Other wars have been photographed.
World War II was covered from start to finish,
in every service, in every theater.
For the first time in history, civilians knew something
of how their sons, husbands and brothers
lived and died in this vast crucible.
The images of this war burned our eyes and spirits
and welded us together.
I loved it because it was dangerous.
I'm a fraidy-cat,
but if there was a job to do, I did it.
No matter how horrible the action was
that you were covering,
when you looked through that glass,
that glass was your filter.
I got carried away one time
and got out in front of the gun,
shooting the gun firing, and that was a big mistake,
because the muzzle blast got me and knocked me about 40 feet,
ass over tea kettle.
We hit an intersection where we were shot at.
The bullets just whizzed by us into the cab of the truck.
When you're bailing out of that airplane,
and you're on the way down, you say, "Oh, no. Oh, no."
But shells... You can't see anything.
You want to yell, "Stop. This is... I'm here."
Those are some of the men who took the pictures
by which we remember World War II.
Some of their images are immortal.
Many have been hidden in the archives for decades.
But whether their pictures are famous or not,
what you are about to see is unique.
War stories backed by the irrefutable evidence
of the films they made.
In their hands,
the camera became a weapon more potent than the rifle,
a weapon whose impact resonates even more powerfully now
as memory is transformed into history.
[Tom Hanks] In 1941, we were as unprepared to photograph war
as we were to wage it.
When John Ford made his film on Pearl Harbor,
the Japanese attack was recreated out of special effects,
intercut with old newsreel footage...
and a few feet of the real thing.
Men, man your battle stations. God bless you.
[Bugle blowing]
[Hanks] The great Hollywood cameraman Gregg Toland
restaged these scenes months after Pearl Harbor.
The actors are obviously amateurs,
but they are real sailors.
The attacking planes were the contribution
of the 20th Century-Fox special effects department.
In this outtake,
you can see the wires supporting the model Zero.
Ford organized his field photographic branch
before the war, as part of the O.S.S.
Toland's crew set fire to crashed planes,
adding drama to his footage.
But his first cut, a feature-length fictional parable
about American unpreparedness
was judged unreleasable.
Ford now took a more active hand,
cutting December 7th to 34 minutes.
He retained much of the miniature footage, also made at Fox.
This material, never before seen,
was shot in color,
though the film was released in black and white.
This is Hollywood's version
of Pearl Harbor's battleship row,
and the Ford-Toland version of the attack on it.
There was authentic footage of the battleship Nevada trying to escape,
but Ford preferred this reconstruction.
It matched the rest of his fake footage better.
Besides, his goal was not strict authenticity.
He was out to stir the nation.
There was enough reality in his film
to win an Academy Award for Best Short Subject.
As Toland and Ford worked on their film in spring 1942,
America mounted its first aggressive response to Pearl Harbor,
a navy task force under Admiral Bull Halsey.
It carried James Doolittle's fliers
and 16 B-25s aboard the Hornet.
Hal Kempe was a photographer's mate on the newly commissioned ship.
[Kempe] I've heard many stories.
Some of them say that we slipped out under the cover of darkness.
We went under the Golden Gate Bridge at noon,
and we had the planes lined up
from one end of the flight deck to the other,
and it looked like a ferry trip.
After we were at sea for about two or three days,
they re-spotted the flight deck.
They took each B-25... they are tricycle landing gear...
and placed them with their tails
extending out over the flight deck at the edge.
They put one on each port and starboard side
until the lead plane had sufficient run for his takeoff.
[Hanks] That was one-third the normal takeoff distance.
The raiders were spotted by Japanese picketboats.
They were sunk, but might have radioed a warning.
There was no choice but to launch the attack prematurely.
[Kempe] They said, "Army pilots, man your planes. We're going to launch. "
So we were launching eight hours too soon.
Doolittle was first.
Boom, he went, and the rest of the crews are wondering,
"Can it be done?"
[Hanks] The raiders, all volunteers,
had practiced short-run takeoffs on land.
A few had practiced from a carrier deck, but never in bad weather.
Yet all were safely launched
for their 30 seconds over Tokyo.
Halsey's concern?
The early launch made it impossible for the planes
to make safe landings in China,
yet all but three fliers survived the raid.
It did little damage, except to enemy morale.
[Kempe] They carried four 500-pound bombs each,
and that's not very much when you really look at it,
but it was enough
to put the fear of God into them for a while.
[Hanks] The Doolittle raid
provoked a huge Japanese counterattack aimed at destroying the U.S. Pacific fleet,
but we had broken their code
and knew they would be attacking Midway Island.
This evened the odds for the Hornet
and two other carriers
as they approached the war's first great naval battle.
Midway was a pair of tiny coral atolls
vital to the defense of Hawaii.
This time, John Ford was present with a film crew.
Ford himself operated one of the cameras
and was wounded getting these pictures.
He would win another Oscar
for the film he fashioned from them.
The crucial part of the battle was at sea,
between ships that never saw one another.
[Kempe] They didn't know exactly where the Japanese fleet was,
but our torpedo squadron skipper had an idea
that it was off in a certain direction,
and he went off there.
He ran into the whole bunch of them.
And they lost...
Fifteen or sixteen torpedo planes went down.
[Hanks] These are the men of Torpedo Squadron 8,
who found the Japanese carriers.
They scored no hits, but along with other torpedo planes,
they distracted enemy gunners,
allowing our dive-bombers to sink four carriers.
Only one man, George Gay, on the right, survived.
One of Ford's crew shot these pictures.
The director made them into a short memorial film,
which he sent to the squadron's next of kin.
Midway shifted the balance of naval power in the Pacific.
It cost the Japanese almost half their carriers.
Still, their wounded navy
continued to pose a deadly threat.
October 1942.
The Hornet steams toward the Battle of Santa Cruz
near Guadalcanal.
With her sister ship, the Enterprise,
she was soon fighting off massive assaults from the air.
Just how close the combat often was
is demonstrated by this sequence,
shot from the Enterprise.
A near miss shakes the Enterprise.
An enemy shadow
is cast on the flight deck as the ship fights on.
The camera catches the wild swing of the huge ship
as it takes evasive action.
But still the bombs rain down.
The camera survived this hit, but not the cameraman.
The Hornet did not survive either.
[Kempe] We were listing to the starboard.
Real heavy list.
I went to the fantail to help with the wounded,
where I stayed the rest of the day until we abandoned ship.
And I swam out on the quarter, about 45 degrees out this way,
and got out so far, and here come the destroyers.
I figured, "This is going to be a piece of cake.
Pick us up quick. "
Then they backed down and took off.
The destroyers start circling way out around the ship
and start firing, and I figured, "What are they firing at?"
We started looking in the sky, and coming in on this line...
we had gone out on the fantail...
was a "V" formation of twin-engine bombers coming in,
and you could see the five-inch antiaircraft bursts up there by it.
And they came and... shoop!
Went right over the head, and one hit the fantail back here,
and the rest was in a pattern around the stern of the ship.
And they continued on and never came back.
I got picked up right after that
by the 411 Anderson.
[Hanks] That final bombing run was the coup de grāce.
The next day, the Hornet's short, brave life was ended
when American destroyers sank her.
Our ship had been in commission for one year and six days.
[Hanks] But the carrier war in the Pacific never ceased.
[Kempe] We didn't have motors on the Mitchells,
but you had to hand-crank.
So when we did flight deck operations,
we did not hand-crank at three turns per second
on the small crank.
We used the big crank,
and we would start going up to high speed,
because we'd want slow motion of the crash.
