(bird singing)
##
SAM HYNES: The world contains evil.
And if it didn't contain evil,
we probably wouldn't need to try to construct religions.
No evil, no God, I think.
No, of course no evil, no war.
But this is not a human possibility
that we need to entertain.
There will always be plenty of evil.
And there'll always be wars.
Because human beings are aggressive animals.
NARRATOR: When the people of Luverne, Minnesota,
and Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut,
and Mobile, Alabama, went to the movies in March of 1945,
they saw and heard a sick and weary
President Franklin Roosevelt... so sick and so weary
that for the first time in his career,
he referred directly to the paralysis
that kept him from standing without braces.
ROOSEVELT: I hope that you will pardon me for an unusual posture
during the presentation of what I want to say,
but I know that you will realize
that it makes it a lot easier for me
about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs;
and also because of the fact
that I have just completed a 14,000-mile trip.
NARRATOR: Roosevelt's strength was waning, but his message
was undimmed.
The war was still to be won.
It's a long, tough road to Tokyo.
It is longer to go to Tokyo than it is to Berlin,
in every sense of the word.
The defeat of Germany will not mean the end
of the war against Japan.
On the contrary, we must be prepared
for a long and costly struggle in the Pacific.
NARRATOR: Americans had been fighting for more than three years now,
and the number of dead and wounded and missing
had more than doubled just since D-Day.
The Nazis seemed at last to be on the verge of collapse,
but American men were still dying in the struggle
to eradicate them, and Allied planners feared
the final battle with Japan would stretch on for years.
In the coming weeks, two men from Mobile
would fight simply to survive:
Eugene Sledge, who had endured
the horrors of the battle for Peleliu,
would once again be forced to enter
what he called "the abyss."
Maurice Bell, who had witnessed much of the Pacific war
aboard the USS Indianapolis,
would find himself hurled into the center of history.
Daniel Inouye from Honolulu would lead his men in an attack
so furious that afterwards
even he could no longer quite comprehend it.
And Glenn Frazier, from Fort Deposit, Alabama,
who had survived three and a half years of brutal captivity,
would find that the Japanese were not his only enemy.
The people of Sacramento and Luverne, Waterbury and Mobile,
and every other American town
knew that there would be more bad news from the battlefield
before they could dare hope to know what it would be like
to live once again in a world without war.
(tool clacking)
EMMA BELLE PETCHER: I remember going to New York on the train.
And at the station at St. Louis, Missouri,
the platform was lined with caskets.
With American flags.
It was just as far as you could see them
on the platform at the train station.
And I went down reading the name in brass plaque
that was all the names.
And I cried and cried.
How could you not cry?
##
HYNES: The Pacific, as one experienced it, began at San Diego.
And you got a sense of what a huge space you were going into.
That this was not going to be like Europe,
where there was land all around and it had names.
This was going to be nameless, empty space.
Almost all of it with little dots of land in between.
NARRATOR: In March of 1945, Marine pilot Sam Hynes was 20 years old,
a former University of Minnesota student
who, like thousands of other young men,
had been made to grow up fast during the war,
passing test after test on the way to manhood.
He had learned to live on his own, had married,
mastered the dangerous art of flying torpedo bombers
and had now received his orders
to proceed 6,000 miles across the Pacific
to face his final trial: combat.
Hynes landed at Ulithi, the sprawling coral atoll
the U.S. Navy had turned into the advance staging area
for the assault that was about to begin
on the Japanese island of Okinawa.
HYNES: It was awesome.
It was huge.
The anchorage was miles across,
and it was covered with ships
of all sizes... carriers, battleships,
destroyers, cruisers.
I'd never seen so many ships.
It was like seeing all the power in your corner.
(laughing): And there wasn't any power in the other corner.
NARRATOR: Okinawa, 60 miles long
and home to almost half a million civilians,
was the gateway to Japan.
The Allies knew they had to take it before they could move on
to the home islands, and were gathering
the largest invasion force since D-Day... almost 1,500 ships
and more than half a million men.
(fierce explosion)
Day after day, in March of 1945,
American and British warships
fired shells and rockets at Okinawa.
There was little evidence of the island's defenders.
Allied planners were not sure just where they were dug in.
But they knew they were somewhere on the island...
more than 100,000 of them, well entrenched
and prepared to die for their Emperor.
The Japanese kamikaze pilots overhead
were willing to die for him, too.
There were nearly 100 Japanese airfields
within flying distance of Okinawa...
and the pilots of some 5,000 warplanes were preparing
to sacrifice their own lives in order to take those
of as many American sailors as possible.
MAURICE BELL: They was trained to fly their planes one way and no return.
And when they went out after a ship or something,
they had their funeral before they actually left.
And they knew they was never coming back.
They was under the impression that if they gave their life
that way for their country,
they had a special place in heaven for them, automatically.
Which wasn't true.
NARRATOR: Seaman First Class Maurice Bell of Mobile, Alabama,
was serving as a gunner
aboard the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis off Okinawa.
On March 31, kamikazes targeted her for destruction.
(alarm sounding) BELL: I looked up to my right,
and there was one small cloud up there and just as I looked up,
I saw a plane come out of this cloud
and it was a Japanese kamikaze plane.
The very instant I saw him up there,
he must have spotted our ship, because he turned into a dive,
instantly, and was coming straight down.
It looked like he was coming just as straight
to the very spot where I was sitting.
A man back there started firing at it with a 20-millimeters,
and you could see the tracers hit it.
The plane actually bounced off the ship,
but the motor and the bomb went through the deck.
Went through number three mess hall
and right down there was three or four or five men
sitting at a table eating.
It killed all of them.
The bomb went all the way through the ship
into the water and exploded back up through.
They said that hole all the way through
was large enough to drive a 18-wheeler through.
NARRATOR:Nine sailors died.
29 were wounded.
The Indianapolis was sent to Ulithi to have its hull mended
and eventually dispatched all the way across the Pacific
to Mare Island, near San Francisco, for further repairs.
Meanwhile, the bombardment of Okinawa continued.
The invasion was to begin on April 1.
This was the night before Easter Sunday, the first of April.
And Tokyo Rose, who was the spokesperson for the Japanese,
TOKYO ROSE: Japanese special attack planes launched late Thursday night...
VAGHI: And having been through Normandy,
and they didn't know we were coming,
and here we are going into Okinawa,
and Tokyo Rose is telling us
"Okay, G.I. Joes, we know you're coming,
"we're gonna give you a Easter party, when you land,
and we'll be there waiting for you."
Well, that really sent shivers up and down one's spine.
(artillery fire continues)
NARRATOR: Navy ensign Joseph Vaghi from Connecticut,
who had been wounded on Omaha Beach,
was among the 60,000 soldiers and Marines
moving toward the island that morning.
He had volunteered to return to combat.
VAGHI: When we finally began unloading, it was quiet.
As the landing crafts went in, you just walked ashore.
Couldn't believe this.
(Glenn Miller's band playing "Little Brown Jug")
NARRATOR: The Japanese mostly held their fire.
Four divisions... 75,000 men... would land that day.
