"(GUNFIRE)" "(PLANE ENGINES ROAR)" "(GUNFIRE)" "(GUNFIRE)" "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "It was on one of my very early missions that I first knew I had..." "I had killed men." "We caught a group of Germans that were on a road in an area where there were no trees, and so there was no place for them... to... to run and hide." "And we caught them before they could really get off the roads and run toward the ditches." "(GUNFIRE)" "And I remember the impact it had on me when I could see my bullets just tearing into them, and... and, uh, we had so much firepower that the..." "the bodies would fly, uh, some yards, and, uh, as I... as I was doing this," "I was doing it knowing I had to do it, that it was my job." "This is what I'd been trained to do, and I dealt with it fine." "But when I got back home to the base in Normandy and landed..." "I got sick." "I had to think about what I had done." "Now, that didn't change my resolve for the next day." "I went out and did it again." "(GUNFIRE)" "And again and again and again." "The Allies were on the offensive now in western Europe as well as the Pacific." "But the enemy was making them pay dearly for every inch of territory they tried to take." "Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne, for whom flying had once seemed the carefree symbol of freedom and escape, would find himself confronting death daily in the skies over France." "While Ray Pittman, of Mobile, would witness the unimaginable on the Japanese-held island of Saipan." "MAN: "June 6, 1944, the Philippine Sea." ""At 6:30pm this evening" ""the announcement came over the loudspeaker," ""that the Allies landed in France." ""Everyone gave a big cheer when they heard this." ""I won 40 bucks from the boys because some time ago," ""I bet the invasion would come off about the middle of June."" "James A. Fahey." "NARRATOR:" "Seaman First Class James A. Fahey of Waltham, Massachusetts was the youngest of four orphaned children." "His brothers, John and Joe, had been in the navy at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked, and had been spared." "James had signed on the following year, assigned to the light cruiser 'Montpelier'." "Against navy regulations, he would record what happened every day he spent aboard in a little diary." "MAN: "It was a great feeling as I staggered up the gangway" ""to the ship with my sea bag in one hand" ""and the mattress cover loaded with blankets, mattresses, etc," ""over my shoulder." ""At last I have a home," ""and a warship at that."" "NARRATOR:" "Fahey went to sea in hopes of seeing action, and he saw plenty of it as a member of a gun crew." "The 'Montpelier' shot down Japanese planes and sank Japanese ships off Guadalcanal, bombarded Japanese defences at Munda, and survived an enemy bomb and two torpedo hits off Bougainville." "A week or so after hearing the news of D-day," "Fahey and the men of the 'Montpelier' prepared again for battle." "She was now a part of an 800-ship fleet, steaming toward the next American objective in the Pacific - the Marianas, a chain of volcanic islands from which the US B-29 Superfortress bombers could begin to attack the Japanese homeland." "The fleet's three most important targets in the Marianas were Guam, Tinian, and Saipan, where the marines would land first." "MAN: "June 13." ""In about 14 hours now, we will start bombarding Saipan." ""We are only about 1,200 miles from Tokyo." ""I guess I will go down and buy some candy." ""The candy has been our old stand-by" ""when we have nothing to eat" ""at battle stations, for long hours."" "NARRATOR:" "Saipan was unlike many of the tiny, flat coral atolls the marines had taken previously." "It was 14 miles long, featured all kinds of terrain and was defended by more than 30,000 Japanese troops." "It was also home to somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 Japanese civilians." "(ALARM BLARES)" "(BOSUN'S WHISTLE SHRILLS)" "The shelling of Saipan went on for two days." "Among the marines of the 4th Division waiting to go ashore was Corporal Alvy Ray Pittman of Mobile, Alabama." "He'd been working as a carpenter alongside his father when he decided to join the marines." "RAY PITTMAN:" "I'd made up my mind" "I want to get in the toughest outfit they had." "And I was afraid the war was going to get over before I got over there." "So, I joined the Marine Corps." "Course, they sent me to Parris Island for boot camp." "And I remember going in, all these guys standing out on the grass." "They said, "You'll be sorry." "You'll be sorry."" "NARRATOR:" "Ray Pittman was in the first wave, part of a 16-man demolition team, assigned to destroy enemy strong points wherever they were found, using explosives, grenades, and flamethrowers." "PITTMAN:" "You never think about getting hurt yourself." "You think about maybe some of your buddies are going to get hurt." "And you wonder who it's going to be." "I mean, I, I really didn't ever think about getting hurt myself." "Of course, when you, when you... slugs start bouncing off your amtrack going in, you know it could happen." "NARRATOR:" "The naval bombardment had failed." "Concentrated Japanese mortar and artillery fire rained down among the amtracks and on the men fighting for a toehold on the beach." "All four commanders of the assault battalions were hit within minutes." "By evening, 20,000 marines had made it ashore, but they could go no further." "The Japanese planned to keep the Americans pinned down until their own fleet could steam in from the Philippines and destroy them." "Despite the rain of shells, the marines began slowly to fight their way off the beach." "PITTMAN:" "I know I was scared a lot and losing a lot of friends really hurts you." "It's, it's really hard for me to describe, really, just how I felt the whole time 'cause there's something happening every day and you're so tired and you can't lift your eyelids hardly." "And something happens, you get a call to blow a pillbox here, blow a pillbox there." "I mean, you wake up and go and do your job." "But it's hard for me to tell just how bad it was - how I felt." "NARRATOR:" "The battle for Saipan had just begun." "MAN: "June 23, 1944." ""This Norman countryside" ""looks exactly like the rich, gentle land" ""of eastern Pennsylvania." ""It is too wonderfully beautiful to be the scene of war." "(BIRDS CHIRP)" ""Some day, I would like to cover a war in a country" ""that is as ugly as war itself."" "Ernie Pyle." "NARRATOR:" "Normandy's beauty was deceptive." "Allied planners had failed to understand the landscape through which their men would have to fight before they could begin to drive the enemy out of France." "(GUNFIRE)" "Normandy was quilted with small, irregularly shaped fields, walled from one another by hedgerows, earthen ramparts four feet high, topped with dense hedges whose tangled roots turned them into natural fortifications and made it impossible to see into" "from one field to the next." "In one area that measured just two miles by four, there were 4,000 such fields." "Here and there, ancient sunken wagon tracks twisted between the hedgerows, ideal for ambushes and often concealed from air attack by overarching trees." "The Germans took full advantage of all of it." "American Sherman tanks could not break through the hedgerows, and when they tried to roll over them, exposed their unprotected underbellies to deadly fire." "(GUNFIRE)" "Each field became what the newspaperman Ernie Pyle called" ""a separate little war", fought mostly by companies of riflemen." "DWAIN LUCE:" "The Germans were good troops." "They did not give up ground easily, there or any other place I saw them." "You had to respect them for the fact they were excellent troops." "(Chuckles) They were too damn good, and... or they wouldn't have caused us so much trouble." "(EXPLOSION)" "NARRATOR:" "Progress was measured in yards." "Now the pace was far slower than the Allied commanders had anticipated, and the cost in dead and wounded was far higher." "Unarmed C-47 s, cargo planes stripped down so that as many litters as possible could be lifted aboard, carried the worst hit to hospitals in England, just 20 minutes away then turned around and came back for more." "Emily Lewis was one of hundreds of nurses who did all they could for the wounded." "LEWIS:" "All those wounded soldiers, they were scared to death." "Really frightened half out of their minds." "I hugged 'em, I was teary-eyed." "It makes me cry to think of it." "(GROANS)" "Got 'em on my plane, talked to them." "Some of them were... so unnerved... that I-I just had to put my arms around them and hold 'em." "I was 23, and they were 22, 21, 24, 18, you know." "It was... it was just... terrible." "But it had to be done, you know?" "NARRATOR:" "By July 1, hundreds of thousands of troops were onshore." "The Cotentin Peninsula and the port of Cherbourg had been taken, and the beachhead stretched for some 70 miles." "But after three weeks of combat, it remained, at most, 20 miles deep." "The plan to liberate France was stalled." "General Bradley feared that unless something drastic were done, the Allies would face the same sort of ghastly stalemate they had endured during the First World War." "To avoid disaster, his men had to get out of the hedgerows and find the kind of wide-open countryside" "American armour needed to make real progress." "The region just beyond the town of St-Lô was what Bradley had in mind." "It was just 15 miles away but to his exhausted men, it seemed as distant as their ultimate target " "Germany." "(PIANO PLAYS 'IF I COULD BE WITH YOU (ONE HOUR TONIGHT)')" "SONG: # If I could be with you one hour tonight" "# If I were free to do the things I might" "# I want you to know that I wouldn't go" "# Till I told you, honey, that I love you so" "# If I could be with you, I'd love you long" "# If I could be with you, I'd love you strong" "# I'm telling you, too, I'd be anything but blue" "# If I could be with you for an hour" "# If I could be with you... #" "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "During the war, you just kept thinking that life cannot begin until this is over." "You just had to see again all the boys that you had known and been fond of, and know they were home safely." "Especially for me." "I was not married, so I was still anticipating my life ahead of me, but I didn't know who it would be spent with." "But I felt, if I could just get my brother Sidney back home again..." "In fact, I talked to one of my old boyfriends two years ago, and I said, "Why didn't you propose to me?"" "He said, "You wouldn't have listened to me." ""Till you got Sidney home," ""you wouldn't have listened to anybody."" "And he said, "By the time that occurred," ""I had lost all my nerve."" "# I'd be anything but blue" "# If I could be with you for one hour" "# If I could be with you. #" "(ALARM BLARES)" "MAN: "Sunday, June 18, off Saipan." ""All hands got up at 4:45am." ""I had a swell sleep last night" ""even if it was only for about six hours." ""We had church services topside this morning," ""even though we are so close to Japan," ""and the Jap fleet might be close by."" "James A. Fahey." "NARRATOR:" "The Japanese fleet was close by." "Vice-Admiral Jizaburo Ozawa had formulated a new plan to destroy both the American land forces, still struggling their way inland on Saipan, and the American fleet offshore." "He would send waves of carrier-based warplanes against the fleet, then reinforce the Japanese garrison on the island." ""The fate of our empire rests on this one battle," he said." ""Everyone must give all he has."" "(ALARM BLARES)" "But the Americans had intercepted coded messages, and knew they were coming." "Hundreds of planes took off to engage the Japanese." "The Battle of the Philippine Sea would be the greatest carrier battle of the Pacific War, nearly four times as big as Midway." "It was clear the Americans now had an edge." "Their pilots were better trained than the enemy's." "Their planes were better, too." "And they had twice as many of them." "Maurice Bell, who had been working in a Mobile shipyard when he was drafted, and joined the navy rather than the army because, he said, he didn't want to sleep in a hole in the ground, was serving as a gunner" "aboard the heavy cruiser USS 'Indianapolis', now the flagship of the 5th Fleet." "MAURICE BELL:" "I was sitting up there with the binoculars and, all of a sudden, I saw a torpedo plane diving in on the ship right behind us." "And, just as he launched his torpedoes, or was ready to launch them, they hit him with fire." "They was firing at him." "And the plane tumbled over and crashed." "Five seconds behind him was another one." "They hit him and he crashed." "About five more seconds, there's a third one come in, and they hit him, and it throwed that plane in a twist, and the torpedoes fell end over end, and hit the water, and the plane crashed." "I was watching all that with my binoculars." "NARRATOR:" "The Americans lost 29 planes that day, but they shot down at least 273." "American submarines sank two Japanese carriers, as well." "Those who took part in the one-sided contest remembered it as the 'Great Marianas Turkey Shoot'." "(GUNFIRE)" "MAN: "Today is the Fourth of July" ""and a good way to celebrate it is by killing Japs." ""We fired star shells all last night and all morning" ""until daylight today." ""It rained for a while this morning." ""Yesterday and today our artillery on the beach" ""gave the Japs an awful pounding." ""The press news said that in the first couple of weeks" ""of fighting on Saipan over 6,500 Japs were killed." ""There is a very strong odour from the beach." ""It smells like burnt flesh."" "PITTMAN:" "Well, your Japanese soldier is probably the toughest soldier that fought in World War II other than the marines." "And I mean, they were tough." "And you surround one, he's going to keep fighting." "In Germany, you surround 50,000 Germans and they'd surrender." "Or Italians, they'd surrender." "But you surround one Japanese, he's going to keep fighting right on." "He's going to keep firing until you kill him." "And they had one thing in mind - it's killing you." "NARRATOR:" "The Japanese troops on Saipan, now without hope of rescue or reinforcement from their shattered fleet, were resolved to die rather than surrender." "American forces had cleared the airfield and begun a slow, agonising march toward the north, trying to keep from killing Japanese civilians while flushing Japanese troops from their hiding places." "(GUNSHOT)" "Again and again, Japanese soldiers threw themselves at the American guns, shouting "Banzai!"" "Apparently willing, even eager, to die for the Emperor." "PITTMAN:" "We'd hear the Japanese talking and drinking and clanking bottles and everything." "And we knew there was one coming." "But they'd come at us and, and, uh... we had machine guns set up doing crossfires every way." "They'd have to get through the crossfire before we started shooting, but then some of them would get through." "I had one that came at me with a bayonet and I shot him in the face and he fell in the foxhole with me, and bled all over my pants and the bayonet went down between my arm and my, my chest." "Nearly got me and him dead." "NARRATOR:" "Before dawn on July 7, the Japanese launched a final banzai charge." "3,000 men, some forced from their hospital beds and barely able to walk, many armed only with clubs and rocks and shovels, charged into the American lines." "Bulldozers buried all but a handful of them the next morning." "It was the largest banzai charge of the Pacific War." "SAM HYNES:" "We thought of the Japanese as... mysteriously unlike us." "We knew that they would fight to the death where, probably, we would have surrendered." "We began to learn, though I don't think we... gathered a lot of information about the prison camps, but we had some and we knew that they were capable of, of a cruelty and, and sadism in a way" "that we hoped our people weren't, though I've never been quite sure what Americans would do in the..." "exactly the same situation." "NARRATOR:" "On July 10, Saipan was officially declared 'secured'." "In almost four weeks of fighting, 16,525 Americans had been killed, wounded or reported missing, the costliest battle in the Pacific to date." "Among them were several black marines who had finally been permitted to fight." ""The Negro marines are no longer on trial,"" "the marine commandant said, "they are marines, period."" "Almost 30,000 Japanese soldiers were dead, as well." "In the final days of the battle, some 4,000 terrified Japanese civilians, mostly women and children, had fled to the island's northern tip, a high plateau called Marpi Point." "Their government had convinced many of them that it was their duty to kill themselves rather than fall into the hands of the cruel Americans - and the handful of Japanese soldiers who had survived were prepared to shoot them if they hesitated." "Some marines risked their lives to halt the madness," "Japanese American interpreters with bullhorns pleaded with civilians to give up." "But more than a thousand were either killed by Japanese troops or chose suicide." "PITTMAN:" "When we got down to the end of the island, they were jumping off the cliff at Marpi Point." "They thought we'd eat them." "They thought we'd kill them and eat them." "Stuff like that." "It's just the Japanese mentality - they don't want to get captured." "I never did go down to look at the bottom of the cliff, but it must have been a mess down there." "NARRATOR:" "A few Japanese soldiers decided to swim out to sea, rather than surrender." "PITTMAN:" "So we decided, well, they're going to die anyway, we might as well shoot them." "So we set up there shooting at them." "We'd hear the slugs hitting around them and sometimes somebody would hit one." "But it was a long shot, trying to hit their head." "MAN: "Sunday, July 16." ""It was a warm, sunny day" ""although it rained during church services." ""It was the first time I ever went to church" ""and saw dead bodies floating by." ""It is nothing to see men, women and children floating." ""There must be thousands of Japs in the waters near Saipan." ""The ships just run over them."" "NARRATOR:" "The Americans went on to take Tinian and then Guam, the first US possession to be recaptured." "The fall of the Marianas and the damage done to the Japanese fleet in the Philippine Sea forced Hideki Tojo to resign as the Japanese premier." "His successors - first a general, then an admiral, vowed to fight on." "The Japanese had succeeded at one thing - the willingness of their soldiers and civilians to die rather than surrender had made Allied planners painfully conscious of the bloodshed that would surely accompany the invasion of the Japanese homeland." "BARBARA PERKINS:" "During the war, it was hard to keep track of your loved ones." "Mail was very slow." "And even the news media, if you knew what-what company and troop and all that was in, those things weren't published in any detail at all as to pinpoint just where they were." "Well, you just never know." "We lived with that." "That was part of our part we had to play." "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." ""July 20, 1944." ""Somehow, the gossip grapevine" ""had heard that there was a telegram" ""coming through after 6:00pm last Friday" ""for Mr and Mrs Ray Lester of Magnolia." ""Ray Lester heard about it, and his heart was heavy." ""He started walking down the street." ""On the way he met Scotty Dewar, the depot agent." ""'Which one is it?" "' Asked Lester," ""because there were four boys to worry about in that family." ""After being told, he went sorrowfully home" ""to break the news to his wife." ""And it was a gracious gesture" ""that was made at the dance in Magnolia that night." ""When the crowd heard the news, the dance was halted immediately" ""out of respect to the memory of that fighting marine" ""who died on Saipan."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "FRANK SINATRA ON RADIO:" "Gentlemen of the armed forces, this is the 'Hoodlum from Hoboken'." "I'd like to sing a tune for you." "My name's Sinatra and I hope youse like it, hey." "(Sinatra sings) # Long ago and far away" "# I dreamed a dream one day" "# And now that dream" "# Is here beside me... #" "AANENSON:" "We would be, uh, sitting around our tent area in the apple orchard in Normandy and we would discuss what they would have to pay us to really do what we had just done that day." "We agreed first that we might do it for $1,000 a mission, but less than 10 days later - our losses had gone up heavily - we decided that we wouldn't consider doing it for less than $10,000 a mission." "And I think that it went off the radar screen in value before the end of July, because there's no way that you can be a mercenary enough, they could pay you enough, to do what we were doing on a volunteer basis." "(PLANE FLIES OVER)" "NARRATOR:" "In the weeks after D-day," "American pilots, including Quentin Aanenson, continued to fly their missions over the fields and hedgerows of Normandy every day, trying to focus on the help they were giving to the men on the ground, and to avoid thinking too hard" "about the losses in their own ranks." "NEWSREEL:" "Dashing to a hedgerow to clear Nazis out of another line of hedge across a meadow." "(EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE)" "The enemy position's blasted and the Germans occupying it have enough, so out comes the white flag of surrender, more prisoners taken in the drive to the important city of St-Lô." "As the infantry pushes forward, the way is cleared by the smashing power of tanks and heavy artillery." "NARRATOR:" "On July 18, St-Lô - or what was left of it after six weeks of Allied bombing - fell to the Americans." "General Bradley's forces had finally reached the line" "Allied planners had expected his men to reach just a few days after D-day," "And he was now ready to send his armour roaring through the German lines beyond the city." "But first, Allied warplanes were called in to blast an opening." "The operation was called Cobra." "The correspondent Ernie Pyle was down below, watching from a battered French farmhouse with officers from the 4th Infantry Division." "MAN: "The first planes" ""of the mass onslaught came over a little before 10:00am." ""They were the fighters and dive-bombers." ""We stood in the barnyard of a French farm and watched them" ""barrel nearly straight down out of the sky." ""And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears," ""a sound deep, all-encompassing," ""with no notes in it," ""just a gigantic, faraway surge of doom-like sound." ""It was the heavies," ""coming on with a terrible slowness" ""in flights of 12, three flights to a group" ""and in groups stretched out across the sky." ""I thought it would never end." ""And then the bombs came." ""It began up ahead as the crackle of popcorn" ""and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise" ""that seemed surely to destroy all the world around us."" "NARRATOR:" "The bombs continued falling for an hour and a half." "The bright day grew dark with smoke," "Pyle remembered, and the steady roar seemed to fill "all the space for noise on earth"." "Two days later, on July 27, the first army poured through the newly opened gap in the German lines, out into the countryside beyond the hedgerows." "For weeks, the Americans on the ground had felt fortunate to gain 1,000 yards a day." "Soon they would be covering up to 40 miles in the same amount of time." "The Germans were reeling." "On August 7, the Americans stopped a counterattack cold at Mortain, and after five days of battle, forced the Germans to retreat." "Then, on August 15, in the south of France," "American and Free French Forces landed, fanned out in all directions and began driving northward." "The following day, Hitler reluctantly agreed to pull his battered Seventh Army out of Normandy." "It began a desperate retreat toward Germany." "The Allies caught them near the town of Falaise." "For three days, the Allies poured fire into the fleeing men from the ground and from the air." "80,000 Germans ran the terrible gauntlet." "At least 10,000 died, so many that the pilots of the Allied spotter planes hundreds of feet above the battlefield were nauseated by the stench." "So many that after the shooting had stopped," "General Eisenhower remembered," ""it was literally possible" ""to walk for hundreds of yards at a time," ""stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh"." "AANENSON:" "I had caught a bunch of Germans in... in double tandem trucks, and