"(BIRDS CHIRP)" "(ARTIE SHAW'S 'MOONGLOW' PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "One evening in the summer of 1941, several months before the United States would be drawn into the Second World War, in a little farming town in Alabama, a 16-year-old high school boy named Glenn Dowling Frazier discovered that the girl he loved" "was interested in someone else." "(CRICKETS CHIRP)" "Frazier was so angry and upset that when the owner of a juke joint refused him service, he stalked outside, climbed onto his motorcycle, and roared through the door, shattering bottles and smashing furniture." "As he raced away, the bar owner chased him down the street with a shotgun." "The next morning, humiliated, scared, and unable to face his parents," "Glenn Frazier went to the nearest recruiting office, lied about his age, and joined the peacetime army." "He volunteered to serve in the Philippines." "FRAZIER:" "When I volunteered for the Philippine Islands," "I had no idea that we would actually be at a war." "I was thinking that probably Germany was the most likely place that there would be a war, so in my mind, I thought it'd be safe over there." "I never thought Japan would be attacking us." "NARRATOR:" "Over the next four years," "Frazier would find himself in the midst of war - desperate hand-to-hand combat, a forced march so brutal the world would never forget it, and nightmarish prison camps where simply surviving required luck and bravery and unshakable will." "Back in Alabama, those who loved him would be told he was dead." "All Glenn Frazier would be able to do was cling to the hope that one day he could come back home." "(ARTILLERY SHELL WHOOSHES, EXPLODES)" "(GUNFIRE, MEN SHOUT)" "I don't think there is such a thing as a good war." "There are sometimes necessary wars." "And I think, one might say, just wars." "And that, never..." "I never questioned the necessity of that war and I still do not question it." "It was something that had to be done." "NARRATOR:" "The greatest cataclysm in history grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions - anger and arrogance and bigotry, victimhood and the lust for power." "And it ended because other human qualities - courage and perseverance and selflessness, faith, leadership, and the hunger for freedom - combined, with unimaginable brutality, to change the course of human events." "(AIR RAID SIREN WAILS)" "The Second World War brought out the best and the worst in a generation, and blurred the two so that they became, at times, almost indistinguishable." "In the killing that engulfed the world from 1939 to 1945, between 50 and 60 million people died so many, and in so many different places, that the real number will never be known." "More than 85 million men and women served in uniform, but the overwhelming majority of those who perished were civilians - men, women, and children obliterated by the arithmetic of war." "(DISTANT EXPLOSION)" "The United States of America was relatively fortunate." "More than 405,000 soldiers and sailors, airmen and marines died, but that figure represented proportionately fewer military casualties than were suffered by any of the other major combatants." "American cities were not destroyed." "American civilians were never really at risk." "But without American power, without the sacrifice of American lives, the struggle's outcome would have been very different." "The American economy only grew stronger as the fighting went on, and by the time it ended, the United States would be the most powerful nation on earth and a once isolated and insular people would find themselves at the centre of world affairs." "The war touched every family on every street in every town in America - towns like Luverne, Minnesota," "Sacramento, California," "Waterbury, Connecticut, and Mobile, Alabama - and nothing would ever be the same again." "(GUNFIRE AND ARTILLERY FIRE BOOMS)" "HYNES:" "I'm not sure I can speak about why human beings in general go to war." "I think that's a pretty large category." "I can only speak about why 18-year-olds from Minneapolis go to war." "They go to war because it's impossible not to, because a current is established in the society so swift, flowing toward war, that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream." "MAN:" "Luverne, Minnesota, August 1941." ""Miss Aagot Rylund, who is in town visiting her brother," ""knows what it is to see vast sections of a city" ""ripped to ruin by German bombs" ""and she remembers the nights that London burned," ""how she could read a letter" ""by the unbelievable glare of the far-off flames." ""She knows what it is to have high explosive bombs blast" ""their big craters right outside the doorway" ""of the shelter in which she was sleeping." ""She has had her best friends killed." ""Looking out at the peaceful countryside" ""from the Thompson porch, she said it was hard to believe" ""that the rest of the world was at war."" "Al Macintosh, 'Rock County Star'." "NARRATOR:" "Much of the world was already at war in the fall of 1941." "But for most Americans, finally beginning to recover from a Great Depression, events overseas seemed impossibly far away." "In Luverne, Minnesota, the biggest town in Rock County, in the state's south-western corner, the autumn harvest was only a memory... and its 3,000 citizens had begun the long winter wait until they could sow their fields again." "Al Macintosh, the editor of the 'Rock County Star', lived at 517 North Kniss Avenue." "He was a newcomer from North Dakota who had turned down big city jobs to run his own small town paper." "He would soon find himself trying to explain the unexplainable to his new neighbours." "Six-year-old Jim Sherman lived with his family at 503 North Estey Street." "SHERMAN:" "I think it was a pretty close-knit community." "Uh, there was a saying that if you don't want people to know about it, you don't do it - sort of thing." "And everybody knew pretty much everybody else in town." "('AMERICAN ANTHEM' PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "Four miles south of town, near the Rock River, was the 120-acre farm of the Aanenson family." "There they raised cows and grew barley, oats, and corn." "Their middle son, who would face the most fearful odds in the skies over France, was named Quentin." "QUENTIN:" "And literally, sometimes," "I would be on a piece of farm machinery ploughing corn and a lonely airplane would fly over and I would look up and my spirit would soar." "That's where I want to be sometime." "I want to live that way." "I want to do those things." "NARRATOR:" "In Sacramento, California, the state capital," "Okies, refugees from the Dust Bowl, still camped on the edge of town." "And worked the fields and orchards and vineyards of the surrounding Sacramento Valley." "The city had been the gateway to the California gold rush, and the western anchor of the transcontinental railroad." "Although it was home to some 106,000 people," "Sacramento still seemed like a small town." "Tom and Earl Burke, who would be asked to sacrifice everything for their country, lived with their parents at 3240 Lassen Way, just north of town." "EARL:" "It was a tremendous town, everybody knew each other." "All, all ethnic groups were just perfect." "I mean it was, you, you could go out on the streets at night at 11:00, 12:00 at night and, you know, you could walk home in the dark." "Nobody locked the doors." "Nobody even thought of it." "It was a, a nice, clean, little town." "BURNETT MILLER:" "The lower end of town was rather colourful to us." "There were lots of whorehouses." "As you got up towards the nicer part of town, towards Tenth Street, uh, the houses of prostitution were quite fancy." "And, as kids, we used to run down there and run through the place, just raising hell." "NARRATOR: 18-year-old Burnett Miller lived with his family in a comfortable neighbourhood at 3643 West Lincoln Avenue." "He would discover, in the last days of the war, why it had to be fought." "Almost 7,000 Japanese-Americans also lived in Sacramento and the surrounding county." "Doctors, lawyers, teachers and shop owners, as well as some of the most productive farmers in America." "Susumu Satow and his family grew strawberries, grapes and raspberries on their 20-acre farm, east of the city." "SUSUMU SATOW:" "My mother didn't speak English." "My father spoke, uh, broken English." "As a youngster, uh, at age about eight, nine, I guess," "I used to walk down the railroad track to a place called Mills." "And Mills had a semipro baseball team." "And so I grew up in sort of a baseball environment, I guess." "NARRATOR:" "In Waterbury, Connecticut, on the banks of the Naugatuck River, a skilled work force, mostly immigrants and immigrants' children, turned out screws and washers and buttons, showerheads and alarm clocks, toy airplanes and lipstick holders," "and cocktail shakers." "Since the 19th century, its citizens had proudly called their town "Brass City"." "Ray Leopold, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Latvia, lived on Route Eight on the southern edge of the city." "Waterbury was a centre for high quality craft." "Uh, there were individuals there who could do one-ten thousandth of an inch on anything and if there was zero tolerance required, they could do that, too." "OLGA CIARLO:" "Well, Waterbury, where we lived, there were a lot of Italian people." "They had made a good business for themselves and were very well liked." "We had a wonderful neighbourhood." "We had parties every single Sunday." "Every Sunday was a picnic for us." "NARRATOR:" "The Ciarlo family lived at 1032 North Main Street, in the Italian section of town." "Their father had recently died." "His loss would be only the beginning of their troubles." "And in Mobile, Alabama, population 112,000, the only real industry was shipbuilding, as it had been since the Great War, a generation earlier." "Once a centre of cotton and slave trading," "Mobile was best known for its annual azalea festival, and its leisurely Southern air." "John Gray and his family lived on the south side of town, near the L  N railroad tracks at 407 Royal Street." "He would soon be asked to fight a war for freedom, though his own country's definition of freedom did not include him." "GRAY:" "Whites and blacks got along pretty good, as long as you had the status quo." "But you could not, uh, eat at the counter at Woolworth." "You'd have to go down to the end and order your sandwich and take it out." "Out to eat." "NARRATOR:" "Across town," "Katharine Phillips and her family lived at 1555 Monterey Place." "PHILLIPS:" "Daddy said Mobile made its living by taking in each other's wash." "And it was absolutely true." "The pace of life was slow." "On a hot summer evening - of course there was no airconditioning - so Daddy would load us in the car and we'd drive downtown to Brown's Ice Cream and he'd buy us an ice-cream cone and then we'd drive out to Arlington" "and park out by the bay, and all sit there and enjoy the sea breeze." "And when we'd cooled down enough, he'd bring us home and everybody could go to bed and go to sleep." "Or we sat on our porch in the evening and the children played in the yard." "It was a wonderful way to grow up." "And we were completely away from the rest of the world down in Mobile." "NARRATOR:" "No-one in Mobile, Waterbury," "Sacramento, Luverne, or anywhere else in America was prepared for what was about to happen to them and their country." "DANIEL INOUYE:" "Pearl Harbor was a Sunday and, together with the family, we were all getting ready to go to church." "And the disc jockey's going on with Hawaiian music, and, suddenly, he sounded hysterical." "For a moment, I thought this was an act." "So I stepped out into the street and, sure enough... there are puffs and smoke coming out of that Pearl Harbor area." "And so I called my father out, said, "Look at that."" "And, all of a sudden, three aircraft flew right overhead." "They were pearl grey with red dots." "I knew what was happening." "(ARTILLERY SHELLS WHISTLE, EXPLOSIONS BOOM)" "And I thought my world had just come to an end." "(EXPLOSION THUNDERS)" "(SIREN WAILS)" "NARRATOR:" "At 7:55am, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese warplanes, launched from aircraft carriers far out at sea, attacked the American Pacific Fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii." "(EXPLOSION BOOMS)" "The attack took a terrible toll." "So terrible a toll that the War Department kept secret the exact details for years." "(EXPLOSIONS BOOM)" "Eight battleships, including the USS 'Arizona', three light cruisers, three destroyers, and four other naval vessels were either sunk or damaged." "164 American aircraft were also destroyed." "Most hadn't even gotten off the ground." "And 2,403 Americans were dead." "Nothing like this had ever happened to the United States of America before." "17-year-old Daniel Inouye, the son of a Japanese immigrant, was a senior at William McKinley High School in Honolulu, and a Red Cross volunteer." "INOUYE:" "A call came in that we had casualties nearby." "One haunts me every so often." "It was a woman clutching a child." "Her head was severed, but here she was with her arms around her baby." "And, uh..." "So this is what I had to pick up, at 17." "MAN ON RADIO:" "One, two, three, four." "Hello, NBC." "Hello, NBC." "This is KBU in Honolulu, Hawaii." "SIDNEY PHILLIPS:" "I was in a drugstore, drinking a milkshake, and this lady burst in the side door and screamed," ""Turn on the radio!"" "They were talking about Pearl Harbor on every station." "MAN ON RADIO:" "And London now awaits" "Prime Minister Churchill's promise to declare war on Japan within the hour." "We knew this meant we were in the war." "And we just... all sat there quietly." "The radio kept giving the same information again and again." "BARBARA COVINGTON:" "I remember I was home eating breakfast with my mother and my two brothers." "I was the youngest, and we were getting ready to go to Sunday school." "I remember the fear coming in my mother's eyes, because she knew my brothers were probably going to be called, and they were." "LEOPOLD:" "It seemed so incredible." "2,400 innocent people blown off the face of the earth was an atrocity." "It was something that had to be corrected - perhaps the word might be 'avenged'." "And, um..." "we had to get busy with it." "NARRATOR:" "On December 8, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan." "Three days later," "Japan's allies, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, declared war on the United States." "All across the country, anxious Americans asked themselves," ""How did this happen?"" "For more than a decade, they had had glimpses of a world descending into chaos - in their newspapers, over the radio and in newsreels shown in movie theatres." "The Strand and the State in Waterbury." "The Crest and the Alhambra in Sacramento." "The Roxy and the Pike in Mobile." "And the Pix and the Palace in Luverne." "NEWSREEL:" "For the first time, we saw great cities squashed flat, civilians bombed and killed." "NARRATOR:" "They had hoped they could stay out of it all." "EMMA BELLE PETCHER:" "You couldn't fathom across the ocean, you know, and you couldn't fathom what it was really like." "But they would show these newsreels, and I'd sneak in the back of the theatre and see these newsreels, and they were horrifying." "NARRATOR:" "Throughout the 1930s, country after country had been held hostage to the ruthless ambitions of the leaders of what would be called the Axis." "Benito Mussolini, the swaggering dictator of Italy, dreamed of restoring the ancient Roman Empire and becoming master of the Mediterranean." "Adolf Hitler built his monstrous Nazi regime and the mightiest army on earth on the German thirst for revenge - revenge against the victors of the First World War, but also against those at home who he claimed had stabbed" "their armed forces in the back - socialists, communists and the Jews." "Above all, the Jews, who he said were both evil and subhuman." "The German people were superior to all others, he assured them, and he had been chosen to lead them to their great destiny - a Reich that would rule over the Old World and the New for a thousand years." "(Crowd chants) Heil!" "Heil!" "The fact is that I am a Jew." "I was aware of what was going on in Europe, perhaps a little more than the average person might have known." "And I did feel that, somehow or other, that Hitler had to be stopped." "Not only for the Jews, but for everybody in the world." "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "We knew the war in Europe was going to affect us eventually." "After Czechoslovakia had been taken over by Germany... we knew that the war was coming our direction, one way or the other." "NEWSREEL:" "The beginning of the Blitzkrieg, "the lightning war", ripping deep into a nation not equipped to meet it." "NARRATOR:" "On September 1, 1939," "Hitler's forces stormed across the border of Poland." "In response to the attack, Britain and France declared war on Germany." "The Second World War had begun." "Denmark and Norway fell." "Holland had surrendered." "Belgium was crushed." "French defences had collapsed." "And in June of 1940, Paris fell." "Adolf Hitler was the master of Western Europe." "Then he set his sights on Britain." "For more than a year, she would stand alone against relentless attack from the air." "EDWARD MURROW ON RADIO:" "Hello, America." "This is Edward Murrow speaking from London." "They came over shortly after blackout time and opened the attack with a veritable shower of flares and incendiaries." "NARRATOR:" "When his plans for Britain faltered," "Hitler had turned his attention to the east, ordering 3 million troops in a surprise attack on his supposed ally, the Soviet Union, setting in motion the worst slaughter of the war." "Meanwhile, on the far side of the world, the military men who ruled Japan in the name of the emperor, believed their people superior, too." "Their small, crowded island nation had moved from medieval feudalism to the modern era in less than a century." "And they dreamed of Japan's becoming a mighty, self-sufficient power." "With extraordinary brutality, they had set out to seize the resources of China." "And they coveted the French and Dutch and British colonies in South-East Asia as well." "NEWSREEL:" "From Shanghai to Nanking," "Japan still spreads destruction from the skies upon a score of Chinese cities." "Here is the result - innocent victims of the savagery that masquerades as modern war." "NARRATOR:" "Among the obstacles in Japan's way were the US Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii... and American military outposts in Guam, Wake Island, and in the Commonwealth of the Philippines." "The Axis leaders were united in their scorn for the United States." "Its people were "timid, undisciplined scum"," "Hitler said, "under the influence" ""of Negroes and Jews"." "He was certain such a mongrel people could never win a war against his Aryan legions." "President Roosevelt had done everything he could, short of war, to combat the aggressors." "Providing desperately needed aid to Britain and Russia demanding that Japan withdraw from China." "Finally, freezing Japanese assets in the United States, so that no American oil could be used to fuel further aggression in Asia." "For the Japanese militarists, that had been the signal to go to war with America." "They made General Hideki Tojo prime minister." "He thought that by destroying the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in a single blow, he could stun and demoralise the country long enough to become so dominant in the region that Japan could never be dislodged." "American intelligence officers had broken the Japanese diplomatic code, and knew some kind of attack was coming." "(EXPLOSION, PLANE SOARS)" "But no-one had known where or when until December 7." "GLENN FRAZIER:" "I was raised in a real Christian family and, as a result, killing was not part of my training." "And, uh, that was a big hurdle for me to get over because I had been taught not to kill." "NARRATOR:" "Within hours of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had also attacked the main Philippine island of Luzon." "17-year-old Glenn Frazier was now in the middle of a war he thought he would never have to face." "FRAZIER:" "And when the war started, and I was going to the field hospital, a couple of Japanese planes" " Zeroes - bombed and strafed the hospital." "(GUNFIRE POPS, BOMBS EXPLODE)" "And as we were approaching, a friend of mine and I - uh, we got in the ditch and one of the dive-bombers came back and strafed us, and dropped one bomb and hit him direct." "And all I ever found of him was his left foot in a shoe." "And when that Japanese Zero turned his wings right above the trees and started to fly away," "I could see him with a smile on his face." "And at that point, I had no problem with killing people." "In fact, I got to the point where I hunted them." "(GUNSHOT)" "And if I didn't kill a Japanese in a day," "I felt I didn't do my job." "(GUNSHOT)" "NARRATOR:" "Glenn Frazier was one of 31,000 men under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the best known soldier in the American army." "A front line hero of World War I, he was as self-absorbed as he was courageous." "But the news of Pearl Harbor had paralysed him." "He had had nine hours warning, yet when the Japanese attacked his airfields in the Philippines, most of MacArthur's planes were still parked wing to wing, easy targets for the enemy." "(BOMBS WHISTLE AND EXPLODE)" "More than 50,000" "Japanese soldiers would soon be ashore, converging on Manila from the north and the south." "Neither the American troops, nor the thousands of Filipino reservists MacArthur called up would be able to stop them." "The Americans were being pushed out of the Pacific." "MacArthur eventually ordered all his forces to retreat onto the mountainous, forest-covered Bataán Peninsula." "He withdrew with his family and his aides to the heavily fortified island at the mouth of Manila Bay called Corregidor." "Meanwhile, other Americans in the Philippines, innocent civilians thousands of miles from home, had been swept up in the war as well." "(SIREN WAILS, BELL CLANGS)" "SASCHA WEINZHEIMER:" "The day Pearl Harbor got bombed was the seventh." "But, in the Philippines, with over the International Date Line, it was the eighth." "Same day, and we were bombed a few hours later." "And I had polio when I was a baby, so I used to go to Manila three times a week for physical therapy." "And this is what I was doing on a Monday morning, on the eighth, when the Japanese started bombing." "NARRATOR:" "Sascha Weinzheimer was eight years old in December of 1941." "The daughter and grand-daughter of wealthy farmers with enormous holdings in the Sacramento Valley and in the Philippines." "As she would detail in a journal, she lived with her mother and father, her 3-year-old sister and her 3-month-old brother on one of the largest sugar plantations on the Philippine island of Luzon." "NARRATOR:" "After Japanese bombs fell near their plantation," "Sascha and her family moved into Manila - now with the army gone, a neutral, "open city" - joining other refugees at the Bayview Hotel." "WEINZHEIMER:" "The Japanese came in on 2 January." "That was the beginning of, you know, this putting the people into camps and so forth." "And your life changed fast." "WOMAN: "The first thing I remember" ""was looking across the street towards the bay" ""and seeing Japanese soldiers and officers around the flagpole" ""hoisting up the Japanese flag" ""where our Stars and Stripes had been."" "(CHEERING)" ""Soon trucks came rolling down the boulevard yelling, 'Bonzai!" "'" ""We were told to be calm and keep away from the windows." ""Everyone was nervous, especially Mother."" "Sascha Weinzheimer." "NARRATOR:" "Japanese soldiers took Sascha's father from the Bayview Hotel to the walled campus of Santo Tomas University, which had been turned into a civilian internment camp." "WOMAN: "After Daddy started to say goodbye," ""I could just hardly stand it," ""and for the first time, I was afraid," ""so I screamed and held onto Daddy" ""until I had to be pulled away." ""Then he ran out," ""and that was the last we saw of him for a few months."" "NARRATOR:" "Sascha and the rest of her family found shelter first in one convent, and then another." "Wherever they were, the sound of the guns from Bataán - where Glenn Frazier and his comrades were still struggling to stop the Japanese advance - continued day and night." "(DISTANT GUNFIRE)" "(LOUD, RUMBLING EXPLOSION)" "(DUKE ELLINGTON'S 'PERDIDO' PLAYS)" "SAM HYNES:" "You have to imagine what it was like to be a teenage, middle-class, lower middle-class kid in Minneapolis in 1941." "The chances for excitement were fairly limited." "You could drive a car fast, you could get drunk, you could take a girl out and try and get somewhere and fail." "That's local excitement." "But to have an exciting life - it was hard to imagine what an exciting life would be." "And then, suddenly, you could be, uh, a pilot or a submariner, or an artilleryman, or any damn thing, but you'd be..." "It was something exciting, and it was something adult." "All of a sudden, you could choose, just choose to be an adult by writing your name." "I'm working for a bank in town and delivering cheques." "I write my name, and now, I'm potentially a combat pilot, a fighter pilot." "Uh, an ace." "Or I'm the commander of a submarine going into Tokyo Bay." "These are incredible opportunities." "You see, they're melodramatic, exciting, like the movies." "And you might do it." "So that's terrific." "It has nothing to do with patriotism." "It has nothing to do, really, with who the enemy is." "It's the opportunity to be somebody more exciting than the kid you are." "(BENNY GOODMAN'S 'WANG WANG BLUES' PLAYS)" "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "I came home for my Christmas holidays, and that's when I found out that my brother Sidney had gone down and joined the Marine Corps." "And then, of course, life really took on meaning." "SIDNEY:" "My father was very patriotic, and..." "I felt like really expected me to join the military, so my friend W.O. Brown said, "Sid, let's go join the navy in the morning."" "And I said, "Fine."" "And the recruiting office was crowded like you wouldn't believe, so we walked up to the