If he did, he would kind of almost make fun of it. These men were brothers. The Navy felt that football - this - I'm not making this up. By the middle of March, they've shipped out from Guadalcanal on their way to Okinawa. [36], On 16 August 1942, FC Start beat Rukh scoring 80. BISSINGER: Oh, yeah, they were - my father was 19. And four or five Ukrainian players did die within six months of the game, according to various accounts. You're going south. So they were all known. This helps explain why Goncharenko gave conflicting versions through the years. And so the Marines went south into chaos and hell and blood and death. ", Without giving any concrete sources Dougan's docufiction which invented dialogues repeats the Soviet version of an SS-officer threatening the Start players (p.178). The exclusion of the FA Cup in these years saw the creation of the Football League War Cup and it was a friendly championship. I understand that. Which Country Would Have Won the Lost 1942 FIFA World Cup? Dougan, the Scottish author, said he believed the Start players were killed deliberately. We are patriots for our country and our team. BISSINGER: And I said, Jesus, that's my dad. And then, how long would the bombardment be? And he was a wonderful guy, Dave Mears, who died about six months later. You know, if you flunked a course, you were out. [44] Pavlo Komarov, Mikhail Putistin and Fedor Tyutchev worked as electricians outside the camp. The truth remains elusive. You tell us in the book that your father was actually a marine who served at Okinawa. And I could never - Dave, I could never figure out - and I thought about this - why were the Army teams of 1944 and '45 their best in history and one of the best in the history of college football? Im pretty certain there would have been a warning, that they had had their fun.. I mean, when I was doing the book, I spoke to a Marine veteran who was crying 75 years later. And then he went to the New York Giants. You write that the Navy hated the Army. We didnt want to lose., He also said that a Gestapo officer visited the team before the match, introduced himself as the referee and told the players they should raise their right arms and make the Nazi salute on the field in a pregame greeting. The Marine would - what they would do is they would find newspaper reporters, and they would say, do you want to join the Marines and be a correspondent? WWI Christmas Truce football match: Fact or fiction? | CNN And he was a rifleman, so he was on the line. So if anyone would've been at that game, it would have been my dad. But he was an Army guy. Still others seem unconcerned with the truth. The Army hated the Navy. That's what it was about. So you had to draft roughly 20 or 21 million people to get to 12 million. [12][34] This photograph was never published during Soviet times. The film follows a former NFL player (Burt Reynolds) recruiting the group of prisoners and playing football against their guards. His new book is The Mosquito Bowl. And, you know, they called it Death Valley. Jer Longman reported from Kiev, Ukraine. But at the beginning, it was two hours. India beat Kuwait 5-4 on the penalties after it was 1-1 at the end of extra time in Bengaluru. And they both - it just amplified the hate between the two. We're going to take another break here. He became the director of the stadium in Karaganda in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan. Trusevich found a job in the Bakery No. Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce win celebrity golf match against Steph But when they would see that flame of fire, I'll be honest, they would come out of the hill and surrender and often were blown away because it was called horse collaring. The Germans controlled the Ukrainian police, who took part in the hunt for Bolsheviks and Jews. DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: My guest, Buzz Bissinger, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who's best known for "Friday Night Lights," his. The commission was not able to find any connections between the game and the execution of people who participated in it, nor any person responsible for the executions being still alive. He said, look, guys. And they called it Death Valley 'cause there's only one way to get them, and that's to go to them. It's about playing through pain and, you know, all the other cliches that we associate with war. DAVIES: And those Navy ships that were just anchored there BISSINGER: Well, in Okinawa, they - not only were they sitting ducks, you had the kamikaze. Not one document can prove any of these things, said Kirill Boyko, manager of the Dynamo fan club. But the Japanese were brilliant strategically. You know, politicians would go to Roosevelt and saying, hey; you know, can we make doctors exempt? KIEV, Ukraine There are few striking features about Start Stadium except its disrepair. BISSINGER: That may be the worst part of war. Fear of being seen as Nazi collaborators. I figured they would all be gone - because you had this three-year exemption, and they recruited like crazy. They built goal posts. You know, it was not dropped from the air like it was in Vietnam, but it was fired from flamethrowers that were handheld or more powerful ones that were mounted on tanks. I saw their