Sanders said the task of organizing the game fell to him because of his role as the division's recreation officer. He turned to Bertelli to help.

Sanders, who played at Louisiana Tech while enrolled in a V-12 training program in 1943 and '44, said he, Bertelli and the special services staff were gung-ho about the game. They traded with officers on Navy ships for equipment. Goal posts and bleachers, cobbled together from wood scraps, were built on Atomic Athletic Field No. 2, one of two recreation areas cleared of debris.

While a squad of Marines handled tasks from public relations to printing game programs, Bertelli and Osmanski were appointed as team captains, Sanders recalled in an e-mail message, because they were the two most prominent players and "we thought it would be great for publicity."

Osmanski stocked his lineup with players from Temple, Northwest Louisiana, Michigan State and the University of Washington, while Bertelli, with Sanders later joining his backfield, found players from Duquesne, U.C.L.A., Colorado State and Texas Tech to help employ his planned vertical passing game. Marines with high school playing experience rounded out both rosters.

Sanders doesn't recall who christened the game the Atom Bowl -- he said it might have been Hunt or Hunt's chief aide -- but there were no elaborate dinners, news conferences or other functions along the lines of the New Year's Day bowls it was modeled after.

In the days leading up to the game, though, Sanders organized another morale-boosting function: a Christmas program featuring a Japanese children's choir. Battle-hardened veterans of Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan and Okinawa were initially skeptical, Sanders said, but, in the end, "sat there and they cried and they just really found that all Japanese weren't bad that night." "People felt good and walked out, talking, arms around each other," he said.

When game day arrived, it was bitterly cold, with snow flurries swirling across the makeshift stadium. Still, a capacity crowd of more than 2,000 Marines, including Hunt, crammed into the bleachers, according to newspaper reports at the time and the 1992 book "The Old Core" by John A. Gunn. The division band belted out a choppy rendition of "On, Wisconsin!"