The pilot coming in for landing...
If you see the photographer on the flight deck
start with that big crank, look out, you bought the farm.
[Hanks] The footage Kempe and his colleagues took on the flight decks
forms an eerie ballet of destruction
and of unlikely survival.
By late 1942,
we were officially training combat cameramen.
Standard army issue was the 35-millimeter Eyemo for movies
and the 4x5 Speed Graphic for stills.
Many of the cameramen had been photographers in civilian life.
Hal Roach's Culver City studio
was a major production and training center.
Naturally, the students took pictures of themselves
taking pictures.
Eventually about 1,500 men, not a lot for a war this huge,
would become motion-picture combat cameramen.
Many served in the air force.
On the endless strategic bombing raids over Europe,
they worked as bomb spotters,
recording damage for intelligence analysts.
The oil fields at Ploesti in Rumania
were vital to the German war effort
and among the most bombed targets of the war.
On August 1, 1943,
these B-24s based in Libya
mounted the first major attack on them
at a daring 500 feet.
Then, as later, results were poor.
Ploesti was never knocked out.
Doug Morrell flew later higher-altitude missions over Ploesti.
[Morrell] This mission could be 10 hours long,
but the combat part is only about 10 minutes.
Ten minutes is a long time. Try holding your breath.
The Eyemo had a hand-crank wind on it,
and it seemed like always when the most important thing happened,
you're winding that thing, trying to get it going.
I hated to reload up at 20,000 feet.
Reloading up there, your fingers get a little cold.
When you come into the target,
they put up so much flak
that the enemy fighters won't come in there.
They'll get hit.
Bomb spotting is when the bombs release.
Then you follow them and pick up their hits.
When you get those hits down there, the intelligence can use those.
We were bombing Ploesti, and flak hit us.
We had to drop out of formation.
And then six ME-109s jumped us when we got out of formation.
We were quite a ways away, all by ourselves.
They raked us back and forth and set us on fire.
I opened the bomb bay door.
I was going to jump out there instead of out the back end.
Here's this fire coming. I says, "Oh."
I grabbed a little fire extinguisher, about that long.
I'm starting to pump that. I says, "I better leave."
I went out the back end.
Just as I left out of there, it blew.
We averaged about five out of an airplane.
When I bailed out, I was the last one out,
and then the other five got killed in there.
[Hanks] Another cameraman
who survived the often catastrophic air war was Dan McGovern.
You were so busy,
you weren't thinking about a battle.
You were thinking about helping others and shooting.
In the meantime,
you couldn't become a spectator.
You had to shoot.
If you're flying in a bomber,
there's 10 crew members in a bomber.
You're the 11th man.
So then we had to prove ourselves.
As a matter of fact...
This is a true story, so help me God.
I photographed my own crash landing.
The two engines on the right side, out.
The third engine on the left side, out. One engine.
So I cut to the right, cut to the left,
look over the top,
and the airplane's coming in for a crash landing.
You don't think about it.
You're so excited, you're not scared,
but you're scared after when you come back.
- You're just shaking. - [Hanks] We dropped
over two million tons of bombs on Europe,
but never matched the results promised by air power advocates.
This war, like all wars, would be won on the ground,
as Norman Hatch learned
when he made the Tarawa landing in 1943.
[Hatch] I was with Jim Crow, who was a battalion commander.
He wasn't happy with having me there
because, as he had told me earlier,
he didn't want any Hollywood marines with him.
I testified to him that I was a regular marine, I shot expert.
If I needed a rifle, I could do something with it.
He said, "Come with me, but don't get in my way. "
I was sitting alongside of him, shooting what was going on,
and he observed that his amtracs,
which were the first three waves,
were not maintaining their course.
And because there was a.50-caliber
buried in the sand that was shooting at them,
they kept edging over to the right,
and Crow could see his front disappearing
because of this maneuver.
So he told the coxswain to put the boat in now.
We ran up on the reef. The ramp wouldn't go down.
All of us had to go over the side,
which is difficult to do with 80 pounds of gear on your shoulder.
We got to the beach, and we were exhausted
because you can't walk through water
without having a lot of resistance,
and loaded down with gear and everything else,
it drained you completely.
It took us a couple of minutes on the beach to get oriented.
[Hanks] Hatch was pinned down with the rest of the invaders.
There was nothing to do but shoot.
Combat footage with a previously unknown ferocity.
[Hatch] The emplacements that were there by the Japanese were fantastic.
They built a concrete bunker and covered it with sand.
Then they covered it with logs.
Then they covered that with sand.
They were pretty impregnable.
[Hanks] The Pacific war favored the cameramen.
Spaces were confined,
the action within them tightly focused.
The brutal reality of war revealed itself here
as it rarely did elsewhere.
Hatch caught the marines and their enemy in combat
in the same shot.
[Hatch] That was luck.
I was on top of this enclosure, and somebody said, "Here they come."
I turned, and there it was, and I just kept on shooting.
[Hanks] Had the Japanese mounted a coordinated counterattack on that first day,
they might have driven the marines back into the sea.
But the fighting remained as Hatch's film showed it:
Ferocious yet disorganized.
Most of the Japanese fought to the death.
The marines took only 17 prisoners.
The seas continued to run against reinforcements.
Among them was another cameraman, John Ercole.
[Ercole] We didn't even know what was going on.
We were going nowhere.
The propeller and the tide didn't come together.
I was shooting whatever I could at the time,
faces of people in my own boat and things like that.
Nineteen hours later,
we finally made a landing.
[Hanks] What Ercole found to shoot
was mostly the dead and wounded.
At first their evacuation was poorly handled.
Hatch credits a movie actor with getting things organized.
[Hatch] Eddie Albert was there.
He was a navy JG at the time,
and he was a boat director.
And he discovered early on in the game
that there wasn't too much coordination on getting wounded out,
so he got on the beach himself,
and he stayed there during the worst part of the fighting
and directed the navy boats bringing supplies in
to carry wounded back out to the ships.
[Hanks] As the battle moved inland,
the futility of the preinvasion naval bombardment was obvious.
[Hatch] Their pounding didn't do too much good.
They were using armor-piercing shells,
and there wasn't any armor to pierce.
They were hitting sand and bouncing off
and skittering all over the island.
You'd see 16-inch shells laying all over the place.
Nothing had ever happened with them.
[Ercole] What grabbed me and took hold of me
was the bodies, the dead bodies,
God knows how many marines,
face down, floating in shallow water.
That was the first time that I had really seen dead bodies.
When you see bodies floating in the water,
it really grabs you.
And they all seemed to look like a buddy of mine,
Norman Hatch.
[Hatch] This was a piece of ground
that wasn't as big as Central Park in New York,
and in the course of that 72 hours,
six thousand people died.
Five thousand of those were Japanese.
One thousand were marines.
Then there were another 2,000 wounded.
[Hanks] Passing a disabled tank, Hatch heard this kitten's cry.
At first he thought it might be a wounded enemy,
but it was just another war victim.
He thought he might make a pet of it,
but after getting his drink, the kitten scampered away,
never to be seen again.
The quality of his Tarawa film earned Hatch a trip home,
where this footage of him
was made for an Army-Navy short subject.
[Hatch] We drove down Market Street,
and every major theater had my name on the marquee
as taking the Tarawa film,
and they were running it.
That's the best frame of combat film I've ever seen.
That's okay.
When an army man says that to a marine, he means it.
It was just luck.
[Hanks] A movie cameraman,
a stills man, and a driver.
That's how the Signal Corps
organized its combat photographers in Europe.
