"SAM 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." "I think we were really reluctant to get into this subject." "We'd made a film on the Civil War, it was successful." "Didn't wanna be typecast, didn't wanna be playing to the success of that." "But people would just call us up all the time and say," ""You gotta tell my father's story." "He's just now beginning to talk."" "Or, "My father passed away and he never told us what he did" ""and we found these letters between him and my mom."" "Or somebody will come and say, "I landed at Omaha Beach." ""How come you haven't done something?"" "And that began to erode our conviction not to go to war again." "And, of course, that's a part of it too - not experiencing that really just visceral sense." "We don't know any other way than to ask the question, "What was it like?"" "And if you ask, "What was it like?"" "You invite so much sadness and loss and terror, in some cases." "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." "(EXPLOSION)" "We wanted to do something experiential, that would help our audience understand what it was like to live through the war and to fight in the war." "And we realised that if we didn't do it now, we wouldn't have the chance to do it later because so many veterans were passing from the scene." "And then I heard that 1,000 veterans of the Second World War were dying a day in America." "And that our kids - many of them the grandchildren of those brave soldiers - think we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the Second World War." "And I just thought, "Oh, my God."" "How could the greatest cataclysm in history - as we call it in the film - how could that get lost?" "And if we lose that, what do we lose?" "And we felt almost honour bound to go in and try to figure out a new way to tell the Second World War, this time from the bottom up not distracted by the generals and presidents and celebrities of the war." "Not distracted by armaments and strategies but by focusing on what so-called ordinary people experienced and to tell the story from their point of view." "And to honour, bear witness, to what they went through." "We tried really hard to find a way to connect what was happening at home to what was happening to the soldiers overseas." "There's this gulf between the life people had at home and what the soldiers were experiencing on the front lines." "It's sort of an unbridgeable chasm, except that there's the thread that connects, which is the human beings and their families, or their loved ones, back home." "And if you can really care about someone who's overseas because his sister is worrying about "Where is he?" and "Is he OK?"" "You can sort of understand how this was a family story." "And, by extension, the whole country was involved in it in that way." "OLGA CIARLO:" "She'd wait every single morning on the porch for the mailman to come to bring her a 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." "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."" "KEN BURNS:" "This is the greatest thing that's happened in the world." "I mean, the biggest thing." "And how do you limit it?" "Where do you begin?" "What do you have to tell?" "How do you get access to it in a new way?" "And we focused, after some time, on the idea that we would do the war from the perspective of four geographically distributed American towns." "It was a little bit of a trial-and-error process to come up with what those towns would be." "And we started with the idea of picking some place in the north-east, partly out of convenience to us because we live in the north-east." "And really with the idea that you could pick any town and find great stories because the war did touch everybody." "We chose Waterbury, Connecticut - Brass City - that had contributed so much to the war effort." "Had made lipstick holders and cocktail shakers and alarm clocks before the war." "Continued to make those alarm clocks, but then it was said there wasn't a British or American soldier that wasn't wearing or shooting or riding on something that had been made in Waterbury, Connecticut." "It wasn't so easy to find veterans who could talk about their war experiences." "We met hundreds of veterans and really only a small percentage of them were able, for a variety of reasons, to share what they'd been through." "And so we thought maybe instead of just picking a town randomly and seeing what we could find there, we'd find some interesting veterans and see where they were from and see if their town might work, and sort of come at it backwards." "We chose Mobile, Alabama." "We'd read a phenomenal memoir of a guy named Eugene Sledge, who passed away just as we were beginning the film." "But when we went to Mobile to seek out his family and tell them how much we liked it and thought Mobile might be a possibility, they introduced us to his best friend and his sister and then their community, and we went out farther afield." "And Mobile became this wonderful place." "More of the folks that we interview are from Mobile than any other place." "Factory workers from poor towns, African Americans, old Mobile aristocracy." "In fact, one of our great choruses, Katharine Phillips - the sister of Sid Phillips, the best friend of Eugene Sledge, our memoirist - is in almost every episode of the film and really helps guide you along" "from what it means to be at the home front." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "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." "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." "We couldn't make a film about the Second World War and not include the Japanese American experience, and particularly the experience of internment." "Therefore we had to pick something on the west coast, because only Japanese Americans on the west coast were interned." "We wanted to talk about Japanese Americans, not only their internment but the much less-known story of the magnificent 442nd Regiment that was as brave as any regiment in the history of the United States Army." "And their amazing adventures in a country fighting for a country, whose parents were locked up back home and under guard and machine guns in the United States." "And then we needed a small town." "That was the toughest of them all." "We wanted to pick something in the Midwest because that was one area of the country we hadn't touched at all." "And again we thought we could just pick any random small town, but it might be hard to find really memorable war stories from that town." "And we found a fighter pilot who lives outside of Washington, DC." "And his story was so amazing and he was so amazing." "Such a strong character." "His story so unbelievable that Hollywood couldn't make it up." "We asked him where he was from." "He said, "Luverne, Minnesota."" "And we tracked it down." "It's in the lower left-hand corner of Minnesota." "Not far from Sioux Falls, South Dakota." "Luverne turned out to be unimaginably rich, with the discovery of Al Mclntosh, the editor of the Rock County paper, who covered the daily experience of how the war touched really every family in that town, in his column." "It was the godsend of this production, getting in touch with Quentin Aanenson, our fighter." "And then, by extension, Luverne and its newspaper editor, who died in the '70s, Al Mclntosh." "Which we've had to have Tom Hanks" " Tom Hanks - read and bring to life as no-one else on earth could do." "August 1941." "Miss Aagot Rylund, who was 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." "KEN BURNS:" "It was from those four places - and if you look at a map, they really anchor, they hold down the country - we began to realise that we could comprehend the whole." "We could get a sense of what the Second World War was like." "Paradoxically, from the bottom up, and following these stories and getting invested in these people, you could learn a lot more about the whole arc of the war as well." "That was the great surprising gift of how we approached it." "We are going on our third early morning dawn shoot and it's about 4:40 in the morning." "And we're not exactly sure where we're gonna shoot today." "We're gonna quickly run up to the Catholic cemetery and see if that's a nice view." "And then if not, we'll probably go to another farm." "Morning." "Good morning, Allen." "Do you see your coffee in there?" "I smell it." "We have to get up really early because we'd like to be able to see the beautiful sky." "And once the sun comes up, the sky no longer has so much colour in it, so if you get up before the sun comes up, the sky is gorgeous." "And then we can try to find something to basically silhouette it against that gorgeous sky." "So, we have a chance of really doing two different kinds of shoots." "If we get up before the sun comes up, we can do a silhouette of something against the gorgeous sky." "And then when the sun crests and we have first light we can get that golden light hitting different things we want to show." "So we have to get up early." "Take a look at this." "Yeah, look at the kick on that window, and then close to the window." "Oh, gorgeous." "That's fantastic." "LYNN NOVICK:" "We had a lot of fun getting to know these four towns and the people in them, and trying to find ways to tell the stories of what the war had meant in these places." "And we went about it in a variety of ways." "We focused first on finding out what was the archival resources that were available to us - photographs, home movies, newspapers, letters, etc." "And we went to historical societies and public libraries primarily for that." "And we put articles in the newspapers asking for people to contact us if they had stories to share or materials to share." "And we were just deluged, basically, with materials." "Why don't you tell us what you've brought for us today?" "Phone calls, emails, all kinds of things." "A lot of the process was actually just going through and weeding through all this material." "Everything that was sent to us was read..." "Oh, that's a great picture." "...and was responded to, and it was a huge job." "But we found treasures we never would have found any other way." "KEN BURNS:" "We live in a digital world now." "We used to be able, in every film, to tell you we shot 1,050 rolls of film, and that represented this many hours." "We don't have that anymore." "Sometimes the photographs don't get photographed - they get digitised." "And then they're into our system, and the movements are made on them." "And I kind of regret, being a kind of hands-on person, the loss of a lot of that." "But I think it's fair to say that we have hundreds of hours of interviews, hundreds and hundreds of hours of still photographs, and thousands of hours of footage that we went through to distil." "You visit hundreds and hundreds of archives." "And it's not just the places where you think, 'cause you're not always just getting the stuff of the war." "You wanna get the stuff when it's not war." "What it was like back home." "So, I see this film as a kind of great merger of a vast public archive, which was from hundreds of places around the world, from Tokyo to Moscow to Berlin to London - everywhere." "And hundreds of archives in the United States, including the National Archives and the Library of Congress." "Particularly the National Archives, which has so many of the treasures of what we've done." "And merge that with the personal archives." "We've got the home movies of the guy in Sacramento who's describing going to the movies, and then coming and playing war with wood guns in the driveway." "We've got him in colour." "It's real." "You know it's happened." "We've got their high school graduation picture." "You've got the exterior of your house." "There's almost no - I'm proud to say - re-creation." "In one point in the Battle of Guadalcanal we just took our camera and went through a jungle." "At another point, when the news of D-day is reaching the United States, we turned on the lights in the middle of the night at Al Mclntosh's house." "SARAH BOTSTEIN:" "OK, James, go." "OK, yeah, that's nice." "Hold on." "Perfect, perfect." "Just sit tight." "KEN BURNS:" "That's really his house." "We turn on the lights at that house and you hear his comment about waking up in the middle of that night." "(PHONE RINGS)" "MAN ON RADIO:" "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 3am."" "That's about it." "And the rest of it is guaranteed authentic footage." "(KLAXON WAILS)" "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "Early in the morning we were awakened from our bunks and we were told to get in our flight gear and meet in the briefing room." "And we knew it was something serious." "We could tell by just the atmosphere." "And as we took our seats, and they pulled the curtain back, they said," ""Gentlemen, this is it." ""The invasion of France has begun."" "We decided not to use historians or so-called experts in the film." "We really wanted it to be the bottom-up story of regular people who anyone of us could know and could be friends with, or could have in our neighbourhood or backyard." "We want someone to tell you," ""I was there and this is what happened to me."" "But that means that we had a lot to ask of those witnesses." "To give us not just their own experience, but a little bit broader meaning of why we should care about it and what it means for all of us." "And, so, finding the people to talk who could do that was a challenge." "No-one had ever really asked me about my experiences." "In my generation, it's just something we all talk about." "We exchange stories about the war." "MAN ON RADIO:" "We have been on the telephone with our station KGMB, which is in Honolulu, and they report to us that the anti-aircraft fire can be heard in a steady drone as the attacking planes come in." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "We comforted each other." "And the girls all cried and wept because they had boyfriends or relatives that were already in the armed forces." "And we realised immediately that this would be war." "SASCHA WEINZHEIMER:" "The day Pearl Harbor got bombed was the seventh." "Back in the Philippines, over the International Date Line, it was the eighth." "Same day, and we were bombed a few hours later." "I'd heard of Ken Burns before because I was a fan of a lot of his projects " "'Baseball' and 'Civil War' and 'Jazz'." "They were special." "And then when I actually became part of it I felt really honoured." "BURNETT MILLER:" "I think that we went to have a great experience." "Then, all of a sudden, we were having more of a great experience than we really had reckoned for." "We were scared to death, of course." "Parts of the film that struck me the most, I would think, were the accuracy of the Bulge in the snow." "And having been there," "I remembered it as being terribly, terribly cold and terribly uncomfortable for a very long time." "But it looked worse than I remembered." "ASAKO TOKUNO:" "The Lost Battalion was a rescue mission, which was conducted by the 442 - that's my brother-in-law's unit." "I knew about the fact that they had rescued these men." "I didn't realise how terrible." "It was devastating for them." "It was quite a revelation anyway to know the story the way it happened and to see it being told by the fellas who were there." "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "It was on one of my very early missions that I first knew I had killed men." "And I remember the impact it had on me when I could see my bullets just tearing into them." "And I was doing it knowing I had to do it." "That it was my job." "I do not look at history with a cavalier viewpoint." "It has to be right." "Or to me it's totally wrong." "When we saw the entire film the seven episodes - at the end of each episode, Jackie and I looked at each other and tried to talk and tried to discuss it." "But it became so overpowering, in an historical sense, in an emotional sense, that we almost had to take a break in there and sit it out for a few days." "This film just did everything that you would hope for and dream about in a film that related to World War II and the massiveness of that enterprise." "This memory, which is not distant, has just been kept so secret in this such admirably reticent generation that we feel, more than anything, privileged to have been able to bear witness to their testimony." "To have been ushered in to some of those dark rooms and been able to construct a narrative based on, not secrets, but truths that they saw when they were young." "They suddenly realise that their memory was their greatest asset and our inheritance." "And that somewhere along the line, those that could began to speak, and we were just ready to listen." "LYNN NOVICK:" "Starting this project was definitely intimidating because it's such a big subject, and you could go so many different directions." "MAN ON TAPE:" "On one of the largest sugar plantations on the Philippine island of Luzon." "Just a few frames, yeah." "KEN BURNS:" "Those of us who've worked on these films sort of feel like, "Yikes," at the beginning," ""what have we done?"" "But you're sort of like getting up in the morning and putting on your pants one leg at a time." "You just start." "LYNN NOVICK:" "It was just a daily process of discovery that you could find things and be open to them and say," ""Didn't know that." "We can put that in."" "And, so, that's part of the fun of it, is that we get to discover things along the way and then use them." "SARAH BOTSTEIN:" "The organisational process of dealing with this material is a daunting task." "The producers would narrow down the material so that when an editor sat down to edit a scene, he or she could really begin to get the elements to sew a scene together." "It's the night before the Japanese came..." "Two nights before the Japanese came into Manila." "And they'd been there for several days." "We can still do this." "So, we go back to the night-time shot of Manila Bay." "KEN BURNS:" "This is a huge distillation process." "That's what it's about." "Our job, in the end, is to actually figure out a way to make this... this." "Now, 14.5 hours may seem like that, but it used to be more than that." "And we beg your indulgence for the amount of time it takes, but we think it's worthwhile." "MAN ON TAPE:" "What followed would be remembered as the Bataán Death March." "GLENN FRAZIER:" "If we had known what was ahead of us at the beginning of the Bataán Death March" "I would have taken death." "LYNN NOVICK:" "We wanted to honour the experience of the veterans who fought in the war - the men and women who really put their lives on the line." "And the best way to do that, we came to understand, was to allow them to bear witness to their own stories in the most direct and unsentimental way." "NARRATOR:" "At dawn, on August 7, 1942 American land forces went on the offensive for the first time in the Second World War." "We should come to the second." "Why not start it from the get-go?" "(All agree) Right?" "KEN BURNS:" "We cover 25 or so battles, pretty " "I don't want to say comprehensively, but you get to know them, and you feel you know them from the inside out." "And that's what we wanted to do." "And some battles are just atrocious." "They're horrible." "And it was so hard for us to do it emotionally." "Then others were simply complicated." "At the end of our first episode is the first major offensive action that the United States takes in the land battle, and that's in Guadalcanal." "NARRATOR:" "No-one had any idea how long, how bloody and how consequential the battle for Guadalcanal would be." "KEN BURNS:" "It goes on for months, and that's a difficult kind of battle to cover because you want something to happen, and it happens spasmodically." "And you think, "Oh, there it is, and we've won." "Oh, we haven't won."" "It just keeps going on and on." "And it took us a long time to sort of break the back of the issues in Guadalcanal, and I'm now really happy about how we did it." "So that one is a kind of technical problem, and then there's the emotional stuff." "SIDNEY PHILLIPS:" "We understood that we might be expendable." "It had become sort of the established thing, and we knew our country was not yet heavily armed." "And, yes, we did feel that we might be expendable." "We really did." "LYNN NOVICK:" "I don't think we really understood how horrible the war was for people who fought in it." "It's hard to really, I think, appreciate from 60 years later what it would have been like to see your best friend blown up, or to kill someone at close range and have their blood splatter over you." "It's kind of unimaginable." "And yet we felt we wanted to try to imagine the unimaginable." "KEN BURNS:" "It's a long process." "And I'm so grateful that public television gives us the chance to do that." "It's not a product." "It's not a commodity that has a beginning, middle and end." "This is something that we love, and we wanna work and caress and cajole, and rework and re-edit and rewrite and do all those things until we think, for our own subjective view, that we've got it right" "and it's time to share it with everybody else." "(PROJECTOR WHIRRS)" "LYNN NOVICK:" "All the footage that we were able to get from commercial archives and from the National Archives came to us without sound." "It was sometimes extraordinary action footage - very vivid, exciting." "And you could see guns going off, you could see things exploding, you could see fire, but you couldn't hear anything." "When we locked our picture and started to add sound, our sound editors got very excited." "(ARTILLERY FIRE AND EXPLOSIONS)" "Found out, for example, the sound that this particular kind of machine gun - what kind of sound does that make?" "Or what kind of sound does a German 88 artillery piece make when it's going off, or a tank?" "What track's the marching on going out, and what track the car pass is coming in." "And we were able to collect an amazing assortment of sound effects." "MAN ON TAPE:" "From 1939 to 19..." "I like that better." "This is the most sophisticated soundtrack we've ever completed, and it's taken us more than a year extra." "We finished the film and for a year after we had locked the picture been working on the soundtrack." "(EXPLOSION, MEN SHOUT, ENGINE REVS)" "(EXPLOSION)" "(GUNFIRE)" "KEN BURNS:" "It is hugely important to us that the planes buzz you." "That the debris from an explosion falls on your shoulders." "And to just have just the tiniest fraction of a sense of what it might have been like for these kids to have gone through what they did." "We had a veteran who came in and he said, "I've waited all my life" ""to have something show it the way it actually was."" "One... two one, two a- one, two, three... (BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS)" "We had a lot of fun with the music on this show." "I think, going in, we thought we'd probably have a lot music of the time, and we didn't know what else." "We were lucky enough to get Wynton Marsalis to compose several pieces." "We showed him some clips of the film, and he really understood what we were trying to do and composed some spectacular music." "Today is a recording session for the 'War' film." "We've done some cello and sort of standard piano things." "And we've asked Wynton to compose some original music for us to tell the story of the four towns." "She's wistful." "She's describing a pace of life." "First of all, starting off with John Gray, who lives in a segregated part of town..." "And what he's done is created a massive suite that takes those four towns and divides nearly every one in two, and creates a set of music that's of the flavour of the town, but has a unified theme." "(MELANCHOLY MUSIC)" "WYNTON MARSALIS:" "It starts with four towns where he wanted a central theme that was evocative of America." "Something that was related to kinda the early roots of the country, but had like American vernacular songs but could be adaptable to kinda swing and the music of the period." "And a theme that could be utilised in some form in four different ways to highlight the aspects of the four different cities, the people who lived there and their way of life." "OLGA