The veterans couldn't believe their luck.
("Little Brown Jug" continues)
Marine Private Eugene Sledge of Mobile and his outfit
were at the landing, too,
and so relieved, they began to sing
the popular hit "Little Brown Jug"
as they unloaded their gear and started inland.
They had been warned
that they would be likely to lose eight out of ten men
before they could make it off the beach.
They lost none.
("Little Brown Jug" continues)
They were pleasantly surprised by the terrain as well.
It was "pastoral and handsomely terraced,"
"like a picture postcard of an Oriental landscape."
EUGENE SLEDGE (dramatized): "The weather was cool,
"and there was the wonderful smell of pines,
"which reminded me of home.
"It was such a beautiful island.
"You really could not believe
that there was going to be a battle there."
("Little Brown Jug" continues)
NARRATOR: American infantry and tanks
raced across the island, cutting it in two.
Then, as Sledge and the Marines moved north
to clear the central and northern parts of the island,
the Army turned south, toward the main Japanese defenses...
...where they began to face increasingly strong opposition.
(bullets ricocheting)
Go, go, go!
Offshore, the Navy continued to have its hands full.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Sky full of flak as the Japs attack warships
supporting the invasion of Okinawa.
Scenes of plunging planes
and enemy bombs land perilously near.
A low-flying enemy speeds toward a warship target.
Will the guns bring it down before it gets to its mark?
(artillery fire)
Yes, it's hit, on fire, and crashes!
(explosion)
NARRATOR: On April 6,
Japan loosed a new tactic against the Allied ships.
Not single kamikazes now... but flights
of hundreds of them at a time,
dropping out of the sky to attack the fleet.
(explosion)
The Japanese called these deadly flights
"Floating Chrysanthemums."
(alarm blaring)
(whistle blowing)
By the end of the day,
they had seriously damaged 17 American vessels
and killed 367 sailors.
VAGHI: We lost more ships,
we lost more sailors, we lost more men,
It was one of the worst part... battles of the Pacific, really.
NARRATOR: As the land battle for Okinawa intensified,
the Floating Chrysanthemums would return again and again,
taking a terrible toll on the men...
and ships.
##
GLENN FRAZIER: If we had an invasion of Japan, we knew we were dead.
(distant explosions)
They issued orders later that if, uh,
the minute American or Allied forces landed on their homeland,
to shoot all prisoners of war.
So we had basically accepted our fate.
NARRATOR: Glenn Frazier was one of 168,000 Allied prisoners of war
still in Japanese hands.
He had been a captive since the surrender on Bataan
in the spring of 1942.
He was now in his fourth POW camp in Japan, at Tsuruga,
southwest of Tokyo, on the Sea of Japan.
(gunfire)
One day, their captors permitted 50 prisoners
to wash their own filthy clothes in the ocean.
They were sitting around waiting for their clothes to dry
when carrier-based American bombers
roared in to attack the port.
FRAZIER: We run out of the warehouse,
or at the end of the dock, and were across the railroad tracks
and was waving, and we knew then
that the aircraft carrier planes were close.
And we knew that the end was coming close.
But that did not help our feelings
as to what was about to happen.
Our lives were going to be sacrificed.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: We interrupt this program to bring you
a special news bulletin from CBS World News.
A press association has just announced
that President Roosevelt is dead.
The president died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
All we know so far is that the president died
at Warm Springs in Georgia.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We can all tell you where we were
when we heard that Roosevelt had died.
President Roosevelt was really...
the binding force
for the United States.
When he would come on and give his fireside chats,
we all gathered around the radio,
and everyone looked to him for leadership.
He had led us out of the Depression,
so we felt that...
certainly he could lead us through a war.
##
And when the news came in April that he had died,
it was a terrible blow to the entire country.
BURT WILSON: It was catastrophic,
because he was the only president we knew
for the first 12, 13 years of our life.
Now, the thing was, my parents were Republicans
and hated Roosevelt, but I loved him.
And most of us kids loved him, too.
Because he was the face of America
that was saying, "Hey, things are gonna be okay."
##
HYNES: I was standing outside a Quonset hut
looking across the little strait
between Saipan and Tinian, the next island,
and... I felt a great sense of loss.
More than that, I think, "How will we go on fighting the war
when our commander in chief is dead?"
PAUL FUSSELL: We were all very sad about it.
Less about his leaving...
than about irony of it.
If he'd died a few months, uh, later,
he could have seen the success of what he had done.
NARRATOR: The men of the 100th 442nd Combat Team...
the Japanese-American unit that had already distinguished itself
in the fighting for Italy and France...
were back in the mountains of Northern Italy
when they got word of Roosevelt's death.
He had signed the order that sent to internment camps
the families from which many of them had come,
but he had also provided them with the opportunity
to prove their loyalty on the battlefield.
It was that FDR they chose to remember.
DANIEL INOUYE: I remember that day,
because when we got the word, suddenly men in my platoon
took out their bayonets and put it on.
(gunfire) And I said, "What's happening here?"
He says, "Well, I think we got to do this one for the old man."
They just stood up and started attacking.
(gunfire continues)
Radio calls coming in from the company commander,
"What in the hell are you doing?" you know.
"You're not supposed to be attacking."
I says, "Captain, you can't stop 'em."
(laughing)
And so they're all moving forward for the old man,
a man they had never met.
(bugle playing taps)
NARRATOR: Many Americans, overseas as well as at home,
couldn't even remember the name of the man
who was now their commander in chief...
...Harry Truman.
MAN: All aboard!
# I guess I had a million dolls or more... #
# I guess I've played the doll game o'er and o'er... #
QUENTIN AANENSON: I had great difficulty adjusting to the fact
that I was going home.
# That's why I'm blue... #
Landed at Washington, D.C.,
was processed through some paperwork there,
caught a train at Union Station taking me down to Louisiana,
where Jackie was.
# To love a doll that's not your own... #
# I'm through with all of them #
# I'll never fall again #
# Say, boy #
# Whatcha gonna do? #
NARRATOR: Fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson of Luverne, Minnesota,
was home on leave that April.
He had been in more-or-less continuous combat in Europe
since D-Day... ten ghastly months
during which he'd killed men and seen friends killed
and come very close to collapsing from despair.
He expected soon to be ordered into action again,
in the Pacific this time,
and he desperately wanted to see Jackie Greer,
the Louisiana girl with whom he'd fallen in love
before going overseas.
Her letters had been Aanenson's anchor to sanity.
GREER: I-I prayed for him to come back,
and I just felt like my prayers would be answered.
I was walking down the street
and I saw the wedding dress in a window.
So I went right in and I bought that dress
and shipped it to my mother and I said, "Have this ready for me.
NARRATOR: Now the two were to meet again.
AANENSON: And I had to adjust to being away from the war.
The silence was difficult to get used to.
But it was such a... an exciting and unbelievable moment.
I was alive, and this was Jackie.
GREER: The first night, we were in the living room
and he formally proposed to me.
And for some reason, I got shy.
And I couldn't quite make myself say, "Yes."
I don't know why because I'd been saying yes
for 11 months, you know.