[Doug Wood] The cameras we were using
were Eyemo, called a "bomb spotter" camera.
It had a big crank on the side.
You wound it up, and they only had one 2-inch lens.
And if you can believe the running you have to do
to get your long shot, medium shot and close-up
with a two-inch lens,
it was really criminal that they sent us with that kind of stuff.
[Hanks] Yet remarkable things could be done with that equipment.
John Huston, one of several Hollywood directors
who followed John Ford to war,
used it to make what critic James Agee thought
the best of all war documentaries.
Huston would write and speak
the strikingly ironic narration.
[Huston Narrating] Patron saint: Peter.
Point of interest: Saint Peter's, 1438.
Note interesting treatment of chancel.
[Hanks] Huston, however, would find real war
more difficult to direct than the Hollywood kind.
[Huston Narrating] From the end of October 1943
until the middle of December,
San Pietro was the scene of some of the bitterest fighting
on our 5th Army front.
The Italian campaign had entered its second phase:
To push forward again after a static period
brought on by heavy seasonal rain.
[Man] Huston came over, and he had a mission.
[Hanks] That was to make a coherent narrative
of one small battle that would represent the entire war.
[Man] He realized that you have no control.
You shoot what you can get.
You come up, you can fire three rounds and drop.
But you can't get 10 feet of film in the same way.
But if you had control, you can do a lot with an Eyemo.
So he came back.
They gave him two battalions
out of the 36th Division who were on rest and said, "Here it is,"
and he went ahead and staged that whole thing.
He used film that we had shot.
Actual battle film. And he intercut it with what he had.
His stuff was much better than ours.
[Hanks] Ed Montagne has a veteran's genial tolerance
of Huston's tricks.
He used the most picturesque munitions.
He slammed the camera with his hand to simulate explosions.
He even posed American Gls as dead Germans.
[Montagne] But he scared the poor 36th. That was a nervous outfit.
He'd have them going up a hill,
and he'd throw a grenade down the hill
and yell, "Grenade!" And, Christ, they'd dive.
Some of the stuff he got was great.
I admire him for what he did, but I resented the fact
that I would get critiques from New York,
"Huston's men are able to do this. Why can't yours?"
I had the same people.
Didn't speak well of me, did it?
[Hanks] Some of Huston's most moving footage
was of people picking up the pieces,
of life reasserting itself
in the little town of San Pietro.
[Huston Narrating] And the people pray to their patron saint to intercede with God
on behalf of those who came deliberately
and passed on to the north
with the passing battle.
[Choir vocalizing]
[Hanks] By 1944, the combat photographers were everywhere,
even the China-Burma-India theater.
To most Americans, that was the war's most obscure corner.
Hidden behind high mountains and deep jungles,
it was both a political and logistical nightmare.
One air supply route was called "The Aluminum Trail,"
after all the planes downed flying it.
When Generals Joseph Stilwell and Frank Merrill
met to plan a mission against the key Japanese airfield at Myitkyina,
photographer Dave Quaid was there.
[Quaid] When General Stilwell flew off in his little plane,
I went up to Merrill
and I said, "Hey, General,
you mind if I join you guys?"
He said, "Come on along."
[Hanks] Technically, Quaid was AWOL
when he joined Operation Galahad.
He had no idea what he was getting into.
[Quaid] Now we're on this trail that is basically impassable,
and we had to cut steps so even the mules...
The mules that can do anything, handle any terrain,
could not handle this trail.
We ourselves carried so much equipment...
five days' K ration and ammunition
and rifles and, ah...
And I carried a 13-pound camera and 2,400 foot of film.
It got so rugged
that the mules could not make it,
and finally what they had to do
was take the loads and the saddles off the mules.
They would get a GI,
and a bunch of guys would lift this 96-pound saddle
and put it on his back,
and then he would have to climb the steps.
And then when we got to a more level area,
we would load up the mules again.
[Hanks] Quaid tired of repeating
the same front and back angles.
He found a precarious perch in a tree to get this side shot.
[Quaid] The drop is 300 feet.
So I was young then,
and I jumped down and I made the shot.
[Hanks] On the way to Myitkyina, Merrill's Marauders
twice encountered Japanese patrols.
Here you can see an enemy bullet cutting through the brush.
During the skirmish, Quaid stepped into the open
to get this shot of a fallen foe
and the American who killed him.
Probably the dumbest shot I've ever made in my life,
because the Japanese
were so stunned, they didn't fire.
They didn't believe their eyes.
[Hanks] This wilderness trek took six days.
[Quaid] The method of handling malaria was very simple.
Simplest thing in the world.
It's called "walking it out of you."
All our walking wounded from the two battles we had fought
while coming over the mountains were still with us.
[Hanks] The weary Marauders still took the airfield by surprise,
but the Japanese continued to hold the nearby town.
[Quaid] I became fascinated with the 88th Fighter Squadron.
They had death's-heads on their P-40F airplanes.
They were only about a mile and a half
from the Japanese bunkers.
So they could make one climbing turn
and come down right on a bunker.
They were great for support
for the American and Chinese surrounding Myitkyina.
I was always interested
in unique ways of looking at things.
I thought it would be great if I could put my movie camera
into the P-40 on a dive-bombing run.
I see them up there, and I see them make their turn,
and down they go,
and I see him right on the back of the captain going down.
And the captain pulls out after he releases his bomb,
and this guy is still following the bomb down.
And there's this terrific blast,
and I see him trying to fly through the blast.
He can't get any altitude, but he comes in
and crash-lands at the end of the strip.
[Hanks] When the flight leader landed,
Quaid thought a strategic retreat was in order.
He was, after all, responsible for wrecking the plane.
And he says to me,
"Quaid, get out of here!"
He said, "Four more, and you're a Japanese ace!"
[Laughing]
I think it's one of the funniest lines in World War II.
He said, "Aw, Dave, don't take it too much to heart.
We really want to get P-51s. "
[Hanks] June 1944.
The marines land in the Marianas
within bomber range of the Japanese home islands.
The late Richard Brooks
was in charge of collecting the exposed footage.
[Brooks] When the landing boats came in for a landing at the beach,
the cameramen came in first.
They came in first so they could photograph the marines
coming in to make the invasion.
[Hanks] Like John Huston,
Brooks would edit, write and narrate this footage into a great war documentary.
Also, like Huston, he would become an Oscar-winning Hollywood writer-director
after the war.
[Brooks Narrating] The Japs bring down another one of our planes.
A sniper is burned out.
[Gunshot]
A Jap makes a run for it.
[Gunshot]
Lieutenant General Holland Smith, U.S. Marine Corps,
commanding the assault forces.
[Hanks] He was known to his men as "Howlin' Mad" Smith.
Brooks was working up the nerve to ask him a question.
[Brooks] I made sure to get some shots of General Smith
up against the skyline and against the sea.
Walking back to his jeep,
I said, "May I ask you a question, sir?"
He said, "Go ahead. I was a corporal. "
And I said,
"Is there any way, General,
that our combat cameramen can carry side arms?"
He said, "What do you mean?"
I said, "We don't have arms. We just got the camera.
"And if somebody's shooting at you,
it's easier if you can shoot back, even if you don't hit them."
He said, "I don't care if you got film in the camera.
"I want those cameras there, and I want them there all the time.
"Because in front of those cameras,
"whether they got film in them or not,
"those are the eyes of the world,
and there are no cowards in front of a camera. "
[Hanks] John Ercole was again one of the photographers.
[Ercole] The sniper, wherever he was,
I'm in his sights.