CIARLO:" "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." "(JAUNTY MUSIC)" "KEN BURNS:" "This process begins with me, who, I am completely inarticulate about music." "I sort of know what I like." "I don't have any language to express what I like." "Nor do I have any musical talent to be able to actually do it." "So it becomes a kind of gesturing, as if you're trying to speak to somebody in a language that they don't understand." "And Wynton, with this patience, sits in his living room, on his piano, and sort of says," ""Well, what about this?"" "And he'll play different themes." "And I'll go, "Yes."" "Or, "What about this way?"" "And then all of a sudden something emerges." "Just something real light." "That's the tempo." "KEN BURNS:" "To me, these are some of the happiest days of making films." "On a project like this that will last four or five or six years, the days where you come into this room and there's bits of wood and brass and catgut and other stuff." "And these people walk in, very much like ourselves, who suddenly are able to come in and do something." "And that you leave at the end of the day with this new thing - music." "I mean, it seems so obvious, but it makes us happy." "And I just turned to Geoff Ward, our writer, and said," ""We don't deserve this."" "It's just too much - the notion that you would get paid to spend a day like this, this is like Disneyland for me." "(BIG BAND SWING MUSIC)" "KEN BURNS:" "The fascination for the Second World War will never end - and it's understandable." "Even as that generation dies away and passes completely, this is still the biggest event in human history." "LYNN NOVICK:" "It's seemingly a very clear-cut black-and-white war." "There's the good guys and there's the bad guys." "And the bad guys are so bad." "And we won, so it's a triumphant story that we can all appreciate and celebrate." "And then it's also this terrible cataclysm that killed so many millions of people." "There's the twin fascination of the horror of it and also the triumphant narrative of it." "KEN BURNS:" "We shoot in film, and every 12 minutes we have to change the roll." "And inevitably you go into somebody's house, or you're filming them where they live, and their wife or their son-in-law or the daughter's there." "And quite often, in between the reel, somebody would say," ""Honey, you never told me that."" "And they would have just described a horrific, horrific action." "LYNN NOVICK:" "You sometimes open things up that their family members have not heard." "And that was amazing to have someone afterwards say," ""Dad never told us about what he saw." ""He never described it quite in that way."" "Or, "We've heard that story a lot of times," ""but never quite the way he told it to you."" "We have a sense that this unusually admirably reticent generation didn't talk about it." "And then towards the end of their life, they began to talk about it." "Intimations of their own mortality." "A sense also of obligation, to posterity, to their families, to us, I think, got people talking." "We wanted to just bear witness and honour the testimony of these extraordinarily brave young men and women." "And then just say, "This is what happened to them."" "And then let these experiences wash over you." "I hope that viewers who watch this film will gain an understanding of what war really is." "As much as it's possible for anyone who hasn't been in war to know that." "There's not any family in America that wasn't touched by the war in some way, if they dig deep enough." "Everybody did something for the war - little kids, old people, young people - everybody was involved in some way." "And so there was a sense of unity, of purpose that people remember today and wonder why don't we have that." "KATHARINE PHILLIPS:" "We were all touched by World War II." "Whole families were touched by World War II." "And that, in my opinion, is the reason we're still so fascinated by it." "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "World War II was a time unique in American history." "There has never been a time when this country was as totally united as we were back during those critical four years." "KEN BURNS:" "We were animated with no political agenda." "We had no sense of wanting to make the most comprehensive film." "What we wanted to do was say," ""How did it happen?" "What was it like?"" "And do the best job we can." "So, I can't imagine the Second World War not being something that we will continually return to and learn new things about, see from a different perspective and light, and ask different questions as our own experiences change." "And realise that it will always, always have so much to teach us." "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 war job." "These are the people - a few of them." "Thousands more storm through these gates on the graveyard shift and the swing shift." "These are the jobs they came to fill." "Just a few of them." "40,000 workers in two great shipyards, repairing and refitting the torpedoed vessels of the Allied nations in giant dry vessels for the Battle of the Atlantic." "The shipyards are the main war job." "But while these men and women weld and rivet and file and plate, tens of thousands more are working round the clock in the steel mills, the paper mills, the gypsum plant, the aluminum plant, the Army Air Corps repair field," "and countless machine shops, foundries, lumber and textile mills." "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." "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 than 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." "And one has to butt one's way into buses at the plants and elbow through thick crowds again in town." "Crowds everywhere." "Crowds at the pay windows." "Block-long lines of white-collar workers outside restaurants." "Thirsty shipyard workers on payday waiting their turn outside the state-controlled liquor stores." "Overcrowded schools staffed with weary teachers working in double shifts." "And still 3,000 in-migrant workers' children had to stay at home this year until accommodations to care for them are rushed to completion." "Dingy cafes crowded to the doors." "And makeshift tent dance halls in crammed amusement parks." "Old Mobile - sedate, grand old lady in crinoline and iron lace - thrust aside 240 years of history and tradition, rolled up her leg-of-mutton sleeves and pitched in to solve the complex problems created by 150,000 strangers dropped without warning, and for the duration," "into the lap of a little city of only 78,000." "Every available room was canvassed, utilised." "Many an old magnolia-shaded mansion is now the roost of an orchestra leader-turned-expediter, a bond salesman-turned-leaderman." "Old warehouses were reopened and peopled with shipyard workers and airplane mechanics." "This was an upholstering establishment converted into a dormitory for women war workers." "This was a neighbourhood grocery store." "These girls - welders, checkers and machinists." "This was a garage, now a barracks - emergency housing for war workers." "This man is one - a pipe fitter just checking in from San Francisco." "Here, there, everywhere - on vacant lots and fields and creek banks, trailer camps, tent colonies and shantytowns - all facilities were overloaded." "In outlying sections of the city, housewives, to make sure of water for their daily needs, set their alarms for two in the morning to fill buckets and pans for tomorrow's drinking and washing and cooking." "Mobile's understaffed Health Department worked day and night on what was really a national rather than a local civic problem to provide basic sanitation, water supply and waste disposal." "But still they poured into Mobile from every corner of the nation - farmers, clerks and little businessmen," "Indians, Okies, cowboys and cotton pickers, hillbillies, Tennessee horse traders and South American gypsies - answering the government's call for more and more war workers." "Many of them accustomed to better things." "Others just in from the brush where they use possums for yard dogs." "In Mobile, as in every other war town, the same acute problem arose - homes for workers, housing for the in-migrant armies of industry." "Mobile, as every American city of any size, had its slums before the war, but when a nation is at war, it becomes clear that the health and welfare of each affects the health and welfare of all." "Lack of comfort, lack of rest, illness breeding in conditions like these mean time lost from production." "Each citizen living poorly weakens the fabric of the society in which all of us live." "These people and these conditions too suddenly become a problem to be faced in solving the health and housing complexities of a congested war town." "The government stepped in." "Vast housing projects were initiated and opened at low rentals to war workers certified by the personnel and housing officers operated by the plants in which they worked." "By January 1 of this year," "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're being written off as part of the cost of building ships and planes and tanks and guns." "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." "Dormitory units for men and women, accommodating from 400 to 1,200 single workers." "Equipped with recreational facilities, barber shops, gymnasiums, hospitals, community centres and low-cost cafeterias - whole towns in themselves." "Government-owned trailers moved in to meet the emergency for rent as low as $15 a month per family." "1,700 units to accommodate 7,000 war workers and their families." "Modern, sanitary and scientific - built by the Maritime Commission and adjoining the shipyards in which their occupants are employed." "These 2- and 4-family dwellings are typical of many of the smaller projects that are being rushed to completion on the outskirts of Mobile." "Day nurseries to care for the children of women war workers are another problem the government is undertaking to solve." "Five small nurseries to 150,000 people is inadequate." "But more are planned to counteract an important contributing cause of absenteeism and loss of valuable production time." "For those that can afford them, there are modern, permanent homes like these, built with the help of FHA loans and put on the market at rentals compatible with government ceilings." "Decent housing, medical care, adequate transportation - as each of these problems is met, the ratio of production increases." "In the shipyards alone, this is already evident." "At the beginning, one ship was launched every six weeks." "Today, cargo and combat vessels slide down the ways one every week." "And the story of Mobile is the story of every American war town." "They were enacting a little scene from the war." "One of them had been wounded, apparently." "And they had a medic who was wearing a tabard with a big red cross on it, and he was crawling towards them." "Especially towards the man who'd been wounded." "And in his left hand he held a roll of bandages." "In his right hand he had a pair of surgical scissors." "He was gonna crawl forward somehow and help this guy, and at that point this shell must have gone off above them." "So, it was like a waxwork - utterly incredible." "And I stood there for a second wondering," ""What am I supposed to make of this?" ""What's the symbolic meaning of this little grouping?"" "That was the big question." "And they were perfect." "It was as if it were a sculpture done by the most sophisticated artist." "(EXPLOSIONS)" "RAY LEOPOLD:" "We were ordered to take the town of Colmar in Alsace-Lorraine." "We were ordered to take it in afternoon, daylight." "Jim Thomas, our wonderful captain, said we could do this so much easier at night, with much less casualties." "The Colonel said, "You have your orders - go."" "We went." "Halfway up the hill, Jim Jim got a bullet through his head." "This is one of the people that I had a great affection for, a tremendous respect." "He was a young 24-year-old Mormon." "And we talked very often." "And..." "Jim was dead." "No, Jim was the only case I can remember in the service that I had