they were just massed in there." "There was so much, uh, firing into that and I was the only one that was firing." "My wingman... his guns had been jammed, and, uh... the effect on me was that my right hand quit working and I was on the way home and I couldn't grip with that hand." "So I had to put my left hand over on top of the stick to maintain it and go and land with that." "When I'd have these nightmares in years after the war, many years after the war, if it was one relating to that mission or missions like that, when I'd get up in the morning, go out to the kitchen, Jackie would be there" "and she would have had the coffee made, and she could tell when I walked in that my right hand wasn't functioning right." "She'd pour a cup of coffee, not say a word." "She'd hand it to my left hand." "Never a word said." "We just went on." "NARRATOR:" "All across France, the Germans were in full retreat." "Since D-day, they had lost some 240,000 men another 200,000 had surrendered." "Allied casualties were terrible, too." "256,000 soldiers and airmen had been killed, wounded, captured, or reported as missing in action." "At least 19,000 French civilians had died as well." "Countless French villages had been pounded into dust." "But most of France was free." "On August 25, 1944, after four years of Nazi occupation Paris, the City of Light, was liberated." "MAN: "I, Ollie Stewart, of sound mind" ""and fairly sober character, do solemnly give my word" ""that I have never been kissed so much in all my life." ""Almost every woman I meet on the street stops" ""and kisses me on both cheeks." ""It is a beautiful custom."" "AANENSON:" "We were flying a mission near Paris and as I pulled off my strafing run and I turned back over the city and as I looked down, there were just thousands of people jamming the streets of the Champs Élysées" "and around the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe and I realised that I was seeing something that was basically the culmination of why we were there." "We are winning this war." "The good guys are going to come out ahead." "MAN ON RADIO:" "It's seven o'clock in the morning and we're steaming along the western coast of Peleliu Island." "In just about an hour and a half, the marines will hit the beaches there." "Before that, the warships of this task force, which have been pounding the island for three days, will give it a final, terrific softening up." "WOMAN:" "Everybody had a radio during the war." "No TVs." "And three times a day you got the national news, and three times a day you did not be far from that radio." "And, of course, my mother had about a four-by-four map." "I really don't know where she got it." "It was a map of all of Europe." "And she had a big, long rule stick, and that map hung right there and it covered that little wall where the, um, buffet is." "And when news time came, she followed all the battles with the rule stick on the map." "She would have been a great historian." "She would have been." "NARRATOR:" "Before the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941, most Americans could not have found Pearl Harbor on a map." "In the two and a half years that followed, they had had to learn a host of new names of the places their sons were fighting." "Kasserine Pass and Monte Cassino and Anzio." "Utah Beach and Omaha Beach." "Sainte-Mère-Église and Saint-Lô and the Falaise Gap." "And on the other side of the world, Guam and Bataán and Guadalcanal." "Midway and Saipan and the Philippine Sea." "Before the war could end, the citizens of Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California," "Luverne, Minnesota and Waterbury, Connecticut, and every other town in America, would be forced to learn still more names." "Arnhem and Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest." "The Vosges mountains and the Ardennes and Remagen," "Peleliu and Luzon and lwo Jima, and more." "And young men from those towns would learn lessons as old as war itself that generals make plans, plans go wrong, and soldiers die." "MAN: "To the noncombatants and those on the periphery of action," ""the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement." ""But to those who entered the meat grinder itself," ""the war was a netherworld of horror" ""from which escape seemed less and less likely" ""as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on."" "(FLAMES CRACKLE)" ""Time had no meaning." "Life had no meaning." ""The fierce struggle eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all."" "Eugene Sledge." "(EXPLOSION)" "The men coined names for the chaos in which they often found themselves and the ineptitude of some of the officers who sent them there, employing language they would never have used in front of their mothers or their wives back home." "'SNAFU' - 'situation normal, all fucked up'." "And 'FUBAR' - 'fucked up beyond all recognition'." "MAN:" "General Patton is a very wise person, despite his personal eccentricities." "He said a number of memorable things about war that only real soldiers know." "He said, "All plans last only until the time of the first shot."" "Then they're set aside." "Then you just have to go on sheer invention and guts and not running away and various other things that are never, never mentioned." "By September of 1944, the Allies seemed to be moving steadily toward victory in Europe." "On the eastern front, the Russians had taken parts of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, and inflicted 700,000 more casualties on the retreating Germans." "And in the 11 weeks since D-day," "American, British and Canadian forces had freed most of France and Belgium and parts of Holland and were arrayed along the 350-mile belt of concrete fortifications the Germans called the 'Westwall'." "Beyond it lay the heart of Germany itself." "Allied planners had not expected their forces to get that far for another eight months." "George Patton's Third Army had set the pace, covering 400 miles in less than 30 days, though he had outrun his supplies and was desperately short of fuel." "His armoured columns alone required some 600,000 gallons of gasoline every 50 miles." "On September 11, an armoured unit of the US First Army crossed the German frontier." ""Militarily", General Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff told the press," ""this war is over."" "Post exchanges were ordered to halt all holiday packages for the men on the European front." "Nearly everyone was certain the war would be over by Christmas." "There was no room in the supply trucks for winter clothing either." "Besides, the men wouldn't need it." "Meanwhile, the British had taken the important Belgian port of Antwerp, but no fuel or supplies could be landed there because the Germans still held the estuary that lay between the city and the North Sea." "Eisenhower ordered British General Bernard Montgomery to clear them out." "That would have taken weeks, and Montgomery proposed a daring alternative designed to speed the Allied advance into Germany " "Operation Market Garden." "First, American and British airborne troops would be dropped behind German lines to seize bridges along a 65-mile highway from Belgium, through Holland, to Arnhem." "Then the British Second Army would race along that highway, cross the Rhine at Arnhem, go around the northern end of the Westwall and drive into the Ruhr Valley, the centre of German industrial might." "For the risky plan to succeed, everything had to go perfectly and quickly." "Eisenhower thought the gamble was worth it." "If it did succeed, the war could end in weeks." ""I not only approved of Market Garden," he said later, "I insisted on it."" "On Sunday, September 17, 1,481 C-47 transports took off in broad daylight from 24 British airfields with 20,000 paratroopers on board." "Towed behind the transports were hundreds of CG-4A gliders carrying men and matériel." "Let's talk about the combat glider - the CG-4A." "An 85-foot wingspan." "It would carry a ton and a half - 3,000 pounds - plus the two pilots up front." "(DISTANT EXPLOSIONS)" "But they were flying coffins. (Laughs)" "There was no return." "So, the idea was to get your people down or get your load down, whatever it is, and then become an infantryman, which is what we became." "Harry Schmid, of Sacramento, had been studying accounting when he was drafted in 1942, and first planned to become a medic." "But then, he said, he didn't want to change bedpans for the whole war, and volunteered to become a pilot." "When his weak eyes kept him out of a fighter cockpit, he settled for flying a glider with the 82nd Airborne instead, and found himself part of Operation Market Garden." "Captain Dwain Luce, of Mobile, was also on his way to Holland aboard a glider." "The father of two small children, he had left his family's cannery business to join the 82nd Airborne when the war started, and had survived Sicily and Italy and 33 days of fighting in Normandy." "MAN:" "I got out over the North Sea there, and that pilot had a parachute on." "I told him, I said, "Look, you might as well take that parachute off" ""because you're not leaving here without me."" "And I said, "Now, you get your ass shot, who's going to land this thing?"" "He says, "You are."" "SCHMID:" "Too fast a speed with a CG-4A will kill you, because you're talking about a fabric airplane with nothing but little aluminum struts." "And these guys come in at 90 miles an hour and crash into something, and, boy, they just disintegrate." "In all my combat missions," "I never came in at more than 50 miles an hour." "I took the chance of getting hit by ground fire and flak, but I wanted to get my people down and get down on the ground." "MAN ON RADIO:" "This is Edward R. Murrow." "In just about 30 seconds now, these 19 men will walk out onto Dutch soil." "There he goes!" "Do you hear them shout?" "Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen." "(ENGINE ROARS OVERHEAD)" "There they go." "Every man out." "I can see their chutes going down now." "Every man clear, hanging there very gracefully, like nothing so much as khaki dolls hanging beneath a green lampshade." "The whole sky is filled with parachutes." "They're all going down so slowly." "It seems as though they should get to the ground much faster..." "Things went well at first." "Dutch citizens poured into the streets to greet the Americans." "The 82nd Airborne, including Harry Schmid and Dwain Luce, seized three bridges near Nijmegen, then dug in and waited for the British armour to race up from Belgium and relieve them." "The 101 st Airborne took four bridges near Eindhoven, and when the Germans blew up a fifth, managed to rebuild it overnight." "They too waited to be relieved." "But when the 10,000 men of the British 1 st Airborne came down seven miles from Arnhem, the Dutch crowds that turned out to greet them slowed their advance." "Only 500 of the soldiers managed to reach the all-important bridge across the Rhine." "Meanwhile, word of the Allied plan had fallen into enemy hands, and by the end of the day," "German panzers had surrounded the outnumbered British at Arnhem." "(GUNFIRE)" "Bad weather delayed airborne reinforcements for several days, and when a parachute brigade of Free Poles was finally dropped in it was shot to pieces." "The British armour that was meant to meet up with the paratroopers on the ground and then spearhead the advance into Germany soon found itself under attack from enemy artillery." "Smashed tanks and vehicles caused massive traffic jams that took hours to clear." "SCHMID:" "The idea of the whole mission, of course, was to control the bridges while Montgomery came up with his tanks." "Well, they shot him all up, and he didn't get there for seven days. (Chuckles)" "So we were in the front lines all that time." "We were not attacking the enemy, but we were defending perimeters." "This was not the way it was supposed to go." "Harry Schmid, Dwain Luce and the men of the 82nd Airborne found themselves struggling just to hold on, with no tanks and no heavy weapons." "SCHMID:" "And they had two ways of going after you." "They'd either do shells that exploded on the ground or they used air bursts." "(EXPLOSIONS)" "You worried about those air bursts, because they would... they would burst about 20 feet above you, and there was just shrapnel everywhere." "And just a little piece of shrapnel could hit you, you know, and you're gone." "LUCE:" "They had better weapons, in many cases, than we did." "You're talking about their 88s." "They were great weapons." "Very high velocity." "They were so damn fast that the bullet got there before the sound did." "It was "Zip, bang!" you know?" "Man, it just..." "It was a terrible weapon to..." "We all dreaded the 88s, I guess." "SCHMID:" "And when you're in a mission where you're behind enemy lines, you worry because nobody knows anything." "You don't know whether the Germans are coming or they aren't coming." "And that's probably the thing that mentally bothers you, is that you don't know what's going on." "As the Americans held their ground near Nijmegen and Eindhoven, the surrounded British at Arnhem were being slaughtered." "(GUNFIRE)" "Finally, after nine long days, Montgomery abandoned his plan, and ordered the survivors to withdraw by boat." "Market Garden had been the largest Allied airborne operation of the war and the most disastrous." "17,000 Britons and Canadians, Americans and Poles were killed or wounded or captured before the operation was abandoned more casualties than the Allies had suffered on D-day." "LUCE:" "You don't like to see what you see." "No." "You don't like to see what you see." "I mean, it's very disquieting to..." "have your friends... gone and some of them pretty terribly mauled and things." "And... but that's part of it." "War is not a pleasant activity." "And you kind of need to keep your sense of humour a little bit to get through it." "The Allies had won themselves a narrow 65-mile corridor across Holland, but the rest of the British and American troops, including Dwain Luce and Harry Schmid, had to stay where they were to hold it, battling the deepening cold as well as the relentless German shelling." "They would be left there for weeks." "LUCE:" "As a boy, I spent a good time in the woods, and I think my experiences with that helped me survive, and I think the little man upstairs had his hand on my shoulder." "And I got hit once, across the helmet." "And it didn't penetrate my helmet, but it'll make you change your underwear, if you have any." "But that's the only time I got hit." "No, it's... it's kind of like a bad dream, I guess." "Wouldn't want to do it again." "Nope." "Couldn't do it again, I don't guess." "It was clear now that the war in Europe would not end before winter." "(DRAMATIC ORCHESTRAL FANFARE PLAYS)" "MAN:" "We couldn't wait for the next war film to come out, because it was filled with heroism and everybody sacrificing for the war, and everybody who died died for a cause." "The biggest audience response came, like, from a movie 'Flying Tigers' with John Wayne." "And when he shot down Japanese planes and the Japanese pilot would hold his hands to his face and the blood would come out of his fingers, we would jump up and cheer because the good guys were winning." "(Speaks Japanese)" "(BIC YCLE BELL RINGS)" "WILSON:" "The big change that the war brought for me was I was a businessman at the age of 10." "I was a 'Bee' carrier managing my own money, managing my own route." "And what did I do with my first pay cheque?" "I went and bought a cardboard replica of a.30 calibre machine gun and went home and put it up in a tree in the backyard and made believe I was mowing down the enemy like that." "That was my contribution to the war effort." "And we all played war to a certain extent, but it's interesting the way we played war, because nobody ever died." "If you got shot, somebody came to your aid and fixed you up, and then you could rise up and shoot again." "In Waterbury, Connecticut, just before Pearl Harbor," "Miss Virginia Fleming had married Staff Sergeant John Soden, who had worked at the US Rubber Company in Naugatuck." "They had a daughter, born while Soden was in training, and he had been home to see her just once before leaving for France in the summer of 1944." "On September 10, after volunteering to lead a patrol across the Moselle River, he was hit in the leg." "(GUNFIRE)" "He had his 'million-dollar wound', his ticket home, he told a friend, and was carried to a barn where he was to receive treatment." "(EXPLOSION)" "Then, a German shell hit the barn." "A few days later, Virginia Soden got a telegram regretting to inform her that John was missing in action." "She wrote to him right away." "WOMAN: "To my dearest husband and daddy." ""I pray to God you will be OK and be back soon," ""as I don't know what I'd ever do." ""But you're coming home, darling." ""And we'll enjoy life like we're supposed to be entitled to." ""Well, sweets, your daughter is OK." ""I still kiss her every night for her daddy." ""But the poor little dear doesn't know what it's all about." ""She's so like you, darling, in every respect." ""The cheque you sent for $40 came." ""Thanks a million, darling." ""Every little bit will help for our future, right?" ""Well, John, I can't seem to write any more," ""except I still love you more than ever." ""I pray you'll be safe and home soon." ""Your wife, Virginia."" "A month later, a second telegram arrived." "John Soden would not be coming home to Waterbury." "The shell that had exploded in the makeshift hospital had killed him." "Virginia's younger brother would always remember that after she read the telegram his sister let out "an unearthly howl"." "MAN:" "War is mostly boredom, telling lies, stealing from some other outfit if they've got something better to eat than you have, and just making the best of a thousand bad situations." "It's going to rain." "You're going to get wet." "It's going to get too hot." "It's going to get too cold." "I mean, you're always uncomfortable in the service, it seemed like to me." "By the spring of 1944," "Sid Phillips, of Mobile, had been stationed in the Pacific for more than two years." "He had survived the fighting on Guadalcanal and at Cape Gloucester and hoped to be sent to Australia, with its plentiful beer and friendly girls, until he got his orders to go home." "Instead, his 1 st Marine Division was sent to Pavuvu, a remote island so small that when the men drilled, one outfit had to march clockwise and the next counterclockwise to keep from blocking the only road." "Sitting on his cot one hot afternoon," "Phillips was surprised to see a familiar figure - his best friend from Mobile, Eugene Sledge." "PHILLIPS:" "I saw him coming down the company street, looking intense." "I recognised him and ran out, screamed his name." "And we ran and beat on each other and embraced and rolled around on the ground." "People thought we were fighting and a big crowd gathered." "But then I introduced him around, and it was just a great day." "20-year-old Eugene B. Sledge was the grandson of Confederate officers." "Bookish and frail as a child, he had been taught to fish and hunt by his physician father and was a freshman at the Marion Military Institute, studying to become an officer, when he decided to sign on as a private in the Marines instead." "He told his anxious parents that if he waited for graduation, he might not get a chance at combat." "WOMAN:" "Eugene Sledge was just an ordinary young man." "He was full of pranks and full of tricks, and he and my brother Sidney pulled every one of them that they possibly could." "But they were such great friends that what one did, the other one followed suit." "He was a very gentle man, as my brother Sidney was, to be thrown into the middle of a fight like that." "Not long after Sledge got to the Pacific, he began keeping an unauthorised journal, slipping tiny sheets of notes between the pages of the small New Testament he carried so that no-one else would know what he was doing." "Years later, those uncensored notes would form the basis of a harrowing memoir of his experiences in the Pacific." "MAN: "The awesome reality that we were training to be cannon fodder" ""in a global war that had already snuffed out millions of lives" ""never seemed to occur to us." ""The fact that our own lives might end violently" ""or that we might be crippled while we were still boys" ""didn't seem to register." ""The only thing that we seemed to be truly concerned about" ""was that we might be too afraid to do our jobs under fire." ""An apprehension nagged at each of us" ""that he might appear to be yellow if he were afraid."" "Eugene Sledge." "PHILLIPS:" "He had come in as a replacement, and I was being rotated home because I had been overseas over two years." "I certainly did think about what he was facing, because it was all bad." "Every campaign was bad." "Some were a little quicker and a little worse than others, some were under worse conditions than others, but they were all bad, and I knew he was going to face some hard times." "In late August of 1944," "Sledge and 16,458 other men of the 1 st Marine Division left Pavuvu for the Palau Islands, more than 2,000 miles away." "The marines were headed for the tiny island of Peleliu, where the Japanese had constructed an airfield." "It was only 550 miles east of Mindanao, which was to be the first stop in General Douglas MacArthur's campaign to recapture the Philippines." "MacArthur wanted Peleliu put out of action to protect his flank." "But as Eugene Sledge and his fellow marines steamed toward their target, playing poker and sunbathing on the deck to fill the time," "Allied plans changed." "After the decisive American victory in the Battle of the Philippine Sea the previous June," "Admiral William Halsey no longer considered the Japanese air force a serious threat." "The Peleliu airfield had become largely irrelevant." "But no-one cancelled the invasion of the island." "Halsey was sure it would take only four days to secure it." "For three days, the navy bombarded Peleliu." "(EXPLOSIONS)" "The foliage that blanketed its jagged coral hills was burned away." "The coral itself was bleached white by phosphorus." "Finally, the officer in charge told his superiors, "We have run out of targets."" "It was time to send in the marines." "MAN: "It was hard to sleep that night before the invasion." ""I thought of home, my parents, my friends," ""and whether I would do my duty, be wounded or disabled, or be killed." ""I concluded that it was impossible for me to be killed, because God loved me." ""And then I told myself that God loved us all" ""and that many would die" ""or be ruined physically or mentally or both" ""in the days following." ""My heart pounded, and I broke out in a cold sweat." ""Finally, I called myself a damned coward" ""and eventually fell asleep saying the Lord's Prayer to myself."" "(EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE)" "The invasion of Peleliu began at dawn on September 15, 1944." "At 6:30 in the morning," "Sledge and his comrades clambered into their amtracs and started for the island." ""The world was a nightmare of flashes, violent explosions, snapping bullets." ""Up and down the beach, a number of amtracs were burning." ""Japanese machine-gun bursts made long splashes on the water," ""as though flaying it with some giant whip."" "Three marine regiments - more than 5,000 men - went ashore side by side and quickly discovered that the bombardment had done little damage to the carefully prepared warren of 500 fortified caves and concealed gun emplacements, some equipped with sliding doors of armoured steel," "that honeycombed the coral ridges running up the centre of the island." "The Japanese poured fire down upon Eugene Sledge and his fellow marines." ""I turned my face away and wished that I were imagining it all." ""I had tasted the bitterest essence of war," ""the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered," ""and it filled me with disgust."" "Willie Rushton, also from Mobile, was on the beach too, now a member of the 11th Depot Company." "And then the first day we went in there, those people they just..." "they slaughtered us marines like we were just a bunch of hogs coming in the slaughter pen." "The Japanese were some tough customers." "They really could fight." "They come at you with everything they had." "So, we marines, we were just as tough or tougher than they were, so we always - well, almost - came out on top." "The Americans lost 1,200 men, but they clung to the beach and some began fighting their way