And I got to move back and forth in order...
He's trying to hit me in the foot
and keeps hitting the ground.
I'm photographing this tank
where our marines are carrying some badly wounded marines
on their shoulders and using the tank as protection.
[Hanks] The tanks were a key element in the victory.
This footage was shot in color.
But like these pictures from inside a tank,
it was released in black and white.
The last Japanese strongholds were the hills,
honeycombed with caves
from which they had to be painfully rooted out.
[Ercole] The big thing on Saipan
was knocking these guys out up on the rocks.
We had people speaking Japanese trying to get them to give up,
and they were just shooting back.
In the Marine Corps, we took an oath
that you were willing to die to save your buddy
and you're willing to get shot up to save your buddies.
And the Japanese took it a little further.
Their oath was to die rather than give up.
They were told we had to kill our own children
to get in the Marine Corps, or consume our parents as food
and all kinds of stories that these people had been told.
[Hanks] As always, only a handful of Japanese soldiers surrendered.
Mostly it was civilians who gave up.
But even some of them were too terrified to do so.
[Ercole] There's a shot on Saipan where I come across a woman.
There's a cut in the cliff,
and she's maybe 60 yards away from me.
She's got a child standing here,
baby in her hand, and she spots me.
She sees the camera, which is on a gun stock.
She doesn't know it's a camera, so as I raise it up,
she kicks this kid off the cliff,
throws the baby off the cliff, and she takes a dive.
Now, that's all on film.
It only may be... four seconds?
That's the fear that these people were embedded with.
[Hanks] This shot of the dead child,
one of the most pathetic images of the war,
was not released at the time.
These paratroopers would be the first
to breach Hitler's Atlantic wall.
They would land in Normandy
in the predawn darkness of June 6, 1944,
forerunners of history's greatest amphibious landing.
The bombers were next.
Every D day plane carried broad identifying stripes.
This defense against friendly fire
used up all the white paint in England.
Carl Voelker remembers that morning.
[Voelker] On D day, we flew twice.
We went out early in the morning. It was too dark to do much.
I was photographing the bombs going down on the beach.
They brought sandwiches and coffee out to the runway.
We stayed with the plane.
It was rebombed, refueled, and we went back out.
We went across the channel and we saw the boats and ships
from Tortie, which was southern England,
all the way across, and it was quite a sight
to see so much equipment being moved across the channel.
They were bumper-to-bumper.
[Hanks] The troops passed the hours
in the usual pastimes of anxious waiting.
But inescapably, they were alone with their thoughts.
And with the equipment on which,
luck aside, and who dared think about that,
their lives would depend.
In that whole vast armada,
only one creature didn't know what awaited him.
But even he was prepared for the worst.
Still, the choppy channel and the fear took their toll.
As the day brightened, the gliders appeared,
carrying more troops to assault the Germans
from behind their lines.
Then the bombers, flying low, returned.
[Voelker] But the second time, we went over low.
Maybe 5,000 feet. It was exceptional for us.
We never bombed down that low.
[Hanks] Voelker's bomb spotting was also exceptional,
steady and unerring.
[Voelker] In most of the documentaries of World War II,
you'll see a chicken foot impression on the screen.
That day I got static electricity in the camera.
The sparks appear in the gate,
and it's on every foot of film goes through the camera.
That was my D day.
[Hanks] "It was like a thousand 4th of Julys rolled into one, "
an eyewitness said.
But the naval bombardment came too soon.
It was too dark for accuracy, or for Walter Rosenblum's camera.
[Rosenblum] I couldn't go in on the first wave 'cause it was dark.
There was no way I could photograph.
Boats going in, and then the landing craft came back
and loaded up another crew, and I went into that crew.
It's like you see in the movies.
You climb down a rope ladder,
and I went in on one of these landing craft.
[Hanks] The men in these later waves
would confront D day's grimmest reality:
The sight of their fallen comrades.
[Rosenblum] And we landed on the beach,
and the thing that struck me first is
I'd never seen a dead person in my life.
I was surrounded by death.
There was Gls in the water,
rolling up and back in the water.
Blood all in the water, and it was a very frightening sight.
[Hanks] The Signal Corps cameramen lived with a bitter irony.
Almost the entire surviving photographic record of D day on the American beaches
was shot by coast guard cameramen.
The film exposed by Rosenblum
and the other men of the 165th Photo Company on the beaches
would be lost.
By late morning, the beachhead was established. By the end of the day,
the cameramen were ready to surrender their hard-won footage.
[Wood] We turned our footage in to the beachmasters,
and they sent a colonel over
who went to each beachmaster and picked up the film,
put it all in a duffel bag,
put it on his shoulder and went out to a ship.
Going up the side of the ship, he dropped it,
and all the film was lost.
[Hanks] There was just one exception.
A cameraman named Dick Taylor.
He made this great shot.
By default, these few seconds
constitute D day's most famous footage.
[Wood] The only film you see, American film from D day,
was our motion-picture guy that was with 1st Infantry Division.
He got wounded, and he carried his film back with him,
and he got about three or four scenes before he got hit.
Much of Taylor's footage is of combat's aftermath.
It is of men who have spent themselves in war,
trying to regather their strength.
They dig in.
They tend to their wounded.
Mostly they register the shock of survival.
Their history has shrunk for the moment
to this one terrible day.
They can see nothing but the awful shore
they so recently crossed.
They are forced to contemplate
the deaths they by some miracle avoided.
On D plus 1, the supplies rolled in.
So did the foul weather.
Everywhere you looked off Omaha Beach,
boats and their crews were in peril on the seas.
Walter Rosenblum was there shooting stills.
So was his motion-picture partner, Val Pope.
[Rosenblum] There was a couple of sinking boats
that I presumed had been shelled,
and a young army lieutenant swam out with a life raft
in order to bring back the people off the boat.
When I started, I said to myself,
"Walter, you're a good swimmer. You have two alternatives.
"You can go out with him and help him bring them back,
or you could photograph."
And at that moment I realized that my job
was to take pictures, and that's what I had to do.
[Hanks] These stills and the perfectly matched movie footage
helped fill some of the gaps left by the lost D day pictures.
Tragically, Val Pope would be killed in action
a few days later.
[Rosenblum] The well-known picture of that sequence
was this young lieutenant who was bending over a GI,
giving him first aid.
He looked like the most heroic fellow
I'd ever seen in my life.
I was happy to be able to make that photograph,
because to me it epitomized what the war was about.
People who came to fight for what they believed in.
Three weeks after D day,
there were almost half a million well-supplied American soldiers
in France.
Stephen Ambrose calls this logistical miracle
the great achievement of the American people and system
in the 20th century.
Who would dispute it?
Only, perhaps, the Gls
still struggling to break out of their beachhead
against unforgiving terrain and a stubborn enemy.
[Hanks] On the ghostly beaches, the barrage balloons arose,
protecting the masses of incoming supplies
against the almost entirely absent Luftwaffe.
Everywhere, casualties were counted.
They were heavy among the airborne troops,
but the planners were ready for death, too.
It was neatly registered.
The high command and their tankers
were less well-prepared for a unique and hazardous feature
of Normandy's topography.
[Wood] All through Normandy there,
it was all through hedgerow country.
They were about six foot high and six foot thick
and got trees growing out of the tops, and they're real fortresses.
We could be digging in on one side of a hedgerow
and the Germans would be digging in on the other side of it.
[Wood] There would be little openings
with gates and stuff through them,
and guys would have to attack through those damn things or over the top of one.