to cry." "ANDY ROONEY:" "The fact is that reporters one of their jobs is to create heroes for the American public." "I guess you're a little dishonest." "You do not write anything, if you are following your own army, you do not write anything that might be interpreted as being unfriendly or not patriotic." "I think it is very difficult to be a critical, tough, honest reporter during a war." "(Ken Burns narrates) Private Andrew A. Rooney was a very junior war correspondent with 'Stars and Stripes', the new army newspaper." "One of thousands of reporters dispatched to the far corners of the world, who struggled under tight official censorship and an honest, personal desire to report nothing that might undermine the war effort." "NEWSREEL:" "Ready to go on an all-American exploitive war." "(Ken Burns narrates) Many war correspondents were little more than cheerleaders, offering mostly upbeat, optimistic accounts of events they'd never seen from miles behind the lines." "But some risked their own lives to get at least a little closer to the truth." "(EXPLOSION)" "(Ken Burns narrates) Ernie Pyle from Dana, Indiana, was a seasoned columnist working for the Scripps Howard papers who saw it as his duty to tell American families back home - as much as the censors and his own sensibilities would allow " "of what life for their men was really like." "MAN: "So, I don't know." "Is war dramatic or isn't it?" ""Certainly there are great tragedies, unbelievable heroics," ""even a constant undertone of comedy." ""It is the job of us writers" ""to transfer all that drama back to you folks at home." ""Most of the other correspondents have the ability to do it." ""But when I sit down to write..." ""...here's what I see instead." ""Men at the front suffering and wishing they were somewhere else." ""Men in routine jobs just behind the lines" ""bellyaching because they can't get to the front." ""All of them desperately hungry for somebody to talk to" ""besides themselves." ""No women to be heroes in front of." ""Damn little wine to drink." ""Precious little song." ""Cold and fairly dirty." ""Just toiling from day to day in a world full of insecurity," ""homesickness and a dulled sense of danger." ""The drama and romance are here, of course." ""But they're like the famous falling tree in the forest." ""They're no good unless there's somebody around to hear."" "Ernie Pyle." "PAUL FUSSELL:" "The first time I killed anybody was really in self-defence when I saw a German leading a patrol, coming towards me." "I mistook him, because of the way he was dressed, for one of my own men." "So I waved to him to indicate, "I'm here." ""Come on, you can come to me." "It's safe here."" "All of a sudden I saw him..." "He looked at one of his fellows." "He took his rifle off his shoulder." "He was wearing it strapped to his shoulder." "And as he raised it, I raised mine and I hit him first." "And he was terrified and died on the spot." "And the rest of his patrol fled, and we captured them later on." "But that was the first time I ever killed anybody." "I did it with the greatest delight, because it saved my life." "And I knew I could do it." "I could perform." "That's what I was supposed to do." "I was supposed to kill people and lead others in killing people." "(Ken Burns narrates) The Seventh Army overran Strasbourg, but halted on the Rhine's west bank." "Patton's Third Army took Metz and secured three bridgeheads across the Saar, but could proceed no further until it could get enough fuel to go on." "In the north, two attacks were launched by the American First Army." "One was aimed at the German city of Aachen." "The other intended to sweep the enemy from the 50 wooded square miles just south of that city called the Hürtgen Forest." "(FLIES BUZZ)" "MAN: "Each morning, just before sunrise," ""when things were fairly quiet," ""I could hear a steady humming sound like bees in a hive" ""as the bluebottle flies became active with the onset of daylight." ""They rose up off the corpses, rocks, refuse, brush" ""and wherever else they had settled for the night" ""like a swarm of bees." ""Their numbers were incredible."" "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." ""The death of Private Russell Wilder in France" ""should be a sobering reminder for all of us" ""that grim and tragic days lie ahead." ""The days of kisses and cheering for the Americans are over." ""No longer are they going to be welcomed with flowers." ""They are to the point now" ""where they come as invaders of the land of the enemy." ""The casualties are going to be many." ""We can have no reason for relaxing." ""The toughest going lies ahead."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "(Ken Burns narrates) Sid Phillips did his best to hide his fear from his family." "SID PHILLIPS: "August 17, 1942." ""Dear folks," ""Nothing much to say, except that I'm OK and doing fine." ""Haven't heard from you yet." ""I hope everybody is doing OK." ""I'll have plenty to tell you." ""I guess you can read the papers." ""Love, Sid."" "SID PHILLIPS: "October 24, 1942." ""Dear family," ""I received a V-mail letter from Mother yesterday." ""It was the first mail from home in a long time." ""I'm still OK." ""I don't have any pictures from home with me now," ""so if you can send me some, I'd really like it." ""Some of the things that happen here" ""seem like a fantastic tale, even before your eyes." ""Hunting season isn't over yet by a long shot." ""Tell Eugene I want him to take four years of college without stopping" ""and to join nothing." ""Lots of love, Sid."" "My friend Eugene Sledge and I were very close - all through grade school, all through high school." "We were full of nonsense and pranks." "But I warned him to join nothing." "I told him not to join the Salvation Army, the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts or anything, just to join nothing." "And to prove he was demented, he went on and joined the Marine Corps." "(Ken Burns narrates) Back in Mobile," "Sid Phillips's best friend didn't want to miss any of the action." "MAN: "Prompted by a deep feeling of uneasiness" ""that the war might end before I could get overseas into combat," ""I enlisted in the Marine Corps at Marion, Alabama." ""The recruiting sergeant asked me lots of questions" ""and filled out numerous official papers." ""When he asked, 'Any scars, birthmarks" ""'or other unusual features?" "'" ""I described an inch-long scar on my knee." ""I asked, 'Why such a question?" "'" ""He replied, 'So they can identify you on some Pacific beach" ""'after the Japs blast off your dog tags."'" "Eugene Sledge." "MAN: "I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the west coast" ""to a point deep in the interior." ""Let him be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it." ""Let us have no patience with anyone whose veins carry his blood." ""Personally, I hate the Japanese, and that goes for all of them."" "Henry McLemore, 'Sacramento Union'." "(Ken Burns narrates) Order 9066 was the result of decades of ugly west coast history." "State law and community custom had barred Japanese immigrants from marrying whites, from eating in white restaurants or living in white neighbourhoods." "Federal law had prohibited Japanese immigrants from ever becoming citizens and, in 1924, cut off immigration from Japan altogether." "Only the American-born descendants of Japanese immigrants, called Nisei, were citizens." "And some now owned the land their families had farmed so successfully for years." "A fact many whites bitterly resented." "MAN: "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs" ""for selfish reasons." ""We might as well be honest - we do." ""It's a question of whether the white man lives" ""on the Pacific coast, or the brown man." ""They came into this valley to work and they stayed to take over." ""If all the Japs were removed tomorrow," ""we'd never miss them in two weeks," ""because the white farmers can take over" ""and produce everything the Jap grows." ""And we don't want 'em back when the war ends either."" "Frank J. Taylor, California Vegetable Growers." "I was in the dead centre of the country, east and west, among people who had left Europe to get away from it " "Germans, Scandinavians, Irish." "They didn't really want to know about Europe, I think." "I don't remember concern about what is going to happen to Europe." "They call Europe the 'old country' - all of Europe. (Chuckles)" "They didn't want it." "They also felt that nobody was threatening them - and they were right." "Hitler wasn't going to invade Minnesota." "That was fairly sure." "So that as long as Japan was being aggressive on the far side of the Pacific and Hitler was being aggressive on the far side of the Atlantic, there wasn't really anything to worry about." "(Ken Burns narrates) In the weeks after D-day," "American pilots, including Quentin Aanenson, continued to fly their missions over the fields and hedgerows of Normandy every day, trying to focus on the help they were giving to the men on the ground." "And to avoid thinking too hard about the losses in their own ranks." "Below them, the Americans were still inching towards St-Lô and the flat, open country that lay just beyond it." "Sergeant Curtis Cullen Junior, an inventive former Chicago cabbie, had shown that sharp prongs fashioned from Rommel's beach obstacles fitted onto Sherman tanks could slice through the matted roots of the hedgerows." "Allied armour could now cut and blast its way from field to field." "Weary riflemen were no longer expected to do it on their own." "NARRATOR:" "The operation was called Cobra." "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "The day that the Cobra attack, which was July 25, 1944 there were 3,000 American airplanes that attacked the front along St-Lô." "And we were in the first group." "I was, I think, number 8 in the attack of 3,000." "NARRATOR:" "The correspondent Ernie Pyle was down below, watching from a battered French farmhouse with officers from the 4th Infantry Division." "MAN: "The first planes of the mass onslaught" ""came over a little before 10am." ""They were the fighters and dive-bombers." ""Our front lines were marked by long strips of coloured cloth" ""laid on the ground," ""and with coloured smoke to guide our airmen." ""We stood in the barnyard of a French farm" ""and watched them barrel nearly straight down out of the sky." ""They were bombing about a half a mile ahead of where we stood." ""And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears " ""a sound deep, all-encompassing" ""with no notes in it," ""just a gigantic, faraway surge of doom-like sound." ""It was the heavies, coming on with a terrible slowness" ""in flights of 12, 3 flights to a group." ""And in groups stretched out across the sky." ""I thought it would never end." ""And then the bombs came." ""They began up ahead as the crackle of popcorn..." ""...and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise" ""that seemed surely to destroy all the world around us."" "NARRATOR:" "The bombs continued falling for 1.5 hours." "The bright day grew dark with smoke, Pyle remembered, and the steady roar seemed to fill all the space for noise on earth." "Then the wind shifted." "The coloured smoke began to move toward the American lines." "So did the bombs." "MAN: "We dived." "(EXPLOSION)" ""Some got in a dugout, others made for foxholes and ditches." ""The feeling of the blast was sensational." ""The air struck you in hundreds of continuing flutters." ""Your ears drummed and rang." ""You could feel quick little waves of concussion on your chest" ""and in your eyes."" "NARRATOR:" "American bombs killed 111 American infantrymen that day and wounded nearly 500 more." "Their desperate fellow soldiers struggled to free them from the earth into which they'd been blasted." "An American lieutenant general, who had come to France to observe the bombing, was hurled 60 feet." "When his body was found, it could be identified only by a fragment of collar with three stars." "It was the worst American friendly fire incident of the war." "The bombing also blasted and