inland." "Eugene Sledge was a mortarman." "He fired round after round into the enemy while riflemen advanced ahead of him." "He and his regiment managed to make it all the way across the narrow island, then dug in for the night." "No-one slept, for fear that Japanese infiltrators would slip into their lines and slit their throats." ""It was the darkest night I ever saw." ""The overcast sky was as black as the dripping mangroves that walled us in." ""I had the sensation of being in a great black hole" ""and reaching out to touch the sides of the gun pit to orient myself." ""Slowly, the reality of it all formed in my mind " ""we were expendable." ""It was difficult to accept." ""We come from a nation and a culture that values life and the individual." ""To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value" ""is the ultimate in loneliness."" "The next morning, the marines were ordered to assault Japanese positions in the cliffs that overlooked the airfield." "Tanks and artillery would go first, then the infantry and Sledge would follow, charging across the exposed gravel airstrip to attack the high ground." "The temperature neared 100 degrees." "There was no shade." "The only water available, hauled up from the beach in 5-gallon cans, turned out to be fouled by diesel oil." "Scores of men collapsed from heat exhaustion before the signal was given." "As the marines - four battalions and 1,800 men - moved forward, the enemy opened up with everything they had." ""I clenched my teeth, squeezed my carbine stock," ""recited over and over to myself, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." ""'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," ""'I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.'" ""The further we went, the worse it got." ""It seemed impossible that any of us would make it across." ""To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying," ""but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded."" "Sledge somehow made it across the airstrip safely, and took what shelter he could beneath a bush." "He was "shaking like a leaf", he wrote, but took comfort from the fact that a veteran of the fighting on Guadalcanal, crouching nearby, was shaking too." "Japanese tactics had changed since the beginning of the war." "Suicidal banzai charges, like those on Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Saipan, were largely a thing of the past." "Instead, Peleliu's 10,500 defenders would contest every inch of the island from their hillside strongholds." "They would have to be blasted or burned out of them, one at a time." "(GUNSHOT)" ""Even before the dust had settled," ""I saw a Japanese soldier appear at the blasted opening." ""He drew back his arm to throw a grenade at us." ""My carbine was already up." ""When he appeared, I lined up my sights on his chest" ""and began squeezing off shots."" "(GUNFIRE)" ""As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony." ""His knees buckled." ""The grenade slipped from his grasp." ""I had just killed a man at close range." ""That I had seen clearly the pain on his face when my bullets hit him" ""came as a jolt." ""It suddenly made the war a very personal affair."" "Willie Rushton was in the thick of it too." "He wasn't supposed to be - his outfit was assigned to just unload supplies and ammunition." "But when the fighting started, he and some of his friends volunteered for front-line duty." "RUSHTON:" "But we were right there where the fighting was going on, you know." "They was just knocking us off as we came forward." "That's what they were doing - knocking us off." "They didn't make no... whether you was black or white or whatever - they didn't care when you got into combat." "15 members of Rushton's depot company were hit." "He was one of them, wounded in the leg by shrapnel." "He was carried to a hospital ship offshore, the only wounded black man aboard." "After his wounds were treated he asked if he could have a haircut." "The ship's barber refused." "When I got up there, he told me, he said, "I can't cut your hair."" "And so then a couple of white marines asked him, "Why can't you cut his hair?"" "Said, "You don't have to give him no style, just cut his hair off." ""All he wants is some of that hair off his head."" "So he said, "No, I can't." "I can't cut his hair."" "Then the captain intervened." "The captain of the Red Cross ship came down there and told that barber," ""I'm telling you for the first and the last time " ""I don't care who comes on this ship, if he's an American soldier," ""whether he's black or white or whatever," ""I want you to cut his hair, you know, just cut his hair." ""Don't ever make a remark like that anymore."" "Private Rushton got his haircut." "For Eugene Sledge and the other marines still fighting on Peleliu, one day, one firefight, one terror-filled night now seemed just like the next." ""During a lull, the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead" ""for souvenirs." ""The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes." ""It was a brutal, ghastly ritual" ""the likes of which have occurred since ancient times" ""on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed" ""a profound mutual hatred." ""It was uncivilised, as is all war, and was carried out with savagery." ""It wasn't simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead " ""it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps." ""While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese," ""I noticed a marine dragging what I assumed to be a corpse." ""But the Japanese wasn't dead." ""He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms." ""The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge, gold-crowned teeth," ""and his captor wanted them." ""He put the point of his KA-BAR knife on the base of a tooth" ""and hit the handle with the palm of his hand." ""Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about," ""the knifepoint glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim's mouth." ""The marine cursed him, and with a slash, cut his cheeks open ear to ear." ""I shouted, 'Put that man out of his misery.'" ""All I got for an answer was a cussing out." ""Another marine ran up and put a bullet in the enemy soldier's brain" ""and ended his agony." ""The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed."" ""There were certain areas we moved into and out of several times" ""as the campaign dragged along its weary, bloody course." ""I became quite familiar with the sight of some particular enemy corpse," ""as if it were a landmark." ""It was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed" ""from just killed, to bloated," ""to maggot-infested rotting, to partially exposed bones," ""like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time." ""On each occasion my company passed such a landmark," ""we were fewer in number."" ""The opposing forces on Peleliu were like two scorpions in a bottle,"" "Eugene Sledge wrote." ""One was annihilated, the other nearly so."" "After six weeks of combat," "Sledge and the rest of the 1 st Marine Division were finally taken off the island." "It would be another month before the Japanese commander finally radioed his superiors that "All is over on Peleliu" and then committed suicide." "A handful of Japanese would go on fighting there until February of 1945." "Securing Peleliu was supposed to take four days." "It took more than two months." "10,000 Japanese were killed - nearly every man who had defended the island." "More than 1,200 Americans perished, including Private John D. New, who had grown up in Mobile just across town from Eugene Sledge." "He hurled himself onto a Japanese grenade, saving the lives of two friends but losing his own." "For his heroism, he received a posthumous Medal of Honor." "5,274 more Americans were maimed or missing." "Out of the 235 men in Eugene Sledge's company, only 85 left the island without physical wounds." "And in the end, there had been no tactical need for the little airfield for which so many of Sledge's friends had died." ""As I struggled upward onto the boat with my load of equipment," ""I felt like a weary insect climbing a vine." ""But at last I was crawling up out of the abyss of Peleliu." ""I stowed my gear on my rack and went topside." ""The salt air was delicious to breathe." ""What a luxury to inhale long, deep breaths of fresh, clean air." ""But something in me died at Peleliu." ""Perhaps it was a childish innocence that accepted as faith" ""the claim that man is basically good." ""Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places," ""who do not have to endure war's savagery," ""will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it."" "Eugene Sledge." "Over the coming weeks, on both sides of the world," "Allied force would continue to be undercut by Allied folly." "NARRATOR:" "On August 3, 1944, in the skies over the town of Vire, in France the law of averages caught up with fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson of Luverne, Minnesota." "MAN:" "I was flying the 'tail-end charlie' position, which means the last one in the line of flight, which is the most vulnerable position because that's the one they'll start with first." "And suddenly the 88s and 20mm started coming up in heavy amounts, and just "Brmm!"" "I heard this roar through my airplane and fire came into the cockpit, just all in an instant." "My airplane was shaking." "I thought, "I'm gone."" "So I tried to bale out." "I tried to move the canopy back, and a piece of flak had come up through the glide and so I couldn't get the canopy open." "Couldn't get it open." "The fire was still coming at me, and so I put the plane in a dive, because we'd always discussed that we didn't want to die by burns." "And so I put the plane in a dive " "I was only at 4,000 feet, so I could hit the ground fast - and that move literally saved my life because the air pressure changed and so the flames were sucked out through that opening in the canopy and that fire died out." "I got back to the base." "I would stall if my speed dropped below 160 miles an hour so I landed at 170 miles an hour, and I didn't know that one of the 20mm had come up through my left wheel well, and I had a flat tyre there." "So when the landing gear collapsed on one side," "I was still going about 100 miles an hour, and I was spun around by the force." "My shoulder harness on the right broke loose." "The left one held." "I was spun around, and the back of my head hit the gunsight." "So I was unconscious." "Then a couple of enlisted men had pulled me out and pulled me away from there." "After medics tended to his dislocated shoulder and the burns on his legs, a British photographer from 'Picture Post' magazine asked Aanenson to pose with his plane." "MAN:" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." ""Lieutenant John Stavenger, bomber pilot now in England," ""has decided it's a mighty small world after all." ""He hadn't hardly landed" ""before he bumped into Lieutenant Howard James, of Luverne." ""Then he leisurely settled back and read an English magazine." ""He looked at one big picture of a wrecked plane." ""The picture carried the caption, 'The man who was lost returns to base.'" ""The pilot in question was none other" ""than Lieutenant Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne." ""His family knew nothing of the incident." ""And the picture showed the Luverne youngster walking away" ""from his wrecked plane" ""as blithely unconcerned as if he'd just bought a nickel's worth of candy."" "A week after his close call, Aanenson was back in the air, providing ground cover for the Americans advancing toward Germany." "By the autumn of 1944, the Allied advance across western Europe had stalled, crippled by continuing problems with supplies, confusion among commanders and stubborn German defence of the fatherland." "The people of Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California," "Luverne, Minnesota and Waterbury, Connecticut, who had hoped the D-day invasion and capture of Paris would bring a swift victory, remained anxious about their sons and brothers, husbands and fathers overseas." "A strategic mistake would put Tom Galloway, a college student from Mobile, in an unwinnable battle where the only victory to be had was survival." "Robert Kashiwagi, of Sacramento, who had had everything taken from him by his country, would be asked to give even more." "And Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne, who had lost so many friends and seen so much death, would endure still more horror and nearly lose all hope." "Meanwhile, for those held captive by the Japanese in the Pacific theatre, rescue still seemed a long way off." "GIRL: "Santo Tomas Camp, Manila." ""Daddy is now out of tobacco." ""He dries papaya leaves on the roof and smokes that." ""People use anything to roll their cigarettes." ""Some even use pages from the Bible because the paper is so fine." ""Every day I hear of some person doing strange things." ""A Catholic priest did a mortal sin by going around with a lady," ""then falling in love with her," ""acting so mushy in front of everybody that he was kicked out of the church." ""I heard a husband and wife fighting loudly." ""She yelled at him, 'lf I hadn't married you, I wouldn't be in this camp now."'" "Sascha Weinzheimer." "11 -year-old Sascha Weinzheimer and her family were still imprisoned, along with 4,000 other civilians rounded up by the Japanese, on the grounds of the Santo Tomas University in Manila, on the island of Luzon." "As the war went on, conditions had steadily deteriorated." "WOMAN:" "Once the food started going down, everything went down." "And toward the end, my mother was 73 pounds." "And she nursed my brother until he was three." "So if you see a picture of him during that time, he is chubby." "And that's because of mother's milk." "But that depleted her." "(AIRPLANE ENGINES BUZZ)" "GIRL: "September 21, 1944." ""This morning, about 9:30," ""there were seven Nip planes above us practising diving." ""It was a bright, sunshiny day." ""Then we heard the sound of many planes in the distance" ""but didn't pay much attention." ""Mother said, 'That's a different sound." "Can't you hear it?"'" "(ENGINES DRONE)" ""Mother ran outside and we heard her yell, 'Look, look!" ""'There are hundreds of them!" "'" ""We all ran out, and right over our heads were planes, planes, planes!" ""Everyone was screaming and pointing up at them."" "WEINZHEIMER:" "That was absolutely fantastic." "First of all, the engines were not Mitsubishi engines, they were American - different-sounding, strong engines." "(GUNFIRE)" "Waves of American planes launched from aircraft carriers roared in over Manila, bombing and strafing Japanese positions, attacking Japanese warships anchored in the bay." ""Everyone was so excited." ""Of course, it was very dangerous for us" ""because of the shrapnel falling all over the camp from the ack-ack guns," ""but everyone seemed to feel that our boys and our bombs couldn't hurt us."" "('PENNIES FROM HEAVEN' PLAYS)" "The Japanese were still in control of the Philippines, but the American assault had begun, and the next morning, the prisoner who played music over the camp's loudspeaker put on 'Pennies from Heaven'." "(Billie Holiday sings) #... the things you love, you must have showers" "# So when you hear it thunder" "# Don't run under a tree" "# There'll be pennies from heaven" "# For you and me... #" "One month later, on October 20," "General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed on the island of Leyte the first foothold in the struggle to win back the Philippines." "MacArthur's own landing craft got stuck 75 yards offshore and he had no choice but to wade to the beach." "His publicity machine made the most of it." "NEWSREEL:" "When General MacArthur left his command of Bataán by presidential order, he gave the solemn promise, "I will return."" "Now he tells the Philippine people, "I have returned."" "WOMAN:" "So when he came wading through the water up on the beach, there were great cheers in the movie theatre." "Because that's, of course, how we saw MacArthur returning." "I realise now it was staged, a lot of it, but, man, it was good to see him walking back." "MacArthur's return thrilled Americans and Filipinos alike." "As his men began to fight their way across the islands of the Philippines, what remained of the once-mighty Japanese fleet would be shattered in the largest naval engagement in history - the Battle of Leyte Gulf." "But 24 volunteer enemy pilots offered fresh evidence of Japan's resolve to keep fighting, no matter the odds." "They deliberately crashed their planes into the decks of American carriers in hopes of setting them ablaze." "They were called Kamikazes - Japanese for 'divine wind'." "(GUNFIRE)" "Despite the victory at sea, months of bloody fighting lay ahead before the Philippine islands, and the people imprisoned on them, could be liberated." "MAN:" "Everybody was scared to death all the time." "And yet, you never said so, you never gave any signals that you were." "You just were, and you knew the other people were too." "You don't run away, because every alternative is impossible." "There's no way out of it, there's no way to change it, and you are there until you get killed or wounded." "Or until you flee and, you know, allow everybody to exercise their instinct for contempt, which is unthinkable to most people." "So there's no way out, and that puts you in a situation that you're never in, I think, in civilian life." "Back in Europe, the Allies were still stalled in the north, suffering from supply problems, the disaster of Operation Market Garden, and intensified German resistance." "The American Seventh Army's drive northward from the south of France had run into trouble as well." "They had landed at Marseilles in mid-August, and at first things had gone better than anyone had anticipated." "Within a month, they had pushed almost 400 miles, taken 89,000 German prisoners and linked up with elements of Patton's Third Army to finally complete the continuous line" "Eisenhower now believed essential to the Allied cause." "But thousands of Germans had retreated into the Vosges mountains - steep, thickly forested with evergreens, shrouded in fog and drenched with cold autumn rains." "There they dug in, ordered to halt the Allied advance into Germany." "American units that had already fought in the mountains of Italy were sent to France and ordered to battle their way through the Vosges." "One was the 36th Texas Division, the same outfit that had nearly been destroyed at Monte Cassino the previous winter." "Another, attached to it, especially requested by headquarters, was the 100th/442nd Combat Team " "Japanese-American troops, most of them recruited from internment camps in the United States." "They had once been considered a problem by the army." "Now they were problem-solvers, called in when others failed." "MAN:" "It was bitterly cold." "That's when the 'lost battalion' campaign happened, because our general was very, you might say, ambitious." "You say "blood and guts"." "Why was it our blood and his guts, you know?" "Major General John E. Dahlquist, commander of the Texas Division, was relatively new to combat and had nearly lost his command twice during the drive north from the Riviera for allowing his men to lag behind." "But he was convinced he was a better tactician than more seasoned soldiers." "And he would prove willing to use his detachment of Japanese-American veterans to correct his own mistakes." "The village of Bruyères was their first target." "Dahlquist assured them the surrounding hills were only lightly defended." "In fact, they were filled with well-dug-in Germans." "The 442nd cleared them off in four days, despite the terrain, the steady icy downpour that filled their foxholes, and the rain of artillery shells bursting among the treetops." "MAN:" "General Dahlquist was, uh a very strict general." "And especially, it seems to me, that he was trying to push the 442nd too hard, too far." "Telling us to "advance, advance", you know." "So he was hard in that way." "And I really didn't have any respect for him." "Meanwhile, General Dahlquist had sent a battalion of his Texans along a densely forested ridge toward the important town of Saint-Dié." "Again, veteran officers warned him the woods were full of Germans." "Again, Dahlquist insisted there were none." "Within an hour, the Texans were under attack." "275 of them were cut off and surrounded by the Germans, who zeroed in on them from three sides." "For two days, shells blasted their positions." "The Texans began to run out of food and ammunition." "Two attempts to break through to them failed." "Finally, on October 26," "Dahlquist ordered the exhausted men of the 442nd to return to the wooded slopes, rescue the 'lost battalion' - as the Texans would come to be called - and restore his reputation." "MAN:" "One time, our regimental commander, Colonel Pence, pleaded with the division commander, you know, that we could pull back 'cause our men were so depleted." "But the division general said," ""No, we need to get those boys out, because every day counts." ""You get in there and get them out" ""if it takes every damn last one of you to do it."" "For five days, fighting from tree to tree in heavy fog, they tried to get to the trapped men." "On the morning of October 30, they were just 1,000 yards from the survivors but pinned to the slope by artillery and machine-gun fire." "KASHIWAGl:" "We were stuck, because it's a terrain that was steep, and so we were on our own, like a cowboy-and-lndian type of battle, and so the other people couldn't help us." "Finally, they had had enough." "I Company and Robert Kashiwagi's K Company rose to their feet and charged up the hillside, hurling grenades into German machine-gun nests and firing from the waist as they climbed." "KASHIWAGl:" "We just went hog-wild crazy." "We were mad at everybody and ready to kill anything that there was." "And finally we made contact with the lost battalion, and we found only 230 or so surviving." "But we lost 400 men trying to rescue those 230." "What a terrible price we paid." "TOKUNO:" "After we rescued the outfit, why, the first Caucasian fellow that came out said, "I was never so glad to see a Jap in my life."" "Ha!" "That's the first thing he said." "I Company had started into the forest with 185 men." "Just 8 walked out unhurt." "Robert Kashiwagi's K Company had begun with 186 men." "Only 17 emerged on foot." "All the rest were dead or wounded or missing." "Kashiwagi had himself been hit by shrapnel for a third and then a fourth time in the fighting." "A few days later, Mr and Mrs Kametaro Takeuchi, formerly of Sacramento, now living behind barbed wire at the Granada Relocation Center, received a telegram." "Their son, Tadashi, had been among those killed in the struggle to rescue the lost battalion." "On November 12," "General Dahlquist announced he wanted to review the 442nd to thank them for what they had done." "KASHIWAGl:" "The general decided," ""Well, now, we want to award you people, recognise your deed."" "And so he said, "We want the whole regiment in formation."" "And when the general got there and looked at the formation, he was so disgusted." "He said, "I asked you to get the whole regiment out there!"" "And our colonel, with tears in his eyes, says, "General", he says," ""that's all that's left of that particular regiment." ""That's exactly what you did to us."" "MAN:" "In the schools, we always talked about what was happening in the war in all the grades that I remember." "Once in a while, we would have somebody come home, you know, who had been overseas, who would come up to the school and talk about where they had been or..." "You really... you know, again, you know, between 6 and 10 years old," "I wasn't into the geopolitical aspects of the war." "I was more impressed to see the guy." "(LIVELY JAZZ MUSIC)" "MAN:" "I think every man that was in the service was well aware of the fact that when you came home on furlough, it was a very good chance that you would lapse into a release of bad language, so..." "It was dominant in your thinking." "It made you speak slowly and deliberately and almost repeat in your own mind what you were going to say before you said it, because, you know, in the service, you just don't use any adjectives " "you forget all your adjectives and just use one or two." "WOMAN:" "Like?" "Like I'm not going say." "(Chuckles)" "My wife would come down from heaven and hit me on the head." "FUSSELL:" "When you come