transcripts. BISSINGER: You know, I would ask - you could tell he - he did mention once - so I asked him once. Who won? BISSINGER: Vomit travels downhill. And then the word comes in, no, you're going south. I think about it all the time. When I did the book proposal, I finally said, I might as well look up his records, see who he was and what he did there. [63] After beating Rukh 8 to 0, all players were either executed or sent to concentration camp, so no one survived. That's how it goes, guys. And the Marines hated everybody else. And it took eight days to secure Sugar Loaf Hill. This is when an SS officer entered the locker room and complimented the skill of the Start players. There are a number of possible reasons given for their arrest: They may have irritated a new occupation regime in Kiev and undermined the idea of German superiority by winning all their matches. He made the Marines into heroes. Well, then I realized that their families had kept everything. You write in the book that this draft was not exactly fairly administered or BISSINGER: No. [21], The first genuine historical studies of the "Death Match" confirmed the reports of the eyewitnesses. A monument honoring F.C. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. [11], In 1965, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR awarded posthumously the Medal "For Courage" to these four Dynamo players murdered by the Germans . That has hardly kept fact from becoming embroidered with legend. A version of this article appears in print on, World War II Soccer Match Echoes Through Time, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/sports/soccer/a-soccer-match-in-ukraine-during-world-war-ii-echoes-through-time.html. I mean, pro football was basically for convicted felons. Was this a friendly rivalry, or was it a blood feud or something in between? But I remember my mother telling a story. We had it on 9/11. And there was no easy solution. They were up north. [10], Seven Start matches are documented for June and July 1942: against the Ukrainian teams Rukh and Sport, three Hungarian military teams, a team of the German artillery and the German railway team RSG. Were football players sought after by the Marines? So that put me over the top. The Kyiv city team Start (Cyrillic: ), which represented the city's Bread Factory No.1, played several football games in World War II. The final score was 5-3. So I really debated. He hated firearms. Former Ukrainian policeman Timofeyev was sentenced to five years in the Gulag for collaborating with the Germans. 1942 FIFA World Cup - Topend Sports One of the interesting little descriptions here is what it was like to be on a troop carrier. But, you know, it's still limited because the Japanese got very smart. The authoritative record of NPRs programming is the audio record. That was actually bigger than pro football at the time, wasn't it? I'm there as events are unfolding because I think it's a great way for me to write to be visceral, to write cinematically because I'm present. They're mounted on tanks. But by June 1942, a kind of soccer tournament was apparently organized, featuring two Ukrainian teams and garrisons representing Germany, Hungary and Romania. In the film, Russian communists are fighting against the German occupiers. I don't think any of them really knew what the war was about, really. (Reading) The Army could not wait to get its hands on the Marine budget and be done with all that Semper Fi swagger, hot dog BS, how the next time they bathed would be the first, and that screwy tilt in their eyes as though they hated everyone except themselves and didn't much like themselves either. But, you know, vomit this, vomit that - it was awful. One eyewitness account in Dougans book said that a Ukrainian player, Alexei Klimenko, dribbled through the Germans near the end, then kicked the ball upfield rather than scoring in a final act of humiliating the occupiers. Two days later, on 18 August, the Gestapo arrested six of the Start players in the bakery and two days later two others were arrested.[37]. Hynda found information about 150 matches and documented the results of 111 among them: the Ukrainians won 60 matches and lost 36 matches, 15 were draws.[24]. They had programs. And, you know, he was trying to get his men down the hill and, you know, was shot in the head. Maybe this sounds weird to me - it was kind of a love story, both uplifting and tragic as love often is. The film has been remade three times, including for the 2001 British film Mean Machine, starring Vinnie Jones, the 2005 film remake, The Longest Yard starring Adam Sandler, and as the 2015 Egyptian film Captain Masr. The Real Story of the Christmas Truce - Imperial War Museums They'd certainly never been there. And then bit by bit, we realized that they were dug in, and they would have to be attacked. Where were they? That's the least - they deserve to be remembered. The exact number of victims was given: four Dynamo players were murdered by the Germans the goalkeeper Nikolai Trusevich, an ethnic Russian, defender Olexi Klimenko and striker Ivan Kuzmenko, who together had played on the vice champion team of 1936,[10] as well as midfielder Mikola Korotkykh, who had left Dynamo in 1939. This is a piece of cake. The players are shirtless, holding hands, boldly