head of the line saw this marine recruiting sergeant." "He came over and said," ""Do you boys want to kill Japs?"" "And we said, "Yeah, that's the idea," ""but we're going to join the navy."" "And he said, "No," he said, "You don't belong in the navy." ""You belong in the Marine Corps." ""You can't get in the navy, anyway," ""because your parents are married."" "And we, uh, ended up joining the Marine Corps." "KATHARINE:" "So, Sidney joined the marines." "Daddy told Mother, "You might as well sign the paper, Kate." ""He's going to go anyway."" "He was only 17 years old." "So, the story in the family is, the marine recruiting officer crossed the street any time in the next year that he encountered my mother, because she would give him a piece of her mind for taking her little boy into the marines." "NARRATOR:" "Unlike the professional armies of Germany and Japan, the armed forces that Sid Phillips and others rushed to join had been totally unprepared to wage a world war." "In 1940, the US Army had been smaller than that of Romania - only 174,000 men in uniform, wearing tin hats and leggings issued during World War I." "Then, in the fall of 1940, Congress enacted the draft, and every young man in America began to worry when his number would come up." "WILLIAM PERKINS:" "Somebody got the greetings." "Long envelope, you know." "And when you opened it up, it would say," ""Greetings, The President of the United States" ""and your neighbours have selected you" ""to be drafted into the armed forces for..." ""to protect the country, etc, etc..."" "And I was down at a friend of mine's," "Howard Lopes, and he got the letter, and he opened it up, and he was drafted." "And, so, boy, we just laughed and roared, and then I had to go home." "And when I walked in the house, my grandma says," ""There's a letter up for you up there."" "And, uh, I... so, I picked it up, and I looked at it." "And it said, "Greetings," ""The President of the United States and your neighbours..."" "I flew out the house, run down the street, you know, back up the street where Howard lived, and I walked in with the paper in my hand." "Everybody looked at me, and they had a good time laughing, because I had been drafted." "They knew." "I didn't have to tell them." "I just hold up... the letter up." "NARRATOR:" "Despite a growing chorus of protests by black citizens outraged at the idea of fighting bigotry abroad while it was tolerated at home, the military continued to insist on segregating African-American servicemen into all-black units." "Even blood supplies for saving the lives of the wounded were kept separate." "WILLIE RUSHTON:" "I always thought that, one day, our country would be better for everybody." "'Cause I knew I saw a lot of things that my father had to go through that I didn't have to go through, so I figured that when my children come on, we'd still have something better than what I had," "so that's why I wanted to go fight for my country." "I was fairly close to being a pacifist." "I believed that there is mostly negotiated solutions to most problems of this sort." "But I couldn't fathom that there was ever a solution to the confrontation that Hitler was giving to us and the rest of the world." "I felt that I belonged in the service, um, because the threat, while it was directed at the entire rest of the world, was particularly directed at the origins that I came from." "(DUKE ELLINGTON'S 'ECHOES OF HARLEM' PLAYS)" "If I didn't know it at the particular moment I went in, 13 weeks later, after I had finished my basic training," "I knew, expertly, how to kill." "Kill with a bayonet, kill with a bullet, kill with your hands." "Yes, I could kill." "HYNES:" "I left Minneapolis for the service on a dank, wet, cold" "March Minneapolis evening." "My father drove me to the station in the car that he almost never let me drive as a kid, downtown, past all the... places that had been the, uh, stations of my childhood and growing up," "to the Rock Island Railroad." "It was dark." "The long platform was dark with hanging arc lights at distance, so that, as you walked, it was dark, light, dark, light, dark, light." "And at the far end was a navy yeoman with a clipboard and a gathering of young men or boys around him." "And we stopped, and my father shook my hand." "It seemed very strange to me that my father and I were on handshaking terms." "Then he turned around and walked back toward the entrance - dark, light, dark, light, dark, light - and out into the street and was gone." "And I turned to the yeoman and went up and said, "Present," when my name came up, and I was in the navy." "NARRATOR:" "Nearly 50 million men would register for the draft during the war." "Some 16 million Americans would eventually wear their country's uniform." "But during the days immediately following Pearl Harbor, it was still anyone's guess where they would be sent or how well they would fight when they got there." "MAN:" "February 23, 1942." ""Out of Poland have come these appalling pictures" ""of the end product of German conquest." ""They show mass misery and death carried by German thoroughness" ""to an extreme rarely seen before in history." ""They also show the kind of thing" ""the fighting foes of Nazism may expect" ""if they really lose the war." ""The methodical massacre takes on" ""an emotional quality of sadism," ""as applied by the Nazis to the Jews." ""Herded in Polish ghettos, forbidden to walk out" ""or use a railway, machine-gunned in their synagogues," ""thrown by thousands into the rivers," ""stripped of clothing and food and possessions." ""The Jews of Poland are literally dying out." ""These are the grim statistical facts." ""The details of human agony are multiplied beyond the telling."" "'Life' magazine." "NARRATOR:" "At the start of 1942, almost all the news was bad." "The Soviet Union, the United States' new ally, was under unceasing attack from the Germans, who had encircled Leningrad and reached the outskirts of Moscow." "Japanese troops had now taken Singapore, the Gibraltar of the East, and with it, all of Malaya." "They had seized Borneo and Burma and Hong Kong." "And they had taken Guam and Wake Island," "Makin and Tarawa." "There was not a single American base between Hawaii and the Philippines." "But President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill agreed that, for the time being, they would have to remain on the defensive in the Pacific." "Germany, they decided, with its vast armies and mighty industrial machine, was the greatest danger." "Victory in Europe would require not only the mobilisation of a generation of young men, but also billions of rounds of ammunition, millions of guns, hundreds of thousands of tanks and airplanes and fleets of ships to bring them to battle." "Producing all of that would take time." "Meanwhile, the survival of Britain and the Soviet Union depended on a steady stream of food and fuel and weapons from America." "BURT WILSON:" "When I was seven years old, in Theodore Judah School, a boy from England, an English refugee, came into our class." "His name was William Murgathroid Buchanan." "We all called him Roid - Roid Buchanan." "And we developed a great friendship." "And, one day, Roid came over to my house, and I was upstairs, and he called, "Burt!" "Burt!"" "And I looked out the window, and I said, "Hi, Roid." "What's going on?"" "And Roid said, "Do you know what" ""a dirty German sub did to my father?"" "And I said, "No." "What?" He said, "It killed him."" "And I don't..." "I didn't know how to deal with that." "I went downstairs, and we sat down under the tree and talked awhile." "But it was still something that" "I'd never had any experience with, up until that time - one of my best friends telling me that his father was killed in a war." "NARRATOR:" "On the evening of January 13, 1942, as American troops tried to stop the Japanese on Bataán, a German U-boat surfaced silently off Manhattan." "Its commander was astonished but gratified to see that, more than a month after Germany declared war on the United States," "America's largest city was still ablaze with lights." "Using those lights to silhouette his target, he sent a torpedo hissing toward the side of an American oil tanker then slipped back beneath the sea and moved south in search of further prey." "Within 12 hours, he had sunk seven more unarmed vessels." "The United States seemed totally unprepared for this kind of war." "By the end of January," "U-boats would sink 25 tankers along the east coast, continuing a fierce struggle for supremacy of the seas, called the Battle of the Atlantic, and threatening to choke off America's allies." "American beaches were black with oil." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "All along the Gulf Coast and all on the shores of Mobile Bay, we could go sit on the beach, but we were not allowed to light a fire, because of the U-boats." "We heard often in Mobile that ships were sunk just as they went out of Mobile Bay." "And we know this to be true, because the life preservers and the canned goods washed up on our beaches." "NARRATOR:" "For a time, the waters from Jacksonville, Florida, to Galveston, Texas, were considered the most dangerous shipping lane in the world." ""The only safe run," said one wary merchant seaman," ""is from St Louis to Cincinnati."" "GLENN FRAZIER:" "I really fought the first few days for the good Old Glory... you know, like everybody else, you're saying, "Good old United States." ""We're going to fight, we're going to whip these Japanese" ""in a matter of six months," and so forth." "But when it really hit me that this was not a short situation and that they were hitting us hard, then I think I changed pretty much to protect myself and my fellow Americans, and I think I was fighting more" "to save my own life." "NARRATOR:" "Nearly 80,000 American and Filipino troops had managed to escape the Japanese around Manila and take up positions on the Bataán Peninsula." "Once again, General MacArthur's planning had faltered." "Most supplies had been left behind." "Rations had to be cut in half." "Bataán's humid forests bred malarial mosquitoes." "Clean water was in short supply." "There was little medicine on hand." "One field hospital had eight operating tables... and 1,200 battle casualties in need of surgery." "Still the men struggled to hold on fighting off one attack after another, then retreating halfway down the peninsula." "For weeks, the men on Bataán continued to hope that rescuers were coming." "Again and again, MacArthur had assured them of it." ""Help is on the way," he promised." "FRAZIER:" "On the 'Voice of America', one time, I remember it, we were getting it on short-wave radio." "It said, uh, as far as the eye can see, these ships and planes coming to the Philippines." "We were told continuously that we were getting reinforcements." "We were told that when we retreated back into Bataán, it would only be for a few weeks." "NARRATOR:" "But no troops, no planes had ever been dispatched." "They could not have made it through, anyway." "The Japanese now controlled the South Pacific." ""There are times," Secretary of War Henry Stimson confided to his diary," ""when men must die."" "By early March, three out of four of Bataán's defenders were incapacitated in some way - sick, exhausted, wounded, weak from hunger, suffering from beriberi." "FRAZIER:" "At the end, close to the end, there was one can of salmon issued to 35 men and some rice and very little rice, so our situation was getting - deteriorating and getting worse every day." "NARRATOR:" "MacArthur managed to leave his quarters on Corregidor to visit his men on Bataán precisely once." "They began calling him 'Dugout Doug'." "The soldiers' bitterness intensified when, acting under direct orders from the president," "MacArthur, his wife, 4-year-old son and 17 members of his staff slipped out of Corregidor in a PT boat." "From Australia, he issued a brief statement." ""I came through," he said, "and I shall return."" "FRAZIER:" "When he left and went to Australia, that's what I call doomsday for Bataán, because we knew then that we had to fight, and he issued orders to fight to the last man, and that's, we knew what our fate was going to be." "NARRATOR:" "On April 9, 1942, Major General Edward L. King sent a soldier forward with a white flag." "It was the largest surrender by the United States Army in its history " "78,000 American and Filipino troops." "General King asked a Japanese officer just one question - would his men be treated decently." ""Yes," said the officer," ""we are not barbarians."" "But Japanese tradition held that those who surrendered rather than die on the battlefield were cowards, unworthy of respect." "The prisoners were prodded northward, 300 at a time." "They were to walk from Mariveles to San Fernando, then be loaded onto railroad cars for the journey to Camp O'Donnell in central Luzon." "What followed would be remembered as the Bataán Death March." "FRAZIER:" "If we had known what was ahead of us at the beginning of the Bataán Death March, uh, I would have taken death." "It was very, very difficult for us to understand, because we had had no contact with the Japanese whatsoever as to what these people are all about and what they're like." "And they immediately started beating guys if they didn't stand right or if they were sitting down." "We didn't know where we were going." "We didn't know anything." "And we were stopped on the way, some of us were, and searched and beat again." "And all our possessions were taken away from us." "Some of them had rings that they just cut the fingers off and take the rings." "They poured the water out of my canteen to be sure that I didn't have any, any water." "I saw them buried alive." "When a guy was bayoneted or shot, laying in the road and the convoys were coming along," "I saw trucks that would just go out of their way to run over the guy in the middle of the road." "And when by the time you have 15 or 20 trucks run over you, you look like a smashed tomato or something." "And I saw people that had their throats cut, because they would take their bayonets and stick it out through the corner of the truck at night and it would just be high enough to cut their throats." "And beating with a rifle butt until there just was no more life in them." "I saw Filipino women cut." "Their stomachs were cut open." "Their throats were cut." "I saw Filipinos and Americans beheaded just with one swipe of a sabre." "I marched six days and seven nights, never stopped," "I did not have but one sip of water and no food." "Now, they say that you can't do this, but I did." "When I got to the end of the march after, uh, at the end of the entire march where I stopped to get on a train - they put us on a train - my-my tongue wouldn't even go back in my mouth." "And if you look and talk to somebody about that, they'll tell you that's how close to death I was." "NARRATOR:" "No-one knows precisely how many men died on the Bataán Death March - somewhere between 6,000 and 11,000 Filipinos and Americans." "And at the end of the march," "Camp O'Donnell provided no relief." "An unfinished Philippine army base, surrounded by barbed wire and machine gun towers, with little water and little shelter from the sun, it would eventually hold nearly" "60,000 miserable, desperate men." "Food was nothing but lugao, watery rice soup filled with weevils and worms." "It was best to try and swallow it after dark, one man recalled, so as not to have to look at it." "Some 16,000 more Filipinos and Americans would die at Camp O'Donnell - of dehydration, malnutrition, malaria, beriberi, scurvy, dysentery, hopelessness." ""Their bodies went by in an endless column,"" "one sergeant remembered." ""Day and night, they were carried to the cemetery."" "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "We had all been so distressed about leaving our boys in the Philippines." "There was no way of rescuing them, we know now, but at the time, we didn't know that there were no ships." "Remember, they didn't tell us how much had been sunk at Pearl Harbor, and we kept thinking," ""Why don't you go in there" ""and get the boys out of the Philippines?"" "(MAN SHOUTS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)" "NARRATOR:" "One day, Glenn Frazier volunteered for burial detail." "FRAZIER:" "On some days, we buried 250 men, so I didn't know that one day it might happen to me." "So, my idea was I had two sets of dog tags." "And I said to myself," ""Well, I think I'll just throw one of these sets of dog tags" ""in the mass grave, so if I'm alive when the war ends," ""there's no problem."" "But if I'm missing or dead, I didn't..." "I wanted my family to know and have some kind of ending, and so forth, so they would think that I was in this grave." "(EXPLOSION)" "NARRATOR:" "On May 6, 1942," "Corregidor, the last American stronghold in the Philippines, fell to the Japanese." "(SEAGULLS CRY)" "SAM HYNES:" "I went to Seattle in 1942." "One memory is very clear and strong." "It's a Saturday, and I'm taking a bus into the centre of town and across the public square in front of the town hall, I guess it is..." "And I see ahead of me a line of people standing patiently by a bus stop." "And as I approach, I see that they're all Japanese and that they're getting onto buses." "And I realise that these are the Japanese-American citizens of Seattle and the neighbourhood who are being sent off to what amounted to a concentration camp." "And I think, "Well, those are my enemies."" "But they don't look like enemies standing there in their American clothes with their cardboard suitcases waiting to be sent off into the desert." "NARRATOR:" "On February 19, 1942," "President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066." "Its tone was carefully neutral." "It authorised the War Department to designate "military areas"" "and then exclude anyone from them whom it felt to be a danger." "But it had a specific target the more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry living along the west coast." "They were about to be forced from their homes and moved inland." "Thousands of German and Italian aliens were also locked up, but millions of German- and Italian-American citizens remained free to live their lives as they always had." "Only Japanese-Americans on the west coast were singled out." ""A Jap's a Jap," said General John L. DeWitt of the West Coast Defence Command." ""It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not." ""I don't want any of them."" "Almost no-one protested the government's plan, which also classified all Japanese-Americans as unfit for military service." "DANIEL INOUYE:" "1" "A is physically fit, and 4-F, something's wrong with you." "But 4-C means enemy alien." "And here I was, 17 years of age." "I considered myself a good American but, uh... made into an enemy." "NARRATOR:" "In Sacramento, soon after Order 9066 was issued, hand-lettered signs went up all over town, saying "Japs must go."" "The orders to leave arrived in May." "Susumu Satow and his family could scarcely believe it." "They were given one week's notice." "It was middle of the harvest and... but still, yet we had to abandon it and leave." "And so, of course, we made arrangement with our friends." ""Hey, come and pick the strawberries" ""because it's ready to be marketed."" "And so I imagine they did that." "And so you put just essentials in your suitcase." "You know, first day, when we had to pack up our thing and go to the train," "I really wondered what's going to happen to us?" "NARRATOR:" "Asako Tokuno was still a freshman at Berkeley that spring." "Her parents and her grandfather were evacuated first, because they had been born in Japan." "She and her sister were left behind for a time to close the family flower business." "We all somehow gathered the flowers, bunched them and got them to the market, to the flower market in San Francisco." "And so we were able to keep the business going." "And all those flowers didn't go to waste, you know." "They were just in the height of their beauty at that time of the year, getting ready for Easter and all the holidays." "We were really..." "kind of caught in the middle when the war happened, although no question about our loyalty to our country, you know, and how we felt." "(Voice breaks) This is our country, and when this whole evacuation thing happened, I mean, it was like we had no country, because we weren't from Japan and, and they took away our, our rights, actually." "We couldn't protest, and we wouldn't have protested, because we had to do what the government told us to do." "And so, uh, I think our parents realised, of course, they were, you know, not citizens, so they accepted the whole thing." "But for us, I think it was a lot harder, the fact that we had no rights." "(PROJECTOR CLACKS)" "NEWSREEL:" "This was the Russian front in 1942." "The Germans advanced, looting, torturing, murdering as they went." "The casualties ran into the millions." "They had driven 1,000 miles deep into Russian territory, but Russia, with her 'scorched earth' policy, left nothing of value behind." "Wheat, which could not be harvested, was set afire." "Bridges were blown up, dams, railroads, power plants." "NARRATOR:" "Although the German invasion of the Soviet Union had stalled outside Moscow, with both sides suffering unspeakable losses, a new Nazi offensive in the spring of 1942 had sent more than 225 divisions steadily advancing across Russia." "Millions of civilians and soldiers died." "Soviet premier Josef Stalin was demanding that the Allies immediately open a second front in the west to relieve the pressure on his beleaguered people." "But there was as yet not a single Allied soldier fighting in western Europe, and there would not be for a long time." "They simply weren't ready." "American planners had a straightforward idea of how to beat the Germans - invade France in the spring of 1943 and drive right for Berlin." "But the British were wary of moving too fast." ""A defeat on the French coast," Winston Churchill warned, was, "the only way in which we could possibly lose this war."" "Instead, he favoured attacking" "German and Italian forces in North Africa." "American commanders thought invading Africa would be a dangerous and wasteful diversion but Congressional elections were coming up." "American voters were eager for more offensive action against the Axis." "President Roosevelt overruled his generals." "The invasion of occupied France would be delayed." "Instead, preparations were made for American troops to land in North Africa at the end of 1942." "A bitter General George C. Marshall, army chief of staff, wrote privately that he and his fellow commanders had "failed to see that the leader in a democracy" ""has to keep the people entertained."" "('AMERICAN PATROL' BY GLENN MILLER PLAYS)" "SIDNEY PHILLIPS:" "I did notice repeatedly during the war that there would be a sense of pride in what you were a part of." "You would feel the power of the military." "You would feel the power of the convoy you were in, the warships that were surrounding you, the weapons that you were responsible for." "It was a strange feeling." "You knew you were in great danger, but you somehow felt safe in that you were a part of this great, powerful group." "NARRATOR:" "In early August of 1942," "Private Sidney Phillips of Mobile, Alabama, and the 19,000 men of the First Marine Division steamed out of Wellington, New Zealand in a large convoy, including all three of America's carriers in the South Pacific." "Their target was so remote, so obscure, that some of their officers had trouble saying its name." "But that summer, Guadalcanal, a 90-mile-long island at the eastern end of the Solomon chain, covered with dense jungle and coconut plantations, had suddenly become one of the most strategically important spots in the Pacific." "Two separate commands had the task of pushing back the Japanese." "General Douglas MacArthur was in command of the South-western Pacific, assigned to drive from New Guinea toward the Philippines and Formosa." "Admiral Chester W. Nimitz would use the marines to climb a longer ladder up the Solomons, the Gilberts, the Marshalls, the Marianas, the Volcano Islands, the Ryukus." "He would begin in the Solomons." "The Japanese had made landings there, and construction crews were hard at work on an airstrip on Guadalcanal." "If they were allowed to complete it," "Japanese warplanes could choke off shipping lanes between the United States and Australia and make the Allied campaign impossible." "The marines, including 17-year-old Sid Phillips, now a mortarman, had been sent to stop them." "Their commander had assumed his green troops would receive another six months of training before they saw combat." "They were armed with old single-shot, bolt-action rifles." "They had only 10 days worth of ammunition, and in order to get them into the fight as fast as possible their supply stocks had been reduced from 90 days to 60." "The men called it 'Operation Shoestring'." "At dawn on August 7, 1942," "American land forces went on the offensive for the first time in the Second World War." "No-one had any idea how long, how bloody and how consequential the battle for Guadalcanal would be." "Sid Phillips's platoon was part of the second wave of marines to go ashore." ""We had been repeatedly told" ""this would be the first" ""ship-to-shore landing," he remembered," ""and nobody could more than guess if such an idea" ""would be successful." ""We braced ourselves, and the craft slid up on the beach." ""We charged out, ready to do or die," Phillips said," ""and there was the first wave sitting, laughing at us."" "There was virtually no opposition." "The first American casualty on Guadalcanal was a marine who cut his hand with a machete, trying to open a coconut." "Americans seized the unfinished airstrip with little trouble and renamed it Henderson Field after a marine pilot who was killed during the Battle of Midway." "They began to prepare it for American planes with signs that read, "Under new management."" "Their orders were to hold the field at all cost." "The enemy couldn't be allowed to retake it." "Then... the Japanese attacked." "The American fleet offshore was their first target." "PHILLIPS:" "The Japanese Navy came in and sank all of our escorts." "NARRATOR:" "Four heavy cruisers were lost, along with more than 1,800 American sailors." "PHILLIPS:" "They