NARRATOR: When the people of Luverne, Minnesota
and Sacramento, California, Waterbury, Connecticut
and Mobile, Alabama
went to the movies in March of 1945,
they saw and heard a sick and weary President Franklin Roosevelt -
so sick and so weary that, for the first time in his career,
he referred directly to the paralysis that kept him from standing without braces.
ROOSEVELT: I hope that you will pardon me
for an unusual posture of sitting down
during the presentation of what I want to say,
but I know that you will realise that it makes it a lot easier for me
in not having to carry about 10 pounds of steel
around on the bottom of my legs,
and also because of the fact that I have just completed a 14,000-mile trip.
(People applaud)
Roosevelt's strength was waning, but his message was undimmed.
The war was still to be won.
It's a long, tough road to Tokyo.
It is longer to go to Tokyo than it is to Berlin,
in every sense of the word.
The defeat of Germany will not mean the end of the war against Japan.
On the contrary, we must be prepared
for a long and costly struggle in the Pacific.
Americans had been fighting for more than three years now,
and the number of dead and wounded and missing
had more than doubled just since D-day.
The Nazis seemed at last to be on the verge of collapse,
but American men were still dying in the struggle to eradicate them,
and Allied planners feared the final battle with Japan would stretch on for years.
WOMAN: I remember going to New York on the train.
In the station at St Louis, Missouri,
the platform was lined with caskets with American flags.
I could cry now.
It was just as far as you could see them on the platform at the train station.
And I went down reading the name in brass plaque, all the names.
And I cried and cried.
How could you not cry?
MAN: The Pacific, as one experienced it, began at San Diego.
And you got a sense of what a huge space you were going into.
That this was not going to be like Europe,
where there was land all around and it had names.
This was going to be nameless, empty space, almost all of it,
with little dots of land in between.
In March of 1945, marine pilot Sam Hynes was 20 years old,
a former University of Minnesota student
who, like thousands of other young men,
had been made to grow up fast during the war,
passing test after test on the way to manhood.
He had learned to live on his own, had married,
mastered the dangerous art of flying torpedo bombers
and had now received his orders to proceed 6,000 miles across the Pacific
to face his final trial - combat.
Hynes landed at Ulithi, the sprawling coral atoll
the US Navy had turned into the advanced staging area
for the assault that was about to begin on the Japanese island of Okinawa.
HYNES: It was awesome. It was huge.
The anchorage was miles across,
and it was covered with ships of all sizes -
carriers, battleships, destroyers, cruisers.
I'd never seen so many ships.
It was like seeing all the power in your corner.
And there wasn't any power in the other corner.
Okinawa, 60 miles long and home to almost half a million civilians,
was the gateway to Japan.
The Allies knew they had to take it
before they could move on to the home islands,
and were gathering the largest invasion force since D-day -
almost 1,500 ships and more than half a million men.
(EXPLOSIONS)
Day after day in March of 1945,
American and British warships fired shells and rockets at Okinawa.
There was little evidence of the island's defenders.
Allied planners were not sure just where they were dug in.
But they knew they were somewhere on the island -
more than 100,000 of them,
well entrenched and prepared to die for their emperor.
The Japanese Kamikaze pilots overhead were willing to die for him too.
There were nearly 100 Japanese airfields
within flying distance of Okinawa,
and the pilots of some 5,000 warplanes
were preparing to sacrifice their own lives
in order to take those of as many American sailors as possible.
MAN: They was trained to fly their planes one way and no return.
And when they went out after a ship or something,
they had their funeral before they actually left.
And they knew they was never coming back.
They was under the impression
that if they gave their life that way for their country,
they had a special place in heaven for them, automatically.
Which wasn't true.
Seaman First Class Maurice Bell, of Mobile, Alabama,
was serving as a gunner
aboard the heavy cruiser USS 'lndianapolis' off Okinawa.
On March 31, Kamikazes targeted her for destruction.
BELL: I looked up to my right and there was one small cloud up there,
and just as I looked up, I saw a plane come out of this cloud,
and it was a Japanese Kamikaze plane.
The very instant I saw him up there, he must have spotted our ship,
because he turned into a dive, instantly, and was coming straight down.
It looked like he was coming just straight to the very spot where I was sitting.