And when I hesitated and, and couldn't quite say yes,
he said, "Well, now, just make up your mind."
The funny part was, the door right near my chair was closed,
and on the other side of that door was my bed
with that gorgeous wedding dress spread out all over it.
AANENSON: I was going to be going back to the war.
I didn't want to face the idea that she could end up
being a widow in a couple of months.
But it... the more we talked about it,
the more we decided, "Let's get married now."
So we got married on April 17,
two and a half weeks after I got home,
in the First Methodist Church in Baton Rouge.
As I saw her coming down that aisle,
it was just a thrill beyond belief.
(dramatic music playing)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: In their stupendous advances, the Russian armies
feature massed artillery.
The kind of warfare the Russians wage on the road to Berlin.
NARRATOR: By the middle of April 1945,
Soviet troops were just 30 miles from Berlin
and bent on revenge
for the horrors the Nazis had inflicted on their homeland.
General Dwight Eisenhower decreed
that the armies under his command
would not drive directly toward the German capital.
The deadly task of capturing the city would go to the Red Army.
Hitler called upon his people to resist to the end.
"Every village and every town will be defended and held
by every possible man," he said.
For the Americans in Europe,
the fighting and the killing sputtered on.
DANIEL INOUYE: And that's a horrible thing,
knowing that the war is going to end,
and you have to keep urging your men to go forward.
NARRATOR: The 100th 442nd Combat Team
was still in the mountains of Northern Italy
hammering away at the last German positions there.
INOUYE: We had this objective, a high mountain.
As I was going up,
I suddenly felt someone punching me on the side.
That's what I thought it was.
I fell down and I got up and kept on moving.
I had a bullet going right through my abdomen.
Came out just about a quarter inch from my spine.
NARRATOR: Three machine gun nests were firing down at Inouye
as he continued to lead his men up the slope.
He hurled a grenade to knock out the first one,
then killed its crew with his tommy gun.
He silenced the next gun with two more grenades.
As he pulled the pin on yet another
and got ready to throw it into the third machine gun nest,
German shrapnel nearly severed Inouye's right arm.
Somehow, with his left hand, he pried his dead fingers
from the live grenade and threw it,
then started up the hill again.
INOUYE:According to the men
and according to my company commander, he says,
"For a moment, you went berserk.
You picked up your gun."
I had a Thompson sub-machine gun
and with my left hand started approaching
the last machine gun nest, just firing
and with the blood splattering out.
It was a horrible sight, I think.
Finally, I got hit again on my leg,
and I kept rolling down the hill and that was the end.
NARRATOR: German prisoners of war were pressed into service
to carry Inouye back down the hill.
He was given morphine at the aid station...
so much morphine that when surgeons at the field hospital
began to amputate his shattered arm,
he had to endure it without anesthetic.
The pain was so intense, he remembered,
"that dying didn't seem like such an awful idea."
INOUYE: I ended up receiving 17 whole blood transfusions.
Before they gave you the blood, they showed you the bottle,
and on that bottle was a label
that had the name, rank, serial number and the unit.
And so, here is someone with some fancy name,
Thomas Jefferson Lee, a serial number, 92nd Division.
was a unit that we were attached to in the last battle,
and they're all made up of African-Americans.
And all the bottles I saw were from the 92nd Division.
So I must have had 17 bottles of good African-American blood.
And so here I am.
NARRATOR: For his heroism under fire,
Daniel Inouye would receive the Medal of Honor.
It was granted to him 55 years later,
during his sixth term
as a United States senator from Hawaii.
##
Meanwhile, events in Europe were moving so fast
it was hard for the people back home to keep track.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: On the final lap of their drive on Berlin,
Russian troops send the Germans reeling.
NARRATOR: On April 25, American and Soviet forces linked up
at Torgau on the Elbe River.
Germany had been cut in half.
The next day, Soviet troops began assaulting Berlin itself.
(distant shouting)
On the morning of April 30,
Russian troops fought their way into the Reichstag,
the symbol of German power.
Less than half a mile away, beneath the rubble,
Adolf Hitler and his closest aides huddled in their bunker.
That afternoon, Hitler named Admiral Karl Donitz
to succeed him, then shot himself in the mouth.
Only his most fanatical followers
now continued to fight on.
PAUL FUSSELL: Eisenhower, on D-Day morning, distributed to the troops
a general order, which is like a handbill, and everybody read it
and he said, "We are about to embark upon the great crusade,"
which we'd been preparing for for many months, etc.
Now, at first none of us could believe
it was anything like a crusade, because we were playing dice
and we were thinking about girls all the time
and getting as drunk as possible and so forth.
It wasn't like a crusade.
There was no religious dimension to it whatever.
When they finally got across France and into Germany
and saw the German death camps...
(voice breaking): they realized that they had...
been engaged in something like a crusade,
although none of them called it that.
And it all began to make a kind of sense to us.
I'm not sure that made it any better.
It may have made it worse.
To see that it was actually conducted
in defense of some noble idea.
NARRATOR: As the Red Army had moved through Eastern Europe
the previous summer,
it had uncovered at Majdaneck, in Poland,
the first evidence of the Nazis' industrialized barbarism.
The ashes of thousands of human beings
were found in a crematorium.
The American and British press played it down,
assuming the Soviets were exaggerating.
Not even the Nazis could be so murderous.
By the end of April 1945,
more than a hundred camps and sub-camps would be liberated.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Ravensbr�ck,
Ohrdruf, Buchenwald,
Bergen-Belsen, Nordhausen, Dachau.
On May 5, advance patrols of the American 11th Armored Division
came upon Mauthausen in Austria.
There they found more than 110,000
desperate so-called "enemies of the Reich,"
men, women and children confined behind barbed wire.
Many were too weak to stand.
Private Burnett Miller of Sacramento was there
and saw it all.
And they had put some signs out,
"Welcome Americans, you've saved us"
and things like this.
And we surrounded the camp
and then, uh, there was a surge of people
who were in fairly good condition begging for food,
and we were giving them what food we had,
and in some cases it overwhelmed their systems
and actually killed them.
I'm sure we were responsible
for the deaths of several hundred people
just by feeding them concentrated food.
We went down in the basement and there were these big furnaces,
and it looked like cordwood piled around
and they were bodies in rigor mortis that they were...
had been preparing to burn in these big furnaces.
And the fellows that went into the other barracks
came away just shocked, some of them very, very sick.
The hospital there, people dying just thick
and people couldn't get out of their bunks
and people in terrible condition.
And then later there was a big trench,
and it was filled with bodies.
Some were dying, some were trying to steal food
and, uh, the, the guards were dispersed all over and we,
we actually saw a guard move into a house
and we chased him in, and he was an officer.
And the prisoners who were there tore him apart,
just killed him right there.
We lived in Mauthausen,
which was an idyllic little Austrian town on the river,
but you could smell the camp in town.
And all the villagers of course said they didn't know anything
about the camp, and the local priest said
he didn't know anything about the camp,
and I knew that was a lie,
because you could smell the camp.
You could just smell, uh, death.
So it was a horrible, horrible experience.