on the line, you are very brave because you know nothing about what's happening." "And it's easy for you to perform pseudo-brave gestures and procedures, because you don't know yet." "And gradually - this is because you have a reservoir of courage when you arrive - and each time you get badly frightened, a little of it diminishes until you don't have any left." "And that is the worst moment." "As the lost battalion was being rescued," "Paul Fussell, a newly minted second lieutenant in the 103rd Infantry Division, was bivouacked at Épinal, at the foot of the Vosges mountains." "He was 20 years old, from Pasadena, California, fresh from 19 months of training and filled with excitement." "He had told his parents he felt "very confident and safe"" "as he went off to war." "The reception he and his fellow soldiers had received during their first few days in southern France only added to his buoyancy." "As the division moved northward, up the Rhône Valley, young women appeared along the road, waving and passing out bottles of wine." "FUSSELL:" "We brought in good health - very important - youth, optimism..." "That's why these 18-year-olds could pursue war at all." "They were kids." "They were optimistic." "And they really thought that if you did well, you'd be rewarded." "I mean, they were that innocent." "They had no idea about life's accidents." "On the night of November 10, he and the rest of the men of Company F were ordered up to the front, to a thickly forested hillside overlooking Saint-Dié, the town toward which the lost battalion had been heading" "when it was surrounded by the Germans." "They were to replace a weary company that had been engaged with the enemy for weeks." "FUSSELL:" "I came across two German kids, dead, lying on their backs." "They'd been killed the day before by the unit we were replacing." "And they were so young, I couldn't believe it." "I thought they were between maybe 12 and 14 years old." "And at the end of the war, of course, the Germans were absolutely scraping the barrel of everybody - old men who could hardly walk and little kids from late grammar school." "These kids had little uniforms on." "They were wearing caps, not helmets." "And each had been shot through the head." "And the blue... bluish-red brains of one were coming out his nostrils." "They had their eyes open too." "And the other one, his bluish-red brain was coming out just from under his cap, and sort of displacing his cap as he wore it." "And that really gave me a jolt." "I seldom refer to it." "But it was my introduction to some painful facts - that this war is serious." "We are going to kill people, regardless of their age, as long as they're wearing German uniforms, and they are going to try to kill us." "MAN:" "I often wondered why the Germans didn't quit." "I wondered why they didn't quit after Normandy." "Once we successfully landed on the Continent, to me it was obvious we're going to win the war - it was just how long, or how soon." "And all that we went through and the people that were killed." "But what's your alternative?" "The Allied command in Europe had not waited to see how Operation Market Garden turned out before mounting four more or less simultaneous assaults on the Westwall, which the Allies called the Siegfried line." "Each had fallen short." "The Seventh Army overran Strasbourg but was halted on the Rhine's west bank." "Patton's Third Army took Metz and secured three bridgeheads across the Saar, but could proceed no further until it could get enough fuel to go on." "In the north, two attacks were launched by the American First Army." "One was aimed at the German city of Aachen." "The other intended to sweep the enemy from the 50 wooded square miles just south of that city called the Hurtgen Forest." "MAN:" "The Hurtgen Forest was the worst." "And you haven't heard much about it because... it was just a mess-up." "There was no reason to go through the forest, but the generals kept wanting to go through the forest." "And you'd put a division in there and chew it up, and they'd pull it out and put another division in and chew it up." "It was a nightmarish place to fight with 100-foot fir trees that in some places grew just 4 feet apart." ""It was so dense and dark and shrouded in dank fog,"" "one general remembered," ""that upon entering it, you want to drop things behind to mark your path," ""as Hansel and Gretel did with their breadcrumbs."" "Two parallel lines of German pillboxes and log-and-dirt bunkers were hidden among the trees, several miles apart." "The pine needles that blanketed the forest floor disguised trip-wires and mines the Americans called 'Bouncing Betties' that sprang into the air and went off at groin height." "The commanders who planned the battle knew almost nothing about the terrain and never came to see it for themselves." "And no-one had been trained to fight in such a place." ""We're taking three trees a day," one officer said," ""and they cost us a hundred men apiece."" "The first two divisions to be ordered into the forest would lose 4,500 men in three weeks and move less than three miles." "On November 2, the 28th Infantry Division followed." "With them was Second Lieutenant Tom Galloway from Mobile, Alabama, an acquaintance of Sid Phillips and his sister Katharine." "He had been a senior at Auburn University and was now a replacement officer on the front lines, a forward observer scouting targets for the 109th Field Artillery." "GALLOWAY:" "The man I replaced got shot, and it just wasn't too good to think what happened to him, but then you've replaced him." "Targets were almost impossible to spot from the ground." "Dense growth and constant fog hid them from the air as well." "Tanks could barely move on the handful of narrow, muddy, heavily mined logging trails." "Soldiers could not see one another, let alone the enemy." ""If anyone said he knew where he was," one commander said," ""he was a damned liar."" "Despite everything, Galloway's division took its first objective - the little town of Schmidt - in just two days." "The Germans took it back the following morning." "The battlelines became totally confused." "We were all mixed up." "Give you an example - the medics." "There was only one building that I know about there and both the German and American medics were using it." "They were just bringing in all the wounded and both sides were using that one building." "A steady, cold rain began to fall, followed by sleet, then snow." "Thousands developed trench foot." "When it was too painful to stand, men took turns kneeling in the icy water that filled their foxholes." "German 88 shells burst in the fir trees above them, showering the men with shrapnel and dagger-sharp shards of wood." "GALLOWAY:" "The artillery would hit those trees and you didn't know if you were hit by artillery or flying wood." "There just was no place to get protection." "The Germans had it, they had it all mapped." "And you had to go down the firebreaks." "Of course, they would have guns at those firebreaks." "And it made it bad." "I just recall one morning I went in with the battalion, and before nightfall the sergeant major came to me and told me I was the only officer they had left." "And that's out of a battalion." "And it just chewed people up." "(EXPLOSIONS)" ""The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,"" "one private recalled," ""and the nights were so bad I would pray for daylight."" "By November 13, the officers of every single rifle company in the 28th Division had been killed or wounded." "After a night of continuous German shelling, an entire company broke and ran." "Even officers with drawn revolvers could not stop them." "Hundreds of men shot themselves in the foot or hand rather than endure any more." "Hundreds more collapsed psychologically, sat staring into the distance as if no battle raged around them." "The reporter Ernie Pyle called it" ""the accumulated blur, the hurting vagueness" ""of being too long in the lines."" "In mid-November, fresh troops replaced what was left of Tom Galloway's division." "The fighting in the Hurtgen Forest would go on for weeks." "More than 33,000 American soldiers would be lost." "So many died, and those who lived spent so much time desperately digging for their own protection, that there were few burials." "When the snow melted the following spring, hundreds of bodies and parts of bodies would still litter the forest floor." "GALLOWAY:" "The men were..." "well, you were just all beat up." "You'd been in that mess." "You'd been under that strain." "You just were glad to get out of there." "I like to think that probably the prettiest sight that I saw over there was coming out of the forest, up on a hill, and looking down." "It had snowed, and the whole - these were big fir trees - and they were all pretty, with snow on and everything." "And I couldn't decide whether the scene was pretty or I was so glad to get out of there that made it look so pretty." "But I do remember that." "Galloway and his comrades were sent for rest and recovery to the Ardennes Forest, a quiet place where nothing much was thought likely to happen." "November 23, 1944 was Thanksgiving." "Defense workers in Mobile, Alabama and Waterbury, Connecticut remained on the job to help speed the day of victory." "At noon, servicemen at McClellan Field, in Sacramento, were serenaded by the glee club of the 4909 Aviation Squadron." "And in Luverne, Minnesota, the local Lutheran church held separate Thanksgiving services in English and in German." "Thanksgiving turkey was served to the men on the forested slopes of the Vosges mountains, though it was cold by the time it got to Lieutenant Paul Fussell." "That same afternoon, he found himself part of a 12-man squad ordered forward to scout the defences of the German-held town of Nothalten." "(GUNSHOT)" "A burst of rifle fire forced them to find what cover they could behind a small rise." "German snipers had them in their sights." "No-one seemed to know what to do." "Then a second lieutenant moved forward with his carbine." ""Let's get the sons of bitches," he said." "FUSSELL:" "His name was Abe Goldman." "And most of the people I fought with, who were from the South and Texas, Oklahoma and so on, had never seen a Jew in their lives." "And the idea of this Jewish kid, Abe Goldman, who should have been - in the view of most of the other soldiers - should have been in the dry goods business, to see him on the front line, and he was very enthusiastic." "He knew what had happened to the Jews." "He was probably the bravest one in the whole platoon of 40 men." "And that's why he got himself shot." "(GUNSHOT)" "And the fact that out of, say, 12 people he was the only one that crawled forward to risk his life, that sort of changed I'd say it changed a lot of minds." "The fight for Nothalten would take a terrible toll on Fussell's men." "Abe Goldman survived, but by the time the battle was over, the company had lost four of its six officers." "Fussell's platoon lost 13 of its 40 men." "The average life expectancy for a junior infantry officer on the front lines was now just 17 days." "In the end, Lieutenant Paul Fussell would beat those odds." "But they would haunt him for the rest of his life." "AANENSON:" "Well, as we pushed the Germans back and as they retreated they were able to take all of their flak guns and most of their artillery with them." "So, as we would fly missions into that area - in the Hurtgen Forest or into the Ruhr Valley - we were facing a larger number of flak guns than we had before." "So it was a terribly brutal time for us." "Fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson of Luverne, Minnesota had been helping provide air cover for American troops on the ground ever since D-day." "Through all that time, his anchor to sanity had been the belief that Jackie Greer, the girl he'd met while in training in Louisiana, would marry him if he survived the war." "WOMAN:" "Following that war was the best history lesson I ever had." "I got a big map, and every day I'd get..." "I had my crayons out." "Every day." "Certain colours meant this group is here, certain colours are this." "And I kept up with that war." "I learned more about Europe than I had ever learned in school." "It was very important that I stay with it." "Aanenson and Greer exchanged letters every two or three days, each trying to keep the other's spirits up till they could be together again." "Aanenson had survived a bad fire in his plane, was haunted by the fear that he had once mistakenly fired on British or American troops, nearly died when his plane hurtled toward its target so fast, his instruments froze." "When he managed to pull out of his dive at 600 miles per hour, blood vessels in his eyes burst and blood trickled from his ears." "Meanwhile, his friends kept dying." "AANENSON:" "Two of the guys that lived in my tent were killed." "There were just four of us in there, and two of them were killed." "I had been listed as missing in action because I had been so badly shot up" "I had to land on a temporary airfield closer to the front lines." "Johnny Bathurst and I, who were the survivors in Duffy's Tavern, our tent there, decided that we couldn't deal with that anymore." "So we quit making friends, new friends." "On December 5, 1944, the impact of all that Aanenson had seen and experienced overcame him and he started writing Jackie a very different kind of letter from the ones he had sent before." "AANENSON: "Dear Jackie," ""For the past two hours, I've been sitting here alone in my tent" ""trying to figure out just what I should do" ""and what I should say in this letter" ""in response to your letters and some questions you have asked." ""I have purposely not told you much about my world over here" ""because I thought it might upset you." ""Perhaps that has been a mistake, so let me correct that right now." ""I still doubt if you will be able to comprehend it." ""I don't think anyone can who has not been through it." ""I live in a world of death." ""I have watched my friends die in a variety of violent ways." ""Sometimes it's just an engine failure on take-off," ""resulting in a violent explosion." ""There's not enough left to bury." ""Other times it's the deadly flak that tears into a plane." ""If the pilot is lucky, the flak kills him." ""But usually he isn't, and he burns to death as his plane spins in." ""Fire is the worst." ""In early September, one of my good friends crashed on the edge of our field." ""As he was pulled from the burning plane, the skin came off his arms." ""His face was almost burned away." ""He was still conscious and trying to talk." ""You can't imagine the horror." ""So far, I have done my duty in this war." ""I have never aborted a mission or failed to dive on a target," ""no matter how intense the flak." ""I have lived for my dreams for the future." ""But like everything else around me, my dreams are dying too." ""In spite of everything, I may live through this war and return to Baton Rouge," ""but I am not the same person you said goodbye to on May 3." ""No-one could go though this and not change." ""We are all casualties." ""In the meantime, we just go on." ""Some way, somehow, this will all have an ending." ""Whatever it is, I am ready for it."" "When he had finished his letter," "Aanenson folded it up and put it away in his foot locker." "Mailing it home would only have been cruel to the woman he loved and hoped to marry - if he happened to make it through what was still to come." "(DISTANT GUNFIRE)" "MAN:" "In the process of this battle we took about 18 or 19 German prisoners." "A young man approximately 24 years of age turned to me, and in a voice completely accent-free, he said, "Where are you from?"" "I said, "I'm from the United States."" ""Where in the United States?"" ""The north-east," I said." ""Where north-east?"" "I said, "I'm from Connecticut."" ""Where in Connecticut?" He was persisting." "I said, "Yes, I'm from Waterbury, Connecticut."" ""Ah, yes," he said. "Waterbury." ""At the junction of the Naugatuck and Mad rivers."" "Now, you have to know a bit about the area." "The Naugatuck is a fairly substantial river, but the Mad River is a little stream that you can jump across without any trouble." "Anyone who knew this, um..." "I was puzzled." "I said, "How did you possibly know that?"" "He said, "I was in training for the administration."" ""The administration of what?" I said." "He said, "The administration of the territories."" "My blood ran cold." "I couldn't imagine that Hitler, in his wildest imagination, not only had figured he practically had Europe in his grasp, but he also figured that he would control America too." "NARRATOR:" "By December of 1944," "Americans were growing weary of the war their young men had been fighting for three long years." "In Europe, it was supposed to be over by now." "The generals who had directed the fighting from far behind the lines had been predicting victory for months." "It had not happened." "In the Pacific, American progress had been slow and costly." "The enemy showed no sign of giving up." "For the people of Luverne, Minnesota and Waterbury, Connecticut," "Sacramento, California and Mobile, Alabama, and every other town struggling to absorb it all, the stream of telegrams and newspaper headlines telling of new losses seemed endless and unendurable." "For their sons overseas it was, of course, far worse." "(EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE)" "For them, there was no option but to fight on and try to stay alive." "Ray Leopold, a mortgage broker from Waterbury, who had been trained to kill people, would find himself trying to save them instead." "Glenn Frazier, from Alabama, who had been a prisoner of war for more than two years, would begin to lose hope of ever seeing his home again." "And Burnett Miller, the only child of a prosperous Sacramento family, would be caught up in the biggest and least expected battle on the western front." "MAN:" "Basically, getting shot at or shelled is just plain scary." "You just hope that it misses you." "When the artillery's coming in, you think, "Oh, God." ""It's covering such an area and I hope it doesn't hit me."" "We would wish they'd just start using rifles, you know?" "Well, when you get to where a bullet whizzes by your head you know that's personal. (Laughs)" "You know?" "You better get out of the way." "Since the summer of 1944," "Hitler had been secretly planning a massive counterattack, an all-out attempt to divide and destroy the Allied armies before they could move further into Germany." "His target would be the Ardennes - rolling, forested hills in Belgium and Luxembourg through which German troops had advanced toward France twice before, in 1914 and again in 1940." "It was now thinly defended." "His armies were to break through the unsuspecting Americans, race for Antwerp, cut off the British Army in the north and drive it into the sea." "Most of Hitler's commanders thought it madness." "They had lost nearly 4 million men since the war began." "They had too little fuel for a major mechanised advance." "The once mighty Luftwaffe had largely been destroyed." "But Hitler was implacable." ""The coming battle", he said, "would decide whether we shall live or die."" "Every able-bodied German male between the ages of 16 and 60 was made eligible for service." "25 new divisions called the People's Infantry were formed." "250,000 fresh troops - convicts and the infirm, old men and young boys, and conscripts from occupied countries who didn't speak a word of German." "Preparations for the attack would take time and demanded utter secrecy." "Hitler would not launch it until he was certain winter weather and dense fog would keep Allied aircraft on the ground." "Meanwhile, Lieutenant Tom Galloway, of Mobile, and his division were among the American troops who happened to be stationed in the Ardennes." "GALLOWAY:" "We were in Luxembourg, rebuilding after Hurtgen Forest, because the losses were kind of heavy." "There, like, we had a front - the division had a front of some 20 miles." "Well, because it was a quiet area and nothing was going to happen," "I fired 25 rounds a day." "I'd go up in the morning and fire just one at the time... (ARTILLERY FIRES) ...just to let them know we were there." "There were only four US infantry divisions in the Ardennes - 80,000 men stretched out along a front that ran some 80 miles from north to south." "Two of the divisions had seen little combat." "The other two - the 4th and Galloway's 28th - had been battered by weeks of desperate fighting in the Hurtgen Forest and had been sent to the Ardennes to rest." "Ray Leopold, of Waterbury, was serving with the 28th too." "He had been trained as a sniper." "LEOPOLD:" "We were in a place called Malmedy-St Vith, at a little place called Sevenig Hill." "You could put one foot in France, one foot in Belgium, and spit into Germany at this particular spot." "One frosty morning, after several hours of guard duty," "Leopold stood up to stretch." "A German sniper shot him in the left thigh." "(GUNSHOT)" "As chance would have it," "I had picked up a German medic's kit a couple of days before, lying in the field, and I doctored my own wound because our own medic had been killed." "And with the German equipment, I probed for the bullet." "I extracted it." "I cleansed the wound." "I doctored it myself." "Two days later, when I got to battalion aid station, the captain looked at the wound and said, "This is wonderful." "Who did it?"" "I told him that I had." "He then told me, "Leopold, I have a proposition for you." ""I'm going to make you a medic."" "I, thereafter, never carried a gun." "(SOFT THUD) Man:" "Strike!" "(Men cheer)" "('LILI MARLENE' PLAYS)" "For the most part, the war seemed a long way away from the Ardennes, and the men took full advantage of the facilities for rest and recreation." "Life there was so quiet, so uneventful, that some of the men called it the 'ghost front'." "(Marlene Dietrich sings) # Outside the barracks, by the corner light" "# I'll always stand and wait for you at night" "# We will create a world for two" "# I'll wait for you the whole night through" "# For you, Lili Marlene" "# For you, Lili Marlene" "(ACCORDION SOLO)" "# It's you" "# Lili Marlene. #" "But just a few miles to the east, hidden beneath the trees," "Hitler's army was making the final preparations for its surprise attack." "There were signs that something was going on." "Civilians slipped through the lines to report growing numbers of German troops." "Spotter planes noted hospital trains and massive Tiger tanks loaded on flatcars." "At night, Gls heard the distant rumble of motors." "GALLOWAY:" "I did know that the roads would not have snow on them in the morning, which meant there was traffic on those roads at night." "Report it, but I didn't put any significance to it." "Allied headquarters paid little attention." "General Omar Bradley remained convinced the German Army had been wrecked." "(EXPLOSIONS)" "Then, at 5:30am on December 16, thousands of guns opened up." "The shells fell on and around the American positions for an hour." "A few moments later, the enemy began to emerge out of the dense fog that shrouded the forest." "(RAPID GUNFIRE)" "And, of course, the Bulge broke right there." "And, as I say, when they fired the first round, it darn near hit me." "From then on, it got worse." "But they came barrelling over there, and just right into us." "20 German infantry divisions were moving forward along a 50-mile front - a quarter of a million men." "Behind them roared 600 tanks." "On the adjoining ridge, which was only a half-mile from us, sitting up as bold as brass, several German tanks in line, with the driver sitting in his black uniform, were coming down paths that could not, in our opinion," "possibly have taken a tank." "Footpaths." "But there it was." "These gigantic tanks, with their 88mm guns, were coming down this path in single file." "GALLOWAY:" "You just had waves of Germans coming at you." "We had one machine gun just mowing them down." "They'd keep coming right down the road, right into that machine gun." "But there were waves of them." "The Germans kept coming at the Americans, pushing them back or flowing around them." "As Hitler had hoped, thick clouds and ground fog kept Allied warplanes out of the sky." "Some men simply fled." "Surrounded by the enemy, cut off from one another, out of ammunition and unable to fight back, others were forced to surrender - more than 10,000 men." "Most struggled to hold on." "Clerks and truck drivers who had never fired a carbine found themselves in