resistant. We are speaking with Buzz Bissinger. Goncharenko gave a similar account of an ordinary match to a Ukrainian newspaper in 1996. Guys lost a lot of money. I think the odds are just way too long.. For the NFL, late June is the time for no competition. Here's Dave to introduce it. You served with duty. The Germans must have by then regretted the rematch, Dougan said. This was in contrast to 1914, when professional football had continued during the first year of war. It was such a celebrated event within the military it was broadcast on the Armed Forces Radio Service. We got a lot of good young players. DAVIES: We are speaking with Buzz Bissinger. Because three months later, they were at Okinawa about to participate in something they couldn't have possibly imagined. DAVIES: Let me reintroduce you. He said, I don't know. You could go from one mountain or one hill to the other. Was there ever in WW2 a football match between the Nazis and - Quora They're on the same side in the war. And we're speaking with writer Buzz Bissinger. He was incredibly self-effacing. The initial success of the Wehrmacht allowed it to capture the city from the Red Army. We're going to go back to Guam and party and cases of beer. And on and on and on. Language links are at the top of the page across from the title. It was the Ukrainian players who became the more aggressive team as the match progressed, she said. [53][54] Both cases were never mentioned in Soviet publications. Oh, man, that's cool. Dave Davies has today's interview. During the Great Purge in 1938, Piontkovsky, and one of the Dynamo's team creators, Barminsky were targeted, and eventually shot in 1941. Tkachenko, one of the three policemen in FC Start, had beaten up a German in Kyiv and therefore was arrested by the Gestapo. Some days later he offered a copy to former Lokomotiv player Volodymyr Balakin. [38][39] According to them, he had been very angry after Rukh's 80 defeat. And these men were brothers. And he said, no, I want to go in the officer reserve program. Peace for a day: How soccer brought a brief truce to World War I on Christmas Day 1914. But his report in the newspaper Izvestiya did not mention the football match. Both served in the Ukrainian police. An estimated 2,000 spectators, paying five rubles apiece, were said to have attended the rematch at Start Stadium, then known as Zenit Stadium. I think they were at his grandmother's and talk got to be about the war, and he had to leave. the red jerseys as symbol of the players communist spirit (p.137), the SS officer demanding the Nazi salutation from the Start players (p.164), the heavy armed German soldiers surrounding the playground with German shepherds(p.177-178), Trusevich praising the Soviet regime before his execution (p. The Start players listened, but ultimately decided to proceed with the match. "Byli i niebyli nasheva futbola". DAVIES: We can't discuss all of it, but give us an example of what they faced in one of these battles. Some believe the 1942 game was, or could have been, a death match. A key reason was fear, Dougan and others said. And it continued. Napalm sticks. The FIFA World Cup was originally planned to take place again in 1942, the previous event was four years earlier in France 1938. They said the Marines were there for one or two battles. Komarov, before World War II Dynamo's penalty specialist, left Kyiv with the Germans. After World War II Kordik declared to the NKVD that in reality he was Czech, not German. We got a guy named John McLaughry who played at Brown and the New York Giants. Can we make this exempt? It wasn't the reason that you pursued this story. BISSINGER: Well, the American force - I'm sure this is right - it was the largest number of ships ever assembled. Its like in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Dougan said. And it's my same - namesake. If you cant silence the story, then you have to tell it so that its going to get maximum political advantage.. I mean, think about that. Drama History Sport Inspired by true events from the spring of 1944 when the Nazis organized a football match between a team of camp inmates and an elite Nazi team on Adolf Hitler's birthday. And boasts and trash talk in 1944 about which regiment had the better talent led to a one-of-a-kind game played on a dirt-and-coral field on the island of Guadalcanal. Tours of the stadium and the monument are not burdened by debate. The postseason ran from May 30 until June 6, when the Sacramento Surge defeated the Orlando Thunder 21-17 in World Bowl '92 at Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Quebec, Canada . There's a bad day. DAVIES: We need to take a break here. Were they used here? It was broadcast on radio all over the Pacific. This is FRESH AIR. They also finished as runners-up in 1941 and 1939. 