Our men back there started firing at it with the 20mm,
and you could see the tracers hit.
The plane actually bounced off the ship,
but the motor and the bomb went through the deck,
went through number three mess hall,
and right down there was three or four or five men sitting at the table eating.
It killed all of them.
The bomb went all the way through the ship into the water
and then exploded back up through.
They said that hole all the way through
was large enough to drive a 18-wheeler through.
9 sailors died. 29 were wounded.
The 'lndianapolis' was sent to Ulithi to have its hull mended.
Meanwhile, the bombardment of Okinawa continued.
The invasion began on April 1.
This was the night before Easter Sunday, the 1 st of April.
And Tokyo Rose, who was the spokesperson for the Japanese,
was on the radio.
WOMAN ON RADIO: Japanese special attack planes
launched late Thursday night...
And having been through Normandy, and they didn't know we were coming,
and here we are going into Okinawa,
and Tokyo Rose is telling us, "OK, GI Joes, we know you're coming.
"We're going to give you a Easter party when you land,
"and we'll be there waiting for you."
Well, that really sent shivers up and down one's spine.
Navy Ensign Joseph Vaghi, from Connecticut,
who had been wounded on Omaha Beach,
was among the 60,000 soldiers and marines
moving toward the island that morning.
He had volunteered to return to combat.
VAGHl: When we finally began unloading, it was quiet.
As the landing crafts went in, you just walked ashore.
Couldn't believe this.
The Japanese mostly held their fire.
Four divisions - 75,000 men - would land that day.
The veterans couldn't believe their luck.
Marine Private Eugene Sledge, of Mobile, and his outfit
were at the landing too,
and so relieved, they began to sing the popular hit 'Little Brown Jug'
as they unloaded their gear and started inland.
They had been warned
that they would be likely to lose 8 out of 10 men
before they could make it off the beach.
They lost none.
They were pleasantly surprised by the terrain as well.
It was "Pastoral and handsomely terraced," Sledge remembered,
"like a picture postcard of an Oriental landscape."
MAN: "The weather was cool, and there was the wonderful smell of pines,
"which reminded me of home.
"It was such a beautiful island.
"You really could not believe that there was going to be a battle there."
American infantry and tanks raced across the island, cutting it in two.
Then, as Sledge and the marines moved north
to clear the central and northern parts of the island,
the army turned south toward the main Japanese defences...
...where they began to face increasingly strong opposition.
Offshore, the navy continued to have its hands full.
NEWSREEL: Sky full of flak as the Japs attack warships
supporting the invasion of Okinawa.
Scenes of plunging planes, and enemy bombs land perilously near.
A low-flying enemy speeds toward a warship target.
Will the guns bring it down before it gets to its mark?
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
Yes! It's hit, on fire, and crashes.
On April 6, Japan loosed a new tactic against the Allied ships.
Not single Kamikazes now, but flights of hundreds of them at a time,
dropping out of the sky to attack the fleet.
The Japanese called these deadly flights 'floating chrysanthemums'.
(ALARM BLARES)
By the end of the day, they had seriously damaged 17 American vessels
and killed 367 sailors.
We lost more ships, we lost more sailors, we lost more men,
and it was a horror.
It was one of the worst battles of the Pacific, really.
As the land battle for Okinawa intensified,
the floating chrysanthemums would return again and again,
taking a terrible toll on the men and ships.
MAN: If we had an invasion of Japan, we knew we were dead.
They issued orders later
that the minute American or Allied forces landed on their homeland,
to shoot all prisoners of war.
So we had basically accepted our fate.
Glenn Frazier was one of 168,000 Allied prisoners of war
still in Japanese hands.
He had been a captive since the surrender on Bataán
in the spring of 1942.
He was now in his fourth POW camp in Japan,
at Suruga, south-west of Tokyo, on the Sea of Japan.
One day, their captors permitted 50 prisoners
to wash their own filthy clothes in the ocean.
They were sitting around waiting for their clothes to dry
when carrier-based American bombers roared in to attack the port.
FRAZIER: We run out of the warehouse at the end of the dock,
and across the railroad tracks, and was waving.
And we knew then that the aircraft carrier planes were close.
And we knew that the end was coming close.
But that did not help our feelings as to what was about to happen.
Our lives were going to be sacrificed.