[Hanks] The hedgerows, first planted in the Middle Ages,
frustrated the war of movement,
but not for long.
[Wood] An ordnance sergeant
figured out that he could weld
two big prongs on the front of a tank,
and they'd dig into the hedgerow,
and the tank would shove its way through a hedgerow.
After we got that, it made it a lot simpler.
Some 60 years ago,
an anonymous German bureaucrat poked his finger on a map
and decreed that here, in this French farmer's fields,
would be the site of these big coastal batteries.
They're still there today,
silent yet ominous reminders of the way in which war
intrudes itself on ordinary human life.
And yet that life has an amazing stubbornness.
The guns may thunder,
but the fields must still be harvested.
The geese have to cross the road,
even if it's choked with military traffic.
The ordinary skein of human life goes on,
and our cameramen recorded that, too.
[Hanks] The young liberators were bored, restless, coltish
when they were off duty.
These American airmen discovered these horses in a Norman pasture.
One of them was an Oklahoma cowboy,
who for a moment gracefully recaptured
one of civilian life's lost pleasures.
[Rosenblum] It was not commonly known
that our preinvasion bombardment
killed a lot of French people who were living behind the line.
I was always amazed at the fact
that the French people I photographed
didn't blame the Americans for what was taking place.
They regarded us as liberators, even though our bombs
killed some of the people who lived there.
[Hanks] There was a sweetness in these welcomes, and a certain haste.
After the Normandy breakout,
if finally became a war of movement.
And for this Free French tank battalion,
it was a very personal war,
as Russ Meyer learned when he joined them.
Right off the bat,
took our jeep with the tank.
The French tank. We'd go right between them.
[Hanks] His best wartime buddy, Bill Teas,
was already with the French unit.
He would lend his name to the title
of Meyer's first postwar erotic hit,
The lmmoral Mr. Teas.
Needless to say, the French tankers were welcomed with special warmth
as they rolled through their native land.
The Americans were included in that welcome.
[Meyer] They would all say, "Oh, Américain. Trčs bien."
[Hanks] There was danger on these roads, too.
[Meyer] You go down the street, and the guy says, "Stop now!
"Don't go. There's a bunch of Germans down that road.
Now get the hell out of there."
[Hanks] Forewarned, they engaged in a brief, violent firefight.
This time, they took prisoners.
I'd love to know the guy today.
If we hadn't been warned, we would have had our...
They would have gotten our tonsils.
[Hanks] But they weren't always so lucky.
In a later engagement, they took heavy losses.
As was so often the case in tank battles,
the wounds were ghastly.
And hard to accept.
As some of the tankers
struggled to free a trapped comrade,
others rethought the battle and refought it.
There was a desire to protect the home front
from war's harshest realities.
If these had been Americans,
these pictures might not have been taken.
[Meyer] You didn't want to get Gls.
You didn't want a GI dying.
If it was, I'd get something
where at least the American wouldn't be readily recognized.
I was concerned about their family
that would see somebody in the newsreels.
[Hanks] But Paris was nearly at hand,
less than three months after D day.
As the liberators approached,
the Communist-led underground rose against the Germans.
In the streets, the German tanks were opposed
by members of the resistance carrying only small arms.
Amazingly, they forced an uneasy truce.
It is possible they prevented the destruction of the city
that Hitler had ordered.
[Hanks] The honor of entering Paris first
was given to Free French forces.
But as their leaders boldly showed themselves,
gunfire erupted.
There was de Gaulle
and I forget which other officers were there.
LeClerc had to be there.
[Hanks] The city had not been cleared of German troops
and their French sympathizers.
[Weiner] They all came marching down the Champs Elysées
as part of this parade,
and there were snipers, and there were shots fired.
And, of course, everybody ducked.
[Hanks] The street fighting was actually intense and deadly.
In many places, people were pinned to the ground,
unable to move.
The terror was palpable.
Reprisals against French collaborators
were swift and harsh.
That was not the end of French vengeance.
[Weiner] We were advised of activity regarding collaborationists,
and what they were doing is taking,
in this case, women collaborationists
and shaving their heads.
These are, I guess, women who had socially gone out
or played around with some of the German soldiers.
The idea, as I understood it,
was that for weeks and months afterwards,
everybody would know who the collaborationists were.
[Weiner] For the most part, they said nothing.
Some smiled and some just stared straight ahead...
and I guess tried to make the best
of what they were faced with.
[Hanks] The Allies had first intended to bypass Paris,
but it was unavoidably in their path.
Most of these soldiers did not stop.
For them, Paris was just a quickly glimpsed place
on the road to victory.
In a smaller French city,
Fred Bornet found the joy of liberation
more freely expressed and more directable.
[Bornet] The people were out in the street,
and they were just absolutely ecstatic.
Hysterical with delight.
And they hung bunting,
and they'd lift glasses of wine.
And what is so great is that you don't have a script.
You seize those wonderful moments.
And there were lots of girls, flowers in their hair.
They were sort of waving and greeting.
But they were not doing it...
with enough enthusiasm.
I thought this is such a great moment.
It should be like the big parade.
So I said to the girl, "Look.
"When that stream of soldiers is walking by,
run against that stream and kiss them!"
And I cried. There was a release.
And then they offered me soup
and fried eggs,
and they were waving flags.
You have a feeling that
you're doing something that is worthwhile.
In the fall of 1944,
American eyes were fixed on Europe,
where headquarters spoke,
overconfidently, as it turned out,
of the war's end being in sight, almost within reach.
No such claims were made for the war in the Pacific.
Combat there was as brutal and furious as ever.
But many of its fighting men felt isolated and ignored.
Navy cameraman Sam Sorenson.
[Sorenson] The marines that I worked with
were happy to have some pictures taken of them.
In the Pacific, they were so lonely.
They never saw a woman.
One of the reasons
that I was happy to work with the marines
was because we got better pictures of combat action.
[Hanks] Peleliu, September 1944.
The fury of the naval and air bombardment was unprecedented.
[Sorenson] For three days we shelled that thing.
When we approached those islands,
it looked like little, nice, green rolling hills.
When we got through,
it looked like little, rugged, jagged mountains.
There were little coral mountains
sticking up all over.
I couldn't believe anything could live on there.
[Hanks] But the bombing was ineffective.
The enemy remained safe in their bunkers.
[Sorenson] So when the marines started in,
there was an outer reef.
And they got hung up on that reef.
They were caught in Japanese crossfire.
So a lot of them had to unload there
and go on in with amphibious tractors.
Then when they hit the beach,
they got raked from this "point," they call it.
[Hanks] The irony of Peleliu is that it was unnecessary.
General MacArthur thought he needed it
to shield his invasion of the Philippines.
Military historians now agree that he did not.
The marines took almost 50% casualties.
[Sorenson] They holed up in caves.
They never made banzai charges.
And they had what they call "spider holes,"
where one sniper would stand.
They finally would close them up.
They'd blow them up and close the entrance.
Then the Japanese would come out of another hole.
[Gunshot]
It took two months to get them out.
They took maybe a hundred prisoners out of this whole thing.
In the end, we had lost something like 1,900 marines,
and we had to kill
nearly 13,000 Japanese.
[Hanks] Meantime, the war in the China-Burma-India theater continued,
and Dave Quaid soldiered on.
It was a Thanksgiving air drop, and President Roosevelt said,
"No matter where your son or daughter is,
"on land or sea or in the air,
he's going to get a turkey dinner. "
And I said, "That's hogwash!"