burned and mangled thousands of German troops." "Some maddened men shot themselves rather than endure any more of it." "Tanks were tossed into the air and landed upside down." ""My front lines looked like the face of the moon,"" "the German commander remembered." ""And at least 70% of my troops were out of action..." ""...dead, wounded, crazed or numb."" "Two days later, on July 27, the First Army poured through the newly opened gap in the German lines, out into the countryside, beyond the hedgerows." "That same day," "Quentin Aanenson found himself back in the air over Normandy." "QUENTIN AANENSON:" "I was flying with Lieutenant Paul Bade." "He was the element leader and I was on his wing." "We were at about 1,000 feet over the trees." "And suddenly I saw him start into a dive, a gradual dive." "And as he started to go down, I was just close to him," "I literally pulled up so our wings overlapped and saw him desperately trying to disconnect everything - his oxygen hose, his radio hose, his seatbelt, and bale out." "But he was already too low." "But in that instant, while I'm overlapping with him, and he knows, in his mind he knows he's dead, he looked over at me and glanced at me for just a minute and then crashed into the tree." "I had pulled off just enough so I wasn't caught in the explosion." "But in that instant, he knew he was dead." "And I remember so many times thinking about that." "He was an only son." "His mother lived in, I believe, Richmond, Virginia." "And I remember thinking," ""She does not know that her son was killed today."" "My friends were being killed off and I was sending letters home to their parents." "The day they were killed, we grieved for them and we packed up their things." "And maybe at the officers' club that night we talked about the circumstances, what the angle of the flak had been so we could try to avoid certain approaches on targets." "But then we never talked about them again." "We never talked about them again." "It's just as if they did not exist." "(Ken Burns narrates) Sam Hynes was based on Okinawa now, close enough to the fighting so that from the doorway of his tent he could see the battleships offshore shelling Shuri." "In one month, he and his squadron mates flew more than 1,000 combat missions, going after torpedo launchers, gun emplacements, submarines, and dropping both propaganda leaflets behind enemy lines and supplies to the Americans fighting below." "And Hynes too lost friends - shot from the sky, victims of their own errors, or simply lost somewhere over the sea." "But the enemy was rarely seen." "SAM HYNES:" "Souvenirs for pilots were hard to come by." "The infantrymen could pick something off a dead Japanese any time, but we didn't see them very often." "So that one night when a person seemed to be trying to enter our area the guards fired on him and killed him." "And then everyone went down to see what was their first dead enemy, if he was the enemy." "He might well have been an Okinawan who was simply driven mad by hunger and was trying to get in to get something to eat." "He wasn't armed, he wasn't in uniform, but he was very dead." "The next morning, the pilot I flew wing on, a captain," "I went round to talk to him about something, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, opened it up and there was the man's ear." "And he said, "Got me a souvenir."" "DANIEL INOUYE:" "I had two silver dollars." "And one was almost split in half, because I had it in my pocket and a bullet grazed on it and it saved my life." "So that was naturally a good luck charm." "And on this morning, April 21, 1945," "I had lost my jacket, I lost these two coins." "And so I saw the platoon leader of the next platoon, and I said," ""I think today's my day."" "He said, "What are you talking about?"" "I said, "This is the day I'm gonna get banged."" "Sure enough." "MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota." "December 6, 1945." ""Remember when you went to a different city" ""to meet some relative you might never have met before..." ""...and you both agreed to wear a flower or something" ""as a mark of identification for recognition purposes?" ""They may have to revive that custom" ""for the benefit of returning servicemen fathers" ""who haven't seen their youngsters for a long time." ""Harry Brodin was returning the other day from Minneapolis" ""after his discharge from the Seabees." ""His wife had gone up to meet him." ""Also returning was Jim Argetsinger." ""And down at the train to greet their fathers were the little tots " ""Judy Brodin and Julie Argetsinger." ""When Harry Brodin stepped off the train," ""in his excitement he grabbed the wrong youngster" ""and smothered Julie Argetsinger with kisses and hugs." ""But the mistake was soon noticed" ""and Judy Brodin got her quota of kisses."" "Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'." "GIRL: "When we came to the ship's dining room," ""we could hardly believe our eyes." ""Long tables with white tablecloths, white plates, two spoons, two forks," ""and what chow!" ""Ice-cream and red apples too."" "Sascha Weinzheimer." "NARRATOR: 12-year-old Sascha Weinzheimer, her brother and sister, mother and father had nearly starved to death during three years as prisoners of the Japanese in Manila." "Now they were at sea, sailing home aboard the USS 'Capps'." "And the sailors spared no effort to make them and their fellow prisoners comfortable after their ordeal." "It took three weeks to reach the California coast." "GIRL: "April 8, 1945." ""I was up on deck with Mother when we passed the Farallon Islands." ""After a quick breakfast we came up again." ""And there, straight ahead," ""we saw the sight we had been thinking about, talking about" ""and praying about for so long " ""the Golden Gate." ""Now we knew we were really home."" "SASCHA WEINZHEIMER:" "We got to San Francisco early in the morning." "It was foggy." "And we went up on deck just as we were going under the Golden Gate Bridge." "It was about nine o'clock in the morning, but the gold tip of the bridge was sticking out with the sun breaking through." "And then we cruised slowly in past Alcatraz, and then docked just as the sun was just coming over the hills." "To me, that will always be a beacon." "That Golden Gate Bridge was a wonderful salvation for us." "That's just like the Statue of Liberty back east." "NARRATOR:" "The Weinzheimer family checked into a downtown hotel." ""Look at this," her father said, as he dialled room service." ""I never thought I'd be dialling a phone again."" "They dined on steaks and potatoes and ice-cream." "Afterwards, Sascha's little brother, Buddy, spent three hours turning the water on and off, on and off." "He'd never seen faucets before." "I knew from the beginning that I wanted to fight my war in the air." "There seemed to be some sort of an appeal about it, or a sense of excitement, so that was my objective." "So within three weeks of Pearl Harbor," "I went out to Fort Lewis, Washington to apply to the Army Air Corps." "I wanted to become a fighter pilot." "And much to my surprise," "I failed a colour vision test." "And I continued to take the test at other locations over a period of time, until, gradually, I memorised what I should see - what numbers and symbols I should see in the test - and then I passed it." "But it was not until I got to Anchorage, Alaska and I was working for the corps of engineers while I was still trying to get into service, and I passed it up there, in early August of 1942." "That is, the day they were killed, we talked about the circumstances, and we packed up their things, and maybe at the officers club that night, if we went in there, we might talk a little bit about what the angle of the flak had been" "so we could try to avoid certain approaches on targets." "But then we never talked about them again." "We never talked about them again." "It's just as if they did not exist." "Yet, the killing we did haunted us all the time." "We thought about... or, I did - I can't speak for the others." "But it was the killing - the numbers of..." "Orders were being prepared to send me to a fighter squadron - fighter group - flying off Okinawa, to participate in the invasion of Japan." "And when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945, and we started to comprehend what this meant." "And then the second was dropped on Nagasaki, four days later, we realised that our war was over, and that we were going to live through this thing." "I can't believe that it ended like that, so fast, and those of us that were primed again, fortified psychologically and emotionally to go back to war, were now reprieved, and we would be able to go on with our life." "I've never been able to understand the objection to the fact that the atomic bomb was dropped." "We just burned all the adrenaline our body could produce, and sometimes when we would come home and land our aeroplane and taxi up to our hardstand and turn off the engines, we would just collapse, just sitting there in the cockpit." "There was nothing else left." "We had burned all the adrenaline, we had used all the energy that we had, and we just..." "Sometimes I had to be helped out of the cockpit." "Fellow who owned the building..." "(Clears throat) ...said that we had to leave because his son was coming home from the Pacific." "His son had been injured, and he didn't want any 'Japs' in his apartment building." "And so she gave us notice, and I said, "But my sister-in-law is pregnant." ""She's expecting in August, end of August."" "The baby was born about the 21 st." "But he's... he was adamant, and so we looked in the papers, and St Paul was just there was no place to be rented." "We went after ad after ad, looking at places." "They were just little, you know places not really livable, to me." "My sister-in-law and I both went to check them out." "She was pregnant and it was such a chore." "And so finally, I said, "You know what?" ""I'm going to go over and talk to this fellow."" "First of all, I went at the front, and his wife..." "It was a Sunday and it was a beautiful day, and his wife and her friends were sitting in the front." "And I said, "I'd like to talk to Mr Lauer."" ""Mr Lauer is in the back." "He's watering."" "So I walked to the back of the garden, and he wouldn't turn off the hose at first - he saw who I was." "And on top of that, he was very hard of hearing." "So I said, "Mr Lauer, I need to talk to you!"" "And I told him" " I said, "You know, my husband is in the Pacific." ""He's with military intelligence." ""He's fighting side-by-side with your son and others like your son."" "And I said, "I'm sorry that he was injured," ""but you just have to understand" ""that we're on the same side, and my husband..."" "You know, I made this plea, and "Eh?" and a couple of times he couldn't hear, and then finally he turned off his hose and he listened, and didn't say yes, no or anything." "He didn't comment." "And so I went away, thinking, "Well, I tried my best."" "And I left and didn't hear anything after." "We just... we were able to stay." "So I thought, "Well, it must have worked."" "So I guess I reached him." "And I told him, I said, "Be sure to ask your son," ""'cause he'll tell you that these Nisei boys are fighting with you," ""you know, fighting with them right there."" "He was two years older than I was, but it seemed like he needed my help more than I needed his." "He was a sweet kid, easily, um so agreeable, and a little bit gullible, you know?" "And very good-looking." "And I just felt that he needed me, and him leaving like that really broke my heart, I tell you." "And, of course, my mother - that meant two boys now were in the service." "And, um it was really hard to give them up." "From his letters, you couldn't tell." "He was a reserved person, and I don't think he wanted us to know, because he was probably protective of Mother and I, and my other brother." "He's a wonderful guy, anyway." "No, he never, never complained." "We lived with that." "That was part of our part we had to play." "He never got a chance to go to a camp to regroup or whatever, rest