on par with the tragedy of the story itself. And it’s not as though I haven’t tried to tell the story from a written perspective – my specialty. In 2005, on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, I contacted editors in the sports department at USA Today, for whom I had written two previous long feature stories which were incredibly popular with national readers. The paper recognized the importance of the story – or so I thought – and agreed to run it in the fall, to coincide with football season. But soon, the piece was pushed back to a later pub date. And then another. In the end, the piece never ran. I was paid a “kill-fee” for my work, but the payment wasn’t the issue. I’d have done the story for nothing. I never received a solid explanation as to why space could not be found, but I do remember some of the other features that the paper ran instead. Not a single one of them could compare with the astonishing story I had told. In fact, one of the features that USA Today ran that fall was a lengthy article on athletes and other sports personalities who have gotten into the business of wine-making. I’m not kidding. It’s a damn shame that we’ve reached a point in this country where Peggy Fleming’s chardonnay or John Madden’s cabernet sauvignon is more important than an extraordinary untold tale of extreme wartime sacrifice, of men dying for their country.

Undeterred, I attempted to shop the story around to other publications for the following football season. Surprisingly, I was unsuccessful. Most editors were sympathetic, agreeing that it was a special story, but that they either had no budget for contributors or could not find room for it in their publications. Fair enough. But then there was the Washington Post. Interestingly enough, the story of the Golden Bobcats first appeared in that paper in the fall of 1945. I thought that literary symmetry, the proposition of reacquainting a national audience with this story via one of the country’s most venerable newspapers, would be a somewhat easy sell. I was wrong. Dead wrong. I successfully reached the Post’s executive sports editor, a cordial man who seemed to be sincerely interested in the story, but this editor referred me to the paper’s college sports editor. The latter, I was told, had the final say on out-of-house feature assignements. Long story short, I never spoke with this individual. In one of the most egregious displays of incompetence I’ve encountered in my career, this individual never answered any of my e-mails or voice-mails. Evidently, any notion of professional courtesy left the Post’s sports department when longtime sports editor George Solomon retired. In fact, I’m not only convinced that the Post of the Shirley Povich era would have bought the story, I’m sure that they would have beaten me to it. Hell, Povich would have done it himself. It’s hardly a surprise, I guess, that the paper, according to a new book by former Post staffer and award-winning sports columnist Dave Kindred, is hemorraging subscribers. I think people are quick to believe that one of the reasons for the demise of newspapers is the rise of electronic media. That’s definitely one of the reasons for the current state of affairs within the print world, but it’s not the only reason for the decline in readership. Personally, I believe that the quality of writing has dropped precipitously at the nation’s major papers. There are few truly great writers working in the business and thus, by extension, far fewer interesting stories – especially of the feature variety – for readers to become engrossed in. Sadly, this is attributable to the folks in positions of power and leadership at our nation’s newspapers and magazines, namely, publishers and department editors. As for the latter, many of these individuals are editors in name only; an overwhelming majority are beancounters and green eyeshades who care and know more about stable bottom lines than attractive bylines. This is also a natural byproduct of hiring constraints that these individuals must work under. While I believe that there are plenty of talented female scribes and writers with varying ethnic backgrounds, a frenzied effort to diversify the sports mastheads at the nation’s publications throughout the course of the past decade has effectively diluted, or weakened many sections. Translation: pure talent is no longer a major factor in the hiring process. But I digress; these are topics for another day, and likely another blog.

In any event, since it certainly seems as though this particular piece will likely never be published via conventional media, I’ve decided to take it out of the vault and post it on my blog. I hope you enjoy it – and, as Veterans’ Day approaches, take the time to reflect on the sacrifices made by one little-known, yet nevertheless legendary team of All-Americans many seasons ago.

BY JOHN D. LUKACS

The late Max Stark was some storyteller. The legendary Montana State athlete told tales of games and days gone by, of shaking hands with Pop Warner and Amos Alonzo Stagg and even of a job at Lockheed where he helped assemble a special airplane for “a young female aviator named Earhart.” Yes, that Earhart.

Yet the story Stark treasured most was the one about his teammates. The virtually unknown, uniquely tragic tale of a whole football team, a star-crossed starting lineup, that went off to war and did not return.