could have sunk our supply ships, too, but they didn't - it was at night, and they didn't know how successful they had been." "But the next day, all of our supplies left, and we were... we were there without ever unloading even our 10 days of supplies that we had brought in with us." "We would have starved to death if there hadn't have been a big supply of Japanese rice there." "NARRATOR:" "The marines found themselves alone and began to wonder if they, like the men on Bataán, had simply been abandoned." "With no support from the sea or the air, the men were strafed and bombed daily pounded by shells from Japanese ships offshore and under attack from enemy troops hidden in the jungle." "PHILLIPS:" "We understood that we might be expendable." "It had become sort of the established thing, and, uh, we knew our country was not yet, uh, heavily armed." "And yes, we did, uh, feel that we might be expendable." "We really did." "NARRATOR:" "Phillips was among those sent out to help recover the bodies of marines killed in an enemy ambush." "PHILLIPS:" "And it was about five miles out to the ambush site where all the American bodies had been mutilated." "They had been beheaded and, uh, had their genitals, uh, stuffed in their mouths, and..." "Uh... our battalion never took a prisoner that I know of after that." "I really..." "I really don't remember that we ever took a prisoner." "NARRATOR:" "On the late afternoon of August 20, after 13 harrowing days on the island," "Phillips heard the sound of approaching aircraft and took cover as usual." "But this time, the planes were American." "The marines cheered." "They were no longer alone." "PHILLIPS:" "It looked like Uncle Sam was going to fight for that miserable place, after all." "NARRATOR:" "But at 2am the next morning, just hours after the first American planes arrived, a Japanese commander sent 900 fresh troops against marine positions along the western bank of a twisting jungle creek." "Its name was the llu River, but because the maps the marines had been issued had it wrong, the fierce firefight that followed would be remembered as the Battle of the Tenaru." "PHILLIPS:" "At that time on Guadalcanal, almost every night there would be some event that would arouse everyone, would keep everyone awake." "But this night it was different." "The whole world erupted, and, uh... the lines became just a wall of fire." "We knew it was the real event." "NARRATOR:" "The Japanese commander was so certain he could destroy the marines that in his diary he had filled in the entry for the day " ""21 August." ""Enjoyed the fruits of victory."" "The Japanese kept coming all night." ""Banzai," they screamed." ""Marine, you die!"" "The marines just kept shooting." "PHILLIPS:" "We killed, I think, over 900 Japanese and lost something like 34 marines." "So it did our morale a great deal of good." "NARRATOR:" "For the first time, the supposedly invincible Imperial Army had been stopped." "The humiliated commander, who had predicted victory, shot himself." "But the Battle of the Tenaru settled nothing on Guadalcanal." "Japanese reinforcements poured onto the island, and the fighting just went on and on." "A confusing, vicious war of ambush and counterattack." "A terrifying world where random Japanese shells would explode among the entrenched and embattled Americans." "PHILLIPS:" "Some men could take it, and, uh, some just physically could not take it." "The sheer terror of knowing that the next one is going to have your name on it - when that goes on and on and on and on, you... you-you get a strange feeling in which you seem to become detached," "and you just think, "Well, maybe this will end" ""and maybe it won't, and maybe we'll all be blown up" ""and maybe we won't, but who cares?"" "And you... you learn to sort of live with it." "It is just a matter of fate." "You will either survive if the Lord is willing or you will not." "So there's really nothing you can do." "And you just take it." "NARRATOR:" "Private Sid Phillips turned 18 on September 2." "The next day, he got his first letter from home since he'd sailed for Guadalcanal." "It was, he wrote back," ""the best birthday present possible for me"." "In late September, some American reinforcements finally made it through." "But nightly visits by fast-moving Japanese ships the marines called the Tokyo Express kept the enemy on the island supplied and reinforced as well." "Twice, the Japanese, determined to retake Henderson Field, mounted full-scale assaults on the airstrip." "Twice, the marines beat them back." "Thousands of Japanese were shot dead or blown to pieces." "Week after week, the battle for Guadalcanal ground on." "On November 12, the Japanese Navy mounted one last major offensive, aimed at reinforcing their forces and dislodging the Americans on Guadalcanal." "A much smaller number of American ships steamed in to try to stop them." "The naval battle that followed went on for three days and three nights." "PHILLIPS:" "You could see the salvos of the ships, and you could see the naval shells going through the air like lightning bugs." "And you could see ships explode." "We didn't know if they were American or Japanese." "We didn't know who was winning or who was losing." "Sometimes when a ship would explode, it would... the concussion would actually flap your clothes miles and miles away." "But we did know that our fate was being decided and we would, uh, we would... sit there sort of mystified and horrified by what was going on, because we knew thousands of sailors were dying on one side or the other." "NARRATOR:" "Some 5,000 American sailors lost their lives in the fighting off Guadalcanal - so many..." "that the casualty figures were again kept from the public." "Among those who died were five brothers from Fredericksburg, Iowa, who all served on the cruiser 'Juneau' " "Joseph, Francis, Albert," "Madison and George Sullivan." "But Japan lost two battleships, 23 other warships," "600 aircraft, and thousands of sailors and airmen." "And most important to Sid Phillips and the men on Guadalcanal, the enemy was no longer able to resupply its forces on the island." "The Japanese continued to fight, but it was clear the Americans would eventually prevail." "The last starving, desperate Japanese troops on the island would not be killed, captured or evacuated until February 1943." "21,000 Japanese soldiers were lost." "Guadalcanal would prove a crucial victory." "After six long months, the Americans were beginning to learn how to beat the Japanese - not only in the air and on the sea, but in the jungles, where, over the next three years, the fighting would only get worse." "Allied shipping lanes to Australia remained open." "And there was more good news." "American and Australian forces had also taken the most important Japanese strongholds on New Guinea." "Japan's expansion had been stopped." "PHILLIPS:" "By the time we left Guadalcanal, which was December 22 of 1942, we had been there since August 7 - everybody had lost at least 25 pounds." "Our clothes were in rags." "We were covered with sores." "And we had nearly starved to death two or three times." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "We did not realise how desperate the marines were on Guadalcanal because the news never told us." "In fact, it was not till years later when Sidney came home that we found that their food was down to fish heads and rice." "And that he was down to 125 pounds when they took him off of Guadalcanal." "NARRATOR:" "More than 1,700 Americans had died on Guadalcanal." "Another 4,700 were wounded, and thousands more were seriously ill." "Sid Phillips had survived." "But his Uncle Charles Tucker, a navy pilot who had flown in and out of Henderson Field, had not." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "When we lost Charlie, it made it very real to all of us." "And by that time, we had started losing boys in the neighbourhood." "The boy up here on the corner was a navy pilot and he was killed." "The boy down the street was an air force pilot and he was missing in action." "We just... they started disappearing all around us." "And my mother spent her time going to visit the other mothers, consoling them." "And it was a very, very fearful time." "It really was." "You don't expect death among people your age." "Old people die." "And then, you begin to see that it's your contemporaries are dying." "And therefore, it is just conceivable that you might die, too." "('AMERICAN ANTHEM' PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "Luverne, Minnesota, had been lucky so far." "No local family had lost a son in the war." "But in Sacramento," "Mrs Lillian Cole had received news that her son David had perished on the USS 'Arizona' at Pearl Harbor." "She had been asked by the government" ""to keep secret for the present" ""the name of the ship on which he served."" "Another Sacramento native, airman Tom Burke, died on a training mission in Puerto Rico, devastating his younger brother, Earl." "In Waterbury, the family of marine private Albert Boulanger learned that he had been killed on Guadalcanal, not far from where Sid Phillips of Mobile had been fighting." "Glenn Frazier was still a prisoner of the Japanese, but the girl he loved back in Alabama had changed her mind and was now waiting for him to come home to her." "(BIRDS SCREECH IN DISTANCE)" "(HORN HONKS)" "NARRATOR:" "Early in 1943, an envelope from the War Department arrived at 1032 North Main Street in Waterbury, Connecticut, the home of the Ciarlo family." "They knew it was coming." "There were three boys in the family." "Two were exempt from the draft " "Dom, married with one child and another on the way, and Tom, just 16 and still too young to go." "But the middle son, Corado, was 19 and single, working at Waterbury Steel Ball, a perfect candidate for the army." "His family and friends called him 'Babe'." "OLGA CIARLO:" "And he was the one to go." "Course, it was a shock to all of us, and my mother cried forever." "Forever." "But that's the way the war was." "So... it was a tough time." "And not only that, but my father had passed away in, uh, 1937." "My mother was very, very heartbroken at that time already." "My mother would take the bus and go up to the cemetery all by herself." "She couldn't speak a word of English." "And all she could tell the man on the bus was, "Cemetery."" "And then to know that my brother was going off to war, she was scared." "She didn't want to go through this all over again, so..." "It was hard times, very hard times." "(HARP PLAYS ARPEGGIOS)" "(BIG BAND PLAYS 'LET'S GET LOST' INTRO)" "RADIO ANNOUNCER:" "Here's number six, a song by Frank Sinatra." "(Sinatra sings) # Let's get lost... #" "MAN: "May 9, 1943." ""Dearest Mom and family," ""We are listening to the Lucky Strike program," ""and Frank Sinatra is singing 'Let's Get Lost'," ""and what a voice he's got." ""Tell Mom not to worry about me, 'cause I'll be home soon enough." ""I am calling Mom to give her Mother's Day greetings." ""I will have to wait five or six hours" ""for the call to go through, but it is worth it."" "# Let's defrost... #" ""From now until I get through with my basic training," ""I will be pretty busy," ""so if Mom doesn't hear from me for a few days," ""you explain to her that I am alright," ""but just busy." ""Love, Babe."" "(Sinatra scats softly)" "(DISTANT GUNFIRE)" "NARRATOR:" "By January of 1943," "Americans had been at war for more than a year." "US Navy warplanes had stopped the Japanese advance at the Battle of Midway, destroying four enemy carriers and inflicting the first defeat on the lmperial Navy in 350 years." "The marines had taken Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and American and Australian forces had defeated the Japanese at Buna on the island of Papua New Guinea." "But the 4,000-mile march toward the Japanese home islands was just beginning." "And thousands of Americans were still held prisoner by the Japanese, including 9-year-old Sascha Weinzheimer, whose family came from the Sacramento Valley, and Corporal Glenn Frazier, from Ft Deposit, Alabama." "Meanwhile, in the snows around Stalingrad," "Hitler's dream of expanding his empire eastward across Russia was ending in catastrophe as the Red Army annihilated his surrounding armies." "But the Germans, with their vast war machine, still occupied most of western Europe, and the Allies had not yet been able to agree on a plan or a timetable to dislodge them." "For the time being, they would have to be content to nip at the edges of Hitler's enormous domain." "American troops were now ashore in North Africa, ready to test themselves for the first time against the German and Italian armies." "For the people of Mobile, Alabama," "Luverne, Minnesota," "Sacramento, California," "Waterbury, Connecticut, and every other town in America, the war would dictate the rhythm and pace of life in ways they could not have imagined a year before." "And the sense of national purpose" "Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had brought to the battle against the Great Depression was now fully focused on winning this war." "PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT:" "I do not prophesy when this war will end." "But I do believe that this year of 1943... will give to the United Nations a very substantial advance along the roads that lead to Berlin and Rome and Tokyo." "(APPLAUSE)" "A tremendous, costly, long enduring task, in peace as well as in war, is still ahead of us." "But as we face that continuing task, we may know that the state of this nation is good, the heart of this nation is sound, the spirit of this nation is strong, the faith of this nation is eternal." "(APPLAUSE)" "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "Roosevelt carried a real message of confidence with his voice." "He gave us all the confidence that we could do anything he asked us to do, and certainly the boys could do anything he asked 'em to do." "And he was the powerful, driving force." "Now, England had Churchill but we had Roosevelt." "And from the time he announced Pearl Harbor, and announced that we would go to war, we were all behind him." "(BENNY GOODMAN'S BAND PLAYS 'IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD')" "WARD CHAMBERLIN:" "The lucky thing was that... the American Army didn't get its first taste of battle going across the Channel, the way some people wanted us to." "They had to go through that..." "that North African thing, which was a learning experience and a very expensive one." "Our army got to be goddamn good, but at the beginning they were like anybody else - they weren't too good at it." "NARRATOR:" "At an Allied conference in Casablanca in January, 1943, everything went well for the cameras, and President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill announced they would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender from the enemy." "NEWSREEL:" "...unconditional surrender." "NARRATOR:" "But behind the scenes, both men were concerned." "The Allies were still trying to find ways to work together." "The previous November," "Allied troops under General Dwight Eisenhower had made coordinated landings in Morocco and Algeria without meeting much resistance." "But Hitler strengthened his forces in neighbouring Tunisia." "Eisenhower's troops were meant to race east to engage the enemy, while British general Bernard Montgomery and his Eighth Army pursued German general Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps westward from Egypt." "NEWSREEL:" "Tunisia, next door to Italian Libya, is at the rear of the Axis Army." "It's the next objective for the American half of the nutcracker campaign, closing in on Rommel from the west as the British smash from the east." "The aim is to chase the Axis out of North Africa, threaten Italy and other Nazi-dominated territories in Europe, and open shorter supply lines to Russia." "That's the meaning of the American drive to Tunis." "(WIND WHISTLES)" "NARRATOR:" "After two months of sporadic fighting, the battle for North Africa suddenly intensified." "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "(MEN SHOUT, EXPLOSIONS)" "On February 14, Rommel sent his seasoned veterans against the untested, poorly led, and ill-equipped Americans." "His goal, he said, was to instil in them" ""an inferiority complex of no mean order"." "And for a time, he succeeded." "With the American forces was Private Charles Mann, a farmer's son from Luverne, Minnesota." "CHARLES MANN:" "It was good, I guess, that you were afraid, but it did not interfere with what your real thinking was because you had one idea and that was that you was gonna make it." "NARRATOR:" "Rommel's forces quickly overwhelmed the Americans whose armour proved no match for German Panzers." "Some soldiers called the Allied tanks Ronsons, after the cigarette lighter, for their propensity to burst instantly into flame when hit." "(HEART BEATS RHYTHMICALLY)" "Stuka dive-bombers screamed down upon the Americans." "Some men held, others panicked." "Survivors fled westward across the open plain." "They would not stop for 50 miles." "CHAMBERLIN:" "They didn't know what the hell they were doing." "Guys never been under fire before, and, uh, when they got hit, they didn't know what to do, and they retreated, and they had terrible leadership." "It was chaos." "And war's always chaos." "The commander of the American troops there was a visible coward." "He built a... a, uh... headquarters for himself in a rock chamber some 20 miles back from the line with the argument that he could communicate better from there." "So, he was appalling." "NARRATOR:" "After beating back two American counterattacks, the Germans poured westward through the Kasserine Pass, gateway to Algeria, threatening the Allies' main supply base at Tébessa." "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "(EXPLOSIONS, MEN SHOUT)" "(AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE)" "(MEN SHOUT)" "In two weeks of fighting, 6,000 Americans were lost." "45 soldiers from the little town of Red Oak, Iowa, were killed or reported missing." "A third of those who lived were victims of neuropsychiatric disorders brought on by the first experience of battle for which they were totally unprepared." "2,400 surrendered." "The Americans simply didn't know how to fight, a British commander said, and if they didn't learn quickly, they "will play no useful part whatsoever"" "in the invasion of Europe." "General Eisenhower agreed." ""Our operations to date," he confided grimly to a friend," ""will be condemned, in their entirety," ""by all war college classes for the next 25 years."" "The correspondent Ernie Pyle was with the troops and struggled to make sense of what he'd seen." "MAN: "You folks at home must be disappointed" ""at what happened to our American troops in Tunisia." ""Personally, I feel that some such setback as this " ""tragic though it is for many Americans," ""for whom it is now too late " ""is not entirely a bad thing for us." ""It's alright to have a good opinion of yourself," ""but we Americans are so smug with our cockiness" ""we somehow feel that just because we're Americans" ""we can whip our weight in wildcats."" "FUSSELL:" "But I think every ground war has to begin that way because what's going to happen to people is so unthinkable." "So it's only after you've been in a little while that you're capable of understanding what's happening well enough to do well at it." "And you have to do well at it." "NARRATOR:" "The Americans pulled themselves together." "Air strikes staggered the German advance." "American artillery moved in to hammer German tank columns with howitzer shells." "The enemy was running out of ammunition, food, gasoline, while the Allies were well-supplied with everything they needed to keep fighting." "Fearing a counterattack," "Rommel pulled back through the Kasserine Pass." "Eisenhower replaced his inept commander with a major general named George S. Patton, who would transform the beleaguered 2nd Corps into a determined, capable force." "MANN:" "It was purely a matter of Patton using different tactics to beat them suckers." "That's what it amounted to." "We'd done so poorly towards, uh, Rommel's forces, but next time around we'd done it right." "NARRATOR:" "Now the Allies pushed forward, surrounding the German and Italian armies on Cape Bon in northern Tunisia." "(LOUD EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE)" "On May 12, after three more months of fighting, the last Axis troops in North Africa surrendered - a quarter of a million men." "(BENNY GOODMAN'S BAND PLAYS 'IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD')" "The lessons the Allies had learned had come hard - 76,000 men had been lost, including Captain Richards Aldridge, a flyer from Mobile, who was reported missing, and Private Charles Mann from Luverne, who had been wounded in the neck by shrapnel." "MANN:" "It bled like a stuck hog." "If that had been an inch higher or lower," "I'd have had it." "NARRATOR:" "The prolonged 6-month campaign in North Africa had forced the Allies to postpone the planned invasion of France once again - from August until spring of the following year." "But the Allies had proven that they could work together toward victory." "And the inexperienced Americans were beginning to learn how to fight." "MAN: "The most vivid change in our men" ""is the casual and workshop manner" ""in which they now talk about killing." ""They have made the psychological transition" ""from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful" ""over to a new, professional outlook" ""where killing is a craft." ""To them, now, there is nothing morally wrong about killing." ""In fact, it is an admirable thing." ""So you at home need never be ashamed" ""of our American fighters." ""The greatest disservice you folks at home can do" ""for our men over here" ""is to believe we are at last over the hump." ""For actually - and over here we all know it " ""the worst is yet to come."" "Ernie Pyle." "NEWSREEL:" "An army of 150,000 men, women and children invaded an American city - whites, Negroes, Indians, Creoles, Cajuns." "They came from every corner of the land, their roots in every curve of the globe " "Moscow, Indiana, Warsaw, North Dakota, Hamburg, California," "Milan, Missouri, Baghdad, Kentucky." "Some came out of patriotism, some out of grim necessity, some for a richer life." "All came to do a warjob." "This could be any one of a hundred great American war centres." "It happens to be Mobile, Alabama, but the story is the same in every war town in America." "NARRATOR:" "The chronic unemployment that had eaten at Mobile and every other American town for more than a decade during the Depression was over." "(DRUMS BEAT INTRO TO 'SING, SING, SING')" "Idle factories were back in business." "(BENNY GOODMAN'S BAND PLAYS 'SING, SING, SING')" "Mass production was an American invention, but now it reached levels its inventors could never have imagined." "Nearly all manufacturing was converted to the war effort." "In 1941, more than 3 million cars had been manufactured in the United States." "Only 139 more were made during the entire war." "Instead, Chrysler made fuselages." "General Motors made airplane engines, guns, trucks and tanks." "And at its vast Willow Run Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan - 67 acres of assembly lines under a single roof that one observer called" ""The Grand Canyon of the mechanised world" - the Ford Motor Company performed something like a miracle" "24 hours a day." "The average Ford car had some 15,000 parts." "The B-24 Liberator long-range bomber had 1,550,000 parts." "One came off the line at Willow Run every 63 minutes." "If the American military wasn't yet quite equal to the Germans or the Japanese," "American workers would soon be able to build ships and planes faster than the enemy could sink them or shoot them down." "By the end of the war, more than one-half of all the industrial production in the world would take place in the United States." "(COUNT BASIE'S 'THE BASIE BOOGIE' PLAYS)" "Mobile was among the fastest-growing of all American war towns." "Even before the war began, powerful Democratic congressman Frank Boykin landed his city a $26 million defence contract that transformed the Municipal Airport into Brookley Field, a major army air force supply depot and bomber modification centre that provided 17,000 civilian jobs." "In 1940, Gulf Shipbuilding had had 240 employees." "By 1943, it had 11,600." "In the same period," "Alabama Dry Dock went from 1,000 workers to almost 30,000." "They included Hank Williams, the future country music star, and the parents of future home run hitter Hank Aaron." "CLYDE ODUM:" "It was seven days a week." "And during the war when it was so strong, it was 12-hour days, five days a week." "10 hours on Saturday, 8 hours on Sunday." "You felt like you've had a week off." "There was such an influx of people that they got on each other's nerves." "And there wasn't enough, uh, watering holes to entertain everybody." "And so they'd get out and have fights and drink and all that kinda stuff." "NARRATOR:" "African-Americans streamed into Mobile from all over the South in search of defence work and a fresh start." "They found both." "But they also found the same kind of discrimination they had known at home." "JOHN GRAY:" "Mobile was a pretty fair-minded city." "And before this time, whites and blacks got along pretty good as long as you had the status quo." "Uh, but when blacks began to get homes, to buy homes and to ride in big cars, uh, it, it turned some people off." "The policemen would stop you and give you a ticket." "My cousin got a ticket for driving 16 miles an hour in a 15-mile zone." "NEWSREEL: 150,000 people, 10 full military divisions - the civilian equivalent of Rommel's entire African army - bivouacked without warning in the narrow confines of one peaceful Southern city." "Less then three years ago, you might have walked blocks in Mobile without encountering a person." "Today you stop to scratch your head and a line forms behind you." "No wonder there's such a chaos and congestion of traffic." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "Mobile became so crowded in six months that people were living in vacant lots." "They put up tents in vacant lots." "People went into the boarding houses, and one room would hold as many as four men." "They would sleep for so many hours, get up and leave the bed, go to work and another man would take the bed." "NEWSREEL:" "This was a neighbourhood grocery store." "These girls - welders, checkers, and machinists." "NARRATOR:" "Emma Belle Petcher was from the tiny town of Millry, Alabama." "Most of her girlfriends had taken secretarial jobs once they'd gotten out of high school, but Emma Belle, like her father, loved to take things apart." "PETCHER:" "I always fixed my own appliances at home, growing up." "If the washing machine got a nail in the pump" "I took the pump apart and took the nail out of the housing of the pump and, you know, run..." "I didn't have the patience to call in a repairman who would be, maybe three days later and he wouldn't tell you morning or evening, so I'd empty the washing machine, turn it upside down, take the screwdrivers" "and, course I, I knew how to do all this stuff." "('PISTOL PACKIN' MAMA' BY JIMMIE LUNCEFORD  HIS ORCHESTRA PLAYS)" "So, I packed my little cardboard suitcase and got on the bus and went to Mobile." "So they put me in a school to learn airplane accessories - that was starters, generators, alternators and some other thing." "So we did those parts, just those little instruments, over and over and over and over until graduation." "We had to almost put them together blindfolded." "NARRATOR:" "Petcher breezed through all her tests and got a job working on airplanes." "By 1943, 6 million women had entered the work force, and nearly half of them were working in defence plants." "'Life' magazine paid tribute to the mythical "Rosie the Riveter"" "as "neither drudge nor slave, but the heroine of a new order"." "In Mobile, 2,500 women worked at Alabama Dry Dock, 1,200 at Gulf Shipbuilding and 750 at Brookley Field where Emma Belle Petcher worked her way up to inspector, responsible for quality control." "PETCHER:" "You would be assigned 'X' number of planes to be responsible for." "I was to inspect the torque in the screws in the wings, and go into the gas tanks, and crawl up in the wings with flashlights." "Well, I was so conscientious, I just didn't make the mistakes." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "I worked at the government nursery school which was downtown in Christ Church Rectory, and we had the children of the women that worked in the shipyards." "Rosie the Riveter would come bring her child in all of her headgear and her togs that she did her riveting in and drop her precious little baby off and go down and work all day and come back at 5:00" "and pick the child up." "NEWSREEL:" "And the story of Mobile is the story of every American war town." "MAN: "Dearest Mom and family," ""I am feeling fine" ""and I hope to hear the same from all of you, always." ""I am at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia." ""I would have called you up," ""but there are no public telephones at the camp." ""I feel bad because I didn't call Mom up," ""but I thought for sure" ""that I would go to New York or Massachusetts." ""I would have done anything in the world" ""to be home that weekend." ""From here I don't know where we are going and when we are going," ""but I am almost positive it is overseas." ""There is nothing to worry about," ""because I will not see action for a long time" ""and the war will be over soon." ""Love, Babe."" "MAN: "To the War Department, Washington, DC," ""Can you furnish me with the exact status of my two sons " ""Walter Weinzheimer and Conrad Ludwig Weinzheimer " ""who were American citizens but resided in the Philippines" ""at the outbreak of the war?" ""Stop." ""Are they military or civilian prisoners," ""dead or alive or missing?" ""Stop." ""Such information is urgently needed." ""Ludwig Weinzheimer " ""Thornton Farms, Thornton, California."" "NARRATOR:" "Ludwig Weinzheimer was a well-to-do farmer in the Sacramento Valley." "Just before Pearl Harbor, his daughter-in-law had written to him from Manila, asking if his sons and their families, including his grand-daughter Sascha, shouldn't come home to California." "War seemed very close." "The old man told them all to stay where they were." "The rumours of war were exaggerated, he said." "Now, filled with guilt, he was frantic to find out what had happened to his two sons and their families." "He wrote to everyone he could think of - old friends, the Red Cross, the War Department, the State Department." "In October, the State Department told him the family had been reported to be in the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila, but it could provide no further information." "GIRL: "On February 15, 1943," ""a few days after my 10th birthday," ""we moved into the Santo Tomas camp." ""We left Nila, our amah, crying loudly." ""After bowing to the sentry on duty," ""we went through the gate, where Daddy was waiting for us."" "Sascha Weinzheimer." "NARRATOR:" "For almost 14 months after Manila fell to the Japanese," "Sascha Weinzheimer, her mother, her sister, Doris, and her younger brother, Buddy, had managed to stay out of the camp the Japanese had established for foreign civilians on the campus of Santo Tomas University on the city's outskirts." "But after Sascha reported having seen" "Japanese soldiers drowning a small Filipino boy, her mother decided they would be safer in the prison than outside it." "Their father had been imprisoned there for more than a year - so long that his young son no longer recognised him." "There were now some 4,000 prisoners at Santo Tomas " "American and British, Dutch and Norwegian, Polish and French." "Immediately, the Japanese didn't want to have anything to do with us." "They weren't going to feed us." "They weren't going to follow the Geneva Convention rules." "So you were left to fend for yourself." "NARRATOR:" "The Philippine Red Cross provided rice." "Filipino friends of the internees passed canned foods and fresh vegetables through the fence." "Families were permitted to build themselves bamboo shanties with palm leaves for roofs in which to spend the day." "At night, they were herded into crowded dormitories in the main building." "Everyone was assigned a job." "GIRL: "It was funny to see bank presidents" ""and other men like that" ""cleaning toilets and garbage cans." ""Mother had toilet duty four times a week." ""There were all kinds of people in camp." ""Some were hard workers, like Daddy." ""Others were gripers who liked to talk a lot" ""and goldbricks who didn't do anything at all."" "NARRATOR:" "The prisoners organised churches, schools, police, even a 'morality patrol', meant to keep teenagers from disappearing together into dark corners." "Your world becomes very small." "And you don't think beyond your little environment, because everything that's important to you is right there." "It's not in the States." "It's not back at the plantation." "It's right there." "So you have to make do with what you can in this small sphere." "GIRL: "We got our chow from the lines in tin cans." ""Then we would eat in our shanty," ""and Mother said that no matter what happened" ""we would eat off our bridge table" ""with a tablecloth with our coloured dishes" ""and a small bowl of flowers so long as we could."" "Sascha Weinzheimer." "(OFFICER SHOUTS IN JAPANESE)" "(TROOPS SHOUT IN JAPANESE)" "(OFFICER SHOUTS IN JAPANESE)" "GLENN FRAZIER:" "We didn't know anything about the Japanese when we were captured, and they didn't know anything much about us." "We most certainly didn't know their language." "(Speaks Japanese)" "And to be able to be compelled or, or made obey an order that you didn't even know what the order was - a misunderstanding or not any, any idea - and this depending on you maybe surviving..." "NARRATOR:" "Glenn Frazier had endured the Bataán Death March and weeks of imprisonment at Camp O'Donnell in the Philippines, where survival had seemed so unlikely, he had thrown one of his dog tags into a mass grave that held the bodies of many of his fellow prisoners." "That way, he thought, if they were ever recovered his family back in Alabama would find some comfort in knowing what had happened to him." "As the marines had struggled to take Guadalcanal," "Frazier was shipped all the way to Japan, to a prisoner of war camp near Osaka." "FRAZIER:" "The number that the Japanese gave us was like a serial number." "And mine was 6-32." "Roko naka san juni, is the number in Japanese." "And they put it on your clothes." "You had a little button saying, uh, 6-32." "And it was, uh, it was part of your records, and I kept that number all the way through my days in Japan." "NARRATOR:" "The commandant told Frazier and his fellow prisoners they would be treated well, as "guests of the Emperor"." "They were not." "What little food they had was rotten." "Barracks were unheated." "The prisoners were divided into 10-man shooting squads." "If one member tried to escape, he and all the others would be shot." "Frazier developed double pneumonia and nearly died." "All the prisoners were made to work in Japanese foundries or on the docks, loading and unloading ships." "Small children jeered and cursed as they walked to and from the docks, calling them cowards for having surrendered, rather than fight to the death." "Guards beat the prisoners regularly, and the smallest infraction of rules could prove fatal." "One day I was walking, coming back from a detail that day on the streets of Osaka." "And the weather was cold." "And I put my hands in my pocket, and I'm walking along with everybody else." "When we got to the camp and they checked us in, this guard pointed me out and called me out." "And, uh, said, "Why did you have your hands in your pocket?"" "I said, "Because I was cold."" "So they took me in the commander's office and the interpreter says," ""That's against the military code." ""Soldiers do not walk with hands in pockets."" "And I said, "Well, I'm not a soldier, I'm a prisoner of war."" "So the commander banged his fist on his desk, and - he was a major - and got up and he says, uh, the interpreter said, "He don't like your attitude."" "So, he come up and he started arguing with me, and I couldn't..." "I couldn't understand anything he said." "So he pulled his sabre out and he said he was going to "make an example of you," ""so that the other men will understand" ""they have to obey orders"." "So he puts his sword to my throat, here, and nicked me a little bit, and I could feel a little bit of blood coming down." "So, he, the interpreter said, "He's going to execute you."" "So he asked me if I had any last words to say." "And I looked him straight in the eye and I said, "He can kill me," ""but he cannot kill my spirit." ""And my spirit's going to lodge in his body" ""and haunt him until the day he dies."" "And he had a frown come over his face and took three steps backward and lowered his sword and ordered me to be put in a five-by-five-by-five cubicle in the ground." "I had never seen a Japanese back down in front of any of his subordinates until that particular time." "Because once they got to that point, they went through with it, regardless of the results." "(TYPEWRITER CLACKS)" "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." ""All of us use the phrase 'after the war'" ""so much it almost becomes meaningless." ""The motorist uses it when he thinks of new tyres," ""a new model car," ""and the right to drive as fast and as far as he pleases." ""But for all of us, although the words aren't often spoken," ""it means the day when you boys come home." ""It means, if you had witnessed it " ""a portion of a little drama as we did this week " ""the ecstatic happiness and the wild gladness" ""of thousands of family reunions." ""The other morning an unshaven, weary uniformed man," ""with a string of gaily-coloured ribbons on his breast," ""slipped off the morning train and was driven to his home." ""Instead of going in the front way," ""he went around the back, unnoticed." ""Probably he just wanted to feast his eyes on home." ""His children were watching at the front," ""their noses almost boring holes in the window panes," ""as they watched for a sign of Daddy." ""Nobody needs to describe their shrieks of joy" ""when he walked in from the back door to surprise them." ""If you could have seen them later," ""hanging on to his hands for dear life" ""as though they could hold him home forever," ""you couldn't have helped getting a bit misty yourself."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "JIM SHERMAN:" "I think, particularly in Luverne, there was this general feeling of we're in the right, we're doing the right thing, and all of the things that we're doing, collectively, sort of brought a lot of people together." "It was in a totally different feeling that I don't think can ever be duplicated, ever." "I just don't think that you could have that sense of oneness that, that we had when we were growing up." "NARRATOR:" "At home and overseas Americans were slowly, sometimes painfully, learning to work together." "But President Roosevelt warned the country in the summer of 1943" ""it's not too much to say that we must pour into this war" ""the entire strength and intelligence and willpower of the United States"" "before victory could be won." "NARRATOR:" "By the late summer of 1943, the United States had been at war for more than 20 months." "Its factories and shipyards were now performing miracles of manufacturing around the clock." "But its armed forces were still far from ready to mount an assault on the Germans occupying western Europe." "Meanwhile, along a thousand-mile front, the Soviets were struggling to hurl the Nazis from their soil." "The Americans and British did what they could to help relieve the pressure on the Russians." "American airmen, including Earl Burke of Sacramento, California, would be called upon to defy preposterous odds and begin to bring the war to the heart of Germany itself." "While Private 'Babe' Ciarlo, an Italian immigrant's son from Waterbury, Connecticut, would find himself battling foul weather, hostile terrain and fierce enemy resistance to liberate the land where his parents had been born." "SAM HYNES:" "Dying is different for pilots, for aviation personnel." "On the ground, in the infantry, there's a corpse." "It might be blown apart, but there's a foot or an arm or something." "And it's very close." "In aviation, the planes tend to go away and not come back." "Even if someone dies in the air with you the plane explodes, it falls to the ground at a place you'll never see." "I had a number of friends killed during the war but I never saw any of their bodies." "EARL BURKE:" "The war came home to my family on a very gut level." "Uh, my Uncle Earl, who lived in Sacramento called me one night and said," ""I want you to come over to my house."" "He was only a couple blocks away, so I went over there." "And he showed me an article in the newspaper that said there was a crash in Puerto Rico." "And my only brother I had, older brother, was listed as killed in an airplane accident." "And we tried for 12 hours on the telephone to try to get to Puerto Rico to confirm that this was, indeed, my brother." "And finally, somebody says," ""Yes, it was a Tom Burke from Sacramento."" "Well, five days later, we got the telegram telling that he had been killed." "So that's how my war came to us." "And there was no talking about what had happened." "My parents were very stoic." "And I only heard my mother cry once." "It was in her bedroom, since she never cried in front of me." "So it was a tough thing for those two people." "For me, I lost a brother." ""Yeah, damn it." ""We gonna do something about it."" "Then I got the crazy idea that I was going to enlist and win the war." "(Chuckles)" "It was kind of for Tommy... in a way." "Not so consciously." "I didn't say, "This is for you, Tom."" "No, I never did that." "But, uh, I enlisted." "I'm glad I did." "(BENNY GOODMAN'S 'ON THE ALAMO' PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "Earl Burke joined the army and trained first at Fort Lewis in Seattle where, he remembered, he learned "how to pick up cigarette butts," ""paint anything that didn't move" ""and salute anything that did"." "Like his late brother, he wanted to take part in the air war." "After serving at a base outside Reno, Nevada, where he loaded bombs onto heavy bombers, he was sent across the country to Camp Shanks, New Jersey, and then on June 1, 1943, boarded the 'Queen Mary'," "part of the seemingly endless stream of Gls now headed for England to prepare for the invasion of France." "Soon after he got there, he happened upon two old friends from Sacramento, twin brothers named Richard and Robert Egger." "BURKE:" "I was in a Red Cross hut on a base." "It was kind of a PX type of thing." "So as we were drinking the beer and all that, having a good time, they said," ""Well, why don't you get with us?"" "They were tail and ball turret gunners on a B-17." "It sounded like fun." "What the heck, you know?" "I was 19." "I could've had a lot of fun." "They seemed to be having a lot of fun." "They were not scared at all." "So I says, "OK," so the next day I went down and got an application and filled out the application." "And at that time, they were losing a lot of bombers." "They were losing 60 at a time." "They were losing over 600 men in a raid." "So they were taking anybody." "They were taking cooks." "They were taking truck drivers, mechanics - anybody that could get into an airplane." "Nothing was going to happen to me - no way." "I'm 19 years old." "I'm gonna conquer this world." "Nothing was going to happen to me, you know... no." "NARRATOR:" "Until the Allies were able to launch their long-planned invasion of Europe, the only way to weaken German power on the Continent was from the air." "Since bombing during the day attracted anti-aircraft fire and swarms of German fighters, the British preferred to fly their missions at night." "But when aerial surveys showed that only one in five British bombs had fallen within five miles of its intended industrial target, their policy shifted to what was called area bombing." "Relentless night-time raids on German cities, intended to destroy not only factories, but whole neighbourhoods and "break the spirit of the people"." "While the British continued to bomb German cities at night, the Americans decided to take on the much more dangerous task of bombing defence industries by day." "The Americans believed the B-17 - their big, 4-engine bomber - superior to anything else their Allies or the enemy had." "It was called the Flying Fortress, because it was armed with as many as nine" ".50-calibre machine guns, and each plane was fitted out with the revolutionary Norden bombsight, said to be so accurate it made it possible to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel" ""from 20,000 feet"." "Around-the-clock bombing took a fearful toll." "In late July, British bombs set off a whirling firestorm that burned or asphyxiated at least 40,000 German civilians in and around Hamburg, taking almost as many lives in one week as the German Luftwaffe had taken in eight months of bombing Britain." "But the German will to resist only intensified, just as the will of Londoners had intensified during the Blitz." "Hamburg's factories were soon back in business." "Meanwhile, American airmen were suffering terrible losses." "MAN:" "Keep your eyes open." "MAN 2:" "Three planes, 9:00." "MAN 3:" "I got my sights." "(ENGINE ROARS)" "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "MAN:" "B-17 out of control at 3:00." "NARRATOR:" "Earl Burke's friends from Sacramento, the Egger twins, would both be shot down in the coming months." "BURKE:" "The number of missions that you had to fly before you were returned to the States and/or given a non-combat job was 25 at that point." "The average number of missions flown in 1943 for a combat person was only 14." "If you got to 14, you were usually dead." "NARRATOR:" "Earl Burke was now a member of the 854th Chemical Warfare Company, part of the 384th Bomb Group in the US Army's Eighth Air Force." "On September 16, 1943, he clambered into the ball turret for the first time." "Their target was the German submarine facilities at Nantes, on the French coast." "BURKE:" "The ball turret is underneath the aircraft." "You put your knees up against your ears... almost." "Almost like a foetal position, 'cause you're up in there jammed in that little thing, and you got these horrendous guns in front of you, two of 'em." "Didn't pass my mind that I was getting into trouble till the first mission." "We're flying about 28,000 feet." "And, uh, the first time I tried my turret to see whether I could fire, you know, possibly, uh... do a reasonable job of tracking a fighter plane," "I didn't know my right foot from my left foot." "I thought I wanted the gun to go that way, and I'd press up my right foot, it'd go that way." "And I didn't know where it was going." "I was so scared." "I didn't know what I was doing." "And pretty soon, you know, before we got to the bombing area, and the fighters started to come out, uh, I learned my right foot from my left foot." "MAN:" "Two fighters, 6:00 up, coming in, diving out, chief." "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "NARRATOR:" "Earl Burke survived his first mission." "The raid and others like it reduced French coastal towns to rubble." ""Not a dog or a cat survived in them," a German officer said, but the concrete submarine pens that had been the Americans' target remained intact." "BURKE:" "Well, the accuracy of our bombing left much to be desired." "They said you could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel." "We couldn't drop a bomb in France that hit anything, any target, in the beginning." "We just couldn't hit 'em." "NARRATOR:" "In August, 376 B-17 s had conducted a massive raid on Schweinfurt and Regensburg, Germany, hoping to smash the heavily-defended factories that supplied ball bearings to the Nazi war machine." "MAN:" "Fighters, 10:00." "NARRATOR:" "It had been a disaster." "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "60 Flying Fortresses failed to return." "600 crewmen were lost." "The battered factories were again back working round the clock." "And so the Allied command ordered a second strike on Schweinfurt for October 14." "BURKE:" "We were briefed that we were going to Schweinfurt." "And you could have heard all the people groan and moan... swear." "Nobody wanted to go back to Schweinfurt." "NARRATOR:" "Burke's squadron was ready before dawn." "BURKE:" "You were getting ready to go." "Those were the times you were more nervous and scared to get into that airplane." "You did not want to get into that airplane." "But you did anyway." "You got in the airplane because your friends were getting in the aircraft." "You didn't want to let your friends down." "Even though, you know... didn't want to go." "NARRATOR:" "283 B-17 s took off into the fog and headed for Schweinfurt." "Fighter escorts shielded them across Belgium, then turned back before their fuel ran out." "Within minutes, hundreds of German fighters rose up to meet them." "(RAPID ARTILLERY FIRE)" "BURKE:" "They came in 10 abreast." "You see these little things wink." "And, as they wink, you know what's coming." "You're talking about a quarter pound of lead each time you saw one of those winks." "Then they would stay off a fair thousand yards, and they would lob..." "Iob rockets at you." "You couldn't reach them because your.50-calibre machine gun couldn't touch them." "That's why we needed the fighter escorts." "We were sitting ducks." "MAN:" "B-17 in trouble." "BURKE:" "When the bogeys were coming in, you're up there, you're pressing the little red button here." "And, uh, hope that he flies into it." "And I was up there flying two .50-calibre machine guns." "Shooting rounds of shells about half an inch in diameter." "Lots of lead in the air." "MAN:" "Going up... and down." "Take the shot, you guys." "One shot." "NARRATOR:" "As Earl Burke's battered formation approached its target, the German fighters withdrew, and American crews braced for yet another terror - anti-aircraft fire, exploding shells that filled the air with thousands of metal shards." "The Germans called it flak." "MAN:" "B-17 out of control at 3:00." "NARRATOR:" "Many more planes were hit and never reached their target." "BURKE:" "And over Schweinfurt bang." "Plexiglas on my right-hand side exploded." "My left-hand side exploded." "And a 20-millimetre shell had come up through my turret, hitting me in the left arm." "Not breaking the arm, but smashing the bone... tearing my jacket off, and went up into the waist window on the left-hand side, hit the stanchion of the.50-calibre gun, and blew up." "Killed the waist gunner." "And here I was down in this ball turret trying to figure out what I was supposed to do." "And, I have to say this, my training as an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America saved my arm that day." "Because I put a tourniquet around it, knew how to do that." "Knew how to stop the flow of blood." "And, uh, everything hunky-dory then." "And continued on flying in the ball turret." "So it's, about 35, 40 degrees below zero." "And when blood flows out, it freezes and drops down and rolls around on the bottom." "So the idea is to make sure that when you're at altitude, you pick your blood up and throw it out." "Because if you didn't, you'd have to mop it up when you got down. (Chuckles)" "But I fly..." "I flew that way for around four, four and a half hours." "When I got hit, immediately I says," ""Oh, my goodness... my parents." ""My parents will get another telegram" ""telling either I was wounded or dead."" "At that point, I didn't know which." "That was the first time I ever thought what my being in the service did to my parents." "And I had second thoughts then." "But it was too late." "MAN: 1:00 high... coming around." "NARRATOR:" "German fighters returned and attacked the bombers in Earl Burke's group again and again, all the way back to the English Channel." "The survivors landed wherever they could, at airfields scattered all across England." "The second Schweinfurt raid was just as disastrous as the first." "60 more Fortresses had been shot down." "600 more men were lost and hundreds more were wounded." "Surviving airmen remembered that day as Black Thursday." "We, uh, first were sent to a bomber base to meet the B-17 s coming in shooting off red flares, which meant there were wounded aboard." "The first one came in just right over the treetops." "We thought it was going to crash." "It skidded on the runway." "And I was in the ambulance." "We ran over there and ran in..." "You had to crawl." "There was no way to get back to a B-17 standing up." "The tail gunner was dead." "He'd been, you know, just shot right through the head." "The, uh, copilot and the pilot had been in a fire." "The belly gunner was hurt." "They were all injured." "I guess that the, uh, plane that, uh... the German plane that fired on 'em just riddled the whole plane." "NARRATOR:" "Earl Burke's injury kept him out of action for weeks." "But each time he - or anyone else - returned to the air, their odds of surviving the war grew longer." "BURKE:" "I kept away from making friends." "I did not make friends." "The reason is, if you met a guy at the..." "at the PX and bought him a beer, tomorrow he would be gone." "You know, and you kept saying "I'm losing people."" "So you locked yourself up." "NEWSREEL:" "Hollywood's most famous movie stars leave the film capital to help the government sell war bonds." "The country has asked the people to invest a billion dollars in one month to help pay for the war." "And here's the start of the drive." "They'll tour 300 cities from coast to coast." "This is the people's way of saying," ""From the home front to the battle front," ""from movie stars to sales clerks," ""America's 130 million citizens are in the war."" "NARRATOR:" "The war - the single greatest coordinated effort in American history - would eventually cost the United States" "$304 billion dollars." "More than $3 trillion in today's terms." "Taxes alone could never pay for it all." "That required a series of annual war bond drives." "The whole country got involved." "In Mobile, John Cottingham, a worker at Brookley Field, invested all but eight cents of his pay cheque each month in war bonds." "The Black Bears, the local Negro league baseball team, staged a double-header that raised $100,000." "The citizens of Sacramento were asked to buy $16 million worth of bonds during one particular drive." "They were told it would pay for 96 minutes of the war." "In Waterbury, bonds were sold from 'Liberty House', set up in the middle of the town green on the site where similar bonds had been sold to help defeat Germany during the First World War." "People turned out to gaze at a giant barrage balloon, to see a German plane that had been shot from the sky and ride a tank." "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." ""They can send all the movie stars they want" ""on countrywide war bond sales drives," ""but for our part, we'll take Maude Jochims" ""as the best bond salesman - or saleswoman - of them all." ""We stopped in at the Palace Wednesday afternoon," ""and they were going to fall $8,000 short." ""Then Maude, as a 1 -woman campaign," ""waded in to canvass Rock County patrons." ""The bond orders poured in" ""and the total was boosted over $48,000."