I said, "I'm going to photograph this drop
and prove that it never happened. "
[Hanks] Aerial resupply had been taken over
by a new unit fresh from Europe.
Their adjustment to the C.B.I. Was poor.
Coming in too fast and low,
their drops were often inaccurate
and often destroyed their cargo.
[Quaid] The plane was directly over the trail we were on.
So I yelled to these guys to get off the trail.
In fact, the skinny, emaciated guy there with the camera is me.
[Hanks] They scored a direct, if accidental hit, on Quaid.
[Quaid] The medics immediately assisted me, as did my buddy Bill.
[Hanks] His ordeal wasn't over.
He is still moved by Bill Brown's willingness
to risk his life for him.
[Quaid] Here was this chute coming down right on my face,
and I said, "Bill! Bill! Look at that!"
And Bill got up,
stepped across me, said, "I'll get it."
So, there was a puff of wind,
and it blew just past my head,
and Bill didn't have to sacrifice himself.
[Hanks] Dave Quaid's war was finished.
He would spend the rest of it in hospitals
having multiple operations on his shattered leg.
[Quaid] Here I am, leaving the war,
taken out by a bag of mule feed.
[Hanks] In northern France,
the fighting slowed as the snows came.
The bad weather helped mask a huge German buildup,
twenty-four divisions near the Ardennes Forest.
[Meyer] The Ardennes were cruel in the sense
that it was critically cold
and it was very difficult to find somewhere
that you could hide from.
The Ardennes did not have big trees.
You had to be very careful
and get down at the base of a tree trunk...
and dig as deeply as you could to protect yourself
from the standpoint of getting injured.
Or... finished.
[Hanks] In December, the Americans manning this line
were often isolated in small units.
Communications between them were poor.
[Explosion]
They were not expecting the battle that began on December 16th.
Many of the Gls fought tenaciously,
though they were often completely surrounded by the enemy.
The "Bulge," Hitler's last great gamble of the war,
eventually extended 50 miles eastward,
but it did not burst.
It's hard to see from these pictures,
but this engagement eventually involved more soldiers...
600,000 of them...
than any battle in U.S. History.
20,000 Americans died in the Ardennes.
Another 20,000 were wounded.
Among them was a cameraman named Jim Bates,
who had been in the war since D day.
At the Bulge, he did what a lot of Gls did.
He hitched a ride on a tank.
Their motors provided warmth.
[Bates] I rattled this tank and asked if I could ride on the back.
A lid flew open, and he says, "Can you fire a machine gun?"
I said I had my basics with the 11th Armored Division.
They picked me up bodily practically
and put me in the bow gunner's position.
[Hanks] Bates didn't know it,
but he was heading into battle with German Tiger tanks.
He grabbed these unique shots of a German ambulance
aiding one of their wounded tank crews.
[Bates] I could see that the number one tank
had passed an open area and was firing uphill.
About that time, I could hear this "kah-thunk,"
and the commander says, "Get out. They're shooting at us."
About that time, that second "whoom" came along,
and it felt like a train hit me in the back.
I didn't know whether I was dead or alive.
I could hear him screaming, "If you're not hit, get up.
If he starts that tank again, he's going to run over you. "
I looked back, and my camera was laying under the tank treads.
That's what made me move, and on the radio they said,
"You get up here quick with the medic's jeep.
"A photographer's been hit, and there's not enough of them left
to photograph the rest of the war. "
"I'll ride on the hood," I said.
"I could lay down. It'll be a warm place to be for a bit. "
[Hanks] Ignoring his wounds, Bates kept on shooting
as the tank rumbled toward the rear.
[Bates] Arosi saw me, the fellow I'd normally work with.
He was my buddy and shooting partner, and he said,
"The hospital's next door. I'll take you. "
I said, "Not yet. Get on your typewriter.
I'm going to dictate to you what, where, why and when."
He says, "You won't quit, will you?" and I said, "No way."
[Hanks] The situation remained fluid for days,
especially for Doug Wood.
Ailing with flu,
he took refuge in the basement of a command post.
He sent his driver and stills man for more film,
then fell asleep.
He did not hear the order to evacuate the C.P. When it came under fire.
[Wood] My still guy at that time was a new guy, a replacement.
And he told the driver, whose name was Ivan Babcock,
"Babcock, there's some guys over there in funny hats,
and I think they're shooting at us. "
And the driver told me,
"I could see their tracers going past my nose."
But he wouldn't stop.
Like the other guys had stopped there,
and they'd captured them.
He just drove on through and let them keep shooting at him.
[Hanks] What Babcock drove through
was the Malmedy massacre.
It was the war's worst atrocity visited on American soldiers.
Somewhere between 71 and 129 Gls...
the number remains in dispute...
were rounded up and shot by S.S. Troops.
They had infiltrated our lines,
some of them wearing American uniforms.
In this last-gasp German effort,
many of their troops were teenagers.
The Germans all escaped serious punishment for Malmedy
at the war crimes trials.
The weather lifted in late December,
and air operations resumed.
[Man] I was fortunate enough, or unfortunate,
whichever way you want to look at it,
to lead the greatest air combat battle of World War II.
There was eight of us.
We had climbed up over the field,
and we were what they called "joining up"
when 900 German fighters made an attack
on the front on January 1, 1945.
The squadron leader...
a squadron would normally be 12 airplanes,
but we had eight... he couldn't see them.
He said, "You take over the flight."
And I dropped five of them right on the field.
[Hanks] The pilots, armed with their gun cameras,
were also combat cameramen.
[Paisley] Hitler had decided
that he would deploy all of the fighters he had
to knock out the fighter fields
to support the Battle of the Bulge,
and they were going to do it in early December,
which would have been very effective.
Weather wasn't good.
They put it off and put it off and said,
"January 1st, these guys will all be in bed. "
It was all over the front. It wasn't just at our field.
It was at the British field.
It was at all the northern airfields.
I later got a hold of Hermann Goering's interviews.
In those interviews, Goering said
the largest loss that the German Luftwaffe ever had
was the loss on January 1st.
[Hanks] Mel Paisley, who was also this film's chief researcher,
was decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross.
Over the course of the war, he shot down nine planes.
The Battle of the Bulge ended January 7, 1945.
Germany was now largely open to the Allies.
Italy 1945.
Dictator Benito Mussolini was deposed and exiled.
The government surrendered,
and the populace turned viciously on their former allies.
[Montagne] I went to the C.P. To find out what was happening
and was told they had captured Mussolini
and General Crittenberger was to take his surrender.
I went down to the C.P. About 5:00 the following morning,
and here's a limousine with three German officers in it.
They'd been picked up by the 1st Armored Division.
They'd run into a roadblock and captured.
I went to Crit and said, "What are you going to do?"
He said, "I'm going to get this bird's surrender."
I said, "What about Mussolini?" He said, "Mussolini will have to wait."
I'll never forget that line.
He said to him, "General, we're both professionals.
"You can't get out. The passes are all closed.
"The smart thing to do is surrender the Ligurian Army,
which is the last intact enemy army. "
Went back to see Crit, and he was sitting on a rail
and sort of dreaming, and he said,
"Montagne, do you know that every cadet at West Point
"dreams of the day when an enemy army surrenders to him?
Today it happened to me."
[Hanks] Crittenberger's decision doomed Mussolini,
his mistress, Clara Petacci, and other fascists
to death at the hands of partisan guerillas.
Their bodies were displayed in Milan.
[Montagne] It had been going on for quite some time when we got there.
And we photographed what we could. We got the crowds.
We got Mussolini hanging upside down,
Petacci alongside him.