And then we came, at least I came to think,
"Well, you know, this effort has been worthwhile.
There was a real reason to do this."
These were inhuman things that were being done to people.
NARRATOR: Other Americans were witnessing similar horrors at other camps.
Ray Leopold, a medic from Waterbury and a Jew,
was with the 28th Infantry Division.
We were...
near the Hadamar concentration camp.
At the same time we noticed that up on the hill
that the B�rgermeister described as an insane asylum.
We went up there and found that, true,
they did have an insane asylum there,
at least initially, but it was a place
where there was medical experimentation going on humans.
I really can't tell you what I saw there.
It affected me profoundly,
and I think all the men who were with me at that time
were equally affected.
I, um, I felt that it was too bad
that I was forbidden by the Geneva Convention to kill.
I... I felt that this was the most horrible human experience
that had ever been visited on the face of the earth.
I saw one of those terrible places where they were...
where they had the people that were dying and dead
and bodies stacked like cordwood, cordwood.
That was the little town of Ludwigslust.
And we made the German people in that community
go get those bodies and had a burial in the park
in front of the castle
so that they would never forget it again.
And we gave them a Christian and Jewish burial.
But the people did it.
I mean, we... we made the German people do it.
These people in this country who say it didn't happen...
It happened.
I saw it; I know.
It happened.
NARRATOR: In 1933, there were nine million Jews in Europe.
By 1945, two out of three of them were dead.
Thousands of Jewish communities were wiped
from the face of the earth.
Hitler's regime also slaughtered
nearly two million non-Jewish Poles.
They murdered more than four million Soviet prisoners of war,
as well as hundreds of thousands of handicapped people
and political opponents, homosexuals and gypsies
and Jehovah's Witnesses and slave laborers
from all the countries they'd conquered.
LEOPOLD: How bad it was, how wide it was...
We never really knew how fully extensive
this horror that Hitler had visited on Europe,
and in particular on the Jews, how it was.
But here we began to see.
We had no idea
that there was going to be six million dead Jews as a result.
I... I think the horror is still with me.
I think there's no apology that can ever atone for what I saw.
NARRATOR: On May 8, three days
after Burnett Miller's unit reached Mauthausen,
Germany finally surrendered.
The war in Europe had come to an end.
The Reich that Hitler had promised
would endure for a thousand years
had lasted less than a dozen.
("Waiting for the Train" playing)
(children shouting)
HARRY TRUMAN: General Eisenhower informs me
that the flags of freedom fly all over Europe.
This is a solemn but glorious hour.
I wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived
to see this day.
##
McINTOSH (dramatized): Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
"Unlike New Yorkers, who whooped, hollered,
"and tore up tons of paper to throw in the streets,
"the news here was greeted with quiet dignity
"and reverent restraint.
"One by one, the flags blossomed out on Main Street
"and store by store the employees quietly filed out
"and the business places were locked up for the day.
"But there was no shouting, no hilarious display of any kind.
"Most everybody went home.
"There was quiet exultation over the fact
"that a great victory had been achieved,
"but that rejoicing was tempered by the sobering knowledge
that there was another great war yet to be won."
(machine gun fire, explosions)
SAM HYNES: It didn't really make much difference on Okinawa.
The Japanese were not going to fight any less hard
because Hitler was out of it.
(machine gun fire)
I suppose there was a certain satisfaction
that we'd beaten that lot
and could now turn our attention entirely to this lot,
but aside from that,
I don't think there was much excitement.
EUGENE SLEDGE (dramatized): "Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon.
On Okinawa, no one cared much."
"We were resigned only to the fact
"that the Japanese would fight to total extinction
"as they had elsewhere, and that Japan would have to be invaded
with the same gruesome prospects."
Eugene Sledge.
NARRATOR: The battle for Okinawa was not going well.
The Marines had cleared the northern and central parts
of the island by mid-April.
But in the south, the Army had been unable
to blast the Japanese from their main defensive positions,
a succession of limestone ridges around the walled town of Shuri.
The Navy, battered daily offshore
by kamikazes and other Japanese warplanes,
demanded that the Army
undertake a landing behind the Japanese lines
so that they could be attacked from two sides simultaneously.
The Army commander refused.
And on the first of May,
the First Marine Division, Eugene Sledge's outfit,
to shore up the center of the American line.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "A column of men approached us on the other side of the road
"from the 106th Regiment, 27th Infantry Division,
"that we were relieving.
"Their tragic expressions revealed where they had been.
"They were dead beat, dirty and grisly,
"hollow-eyed and tight-faced.
"As they filed past us, one tall, lanky fellow caught my eye
"and said in a weary voice, 'It's hell up there, Marine.'
"I said with some impatience,
"'Yeah, I know. I was at Peleliu.'
He looked at me blankly and moved on."
NARRATOR: Japanese shells shrieked down
as the Marines struggled to find cover.
Friends died, old friends
who had fought alongside Sledge on Peleliu.
"Replacement lieutenants were killed or wounded
with such regularity," he remembered,
"that we rarely saw them on their feet
"more than once or twice,
and never got to know their names."
Get down, get down.
The Marines inched their way toward Shuri,
blasting and burning the enemy out of their hiding places
one ridge, one village, one gulley at a time.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "I found it more difficult to go back
"each time we squared away our gear to move forward.
"The increasing dread of going back into action obsessed me.
"It became the subject of the most tortuous and persistent
"of all the ghastly war nightmares
that have haunted me for many, many years."
"The dream is always the same, going back up to the lines
during the bloody month of May on Okinawa."
HYNES: Terrible things happened at Okinawa.
But a man in an airplane above the battle
doesn't see the terrible things.
What I saw was drifting smoke, explosions.
You see destruction.
You can imagine the devastation, but you don't exactly see it.
You don't see the dead civilians who died in their thousands.
You don't see the dead Japanese.
You don't even see your own dead.
I dropped some bombs on buildings that blew up.
If there was anybody in them,
I suppose I killed somebody.
I don't know.
I'd like to think I didn't...
but that's what I was being paid for, was to kill people.
(indistinct shouting)
NARRATOR: Eugene Sledge and his fellow Marines were now pinned down,
just 20 yards from enemy lines and under fire from three sides,
on the slope of Sugar Loaf Hill, the key to the defense of Shuri.
Artillery shells uncovered half-buried Japanese corpses
and tore dead Marines into pieces.
Rain pounded down, more than a foot of it in a week,
washing maggots and feces into the Marines' foxholes.
The stench was overpowering.
There was no relief from any of it, day after day.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "If a Marine slipped and slid
"down the back slope of the muddy ridge,
he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting."
"I saw more than one man stand up horror-stricken
"as fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets,
"cartridge belt, legging lacings and the like.
"We didn't talk about such things.
"They were too horrible and obscene
"even for hardened veterans.
I believed we had been flung into hell's own cesspool."
NARRATOR: Nearly 3,000 Americans died taking Sugar Loaf Hill...
more per square foot than anywhere else in the war.
In late May, the Japanese began a carefully staged withdrawal
slipping back ten miles or so to their last redoubt,
another series of ridges at the island's southern end.