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "MAN: "Dear Mom and family," ""I know you didn't receive mail from me for over a week," ""but circumstances prevented me from writing to you." ""Yes, that's right," ""I took a little boat ride and I didn't even get seasick." ""Well, I suppose you're wondering where I am." ""I think if I wouldn't tell you, you would never guess it." ""OK, I'll tell you," ""because I know you will want to know in the worst way." ""I'm somewhere in North Africa." ""Surprised?" ""Well, I am, too," ""but I am very safe, so don't worry." ""Love, Babe."" "NARRATOR:" "At the Casablanca Conference back in January, the Allies had publicly called for the unconditional surrender of the Axis, and privately decided upon an invasion of the island of Sicily and then the Italian mainland, what Churchill called "the soft underbelly of the Axis"." "American commanders had impatiently insisted on a cross-Channel invasion of France, but the British were wary, still haunted by the memory of the losses they had suffered there during the First World War." "They got their way." "Sicily would be first." "(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS)" "NEWSREEL:" "American troops of General Patton's Seventh Army move swiftly through western Sicily, taking town after town as they drive to join" "General Montgomery's British Eighth Army." "(EXPLOSIONS AND RAPID GUNFIRE)" "DWAIN LUCE:" "And Patton came to see us and talk to us." "We all loved Patton." "We loved lke, too." "But I mean, we loved Patton." "And then, he was something." "He says, "Now, some troops can move and some troops can shoot." ""But when you can move and shoot at the same time," ""then you and Napoleon are pissing through the same straw."" "NARRATOR:" "It took the Allies just 38 days to capture Sicily, pushing the enemy from one town to another." "Thousands of civilians died, and 25,000 Allied soldiers were dead or out of action." "The Axis lost 167,000 men, the overwhelming majority of them Italian." "Tens of thousands of crack German troops had managed to escape." "In Rome, Mussolini had been deposed by his own generals and counsellors." "The new Italian government surrendered on September 8, and declared war on Germany soon thereafter." "But there were now more than 132,000 German troops waiting on the Italian mainland, another 460,000 were on their way to join them." "And a daring Nazi commando raid rescued Mussolini from captivity and set him up in northern Italy as head of a puppet regime." "It was clear to the Allies that the Germans were resolved to hold Italy at all costs." "NARRATOR: "Italy is like a boot," Napoleon once said." ""You must enter it, like Hannibal, from the top."" "The Allies planned to attack it from the bottom." "(ALARMS BLARE)" "(RAPID GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS)" "At first, everything seemed to go according to plan." "The Fifth Army landed at Salerno on September 9." "(MEN SHOUT)" "The British Eighth Army seized the important airfields at Foggia." "And Naples fell to the Americans on October 1." "(APPLAUSE AND CHEERING)" "Despite fierce resistance, in three months the Allies managed to achieve two key goals - they had forced Italy out of the war and onto their side, and they were keeping thousands of German troops busy who might otherwise have been fighting in Russia" "or preparing to defend France against the invasion both sides knew was coming." "The Allies' target now was Rome, only 150 miles away." "Getting there would prove harder than anyone could have imagined." "With the Allied forces was Private Babe Ciarlo of Waterbury, Connecticut, now a member of Company G," "2nd Battalion, 15th Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division," "Fifth Allied Army, under the command of General Mark Clark." "On September 18, nine days after the first elements of the Fifth Army had landed at Salerno, the 3rd Division had gone ashore to join them." "(DISTANT GUNFIRE)" "MAN: "October 20, 1943." ""Dear family," ""I know I haven't written to you for a long time," ""and I hope you understand" ""the army has been keeping me pretty busy." ""I suppose you've been keeping up with the news lately," ""and by the way we're beating the Germans," ""this war won't last much longer." "(DISTANT EXPLOSION)" ""Eddie and I are dying for some nice raviolis" ""and I don't think it'll be long before we get them." ""Will you please send me Mom's brother's address" ""in your next letter?" "(EXPLOSION)" ""Love, Babe."" "NARRATOR:" "Babe was careful always to keep the details of what he was doing from his family so as not to alarm his mother." "But her brother lived in Rome, and Babe clearly wanted everybody back home to know he'd made it to Italy." "As the Allies tried to move north, the weather turned bad, and the terrain grew more and more forbidding." "Crags, deep-cut valleys, twisting mountain roads, blown bridges - all under constant German fire from hidden hillside strongholds." "(MACHINE GUN FIRES)" "Bill Mauldin, from Mountain Park, New Mexico, was a cartoonist for 'Stars and Stripes', the army newspaper." "Week after week, he managed to find laughs in the lives of ordinary infantrymen, even when, as he said," ""You don't think life could be any more miserable."" "MAN: "Dig a hole in your backyard while it is raining." ""Sit in the hole while the water climbs up around your ankles." ""Pour cold mud down your shirt collar." ""Sit there for 48 hours..." ""...and so there is no danger of your dozing off," ""imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance" ""to club you on the head or set your house on fire." ""Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks," ""pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand," ""and walk on the muddiest road you can find." ""Fall flat on your face every few minutes," ""as you imagine big meteors streaking down" ""to sock you." ""If you repeat this performance every three days" ""for several months, you may begin to understand" ""why an infantryman gets out of breath..." ""...but you still won't understand" ""how he feels when things get tough."" "NARRATOR:" "The men learned to sleep while marching - it was "a kind of coma", one remembered - and when they got a chance to lie down, preferred to sleep on rocks rather than bare ground because rocks were relatively dry." "Hundreds of mules were used to carry up supplies and to carry back the dead." "Boulder by boulder, hill by hill, the Allies battered their way through the German defences - the Volturno Line... the Barbara Line... the Reinhard Line... (ARTILLERY FIRE)" "On November 17," "Babe Ciarlo's 3rd Infantry Division was pulled back to rest." "In 58 straight days of combat since the landing at Salerno, they had lost 3,265 men and moved less than 50 miles." "The 3rd Division would cycle through 76,000 men before the war was over." "MAN: "November 17, 1943." ""The reason why I didn't write" ""is because I don't have much to say and I am a little lazy." ""I hope you have a good time over the holidays," ""and I hope you eat up at Mom's house for Christmas" ""so that Mom might be happier." ""Your loving brother, always, Babe."" "(EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE)" "(ENGINES HUM)" "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "NARRATOR:" "The terrible losses suffered during the second assault on Schweinfurt in October of 1943, and other raids that week in which 88 more American bombers had been shot down, helped persuade the Allies to cut back on daytime raids over Germany" "until they could design and produce enough fighters capable of escorting bombers all the way to their targets and back again." "The targets themselves were changed, as well." "Bombers continued to bomb cities, including Berlin, and to batter war industries, but the destruction of the German air force on the ground, as well as in the air, now took top priority." "MAN:" "Right to your left." "(ARTILLERY FIRE)" "MAN:" "I got my sights on him." "NARRATOR:" "The Allies were determined to dominate the skies before the planned invasion of France." "Before D-day." "EARL BURKE:" "Of course, being an enlisted man, we didn't think the officers knew what they were doing." "We could have fought it a little bit better than they did." "(CHEERING)" "But, occasionally, the missions came off proper." "We finally realised that these guys knew what they were doing." "That we're fighting the right war." "It was not an economical thing to do in terms of life." "You'd lose 10 bombers, you'd lose 100 men." "NARRATOR:" "Earl Burke was no longer flying." "He had been wounded again, this time by shrapnel from a bomb that exploded while he was on the ground." "BURKE:" "They put me in a hospital." "And there they told me that I had to have my arm removed." "But fortunately, there was the chief of surgery came upon me in a hallway as I was going into the operating room." "Says, what was I doing in there?" "I says, "Well, I'm..." ""guess I'm going to have a little problem with my arm."" ""What's wrong with your arm?"" ""L-I..." "I got wounded," ""and I got what they call osteomyelitis."" "And that was the scourge of World War I." "If you got wounded in the bone, that's what happened." "He says, "That..." "No, but..." "not going to do it." ""Back in the ward."" "They put me back in the ward, bring me back in a cast, cut a hole in the cast, put a little wire net across it." "I said, "What are you doing?"" "He says, "I'm making a little home for somebody."" "I said, "What is that little home going to do?"" "He says, "I'm going to keep these little guys in on your arm" ""so they can eat all that stuff out of your bone."" "And I said, "Well, what-what kind of things are they?"" "He says, "They're little white things," ""you know, like-like this."" "Had a handful of maggots, flipped them in there, and put the wire cage back on it." "Says, "Now, those little guys are going" ""to eat that stuff out of you," ""'cause we can't get it out of you." ""No way we can get that out of you."" "So, there I was with this little thing over there, and watching those guys having a meal." "I was in the hospital 15 months." "NARRATOR:" "Earl Burke's air war was over." "He returned to California, helped rescue pilots lost at sea on training missions, and finally, went home to his parents in Sacramento." "Despite the all-out Allied raids," "German aircraft production would actually increase." ""We are virtually drowning in aircraft,"" "wrote one German flyer." "But the Luftwaffe was now losing trained crews far faster than they could be replaced." "And Allied bombing had also denied the Germans the precious fuel they needed to train new ones." ""The time has come,"" "the chief of the German fighter wing told his superiors," ""when our force is within sight of collapse."" "When the time finally came to invade France, the Allies would own the skies." "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." ""For our Rock County boys." ""Dear gang," ""Who'd have thought four years ago" ""that you'd be reading this in all the states of the Union," ""maybe in Africa, India," ""Iceland, England," ""Alaska, New Guinea," ""Australia, Caledonia, Hawaii," ""New Zealand" ""and a score of other places with funny names?" ""Up until late Monday," ""it didn't look much like winter," ""and then the white flakes began to fall silently," ""swirling in white clouds," ""almost blotting out the street lights at night." ""But it didn't last very long," ""just enough to throw a little mantle of white" ""in patches over the dark, bare, dirty-looking ground." ""Tuesday morning, the snapping cold came," ""and by Wednesday morning," ""the smoke from the chimneys was hanging like white plumes" ""in the clear, quiet, frosty air."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "NARRATOR:" "Americans could now look back on some real progress in the war against the Axis." "In the Pacific Theatre of Operations," "Americans had recaptured Attu in the Aleutian Islands and were fighting on Bougainville and New Guinea." "But the Japanese were still on the march in Burma, intent on invading north-eastern India." "And the long campaign to take the Gilberts, the Marshalls and the Carolines, to liberate the Philippines and eventually attack the Japanese home islands, had only just begun." "In the European Theatre, improved radar, new, long-range Allied aircraft and ever-growing numbers of escort ships sailing from American shipyards reduced the threat from German U-boats." "More and more weapons and equipment were now reaching the embattled Soviet Union." "When the Red Army began to sweep the enemy from the Ukraine, thousands of newly-manufactured American trucks helped make possible their deadly pursuit." "The Axis had been driven from North Africa, too, and Sicily was now in Allied hands." "But the Germans were fighting back hard in Italy." "And in secret, they had already begun to implement a policy of systematised murder that would one day persuade even the most cynical GI that the war had to be fought." "As Allied leaders drew up plans for the long-delayed invasion of the Continent," "Hitler put tens of thousands of labourers to work strengthening his coastal defences." "For the men of Luverne, Sacramento," "Mobile, Waterbury, and every other American town, things were bound to get still tougher." "(MACHINE-GUN FIRE)" "(SHELL WHISTLES)" "(EXPLOSION)" "MAN: "Here lie three Americans." "What shall we say of them?" ""Shall we say that this is a fine thing," ""that they should give their lives for their country?" ""Why print this picture anyway of three American boys," ""dead on an alien shore?" ""The reason is that words are never enough." ""The eye sees." ""The mind knows." ""The heart feels." ""But the words do not exist to make us see, or know," ""or feel what it is like, what actually happens."" "NARRATOR:" "In the September 20, 1943 issue of 'Life' magazine, the editors had published a photograph taken on a New Guinea beach in the South Pacific, ten months earlier." "It was the first image of dead American servicemen that American civilians had been allowed to see in the 21 months since Pearl Harbor." "MAN: "And so here it is." ""This is the reality that lies behind the names" ""that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares" ""of busy American towns." ""The camera doesn't show America," ""and yet here on the beach is America." ""Three parts of 130 million parts." ""Three fragments of that life we call American life." ""Three units of freedom." ""So that it is not just these boys who have fallen here," ""it is freedom that has fallen." ""It is our task to cause it to rise again."" "'Life' magazine." "WILSON:" "The war was always around us." "We had an air raid warden, uh, a block warden on the street, who wore a white hat and a gas mask." "None of the rest of us had any." "Uh, across the street from my house on 46th Street there was an empty lot, so we built a victory garden there." "And of course we all relished the vegetables that came up the fastest." "NARRATOR:" "The war was now being felt by every citizen in every town in America." "In fast-growing Sacramento, California, and quiet Luverne, Minnesota, even children found themselves caught up in the effort to win victory." "Waterbury, Connecticut and Mobile, Alabama had been transformed into war towns almost overnight, and in Mobile that transformation would lead to confrontation and ugly violence." "Overseas, victory seemed a very long way off." "Americans had landed in Italy and then found themselves stopped by terrain and weather and an implacable enemy." "There was still no firm date for the cross-channel invasion, without which, the Nazi grip on Western Europe could never be broken." "In the Pacific theatre, more than a million Japanese troops were on the offensive in central and southern China against the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek and his sometime ally Mao Zedong." "The Americans were fighting on Bougainville and preparing to attack the Gilbert Islands." "But Tokyo was almost 4,000 miles away and the Japanese seemed ready to defend every island chain in between." "Over the coming months, Robert Kashiwagi, a Japanese-American from the Sacramento Valley, whose family had been interned by their country simply because of their ancestry, would nonetheless demonstrate his devotion to that country as few Americans ever have." "Family memories of heroism in an earlier war would help propel a Princeton man from Connecticut, named Ward Chamberlin, to find a way to serve despite handicaps that could have kept him safe at home." "And Babe Ciarlo, a factory worker from Waterbury, would see things no-one should ever have to see, and say nothing about them in his optimistic letters home." "Everywhere, the war was tearing Americans apart, and bringing them together, and infusing every detail of daily life with a new intensity." "FUSSELL:" "Every family had somebody in the war." "And almost every household had somebody wounded or killed or missing." "Everybody had some bad news they didn't want to talk about." "And it was very bad to bring up the subject among strangers." "You'd say, "How you doing?"" "Well, he'd say, "Well my son was killed in Anzio last Thursday."" "And so your relation to strangers was different from what it is now." "People were likely to tell you if things were intolerable." "NEWSREEL:" "By January 1, Congress had appropriated over $2 billion for emergency housing in America's war boom towns." "Here's how some of it was spent in Mobile." "These are the slums we have seen." "Slum clearance projects had been the local, private enterprise of a few high-minded, far-sighted individuals." "But in Mobile, such projects as these have become one of the obligations of good government." "They are rented only to certified, coloured war workers and are equipped with auditoriums, playgrounds, and day nurseries to take care of the children while their parents are working in the war plants." "NARRATOR:" "To relieve the desperate overcrowding in Mobile, the National Housing Agency provided 14,000 units for white workers, but fewer than 1,000 for blacks." "There were 30,000 African-Americans in the city now, and just 55 hospital beds that would take them." "GRAY:" "You had white water fountain, and a black water fountain." "And a black would get into trouble if he went and drank at the white water fountain." "My friend at Brookley Field had his head busted wide open because he drank at the white fountain." "NARRATOR: 16-year-old John Gray of 407 Royal Street was working as a carpenter's helper at Alabama dry dock before the war began." "There had been then no way for a black employee to be upgraded to the ranks of skilled workers." "Similar discrimination was found in defence industries throughout the Jim Crow South and in other parts of the country as well." "But black leaders had insisted on more jobs for black workers, and President Roosevelt had established a Fair Employment Practices Commission to combat discrimination in defence plants." "Things were beginning to change even for the African-American citizens of Mobile." "GRAY:" "A lot of black people who used to work in private homes as cooks and chauffeurs and maids got jobs at Brookley Field." "And it created some tension." "One white person asked a black person," ""Do you know where I can find me a good girl?" ""I'll give her $25 a week and car fare."" "And the black woman told her, "If you can find one, I'll give her $35."" "NARRATOR:" "With change came trouble." "In August of 1942, a city bus driver named Grover Chandler shot and killed Henry Williams, a black private in uniform, after he refused to move to the back of the bus." "GRAY:" "And they put the bus driver in jail, but they boasted that he never stayed in a cell." "They let him sleep on a cot that the sheriff used." "And then they let him out." "Eventually it died down, but nothing was done to the man actually." "NARRATOR:" "Tensions continued to rise." "On Tuesday morning, May 25, 1943, they exploded at the Alabama dry dock shipyard, after management gave in to a federal directive and agreed to let 12 black workers become welders." "ODUM:" "We were training them to be burners and welders and become mechanics." "And the white people was resenting it." "NARRATOR:" "Shortly after the new welders had finished their first shift, white shipyard employees set upon the first blacks they could find, shouting," ""No nigger is going to join iron in this yard."" "ODUM:" "I'm standing up there watching, and I never saw people so mad and agitated in my life." "And they'd have sticks, like 3ft long." "They would knock them down to their knees." "I saw men and women bleeding, blood running down their face and they didn't stand a chance coming down that gauntlet, men and women on each side beating them with sticks." "And a good many of the blacks went out and jumped off the piers, tried to swim the river." "Coastguard was out there picking them up." "JOHN GRAY:" "The riot upset the whole community." "Most people who worked were afraid to go back, because there would be a bunch standing outside and they would have their cars parked." "And in their cars they had monkey wrenches and tyre irons and stuff like that." "NARRATOR:" "More than 1,000 black workers formally requested transfers to other defence jobs." "The requests were denied." "Some left Mobile altogether, but most were persuaded to stay on the job." "We had to send out and get them and haul them back because we needed them to do the work." "And they came back because we begged them to come back." "GRAY:" "And they would not go back until they had some protection." "When they went back, this is when you had to separate them." "Normally, one ferryboat would take whoever came." "But after the riots, they had a ferryboat to take blacks over and a ferryboat to take whites over." "NARRATOR:" "In the end, the shipyard itself was segregated." "Four separate shipways were created where blacks were free to hold every kind of position, except foreman." "Blacks working in the rest of the shipyard remained largely confined to the kind of unskilled tasks they had always performed." "The African-American newspaper the 'Pittsburgh Courier' denounced the compromise as "a victory for Nazi racial theory" ""and another defeat for the principle embodied" ""in the Declaration of Independence."" "In the following months, there were racial confrontations in industrial areas all across the country " "Springfield, Massachusetts and Port Arthur, Texas," "Hubbard, Ohio and Newark, New Jersey, and in Detroit where 34 people were killed and more than 200 wounded." "Despite the violence, the war was profoundly altering life for African-Americans." "Membership in the NAACP increased ninefold." "The Committee of Racial Equality demanded the desegregation of restaurants, theatres, bus lines." "And the 'Pittsburgh Courier' campaigned for double victory - over the enemies of freedom at home as well as overseas." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "Going back through these letters written to me during the war," "I find almost every letter will mention "We had a V-mail from Sid."" "He was the main concern of the entire family." "Daddy would try to anticipate where he thought Sid would be sent next." "And when the Battle of Tarawa occurred, we lived in horror for five days." "We thought Sidney was in the Battle of Tarawa." "NARRATOR:" "Katharine Phillip's brother, Sid, who had endured four harrowing months on Guadalcanal, was actually in New Guinea in November of 1943, not Tarawa, preparing for an assault on Cape Gloucester, on the western tip of New Britain." "SIDNEY PHILLIPS:" "It rained the entire time we were at Cape Gloucester." "Everything rotted." "Clothes rotted, your shoestrings rotted." "All the wounded were brought right by our position, and that was when I decided I would like to do something in life that would amount to something." "And I decided that I wanted to study medicine that day." "Because here were all these wounded and there was no way that I could help them." "NARRATOR:" "Cape Gloucester would be a rugged, bloody jungle campaign, but Phillips was fortunate not to be among the marines ordered to take Tarawa." "The hard-won victories at Midway and Guadalcanal had ended Japan's expansion in the Pacific." "The Americans were free to begin their two-pronged offensive." "While General Douglas MacArthur's forces moved north from Australia toward the Philippines, the Navy, under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, began its advance across the central Pacific." "Tarawa was part of the Gilbert Chain, a coral atoll, a ring of 38 tiny islands around a blue lagoon that marked the easternmost edge of the perimeter" "Japan had built to shield its new empire." "The main target was a heavily fortified island with an airstrip." "It was a only little larger than New York's Central Park, but defended by 4,500 Japanese lmperial marines hidden within a maze of rifle pits and trenches, and hundreds of interconnected blockhouses and concrete pillboxes." "Tarawa was to be the test case for a new theory of amphibious warfare - any island, no matter how fiercely defended, could be taken by an all-out frontal assault." "The official version for the people back home was that everything was going smoothly." "NEWSREEL:" "The invasion force of warships and transports steams for the conquest of the Gilbert Islands, and aboard vessels crowded with troops, religious services are held." "The worshippers are fighting men who know they are going into desperate peril, where many are destined to give their lives." "And now, official navy motion pictures of the bombardment of the Japs on Tarawa with giant salvos." "NARRATOR:" "But the bombing and shelling yielded so much smoke and coral dust that the fleet's view of the landing craft was obscured." "Firing was stopped for half an hour to clear the air, plenty of time for the Japanese to ready themselves for the assault." "The landing craft, meant to ferry the marines of the 2nd Division close to the beach, hung up on the coral reef, easy targets for enemy guns." "(MACHINE-GUN FIRE)" "Men were forced to wade shoulder-deep for hundreds of yards under enemy fire." "The first wave suffered some casualties." "The second was badly hit." "(EXPLOSION)" "The third, nearly destroyed." "By nightfall, 5,000 marines had made it to the beaches, but some 1,500 of them had been killed or wounded." "Maurice Bell, a neighbour of Sid Phillips' from Mobile, had watched the landings with his binoculars from the deck of the USS 'Indianapolis'." "BELL:" "I could see the fighting going on on the island, just like if it was just across the street here." "Looked like it was that close." "And soldiers and marines falling all over the place and you could see bodies in the water." "And it's something that I hope never happens again because it's just things that happened at that time I'll never forget." "NARRATOR: "A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years,"" "the Japanese commander had said before the battle." "It took 10,000 marines just four days." "But more than one third of them had been killed or wounded." "The marine commander told the press Tarawa had fallen only because so many young Americans had been willing to die." "Outraged parents denounced him for callousness." "Eventually, the War Department reversed policy and produced a film called 'With the Marines at Tarawa', containing combat footage more brutal than anything ordinary Americans had ever seen." "Some in Washington argued that its release would damage morale, but President Roosevelt himself ordered that it be shown." "He wanted to give Americans a clearer sense of what their men were facing." "FILM:" "These are the men of the 2nd Marine Division, who are now embarking on a full phibious operation after many..." "When we saw those first pictures of Tarawa we were overcome, just overcome." "For three days before we moved in, over four million pounds of explosives had been dropped on the island." "It was just devastating to us." "Those American boys' bodies floating in the surf." "The chaplain's assistants tend the dead." "We just sat around and cried, and I know that's why they'd kept it from the American public for so long." "These are marine dead." "This is the price we have to pay for a war we didn't want." "Our dislike for the Japanese was very violent, that they would do this to us, and would kill our boys like that." "And, course, the idea was "kill the Japs."" "I'm ashamed to say, but that's the way it was." "We just had to get that war over with." "NARRATOR:" "Mrs Martina Ciarlo, a widow in Waterbury, Connecticut, had two daughters and three sons." "The oldest boy and the youngest were exempt from the draft and safely at home, but the middle son, Corado, known as 'Babe', was with the Fifth Allied Army, somewhere in Italy." "His letters home were the most important thing in his mother's life." "OLGA CIARLO:" "She'd wait every single morning on the porch for the mailman to come to bring her a letter." "And he would go by sometimes, and he would say, "Mrs Ciarlo, not today."" "So the following day she'd wait again for that letter and finally she would get a letter, she'd be so happy." "She'd run upstairs and she'd let us read the letter, 'cause my mother couldn't read English." "And we would read the letter to her and she'd be happy just knowing that she heard from him." "MAN: "Mom, how are you getting along?" ""Fine, I hope, and keeping happy always." ""I know I haven't written to you for a long time" ""and I hope you understand" ""the Army has been keeping me pretty busy." ""I'm doing good, and always happy because I know you're OK." ""Love, Babe."" "NEWSREEL:" "What is there we can all do on the home front to help the men coming back and the men still over there?" "Make your home an arsenal for victory by fighting waste every day from now until the war is over." "('OPUS ONE' BY TOMMY DORSEY PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "The Office of Civilian Defense called upon each American family to become a "fighting unit on the home front."" "Everyone was asked to collect scrap metal from which armaments could be made." "In one year alone," "Mobile's citizens amassed 22 million pounds." "In Sacramento, 22 big 'victory bins' were set up on downtown street corners for the duration, even though some people thought they were unsightly." "Luverne, Minnesota, had been founded by Civil War veterans, but now the town council volunteered to melt down the cannonballs that formed part of the memorial to the Union dead to make munitions for the new conflict." "And in Waterbury, Connecticut, 281,135 pounds of tin were collected, along with 65,000 pounds of rubber," "225,458 pounds of rags, and 372,733 pounds of fat." "ANNOUNCER:" "Fats make glycerin and glycerin makes explosives." "Every year two billion pounds of waste kitchen fats are thrown away - enough glycerin for ten billion rapid-fire cannon shells, a belt 150,000 miles long, six times around the earth." "A skillet of bacon grease is a little munitions factory." "(MACHINE-GUNS FIRE)" "INOUYE:" "Consider the fact that I'm 18, so your emotions are that of a young person." "I was angered to realise that my government felt that I was disloyal and part of the enemy, and I wanted to be able to demonstrate, not only to my government, but to my neighbours, that, uh..." "I was a good American." "NARRATOR:" "After Pearl Harbor," "Washington had ordered some 110,000 Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent living along the West Coast, out of their homes and into ten internment camps." "All Japanese-American men of draft age, except those already in the Armed forces, had been classified as enemy aliens, forbidden to serve their country." "Then, in early 1943, Washington announced a new policy." "Japanese-American men were now going to be permitted to form a special segregated outfit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team." "When the army called for 1,500 volunteers from Hawaii, where Japanese-Americans had never been locked up," "10,000 turned up at recruiting offices, including a freshman in pre-medical studies at the University of Hawaii - Daniel Inouye." "INOUYE:" "And my father took time off." "And we got on the streetcar." "And he was very silent until we got close to the point of departure." "He cleared his throat, and I knew something was coming." "He's not a scholarly person, but I know he struggled, and he said," ""This country has been good to us." ""It has given me two jobs." ""It has given you and your brothers and your sister education." ""We owe a lot to this country." "Do not dishonour this country." ""Above all, do not dishonour the family." ""And if you must die, die in honour."" "You know, I'm 18 years old and here he is telling me these heavy words." "And I've always thought to myself," ""Would I be able to say the same thing to my son?"" "ASAKO TOKUNO:" "I think that they may not really have known it themselves, but I think this feeling was instilled in them through all of our parents." "It's called 'yamata damashi', and it's this, um, it's like a proving of yourself and that your loyalty goes beyond just saying it or talking it, you know." "It's proving it, giving it your all, even if you die in the process by going to war." "And I think that's so strongly instilled from when you're very young that I think that was one of the things that pushed them on." "NARRATOR:" "Now, army recruiters went to work inside the internment camps." "Robert Kashiwagi, from Sacramento, was bed-ridden from a lung ailment when recruiters turned up at Camp Amache, in Colorado." "KASHIWAGl:" "When the recruiting team came around, they announced that this is going to be a segregated combat infantry unit slated for front line duty." "And I protested very vigorously." "I don't mind volunteering, but it's really unfair for me to volunteer only to an infantry unit that's slated for front line duty." "But we're only to have one choice - volunteer to a segregated infantry unit, or don't and call yourself disloyal." "My feeling was that the United States is our country and if we disowned United States, we were a man without a country." "We had no other place we could go to." "So I more or less volunteered... from bed." "NARRATOR:" "Those Japanese-Americans already in the armed forces when the war started were reassigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and sent for training to Camp Shelby in Mississippi, where the Governor assured them they would be treated as 'white' people." "KASHIWAGl:" "There were drinking fountains marked "colored"" "and "white" and you had to adhere to the instruction." ""Can I go into that restaurant or will I not be served?" you know." "These are the difficult questions that entered my mind." "And then when I got on the bus, why all the black people had to go to the rear of the bus, and whites stayed in the front." "That's confusing to me, because I didn't know where I was belonging to, as far as a situation like that." "So I just, without any... without thinking," "I would always go towards the black section, but they would turn me around and put me in the white." "NARRATOR:" "Early in 1944, the 442nd received its orders to head overseas." "Tim Tokuno, from the Sacramento Valley, was granted leave to go and say goodbye to his parents." "TOKUNO:" "They gave us a 15-day furlough." "So I went back to visit my folks at Topaz, Utah." "As I entered the compound, the MP captain stopped me and said, "Sergeant, have you got any liquor in your bag?"" "I said, "Yes, I have a fifth of whiskey to take to my folks."" "The captain shook his head and says, "Sorry, Sergeant." ""No liquor allowed in camp." ""Hell of a war, isn't it?" That's what he told me." ""Hell of a war, isn't it?"" "I said, "It sure is, Captain." ""Look, you got machine-guns on all four corners," ""with live ammunition" ""and you got the guards patrolling the perimeter," ""and here I'm going into combat" ""with my folks behind barbed wire."" "I said, "Yeah, it is a hell of a war."" "(EXPLOSIONS)" "MAN: "January 1, 1944." ""Dearest Vic and the babies," ""I am feeling fine" ""and I hope to hear the same from you always." ""I didn't write sooner because I was very busy" ""and there was no mail service where I was."" ""I had a big turkey dinner for New Year's and it was very good." ""Don't worry about me." ""Love, Babe."" "(LIVELY TRUMPETS PLAYING)" "NEWSREEL:" "General Eisenhower, named to command the gathering Allied invasion forces, surveys the Italian front with General Clark, 5th Army commander." "In the mountains of central Italy, he observes artillery fire blasting the way toward Cassino." "NARRATOR:" "As 1944 began, the Allies continued to slowly battle their way northward in Italy, pushing the Germans out of one defensive position after another." "With them now was Ward Chamberlin, from Norwalk, Connecticut." "CHAMBERLIN:" "My father was in World War I." "He was at Belleau Wood and he was wounded twice, got the Distinguished Service Cross, second-highest medal you can get." "After he died, I was walking by St Patrick's Cathedral, and I saw Father Duffy out there, the famous chaplain from World War I." "But I'd met him with my dad a couple of times." "So I went up to him on the steps of the cathedral." "I said, "Father Duffy, my name is Ward Chamberlin."" "He said, "That's a wonderful name."" "He said, "Your father's one of the bravest men I ever knew."" "That'll break your heart, yeah." "NARRATOR:" "Chamberlin had been captain of the Princeton soccer team when the war broke out, and he was eager to do his part." "But there was a problem." "CHAMBERLIN:" "I couldn't serve in the army or the air force because I'd lost my eye, my right eye, with meningitis when I was about ten." "And so I was 4-F as far as the military services were concerned." "Then I heard about this organisation called the American Field Service, which at that point were with the British in the North African desert." "NARRATOR:" "The American Field Service was a relief organisation that had been formed during the First World War, and now Chamberlin signed on as a volunteer ambulance driver." "He had originally shipped out for North Africa, only to find himself hospitalised there for six weeks with a mild case of polio." "CHAMBERLIN:" "And after I did that for six weeks," "I was in pretty good shape." "And I got some orders to report back to my Cairo headquarters, and I read them and they said," ""You're supposed to have desk duty for a year."" "So I just tore those up and never gave 'em to anybody, so..." "And ten days later I was in Italy." "Exactly where I wanted to be, exactly." "Wasn't so sure once I got there." "NARRATOR:" "In early January, 1944," "Chamberlin had his first taste of war." "CHAMBERLIN:" "We were in a forward position probably, you know, a half a mile from the actual front line, if you could call it that." "And the first guy that they brought in who was so badly shot up we got him into the ambulance on a stretcher, and I've..." "I don't think I've ever said this to anybody," "I went around the side of the ambulance and just let everything out." "I just... sick, sick as I could be for about 30 seconds." "And it's just..." "I'd never seen a body cut up as badly as that guy was." "NARRATOR:" "The Allies now came up against new and still more formidable German defences - the Gustav Line." "It combined three rivers - the Sangro, the Garigliano and the Rapido - and a chain of mountains honeycombed with mines, pillboxes and sheltered gun emplacements." "Its keystone was the 1715-foot Monte Cassino." "Looming above the village that gave the hill its name, stood the most important monastery in Europe, a Benedictine abbey whose origins went back to the sixth century." "Behind it lay the broad Liri Valley and the road to Rome." "Time and again, Allied forces tried to fight their way around its edges and were stopped cold." "Prime Minister Winston Churchill proposed a daring solution to the impasse - a surprise landing behind the German lines at Anzio," "35 miles south of Rome." "It was a risky idea that would take time to plan and execute." "Meanwhile, the Allies - including American, British," "Canadian, New Zealand, French, North African, Indian, and Free Polish troops - would mount a series of all-out assaults on Cassino aimed at somehow breaking through." "CHAMBERLIN:" "It was a horrible battle because... we kept throwing divisions, new tactics..." "You couldn't get through there." "And we'd lost an awful lot of casualties." "The guys that I admired most were the guys that were really scared to death, and did what they had to do." "Some of us were too stupid to, uh, feel so scared, or you just had some protective armour, psychologically, that you put on." "(GUNFIRE, BULLETS WHIZZING)" "But the guys I admired were the guys who really were frightened and went on and did what they had to do, whether they were soldiers or ambulance drivers or whatever." "NARRATOR:" "In the early morning hours of January 21," "Chamberlin watched as the 36th Texas Division tried to cross the fast-moving Rapido in the centre of the line." ""We might succeed,"" "its commander had written in his diary," ""but I do not see how we can."" "He was right." "There was no cover." "The men stumbled into mine fields, drawing torrents of machine-gun and mortar fire." "Every man who managed to make it across the Rapido was killed, wounded or captured." "Some, who tried to swim back to safety, drowned." "CHAMBERLIN:" "How anybody could have sent people through that" "I just can't imagine." "They were shot to pieces." "I saw them come out of the line." "They were walking, uh, when I was, first came up, they were coming out of the line, walking down the side of the road just, eyes shut, just... plodding ahead one foot after the other." "They looked like they'd been through the worst stuff, and they had been, they had been." "Germans just sat across the river and sprayed 'em off." "NARRATOR:" "On January 22, 1944, the same day Ward Chamberlin watched the men of the 36th Division stagger back from the Rapido," "36,000 Allied troops were scheduled to land far behind the German lines at Anzio." "Their fate, and that of the whole Allied effort in Italy, hung in the balance." "MAN:" "Luverne, Minnesota." "'Rock County Star-Herald.'" ""The four grim lead lines of the newspaper seemed" ""so tragically cold and bare." ""Staff Sergeant Richard E. Mueller is reported missing" ""with seven others following the crash of a medium bomber" ""in the Atlantic near Columbia, South Carolina Saturday." ""All are believed dead." ""Four grim lines of newspaper type" ""that tell so much and yet so little." ""For us and thousands of other friends," ""none of the usual information, or even a picture, is needed" ""to help us remember Red of the AP," ""because that is the way he will be remembered here," ""not as Staff Sergeant Richard E. Mueller." ""With hair as vivid as a June carrot" ""and a grin that had the power of a locomotive headlight," ""this boy never walked down the street" ""or round the aisles of the store." ""He fairly danced or ran" ""and you knew that here was a chap" ""that was going places."" "Al Mclntosh." "NARRATOR:" "By January of 1944, Americans all over the country had already become accustomed to scanning their newspaper every morning hoping not to see the names of young men they knew listed as missing or wounded or dead." "Men and materiel were streaming into England in preparation for the invasion of France." "US forces were about the assault the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific." "American and British troops in Italy remained mired behind the German Gustav Line at Cassino, unable to batter their way through to Rome." "It was clear to everyone that the newspaper casualty lists would soon be growing longer." "SHERMAN:" "I delivered papers." "And all of the mothers who had somebody in the army would have a blue star in the window on the little flag." "And then if the son or husband or whatever died they'd change that to a gold star." "The gold star mothers were those who had lost a family member in the war." "And it was the fact that the star had changed." "But I was too young to really understand the consequences of death." "NEWSREEL:" "Now, taking the Nazis completely by surprise, the Allies hurl their fleet upon Nettuno and Anzio, points behind the German line south of Rome." "At dawn, landing ships and barges stand offshore." "Small boats begin to pour in." "The initial landing meets with no opposition." "NARRATOR:" "On January 22, Allied forces landed behind the German lines at Anzio, hoping to break the stalemate in Italy." "Babe Ciarlo, of Waterbury, was with them, part of the 3rd Infantry Division." "The Allies had caught the enemy totally unprepared." "But the Allied commander, General John P. Lucas, was a cautious man." "His orders were to move inland 20 miles, seize the Alban hills that overlooked Rome and cut off the railroad line and two roads that supplied the enemy." "Lucas wanted to be certain he had enough men and enough firepower to be successful." "He took nine days to consolidate his position, more than enough time for the Germans to build up their defences." "By the time the Allies began to move forward toward the Alban Hills, the better part of eight enemy divisions - 100,000 men - held the high ground along the Allied perimeter, ready for any attack." "Fire!" "(GUNFIRE, EXPLOSIONS)" "Babe Ciarlo's division tried to fight its way through the German lines near the town of Cisterno only to be hurled back toward the beach." "Unable to advance, Americans and Britons dug in as best they could on the Anzio plain." "15 miles long, 10 miles deep, and totally exposed to enemy fire." "They would remain pinned down there for four miserable months." "The secret landing meant to stun the enemy had stalled, just as the assault on the Gustav Line it had been meant to aid had also stalled." "As Churchill said about that Anzio thing, he said, "I thought I was putting a wildcat ashore." ""It turned out to be a bloated whale."" "Because we just sat there." "Meanwhile, the Allied armies back at Monte Cassino were faring no better." "In February, New Zealand and Indian troops were ordered to take Cassino." "They failed." "Their commander insisted the Germans were using the abbey as an observation post to direct fire on the huddled men below." "Waves of American warplanes dropped 586 tons of bombs, turning the abbey into rubble." "The men below stood and cheered." "Some wept with joy." "But German resistance was actually strengthened." "Having promised the church not to disturb the sanctuary, the Nazis had never actually used the abbey as an observation post." "But they quickly turned its ruins into a new stronghold from which they directed fire to destroy the men that were again sent against them." "In March, the Indians and New Zealanders attacked once more." "The battle seesawed back and forth for two days and two nights before the Allies fell back to where they'd started." "4,000 men were lost." "The Germans held." "In the mud and snow and bitter cold, the killing went on." "(GUNFIRE)" "CHAMBERLIN:" "You'd get a guy in and he looked OK, but a little further on, there'd be a medical guy and he'd say, you know, "This guy's going."" "And I said, "Should I stop?"" "He said, "Yeah, why don't you stop for a minute?"" "So I went back and held his hand and you know, he just looked up and kind of gave a sign of recognition and then he was gone." "It was quick, quick." "It's hard to describe what it's really like." "You can remember the moments, but..." "You see some guy leaving this world, it's not a lot of fun." "NEWSREEL:" "At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the largest training camp of its kind in the world, 800 coloured rookies get their basic physical build-up for eventful days to come." "Ten weeks ago they were coalminers, steel workers, mechanics, professional boxers - in fact, most everything from college teachers to Pullman porters." "A few weeks more of this intensive drill and they'll become the field artillery replacements of the famed 16th Battalion, a compact fighting force of cannoneers, radio and signal men, an all-Negro group assembled from all over the nation " "a well-trained unit ready and eager to join the fight for survival of the great democracy that gave them birth." "Man:" "Alright, men." "On behalf of the United States Army, and the reception centre here at this camp, we're glad to welcome you here to today, and into the United States Army." "We're glad to see all of your happy, smiling faces." "You'll be converted from a civilian into a full-fledged soldier." "GRAY:" "When I went in they, uh, had a pad." "And "Eyes - negro." ""Hair - negro." ""Colour - negro." ""Complexion - negro." ""Race - negro."" "Everything was "negro" except height and weight." "NARRATOR:" "Despite the bravery of African-Americans in all of America's previous wars, despite the argument made by the NAACP and others that "a Jim Crow army cannot fight for a free world,"" "the armed forces of the United States remained strictly segregated." "Growing protest by African-Americans would force the military to make a few changes." "An Army Air Corps training camp was set up at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama." "A single ship, the USS 'Mason', was manned entirely by blacks - except for her commander." "The 761 st Tank Battalion would eventually fight in Europe, sent to the front by George Patton with the admonition - "I don't care what colour you are," ""so long as you go up there and kill" ""those Kraut sons of bitches."" "The Marine Corps had refused to accept any blacks at all, but after 1942, as casualties in the Pacific mounted, and pressure from civil rights groups intensified," "John