210). But - you know, so you get frustrated. They know that their job is to extract as high a price as they can from the Americans DAVIES: Try and hold them off. I think 18 were either drafted and would be drafted by the pros. It did turn out to be a nightmare because they had given the local people something to rally around, Dougan said. So the actual description of the game itself is short. His commanding officer went to the captain and said, don't make them do this. A World War I sculpture in Stoke-on-Trent, England, celebrates the Christmas Day truce, during which rival . They wanted to have a rematch. uniform and that he was turned in under duress by his sister. Brazil must be included in the discussion, too, but do keep in mind . But you know what? But they closed the case in 2005, saying they found a lack of any evidence that the Start players were purposely killed for defeating the Flakelf team on that late afternoon in 1942. Behind the tiny seating area, though, a sturdy column rises and supports a statue. A British soldier kicked a football onto the battlefield to begin a day, and a match,. ", The Death Match: Dynamo Kyiv vs. the Nazis, Hot summer of the forty second ( ), World War II Soccer Match Echoes Through Time, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Death_Match&oldid=1130462534, Military history of Ukraine during World War II, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles containing Ukrainian-language text, Articles containing Russian-language text, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0, Kyiv Radio broadcast an interview with former Dynamo player. It was - you know, saltwater showers, very little fresh water. The names of the German players are given in cyrillic letters on the poster: Harer, Danz, Schneider, Biskur, Scharf, Kaplan, Breuer, Arnold, Jannasch, Wunderlich, Hofmann. The facts say the match took place, but there was no death match as such, said Marina Shevchenko, a historian who works at Kievs National Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in the former Soviet Union. That's probably the most important strategic thing that I learned. So they were well-known. But the word that comes to mind is waste. We will sacrifice ourselves at any cost. [63] In the article the writer also describes that the Kyiv team was always threatened with execution, but played and won every single game including the game against "German" team Rukh. I still can't fathom it. BISSINGER: And the Japanese, they were obviously on shore on Okinawa. They're not used to waves. And that's what I wanted to get across. And there's been all sorts of speculation that Buckner really sort of wanted to marginalize the Marines because they wanted this to be an Army win. [26], But most of the former Dynamo players, among them the very popular goalkeeper Trusevich, did not want to play in Rukh, probably because they took Shvetsov for a collaborateur. The Japanese command post was several thousand feet deep below the ground. The football match during the 1914 Christmas truce has become one of the most iconic moments of the First World War. And they realize that there's actually three hills - there's Sugar Loaf, and there's two others. [51][52] His name was never mentioned in any Soviet publications. Training gets boring. They were on Guadalcanal. It seemed that war was inevitable. The latest film, called Match and made by Russians, was released before Euro 2012 and raised an outcry for portraying Ukrainians as Nazi sympathizers. With Kiev under Nazi occupation during World War . Today, Start Stadium hosts summer matches by amateur and semiprofessional teams, whose players do not always wait until the final whistle to fortify their fitness with beer and cigarettes. It was very, very successful. Survivors reported that the bodies were thrown into the mass graves of Babi Yar. Maybe some journalist - I mean, who the hell is going to know? He did not elaborate, but Dynamo was sponsored by the police. And then, the fact that it's Marines is, like, oh, Jesus, let's drop it. Sport is sport, Goncharenko said. DAVE DAVIES, BYLINE: My guest, Buzz Bissinger, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who's best known for "Friday Night Lights," his book about Texas high school football, which was a bestseller and was adapted into a movie and a TV series. But everyone should know the truth.. But these guys are Marines, you know? DAVIES: You know, the football game in the title, the Mosquito Bowl, is actually a very small part of the book, but you kind of use football and its role in some of these players' life is sort of an organizing principle here. Start played again on Aug. 16, trouncing another Ukrainian team, Rukh, 8-0. This is the 4th Regiment. There's two bad days. Did they BISSINGER: The ones I talked to were not. That's what we're about. His latest book focuses on a group of Marines who fought in the Pacific theater in World War II, many of whom had been college football stars before the war. In this version, Start drew inspiration from its goalkeeper being kicked in the head and made woozy, taking a 3-1 lead by halftime. DAVIES: You know, people who know something about World War II know that the battle of Okinawa was one of the bloodiest. (SOUNDBITE OF THE WESTERLIES' "FROM THE VERY FIRST TIME"), DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. [56] As Soviet authorities did not collaborate on the case, it was closed in March 1976. Start, went undefeated. Also in 1958, Piotr Severov and Naum Khalemsky published their novel The Last Duel (Posledni poyedinok).