and relaxation or be analysed." "And a friend of his, a Fresno boy that was a friend of both of us, came back from over there, and he had seen him in Germany." "And he said, "He looked terrible, and I think they should send him home."" "Well, it didn't happen, and when he did get discharged and came home, he came to Sacramento and stayed with us for about two days, or three days." "He seemed fine." "He was kind of a quiet kid anyway, so there was no way for me to know." "I didn't detect anything, that he was really suffering from trauma." "So he went home to my mother in Fresno, and inside of a week, she was calling me and telling me that she thought my brother was having some problems, emotionally." "I guess his it was overpowering, I guess, the depression and the trauma, and stress of it all, until he just hung himself from the kitchen light and my mother came in and found him." "Yeah." "So..." "Yeah." "He was 22." "War can be rough." "My poor mother." "She was never quite the same." "My grandfather trained me to be a warrior." "The intertribal war days were over." "But being... (Clears throat)... uh a warrior in his time, before the reservation was settled, he kept training me to become a warrior." "Then, of course, I would ride horses all my life." "Ever since I was a little boy." "But in the wintertime he would wake me up early in the morning." "Said, "Alright - don't put your shoes on, don't put your clothes on."" "Running round the house, barefooted." "Maybe 15, 20 below zero." "Every morning, it was tradition with those old Indian men to take a dip in the river." "So in wintertime, we'd go to the river there - maybe 15, 20 below zero - we'd go to the river and he'd cut a hole in the ice." "It was already cut, but he had to cut it again for his horses." "So he'd remove the thin layer of snow, uh, ice, then we'd go in there." "I tell you, that's pretty cold, you know." "He trained me to be physically strong." "By his training, and my observing the activities around me, in my environment the movement of the animals and the blowing of the wind, direction and so forth." "So I was generally well aware of what I'm doing and what I'm going to do." "So during World War II," "I was not afraid " "I knew what I was doing and I knew I was going to be alright." "So he trained me that way, mentally." "I was ready to go overseas." "And a cousin of mine had just come back from Europe." "He was a tail gunner." "And then, before he left, a medicine man, a sun dance medicine man - powerful, sacred powers." "So he gave my cousin an eagle feather, a fluffy feather, painted yellow." ""Alright," he said, "put that inside of your helmet." ""That's your protection."" "That helped a lot too, you know." "So long as that sacred protective feather was in my helmet," "I was never afraid of anything." "I never panicked, and I think I survived quite adequately." "Some soldiers get excited and get scared, panic and run, and they get shot down." "But I'm always in charge of myself." "I know what the enemy's going to do, so I was alright." "And that little medicine in there " "I think that kind of gave me that uh feeling of having power over myself and the enemy." "I've seen a lot of sad situations." "People getting killed, lying there." "Civilians, soldiers - both American soldiers, German soldiers." "And one of the worst I've witnessed was we were advancing into this little town, and, uh and our company commander stepped on a mine." "Boy." "Both legs were gone." "There were just these stubs." "And so he was sitting there, and I was standing there and couldn't help but look at him." "I was scared, you know, shook up." "And he looked at his legs and he fell over dead." "He died." "That was terrible." "Yeah, that was terrible." "I sang a song belonging to a chief who used to live here." "A chief by the name of Grey Bull." "And he would sing that whenever they'd meet the Cheyennes, you know?" "And when they do that, they're ready to clash, why, a Cheyenne medicine man would sing a song." "I mean, a Crow medicine man by the name of Grey Bull would sing this song, and the words would go, would say," ""The Cheyennes are coming now" ""To do battle" ""Today I shall run over one of them" ""Yes, I ran all over them."" "All of them." "So I sang that song." "First it was the dead German boys lying all over the field of battle, and beginning to turn yellow and so forth, their eyes open." "I'd never seen a cadaver with eyes open before." "I'd seen dead people, like my relatives, in coffins and so on." "Their eyes were always decently closed." "And when you see violently killed people, with holes in them and missing limbs and so on, staring at you with open eyes as if they were alive, you feel terribly disconnected from things." "Are you supposed to say something to them?" "Are you supposed to say, "I'm sorry." "Did it hurt much?" and so forth?" "And I was still in command of my platoon, and we attacked a German position through a smokescreen which was so thick that you didn't know where you were." "It's a bizarre thing." "It was a technique dating from ground warfare from the First World War, but we did it anyhow." "And there were dead Germans all the way along, and people were stepping on mines and blowing their feet off, and things." "And my people were relatively untouched." "And when we had to clear a woods, a small woods that was separated from everything else, maybe a half-mile wide and a mile long, and the Germans had been preparing that defensively, that position, for months, probably since Normandy." "And we attacked it cheerfully, as cheerfully as we could, running in with our rifles at port arms and so on, through machine-gun fire, and a number of people were hit and killed by that." "On my left, I remember, I was lying on my stomach, trying to keep as low as possible to avoid this machine-gun stuff that was going on about an inch above my head, so close that I could feel the heat of the bullets as they passed by." "One of these replacements, who'd never impressed me very much, 'cause he was rather fat and clumsy, he kneeled up, and he was aiming at a machine gun some distance from us." "And before he could get a shot off, they hit him with, I think, about three bullets." "And I saw only his back - I didn't see his face or anything else." "Out of his back, there flew what looked like little clouds of dust." "But they were powdered blood, they were bits of flesh tissue, and they were pieces of cloth uniform." "And about three of these came at me, and then he collapsed, and that was the end of him." "When I came out of the war, I could not be recognised, and I had a terrible time with my family, 'cause they'd been reading the 'Saturday Evening Post' and 'Life' magazine all during the war," "and they thought it was a sort of cheerful game that we won." "They knew I was in the infantry but they thought that was a branch of the service where you did a lot of running, you know, moving, athletic stuff and so forth." "They had no idea that it was about close-up killing." "The mission of the infantry, as I learned in training many times, was that the infantry is charged with a mission of getting as close as possible to the enemy and destroying him, and that means tear him to bits, if possible." "So that was impossible for my parents even to understand." "I had some notes, fairly bloodthirsty, that I'd written about the war, and I gave them to my dad afterwards and he couldn't finish them." "About all the 'good war' stuff - to say that I'm offended would be a grave understatement." "I'm appalled by it, by the lack of imagination of Americans, by the obligatory optimism of Americans, by their difficulty in understanding the troubles of people who are less well-placed than they are " "I'm talking about the poor, and the infantry are the poor, in time of war." "I've had a very difficult time, sometimes, trying to explain what happened to me." "People say, "What's the matter?" "Why are you so irritable?"" "I'll say, "I'm irritable because I thought of a college friend of mine" ""who spent the war as an admiral's aide in the Pacific" ""and never fired a gun or was fired at." ""And the conflict, the contrast," ""between what he was doing and I was doing" ""is just too appalling" ""to bear without some kind of emotion of resistance and anger."" "I was angry that everybody didn't understand the the... situation of soldiers who fought the war on the ground." "Well, basically, when you're in OCS, there were six of us, and you lived, ate, slept and everything else together." "You studied together, and I still remember it - it was Gallicly, Galloway, Gamble, Gardiner, Gaughton, Ginsberg." "Forward observers up forward to find targets for the artillery, and you worked with the infantry." "In our unit, the forward observer, if the infantry was moving, you had to stay with the lead platoon of the attacking company." "And the reason for that was that chances are, you wouldn't bring artillery down on yourself." "You'd keep it out in front." "And that was there, but then we also went for targets, if we could go out and find some targets." "To be perfectly honest, it was boring." "We didn't have but four officers, and most of the time there wasn't but one available." "If I was not forward, then I had to read the mail." "And it was just about as boring as you could get." "I do recall one fellow that I just didn't read his letter to his girlfriend - it was 10 pages every day, and there just wasn't any sense to it." "He was only writing his wife about a page, but he was... his girlfriend was in England." "One example was a platoon, which basically had 50 people, jumped off one morning, and I happened to hear them on the radio that afternoon." "The battalion commander was asking how many men they had." "They had chocolate - wanted to wait for dark and they would send up chocolate bars." "He says, "We've got one for each man." "How many do you want?"" "He says, "Send me five."" "He only had five men left out of his platoon." "Himself and four, apparently." "But you just lost folks like mad in there." "I'm sitting, when after I was captured, several days later, maybe a week" " I don't know." "Some time after that," "I was in this little village where I had fired." "As a matter of fact, one round got away from it and knocked the steeple off the church." "But I'm sitting on the church steps and this German officer came up, and he was artillery." "And he could tell I was artillery - you had your brass on your collar." "And he asks me, "Were you the forward observer over there?"" "I said, "Yeah." "And you up there?" "Yeah."" "So he went and got me food." "And he spoke better English than I did." "He'd been to school in England." "And he got caught." "He came over there and got caught up in the war." "He came home, got caught up in the war." "And he was just like I was." "He was just in the war." "So he and I had Old Home Week sitting there on the church steps." "But that was an unusual experience." "But I was glad to see him." "Well, on one, we were on a railroad car, and the Americans came in, strafing it, and everybody ran." "You just tried to get away from the train, and I went out a window and down an incline and across to where there was a little bridge over a road - not a big one." "And I slid under there and there were two or three German soldiers under there that gave up to me." "I mean, they thought the Americans had landed or something, yeah." "They wanted to surrender to me, and I didn't want them." "I explained to them that I wasn't in any position to take them captive." "But, yeah, they tried to give up to me." "When I went into the Marines, the first thing was we was, uh... um we had a little scrip to eat with." "And when you would stop in a town like Macon, Georgia, um, the regular marines - there had been no black marines." "So the regular marines would eat in the dining room, in the regular area." "But in order to honour my scrip, they took me upstairs in the private dining room and they brought me anything I wanted to eat, as long as I didn't eat downstairs." "And I immediately ordered a filet