Gray and others were finally allowed to sign on and serve in segregated units." "GRAY:" "They did not intend to have blacks as fighting units." "They intended to have them, if at all, as support units." "Look like you ought to appreciate the fact that you're not up front." "But they didn't want you to get that kind of a glory." "NARRATOR:" "John Gray was sent to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where he joined the 51 st Defense Battalion, one of only two black units being trained for combat in the Marine Corps." "Its commander was Lt. Colonel Floyd Stephenson, a veteran of the attack on Pearl Harbor who won his men's loyalty by declaring," ""There is nothing that black troops cannot be taught."" "He was a far cry from the officers" "John Gray was used to." "GRAY:" "And that was different from Major Larsen who said he had been out in the jungles and he had fought this and he had done that and he came back to find women Marines and dog Marines and then "you people."" "We didn't like for people to say "you people."" "So instead of referring to troops as "troops,"" "they would always refer to black troops as "you people."" "And we resented that." "NARRATOR:" "John Gray and his unit were eventually sent to the South Pacific." "They had been trained as expert gunners on 90mm and 150mm guns, and were so skilled, Gray remembered," ""We could shoot the sting off a bee."" "But their white commanders did not see fit to send them into battle." "The men took to calling themselves "the lost battalion"" "because they had so little to do, and white Marines resented their presence - especially when Samoan women were involved." "GRAY:" "And when they got a chance to dance or something and those girls were told that we had tails." "So when a girl would dance with you, she would reach down and try to see if you had a tail." "But those girls would be so glad to have the treatment." "So they extended, uh," ""separate, but equal," so to speak, into the armed services." "(EDGAR MEYER'S 'CONCERT DUO MOVEMENT ONE' PLAYS)" "AANENSON:" "I wanted to fly fighters." "And by the luck of the draw, I was sent to Harding Field at Baton Rouge, Louisiana." "That's where they had the P-47 Thunderbolt." "And that was the plane I wanted to fly." "NARRATOR:" "The war offered Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne, Minnesota, a chance to realise his boyhood dream of flying." "Colour blindness had kept him out of the Army Air Corps until he took the test enough times to memorise it." "In early 1944, he was one of hundreds of thousands of men being trained to play their part in the coming invasion of France." "The P-47 Thunderbolt was a powerful airplane." "We could carry two 500-pound bombs under the wings or we could carry two 1,000-pound bombs under the wings." "We carried up to ten rockets." "We had eight.50 calibre machine-guns mounted in the wings that had a rate of fire of 600 rounds a minute per gun." "So we, in a second, we could throw a hundred shells on a target and just devastate anything that was in front of us." "(RAPID GUNFIRE)" "NARRATOR:" "Fighter training in Baton Rouge was exhilarating, but dangerous." "(EXPLOSION)" "Five members of Aanenson's group of 40 trainees died before they got a chance to go overseas." "(MILLS BROTHERS' 'PAPER DOLL' PLAYS)" "SONG: # I'm gonna buy a paper doll" "# That I can call my own... #" "AANENSON:" "And I had been there only about ten days or two weeks when I met Jackie." "I went to a dance that was put on by a girls' club that she belonged to." "And this absolutely darling girl came up." "JACKIE GREER:" "And that particular night," "I had a darling Valentine dress, you know, the red and the white stripes and all." "There was a song called 'Paper Doll' that was so famous at that time." "And as I took her to dance with her, I said," ""Hello, paper doll."" "GREER:" "We did have our dance, and we danced for about five minutes, the music stopped to let the band rest, and I went home." "And when I got home that night, my sister was already in bed asleep." "We slept together, and I woke her up and I said, "Nelwin," ""tonight I met the man I'm going to marry."" "AANENSON:" "Well, we had 90 days to work with from the time I met her until the time I shipped out to go overseas." "We would go to parties, and we saw each other almost every night." "And we knew within a matter of just a short time that this was something serious and everything was it's sort of like on fast forward." "You live your life realising that, uh, you don't have a lot of time." "NARRATOR:" "Before he left for England," "Aanenson laid down some ground rules for Jackie." "AANENSON:" "So I said that" ""I'd like to make a deal with you." ""I will come back and survive this war" ""if you will agree that while I'm gone" ""that you will not date any one guy" ""more than three times."" "I don't know where in the world he came up with that." "I never did understand it." "But the rule was," "I couldn't have over three dates with any one fella." "And he explained it that I wouldn't get too familiar with them in three dates, and if I couldn't have any more, it couldn't go any further." "And it surely worked." "(COUNT BASIE PLAYING 'FOR THE GOOD OF THE COUNTRY')" "TOM CIARLO:" "Waterbury at that time, during the war, was like, uh, you could almost compare it to a miniature Times Square." "It was never quiet because there were so many factories and each factory had three shifts so they're going around the clock." "So we had buses running up and down from the centre of town to different streets all over the city going constantly." "NARRATOR:" "Like Mobile and countless other American towns," "Babe Ciarlo's hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut was booming." "Its peace-time industries had all switched over to defence and were working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year." "Workers came to Waterbury from everywhere." "LEO GOLDBERG:" "While looking for work, there was one memorable morning when I got on a bus, sat down next to a stra... somebody who turned to me and said, "Good morning."" "And I looked at him as if to say," ""Who are you to say good morning to me?"" "After all, I'm from Brooklyn, New York." "But any rate, the impact was very great." "The friendliness that I found in Waterbury was something I was not accustomed to." "NARRATOR: 23-year-old Leo Goldberg quickly got a job as a saw sharpener at the Scovill Manufacturing Company." "Scovill produced so many different military items, the 'Waterbury Republican' reported," ""That there wasn't an American or British fighting man" ""who wasn't dependent on the company" ""for some part of the food, clothing," ""shelter and equipment" ""that sustained him through the struggle."" "GOLDBERG:" "Having a job and no attachments, it gives you a freedom." "You don't have to answer to anybody." ""Hey, Mom, I'm gonna stay out until 10:00,"" "or "You gotta to be home by noon,"" "or whatever it was." "So, it was a burst of freedom." "So couple that with the friendliness." "I got to know people." "I went horseback riding for the first time in my life." "I never knew what a horse looked like." "And uh... it was just great." "NARRATOR:" "Waterbury also sent group after group of draftees to the war, 12,000 of them." "The mayor saw them all off at the railroad station." "Each man received a prayer book and a carton of cigarettes, courtesy of the Shriners." "Meanwhile, young Waterbury women did their best to keep in touch with the men overseas." "ANNE DEVICO:" "We wrote letters to all the boys we knew." "And they loved getting the letters because they said at roll call they wanted their name to be called over and over because they said it was so wonderful." "They loved these letters because we told them where we went last night." "We went for a hot dog or something." "You know, it wasn't anything big, or we went to the USO dance and we saw so-and-so there." "And at Christmastime, they got boxes galore." "My whole kitchen table, my mother used to help, everybody helped." "And we sent boxes to all of them." "(CREAKING)" "NARRATOR:" "From guns hidden in the Alban Hills the Germans continued to hurl artillery shells at the Allied troops pinned down at Anzio." "For more than eight weeks, since the end of January, 1944, they had been stuck there." "With the American forces was Private Bill Mauldin, a cartoonist for 'Stars and Stripes'." "MAN: "There wasn't any rear." ""There was no place in the entire beachhead where enemy shells" ""couldn't seek you out." ""Wounded men got oak leaf clusters on their Purple Hearts" ""when shell fragments riddled them as they lay on hospital beds."" "(EXPLOSION)" ""Nurses died." ""Planes crash-landed on the single airstrip." ""You couldn't stand up in the swamps" ""without being cut down," ""and you couldn't sleep if you sat down."" "(EXPLOSION)" ""Guys stayed in those swamps for days and weeks."" "(MEN SHOUT)" "(EXPLOSIONS)" "NARRATOR:" "After one massive shelling, a mess sergeant fell to his knees and began loudly to pray." ""God, help us," he said." ""You come yourself." ""Don't send Jesus." ""This is no place for children."" "Some 7,000 Allied personnel were killed during the Anzio campaign." "36,000 more were wounded or missing." "And another 44,000 were classified as "non-battle casualties", victims of frostbite and trench foot, shell shock and madness." "Axis Sally, the Nazi radio propagandist, began calling Anzio "the largest self-supporting" ""prisoner of war camp in the world."" "And German aircraft littered the beach with leaflets, urging Allied solders to surrender." ""The beachhead," they said, "has become a death's head."" "On the front line with the 3rd Infantry Division," "Babe Ciarlo saw all of it, took part in some of it, but never said a word about any of it in his letters home." "MAN: "March 27, 1944." ""I just got through with chow." ""We are having beautiful weather here," ""and I hope it's the same way there," ""so you could take the babies out every afternoon."" "TOM CIARLO:" "He never mentioned a word about what he was doing, where he was." "You couldn't say much about where you were anyway, but it was always the upside." ""I could only write a few lines right now because I'm... '..." "I'm going to chow, and I don't have time."" "This is in the heat of the battle, and he's going to chow line." "I mean, there's no such thing as a chow line when you're in..." "But you don't realise it at the time, until years later, you get a little smarter and you go, geez, you know, uh, how could he be going to a chow line when you're in" "the middle of a battle or you're in a foxhole or someplace?" "But he always had that upbeat outlook about him." "MAN: "April 14, 1944." ""I am in the very best of health, and I hope to hear" ""the same from all of you always." ""Well, things here are moving pretty smooth" ""and the only thing I do is eat and sleep." ""And if I keep it up much longer, I'll be like a barrel." ""Well, take care of yourselves and keep those stoves roaring," ""because I'll be doing a lot of eating when I get home."" "NARRATOR:" "By the end of April, the Allied command was determined to break the stalemate and resume its drive toward Rome." "Babe's division had finally been pulled back to rest, and to get ready for the big battle to come." "MAN: "April 30, 1944." ""Dear Mom and family," ""This afternoon, I might go swimming in the Tyrrhenian Sea." ""The salt water will do me good." ""Well, I had my dinner and guess what I had " ""pork chops, about a dozen of them." ""I'm getting to be a chow hound." ""Love, Babe."" "NEWSREEL:" "The Allies are stalled at Anzio, but patrol clashes are frequent." "Here's a German outpost." "(GUNFIRE, EXPLOSIONS)" "TOM CIARLO:" "You see, probably, on the newsreel or you read about it in the paper about different battles." "But you don't actually put Babe in that position, because he's always telling you how everything is fine, everything is no problem." "At one point, as a matter of fact, my mother had my aunt write a letter in Italian that she had sent to Babe." ""When you get to Rome, when you get to Italy," ""we have relatives over there." ""When you get there," ""show them these letters and they'll treat you well,"" "and everything else, you know." "And at the time, you think, well, yeah, he's going to Italy." "He's going to go to Rome and he's going to see his relatives." "Can you imagine that?" "It's so unreal." "MAN: "May 9, 1944." ""I'm glad that you're going down to the beach with the babies," ""and I hope Mom goes down with you," ""because it'll do all of you good." ""I won't be with you this year," ""but I'll guarantee you I'll be there next summer." ""That's a date." ""I'm alright." ""Nothing ever happens here." ""I guess it's like Waterbury - dead." ""Love, Babe."" "(BENNY GOODMAN'S 'MEMORIES OF YOU' PLAYS)" "(CANNON FIRE)" "NARRATOR:" "By the middle of May," "American artillery had managed to target German guns, and things at Anzio had calmed down a good deal." "The rain of shells that had once fallen day and night was reduced to sporadic, harassing fire." "(LAUGHTER)" "In one sector, German gunners held their fire each afternoon while Gls played a game of baseball." "In a ceremony on the beach, 37 foreign-born members of Babe's division were sworn in as American citizens." "300 men from his outfit attended a wedding between a first lieutenant and an army nurse." "The bride cut the cake with a trench knife." "(RAPID GUNFIRE)" "MAN: "I figured out just what" ""I'm going to do after the war when I get home." ""I'm going to loaf for a while, and then I'm going to work," ""and the next spring," ""I'm going to get a car." ""Not bad, huh?" ""May 19." ""I am in the very best of health," ""and I hope to hear the same from all of you always." ""Today we had a little rain, but it wasn't bad at all," ""'cause it cooled us off." ""We had beer again today," ""and I gave my share to the fellas." ""Mom, how are you getting along?" ""Fine, I hope, and keeping happy always." ""I'm doing good," ""and always happy, 'cause I know you're OK." ""Love, Babe."" "(MAN SCREAMS)" "NEWSREEL:" "The heaviest Allied barrage of the war precedes a dawn attack in the final battle for Cassino." "(DISTANT GUNFIRE)" "(PLANES HUM)" "(WEAPONS FIRE, RUMBLING)" "(EXPLOSIONS)" "(EXPLOSIONS)" "(EXPLOSIONS)" "NARRATOR:" "On May 11, Allied troops had begun still another assault on Monte Cassino." "(GUNFIRE, DISTANT SHOUTING)" "French forces from North Africa battled their way behind Cassino and began to choke off German supplies." "(DISTANT SHOUTING)" "(GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING)" "(GRUNTS)" "(EXPLOSION)" "(GUNFIRE AND SHOUTING)" "(RAPID GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS)" "(DISTANT RAPID GUNFIRE)" "Polish troops, eager to avenge the Nazi invasion of their country, finally took the ruined monastery and the positions around it." "(EXPLOSION)" "The Gustav Line had broken." "The Germans began falling back." "Monte Cassino was in Allied hands." "Meanwhile, at Anzio," "General Mark Clark ordered his forces there to begin their own offensive on May 23." "He was determined to break out of the beachhead and link up with the Allied armies coming up from Cassino to trap the enemy now retreating northward." "Babe's regiment helped lead the way, finally taking the fiercely defended village of Cisterna they had tried to take months earlier." "(DISTANT GUNFIRE)" "(EXPLOSION, MAN SHOUTS)" "But when his men broke through," "General Clark astonished his own staff and his British Allies by racing toward Rome rather than trapping and destroying the retreating German army, which had been the original plan." "CHAMBERLIN:" "And when we finally did break through there, we didn't even beat the German army then." "So there wasn't a lot to show for all that." "All those casualties, all those terrible things." "The only thing we did from a larger perspective was to keep a number of German divisions occupied there that otherwise could have gone to France, or could have gone to Russia or somewhere else." "But there wasn't a lot to show for it." "It was horrible." "(RADIO STATIC, RADIO CHANGING STATIONS QUICKLY)" "RADIO:" "This is Douglas Edwards reporting that the 5th Army, tanks and motorised infantry has roared on through Rome today in relentless pursuit of two battered German armies." "That's the picture in Italy as Allied planes continue hammering German-held Europe from the west." "Now, General Electric takes you direct to Rome," "Winston Burdett reporting." "BURDETT:" "The people of this ancient and still splendid capital have seldom celebrated such a riotous holiday as they did today..." "NARRATOR:" "On June 4, 1944, units of the 5th Army marched into Rome." "BURDETT:" "A tremendous shout went up in the square..." "NARRATOR:" "It was Babe Ciarlo's 21 st birthday." "BURDETT:" "We are bringing some 3,000 carabiniere into the city." "NARRATOR:" "Back in Waterbury, his sister Olga sat down to write him a letter." "OLGA: "Dearest Babe..."" "('THE AMERICAN ANTHEM' PLAYS)" ""It is now about 3:15 in the afternoon," ""and it's a beautiful day." ""We are all in the best of health" ""and always hope to hear the same from you." ""We just had news a little while ago," ""and our American forces are in Rome." ""The Allies have passed the city limits in Rome," ""but they're not doing any fighting." ""Gee, I don't have to tell you anything." ""You know everything from beginning to end." ""Babe, try to tell us a little more about you." ""Where you are and what you are doing." ""We do hope everything is alright with you." ""Remember always to take good care of yourself." ""Well, Babe, today is your birthday," ""and we do wish you a happy one." ""May all your wishes and dreams come true." "(Voice breaks) "Let's hope that you'll be home for your next birthday." ""I'm sure you will be." ""It won't be long now." ""We'll have the biggest party you've ever seen." ""Just keep your chin up." ""You're 21 years old, and what a man." ""We're all so proud of you," ""especially Mom." ""There's not a minute that goes by" ""that she doesn't think of you." ""We all miss you and pray so hard" ""for this war to end so you can come home." ""You said you sent home $30.00." ""We didn't receive it yet, but it will get here soon." ""Mom is going to put it in the bank for you, Babe," ""so that when you come home..."" "(Sobs) "...you can have everything you want." ""You can buy your car and all your new clothes." ""Well, Babe, I guess I've said enough for now." ""Love from all." ""Take good care of yourself" ""and write as often as you can." ""May God bless you and keep you safe." ""Our thoughts are always with you." ""Your loving sister, Olga."" "NARRATOR: 22 days later, on June 26, 1944, a telegram arrived at the Ciarlo home." "Babe was dead." "He may have been wounded as early as May 23, as his battalion struggled to take Cisterna during the first few hours of the Anzio breakout." "995 men from his division were lost that day, perhaps the largest number suffered in a single day by any American army division during the entire war." "Hundreds more were killed or wounded during the next few days, some of them hit by American fighter planes whose pilots mistook their advancing countrymen for retreating Germans." "Whenever Babe was hit, however he was wounded, he died on May 27, eight days before his birthday." "Among the belongings in his pockets were two rosaries, his driver's licence, a wallet with 16 photographs of family and friends, a blood-stained letter, and $1.61." "OLGA CIARLO:" "Well, I was out that night with the girls." "We had a sewing club." "I came home and after I got off the bus," "I see all these lights lit, which is very unusual that my mother would have all these lights lit, and the closer I got to my house, lights were all over the place and I can hear people talking," "and as I went up the front stairs," "I can hear my mother screaming, crying." "My aunts, uncles, everybody was there, and I didn't know what had happened, so my aunt called me aside and told me what had happened." "Well, it was a terrible night." "When I got upstairs and found out what happened, of course... a complete shock to all of us because we thought everything was fine." "Babe said everything was fine." "He's coming home soon and it would be great..." "So to tell you the truth, I just went to my room," "I closed the door, and that's where I stayed." "('EXILES' BY AMY BEACH PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "The news of Babe's death spread throughout the neighbourhood." "ANNE DEVICO:" "And my girlfriend called me up." "She's crying." "I said, "What happened?"" ""Babe Ciarlo was killed."" "You know, we couldn't do a thing for days after that." "We didn't because all we could think of was him." "He was always so happy and jolly and always so fun-loving, and then I'm thinking, "He's not coming back."" "And it was terrible 'cause you started to realise that this isn't just going over there and..." "They're not coming back." "Some of them aren't." "NARRATOR:" "Babe's mother refused to believe her son was gone." "There had been some mistake, she was sure of it." "OLGA CIARLO:" "My mother, of course, was... well, how can I explain it?" "She was a disaster." "We would be getting the newspaper and my mother would look at pictures and she'd say to me, "There's Babe." "That's Babe."" "And I'd say, "Gee, no, Mom."" ""No!" "You have to write." "You have to write."" "I don't know how many newspaper offices I would write to, magazine places I would write to, questioning the name of that boy that was in that picture because my mother always thought it was Babe." "But it never came to be." "It was so bad in our house that nobody ever knows." "I used to play the piano ever since I was a young girl." "When my father passed away and my brother Babe died, my mother had no music in the house." "I never played the piano again." "('TWO PIECES FOR STRINGS' BY WILLIAM WALTON PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "By the late spring of 1944, events were accelerating at last." "In the Pacific, the Americans were on the move and a large force was steaming toward the Marianas - the islands of Guam, Tinian, and Saipan." "(BOMB EXPLODES)" "On the Eastern front, the Soviets had triumphed at Leningrad, then destroyed or captured some 250,000 German troops in the Crimea." "But the basic fact remained, that until the Nazi grip on Western Europe was broken, Allied victory was impossible." "The German army had taken up new positions on the Adolf Hitler Line north of Rome and the greatest test for the Western Allies - the long-delayed invasion of France - was now just days away." "Back in Baton Rouge, Quentin Aanenson from Luverne had to say goodbye to Jackie and prepare for war." "AANENSON:" "We were very much aware of the fact that it was a deadly calling." "And we knew that the loss rates were extremely high, and so it was the, uh, Judge Advocate General's Office that put this program in place that all of us should have our wills drawn up." "And, of course, we knew the reality of our situation, and so we tried to make light of it, but, nevertheless, we we all signed our wills, drew up our wills " "they were standard-type wills - and there had to be three pilots that would witness the other pilot's will." "The three pilots that witnessed my will were all dead in six months." "('UNTIL I'M IN YOUR ARMS AGAIN' PLAYS)" "(WAVES CRASH)" "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "We were all granted about 10 days leave for our final visit to our homes." "This was around the middle of April, 1944." "So I went up to Luverne to see my parents, my brothers and sisters." "And it was a very difficult time because I knew..." "I had the orders in my possession that would be sending me to the European Theatre of Operations, and I knew that we had been assigned to fly this terribly dangerous type of combat mission." "So... when I was leaving and saying goodbye to my mother and dad, we went to the train station in Luverne to catch the midnight train." "My sister Mavis was with me, and I took her aside and we walked down the platform for a ways and I told her what my assignment had been... and that the odds were pretty great that, uh..." "I would be killed." "So I had told her... to be very much aware of this possibility and that she should be... prepared to help my parents." "(DRAMATIC NEWSREEL FANFARE)" "NEWSREEL:" "This immense piling up of war supplies in Britain is massed for the giant blow designed to knock out the Nazi." "An astounding panorama of everything that you can think of... and more." "Invasion shipping massed in British harbours along the English Channel - barges and boats." "Imagine those stacked-up amphibious craft when they stream in swarms for the landing." "Bombers, which, in the ground invasion must keep on hammering, gliders for airborne troops, and myriad fighter planes for the monster air battles of the offensive designed to be the final phase of the European War." "Acres of planes reaching far into the distance." "('I'M CONFESSIN" BY THE BENNY GOODMAN SEXTET PLAYS)" "NARRATOR:" "By the late spring of 1944, on both sides of the world, there were signs that the tide of war had begun to turn." "The Allies had stopped Japan's expansion in the Pacific." "They had taken Guadalcanal in the Solomons and Tarawa in the Gilberts, had savaged the enemy fleet at Midway and had begun the long climb from island to island toward the Japanese homeland." "In the European Theatre, the Allies had cleared North Africa of Axis forces and taken Rome." "Allied warplanes were still bombing Germany night and day." "The Battle of the Atlantic had been won, the sea lanes were now open and men and weapons and supplies were flooding into Britain." "And in the East, the Red Army had driven the Germans from the Ukraine and was moving into Poland." "Back home, in places like Luverne, Minnesota," "Waterbury, Connecticut," "Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California," "Americans did their best to go about their normal lives." "(INTRO TO 'IT'S BEEN A LONG, LONG TIME' PLAYS)" "(Bing Crosby sings) # Kiss me once Then kiss me twice" "# Then kiss me once again" "# It's been a long, long time" "# Haven't felt like this, my dear" "# Since I can't remember when" "# It's been a long, long time... #" "NARRATOR:" "But in the back of everyone's mind, hope was combined with dread." "In spite of the progress that had