It would be three more weeks before its last defenders
were killed and their commanders committed suicide.
By then, 92,000 Japanese soldiers
and as many as 100,000 Okinawan civilians were dead.
Of the 235 members of Eugene Sledge's Company K
who landed on Okinawa, just 26 emerged unhurt.
Of the 254 men brought in to replace those who had fallen,
only 24 remained.
In the end,
more than 12,000 Americans died,
60,000 were wounded...
the worst losses of the Pacific war.
Among the dead were Private First Class J.J. McCarthy
of Waterbury; Sergeant Jeff Fleming of Sacramento;
Private First Class Lowell Reu of Luverne,
and Private Ernest Roy of Mobile.
As the Allies prepared to move on to Japan itself,
still more terrible losses seemed inevitable.
HYNES: We were told
that in the invasion of Japan,
we would be the first land-based single engine bombing squadron.
To go in, be in on the invasion of the Japanese home island.
That would be heroic stuff.
But at the same time, by then, our sense of the strangeness
of the Japanese opposition had become stronger.
And I could imagine every farmer with his...
with his pitchfork
coming at my guts;
every pretty girl with a hand grenade
strapped to her bottom or something...
That everyone would be an enemy.
NARRATOR: The Allies planned to begin
with the island of Kyushu on November 1, 1945.
More than 500,000 Japanese troops
were already in position to repel them...
and another six million were either under arms
or ready to be called up.
Women and schoolchildren were drilling
with sharpened bamboo spears.
The Americans did not expect
to be able to move against the larger island of Honshu
until April of 1946.
Former president Herbert Hoover headed a commission
that suggested half a million Americans might die
before the islands could be taken...
along with perhaps seven million more Japanese.
Military planners came up with different estimates,
was that the cost in casualties was likely to be astronomical.
The end of the war in the Pacific
still seemed very far away.
G.I.'s who had once talked of getting "Home Alive in '45"
began to coin new slogans: "Back in the Sticks in '46,"
"Back to Heaven in '47 "... even "Golden Gate in '48."
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: The soviet premier, the remaining member
of the original Roosevelt- Churchill-Stalin Big Three.
Now President Truman greets Prime Minister Attlee.
And the conference of the Big Three at Potsdam
sets the policy of the Allied powers.
NARRATOR: In mid-July, the Allies met in Germany, at Potsdam,
and set forth the terms
under which they would agree to end the war.
Japan's leaders would have to abandon
every inch of their empire,
face trial for war crimes,
submit to being disarmed, and agree to American occupation
until a new, democratically elected government
could be established.
Unless they agreed to all of it,
the declaration warned, they could expect
"the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland."
Japan chose not to respond to the Allied ultimatum,
and tried instead to persuade Russia,
which had never declared war on Japan,
to broker more favorable surrender terms.
For most of Japan's leaders...
despite the agony the Japanese people were enduring,
despite the even greater agony that seemed sure to come...
unconditional surrender still remained unthinkable.
MAN: Yeah!
NARRATOR: On July 15, 1945,
the USS Indianapolis,
her repairs now complete and ready to go back to war,
received orders to pick up special cargo
at Hunters Point, California.
MAURICE BELL: 'Course, we had no idea what the cargo was.
Well, there was all kind of rumors went on
aboard ship, uh, what we was delivering.
There was one rumor that's very outstanding in my mind,
and this rumor just flew all over the ship
was that we was delivering scented toilet paper
to General MacArthur.
And they picked certain men on the ship
to load and unload this,
and they picked me.
So I helped load it.
##
(music ends)
NARRATOR: On July 26,
the Indianapolis delivered its mysterious cargo
to the B-29 base on Tinian.
##
Then she set out for the Philippines.
Four days later, in the middle of the night,
disaster struck.
BELL: A few minutes after midnight,
there was a loud explosion on there.
It knocked me out of my bunk.
and the first thing that passed... went through my mind
was that a... a boiler had blown up.
(explosion)
NARRATOR: A Japanese submarine
had sent two torpedoes
hissing into the hull of the Indianapolis.
They cut it nearly in half.
1,196 men were aboard.
Within the first few minutes,
some 300 of them were blown apart
or burned to death.
The captain ordered the rest...
nearly 900 men... to abandon ship.
BELL: I estimated I was about 25 to 30 feet up in the air
when I jumped.
I put my foot against the side of the ship and pushed
and started swimming, because I was told that, uh,
the best thing to do is to get away from a ship...
as it went under, it would create, uh, tremendous suction.
So as I pushed with my foot and started swimming,
when I did, the ship just shot away from me
as it was going under.
NARRATOR:Within 12 minutes,
the Indianapolis sank from sight.
The men were alone now,
scattered across miles of dark, empty sea.
Many men were badly wounded.
Some had broken limbs.
Able-bodied survivors did what they could in the dark
to fashion floats for them,
tying together life rafts as floating beds.
Morning brought worse horrors.
BELL: When daylight came, you look around,
all you could see was just the group that I was in.
There was probably over a hundred men
in that group to start with.
Just shortly after daylight, somebody yelled...
yelled out real loud, "Sharks!"
And sure enough, there were sharks swimming all around us.
And, uh, those sharks would swim around us,
and then, uh, all of a sudden, they would dive in on us
and start attacking guys.
And, uh...
you'd see them attack somebody
over just a short... just a few feet from you,
and, of course, they'd grab them,
and down they'd go, and you'd never see that... man again.
All you would see then
would be the water turning red around them.
They attacked us every day,
several times a day.
Some of the sharks swimming three or four feet of me,
but none ever touch me.
NARRATOR: No one came to rescue them.
Distress signals from the sinking ship
had been dismissed as Japanese trickery.
BELL: I stayed in the water for four days and five nights...
a little over a hundred hours, altogether...
with nothing to eat or no fresh water to drink.
Some of the guys just went completely out of their head.
Didn't even know where they was at.
They would feel that fr... cold water down at their feet,
and they'd dive down there and drink it,
thinking they was back aboard ship.
And they'd come back up and describe...
that, uh, "Come on down below."
They thought they was on the ship.
"Come on down... at the officer's quarters,
there's water fountains up there with ice water all the time."
NARRATOR: When the Navy finally did come upon them on August 2,
only 321 men remained alive.
Some 880 crewmen died.
BELL: Some of the things
that I actually went through out there,
it just seems more like a dream... sometimes.
I wonder how I made it through.
I tell everybody now
that I was too sour for the sharks to eat.
NARRATOR: On August 5,
three days after the rescue of the Indianapolis survivors,
the unknown object they had delivered to Tinian
was placed aboard a B-29
named for the mother of its pilot...
the Enola Gay.
It was an atomic bomb.
It had originally been intended for use against the Germans,
who had been feverishly working to make a bomb of their own,
but it had not been ready for delivery
before they surrendered.
The American bomb had been developed
under such strict secrecy that the new president
had never heard of the project before he assumed office.
But once he was told about it,
Truman approved the bomb's use as soon as it was ready.
At 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945,
the bomb tumbled through the bomb-bay doors
of the Enola Gay.