mignon with all the trimmings." "It would remind you of home, and it broke your heart." "For instance, they had bands that would come out and entertain the troops." "And one band brought out Lena Horne." "And one of these... we had the white troops around us, and they would make seats out of making trees even and putting strips, and this was your seats." "When she came out and said, "Shoo, shoo, shoo, baby,"" "a whole strip full of white boys fell off fell off their seats." "We were proud as punch to see Lena Horne and other people " "Count Basie, Duke Ellington." "It really made... this is worth fighting for, is what we thought." "If we can just get back home and get a chance to enjoy some of this." "Our attitude was, if the Germans or the Japanese won the war the white folk would get on their side and we'd have to fight both the Germans or Japanese and the white folk." "So what we did was go over there and win the war, and then come back up and pick up the gauntlet where we'd try to get our civil rights." "That was the feeling." "I was on a list somewhere in the navy to be called up at the appropriate time, and I was in college, at the University of Minnesota." "And I'd spent my money, and my friends were going." "One of them was already a marine fighter pilot." "That was unendurable - for me to be a college boy and him to be a marine fighter pilot." "So I felt I had to accelerate this somewhat, and I went in to the recruiting office, and there was - to my astonishment - an old friend of mine at the desk." "And I said, "I've got to go."" "And as I talked to him, it got more and more intense " ""I've got to go." "I'm out of money." "Everyone else is going."" "And he went to the corner of the room where there was a great pile of files, and fingered down to the bottom, pulled one out and put it on top, and said, "You'll get your orders next week." "Don't tell anybody."" "And I went out, and it was like that moment at the beach when you climb the ladder of the diving board up to where you usually dive off, and then keep going to the one where you might jump off," "and keep going still until you get to the very top, where you've never jumped off before, and then you step up to the edge and jump." "I felt that I was in empty space." "Something had happened to me that had never happened before and that I had done it." "You know, as a kid, you don't have an opportunity to determine your life very often." "Your parents do that for you." "Your teachers do that for you." "But I just made a decision that was going to change my life forever." "And it did." "Everybody joined." "I wanted to be a pilot." "And everybody was in the air force." "And they wore pink pants and hats with the grommet taken out." "There was something spurious, to me, about those guys." "They flew too high." "I wanted to be in..." "I didn't know anything." "You have to understand that I was 17 years old." "These were impressions that didn't have any basis in reality." "I also thought that the Marine Corps, which was an elite of the navy, as I saw it, and therefore was the best of the best, would be the organisation to fly with, if I could." "I began flying from a little grass field north of Dallas." "And it was wonderful." "First experience of being up in the air and seeing the world down below you, it's indescribable." "But it adds a dimension to the world you've been living in." "Growing up is a series of tests, inevitably, motivated partly by curiosity about what it's like to do things that grown-ups do, that you've never done before, and partly a series of tests of your readiness to be an adult, I think." "By passing the tests, you earn admission to this class of people that you think all know what they're doing." "Aviation is certainly, learning to fly is a series of tests." "But you have to remember that, as an 18- or 19- or 20-year-old kid, you're at the same time still going through the other set of tests." "You're finding out what it's like to be drunk, you're trying to pass the test with girls when you really don't know what to do when you get there." "You're trying to live independently, you're trying to act independently." "You'd be doing those, you see, whether you were in military training or not." "On top of those, then, are the tests about soloing an aeroplane and doing your first loop and dropping your first bomb and so forth." "There was a song which was sometimes the refrain of which sometimes was "Bless 'em all"" "and sometimes "Fuck 'em all,"" "depending on the audience and who was singing." "And the verses went..." "(Sings) # They..." "# They sent for the... #... sent for the army to come to Tulagi" "# But General MacArthur said no" "# He gave as his reason, "This isn't the season" "# "Besides, there is no USO"" "# Fuck 'em all, fuck 'em all" "# The long and the short and the tall" "# Fuck all the admirals in ComAirSoPac" "# They don't give a damn if we never get back" "# So we're saying goodbye to them all" "# As back in our foxholes we crawl" "# There'll be no promotion this side of the ocean" "# But cheer up, my lads, bless 'em all. #" "MAN:" "That's great!" "That's the least obscene of my repertoire." "If you want the rest of them, I can oblige." "The atomic bomb was, of course, an enormous... more than a big help." "It was the end of the war." "And we felt that, and with relief, but also with a kind of sadness." "We had been turned into artificial adults for a few years and we'd lived lives that were full of excitement, and kind of adventurous lives - lives that we could never have anticipated back in Minneapolis and Bonesteel." "Now it was all over." "And there was..." "I'm sure I wasn't the only person who felt," ""Now I will have to go back to being who I really am," ""who is a college undergraduate at the University of Minnesota." ""How boring that will be." ""How narrow and limited that will be." ""What kind of future will I have" ""that will be as much fun as being a pilot in the Marine Corps?"" "When the Japanese surrendered, it was announced to us." "We felt... the squadron decided that it ought to make some gesture of celebration." "And we took off as a squadron, in formation, and flew out over the fleet in Buckner Bay." "And I expected that was what it was going to be - we'd fly over the fleet and then we'd go home and land." "And to my astonishment, the man leading the flight signalled to go into a column." "So we all pulled back, one behind the other, and dove on the fleet." "And then, to my amazement, he pulled up and did a barrel roll." "Now, a barrel roll in a TBM is like a fat lady dancing - she shouldn't do it, and you're not even sure she can do it." "But he did it, and then the next plane did it, and then it was my turn." "And I pulled up and pulled it over, and all the rubbish and debris in the bottom of the airplane came floating up into my eyes, and the crewman in the back rattled around a bit, I guess." "And then we came out and it was still flying, the wings hadn't fallen off, and then we went back and landed." "And I reckon what we were doing was giving death one more chance." "It was like the storm." "Of course it could have been me." "But it wasn't." "I grieve for them." "I grieve for them every day." "The two or three with whom I was most I was closest to." "But, then, people die in life." "Not that young, but every life has some grief in it." "And you go on living." "I talked recently with a friend of mine." "Her name is Georgine DuVivier-Hall." "She's about my age or a little younger." "Was in college in Pennsylvania during the war, a little women's college called Wilson College, where she said they wore white gloves to dinner, or at least the white gloves were part of it." "She said she really wasn't aware of the war." "There was kind of innocence in this place, as though the war didn't exist." "But when she went home after the term ended, she had to sit in a boxcar, sitting on a coffin, which was a coffin of an American serviceman." "It seemed an odd juxtaposition." "They were casualties from somewhere, being brought home." "A grave responsibility." "I was now in charge of three squads and that's a total of 41 men." "And then I began to realise why this was done." "If you're an engineer, you're selected to be an officer because you know mathematics and logarithms and all of that." "If you're an artillery officer," "I suppose they'll select you because you know something about trajectory and physics." "Why would they select someone for an infantry officer?" "Well, he has to know how to read the maps and the compass." "But he has to know how to kill." "Yeah, that's a horrible thought." "I won't tell you how many men I killed, but, uh..." "There are some who count sheep, so they tell me, but there are times in my life when I count men." "And that's a terrible thought." "Because I'm certain the average person, if he or she ran over a cat, you'd never forget that." "So how in the world can you forget killing a man, you know?" "Well, I was in Oakland, getting ready to get on a ship for a boat ride back to Hawaii." "I was in my uniform with three rows of ribbons and the captain's bars on my shoulder." "I must have looked pretty good, like a big hero, with a hook on my right hand, where it used to be." "And so I thought I'd just get a nice haircut so I'd look neat." "I looked around Oakland, and here was a barbershop." "Three chairs, I remember that." "All three empty." "The barbers are just standing around, so I walked in." "This one barber approached me and he looked at me and he said, "Are you a Jap?"" "And, you know, that was a strange welcome." "And I said, "I'm an American."" ""Well, I'm asking you, are you a Jap?"" "I said, "My father was born in Japan." "My mother is Japanese." ""I suppose that makes me one."" ""We don't cut Jap hair."" "And I thought to myself, "Here I am in uniform." ""It should be obvious to him that I'm an American soldier," ""a captain at that," ""and that fellow very likely never went to war," ""and he's telling me, 'We don't cut Jap hair."'" "I was so tempted to strike him, but then I thought, "If I had done that," ""all the work that we had done would be for nil."" "So I just looked at him and I said, "Well, I'm sorry you feel that way,"" "and I walked out." "But it became clear to me that what the captain said was very correct - it's going to be a long struggle." "A tough one." "We all say that if it hadn't been for that childhood that we had, stressed, and knowledgeable in matters that were so out of proportion from regular childhood, we probably wouldn't be the people we were today." "And it's just like me living in the wine country here, where I just found out that the more stressed the vine, the better the wine and the grape is." "So, I didn't know that." "So it makes a lot of sense." "I think Luverne probably was cleaner during the war than at any time in its history, primarily because we kids would go out and we'd go the alleys, back roads, ditches, anything, to find something out of metal," "because you could get, like, a penny a pound for something of this nature." "And then if you took them down to the theatre, you could get in - if you had, like, two, three, four pounds of scrap metal, you would get a free ticket." "My two brothers and I went out one time and made a horrendous haul." "We just..." "I don't know." "The one major thing that I remember in there, we had a brass bedstead." "But we had wheels, old wheels we found." "We had more than enough to get into the theatre." "So the kids who didn't have enough, we were down on Main Street, right by the theatre, and we're handing out, you know, "What do you need?" "Tyre?" ""Here's an old rim, here's an old piece of metal," or whatever it was." "And so they'd get in." "Then Doc, who was the manager of the theatre, came down and told us, "I don't want you doing this anymore." ""These kids have to get their own stuff."" "Two pounds of milkweed would make one life vest." "So they gave everybody these sacks, or bags, and then we would go out looking for milkweed." "And we got two cents a pound for these." "No - we got 20 cents a bag." "OK, now, that's