[5]. They were being decimated. And that was the big use of the kamikazes. [2] Thousands of inhabitants were deported to Germany for forced labour. These guys were in their early 20s. I didn't know what he did. [19] The German team played a normal game and were fair, nor did the referee attempt to manipulate the match. It was composed of Ukrainian bakery workers, most of whom had played or were to play for the powerful Kiev club Dynamo, which would later win 13 Soviet league championships. But I had to read a ton. We are loaded. DAVIES: You know, these guys who had been All-Americans and college football stars who were now, you know, Marines with other Marines - were they recognized? There were flaws in America. According to his son, he did not want to repeat the propaganda version.[12]. I mean, you - you know, you die in all sorts of ways. DAVIES: Right. They were underground. From the Polytechnic to the Death match, " - + ", . Andy Lehren reported from Kiev and New York. The title of Bissinger's latest book, "The Mosquito Bowl," also refers to a football game, but it's not really a sports story. This was the last time that I think they were allowed to be boys. So the idea of these two regiments filled with great football players playing against each other, throwing in front of 1,500 people and everything simulated like a real game, I said, I've got to get a piece of this because the upshot was - and it's just so tragic - of the 65 who were in that game, 15 were later killed. And I - this was the first time they were really used frequently in Okinawa. BISSINGER: I think in between. Interestingly, you know, the Marines are part of the Navy. He played offensive end and on defense. FC Start won all these matches, scoring 37 goals in total and conceding only 8. In a 1992 interview with a Kiev radio station, Goncharenko gave another version of the match, which is the most romanticized account. Bissinger writes about a group of young men who fought in the Pacific theater of World War II assigned to the 6th Marine Division. Georgi Kuzmin, a Ukrainian journalist who has covered soccer for more than 40 years, has tried to shed light on a mystery. And look. That's what they think. As the story goes, the owner of the bakery, also described as a bread factory, had been a big fan of Dynamo. The Longest Yard is a 1974 American sports comedy film directed by Robert Aldrich, written by Tracy Keenan Wynn and based on a story by producer Albert S. Ruddy. On 25 December 1914, almost one hundred British soldiers lost their lives in France and Flanders, with another 62 dying over the next 24 hours. BISSINGER: My father basically never, ever talked about it. India vs Kuwait, SAFF Championship Final: Gurpreet's save helps India Football and the Christmas Truce of 1914 - Football and the First World War According to the archives, some of the Start players said during the NKVD interrogation that they had been denounced to the Gestapo by Rukh trainer Georgi Shvetsov. So some Army units went in and kind of got chewed up because the Japanese were well dug in and well defended. Training began again - January, February. As you pointed out, a lot of guys were getting out of the draft. Christmas truce soccer matches during World War One - ESPN The Death Match - Wikipedia You know, you don't have to go in this thing. The Navy existed to sink other ships. So many, many lived through it. We outman them. And all sorts of epithets - you know, I won't repeat them, but, you know, we're saving your ass once again, and you're putting us into harm's way. While this particular triumph didn't occur on the gridiron, Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce's 3 & 2 victory over Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson in the eighth edition of The Match might has well . (SOUNDBITE OF TODD SICKAFOOSE'S "WHISTLE"). They knew who these guys were. I know it was broadcast on radio, but those tapes are long gone. And why, in his 1985 account, Goncharenko said that before Trusevich, the goalkeeper, was shot to death six and a half months after the match, his final words were, Long live Stalin, long live Soviet sport., According to Dougan, Goncharenko had been very scared.. Goncharenko said in 1985 that the Start players were a little nervous, but showered and went home. If you had to build an all-American, you know, if we went to our computer and said, I'm going to build an all-American football player, it would have been him. Not only were you sitting ducks, you're hoping that the kamikaze doesn't attack you. Did The WWI Christmas Truce Football Match Really Happen - HistoryExtra Prosecutors in Hamburg, Germany, investigated the episode. Some accounts say that a photograph was found of him in an N.K.V.D. [12][50], Putistin and Tyutchev fled from the camp in September 1943 when the Germans left Kyiv. The men who served, it was a great generation. And they argued. Only the first half of the match is documented: The Germans opened the score but Ivan Kuzmenko, and Makar Honcharenko scoring twice, made the score 31 at half time. A number of organizations have used the tale for educational purposes. [1] Prior to World War II, Fomin also played for Lokomotyv. We believe in legend.. And when you see pictures, it's amazing the Japanese just didn't say, all right, that's it; we're going home. And a lot of guy - that's how most guys got hurt because it blows up with infection because it's Guadalcanal, and it's hot.
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