combat." "Some officers acted like traffic cops, trying to restore order to the chaos on the clogged roads." "GALLOWAY:" "At one point, I'm there and I'm trying to figure out tactics." "And to be perfectly honest, I figured, as a junior officer in the artillery," "I'd be a forward observer and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much." "As it ended up, here I am in charge, and trying to say, "Why did you sleep through tactics?"" "And... (Chuckles)... it makes you think." "The Germans continued to advance." "On December 17, an SS panzer unit ambushed an American convoy near a tiny village called Malmedy, captured and disarmed 150 men, and then gunned down at least 86 of them." "They also butchered scores of Belgian civilians." "News of the killing spread fast among the embattled Americans." "LEOPOLD:" "Archie Costran was the first sergeant of our outfit." "Came up to me within the hour with word of what had happened at the Malmedy massacre only two miles away from us." "He said, "If you are captured and identified as Jewish," ""you will not live."" "He said, "Ray, why don't you do what I'm doing?" ""Take your dog tags, with its big letter 'H' on it," ""wrap it around your hand, put your glove back on." ""Lf, by chance, you're ever forced to surrender," he said," ""as you raise your hand, throw the glove, together with the dog tag," ""into the snow and step on it."" "For 12 days, my hand had the dog tag wrapped around it." "The Germans succeeded in smashing through the centre and spreading out to create a 50-mile salient, a bulge in the Allied line." "The Americans managed to keep the breakthrough from widening by holding on to two villages " "St Vith to the north and Bastogne in the south." "GALLOWAY:" "The unit tightened up, and we held." "Until - we had about a day, two days - and then we had to start dropping back." "So we'd drop back and fire, drop back and fire." "At that time I didn't know it, but apparently we were trying to protect Bastogne." "I had never heard of Bastogne, I didn't know there was such a place, but we were trying to protect Bastogne." "The little town commanded seven all-weather roads." "Keeping the Germans from gaining control of those roads was now the Allies' highest priority." "I was asked to go out and ride recon, and that was a mistake." "And I reported that German tanks were coming." "And I could hear them speaking, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"" "So I had to back up." "But it was too late." "Tom Galloway and his men were surrounded." "They hid in a house." "They brought a tank up, shot that house up pretty bad." "Left with no other option, Galloway surrendered." "Well, you never think you're going to get caught." "You think, "It's not going to happen to me."" "He and some of his fellow captives were sent deep inside Germany to a prison camp 40 miles east of Frankfurt." "Meanwhile, the 101 st Airborne was ordered to hold Bastogne until other reinforcements could reach the Ardennes." "While elements of the First Army drove south toward the forest," "General George Patton's Third Army began a headlong rush north to try to relieve Bastogne before the enemy could take it." "The Germans encircled the town and began to shell it." "The surrounded Americans began running out of ammunition, food, medicine." "On December 22," "German officers under a white flag approached the American commander at Bastogne," "General Anthony McAuliffe of the 101 st Airborne." "The Americans' situation was hopeless, they said." "The town was surrounded." "They demanded the Americans surrender." "McAuliffe had a one-word answer - "Nuts!"" "The Germans had no idea what he meant, but they returned to their lines and the shelling started again." "But the next morning, the skies cleared and were quickly filled with Allied planes, bombing and strafing German armour and dropping supplies and ammunition to the besieged Americans." "They were still surrounded, still cut off from help on the ground, but now at least they had food to eat and ammunition with which to shoot back." "And they were fast becoming a symbol back home of American resistance." "WOMAN:" "The Battle of the Bulge was publicised." "We knew they were holding out in Bastogne and we were all cheering them on." "Again, we know now how dreadful it was, but we were very conscious of the Battle of the Bulge, because we felt like we had just about completed that campaign in Europe." "And when this counterattack came, it came as a blow to the entire nation." "('SILENT NIGHT' PLAYS)" "FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT:" "It is not easy to say merry Christmas to you, my fellow Americans, in this time of destructive war." "Nor can I say merry Christmas lightly tonight to our armed forces at their battle stations all over the world." "General Eisenhower, as surprised as anyone by the success of the German advance, nevertheless saw the opportunity embedded in the crisis." "The Germans were on the offensive for the first time since Normandy, but that meant they were exposed and could be themselves surrounded and cut off." "On Christmas Day, 30 miles west of Bastogne, the Americans stopped the German advance." "The following day, American tanks broke through the German lines and linked up with the 101 st Airborne inside Bastogne." "The men there celebrated a belated Christmas, despite the shells and bombs that continued to fall around them and the fighting that lay ahead." "('O HOLY NIGHT' PLAYS)" "GIRL: "I am making a few Christmas gifts for Buddy and Doris" ""and bookmarks for all my friends." ""Mother said it was best to forget it this year," ""but we can't, on account of the little kids." ""She told them, because of the anti-aircraft guns in Manila," ""Uncle Sam told Santa to keep away this year" ""and leave his gifts for the kids in San Francisco."" "(EXPLOSIONS)" ""When you stop and think how hard our boys are fighting for us," ""I guess we can take it too." ""But just a little more rice would be all I can ask for." ""We always picture Opa and Oma on their farm in California." ""If they only knew how hungry we are, they would be very sad." ""I guess even when we tell them, they will never, ever believe it."" "Sascha Weinzheimer." "The grandparents Sascha Weinzheimer called Opa and Oma lived in the Sacramento Valley." "Her grandfather blamed himself for his family's captivity in the Philippines." "When they'd asked to go home in the weeks before Pearl Harbor, he'd insisted they stay where they were, certain there would be no war." "Once he knew they had been imprisoned, he had tried to get messages and Red Cross packages to them month after month." "His health began to fail." "My dad walked me to the main building for my siesta 'cause the camp shut down for three hours in the heat of the day." "So he stopped at the desk, and they said, "Oh, we have a Red Cross telegram for you."" "It was from my grandmother." "And it said my grandfather, he had passed eight months prior, and we were just getting it." "He stood there and cried, and then walked me up to my room." "Everybody told us that my grandfather literally died of a broken heart." "That evening, the family did its best to celebrate the holiday." "They made a tree out of a palm branch stuck in a tin can filled with dirt, and lined up at the canteen with the other prisoners for a special treat - two tablespoons of jam and one bite of chocolate." "Sascha thought it all delicious, even though there were tiny white worms in the chocolate." "During the night, American planes could be heard overhead again and scores of leaflets fluttered out of the dark sky " "Christmas greetings from the troops fighting their way across the Philippines toward Manila toward them." "Back in the spring of 1944," "John and Glynnie Frazier, of Fort Deposit, Alabama, received a telegram from the War Department." "Their son, Glenn, had been missing in action in the Philippines for two agonising years, and since nothing had been heard from him since May of 1942, he was now officially presumed dead." "Frazier had joined the army in 1941, in part because he believed that the young woman he loved loved someone else." "He was wrong." "She had remained loyal to him all that time." "Now, with this latest news, she began to give up hope of ever seeing him again." "But Glenn Frazier was still alive, a prisoner of the Japanese." "MAN:" "When I'd think about home," "I would think about the things that I missed most, like ice-cream and potato salad and some ambrosia that my mother used to make for Christmas, and so forth." "And of course it was always a thought of if we would get back home, but it got a time that we were so weak, it got a time with me, I was so weak until I couldn't even remember" "whether I had sisters or brothers, and I couldn't even remember their names." "And it comes to a time when you think, "Did I have a home?" ""Did I have a home?" "Did I have a family?"" "Frazier had come close to death several times." "He had endured the Bataán Death March and nightmarish conditions at Camp O'Donnell and Bilibid Prison in the Philippines." "And he had been forced to perform slave labour in prison camps in Japan itself, where he had survived double pneumonia, torture, a week of isolation in a covered pit, and beatings so frequent they became routine." "Once, when he failed to lift his feet high enough while marching, a guard drove a bayonet into his knee." "FRAZIER:" "It started getting infected and it finally got gangrene, and the doctor, our American doctor in there, had nothing to treat me with except iodine." "I would hold a cup to catch all the blood and he cut it open with a pocketknife, and it would get to the point where he would pour pure iodine in there to cure the gangrene." "They were thinking about taking my leg off." "So I told the doctor, "I'd just rather die than have my leg taken off."" "So he fought it and we won." "At one point, there was only a space in the back of my leg about an inch and a half across that the flesh was like normal flesh." "The rest of it was decaying." "I could open that wound up and see my bone." "Frazier's leg eventually healed and he went back to work on the waterfront, where he and his friends did all they could to sabotage the Japanese war effort." "They risked their lives to drill holes in the bottoms of oil barrels, poured sand into gas tanks, wrecked machinery, destroyed a dock, and loosened blocks so that a submarine under repairs slid into the bay upside down." "And through it all, Frazier thought of home and of the girl he still hoped, somehow, to see again." "But the thing that really kept me going is seeing if that girl was still there and see if, you know, I still in my heart was crazy about her, and the fact that I wanted to live." "I did not want my body pushing up Japanese daisies." "And I just felt that way, and I thought, "They're going to have a heck of a time getting me in a casket."" "MAN:" "I became a 'Sacramento Bee' news carrier at the age of 10, and for me, the war was that little square map on the front page where it showed wavy lines moving in some direction, and then the next day you'd see them move a little more," "and arrows pointed here and there where different armies were going." "And then, all of a sudden, there was this bulge in the map that was going back the other way." "That was the Battle of the Bulge." "And, "My God, what's happening here?" ""Are we losing now that we're this close?"" "We all took it seriously, because the lines had moved the other way." "(DISTANT SHOUTING, EXPLOSIONS)" "MAN: "This is being written on the verge of the new year," ""when all along the western front the outcome still remains in doubt." ""When German parachutists were known" ""to have been dropped behind American lines" ""dressed in American uniforms," ""it became necessary to demand identification papers from everybody." ""But with coloured troops, it was only a matter of form," ""since the Germans have no known coloured soldiers." ""I was halted many times," ""but my face was my best identification."" "Ollie Stewart, the 'Baltimore Afro-American'." "MAN:" "I think that we went to have a great experience." "And all of a sudden we were having more of a great experience than we really had reckoned for." "We were scared to death, of course." "Burnett Miller, of Sacramento, who had been raised a few blocks from where Burt Wilson lived, was a private in the 21 st Armoured Infantry Battalion," "11th Armoured Division." "He was among the thousands of American troops ordered into the Ardennes to relieve Bastogne and drive the Germans back." "It would be Miller's first real taste of war." "We crossed France, went through parts of Belgium and hit the Bulge in a big snowstorm." "Our vehicles became almost inoperable." "And the tanks, one after another, were blown up and we could see dead tankers and wounded tankers running for cover all over the place." "That was not a pretty sight." "We baled out of these tracks and started running through the snow to get some kind of coverage and actually retreated back up onto a hill, dug in, and spent that night in a big snowstorm." "We were wet, and I thought, "Boy, I don't think we can make it."" "And that night there were tracer bullets all over, lots of artillery - very, very scary." "And you'd rationalise things, like, "Nothing worse can happen but getting killed."" "But there were things worse than being killed." "In the Ardennes, the fighting and the dying went on." "It was the coldest winter in memory." "Many men were without winter boots or winter coats." "Thousands lost fingers, toes or feet to frostbite." "MILLER:" "Lots of our equipment wasn't very good." "We always had frozen feet because our shoes were really very, very poor." "Also, you know, we went into combat in the Bulge in the same overcoats we went to London in, and they were big, bulky, miserable things that would get wet." "And pretty soon we were looking for German prisoners or German dead." "They had nice, white, bunny-fur jackets that were just terrific - not only comfortable and warm, but were white and camouflaged." "MAN:" "Morale, I thought, kept up because you were with people." "That as long as you were with other Gls in the snow and in the misery, if you had somebody next to you, you figured, "Well, they can handle it, I can handle it."" "You just keep moving ahead." "In the chaotic fighting that followed, some towns changed hands four times." "Civilians hid in cellars as their homes were destroyed above them." "Allied troops had to recapture the ground they had lost inch by frozen inch, sometimes reoccupying foxholes they'd been forced from just a few weeks earlier." "The Americans lost an average of 1,600 men a day." "Among the dead were Private John Tavera, of Sacramento," "Corporal Lester Bendt, of Luverne," "Private First Class Domenic Derosimo, of Waterbury, and Private First Class Jesse Leon Hattenstein, of Mobile." "Those who were killed and wounded were replaced by thousands of green troops, mostly high school boys, who had been rushed through basic training." "Many replacements died before officers could learn their names and were replaced by still more frightened newcomers." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "I had a friend who claimed he was sent into the Battle of the Bulge with six weeks training and a new rifle." "He said if he had not been shooting squirrels all his life, he would have been completely lost." "But he shot the Germans like he would squirrels, and that was it. (Chuckles)" "Some officers ordered their men to take no German prisoners." "The memory of the massacre of American troops at Malmedy remained fresh." "MILLER:" "We had been held up at a little town." "We were supposed to just walk through it, and the Germans stopped us dead." "We just couldn't crack it." "Eventually, artillery came in." "Sort of levelled the houses." "They finally surrendered, and they came out and sort of lined up, and per usual, no-one knew what was going on." "We had a new battalion commander, just graduated from West Point, and he lined them up and said, "I want you to shoot 'em."" "And I was horrified." "Quite a few of us were horrified." "And I went to him and told him, you know, that this was against all international law and humanity." "My good buddy, who I'd spent so much time with, grabbed me and said, "This nut will shoot you." ""You'd better quit." "Knock this off."" "And he got enough guys and they shot these... about 25 prisoners." "It was a terrible thing to see, and I talked to a lot of my buddies who had shot these guys and they were horrified too." "By January 30, 1945, six weeks after the German offensive in the Ardennes began, six weeks after the start of the Battle of the Bulge, the Allies had finally managed to regain all the ground they'd lost." "It had been the biggest battle of the war on the western front." "More than a million men took part." "19,000 Americans died." "60,000 more had been wounded or captured or listed as missing." "Hitler's enormous gamble had ended in disaster." "He had lost some 100,000 men and virtually all his tanks and aircraft, and now had no way of replacing them." "And in the east, the Russian army was blasting its way closer to Berlin every day." "LEOPOLD:" "They had blown up our chow truck." "So these big aluminum cans that contained the variety of food they had were spaced about 40, 50 feet apart." "If a shell came in, it would only kill one or two men instead of groups of us if we were all blocked together." "We walked down the line slowly and opened up our mess kits." "And in the big pan of your mess kit, the first man placed two pieces of toast." "The second man put a nice half-inch-thick piece of magnificent roast beef, covering most of the toast." "The third man, a ladle of gravy over all of it." "Everything was fine." "The next man gave us a scoopful of reconstituted dried peas and carrots." "It was proper." "It was good." "It was on one side." "And finally we came to the end of the line." "And the end of the line, the man reached in and took a great big scoop of chocolate pudding and covered this magnificent roast beef from one side to the other with chocolate pudding." "I don't know how many of you have ever had chocolate pudding roast beef, but I can tell you, despite this fact - despite the insult that must have come to this beautiful piece of meat - we loved every single bite." "I still remember chocolate-flavoured roast beef." "(DISTANT EXPLOSIONS)" "MAN:" "You had no possessions at all." "You would cut everything down to the simplest, 'cause you had to carry everything." "When we were marching from one horror to another" "I had shoepacs on because the ground was always wet or frozen." "I had two pairs of woollen socks." "In my pockets I carried probably a couple of boxes of K-rations." "I had never had a toothbrush at all." "I didn't take a shower for six months." "No change of underwear at all." "No change of clothes at all for months." "And I had a sleeping-bag which I carried with a rope over my shoulder, like a tramp." "And that's all I had." "NARRATOR:" "More than 16 million Americans served in the armed forces during the war." "The vast majority of them never saw serious combat." "The infantry represented just 14% of the troops overseas." "But wherever they fought - in North Africa or the South Pacific or western Europe - the infantry bore the brunt of the fighting on the ground and suffered 7 out of 10 casualties." "And they endured hardships and horrors for which no training could ever have prepared them." "MAN:" "You know, you get hardened to it." "I stayed in a hole for an hour and a half or something like that - it seemed like that anyway - with a dead German." "And it's kind of an eerie feeling." "But you're so worried, really, about yourself at that time that you didn't think too much about it." "But you get really hardened to seeing a lot of gruesome sights." "And that worries you as much as anything." "You think, "My gosh, I saw so-and-so get killed today," ""and then he got run over by a tank and just a horrible mess," ""and it didn't bother me at all."" "In western Europe in early 1945," "Allied troops had gained back every snowy inch of the territory they'd lost during the Battle of the Bulge, and vast American and British armies were probing enemy defences, seeking a way across the Rhine and into the German heartland." "Meanwhile, their Soviet allies were rolling westward towards Berlin, driving the Nazis before them." "In the Pacific, US forces were readying an assault on a tiny volcanic island that would be remembered forever as a symbol of war's worst savagery " "Iwo Jima." "Behind enemy lines on both sides of the globe," "German and Japanese cities were disappearing in flames and American prisoners dared begin to hope for rescue." "11 -year-old Sascha Weinzheimer, a captive of the Japanese, whose fondest dream was that her life might simply return to normal, would have the happiest day of her life." "While in Germany," "Tom Galloway, of Mobile, would also taste freedom for a time, and then have it cruelly snatched away again." "On January 8, an American plane had flown low over Santo Tomas Prison Camp in Manila and dropped leaflets addressed to the people of the Philippines." ""General MacArthur has returned," they said." ""He will tell you over the radio," ""in proclamation and leaflet," ""exactly how and when you can help." ""Watch closely for these instructions."" "GIRL: "Gosh!" "Maybe soon we can sing 'God Bless America' out loud." ""Maybe we can see our flag flying again." ""What a thrill it will be when our first boys come through that gate." ""Mother says we fought this war too," ""like soldiers." ""People are dying every day from starvation." ""Fred Fairman and Mrs Everett yesterday." ""We have such a short time to go." ""What a pity they couldn't hang on to life just a while longer." ""Mother weighs only 73 pounds." ""She used to weigh 148." ""And Dr Allen says she has to stay in bed from now on" ""because she can't walk."" "WOMAN:" "When I'd get bouts of really severe hunger - it comes over you like waves - and then I'd do something to distract me." "Like drumming on the side of the shanty, or making noise, or even go screaming a little bit, just to get it out of your system, and then I'd go on." "But the kids would cry and grab their throat, or they'd grab their belly and go up to my mother." "That probably was a very bad thing, you know, to see your kids do." "GIRL: "January 17." ""Buddy's favourite expression is, 'Let's talk about food.'" ""He has a favourite suit too, which he calls his 'gate suit'." ""He's been taking this suit out almost every day for months," ""putting it on the bed and saying," ""'I'll put my gate things right here, Mummy, so I can be ready.'" ""All of us have something saved to wear out the gate " ""all of us except Daddy, who has been barefooted now for six months." ""'I don't need a thing for the gate except two good legs to walk out with,' he said." ""February 1." ""This morning, Aunty Bee came to visit." ""She works in the hospital." ""She says the doctors expect seven more to die today, all from starvation."" "MAN:" "To me, the real heroes of the war were those who very seldom get medals." "They're the medics." "Whenever a man gets injured, he very, very seldom calls out for his sweetheart or his mother." "First thing he calls out is the medic." "He always says, "Medic!"" "And whenever that word is heard, the medic rushes over." "And to rush over, he is just dodging bullets." "That takes guts." "MAN:" "Munitions are a terrible thing." "It tears a person apart." "It's not a clean cut - it tears, it rips." "I can't imagine what the medics went through." "You know, they were right there, and they were patching people up who were bleeding to death." "So my heart goes out to those boys." "Medics were paid $10 less per month than the men they tried to save." "Many were pacifists and conscientious objectors, unwilling to take lives, but willing to risk their own lives to save others." "Like the men they tended, they learned to improvise in combat." "During the Battle of the Bulge, they kept morphine and plasma inside their shorts to keep it from freezing." "In the Pacific, some dyed the red crosses on their helmets green to make themselves less likely targets for the Japanese." "And everywhere, they were forced to make terrible choices." "MAN:" "If you're in a firefight and you see a party that is wounded in a way that you know he cannot survive, you must pass him by, even though he may be calling to you for help," "and you must doctor somebody