More than sixty years ago, stunned Americans learned the details of one of the most extraordinary tragedies in sports history: 14 Montana State players spanning the classes of 1935 through 1944 were killed during World War II, a supreme sacrifice that far surpassed that of any other school. Of the more than 400 institutions whose football alumni represented America during World War II on battlefields from Bataan to Berlin, West Point and Annapolis naturally incurred the most total casualties, but only Georgia Tech’s 1939 Southeastern Conference championship squad, which lost nine players and one assistant coach, closely rivaled Montana State’s supreme sacrifice. As for other notable schools, Notre Dame lost nine total football alumni from its graduating classes of 1925 to 1945. Nebraska, another school with a much larger student body and well-known football program, sacrificed six players to the conflict. Brigham Young, a Western rival that frequently appeared on the Bobcats’ schedule, lost one player to the war.

But the most astonishing aspect of this story is that during the 1940 and 1941 seasons, 11 were full or part-time starters on the Montana State varsity.

Stark passed away at age 86 in 2003. Cradling his figurative lateral – responsibility for carrying on the legend – is Bill Zupan, 86, a standout sophomore halfback in 1941 who is believed to be the last surviving player from the school’s last pre-war squads. But because of Montana State head coach Mike Kramer, the story will not end with Zupan.

At Kramer’s invitation last fall, Zupan, a lieutenant in General George S. Patton’s Third Army during the war, delivered the game ball to midfield before the kickoff of Montana State’s Big Sky Conference tilt with Sacramento State and watched the ‘Cats 37-16 win over the Hornets from the Bobcat Stadium pressbox. During a Friday reception, Zupan regaled Kramer’s 17 seniors with gridiron and, most importantly, battlefield tales. “The kids really went for that,” said Zupan.

So did Kramer. For the sixth-year Montana State coach, a self-described “World War II enthusiast” who spends his summer vacations touring battle sites such as the Normandy beachhead, the opportunity to bridge Montana State’s football past with its future and to honor the men whose incredible story he first heard while coaching Montana high school football during the late 1970s could not be ignored.

“To come out of the old west and play college football and not give a second thought about helping our country,” said Kramer, “…there has never been as dedicated a team to our nation’s need.”

Kramer’s sentiments echo those of famed sportscaster Bill Stern, who named the fallen Bobcats his “All-American Team” of 1944. By late 1945, the names of Montana State’s highly-decorated heroes were lionized in newspapers across the country and were read into the Congressional Record by legislators.

The legend, however, was destined to fade because Bozeman, Montana remains only a small dot on the yellowed map of college football lore. Nestled in the scenic Gallatin Valley, 200 miles west of Little Bighorn Battlefield, Montana State University can boast of gridiron alums Jan Stenerud, Joe Tiller and Dennis Erickson and its trophy case contains three post-war Division I-AA national titles, but the school enjoyed only seven winning seasons from 1918 through 1941. Back then, the average Bobcat team was always more Custer than Camp, a Seventh Cavalry in shoulder pads regularly engaging deeper opponents in gritty, gridiron last stands.

The squads of 1940 and 1941 were no exception. Then-Montana State College – a land-grant institution where participation in R.O.T.C. was mandatory and most of the players were from farming, ranching and mining families who had weathered the Depression on America’s frontier – suited up only 33 players in a season-opening victory over Western State on September 21, 1940. Service call-ups, injuries and the harvest shaved coach Schubert Dyche’s roster weekly. Predictably, games with squads such as San Jose State and Drake, sometimes played with only 15 players, concluded with disastrous results.

The 1940 Bobcats clawed their way to a 4-4 finish, but with the winds of war swirling through Big Sky Country, it was difficult for the 1941 squad to focus on football. On November 26th, four days after a 39-0 loss to the University of Idaho concluded a dismal 1-4-2 campaign, a secret Imperial Japanese naval task force set sail for Pearl Harbor.

“My college years were carefree, the best time of my life,” recalled Zupan. “Then away she goes.”

Because of the manpower shortage, only schools that hosted large military training programs would field competitive teams. Starting in 1942-43, schools such as Michigan State, Oregon State, Syracuse, Tennessee and Wyoming dismantled their programs for anywhere from one season to the duration of the war. With a skeletal enrollment, Montana State decided in 1942 to suspend football, but most of the Bobcats had long before exchanged their pads and playbooks for khakis and commissions.

Stark, an agricultural education major and National Guardsman, received a deferment and was thus perhaps spared the fate of his teammates. He never forgot the last time he saw his best friend, guard Bernard Cluzen, and heard Cluzen’s sobering premonition.