MAN ON RADIO: We interrupt this program
to bring you a special news bulletin from CBS World News.
A press association has just announced that President Roosevelt is dead.
The President died of a cerebral haemorrhage.
All we know so far is that the President died at Warm Springs, in Georgia.
WOMAN: We can all tell you where we were
when we heard that Roosevelt had died.
President Roosevelt was really
the binding force for the United States.
When he would come on and give his fireside chats,
we all gathered around the radio
and everyone looked to him for leadership.
He had led us out of the Depression,
so we felt that certainly he could lead us through a war.
And when the news came in April that he had died,
it was a terrible blow to the entire country.
MAN: It was catastrophic, because he was the only president we knew
for the first 12, 13 years of our life.
Now, the thing was, my parents were Republicans and hated Roosevelt,
but I loved him and most of us kids loved him too.
Because he was the face of America
that was saying, "Hey, things are going to be OK."
HYNES: I was standing outside a quonset hut
looking across the little strait between Saipan and Tinian, the next island,
and I felt a great sense of loss.
More than that, I think -
"How will we go on fighting the war when our commander-in-chief is dead?"
MAN: We were all very sad about it.
Less about his leaving than about the irony of it.
If he'd died a few months later,
he could have seen the success of what he had done.
The men of the 100th/442nd Combat Team,
the Japanese-American unit that had already distinguished itself
in the fighting for Italy and France,
were back in the mountains of northern Italy
when they got word of Roosevelt's death.
He had signed the order that sent to internment camps
the families from which many of them had come,
but he had also provided them with the opportunity
to prove their loyalty on the battlefield.
It was that FDR they chose to remember.
MAN: I remember that day,
because when we got the word,
suddenly men in my platoon
took out their bayonets and put it on.
And I said, "What's happening here?"
He says, "Well, I think we've got to do this one for the old man."
They just stood up and started attacking.
Radio calls coming in from the company commander,
"What in the hell are you doing?" You know.
"You're not supposed to be attacking."
I says, "Captain, you can't stop them."
And so they're all moving forward for the old man, a man they had never met.
(LAST POST PLAYS)
Many Americans, overseas as well as at home,
couldn't even remember the name of the man
who was now their commander-in-chief...
...Harry Truman.
MAN: All aboard!
SONG: # I guess I had a million dolls or more
# I guess I've played the doll game o'er and o'er... #
MAN: I had great difficulty adjusting to the fact that I was going home.
# That's why I'm blue... #
Landed at Washington, DC,
was processed through some paperwork there,
caught a train at Union Station taking me down to Louisiana,
where Jackie was.
# To love a doll that's not your own
# I'm through with all of them
# I'll never fall again
# Say, boy
# Whatcha gonna do? #
Fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne, Minnesota,
was home on leave that April.
He had been in more or less continuous combat in Europe since D-day -
10 ghastly months, during which he'd killed men and seen friends killed
and come very close to collapsing from despair.
He expected soon to be ordered into action again, in the Pacific this time,
and he desperately wanted to see Jackie Greer,
the Louisiana girl with whom he'd fallen in love before going overseas.
Her letters had been Aanenson's anchor to sanity.
WOMAN: I prayed for him to come back,
and I just felt like my prayers would be answered.
I was walking down the street
and I saw the wedding dress in a window.
So I went right in and I bought that dress and shipped it to my mother
and I said, "Have this ready for me. I'm going to need it."
Now the two were to meet again.
AANENSON: And I had to adjust to being away from the war.
The silence was difficult to get used to.
But it was such an exciting and unbelievable moment.
I was alive, and this was Jackie.
GREER: The first night, we were in the living room
and he formally proposed to me.
And for some reason I got shy
and I couldn't quite make myself say yes.
I don't know why, because I'd been saying yes for 11 months, you know.
And when I hesitated and couldn't quite say yes,
he said, "Well, now, just make up your mind."
The funny part was,
the door right near my chair was closed,
and on the other side of that door was my bed
with that gorgeous wedding dress spread out all over it.
AANENSON: I was going to be going back to the war.
I didn't want to face the idea that she could end up
being a widow in a couple of months.
But the more we talked about it,
the more we decided, "Let's get married now."