whose life you potentially can save." "And it's a terrible decision you have to make to pass somebody by who is in need of comfort but is not going to live." "It's never pleasant to do the work of a medic." "But it's one of the essentials of civilised behaviour." "There were some wounds no medic could treat." "What were you afraid of?" "(Mumbles) Dead people." "I can't stand seeing them." "I can't hear you." "I can't stand seeing dead people." "There were many names for it - 'shell shock', 'battle fatigue', 'combat exhaustion'." "One out of four of all the army men evacuated for medical reasons in Europe and the Pacific suffered from some form of neuropsychiatric disorder." "(EXPLOSION, GUNFIRE)" "Army planners determined that the average soldier could withstand no more than 240 days of combat without going mad." "By that time, though, the average soldier was more than likely dead or wounded." "(JAUNTY JAZZ PIANO MUSIC)" "(Nat King Cole sings) # Knock me a kiss" "# You'll never miss" "# When I'm ready to go" "# But if you can't smile and say yes" "# Please don't cry and say no" "# Squeeze me a squoze in these fine clothes" "# Mmm, I love you so" "# But if you can't smile and say yes" "# Please don't cry and say no. #" "WOMAN:" "During that time, they had a lot of pin-up girls." "Betty Grable had a picture of herself in her bathing suit, and she's glancing back over her shoulder." "And it's a back view and, oh, it was gorgeous." "So I says, "My Norman is going to have his own pin-up picture."" "And I had a red and white polka-dot bikini." "But you could either wear it low, if you had enough nerve to do it, or you could wear it all the way to the top." "Well, anyway, I put on my red and white bikini and went out in the backyard and I gave my mother my camera." "I says, "Here." "Take a picture." ""I want to send it to Norman." ""I'm going to be his pin-up girl."" "And he carried that through the war with him, and he said that he received a lot of comments from his buddies when they saw that picture, because after some of them saw it, they looked at him, and they looked back at the picture," "and they looked at him again, and they says, "What does she see in you?"" "(Laughs)" "And I had a picture of him on my desk, one that he took in France, so I was with him and he was with me." "GIRL: "February 3, 1945." ""At about five o'clock last night, 10 of our planes came over our camp." ""One pilot dropped his goggles with a note tied to them." ""It fell in the main building patio where there weren't any Nips," ""and a lucky friend of ours found it," ""because we found out right away what it said " ""'Roll out the barrel!" "Your Christmas will be here today or tomorrow.'" ""Shortly, we heard guns and tanks in the distance." ""Everyone thought it must be the Japs, except Daddy." ""He was sure it was the Americans."" "(GUNFIRE)" "The liberation was the most exciting thing in my life." "And if I cry, you'll forgive me." "So, on 3 February, my father walked me to the main building." "But while we were walking, we heard these big rumblings in the distance." "And usually when that happened, we could alright, we had trained ears by this point." "We knew it was the big bombers coming overhead." "But as we walked, we noticed the the noise was getting louder and louder but there was no planes appearing." "And we thought that was weird." "And people were coming out of their shacks and saying, "Gee!" "This is a different thing."" "And we heard guns going off." "The Brits were saying, "Oh, it's the Brits!" "The Brits are coming!" ""They're here!" "The limeys are here!"" "And the Americans said, "Don't be silly." "This is the Americans coming."" "So, we were doing..." "rushing back and forth, and because of the fire - the firing and the noise - people were just running around, you know?" "They weren't staying put." "All of a sudden - and we didn't know this till later - it was, like, three minutes to 9:00 in the evening, they came through, crashed through the front gates with their tanks." "And it was wonderful." "People went crazy." "You'd think the war was over, but it wasn't." "My mother was bedridden and 73 pounds." "My mother always said," ""Now, let's always keep one item to wear when our boys come in."" "So she had a half-eaten lipstick." "I had something, I forget, a sock, which is now, you know no shoes, there's no point in wearing a sock." "My sister had a clip, a barrette." "And so when my father picked up my mother and ran out of the shanty, she says, "Wait!" "Wait!"" "So he couldn't understand why." "She said, "Go back."" "So she reached underneath her mattress and pulled out her lipstick and put it on." "She said, "Now I'm ready for my boys."" "(ROUSING FANFARE PLAYS)" "NEWSREEL:" "At Santo Tomas Prison in Manila, safe at last, the internees gather for evacuation back home." "Pitifully undernourished, they can still chop wood to cook their new army rations." "News from home - after three long years, the Red Cross distributes letters from loved ones these internees had thought they might never hear from again." "(CHEERING)" "As Gls escorted the Japanese guards out of the camp, some of the children ran after them shouting, "Make them bow, boys!" "Make them bow!"" "Four days later," "General MacArthur himself visited Santo Tomas." "WEINZHEIMER:" "February 7 was my birthday." "I had turned 12." "And MacArthur came in for 20 minutes, greeted the prisoners and left." "(EXPLOSION)" "And as soon as he left, the Japs started shelling the camp." "And we had a lot of internees that were killed." "A lot of soldiers, Gls, that were killed." "And it was just one of those wild things that..." "There was just blood everywhere and stretchers and people running." "There were two days of shelling." "We spent two days in the central kitchen until they found the nest." "The battle for Manila would go on for a month." "Most of the city was destroyed." "1,000 Americans died." "So did 16,000 Japanese soldiers and nearly 100,000 Filipino civilians hit by artillery fire or slaughtered by their retreating captors." "MAN:" "The information that we were getting in Japan was very sketchy." "We would see some of the maps on the paper, on the newspapers on the stands as we were passing, showing that the navy was..." "the navy battles were closer, and that was encouraging for us." "But it was still a question as how we were going to get out of there." "Glenn Frazier, from Fort Deposit, Alabama, was one of 168,000 Allied prisoners still in Japanese hands." "He had been captured in the Philippines after the fall of Bataán in the spring of 1942." "Frazier had then been so certain he would die that he had thrown his dog tags into a mass grave so that when they were found his parents would have some idea of what had happened to him." "Now, with the Philippines retaken," "American troops came upon the grave." "FRAZIER:" "So then they found the dog tags that I threw in the grave." "So they had absolute proof that I was in that mass grave." "So they take the dog tags and the army gentleman goes to my mother and dad and tried to show them the dog tags and tried to settle the insurance." "So my daddy said, "Well, if I take the $10,000 and he's not dead," ""what happens then?"" "And he says, "You'll have to pay it back."" "He said, "Well, you just keep it," ""because I'm sure if anybody can make it, my son can make it." ""And if he's dead, then I'll come back to you and get the $10,000."" "NEWSREEL:" "The historic Yalta conference as it arrives at decisions that will shape the future of the world." "The Big Three reaffirm the ideals of the Atlantic Charter." "They call for..." "On February 4, 1945, the day after Sascha Weinzheimer and her family were liberated, the Big Three " "US President Franklin Roosevelt," "British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin - met at Yalta, on the Black Sea." "In week-long talks, they pledged to hold free elections after the war in the eastern European states captured by the Soviets, and agreed to divide Germany and Austria into three zones of occupation." "But first, Germany had finally to be defeated." "The Nazis were still trying to reinforce their army on the eastern front." "Stalin wanted help from American and British air power to stop them." "The Soviet leader called for air attacks on railroad stations and marshalling yards, often located in the hearts of cities." "Dresden was the first target, a beautiful old city on the Elbe, through which German reinforcements were said to be streaming east." "On February 13 and 14, 900 British and American bombers hit Dresden in two waves, dropping incendiary bombs in hopes of setting off a firestorm." "They succeeded." "At least 35,000 civilians were burned or blown apart or asphyxiated as they huddled in basements and bomb shelters." "The bombing went on, battering oil facilities, defence factories, roads and railways, and more cities." "Pforzheim, Würzburg," "Essen, Dortmund, Potsdam." "In March alone," "Allied warplanes dropped 163,864 tons of bombs on Germany - almost as many as they had dropped in the preceding three years combined." "By the middle of the next month, the air chiefs would call a halt." "They had run out of targets." "By then, 593,000 German civilians had died under Allied bombs." "Most were women." "More than 100,000 were children." "(PLANE ENGINES DRONE)" "NEWSREEL:" "Airborne, the B-29s head for Tokyo." "The giant bombers, equipped to range over 5,000 miles, now swiftly cover the 1,500 miles from Saipan to their objective to open the full-fledged air war against Japan." "Allied planners hoped the kind of bombing that had levelled German cities would destroy the Japanese will to resist and make unnecessary the bloody invasion that otherwise seemed inevitable." "American B-29s could now reach the enemy's homeland from Saipan and Tinian, but roughly halfway between them and Japan itself lay a tiny volcanic island" " Iwo Jima." "It was an otherworldly place - barely eight square, barren miles of rock and ash, reeking of sulfur, without safe drinking water." "But it had an airstrip from which Japanese fighters rose to harass American bombers as they flew to and from their mainland targets." "American commanders wanted the island taken." "Then they could make it a haven for their crippled bombers." "For 72 straight days," "American bombers pounded lwo Jima and its defenders with some 6,000 tons of high explosives." "Three more days followed of ceaseless shelling by the navy." "In the early morning of February 19, 1945, the marines started toward the island." "Most were veterans of earlier landings " "Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu." "The first three waves met little resistance." "Some began to think this invasion would be different, that for once the pre-invasion bombardment really had knocked out the island's defences." "It had not." "Some 21,000 Japanese soldiers were waiting for the Americans inside a virtually impenetrable network of tunnels and bunkers." "As the fourth wave neared the beach, the enemy opened fire." "Sergeant Ray Pittman, of Mobile, was there." "MAN:" "Going into lwo Jima," "I was a squad leader by that time." "And I always looked around and wondered," ""Now, how many men am I going to lose?"" "Course, we didn't know it was going to be bad as it was." "The fighting would go on for nearly a month before the Americans took the island." "The Japanese lost their entire garrison." "Once again, they had never intended to surrender." "Their mission was to kill as many Americans as possible before they were killed themselves." "6,821 Americans died - five times the number killed on Guadalcanal or Saipan." "Among the dead were Private David Harris, of Luverne," "Corporal John B. Zwanch, of Waterbury," "Private Zera Richards, of Sacramento, and Sergeant James Albert Chambliss, of Mobile." "27 Medals of Honor were awarded to those who fought on Iwo Jima." "13 of them had to be given posthumously." "So many of the men in one unit were lost that it came to be called the 'X-Ray Company'." "Of the 16 men in Ray Pittman's squad, only he and two others were left." "PITTMAN:" "What I went through after the war, the dreams and everything I had it would be just like reality to me." "But, uh it, uh... it's really it's really hard to explain just how you feel, because I came home and married and raised a family and lived a real happy life after the war." "But so many of them left their blood on the sand on Iwo Jima, Saipan and Tinian, that they didn't have that chance." "With the airstrip on Iwo Jima in their hands, the Americans were one big step closer to the Japanese homeland." "American bombers were now free to attack it at will." "(DRAMATIC MUSIC)" "NEWSREEL:" "The new American firebomb, the type that has been devastating Tokyo with flame." "This is how it was tried out - a blazing sweep of jellied gasoline." "That's the incendiary material, a newly developed form of ordinary gas, gelled in a way that gives it a volcanic force of blazing devastation." "On the night of March 9, 1945, firebombing came to the cities of Japan." "334 American B-29s roared in low over Tokyo and dropped hundreds of thousands of 70-pound napalm bombs." "16 square miles of the city, built largely of pine and paper and bamboo, burst into flame." "Perhaps 100,000 people died." "More than a million were left without homes." "In the next 10 days, the Americans went on to hit Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya again." "Some 50,000 more people were killed." "FRAZIER:" "When the bombing started in our area, first it was about once every two weeks, then it was a raid about every week, then it stepped up." "And most of the raids started at night with the B-29s, and you could hear the B-29, you could distinguish their sound, and all of a sudden you could hear these Zeros up there trying to - and the gunfire - trying to shoot them down." "And we knew that Americans were getting closer." "But they also told us that if any American landed on their soil, that we would all be shot, the POWs, that all guards had the ability to shoot you." "American B-29s continued to firebomb Japanese cities, eventually forcing more than 8 million people from their homes." "The Fifth Air Force printed up a pamphlet to reassure pilots who might have felt uneasy about killing so many civilians." ""The entire population was a proper military target," it said," ""since the Japanese Government had ordered all men and women" ""to enlist in a volunteer defence corps." ""For us," the pamphlet continued, "there are no civilians."" "FUSSELL:" "The German Army had been beaten up very badly, and not just in France, but other places they'd been." "Also, Russia was beating the hell out of them in the other direction." "It wasn't child's play beating them, but it was clear they were going to be defeated." "And so we really had them in the bag." "And at that moment, I knew we were going to win this war." "As soon as the ice goes away and spring comes again, we get on the attacking frame of mind again." "We're going to win." "By the middle of March 1945, hundreds of thousands of Americans were crossing the Rhine and driving into the heart of Nazi Germany." "When George Patton and his Third Army began to cross near Frankfurt, the general stopped halfway across the pontoon bridge." "He'd always wanted to piss in the Rhine, he said, and in full view of his men, he did." "Then Patton learned that his son-in-law, who had been captured in North Africa two years earlier, was being held in a German POW camp near Hammelburg." "It was some 40 miles behind the German lines, but Patton didn't care." "He dispatched a special task force - 16 tanks, 27 half-tracks, and 300 men - to free his daughter's husband right away." "Meanwhile, at the POW camp, the prisoners had heard that the Americans had crossed the Rhine, and believed that it was only a matter of time before they would be liberated." "Tom Galloway, who had been forced to surrender early in the Battle of the Bulge, was among the prisoners." "GALLOWAY:" "But you couldn't get too excited about anything - you were too hungry." "Hunger was just foremost in everybody's mind when you just stay hungry all the time." "I probably lost about 50 pounds in just a few months." "MAN:" "Well, you're just cold all the time." "I went three months without ever taking my clothes off." "You just stayed in your clothes 24 hours a day." "You took your boots off - we had boots - and you'd tie them to your bunk at night because they may get stolen." "Second Lieutenant Herndon Inge was also from Mobile." "He too had been captured at the Bulge." "INGE:" "When I was at Hammelburg," "I heard that there was a prisoner in another hut from Alabama, so I looked him up." "A skinny, dirty fellow came up to me and wanted to know if I..." "He said he heard I was from Mobile." "And it turns out it was Herndon Inge, whom we call 'Wanky'." "And he and I were raised probably about eight blocks from each other." "He knew my brothers and sisters, and we've been fast friends ever since." "On March 27, Patton's task force reached the prison camp." "INGE:" "Everybody was cheering and jubilant over the fact that at last we were going to be taken to good food." "Then someone started shooting." "In the confusion, Patton's son-in-law was hit by a bullet and rushed to the camp hospital, too badly wounded to be liberated." "GALLOWAY:" "Then they said, "We're going to move out."" "They said, "If you want to go, you can go,"" "but some went back into prison and some took off." "I took off - two others and myself." "More than 1,200 Americans ran out of the camp, but there were only enough vehicles to carry 250." "Thousands of Germans quickly surrounded them." "The freed prisoners scattered." "Most, including Herndon Inge, were recaptured right away." "But Tom Galloway and his two buddies had managed to escape and were trying to make it to the American lines on foot." "GALLOWAY:" "We had passed a farmhouse with barns, outbuilding and a small chapel." "So I told them, and I said, "Look..."" "By the way, it was Good Friday - Friday before Easter." "And I said, "This is..."" "That part of Germany, Bavaria, was mostly Catholic." "A matter of fact, I thought it was all Catholic." "I told them, "3:00 on Good Friday, they're going to be in church" ""and we're going to go in there and get in that barn that we saw last night" ""and get out of this weather."" "Well, we broke across the field just as fast as we could go and ran in that barn." "And I think we hit the only Protestant family in that part of Bavaria." "(Laughs) They were all in the barn!" "So, our luck ran out at that point." "Soon, Tom Galloway too was back behind barbed wire." "He and Herndon Inge would have to wait to be freed once again." "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota, March 29, 1945." ""A number of the boys in service have mentioned in their letters" ""they'd like to know how things are going back home." ""Dear gang..." ""...today started off with a big mistake" ""caused by an overenthusiastic radio broadcaster," ""who got the idea that a victory flash was coming up in a few minutes." ""To tell you the truth, it didn't cause much of a flurry on Main Street." ""People have had tentative dates for victory before" ""and have seen their hopes dashed." ""So they've made up their minds to keep their heads down" ""and keep working until there is no doubt of victory anymore."" "By the end of March 1945," "American forces were steadily gathering for their next target in the Pacific war - the big, densely populated island of Okinawa." "The British had taken back Mandalay in Burma." "The Russians were within 50 miles of Berlin." "But Hitler continued to exhort his people to resist, and the militarists who governed Japan were calling upon every man, woman and child to fight to the death against the American invasion they knew was coming." "NARRATOR:" "When the people of Luverne, Minnesota and Sacramento, California, Waterbury, Connecticut and Mobile, Alabama went to the movies in March of 1945, they saw and heard a sick and weary President Franklin Roosevelt - so sick and so weary that, for the first time in his career," "he referred directly to the paralysis that kept him from standing without braces." "ROOSEVELT:" "I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realise that it makes it a lot easier for me in not having to carry about 10 pounds of steel" "around on the bottom of my legs, and also because of the fact that I have just completed a 14,000-mile trip." "(People applaud)" "Roosevelt's strength was waning, but his message was undimmed." "The war was still to be won." "It's a long, tough road to Tokyo." "It is longer to go to Tokyo than it is to Berlin, in every sense of the word." "The defeat of Germany will not mean the end of the war against Japan." "On the contrary, we must be prepared for a long and costly struggle in the Pacific." "Americans had been fighting for more than three years now, and the number of dead and wounded and missing had more than doubled just since D-day." "The Nazis seemed at last to be on the verge of collapse, but American men were still dying in the struggle to eradicate them, and Allied planners feared the final battle with Japan would stretch on for years." "WOMAN:" "I remember going to New York on the train." "In the station at St Louis, Missouri, the platform was lined with caskets with American flags." "I could cry now." "It was just as far as you could see them on the platform at the train station." "And I went down reading the name in brass plaque, all the names." "And I cried and cried." "How could you not cry?" "MAN:" "The Pacific, as one experienced it, began at San Diego." "And you got a sense of what a huge space you were going into." "That this was not going to be like Europe, where there was land all around and it had names." "This was going to be nameless, empty space, almost all of it, with little dots of land in between." "In March of 1945, marine pilot Sam Hynes was 20 years old, a former University of Minnesota student who, like thousands of other young men, had been made to grow up fast during the war, passing test after test on the way to manhood." "He had learned to live on his own, had married, mastered the dangerous art of flying torpedo bombers and had now received his orders to proceed 6,000 miles across the Pacific to face his final trial - combat." "Hynes landed at Ulithi, the sprawling coral atoll the US Navy had turned into the advanced staging area for the assault that was about to begin on the Japanese island of Okinawa." "HYNES:" "It was awesome." "It was huge." "The anchorage was miles across, and it was covered with ships of all sizes - carriers, battleships, destroyers, cruisers." "I'd never seen so many ships." "It was like seeing all the power in your corner." "And there wasn't any power in the other corner." "Okinawa, 60 miles long and home to almost half a million civilians, was the gateway to Japan." "The Allies knew they had to take it before they could move on to the home islands, and were gathering the largest invasion force since D-day - almost 1,500 ships and more than half a million men." "(EXPLOSIONS)" "Day after day in March of 1945," "American and British warships fired shells and rockets at Okinawa." "There was little evidence of the island's defenders." "Allied planners were not sure just where they were dug in." "But they knew they were somewhere on the island - more than 100,000 of them, well entrenched and prepared to die for their emperor." "The Japanese Kamikaze pilots overhead were willing to die for him too." "There were nearly 100 Japanese airfields within flying distance of Okinawa, and the pilots of some 5,000 warplanes were preparing to sacrifice their own lives in order to take those of as many American sailors as possible." "MAN:" "They was trained to fly their planes one way and no return." "And when they went out after a ship or something, they had their funeral before they actually left." "And they knew they was never coming back." "They was under the impression that if they gave their life that way for their country, they had a special place in heaven for them, automatically." "Which wasn't true." "Seaman First Class Maurice Bell, of Mobile, Alabama, was serving as a gunner aboard the heavy cruiser USS 'Indianapolis' off Okinawa." "On March 31, Kamikazes targeted her for destruction." "BELL:" "I looked up to my right and there was one small cloud up there, and just as I looked up, I saw a plane come out of this cloud, and it was a Japanese Kamikaze plane." "The very instant I