I remember her skirt had fallen over her face,
and a woman came and pinned her skirt
between her legs so she wasn't exposed.
They cut him down... I remember he got his head hit...
and picked him up.
The partisans were running it. We had nothing to do with it.
They took them over to the morgue.
There were bodies all over the place.
You had to walk on two or three bodies to get to where Mussolini was.
And I asked the morgue attendant,
"Can you get him in the light?"
He said, "Lieutenant, if I move him, his head will fall apart. "
So he got Petacci, pulled her over
and put her head on his shoulder.
Became quite a famous shot.
[Hanks] Meantime, Nazi Germany was in its death throes,
but it desperately fought on.
Everything that could happen to me,
photographically speaking, did happen that day.
[Hanks] The place was Cologne. The date was March 6, 1945.
The street fighting was intense.
It was often impossible to tell soldiers from civilians.
Sometimes the victims caught in the crossfire
were entirely innocent.
[Bates] By this time we had a new T-26.
The T-26 was so far ahead of the old Shermans,
it was unbelievable.
This German tank was sitting in front of the Cologne Cathedral.
It had knocked out a number of our tanks and causing havoc.
They had control over that whole area.
[Hanks] Bates followed the tank into battle, and, scrambling for position,
got this great footage of armored combat.
[Bates] I heard our T-26 coming up.
The first shot went in
and cut the legs off of the tank commander in the Tiger.
In the film you can see the armor-piercing shell
going through the bottom of the picture.
Immediately, the driver and bow gunner, they climbed out,
but the second shot shrapnel had gotten them, too.
The concussion from that 90-millimeter gun
is so tremendous that it would just blow me off my picture,
and I'd have to get back on it again.
I couldn't use a tripod. I had to hand hold it.
The tank commander that had his legs cut off
just laid on top of his tank and burned up in front of the camera.
That thing was burning even the next morning.
After it was all over, there was still smoke coming out of it
because it had so much ammunition and whatnot in it.
[Hanks] Two months and one day later, the war in Europe was over.
Its dead, its "crusaders,"
as General Eisenhower called them,
rest in cemeteries all over Europe.
If anything, their deeds are more revered now
than they were at the time.
Some of their immortality
derives from the photographic record.
The combat cameramen recorded the last days,
hours, moments, even the last breath
of many of those who lie here.
It isn't something that they talk about very much.
It was, as they say, just a part of their job.
[Ambrose] But it was a more important job than they knew.
For the film they made is now beginning to outlive memory.
Eventually it will be the only recollection made on the spot
of how our citizen soldiers
lived, fought and died.
[Hanks] The cameramen in Europe had one more duty to history.
It was unquestionably their most important one.
That was recording the horrors of the death camps.
At Dachau, Walter Rosenblum was too shocked to shoot.
These pictures were made by others.
[Rosenblum] There was a group of boxcars.
I climbed up the boxcar to see what was inside.
And the boxcar was full of dead people,
and there were about 30, 40 boxcars along that road.
When I looked in, I was so shocked.
Could you imagine, not having seen anything like that before,
to see a boxcar full of dead, emaciated people?
At that particular moment,
I forgot I was a photographer.
I was just overcome by it all.
[Man] I was on assignment with Ellis Carter,
and we went into Germany to cover bomb damage
that was done by the Allied air power.
On April 11th, the 3rd U.S. Army liberated Buchenwald,
and when we heard of this, we immediately drove over there.
[Hanks] What the cameramen found behind these gates
was beyond their imagining,
but the inhumanity they recorded
is literally undeniable.
As a soldier in the American Army,
I had no knowledge of these camps
and had not heard anything about it.
[Mainzer] It was horrible.
There was bodies stacked up like cordwood.
We judged them to be about 60 to 80 pounds in weight,
and people were actually dying, day by day,
even after the camp was liberated.
Many of the prisoners could not speak English, of course,
but they raised their hands to us
and showed their gratitude for us freeing them.
This camp had about 20,000 survivors
at the time of liberation,
and about 8,000 of them were children.
There was a section where they displayed tattooed skins
which were made into lampshades and book covers.
The German commandant's wife would select tattooed men
to be doomed to die and then use their skin.
After a few days, the German civilians of the town
right next to Buchenwald called Weimar
were paraded through on a tour of the camp
to show the atrocities
and to show them what the Germans had done.
Many of them wouldn't even look at the torture or the bodies.
Some of them were crying.
Some of them had their mouth and nose covered
with their handkerchiefs, especially women.
So, in the filming that we did, you could see this evident, uh,
where they just kept going through
because they had to.
They weren't too interested in looking at the...
at the atrocities.
There was a lot of people that didn't believe in this.
They didn't believe that it happened.
But here we had it on film.
I think in all the time that I was over there,
this experience stood out pretty much in my mind.
It took a while to get over it.
It was something that you wouldn't want to see,
you wouldn't want to go through again.
[Hanks] The horrors of the concentration camp
had a more immediate effect on Art Mainzer.
After what he had seen, he yearned for normalcy.
[Mainzer] I met her in Paris
the day before the Battle of the Bulge started.
Believe it or not, we were walking down the boulevard
and it started snowing, and my buddy and I
saw these two lovely looking ladies under an umbrella.
So we sneaked in under the umbrella with them
and introduced ourselves.
I made the decision
after I covered the Buchenwald assignment.
I said, "If I ever get back to France alive,
I'm going to ask Germaine to marry me. "
Being a camera unit, we had three 16-millimeter cameras
and a couple of Speed Graphics for the still photos.
We had gotten some cases of champagne
that the Germans had looted from the French.
So we got it back to France.
And a lot of French people showed up
because in this suburb of Paris
they had not had a formal wedding like this during the occupation.
It was quite an event for them.
[Hanks] It was a June wedding, the month after V.E. Day.
These pictures were his unit's gift to the bride and groom.
The Mainzers would live their lives together in the United States
until Germaine passed away in 1998
after almost 53 years of marriage.
Iwo Jima, February 1945.
As the Americans came closer to the Japanese mainland,
fighting in the Pacific grew still more bitter.
The bombardment crumbled one side of Iwo's key bastion,
Mount Suribachi.
But it took five bloody days for the marines
to fight their way to its summit.
When the marines set out to place a conqueror's flag
on Suribachi,
they still encountered resistance.
But they persevered, and the flag was raised.
Unfortunately, it lacked properly heroic proportions.
Something would have to be done.
[Hatch] It was too small to be seen by anybody.
So the commanding general down there
figured we better get a bigger flag.
So they got some of the LSTs that were there,
and one of the LST commanders said, "When we stopped at Pearl,
we got a big flag, but we've never flown it. "
My boss came to me and said, "Make sure we send photographers up.
This is going to be considered the official flag raising. "
I said sure and got in touch with Genaust and Bob Campbell.
Bill Genaust was the movie man, Bob Campbell the still.
They hooked up with Rosenthal going up the hill.
[Hanks] That was Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press,
a civilian photographer who had taken these pictures of the landing.
These are the shots Genaust took on that second climb.
A few days later, he would be killed in action.
He would not live to see the images he made.
[Hatch] People would always contest
whether or not this was the first
or whether the other one was the first,
but Bob Campbell didn't like the position
that the other two cameramen were in,
so he got over to the side, and he's got a beautiful picture
of the first flag coming down and the second going up at the same time.
[Hanks] It was Rosenthal, however,
who got the immortal shot and a lifetime's controversy,
for he shipped all his pictures back
unseen and undeveloped.