43 seconds later,
six miles below
but still high above the city of Hiroshima,
it detonated, changing the world forever.
(explosion)
(rumbling continues)
(rumbling fading out slowly)
With a single bomb, 40,000 men, women and children
were obliterated in an instant.
100,000 more would die within days
of burns and radiation.
Another hundred thousand would succumb
to radiation poisoning over the next five years.
##
More than half a century later,
citizens of Hiroshima would still be dying
from the bomb's long-delayed side effects.
Despite the devastation,
the Japanese still would not accept
the Allied surrender terms.
Then on August 8,
the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.
The islands now faced invasion on two fronts.
At 11:02 the following morning,
an American plane dropped a second atomic bomb
on the city of Nagasaki.
Some 40,000 more civilians died instantly.
The Americans had no more such bombs
and would be unable to produce another for several months.
But the Japanese had no way of knowing that.
In Tokyo, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War
remained split between those still determined to fight on
and those willing, finally, to give up.
That evening, all six members of the council
called upon the emperor,
who broke the deadlock.
Japan would surrender.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Everything was set
for the landings in Japan.
So when the atomic bomb was dropped
and it ended it so quickly, we were stunned
but rejoiced.
Our boys would come home!
There wouldn't be any more of them killed.
You can never convince anyone of my generation
that the atomic bomb was not the greatest thing
(laughs): that they ever came up with,
because we'll defy you.
It was just finally the end of that horrible war.
RAY LEOPOLD: I had very mixed feelings about it.
That the atom bomb...
could be blasted on fellow humans
whose blood is as red as mine,
whose skin blisters as readily as mine does...
was something I had hoped could be avoided.
Of course, there is the mathematical odds
that by killing some...
quarter million... Japanese,
we may have saved half a million American lives.
Mathematically, that's a good thing.
But it's hard to give up someone else's life.
NARRATOR: After Japan gave up, the guards at Glenn Frazier's prison camp
had simply walked away.
He and his comrades wandered out
among a dazed civilian population...
and took the train to Tokyo and freedom.
EUGENE SLEDGE (dramatized): "We thought the Japanese would never surrender.
"Many refused to believe it.
"Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead.
"So many dead.
"Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,
"the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent,
trying to comprehend a world without war."
Eugene Sledge.
("Every Tub" playing)
(cheering)
##
EARL BURKE: V-J Day... I was in San Francisco
and it just blew up!
People come out of everywhere:
out of every window, out of every door.
They came out of the sewer.
You could cop a feel going down the street
and nobody would say a word.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Well, my dad was so excited that he ran in the room
and he got his pistol from World War I and he filled it
and we went out of the front door,
and if you go dig around that azalea bush,
I know the bullets are still in the azalea bush.
He fired six rounds into the azalea bush,
brought the pistol back in the house
and said to my brother and I, "Come on, gang,"
and "We're going downtown."
And he threw mother in the car
and we drove down to Admiral Semmes' statue.
And daddy circled it three or four times honking his horn.
So by the time we left downtown,
people were climbing up Admiral Semmes' statue
and the celebration had begun.
But I've always said
my daddy started the celebration for V-J day.
NARRATOR: In Waterbury, Connecticut,
newsboys peddling a special "War's Over" edition
of the Waterbury American were on the street
within 60 seconds of the president's formal announcement.
Every firehouse siren
and factory whistle in town began to blow.
ANNE DeVICO: We didn't even know the people.
We didn't know who they were and they didn't know who we were.
It was just a joyous time.
It was a happy, happy time 'cause we're thinking,
"Well, now all our boys are going to come home."
(bell tolls)
NARRATOR: That evening, special services were held
at every Waterbury church and synagogue.
As a sign of profound gratitude for the good news,
some Italian-American women climbed the hill
to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on their knees.
OLGA CIARLO: It was a happy time for a lot of people.
It was a happy time for us, too, to know that the war was over
for other boys, too, that were there.
But it wasn't so happy for us
because we knew my brother wasn't coming home.
NARRATOR: Private Babe Ciarlo of Waterbury had been killed in Italy
during the Anzio break-out in late May of 1944.
His mother had refused to believe it,
poring over newspaper photographs
in hopes of glimpsing him,
insisting the Army had made an error,
that somehow her son would still be coming home to her.
Eventually, long after the war, he did.
OLGA: I think the worst day was when they brought his body back.
And we went down to the railroad station
and when they took his body off the train and we were all there,
we all went to the cemetery,
when they handed my mother the flag...
##
FRAZIER: We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge
and into San Francisco Bay...
and as we approached the pier,
there... I get a little choked up...
there was the American flag
flying high in the breeze over American soil,
and it was the most gratifying thing
'cause we never dreamed we would ever get back.
And there was a bunch of prisoners of war on there.
couldn't even see anything... with tears in our eyes.
And as we docked, I was one of the...
I was the second one to get off.
And I get down on the ground, I kissed the ground.
And every one of the prisoners of war that was on that ship
got off the gangplank and kissed the ground.
was just clapping their hands every time
and welcomed us home.
And it was the greatest feeling in the world.
NARRATOR: Glenn Frazier's family back in Fort Deposit, Alabama,
had officially been informed that he had died
in the Philippines.
(phone ringing)
FRAZIER: We were told we could make a phone call home
at the expense of the government.
So I made my phone call to my home.
And the phone was answered by my mother.
And I told her who it was,
and now I didn't know anything about all these,
the... the letters
and the guy coming there, you know,
telling them I was dead.
So she answered the phone
and then she fainted, and the phone went dead.
And then her sister, who was there visiting,
and she fainted when I told her who it was.
And then my oldest sister came to the phone and she fainted.
So then there was a long pause and my daddy answered the phone.
He said, "Who in the world is this?"
And so I told him
and I used my middle name at home.
It was Dowling.
And he said, "Well," he said, "I knew you weren't dead."
But he said, "Look like I've got a bunch of dead women here."
He said, "I've got to get them up off the floor."
So he said, "Now, you hold on. Don't... don't go away now.
I'll be back in a minute."
So he goes and gets a pitcher of water
and he's pouring some water in their face.
Come back to the phone and he said,
"I think they're waking up. Their eyes are moving.
He said, "They'll be able to talk to you in a little bit."
And that's when they knew I was in San Francisco.
NARRATOR: By the fall of 1945, 750,000 service personnel
were returning to civilian life every month.
("It's Been a Long, Long Time" playing)
BING CROSBY: # Kiss me once, then kiss me twice #
# Then kiss me once again #
# It's been a long, long time #
# Haven't felt like this, my dear #
# Since I can't remember when #
# It's been a long, long time #
# You'll never know how many dreams #
# I dreamed about you #
# Or just how empty they all seemed without you #
# So kiss me once, then kiss me twice #
# Then kiss me once again #
# It's been a long, long time... #
# Long, long time #
TOM GALLOWAY: Certainly when you come home, it, uh, it's an occasion.
I didn't know how to really react to it because...
you'd seen a lot of things that,
that, uh, you didn't ever think you'd see.