been made, everything that had happened so far in the war had been a mere preliminary." "The Japanese Empire had begun to shrink, but its rulers seemed determined to defend to the death every island that remained." "Rome may have fallen, but everyone knew that Hitler's grip on Europe could not be broken until Allied troops crossed the English Channel, smashed the German defences and drove the Nazis out of France." "Hundreds of thousands of sons and fathers and husbands would be called upon to gamble their lives for the sake of victory." "# You'll never know" "# How many dreams I dreamed about you" "# Or just how empty they all seemed without you" "# So kiss me once... #" "Naval ensign Joseph Vaghi of Bethel, Connecticut - just up the road from Waterbury - went home to say goodbye to his family that spring." "He had his orders to go overseas, and it seemed to him and to them, that he would likely be one of those who would be asked to run that terrible risk." "VAGHl:" "It was very difficult because I had two other brothers already in the service and my poor mother, she knew all of us were gonna go eventually." "And, as it turned out, we all did go." "All of us were in the service." "And that, that was kind of rough." "But leaving, she had chin up, you know, she..." "we spoke in Italian." "She spoke English very well but she said all of the sentimental things in Italian." "She said, "Mio caro figlio, dio stai con lei." ""Non dimenticare mai tuoi genitori,"" "and, uh, it goes on like that." "(FANFARE PLAYS)" "NEWSREEL:" "Hundreds of miles of invasion coast are heavily fortified, bristling with gun emplacements, defence in depth, as Hitler prepares for the coming test of supremacy, battle for the greatest of beachheads." "Gigantic coastal guns go into place, ready to rise up when the zero hour comes, when the Allies move on Hitler's Europe." "(EXPLOSIONS)" "No room for complacency, Hitler is prepared." "(EXPLOSIONS)" "NARRATOR:" "The Germans had known for months that the Allies were going to open the second front that Soviet leader Josef Stalin had been demanding since 1941." "Hitler had used that time to construct his Atlantic Wall, 1,670 miles of fortified gun emplacements, radar and observation towers and bunkers that stretched from Denmark all the way south to the Spanish frontier." "Meanwhile, across the English Channel, more than a million and a half Americans were now in Britain waiting for the signal to start the invasion, an invasion that would determine the success or failure of the Allied effort in Europe." "General Dwight Eisenhower was in overall command." "The assault was to proceed in three phases." "First, paratroopers would be dropped behind the beaches in the dead of night to confuse the enemy and seize the roads and bridges that led inland from them." "Then, wave after wave of airplanes were to batter German defences, destroying enemy emplacements and creating craters on the beaches in which assault troops could take shelter." "Finally, a massive flotilla was to ferry thousands of British, Canadian and American troops toward the French coast." "Allied commanders planned five coordinated landings along a 45-mile stretch of the Normandy coastline between the Cotentin Peninsula and the Orne River." "Canadian and British troops under General Bernard Montgomery would fight their way ashore at beaches codenamed 'Gold', 'Juno' and 'Sword' - where they were also meant to take the city of Caen, nine miles inland." "Americans, under General Omar Bradley, would assault 'Utah' and 'Omaha' beaches." "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." ""May 25, 1944." ""Outwardly, things haven't changed here." ""The lilacs are out in full bloom." ""The countryside was never greener." ""At night there are a million stars" ""winking in the sky, with a couple of million bullfrogs" ""parked along the edges of the bank-full ditches" ""croaking a mighty chorus." ""But things are different." ""The staffs of daily newspapers all over the country" ""are on alert in case news of the invasion of Europe breaks." ""Key executives don't stir very far from a telephone," ""day or night." ""The belief is that the long-awaited flash" ""will come sometime after 11:00pm but before 5:00am."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "(DRUM BEATS SLOWLY)" "PAUL FUSSELL:" "We tend to call it the real war." "The rest of it's just the showbiz war." "The real war involves getting down there and killing people, and being killed yourself or just barely escaping it." "And it gives you attitudes about life and death that are unobtainable anywhere else." "RADIO ANNOUNCER:" "Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force, you are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months." "The eyes of the world are upon you." "The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you." "NARRATOR:" "The greatest invasion in history began just after midnight on June 6, 1944 " "D-day - as the first of 24,000 paratroopers, flown over the Channel in more than 1,000 aircraft, were dropped behind enemy lines in Normandy." "The Germans' theory of the defence of the Continent was they put, they built pillboxes along the coastline and they put their old troops in it." "Then they put their, their Panzer divisions and their SS divisions and their good divisions back in central points, the theory being that when we hit the beach, they would come in from those points and drive us off." "Our job was to get in between them and the beach and to have them hit us instead of the beach." "NARRATOR:" "Most of the men of the British 6th Airborne dropped on target, reassembled, and within an hour had achieved their objectives, seizing bridges across the Orne and Dives rivers to keep German tanks from mounting a counterattack along the coast." "On the western flank, the 16,000 Americans belonging to the 101 st and 82nd Airborne divisions were less fortunate." "Low-hanging clouds blocked the moonlight and obscured the landing zones." "The narrow neck of the Cotentin Peninsula was hard to hit from the air." "Many paratroopers fell helplessly into the sea." "Others landed in fields and river valleys flooded by the Germans and drowned." "Some were blown from the sky as German tracer bullets set off the explosives they carried." "Still others were dropped so low their parachutes had no chance to open." "They hit, one man remembered, with "a sound like ripe pumpkins" ""being thrown down against the ground"." "The men of the 101 st Airborne were scattered over an area 25 miles long by 15 miles wide." "Elements of the 82nd Airborne came down in and around the little town of Sainte-Mère-Église, just behind Utah Beach." "The fighting was already raging when a glider carrying Dwain Luce of Mobile, Alabama headed toward the landing zone." "A survivor of the invasion of Sicily and the landing at Salerno, he was a captain in the 320th Glider Field Artillery Battalion." "LUCE:" "We had been in combat before and we knew kind of what we were getting into, but, uh, we knew this was the big bang and it was, it was kind of..." "worrisome, you might say." "NARRATOR:" "Gliders were something new in warfare - silent, ideal for clandestine landings behind enemy lines, and capable of ferrying equipment and vehicles too heavy to be dropped in any other way." "But they were also fragile, covered with flammable fabric, and hard to control." "And in some landing zones, the Germans had placed forests of sharpened poles to tear them apart and impale the men aboard." "More than half the gliders missed their drop zones and scores of pilots and passengers were crushed when vehicles and artillery pieces slammed forward during crash landings." "LUCE:" "I remember, in my glider, I was sitting up next to the pilot and I leaned over his shoulder to look at it and we dove over those trees, we were doing 110 miles an hour and I thought, this is no speed to land." "But it was too late to change." "I fortunately did not land in front of any antitank guns which were vicious." "I had a friend that landed in front, in front of one and he was cut in half." "And, uh, those are things you don't like to think about or talk about." "NARRATOR:" "Dwain Luce somehow made it out of his glider, and quickly found himself part of the continuing battle to hold Sainte-Mère-Église." "LUCE:" "Oh, we had a fight, and the Germans moved people in in a hurry." "(MACHINE GUN FIRES)" "You see, we didn't have heavy weapons... and we were fighting heavy weapons." "NARRATOR:" "Surrounded, isolated, out of communication with one another," "Dwain Luce and his unit struggled to hold their ground and block German tanks, while they waited for the landing force to take Utah Beach and come to their rescue." "LUCE:" "Whenever we went in behind the lines, they always gave us, ah, morphine." "The morphine was a little thing like a toothpaste tube except it had a sharp, ah, point when you unscrewed it, you know, and you could then stick the needle and break it and then you pop it in your arm." "We were back there where if you got... really got hit bad, nobody could take care of you." "Sainte-Mère-Église, it was a mess." "Terrible." "AANENSON:" "Early in the morning we were awakened from our bunks - about 25 or 30 of us - at the air base that was just above London, and we were told to get in our flight gear and meet in the briefing room." "And so we assembled in there, just barely awake, and we knew it was something serious." "We could tell by just the atmosphere." "There were two or three briefing officers up at the front." "They had a large map that was covered, and as we took our seats and they pulled the curtain back, they said, "Gentlemen, this is it." ""The invasion of France has begun."" "NARRATOR:" "At 4:30am," "Quentin Aanenson of Luverne took off for France as part of the flight of 11,000 warplanes." "Lightnings and Lancasters and Liberators," "Mosquitoes and Marauders and Mustangs," "Spitfires and Thunderbolts and Flying Fortresses, assigned to bomb and strafe and batter German defences before the first troops landed on the beaches." "It was Quentin Aanenson's first combat mission." "As we came in over Normandy I looked off to the left, and it was just a short look, and I realised later I was looking at Omaha Beach." "We had to be very careful of our timing, and we had to be very careful that we didn't go inland too far because the paratroopers had been dropped in there." "And we didn't know exactly where they were." "And as it turned out they didn't know where they were either." "NARRATOR:" "Aanenson dropped his bombs and headed back to England." "AANENSON:" "It was a mixture of some clouds, but we could see down into the Channel and it was impossible to understand really what we were seeing." "There were ships everywhere." "MAN: "The best way I can describe this vast armada" ""and the frantic urgency of the traffic" ""is to suggest that you visualise New York Harbor" ""on its busiest day of the year" ""and then just enlarge that scene until it takes in" ""all the ocean the human eye can reach," ""clear around the horizon." ""And over the horizon." ""There are dozens of times that many."" "Ernie Pyle." "NARRATOR:" "More than 5,300 ships, carrying 176,000 men were streaming across the Channel - battleships and tugboats, cruisers and barges and rusty freighters, gunboats and hospital ships and converted ocean liners, ships filled with ammunition and ships equipped to lay down screens of smoke" "to mystify the enemy - and a fleet of more than 2,000 landing craft to ferry men and supplies to the beach." "Joseph Vaghi was assigned to be a beach master that morning." "It would be his job to use flags, blinkers, and a megaphone to get men, vehicles and supplies safely ashore on Omaha Beach." "It was his first combat, too." "VAGHl:" "I had no fear." "We prayed as, as a platoon, we prayed together." "And said, "Well, it's God's will." ""They want us to go over there" ""and get this devil off the thing." ""We're gonna do it." "We know what to do, and we're ready."" "I wasn't scared only because I had not experienced this before." "WALTER EHLERS:" "The more you're in combat, the more tension you get as time goes on, because the odds are that you may not be going to make it because you've seen so many other people die." "I'd get so sick when I was going into combat," "I'd, until that first shot was fired, why I thought I was... my stomach was going to turn inside out or something, but when the first shots went, all that goes away." "NARRATOR:" "Among the thousands of men moving toward the beaches were two veterans of earlier invasions in North Africa and Sicily." "They were from Manhattan, Kansas " "Staff Sergeant Walter Ehlers and his older brother, Roland." "EHLERS:" "He was a little bit shorter than I." "He had red hair, and he had blue eyes and a beautiful smile." "And he was a perfect gentlemen all the time." "And he, uh, he was immaculate in dress and everything." "And he tended to keep me that way, too. (Chuckles)" "NARRATOR:" "At 6:30am, the invasion force began landing in Normandy." "Utah Beach came first." "Drifting smoke that obscured the target and strong currents that drove their landing craft off-course brought the Americans into shore more than 2,000 yards from the spot chosen by the planners." "But General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr, armed only with a cane, rallied his men and took the beachhead anyway in less than an hour." "Of the 23,000 men who went ashore at Utah Beach, only 197 were lost." "By late morning American tanks were moving off the beach to rendezvous with the embattled 82nd Airborne at Sainte-Mère-Église." "DWAIN LUCE:" "We were back there and we didn't know what was going on on the beach, for sure." "We knew that the beach would hold if we'd have got our job done." "We also knew that if the beach didn't hold, we would probably be left there, we would be abandoned, they couldn't get us out." "So naturally, it was of great interest to us to get our job done and see the beach hold." "One of the things I will always remember, with a great deal of emotion is that first tank that came through." "Because that first tank came through," "I knew the beach had held and I knew help was on the way." "NARRATOR:" "British troops would take the Gold and Sword beaches almost as fast, though German tanks prevented them from capturing their next objective, the city of Caen." "Canadian troops took Juno, too, although 90 of their 306 landing craft were destroyed by German obstacles, and one in every 18 men in their invading force was killed or wounded." "Still, they managed to fight their way seven miles inland by nightfall." "But for the Americans in the 1 st and 29th infantry divisions approaching Omaha Beach, the most difficult landing site, almost everything would go wrong." "Omaha was the broadest of the five beaches, and the deepest, with 100 yards of pebbles, then sand dunes, barbed wire and thick undergrowth, all of it heavily mined." "Behind all that loomed formidable bluffs fortified by 2,000 German troops, many of them battle-seasoned veterans." "Stützpunkts, or strongholds, overlooked the four gullies that led inland - each manned by 70 Germans with machine guns, mortars and armour-piercing howitzers, all zeroed in on the men about to try to come ashore." "During phase two," "American pilots had dropped most of their bombs miles inland." "There were no bomb craters in which to take shelter and the naval bombardment had barely dented German defences." "VAGHl:" "As we are approaching it we see ships to the right of us, ships to the left of us." "The skies are loaded with these flying balloons." "The battleships are shooting and you could see the projectiles, the 14-inch projectiles from the battle wagons, going through the air." "The smell of powder." "We didn't know what we were gonna hit when we got in there." "NARRATOR:" "Men had been transferred to their landing craft 12 miles from shore and while it was still dark, so that many boats lost their proper positions going in." "The sea was rough." "The men, most of whom had had no sleep, were wet and cold and seasick." "The amphibious tanks that were supposed to lead the way and provide cover for the infantry were released too far out at sea," "32 tanks rolled off the vessels that carried them, and all but five went straight to the bottom." "Most of their crews were trapped inside." "Landing craft were swamped, scores of men, burdened with equipment, slowly drowned, screaming for help as other boats wallowed past them." "Commanders were forbidden to stop and pick them up." "Along the bluffs the Germans held their fire until the first landing craft shuddered to a stop and the ramps went down." "Many men were ripped apart by German machine guns before they could step off." "Hundreds more were hit in the water." "Some badly wounded men made it to the waterline, collapsed, then lay helpless as the tide rose over them." "Those who managed to push past the dead and dying in the shallows found they had nowhere to go once they reached the shore." "Some scrabbled at the sand and shale, trying to dig foxholes." "Others huddled together behind wrecked landing craft or German obstacles - only to find themselves under concentrated fire." "EHLERS:" "We were about a hundred yards out and we hit a sandbar." "We asked the pilot of the boat, "Is this as far as it's going?"" "And he says, "As far as it can go."" "So he lets the ramp down and so we rush out the front, and we go in the water and it's clear up to my neck like this." "(CONTINUOUS GUNFIRE)" "But we got all the guys up onto the beach." "NARRATOR:" "Joe Vaghi's platoon came ashore at 7:35." "VAGHl:" "Things happened so fast that you saw men who were being shot, you saw them fall." "These things you saw." "The fact that, uh, this is for real." "NARRATOR:" "Somehow, everyone in Vaghi's platoon managed to make it onto the beach, but it remained a killing zone, choked with shattered and burning equipment, and desperate men unable to move inland or retreat from enemy fire." "Far offshore, General Bradley considered abandoning Omaha rather than sending in more men to die." "Then, the Americans began to improvise." "Commanders defied orders and risked tearing the bottoms from their ships, to bring them within a thousand yards of the beach and use their guns to finally knock out the German pillboxes and gun emplacements." "And on the beach itself, officers and enlisted men alike began taking their survival into their own hands." ""They're murdering us here!"" "One wounded officer shouted to his men." ""Let's move inland and get murdered there, instead!"" "Here and there, individuals got to their feet and started forward." "Then small groups began to follow." "VAGHl:" "This officer came up to me and saw that I was a beach master and I had the power megaphones and he said, "Tell these guys to get the hell off the beach."" "So I said, "Got orders here" ""that you're to get the hell off the beach now."" "The beach master said, "Well, you follow that path there," ""because if you go to the right or left of it," ""you'll be stepping on mines."" "VAGHl:" "This one soldier, he got up, and he put a Bangalore torpedo in the, under the barbed wire, blew a gap in it and said, "Come on, follow me," and he led the way." "EHLERS:" "I rushed my squad through it." "We got off of the beach, and it was probably the biggest thing" "I ever did in my life was get those 12 men off of the beach." "NARRATOR:" "When the Germans continued to block the gullies that led inland, the Americans hurled themselves right at the bluffs, clambering to the top and attacking enemy positions from the side and rear." "EHLERS:" "We went up, right up the hill into the, uh, trenches, and we were chasing the Germans then." "We captured four of them and sent them back down, and then we got behind a pillbox and what we didn't kill - some escaped because they were running from us - but we got that particular pillbox that day." "NARRATOR:" "By 1:00, after more than six hours of desperate fighting," "German resistance had begun to weaken." "(EXPLOSION)" "And as the afternoon went on, combat engineers managed to clear a safe boat path through the shallows, bulldozed five new exits from the beach... and built a road that men and vehicles could follow inland." "35 engineers died doing it." "It had been the bloodiest day in American history since the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War." "Many of the survivors were in shock, unable to comprehend what they'd just been through unsure of what they'd accomplished." "Some 2,500 American soldiers lay dead on French soil." "Walter Ehlers's brother, Roland, was among the missing." "EHLERS:" "I thought about looking for my brother, but then, when we looked at that beach, there were so many things down on the beach, it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack." "I figured he was either wounded or in a hospital and they just didn't have a record of it." "NARRATOR:" "It would be five weeks before Walter Ehlers found out what had happened to his brother." "EHLERS:" "I never saw him die." "He got killed as he was coming down the ramp on his LCI." "His whole squad got, uh, wounded... or killed." "I would of rather come back without my arms and legs than to come back without my brother." "That's, uh... that's what it meant to me." "Well, that stayed with me for over 50 years." "I had nightmares about that." "He'd come back every night, and, uh, we'd, he'd be all neatly dressed, and smiling like he usually does, and we'd have a conversation, and first thing, he'd disappear." "Or I'd go to do something and he'd disappear." "NARRATOR:" "In less than 24 hours, the Allies had torn a 45-mile gap in Hitler's Atlantic Wall." "They had lost far fewer men than their commanders had expected." "More than 150,000 men were now ashore in France, and more men and more equipment and supplies were coming ashore every hour." "(TELEPHONE RINGS)" "MAN ON RADIO:" "This is Robert St John in the NBC newsroom in New York." "Ladies and gentlemen, all night long bulletins have been pouring in from Berlin claiming that D-day is here, claiming that the invasion of western Europe has begun." "MAN: "When we stumbled sleepily down the hall" ""to answer the ringing telephone," ""we made a mental note that it was shortly before 3:00am."" "ST JOHN:" "Heavy fighting is taking place between the Germans and..." "MAN: "We picked up the receiver" ""thinking it was Sheriff Roberts calling" ""to say there had been an accident." ""Instead, it was Mrs Lloyd Long," ""playing the feminine counterpart" ""of Paul Revere, saying," ""'Get up, Al, and listen to the radio." ""'The invasion has started."'" "ST JOHN:" "Says the British-American landing operations from the sea and from the air are stretching over..." "MAN: "We sat by the radio for over an hour," ""listening to the breathtaking announcements."" "ST JOHN:" "Casualties may reach a dreadful toll." "MAN: "And then we went to bed," ""to lie there for a long time," ""wide-eyed in the darkness," ""thinking, 'What Rock County boys" ""'are landing on French soil tonight?"'" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "NARRATOR:" "Americans woke up on June 6, 1944, to newspaper headlines and radio bulletins." "It was the news they'd been waiting for." "But there were no further details, no live radio reports from the beaches." "No-one knew where their sons and brothers and fathers had landed... or how those landings were going." "In Philadelphia, the mayor gently tapped the Liberty Bell for the first time in more than a century." "In New York, traders on the Stock Exchange observed two minutes of silence - and then went back to work - sending the Dow Jones average soaring 142 points to a new high for the year." "Major League Baseball cancelled all games." "Everywhere, church bells rang, calling people to prayer." "They knelt or bowed their heads in factories and schoolrooms and public parks." "In Waterbury, special masses were said at the Church of the Immaculate Conception." "There were prayer services at Temple Israel and Beth El Synagogue, and on the town green, as well." "In Sacramento, workers at the Pacific Fruit Express Cannery prayed for the safety of 100 former employees now in the service." "In Mobile that day, no liquor was sold, and at the railroad station girls walked up and down the platforms holding up the morning newspapers so that travelling soldiers could read the headlines." "MAN ON RADIO:" "First of all, here's another quick news summary in the eighth hour of invasion news coverage." "Prime Minister..." "MAN: "And so the invasion news came to Luverne, quietly." ""There were no whistles, no sirens..." ""no demonstrations." ""Not much was said." ""The coffee shops were filled almost to standing room" ""as the 10:00 morning news approached." ""There were sober faces on the men" ""as they listened to the news," ""but there was a smile of exultation" ""when they heard that the Allied forces" ""had penetrated 10 miles inland." ""One mother dropped in the coffee shop." ""She shook her head and pushed the cup of coffee" ""placed in front of her aside." ""'I just want to listen to the radio,' she said." ""Her boy, by all the odds, was there." ""One didn't have to be psychic to know" ""what was in her mind - or her heart." ""The prayer that she was uttering right then," ""as she listened to the announcer," ""was multiplied a thousand times and more in Rock County" ""countless times during the day."" "NARRATOR:" "That evening, President Roosevelt spoke to the country." "ROOSEVELT ON RADIO:" "Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavour a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion and our civilisation, and to set free a suffering humanity." "Lead them straight and true, give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith." "They will need Thy blessings." "Their road will be long and hard for the enemy is strong." "He may hurl back our forces." "Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again, and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph." "NARRATOR:" "The Allies were on the mainland of western Europe at last." "Hitler was under siege from two directions." "But the battles that followed would prove more costly than anyone could imagine." "And on the island of Saipan, in the Marianas, the Japanese were about to demonstrate how horrific the final campaign against them would be."