saw him up there, he must have spotted our ship, because he turned into a dive, instantly, and was coming straight down." "It looked like he was coming just straight to the very spot where I was sitting." "Our men back there started firing at it with the 20mm, and you could see the tracers hit." "The plane actually bounced off the ship, but the motor and the bomb went through the deck, went through number three mess hall, and right down there was three or four or five men sitting at the table eating." "It killed all of them." "The bomb went all the way through the ship into the water and then exploded back up through." "They said that hole all the way through was large enough to drive a 18-wheeler through." "9 sailors died. 29 were wounded." "The 'Indianapolis' was sent to Ulithi to have its hull mended." "Meanwhile, the bombardment of Okinawa continued." "The invasion began on April 1." "This was the night before Easter Sunday, the 1 st of April." "And Tokyo Rose, who was the spokesperson for the Japanese, was on the radio." "WOMAN ON RADIO:" "Japanese special attack planes launched late Thursday night..." "And having been through Normandy, and they didn't know we were coming, and here we are going into Okinawa, and Tokyo Rose is telling us, "OK, GI Joes, we know you're coming." ""We're going to give you a Easter party when you land," ""and we'll be there waiting for you."" "Well, that really sent shivers up and down one's spine." "Navy Ensign Joseph Vaghi, from Connecticut, who had been wounded on Omaha Beach, was among the 60,000 soldiers and marines moving toward the island that morning." "He had volunteered to return to combat." "VAGHl:" "When we finally began unloading, it was quiet." "As the landing crafts went in, you just walked ashore." "Couldn't believe this." "The Japanese mostly held their fire." "Four divisions - 75,000 men - would land that day." "The veterans couldn't believe their luck." "Marine Private Eugene Sledge, of Mobile, and his outfit were at the landing too, and so relieved, they began to sing the popular hit 'Little Brown Jug' as they unloaded their gear and started inland." "They had been warned that they would be likely to lose 8 out of 10 men before they could make it off the beach." "They lost none." "They were pleasantly surprised by the terrain as well." "It was "Pastoral and handsomely terraced," Sledge remembered," ""like a picture postcard of an Oriental landscape."" "MAN: "The weather was cool, and there was the wonderful smell of pines," ""which reminded me of home." ""It was such a beautiful island." ""You really could not believe that there was going to be a battle there."" "American infantry and tanks raced across the island, cutting it in two." "Then, as Sledge and the marines moved north to clear the central and northern parts of the island, the army turned south toward the main Japanese defences where they began to face increasingly strong opposition." "Offshore, the navy continued to have its hands full." "NEWSREEL:" "Sky full of flak as the Japs attack warships supporting the invasion of Okinawa." "Scenes of plunging planes, and enemy bombs land perilously near." "A low-flying enemy speeds toward a warship target." "Will the guns bring it down before it gets to its mark?" "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "Yes!" "It's hit, on fire, and crashes." "On April 6, Japan loosed a new tactic against the Allied ships." "Not single Kamikazes now, but flights of hundreds of them at a time, dropping out of the sky to attack the fleet." "The Japanese called these deadly flights 'floating chrysanthemums'." "(ALARM BLARES)" "By the end of the day, they had seriously damaged 17 American vessels and killed 367 sailors." "We lost more ships, we lost more sailors, we lost more men, and it was a horror." "It was one of the worst battles of the Pacific, really." "As the land battle for Okinawa intensified, the floating chrysanthemums would return again and again, taking a terrible toll on the men and ships." "MAN:" "If we had an invasion of Japan, we knew we were dead." "They issued orders later that the minute American or Allied forces landed on their homeland, to shoot all prisoners of war." "So we had basically accepted our fate." "Glenn Frazier was one of 168,000 Allied prisoners of war still in Japanese hands." "He had been a captive since the surrender on Bataán in the spring of 1942." "He was now in his fourth POW camp in Japan, at Suruga, south-west of Tokyo, on the Sea of Japan." "One day, their captors permitted 50 prisoners to wash their own filthy clothes in the ocean." "They were sitting around waiting for their clothes to dry when carrier-based American bombers roared in to attack the port." "FRAZIER:" "We run out of the warehouse at the end of the dock, and across the railroad tracks, and was waving." "And we knew then that the aircraft carrier planes were close." "And we knew that the end was coming close." "But that did not help our feelings as to what was about to happen." "Our lives were going to be sacrificed." "MAN ON RADIO:" "We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News." "A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead." "The President died of a cerebral haemorrhage." "All we know so far is that the President died at Warm Springs, in Georgia." "WOMAN:" "We can all tell you where we were when we heard that Roosevelt had died." "President Roosevelt was really the binding force for the United States." "When he would come on and give his fireside chats, we all gathered around the radio and everyone looked to him for leadership." "He had led us out of the Depression, so we felt that certainly he could lead us through a war." "And when the news came in April that he had died, it was a terrible blow to the entire country." "MAN:" "It was catastrophic, because he was the only president we knew for the first 12, 13 years of our life." "Now, the thing was, my parents were Republicans and hated Roosevelt, but I loved him and most of us kids loved him too." "Because he was the face of America that was saying, "Hey, things are going to be OK."" "HYNES:" "I was standing outside a quonset hut looking across the little strait between Saipan and Tinian, the next island, and I felt a great sense of loss." "More than that, I think " ""How will we go on fighting the war when our commander-in-chief is dead?"" "MAN:" "We were all very sad about it." "Less about his leaving than about the irony of it." "If he'd died a few months later, he could have seen the success of what he had done." "The men of the 100th/442nd Combat Team, the Japanese-American unit that had already distinguished itself in the fighting for Italy and France, were back in the mountains of northern Italy when they got word of Roosevelt's death." "He had signed the order that sent to internment camps the families from which many of them had come, but he had also provided them with the opportunity to prove their loyalty on the battlefield." "It was that FDR they chose to remember." "MAN:" "I remember that day, because when we got the word, suddenly men in my platoon took out their bayonets and put it on." "And I said, "What's happening here?"" "He says, "Well, I think we've got to do this one for the old man."" "They just stood up and started attacking." "Radio calls coming in from the company commander," ""What in the hell are you doing?" You know." ""You're not supposed to be attacking."" "I says, "Captain, you can't stop them."" "And so they're all moving forward for the old man, a man they had never met." "(LAST POST PLAYS)" "Many Americans, overseas as well as at home, couldn't even remember the name of the man who was now their commander-in-chief Harry Truman." "MAN:" "All aboard!" "SONG: # I guess I had a million dolls or more" "# I guess I've played the doll game o'er and o'er... #" "MAN:" "I had great difficulty adjusting to the fact that I was going home." "# That's why I'm blue... #" "Landed at Washington, DC, was processed through some paperwork there, caught a train at Union Station taking me down to Louisiana, where Jackie was." "# To love a doll that's not your own" "# I'm through with all of them" "# I'll never fall again" "# Say, boy" "# Whatcha gonna do?" "#" "Fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne, Minnesota, was home on leave that April." "He had been in more or less continuous combat in Europe since D-day - 10 ghastly months, during which he'd killed men and seen friends killed and come very close to collapsing from despair." "He expected soon to be ordered into action again, in the Pacific this time, and he desperately wanted to see Jackie Greer, the Louisiana girl with whom he'd fallen in love before going overseas." "Her letters had been Aanenson's anchor to sanity." "WOMAN:" "I prayed for him to come back, and I just felt like my prayers would be answered." "I was walking down the street and I saw the wedding dress in a window." "So I went right in and I bought that dress and shipped it to my mother and I said, "Have this ready for me." "I'm going to need it."" "Now the two were to meet again." "AANENSON:" "And I had to adjust to being away from the war." "The silence was difficult to get used to." "But it was such an exciting and unbelievable moment." "I was alive, and this was Jackie." "GREER:" "The first night, we were in the living room and he formally proposed to me." "And for some reason I got shy and I couldn't quite make myself say yes." "I don't know why, because I'd been saying yes for 11 months, you know." "And when I hesitated and couldn't quite say yes, he said, "Well, now, just make up your mind."" "The funny part was, the door right near my chair was closed, and on the other side of that door was my bed with that gorgeous wedding dress spread out all over it." "AANENSON:" "I was going to be going back to the war." "I didn't want to face the idea that she could end up being a widow in a couple of months." "But the more we talked about it, the more we decided, "Let's get married now."" "So we got married on April 17, two and a half weeks after I got home, in the First Methodist Church in Baton Rouge." "As I saw her coming down that aisle, it was just a thrill beyond belief." "(DRAMATIC MUSIC)" "NEWSREEL:" "In their stupendous advances, the Russian armies feature massed artillery." "The kind of warfare the Russians wage on the road to Berlin." "By the middle of April 1945," "Soviet troops were just 30 miles from Berlin and bent on revenge for the horrors the Nazis had inflicted on their homeland." "General Dwight Eisenhower decreed that the armies under his command would not drive directly toward the German capital." "The deadly task of capturing the city would go to the Red Army." "Hitler called upon his people to resist to the end." ""Every village and every town will be defended and held" ""by every possible man," he said." "For the Americans in Europe, the fighting and the killing sputtered on." "INOUYE:" "And that's a horrible thing, knowing that the war is going to end and you have to keep urging your men to go forward." "The 100th/442nd Combat Team was still in the mountains of northern Italy, hammering away at the last German positions there." "INOUYE:" "We had this objective, a high mountain." "As I was going up, I suddenly felt someone punching me on the side." "That's what I thought it was." "I fell down and I got up and kept on moving." "I had a bullet go right through my abdomen." "Came out just about a quarter inch from my spine." "Three machine-gun nests were firing down at Inouye as he continued to lead his men up the slope." "He hurled a grenade to knock out the first one, then killed its crew with his Tommy gun." "He silenced the next gun with two more grenades." "As he pulled the pin on yet another and got ready to throw it into the third machine-gun nest," "German shrapnel nearly severed Inouye's right arm." "Somehow, with his left hand, he pried his dead fingers from the live grenade and threw it, then started up the hill again." "INOUYE:" "According to the men and according to my company commander, he says, "For a moment, you went berserk." ""You picked up your gun."" "I had a Thompson submachine gun, and with my left hand, started approaching the last machine-gun nest, just firing it, with the blood splattering out." "It was a horrible sight, I think." "Finally, I got hit again on my leg, and I kept rolling down the hill and that was the end." "German prisoners of war were pressed into service to carry Inouye back down the hill." "He was given morphine at the aid station - so much morphine that when surgeons at the field hospital began to amputate his shattered arm, he had to endure it without anaesthetic." ""The pain was so intense," he remembered," ""that dying didn't seem like such an awful idea."" "I ended up receiving 17 whole blood transfusions." "Before they gave you the blood, they showed you the bottle, and on that bottle was a label that had the name, rank, serial number and the unit." "And so here is someone with some fancy name, Thomas Jefferson Lee, serial number, 92nd Division." "Now, 92nd Division was a unit that we were attached to in the last battle, and they're all made up of African Americans." "And all of the bottles I saw were from the 92nd Division." "So I must have had 17 bottles of good African American blood." "And so here I am." "For his heroism under fire," "Daniel Inouye would receive the Medal of Honor." "It was granted to him 55 years later, during his sixth term as a United States senator from Hawaii." "Meanwhile, events in Europe were moving so fast it was hard for the people back home to keep track." "NEWSREEL:" "On the final lap of their drive on Berlin," "Russian troops send the Germans reeling." "On April 25, American and Soviet forces linked up at Torgau on the Elbe river." "Germany had been cut in half." "The next day, Soviet troops began assaulting Berlin itself." "On the morning of April 30," "Russian troops fought their way into the Reichstag, the symbol of German power." "Less than half a mile away, beneath the rubble," "Adolf Hitler and his closest aides huddled in their bunker." "That afternoon, Hitler named Admiral Karl Dönitz to succeed him, then shot himself in the mouth." "Only his most fanatical followers now continued to fight on." "FUSSELL:" "Eisenhower, on D-day morning, distributed to the troops a general order, which is like a handbill, and everybody read it and he said, "We are about to embark upon the great crusade," ""which we've been preparing for for many months, etc."" "Now, at first, none of us could believe it was anything like a crusade because we were playing dice and we were thinking about girls all the time and getting as drunk as possible and so forth." "It wasn't like a crusade." "There was no religious dimension to it whatever." "When they finally got across France and into Germany and saw the German death camps they realised... that they had been engaged in something like a crusade, although none of them called it that." "And it all began to make a kind of sense to us." "I'm not sure that made it any better - it may have made it worse - to see that it was actually conducted in defence of some noble idea." "As the Red Army had moved through eastern Europe the previous summer, it had uncovered, at Majdanek in Poland, the first evidence of the Nazis' industrialised barbarism." "The ashes of thousands of human beings were found in a crematorium." "The American and British press played it down, assuming the Soviets were exaggerating." "Not even the Nazis could be so murderous." "By the end of April 1945, more than 100 camps and subcamps would be liberated." "Auschwitz, Treblinka, Ravensbrück," "Ohrdruf, Buchenwald," "Bergen-Belsen, Nordhausen, Dachau." "On May 5, advance patrols of the American 11th Armoured Division came upon Mauthausen, in Austria." "There they found more than 110,000 desperate so-called "enemies of the Reich" - men, women and children confined behind barbed wire." "Many were too weak to stand." "Private Burnett Miller, of Sacramento, was there and saw it all." "And they had put some signs out " ""Welcome, Americans." "You've saved us," and things like this." "And we surrounded the camp and then there was a surge of people who were in fairly good condition begging for food." "And we were giving them what food we had, concentrated food, and in some cases it overwhelmed their systems and actually killed them." "I'm sure we were responsible for the deaths of several hundred people just by feeding them concentrated food." "We went down in the basement and there were these big furnaces, and it looked like cordwood piled around, and they were bodies in rigor mortis that they had been preparing to burn in these big furnaces." "And the fellows that went into the other barracks came away just shocked, some of them very, very sick." "The hospital there, people dying, just thick, and people couldn't get out of their bunks and people in terrible condition." "And then later there was a big trench, and it was filled with bodies." "Some were dying, some were trying to steal food." "And the guards were dispersed all over, and we actually saw a guard move into a house, and we chased him in, and he was an officer." "And the prisoners who were there tore him apart, just killed him right there." "We lived in Mauthausen, which was an idyllic little Austrian town on the river, but you could smell the camp in town." "And all the villagers of course said they didn't know anything about the camp, and the local priest said he didn't know anything about the camp, and I knew that was a lie because you could smell the camp." "You could just smell death." "So it was a horrible, horrible experience." "And then we came..." "at least I came to think," ""Well, you know, this effort has been worthwhile." ""There was a real reason to do this." ""These were inhuman things that were being done to people."" "Other Americans were witnessing similar horrors at other camps." "Ray Leopold, a medic from Waterbury, and a Jew, was with the 28th Infantry Division." "We were near the Hadamar concentration camp." "At the same time, we noticed that up on the hill there was a building that the burgomaster described as an insane asylum." "We went up there and found that, true, they did have an insane asylum there, at least initially, but it was a place where there was medical experimentation going on humans." "I really can't tell you what I saw there." "It affected me profoundly, and I think all the men who were with me at that time were equally affected." "I, um..." "I felt that it was too bad that I was forbidden by the Geneva Convention to kill." "I..." "I felt that this was the most horrible human experience that had ever been visited on the face of the earth." "I saw one of those terrible places where they were where they had the people that were dying and dead and bodies stacked like cordwood." "That was the little town of Ludwigslust." "And we made the German people in that community go get those bodies, and had a burial in the park in front of the castle so that they would never forget it again." "And we gave them a Christian and Jewish burial." "But the people did it." "We made the German people do it." "These people in this country who say it didn't happen - it happened." "I saw it." "I know." "It happened." "In 1933, there were 9 million Jews in Europe." "By 1945, two out of three of them were dead." "Thousands of Jewish communities were wiped from the face of the earth." "Hitler's regime also slaughtered nearly 2 million non-Jewish Poles." "They murdered more than 4 million Soviet prisoners of war, as well as hundreds of thousands of handicapped people and political opponents, homosexuals and Gypsies and Jehovah's Witnesses and slave labourers from all the countries they'd conquered." "LEOPOLD:" "How bad it was, how wide it was, we never really knew how fully extensive this horror that Hitler had visited on Europe, and in particular on the Jews, how it was." "But here we began to see." "We had no idea that there was going to be 6 million dead Jews as a result." "I think the horror is still with me." "I think there's no apology that can ever atone for what I saw." "On May 8, three days after Burnett Miller's unit reached Mauthausen," "Germany finally surrendered." "The war in Europe had come to an end." "The Reich that Hitler had promised would endure for a thousand years had lasted less than a dozen." "HARRY TRUMAN:" "General Eisenhower informs me that the flags of freedom fly all over Europe." "This is a solemn but glorious hour." "I wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to see this day." "MAN:" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star-Herald'." ""Unlike New Yorkers, who whooped, hollered," ""and tore up tons of paper to throw in the streets," ""the news here was greeted with quiet dignity and reverent restraint." ""One by one, the flags blossomed out on Main Street," ""and store by store the employees quietly filed out" ""and the business places were locked up for the day." ""But there was no shouting, no hilarious display of any kind." ""Most everybody went home." ""There was quiet exultation over the fact that a great victory had been achieved," ""but that rejoicing was tempered by the sobering knowledge" ""that there was another great war yet to be won."" "MAN:" "The world contains evil." "And if it didn't contain evil, we probably wouldn't need to try to construct religions." "No evil, no God, I think." "No, of course, no evil, no war." "But this is not a human possibility that we need to entertain." "There will always be plenty of evil." "And there'll always be wars." "Because human beings are aggressive animals." "NARRATOR:" "The hard-won Allied victory in Europe had delighted Americans back home." "But the hundreds of thousands of men still fighting in the Pacific knew that the war was far from over." "Eugene Sledge, of Mobile, who had endured the horrors of the Battle of Peleliu, would once again be forced to enter what he called 'the abyss'." "Glenn Frazier, from Fort Deposit, Alabama, who had survived three and a half years of brutal captivity, would find that the Japanese were not his only enemy." "And the people of Sacramento and Luverne," "Waterbury and Mobile, and every other American town, knew that there would be more bad news from the battlefield before they could dare hope to know what it would be like to live once again in a world without war." "HYNES:" "It didn't really make much difference on Okinawa." "The Japanese were not going to fight any less hard because Hitler was out of it." "I suppose there was a certain satisfaction that we'd beaten that lot and could now turn our attention entirely to this lot, but aside from that, I don't think there was much excitement." "MAN: "Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon." ""On Okinawa, no-one cared much." ""We were resigned only to the fact" ""that the Japanese would fight to total extinction, as they had elsewhere," ""and that Japan would have to be invaded," ""with the same gruesome prospects."" "Eugene Sledge." "The battle for Okinawa was not going well." "The marines had cleared the northern and central parts of the island by mid-April." "But in the south, the army had been unable to blast the Japanese from their main defensive positions, a succession of limestone ridges around the walled town of Shuri." "The navy, battered daily offshore by Kamikazes and other Japanese warplanes, demanded that the army undertake a landing behind the Japanese lines so that they could be attacked from two sides simultaneously." "The army commander refused." "And on 1 May, the 1 st Marine Division, Eugene Sledge's outfit, was sent south to shore up the centre of the American line." "MAN: "A column of men approached us on the other side of the road" ""from the 106th Regiment, 27th Infantry Division" ""that we were relieving." ""Their tragic expressions revealed where they had been." ""They were dead beat, dirty and grisly," ""hollow-eyed and tight-faced." ""As they filed past us, one tall, lanky fellow caught my eye" ""and said in a weary voice, 'lt's hell up there, marine.'" ""I said with some impatience, 'Yeah, I know." "I was at Peleliu.'" ""He looked at me blankly and moved on."" "Japanese shells shrieked down as the marines struggled to find cover." "Friends died - old friends who had fought alongside Sledge on Peleliu." ""Replacement lieutenants were killed or wounded" ""with such regularity," he remembered," ""that we rarely saw them on their feet more than once or twice" ""and never got to know their names."" "The marines