But in any event, it, other than, uh,
I'll never forget my mother wanted to see.
For instance, I was just sitting there with my shoes on.
And she wanted to see that I had all my limbs and everything.
(laughs)
That I still had my feet.
And, uh, yeah, she stayed with me a good while
till I showed her that I had... had all my parts on me.
LEOPOLD: No matter how great, no matter how small,
no matter how indifferent, no matter how stupendous,
regardless of the facts, home has a unique quality
that just cannot be exceeded.
Home is the ultimate value that humans venerate.
NARRATOR: The war had rescued Waterbury, Connecticut,
and the industries that had provided
its nickname: "Brass City."
And at first, its workers returned
to making the screws and washers and buttons,
showerheads and alarm clocks,
toy airplanes and lipstick holders
and cocktail shakers they'd been making before Pearl Harbor.
But as the years went by, the brass industry declined.
So did Brass City.
Ray Leopold came home for a time, then moved away,
went into business
and eventually became a fund-raiser for charity.
LEOPOLD: I ran into a young man who was the brother of a young man
I had known reasonably well.
He said, "What outfit were you with, Ray?"
And I told him that I was with the 28th Infantry.
He said, "My brother was with that outfit."
And I said, "Where is your brother?"
He said, "Oh, he didn't make it.
"He's dead.
He was killed in action."
And then he turned, he says,
"You were with the 28th, too, and you are home and he isn't."
He couldn't get over the idea
that someone so dear to him as his brother couldn't make it...
and someone who is more or less
an indifferent third person made it.
AANENSON: There are casualties in war
that... they never show up as casualties.
They're internal casualties.
We all changed.
We went out as a bunch of kids.
Wars are fought by kids.
And we came back...
looked maybe the same, but inside we were so different.
They thought we were just odd, I guess.
"What's happened to Quent?
And I was wondering, "Nobody knows, nobody understands,"
and I am not good enough with words
to be able to tell 'em.
NARRATOR: Quentin and Jackie Aanenson did not return
to his father's farm south of Luverne.
He went to Louisiana State University instead
and eventually entered the insurance business.
AL McINTOSH (dramatized): "Luverne, Minnesota.
"October 25, 1945.
"A lad who was one of the 'living dead'
"has returned to his home... very much alive
"and bubbling over with high spirits.
"To look at Sergeant Frank Lane with his 160 pounds,
"you'd never realize now
"that he was one of those emaciated, tortured souls
"who survived by some miracle,
"the horror of that 'Death March' at Bataan.
"And in some ways, returning to the States and to Luverne
"is like rising again from the dead
"because he has to acquaint himself with so many things
that have happened in this changing world."
"He has a lot of brushing up to do
because nearly four whole years have gone out of his life..."
"Four years in which he descended
"into a black hole of silence,
"knowing nothing about what was going on in the world
"except that it was a terrible struggle
to just barely survive."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
NARRATOR: More than 1,000 citizens of Rock County, Minnesota,
served in uniform during the war.
32 of them lost their lives.
The names of all those who served were carefully painted
on a wooden roll of honor in front of city hall in Luverne.
As the years passed, Minnesota winters wore away the names.
One year, the monument was taken down
to be repainted and repaired.
Somehow, it was lost.
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER: Our hope was we were going to have a new life,
and I remember driving up on the day
that we drove through to the ranch.
And it was like being in Alice in Wonderland.
It was absolutely amazing.
NARRATOR: Sascha Weinzheimer and her family,
who had nearly starved to death as prisoners of the Japanese
in Manila, settled on their late grandfather's farm
in the Sacramento Valley.
WEINZHEIMER: It was some sort of, um, cultural shock coming back,
because your body's here, but your mind isn't.
And to have to put up with the stupidity
of some of the Americans that have been living here.
They'd walk into a room
and say, "Oh, tell us about your experience."
And then immediately they'd say,
"Um, we had these coupons
"that had to be, you know, uh, rationed,
and then we couldn't go here because of the gasoline."
And so we just sort of avoided everything.
And when people were talking to us about our experience,
because it... they didn't want to hear it, anyway.
NARRATOR: Sacramento's wartime transformation
from small-town state capital to big city would prove permanent.
State government grew, too.
So did the military bases on Sacramento's outskirts
as the world war was eventually supplanted by the cold war.
Among the Sacramentans returning home
were thousands of Japanese-Americans
newly freed from the inland camps
in which they had been imprisoned
for no other reason than their ancestry.
They struggled to recover their property
and rebuild their lives.
The men of the 100th 442nd Combat Team came home, too.
Robert Kashiwagi, wounded four times in Italy and France,
got a job with the California Highway Department.
KASHIWAGI: When I showed up in the shop,
this one fellow from the floor went to his foreman,
"Look, if that Jap is gonna work here," he says, "I'm quitting."
And this foreman told me that.
And I says, "Well, you know, I passed my test
"and I served overseas and I think I did
"what I was supposed to do, so I'm going to hold my position
and I'm going to remain here, you know?"
And so, as I remained there, why, he quit.
And then everything turned a little bit better
as time went on, and it got easier and easier for me.
And so I was able to serve 32 years and retire.
EUGENE SLEDGE (dramatized): "The train trip home was a nostalgic one for me.
"I was a proud American, of course,
but I was also a terribly homesick Southerner."
"A porter came through our car
"calling, 'Next stop, Mobile! Next stop, Mobile!'
"My buddies shouted, 'That's you, Sledgehammer.'
"A thrill ran through me.
"There were countless times it looked as though
"I would never live to see the next moment,
"much less live to make it.
"And now, here we were, rolling into the L & N Station.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: When Eugene came back from the war,
he came directly here to see us.
I remember him well,
coming in with his uniform and all of his ribbons and all.
And I thought, my, you certainly are handsome!
I do remember thinking that, how he had grown up.
He was no longer that little young friend
of my young brother Sidney.
I suddenly had these two men in my presence,
and I had that feeling about both of 'em.
Uh, it was written on their faces.
Their faces changed.
They just no longer looked like boys.
They looked like men, which they were.
NARRATOR: The war had made Mobile into a boomtown.
But by the time Eugene Sledge came home,
some 40,000 defense jobs had already disappeared.
Some workers left the city for the small towns
where they'd been living when the war began.
Others moved north and west to bigger cities in search of work.
Returning black veterans, who had fought for freedom overseas,
found themselves facing the same segregation
they had left behind.
JOHN GRAY: It would be a matter of disgust and distaste with you
when you found out
that the fruits of victory were not yours.
I never did appreciate going to work at night.
And the police officer would stop you at night and say,
"Hey, boy, where you going?"
And you come up to, uh, to answer him.
"You got your hat on.
Take your hat off when you talk to a white man."
And that kind of stuff, uh...
And I'd worked all night, just about, at the railroad.
And didn't have a car, so I had to walk home.
I cried all the way home.
It was, it was hurt.
NARRATOR: John Gray eventually went on to college, became a teacher
and then a beloved school principal and community leader
for 50 years in Mobile.
Katharine Phillips briefly became an airline stewardess
and married a former Navy pilot.