[Hatch] Joe gets on a boat about four days later and goes to Guam,
and he's bombarded by press guys there saying,
"What was this picture?"
They had seen it, but they wanted to know what he thought about it.
He says, "I don't know.
Maybe it's that picture I posed with the men under the flagpole
in the typical 'banzai, ' raising their rifles. "
And that word "posed" got into the lexicon of the problem.
It's hung in there for years and years and years.
That thing we have fought
for 50 years to try to straighten out.
I thought at the end of the 50th anniversary we had it resolved,
but I think it'll probably go on for another 50.
[Hanks] The comparison between the movie footage
and Rosenthal's image is definitive.
He took exactly the same shot Genaust did
from virtually the same position.
This controversy, to some degree,
masks the real story of Iwo Jima: Its cost.
Almost 7,000 marines died here,
along with 21,000 Japanese.
The marines were awarded 27 Medals of Honor,
more than in any other engagement.
Manila, spring of 1945.
It was now, unquestionably,
"war without mercy," as one historian called it.
The fires the Japanese set destroyed 70% of the city.
They killed 100,000 civilians in an orgy of destruction.
This act of vengeance on an innocent population
was recorded by Don Honeyman.
[Honeyman] The next day, the infantry was moving into the city,
and we got some very good street fighting.
[Gunfire]
[Hanks] Honeyman then joined forces
surrounding the presidential palace outside the city.
[Honeyman] We were leaving the palace aside and going to the gardens,
which included the other side of the river.
We had the north bank of the river,
and they had the south bank.
So we made a crossing of the river in assault boats.
I watched one wave of boats go over,
and they didn't seem to have trouble.
So I figured it was safe to go on the second one.
We got out in the middle,
and the Japanese began to shoot at us
from the side of the river which we thought was ours,
which we thought was hardly fair.
[Hanks] The Americans brought up armored amphibious vehicles
to bring their troops safely to shore.
[Honeyman] We came across a BAR man
who happened to be down on his elbows
next to a sign saying, "Please do not pick the flowers."
[Hanks] In the city, fighting remained intense.
A Japanese strongpoint was the legislative palace.
[Honeyman] Eight-inch howitzers lined up side by side,
practically firing point-blank.
Simply taking down the building stone by stone, practically.
[Hanks] Despite the incredible firepower leveled at them,
the Japanese hung on in the ruined palace.
Infantry would have to root them out.
[Honeyman] Next day I went to cover
the transfer of civil government
from MacArthur to the Filipinos.
And he said very proudly how Manila was now secure.
And I said, "All except the legislative building."
[Hanks] Okinawa, Easter Sunday.
The idea was to stage the invasion of Japan
from this large island.
Rather innocently, Lloyd Durant
decided to shoot a film on combat cameramen here.
What better subject to put on film
than the story of the combat cameraman,
who was practically unknown at the time.
We knew that our next operation was coming off in the Pacific.
So I said, "Let me go out there,
"let me find the cameramen we have out there,
"and presumably they will be in on the action, whatever it may be,
"and I want to be there photographing them
photographing the action. "
So we hit the beach at Okinawa.
There I was, working with these guys,
creeping in foxholes, squirming along the beach
and trying to keep the sand out of the camera
and out of my mouth,
and they're trying to do the same thing.
Also, there were a few bullets flying around.
[Hanks] The battle would continue for three months.
Among the casualties, the worst of the war,
was a cameraman.
[Honeyman] He was a navy cameraman.
Somehow or another, he was hit and blinded.
They had bandaged, in the field, his eyes, and some of it
was still hanging down.
He, of course, could not see.
They brought him up on the side of the ship, and he got to the top,
and he's reaching for help.
He can't see a thing.
And his buddies reached up and took him down.
And our commentary is,
"For this cameraman, the picture was over. "
And that's exactly what it was.
He never saw again.
Later that day, the kamikazes came in.
These were guys
who were dedicated to giving their lives for their country.
And they crashed into us.
Our antiaircraft guns were working at them full-time.
And our other problem was our own flak coming down
did as much damage to many of us
as did the kamikazes,
because it'd go right through your helmet,
of course, if it hit you directly.
[Hanks] Bull Halsey said,
"The kamikazes were the only weapon I feared in the war. "
There were over 1,300 of these suicide attacks.
They sank 26 ships and damaged 300.
The photographic record of these attacks
includes some of the most astonishing footage of the war.
There were many near misses, as this one turned out to be,
but most of the navy casualties at Okinawa
are attributed to kamikazes.
They damaged some carriers but sunk none.
Yet they persisted.
The last kamikaze attack
was mounted after the surrender.
These B-24s are over Balikpapan in Borneo.
Known as the Ploesti of the Pacific,
the huge oil refinery was bombed for 30 consecutive days
in the summer of 1945.
They were softening it up for what would be
the last amphibious landing of World War II.
The American Coast Guard took Australian troops ashore.
Jerry Anker was there
with his buddy Jim Lonergan, also a cameraman.
He wanted a picture of himself in action.
Anker obliged with a snap
that became famous in the photo histories.
When the landing craft hit the beach
at Balikpapan, I said,
"Oh, my God, that idiot!" And pulled up my four-by-five
and shot the picture of him,
and I only took one picture of it,
and it turned out to be a prizewinner.
Here, in the war's waning days, Anker was presented
with another more terrible photo opportunity.
[Anker] I had been following
this Australian infantryman with a flamethrower
around, I guess, for probably a half hour,
and it just so happened that when he shot
this flamethrower into this cave,
this Japanese soldier came running out in flames,
and I was able to photograph the entire sequence.
To this day,
I can still smell the stench of that burning body.
That one anonymous soldier, dying in agony,
vividly symbolizes the waste of war.
Multiply his fate 100,000 times
and you begin to comprehend Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But not entirely,
for as many people died later of radiation poisoning
as died in the initial blasts.
We are told these lives were traded for the many more
that would have been lost on both sides
in an invasion of Japan.
But all we know for sure is
that the atomic bombs brought the war to an abrupt end
and finally stopped all the killing
at over 40 million.
[Hanks] At Nagasaki, as at the concentration camps,
the combat photographers had one last service to render.
Dan McGovern speaks for all those
who entered this charnel house.
My effort was...
to show the world
what the atomic bomb had done to a nation.
What it had done to human beings.
The Sorayama School in Nagasaki...
Sucked out hundreds of kids through the windows.
I remember one particular scene that I shot,
and I couldn't figure out
what was wrong with this particular person.
He reminded me of a monk,
orjust a priest with his staff,
and he was standing up on a rise
looking over the hill of Nagasaki from the Urakami Valley.
He was a radiologist from the Nagasaki teaching hospital,
which was just down below the hill.
He told me then that he had lost his wife,
that he was suffering from radiation sickness.
Two days later, he was gone.
[Hanks] Where people were sitting when the bomb exploded,
permanent shadows were burned.
It was the same way with things.
You can paint over the shadows, but you cannot erase them.
[McGovern] That was my effort.
Thought because we showed the...
burned bodies of children,
people would cry out,
"Let's not do this again."
[Hanks] Yet we do.
These pictures have been duplicated in every war
for over a half century.
The children reach out to us in their abandonment,
their incomprehensible loneliness.
The soldiers offer what comfort they can.
These men and these children share the terrible bond of war.
But the soldiers will soon move on.
They will not know the fates of these orphans
with whom they shared their humanity for a moment.
These picture ought to assure centuries of peace.
They do not.
But it may be that after the shooting stops,
the combat cameramen achieve their finest hour.