inched their way toward Shuri, blasting and burning the enemy out of their hiding places one ridge, one village, one gulley at a time." "MAN: "I found it more difficult to go back" ""each time we squared away our gear to move forward." ""The increasing dread of going back into action obsessed me." ""It became the subject of the most torturous and persistent" ""of all the ghastly war nightmares" ""that have haunted me for many, many years." ""The dream is always the same " ""going back up to the lines during the bloody month of May on Okinawa."" "HYNES:" "Terrible things happened at Okinawa." "But a man in an airplane above the battle doesn't see the terrible things." "What I saw was drifting smoke, explosions." "You see destruction - you can imagine the devastation, but you don't exactly see it." "You don't see the dead civilians who died in their thousands." "You don't see the dead Japanese." "You don't even see your own dead." "I dropped some bombs on buildings that blew up, and if there was anybody in them, I suppose I killed somebody." "I don't know." "I'd like to think I didn't." "But that's what I was being paid for, was to kill people." "In late May, the Japanese began a carefully staged withdrawal from the Shuri line, slipping back 10 miles or so to their last redoubt, another series of ridges at the island's southern end." "It would be three more weeks before its last defenders were killed and their commanders committed suicide." "By then, 92,000 Japanese soldiers and as many as 100,000 Okinawan civilians were dead." "Of the 235 members of Eugene Sledge's Company K who landed on Okinawa, just 26 emerged unhurt." "Of the 254 men brought in to replace those who had fallen, only 24 remained." "In the end, more than 12,000 Americans died," "60,000 were wounded - the worst losses of the Pacific war." "Among the dead were Private First Class J.J. McCarthy, of Waterbury," "Sergeant Jeff Fleming, of Sacramento," "Private First Class Lowell Reu, of Luverne, and Private Ernest Roy, of Mobile." "As the Allies prepared to move on to Japan itself, still more terrible losses seemed inevitable." "HYNES:" "We were told that, in the invasion of Japan, we would be the first land-based single-engine bombing squadron." "To go in, be in on the invasion of the Japanese home island, that would be heroic stuff - we all felt that." "But at the same time, by then, our sense of the strangeness of the Japanese opposition had become stronger." "And I could imagine every farmer with his pitchfork coming at my guts, every pretty girl with a hand grenade strapped to her bottom or something - that everyone would be an enemy." "The Allies planned to begin with the island of Kyushu on November 1, 1945." "More than 500,000 Japanese troops were already in position to repel them and another 6 million were either under arms or ready to be called up." "Women and schoolchildren were drilling with sharpened bamboo spears." "The Americans did not expect to be able to move against the larger island of Honshu until April of 1946." "Former president Herbert Hoover headed a commission that suggested half a million Americans might die before the islands could be taken, along with perhaps 7 million more Japanese." "Military planners came up with different estimates, but all anyone knew was that the cost in casualties was likely to be astronomical." "The end of the war in the Pacific still seemed very far away." "Gls who had once talked of "getting home alive in '45", began to coin new slogans " ""Back in the sticks in '46"," ""Back to heaven in '47", even "Golden Gate in '48"." "NEWSREEL:" "The Soviet Premier, the remaining member of the original Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin Big Three." "Now President Truman greets Prime Minister Attlee and the conference of the Big Three at Potsdam sets the policy of the Allied powers." "In mid-July, the Allies met in Germany, at Potsdam, and set forth the terms under which they would agree to end the war." "Japan's leaders would have to abandon every inch of their empire, face trial for war crimes, submit to being disarmed, and agree to American occupation until a new, democratically elected government could be established." "Unless they agreed to all of it, the declaration warned, they could expect "the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland"." "Japan chose not to respond to the Allied ultimatum, and tried instead to persuade Russia, which had never declared war on Japan, to broker more favourable surrender terms." "For most of Japan's leaders, despite the agony the Japanese people were enduring, despite the even greater agony that seemed sure to come, unconditional surrender still remained unthinkable." "On August 5 on the island of Tinian, a secret object was placed aboard a B-29 named for the mother of its pilot - the 'Enola Gay'." "It was an atomic bomb." "It had originally been intended for use against the Germans, who had been feverishly working to make a bomb of their own, but it had not been ready for delivery before they surrendered." "The American bomb had been developed under such strict secrecy that the new president had never heard of the project before he assumed office." "But once he was told about it," "Truman approved the bomb's use as soon as it was ready." "At 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945, the bomb tumbled through the bomb-bay doors of the 'Enola Gay'." "43 seconds later, six miles below, but still high above the city of Hiroshima, it detonated, changing the world forever." "(EXPLOSION)" "With a single bomb, 40,000 men, women and children were obliterated in an instant." "100,000 more would die within days of burns and radiation." "Another 100,000 would succumb to radiation poisoning over the next five years." "More than half a century later, citizens of Hiroshima would still be dying from the bomb's long-delayed side effects." "Despite the devastation, the Japanese still would not accept the Allied surrender terms." "Then, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan." "The islands now faced invasion on two fronts." "At 11:02 the following morning, an American plane dropped a second atomic bomb, on the city of Nagasaki." "Some 40,000 more civilians died instantly." "The Americans had no more such bombs and would be unable to produce another for several months." "But the Japanese had no way of knowing that." "In Tokyo, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War remained split between those still determined to fight on and those willing, finally, to give up." "That evening, all six members of the council called upon the emperor, who broke the deadlock." "Japan would surrender." "WOMAN:" "Everything was set for the landings in Japan." "So when the atomic bomb was dropped and it ended it so quickly, we were stunned but rejoiced." "Our boys would come home!" "There wouldn't be any more of them killed." "You can never convince anyone of my generation that the atomic bomb was not the greatest thing that they ever came up with, because we'll defy you." "It was just finally the end of that horrible war." "MAN:" "I had very mixed feelings about it." "That the atom bomb could be blasted on fellow humans whose blood is as red as mine, whose skin blisters as readily as mine does was something I had hoped could be avoided." "Of course, there is the mathematical odds that by killing some quarter million Japanese we may have saved half a million American lives." "Mathematically, that's a good thing." "But it's hard to give up someone else's life." "For nearly three years," "Glenn Frazier, of Alabama, had been a prisoner of war in Japan." "After the surrender, the guards at the prison camp simply walked away." "Frazier and his comrades wandered out among the dazed civilian population and took the train to Tokyo and freedom." "MAN: "We thought the Japanese would never surrender." ""Many refused to believe it." ""Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead." ""So many dead." ""Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy," ""the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent," ""trying to comprehend a world without war."" "Eugene Sledge." "(LIVELY JAZZ MUSIC)" "MAN:" "VJ Day" " I was in San Francisco, and it just blew up!" "People came out of everywhere, out of every window, out of every door." "They came out of the sewer." "You could cop a feel going down the street and nobody would say a word." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "Well, my dad was so excited, that he ran in the room and he got his pistol from World War I, and he filled it, and we went out of the front door, and if you go dig around that azalea bush," "I know the bullets are still in the azalea bush." "He fired six rounds into the azalea bush, brought the pistol back in the house, and said to my brother and I, "Come on, gang,"" "and "We're going downtown."" "And he threw Mother in the car and we drove down to Admiral Semmes's statue." "And Daddy circled it three or four times, honking his horn." "So by the time we left downtown, people were climbing up Admiral Semmes's statue and the celebration had begun." "But I've always said my daddy started the celebration of VJ Day." "In Waterbury, Connecticut, newsboys peddling a special "War's Over" edition of the 'Waterbury American' were on the street within 60 seconds of the president's formal announcement." "(SIRENS WAIL)" "Every firehouse siren and factory whistle in town began to blow." "WOMAN:" "We didn't even know the people." "We were hugging them and kissing them." "We didn't know who they were and they didn't know who we were." "It was just a joyous time, it was a happy, happy time, 'cause we're thinking, "Well, now all our boys are going to come home."" "(BELL TOLLS)" "That evening, special services were held at every Waterbury church and synagogue." "As a sign of profound gratitude for the good news, some Italian-American women climbed the hill to Our Lady of Mount Carmel church on their knees." "MAN:" "We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the San Francisco Bay." "And as we approached the pier, there" " I get a little choked up - there was the American flag flying high in the breeze over American soil, and it was the most gratifying thing, 'cause we never dreamed that we would ever get back." "And there was a bunch of prisoners of war on there, and we stood there, couldn't even say anything, with tears in our eyes." "And as we docked, I was the second one to get off." "And I get down on the ground and I kissed the ground." "And every one of the prisoners of war that was on that ship got off the gangplank and kissed the ground." "And our audience out there was just clapping their hands every time and welcomed us home." "And it was the greatest feeling in the world." "Glenn Frazier's family back in Fort Deposit, Alabama had officially been informed that he had died in the Philippines." "(PHONE RINGS)" "FRAZIER:" "We were told we could make a phone call home at the expense of the government." "So I made my phone call to my home, and the phone was answered by my mother, and I told her who it was." "And, now, I didn't know anything about all the letters and the guy coming there often, you know, telling them I was dead." "So she answered the phone, and then she fainted and the phone went dead." "And then her sister, who was there visiting, and she fainted when I told her who it was." "And then my oldest sister came to the phone, and she fainted." "So then there was a long pause, and my daddy answered the phone." "He said, "Who in the world is this?" And so I told him." "And I used my middle name at home - Dowling." "I said, "This is Dowling."" "And he said, "Well," he said, "I knew you weren't dead."" "But he said, "Looks like I've got a bunch of dead women here."" "He said, "I've got to get them up off the floor."" "So he said, "Now, you hold on." "Don't go away, now." "I'll be back in a minute."" "So he goes and gets a pitcher of water and he's pouring some water in their face." "Comes back to the phone and he said, "I think they're waking up." ""Their eyes are moving." "Some are moving a little bit."" "He said, "They'll be able to talk to you in a little bit."" "And that's when they knew I was in San Francisco." "By the fall of 1945, 750,000 service personnel were returning to civilian life every month." "LEOPOLD:" "No matter how great, no matter how small, no matter how indifferent, no matter how stupendous, regardless of the facts, home has a unique quality that just cannot be exceeded." "Home is the ultimate value that humans venerate." "The war had rescued Waterbury, Connecticut and the industries that had provided its nickname - 'Brass City'." "And at first, its workers returned to making the screws and washers and buttons, shower heads and alarm clocks, toy airplanes and lipstick holders and cocktail shakers they'd been making before Pearl Harbor." "But as the years went by, the brass industry declined." "So did Brass City." "Ray Leopold came home for a time, then moved away, went into business, and eventually became a fundraiser for charity." "LEOPOLD:" "I ran into a young man who was the brother of a young man I had known reasonably well." "He said, "What outfit were you with, Ray?"" "And I told him that I was with the 28th Infantry." ""Really?" he said." ""My brother was with that outfit."" "And I said, "Where is your brother?"" "He said, "Oh, he didn't make it." "He's dead." ""He was killed in action."" "And then he turned, he says," ""You were with the 28th too, and you are home and he isn't."" "He couldn't get over the idea that someone so dear to him as his brother couldn't make it and someone who is more or less an indifferent third person made it." "MAN:" "There are casualties in war that they never show up as casualties." "They're internal casualties." "We all changed." "We went out as a bunch of kids." "Wars are fought by kids." "And we came back - looked maybe the same, but inside we were so different." "They thought we were just odd, I guess." ""What's happened to Quent?" "What's wrong?"" "And I was wondering, "Nobody knows, nobody understands," ""and I am not good enough with words to be able to tell them."" "Quentin and Jackie Aanenson did not return to his father's farm south of Luverne." "He went to Louisiana State University instead and eventually entered the insurance business." "More than 1,000 citizens of Rock County, Minnesota served in uniform during the war." "32 of them lost their lives." "The names of all those who served were carefully painted on a wooden roll of honour in front of city hall in Luverne." "As the years passed, Minnesota winters wore away the names." "One year, the monument was taken down to be repainted and repaired." "Somehow, it was lost." "WOMAN:" "Our hope was we were going to have a new life." "And I remember driving up on the day that we drove through to the ranch." "And it was like being in 'Alice in Wonderland'." "It was absolutely amazing." "Sascha Weinzheimer and her family, who had nearly starved to death as prisoners of the Japanese in Manila, settled on their late grandfather's farm in the Sacramento Valley." "WEINZHEIMER:" "It was some sort of cultural shock, coming back, because your body's here but your mind isn't." "And to have to put up with the stupidity of some of the Americans that have been living here." "They'd walk into a room and say, "Oh, tell us about your experience."" "And then immediately they'd say, "Oh!" ""We had these coupons that had to be rationed," ""and then we couldn't go here because of gasoline."" "And so we just sort of avoided everything." "And when people were talking to us about our experience, we just clammed up, because it..." "they didn't want to hear it anyway." "Sacramento's wartime transformation from small-town state capital to big city would prove permanent." "State government grew too." "So did the military bases on Sacramento's outskirts as the world war was eventually supplanted by the Cold War." "Among the Sacramentans returning home were thousands of Japanese-Americans newly freed from the inland camps in which they had been imprisoned for no other reason than their ancestry." "They struggled to recover their property and rebuild their lives." "The men of the 100th/442nd Combat Team came home too." "Robert Kashiwagi, wounded four times in Italy and France, got a job with the California Highway Department." "MAN:" "When I showed up in the shop, this one fellow from the floor went to his foreman." "He says, "Hey, look, if that Jap is gonna work here," he says, "I'm quitting."" "And this foreman told me that." "And I says, "Well, you know, I passed my test and I served overseas" ""and I think I did what I was supposed to do," ""so I'm going to hold my position and I'm going to remain here, you know?"" "And I did." "And so, as I remained there, why, he quit." "And then everything turned a little bit better as time went on, and it got easier and easier for me." "And so I was able to serve 32 years and retire." "The war had made Mobile into a boom town." "But only a few years after it ended, some 40,000 defence jobs had already disappeared." "Some workers left the city for the small towns where they'd been living when the war began." "Others moved north and west, to bigger cities, in search of work." "Returning black veterans, who had fought for freedom overseas, found themselves facing the same segregation they had left behind." "MAN:" "It would be a matter of disgust and distaste with you when you found out that the fruits of victory were not yours." "I never did appreciate going to work at night." "And the police officer would stop you at night and say," ""Hey, boy, where you going?"" "And you come up to answer him " ""You got your hat on." "Take your hat off when you talk to a white man."" "And that kind of stuff, uh..." "And I'd worked all night, just about, at the railroad, and didn't have a car, so I had to walk home." "I cried all the way home." "It was... it was hurt." "John Gray eventually went on to college, became a teacher and then a beloved school principal and community leader for 50 years in Mobile." "Katharine Phillips briefly became an airline stewardess and married a former navy pilot." "Her younger brother, Sid, who had encountered terrible suffering while serving with the 1 st Marine Division and vowed to find a way to do something about it, went on to medical school and became a doctor." "But there was one person for whom he could do nothing." "MAN:" "My friend Eugene was probably as good a friend as I've ever had in my whole life, but he could not throw off the war." "He could not forget it." "It seemed to haunt him." "MAN: "As I strolled the streets of Mobile," ""civilian life seemed so strange." ""People rushed around in a hurry about seemingly insignificant things." ""Few seemed to realise how blessed they were to be free" ""and untouched by the horrors of war." ""To them, a veteran was a veteran - all were the same," ""whether one man had survived the deadliest combat" ""or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform."" "Eugene Sledge had been an enthusiastic hunter before the war." "Now he found he no longer had the heart for it." "In combat, he had felt the same terror his targets felt when he fired at them, he said, and he couldn't bear it that they could not shoot back." "Nightmares plagued him." "He earned a business degree under the GI Bill, tried the insurance business and abandoned it, eventually became a biologist and teacher." ""Science was my salvation," he remembered." ""It helped keep at bay the flashbacks from Peleliu and Okinawa."" ""Close, constant study of nature," his wife said," ""kept him from going mad."" "But the war remained with him nonetheless." "He still had the tiny sheets of paper on which he'd kept a journal in the Pacific, and finally, at his wife's urging, he turned it into a combat memoir called 'With the Old Breed'." "Describing the horrors he had endured eventually allowed him to begin to put them behind him." "Eugene Sledge died in 2001." "MAN: "Until the millennium arrives and countries cease to enslave others," ""it will be necessary" ""to accept one's responsibility to, and to be willing to make sacrifices for," ""one's country," ""as my comrades did."" ""War is brutish, inglorious and a terrible waste." ""Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it." ""The only redeeming factors were my comrades' incredible bravery" ""and their devotion to each other."" "Eugene Sledge." "FRAZIER:" "My home town just gave me a hero's welcome." "Couldn't ask for anybody to be any nicer to you." "But little did you know what was ahead, and I didn't until it started happening to me." "Glenn Frazier and his brother, who had served with the army in North Africa and Italy, happened to arrive home in Fort Deposit, Alabama the same day." "Their mother, Frazier recalled, seemed dazed to have both her boys back, but she remembered to give each of them the little pile of Christmas packages she'd bought and wrapped but had been unable to send them during the war." "When the boys stepped out into the street, they were mobbed by friends and neighbours happy to have them home." "Before Frazier joined the army in 1941, he had confessed to a high school classmate that he loved her." "She had waited patiently for him for over three years, until the army formally told his family Glenn was dead." "Frazier now eagerly asked after her." "Hope that he and she would one day marry had helped sustain him in captivity." ""I hate to tell you this," a friend told him," ""but she's getting married this coming Sunday."" "That night, the nightmares began." "FRAZIER:" "It was just like real life again." "It was just so real." "It sort of kept me from sleeping." "I got to the point where I didn't even want to go to sleep." "My nerves were bothering me." "You couldn't tell anybody." "You couldn't tell..." "In those days, if you were seeing a psychiatrist, it didn't make any difference whether it was military or what, nobody'd give you a job." "Psychiatrists working for the Veterans Administration were of little help." ""Just act normal and you'll feel normal," they told him." "Frazier eventually married, had two children, ran his own trucking business." "But the war would not go away." "I hated the Japanese as hard as anybody, I believe, could ever hate for so long." "And mine was as deep." "I think I was justified in the hate that I had." "But it come a time when..." "It wasn't affecting them." "They didn't even know I existed." "They were over there and having their fun and getting their things, their country straightened out." "And here I am over here, I'm hating and hating and hating, and having the nightmares and so forth." "And it..." "I had to get rid of it." "I had to throw it off because it was just completely destroying me." "And I prayed, and with the preacher's help" "I got to the point to where I woke up one morning and I felt a little bit more rested." "But my war lasted, actually, another 30 years." "MAN:" "To forget the war would be not just impossible - it would be immoral." "It doesn't get to me very often, except when I talk about it like this, and I seldom do that, actually." "It's just something, it never goes away." "It's something you have to endure the way you endured the war itself." "There's no alternative." "You can't wipe out these memories." "You can't wipe out what you felt at that time or what you knew other people felt." "It's just part of your whole possession of life." "And I suppose it does some good." "For all those Americans who lived through the terrible conflict, for those whose fathers and sons and brothers were lost or maimed, as well as for those whose only contact with combat was listening to the radio and reading the local paper," "it remains to this day simply "the war"." "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." ""All week long, with 'Silent Night' running through my head," ""I've been groping for a Christmas story." ""Somehow, the story always eluded me." ""A lot of servicemen have been in." ""They told us where they spent last Christmas overseas." ""But you didn't need to write a story about them." ""The story of their happiness about being home" ""was written all over their faces for the world to see." ""And now comes the time when it comes our turn" ""to extend our Christmas greetings to each and every one of you." ""May the joy of Christmas and a big share of its peace and beauty" ""be with you all," ""every single day of the new year to come."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star-Herald'."