a lot of milkweed stuck in one of these bags." "But we would have our patches, and the one that I remember was from the Olsen's Dairy out towards the Blue Mounds, along the old Rock Island railroad." "And we'd go out there at night, or after dinner, and we would crawl down in these..." "You know, it's nothing but weeds and brambles and everything else, and we're collecting these God-awful milkweed pods." "But we wouldn't tell anybody where we were going, because we didn't want anybody finding the milkweed in our patch, kind of thing." "They had... in one year, I think, there were, like, 1,300 bags that were turned in of this milkweed." "I could never understand how they were going to take this little bit of stuff and save some navy pilot who ended up in the Pacific Ocean." "You know, but that was the story we got." "My dad was a warden, and there were wardens, you know, all around the neighbourhood." "These guys would go out there." "And we'd have these blackouts." "The siren would ring downtown and you had to turn off all your lights, unless you had a blackout curtain that you could put over your window so that no light got out." "The dads - my dad and these other guys - would go out and they would walk around the neighbourhood." "Now, I couldn't figure out how the Germans were going to fly all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and the Japanese were going to fly all the way across the Pacific Ocean to bomb Luverne." "I mean, I just had no concept of what was going on." "They wanted these guys to have guns, but, you know, they didn't have any guns for them." "So my dad, the first couple of times he went out, he had a broomstick." "I guess you were supposed to have this notion that you were carrying a weapon." "He thought that was kind of dumb, so he'd go out with his 12-gauge shotgun, but he had no shells or anything." "And then it got to be where these guys would stay out for a while." "And my mother finally figured out that they may be down at Doc Blake's or Ez Collins's or some place, having a highball." "So it was more of a social thing, I think, for these men to protect us from I don't know what, but they had to go out on these nightly patrols." "Collecting anything at that time was our basic source of income, for kids." "And we could go..." "Now this seems kind of ridiculous." "But we could go to the pool hall, for example, on a Saturday night, and have a hot dog and a milkshake and a candy bar for 25 cents." "The hot dog was a dime, the milkshake was a dime, the candy bar was a nickel." "And if you had 11 cents, you could go to the movie besides." "So we didn't really need a lot of money, OK, but what money we got, we got from a lot of the scrap things." "We had an army air base that was 30 miles away, and a lot of those soldiers came over to Luverne on their R and R, so we had soldiers around us." "They were flying Liberators and P-47 s out of Sioux Falls, so we had a lot of airplanes over us." "If some guy was going - dating - one of the Luverne girls, let's say, and they went up on an exercise, and he was flying one of these P-47 Thunderbolts, he would come zooming down Main Street, you know," "like, 200 feet, 200, 300 feet over the city, you know, and the wings are going like this." "And she's working with a phone company, she'd know who it was." "I mean, this was kind of a way they were signalling." "And the windows would rattle and people would get all upset, you know, "These guys shouldn't be doing this,"" "but I don't think it ever stopped them." "I remember another funny thing about..." "The bombers went up a lot, and we were all excited to see them - these big Liberators and B-29s, some of these, that they were flying out of Sioux Falls." "And so we could hear them coming and we'd say, "Bomber!" "Bomber!"" "And everybody would run out the back door and we'd look up and we'd watch these." "Well, we had a cocker spaniel, Rinky, and we'd say, "Bomber!" "Bomber!"" "And Rinky would head for the back door, just as fast as he could." "Whether the planes came or not, all you had to say is "Bomber!" "Bomber!"" "And Rinky, he's gone." "And one time, my mother had just waxed the kitchen floor." "And we said, "Bomber!" "Bomber!"" "And Rinky goes tearing out to the back door." "His feet are just churning away like crazy, falling down, trying to get out the back door to see that." "But that was a... we all ran out to watch these planes go over and they went over a lot." "You know, there was terrible confusion during combat." "Just unbelievable." "I mean, no-one knew what was going on." "I don't think the Germans did either." "But one of the most confusing things was the radio." "We always had a radio in some place around us so that we could contact headquarters and they were asking where we were." "Call for artillery fire - you could talk to the artillery observer." "But the radio was just madness because there was always some guy pinned down in a terrible situation, screaming for help, and then a very cool, calm guy in the background saying, "This is Rabbit 3." "This is Rabbit 3."" "And this guy would say, "Cut that crap out!" ""Christ Almighty." "We're getting fired on!"" "But this coming from all directions." "Well, when the war ended, I believe I was in Paris and living a very, very splendid life." "It was very, very good." "I was working for a branch of 'Stars and Stripes' called 'Army Talks', which was a magazine that was put out, and travelling rather freely, and had some nice girlfriends and a very, very interesting, mature group of guys" "who educated me more than the college had educated me." "Uh, they were..." "And when the war ended in Japan, it wasn't the great celebration to Parisianers, but to we in the army, who had thought maybe we'd get sent to Japan or something, it was a great celebration." "And Paris was a great place to celebrate in, so we did lots of celebrating there." "Quite unlike VE Day." "You know, I did shoot a fellow one time, and it was in Bayreuth, you know, the home of Wagner." "And there was a river that split the town in half and we'd moved down to the river and we were in a little bar." "And our radio, it came through from way up in back of us that there was a squad of Germans coming down the road that we were at." "And we watched them, and they came down, and they went in a building across the street." "And we really didn't want to put up a big fight, but pretty soon one came out and came down and looked at the bridge that had been blown, that we were, and then trotted up the road, a couple of blocks." "And we thought, "Well, the squad up there will pick him up."" "Pretty soon he came trotting back, so we realised, "There's no squad there."" "So we sort of... everybody said, "Why don't you shoot him?"" ""Oh, you shoot him."" "I ended up having to shoot him." "Well, I shot him, and the next thing I knew, I was out there." "He flew up in the air, and two of us, next thing we knew, we were out there nursing him." "Drag him back, and then the squad came out from across the street and surrendered." "That's the only one I'm ever sure I..." "I shot at lots and lots of things, but you're shooting at smoke, you were shooting at where you could see machine-gun fire coming from, you were shooting at tanks, which was useless." "You never knew what you were doing." "That was the only case where you could really see somebody, and nobody really wanted to do it." "Here he was, and he was doing no harm, and he was really just trying to retreat, but we couldn't think of any other way to do it." "Our movie stars in those days were guys like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart and Edward G. Robinson and those guys." "You know, we grew up on adventure stories." "What is the reason for a story to exist?" "It's to take you out of a drab existence, isn't it, into a different world." "That was how we grew up and those were our aims." "And when the real war broke out, it did give many of us..." "many Latinos enlisted - you know, thousands." "And I suspect that, in the back of their minds, there was James Cagney doing his thing in a war movie or something." "But they did OK in reality." "Especially on Iwo Jima, we did find many, many Japanese who had killed themselves." "They shot themselves, they blew themselves up with hand grenades, they disembowelled themselves with their knives, they... you know." "And sometimes when we threatened to blow their caves up and bury them alive, they in effect said, "Screw you." "Go ahead and do it."" "And we did." "We buried a lot of them alive." "Our attitude was "Better them than us," you know?" "And we had a saying in the Marine Corps " ""The Japanese want to die for the emperor, and we want to help them."" "And that was basically it." "It's that simple." "You know, you're in a war." "You're not going to be feeling..." "You feel sorry for a guy when you see that he held a hand grenade to his belly and blew himself up, but very briefly." "I mean, that's the guy who potentially might have killed you or one of your buddies." "They were tough people." "So, you know, if they wanted to blow themselves up, that was one less guy to nail you." "And the shelling was so intense," "I thought I was going to lose my mind." "And I thought, "Gee, I've been in this too damn long already." ""I can't take it anymore."" "But I didn't realise until later, when we were told about that defence, how effective that defence was and how much artillery we were taking." "I thought it was me." "That was my worst moment." "That night... that night we were gathered, and the lieutenant came over and he said, "If we're driven off the beach," he said," ""try to swim towards the transports."" "And we thought, "Jesus!" "What is he saying to us?"" "I know that sounds ridiculous, but they actually told us that." "If we're driven off the beach, start swimming for the trans... (Laughs)" "I'm a Mexican!" "I didn't even know how to swim right!" "I sink like a rock." "So, you know, for us, it was like the Japanese - it was do it or too bad." "We met the cadets when they were training over in Pensacola." "And I had one cute boyfriend who was from the Midwest." "And when he knew he would have Saturday night free, he would fly his training flight over Mobile and dive down and buzz my house twice." "And that way, I knew he'd be over that Saturday night." "And I was not to date anyone else " "I was to save that Saturday night for Norm." "So I had an old maid neighbour across the street, and every Saturday she'd sit on her front porch and wait to see if we'd be buzzed." "And when he buzzed me, she'd come running across the parkway out here, yelling, "Katharine, he's coming!" "Katharine, he's coming tonight!" ""I just heard him!"" "So the whole neighbourhood was alerted to whether he would come or not." "Well, the last person we thought would ever be killed was my Uncle Charlie Tucker." "He was such a... macho person." "He just did everything well." "And we just never thought anything would happen to Charlie." "If anyone would come through the war, it would be Charlie." "So when the news came that Charlie was missing in action at Guadalcanal, we were devastated." "We kept thinking they would find him on an island, alive." "We kept thinking that maybe his plane had gone down some place where he could get ashore and be saved." "In fact, it was four years before we finally gave up, that they would never find Charlie, because we just did not think the Lord would take him." "But you know the wonderful thing?" "He stays 22 years old." "WOMAN:" "That's beautiful." "During the entire war, I made up my mind that I would never marry a man in uniform, because I loved the uniforms." "So I thought, "Well, then, maybe I would marry him" ""and realise I didn't like him at all," ""that it was all the uniform."" "So I did not marry till after the war because of that as much as anything." "And the man I did marry had on a uniform, but it was a pilot's uniform." "And I never saw him in his dress navy uniform till the day I married him, and he wore it in our wedding." "So..." "Oh, and I did like him in it." "I really did!"