Her younger brother Sid,
who had encountered terrible suffering
while serving with the First Marine Division
and vowed to find a way to do something about it,
went on to medical school and became a doctor.
But there was one person for whom he could do nothing.
SID PHILLIPS: My friend Eugene was probably as good a friend
as I've ever had in my whole life,
but, uh, he could not throw off the war.
He could not forget it.
It seemed to, uh, uh, to haunt him.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "As I strolled the streets of Mobile,
"civilian life seemed so strange.
"People rushed around in a hurry
"about seemingly insignificant things.
"Few seemed to realize how blessed they were to be free
and untouched by the horrors of war."
"To them, a veteran was a veteran; all were the same,
"whether one man had survived the deadliest combat
or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform."
NARRATOR: Eugene Sledge had been an enthusiastic hunter
before the war.
Now he found he no longer had the heart for it.
In combat, he had felt the same terror his targets felt
when he fired at them, he said,
and he couldn't bear it that they could not shoot back.
Nightmares plagued him.
He earned a business degree under the G.I. Bill,
tried the insurance business and abandoned it,
eventually became a biologist and teacher.
"Science was my salvation," he remembered.
"It helped keep at bay the flashbacks
from Peleliu and Okinawa."
"Close, constant study of nature," his wife said,
"kept him from going mad."
But the war remained with him nonetheless.
He still had the tiny sheets of paper
on which he'd kept a journal in the Pacific,
and finally, at his wife's urging,
he turned it into a combat memoir called
With the Old Breed.
Describing the horrors he had endured
eventually allowed him to begin to put them behind him.
Eugene Sledge died in 2001.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "Until the millennium arrives
"and countries cease to enslave others, it will be necessary
"to accept one's responsibility to,
to make sacrifices for, one's country as my comrades did."
"War is brutish, inglorious and a terrible waste.
"Combat leaves an indelible mark
"on those who are forced to endure it.
"The only redeeming factors were my comrades' incredible bravery
and their devotion to each other."
Eugene Sledge.
FRAZIER: My hometown just gave me a hero's welcome.
Couldn't ask for anybody to be any nicer to you.
But, uh, little did you know what was ahead.
And, uh, I didn't until it started happening to me.
NARRATOR: Glenn Frazier and his brother O'Vaughn, who had served
with the Army in North Africa and Italy,
happened to arrive home in Fort Deposit, Alabama, the same day.
Their mother, Frazier recalled, seemed "dazed"
to have both her boys back, but she remembered
to give each of them the little pile of Christmas packages
she'd bought and wrapped
but had been unable to send them during the war.
When the boys stepped out into the street,
they were mobbed by friends and neighbors
happy to have them home.
Before Frazier joined the Army in 1941,
he had confessed to a high-school classmate
that he loved her.
She had waited patiently for him for over three years,
until the Army formally told his family Glenn was dead.
Frazier now eagerly asked after her.
Hope that he and she would one day marry
had helped sustain him in captivity.
"I hate to tell you this," a friend told him,
"but she's getting married this coming Sunday."
That night, the nightmares began.
FRAZIER: It was just like real life again.
It was just so real.
It sort of kept me from sleeping.
I got to the point where I didn't even want to go to sleep.
My nerves were bothering me.
You couldn't tell anybody.
In those days, if you were seeing a psychiatrist,
it didn't make any difference whether it was military or what,
nobody'd give you a job.
NARRATOR: Psychiatrists working for the Veterans Administration
were of little help.
"Just act normal and you'll feel normal," they told him.
Frazier eventually married, had two children,
ran his own trucking business.
But the war would not go away.
FRAZIER: I hated the Japanese as hard as anybody,
I believe, could ever hate for so long.
And mine was as deep.
I think I was justified in the hate that I had.
But it come a time when it wasn't,
it wasn't affecting them.
They didn't even know I existed.
They were over there and having their fun
and getting their things, their country straightened out.
And here I am over here, I'm hating and hating and hating
and having the nightmares and so forth.
And it, it... I had to get rid of it.
I had to throw it off
because it was just completely destroying me.
And I prayed and... and with the preacher's help,
I got to the point to where I woke up one morning
and I felt a little bit of... more rested.
But my war lasted actually another 30 years.
PAUL FUSSELL: To forget the war would be, not just impossible,
it would be immoral.
It doesn't get to me very often
except when I talk about it like this
and I seldom do that, actually.
It's just something, it never goes away.
It's something you have to endure
the way you endured the war itself.
There's no alternative.
You can't wipe out these memories.
You can't wipe out what you felt at that time
It's just part of, it's part of your whole possession of life.
And I suppose it does some good.
NARRATOR: For all those Americans
who lived through the terrible conflict,
for those whose fathers and sons
and brothers were lost or maimed,
as well as for those whose only contact with combat
was listening to the radio and reading the local paper,
it remains to this day, simply, "The War."
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: The young men that came home from the war were my neighbors
when I was a young married woman, and they lived the war.
They married, they established homes.
We all lived in a wonderful little neighborhood
where the homes were built for the G.I.'s.
And every night after we would get the children to bed,
we would all gather and the boys would exchange stories.
That was the great way of entertaining ourselves.
The boy next door to me
had ridden with Patton across Europe.
The boy across the street went in on D-Day plus four,
hanging on to a machine gun on a half-track,
and he said he was four miles inland
before he could pry his hands off the half-track.
He was scared out of his wits.
The boy catty-cornered had been a medic
and had survived battles in Europe.
And we would just sit and listen, we wives.
We learned more about our husbands and what they did
by listening to them exchange stories.
But I realize, as I've gotten older,
this was a healing for them.
AANENSON: The dynamics of war are so absolutely intense,
the drama of war is so absolutely,
emotionally spellbinding,
that it's hard for you to go on with a normal life
without feeling something is missing.
Now, I have had a wonderful life.
I have a family that just is ideal,
and, uh, I've enjoyed my life.
But I find there are times
when I am pulled back into the whirlpool.
I find that the intensity of that experience
was so overwhelming
and almost intimidating,
that you can't quite let go of it.
AL McINTOSH (dramatized): "Luverne, Minnesota.
"All week long, with 'Silent Night'
"running through my head,
I've been groping for a Christmas story."
"Somehow, the story always eluded me."
"A lot of servicemen have been in.
"They told us where they spent last Christmas overseas.
But you didn't need to write a story about them."
"The story of their happiness about being home
was written all over their faces for the world to see."
"And now comes the time when it comes our turn
"to extend our Christmas greetings
to each and every one of you."
"May the joy of Christmas, and a big share of its peace
"and beauty, be with you all,
every single day of the new year to come."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
NORAH JONES: # For those who think they have nothing to share #
# Who fear in their hearts there is no hero there #
# Know each quiet act of dignity #
# Is that which fortifies #
# The soul of a nation #
# That will never die #
# Let them say of me #
# I was one who believed #
# In sharing the blessings #
# I received #
# Let me know in my heart #
# When my days are through #
# America, America #
# I gave my best to you... #
# America... #
# I gave my best to you #
Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH Ripped by stlc8tr!