“He told me that he didn’t think he was coming back, and wanted to say goodbye,” said Stark. “…I never saw him again.”

“A lot of other football players from other college teams deserted the gridiron and went to war,” noted Bill Stern, “but in the case of the eleven players from Montana State College, a strange and grim story began to take shape. A fatal cycle of death.”

A strange and grim story, indeed. Stateside airplane accidents claimed Lieutenant/end Dana Bradford on March 11, 1942, as well as halfbacks Lt. Wendell Scabad and Captain Al Zupan – a mid-1930s star and Bill Zupan’s older brother – on April 12 and October 28, 1943, respectively.

A commendation praising Captain Jack Burke arrived at 752nd Tank Battalion headquarters in Tunisia in late January 1944, but the author – General Dwight D. Eisenhower – was unaware that the all-Rocky Mountain Conference tackle had died of unknown causes weeks earlier.

Lieutenant/end John Hall, the jocular, red-haired skipper of a B-24 bomber, died in a crash over Halesworth, England on May 29, 1944.

Marine Lieutenant Newell Berg, wounded on Tarawa in 1943, was personally decorated for his bravery by Admiral Chester Nimitz. The all-conference guard was killed on Saipan on June 19, 1944.

German machine gun bullets snuffed the life of Captain/tackle Joe McGeever – a paratrooper in the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team – near Sospel, France on September 11, 1944.

Major Bernard Cluzen, a Marine Corps fighter pilot, was last seen on October 8, 1944, after his F4U Corsair disappeared over Jaluit Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

A descendant of John Paul Jones, Lieutenant/halfback Orin Beller had just begun to fight to liberate Europe when he was mortally wounded leading a platoon near Blain, France on November 13, 1944.

Captain William Coey, halfback, ‘35, never returned from a reconnaissance mission to Marcus Island on November 28, 1944.

Lieutenant/quarterback Johnny Phelan, wearer of the Distinguished Flying Cross, died when his P-47 Thunderbolt was shot down on December 29, 1944 near Massa, Italy.

Late 1930s halfback Rick Roman, Major, U.S. Army, was killed in France on February 15, 1945.

One month later, Lieutenant Karl Fye of the 63rd Infantry Division, a center from Butte and Bill Zupan’s best friend, was killed in a firefight near Bliesransbach, Germany.

By summer 1945, Lt. Alton Zempel “alone had escaped the Reaper,” noted Stern. But the center perished in a crash on July 7th.

“As students of Montana State College yell for their Golden Bobcat football team to roar on to victory when the sport is resumed, there will be lumps in their throats,” commented The Washington Post’s Frank Whitney in 1945. “…No college football team has been as hard hit by World War II as Montana State.”

Montana State would not field a squad in 1945, but new coach Clyde Carpenter would have a healthy roster of 71 battle-hardened veterans and talented freshmen at his disposal in 1946. And that team would have a powerful rallying cry.

Playing for the “Golden Ghosts,” the Bobcats won a conference championship and a trip to San Diego to play the University of New Mexico in the inaugural Harbor Bowl. Despite all that the school had endured, the feat received little national fanfare.

“We were from Montana, we went to the front lines,” explained Zupan, the only pre-war letterman to suit up in 1946. “(Other teams and players) got the front pages.”

Nevertheless, the Bobcats enjoyed the school’s first bowl game, a 13-13 tie played before 25,000 fans at Balboa Stadium on New Year’s Day, 1947.

“Everybody was pretty much happy just to be playing football,” remembered quarterback Gene Bourdet, later Montana State’s athletic director from 1958 to 1970. “It was a lot of fun after being at war.”

At halftime of Montana State’s home game against Wichita State on October 1, 1960, the Montana Sports Hall of Fame presented the school with a bronze plaque engraved with the names of the 14 fallen Bobcats. The public address system then crackled to life with Bill Stern’s voice – a recording of his 1944 broadcast.

After hearing Stern’s emotional words, one can understand why this tale captured the hearts and imaginations of a nation sixty years ago.

Why, en route to his office each morning in the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse, Kramer stops in the concourse to read and touch the plaque.

And why Bill Zupan will continue to pass on the story of his and his teammates’ sacrifices to a new den of Bobcats.

“On that Montana State team were no nationally famous football stars…none of them very well known outside of Montana,” concluded Stern. “They were just typical American boys.”

And, though perhaps not in the traditional football sense, All-Americans.