So we got married on April 17,
two and a half weeks after I got home,
in the First Methodist Church in Baton Rouge.
As I saw her coming down that aisle,
it was just a thrill beyond belief.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
NEWSREEL: In their stupendous advances,
the Russian armies feature massed artillery.
The kind of warfare the Russians wage on the road to Berlin.
By the middle of April 1945,
Soviet troops were just 30 miles from Berlin
and bent on revenge
for the horrors the Nazis had inflicted on their homeland.
General Dwight Eisenhower decreed that the armies under his command
would not drive directly toward the German capital.
The deadly task of capturing the city would go to the Red Army.
Hitler called upon his people to resist to the end.
"Every village and every town will be defended and held
"by every possible man," he said.
For the Americans in Europe, the fighting and the killing sputtered on.
INOUYE: And that's a horrible thing,
knowing that the war is going to end
and you have to keep urging your men to go forward.
The 100th/442nd Combat Team
was still in the mountains of northern Italy,
hammering away at the last German positions there.
INOUYE: We had this objective, a high mountain.
As I was going up, I suddenly felt someone punching me on the side.
That's what I thought it was.
I fell down and I got up and kept on moving.
I had a bullet go right through my abdomen.
Came out just about a quarter inch from my spine.
Three machine-gun nests were firing down at Inouye
as he continued to lead his men up the slope.
He hurled a grenade to knock out the first one,
then killed its crew with his Tommy gun.
He silenced the next gun with two more grenades.
As he pulled the pin on yet another
and got ready to throw it into the third machine-gun nest,
German shrapnel nearly severed Inouye's right arm.
Somehow, with his left hand,
he pried his dead fingers from the live grenade and threw it,
then started up the hill again.
INOUYE: According to the men and according to my company commander,
he says, "For a moment, you went berserk.
"You picked up your gun."
I had a Thompson submachine gun,
and with my left hand,
started approaching the last machine-gun nest,
just firing it, with the blood splattering out.
It was a horrible sight, I think.
Finally, I got hit again on my leg,
and I kept rolling down the hill and that was the end.
German prisoners of war were pressed into service
to carry Inouye back down the hill.
He was given morphine at the aid station -
so much morphine
that when surgeons at the field hospital began to amputate his shattered arm,
he had to endure it without anaesthetic.
"The pain was so intense," he remembered,
"that dying didn't seem like such an awful idea."
I ended up receiving 17 whole blood transfusions.
Before they gave you the blood, they showed you the bottle,
and on that bottle was a label
that had the name, rank, serial number and the unit.
And so here is someone with some fancy name, Thomas Jefferson Lee,
serial number, 92nd Division.
Now, 92nd Division was a unit that we were attached to in the last battle,
and they're all made up of African Americans.
And all of the bottles I saw were from the 92nd Division.
So I must have had 17 bottles of good African American blood.
And so here I am.
For his heroism under fire,
Daniel Inouye would receive the Medal of Honor.
It was granted to him 55 years later,
during his sixth term as a United States senator from Hawaii.
Meanwhile, events in Europe were moving so fast
it was hard for the people back home to keep track.
NEWSREEL: On the final lap of their drive on Berlin,
Russian troops send the Germans reeling.
On April 25, American and Soviet forces linked up at Torgau on the Elbe river.
Germany had been cut in half.
The next day, Soviet troops began assaulting Berlin itself.
On the morning of April 30,
Russian troops fought their way into the Reichstag,
the symbol of German power.
Less than half a mile away, beneath the rubble,
Adolf Hitler and his closest aides huddled in their bunker.
That afternoon, Hitler named Admiral Karl Dönitz to succeed him,
then shot himself in the mouth.
Only his most fanatical followers now continued to fight on.
FUSSELL: Eisenhower, on D-day morning,
distributed to the troops a general order, which is like a handbill,
and everybody read it
and he said, "We are about to embark upon the great crusade,
"which we've been preparing for for many months, etc."
Now, at first, none of us could believe it was anything like a crusade
because we were playing dice and we were thinking about girls all the time
and getting as drunk as possible and so forth.
It wasn't like a crusade. There was no religious dimension to it whatever.
When they finally got across France and into Germany
and saw the German death camps...
...they realised... that they had...
...been engaged in something like a crusade,
although none of them called it that.
And it all began to make a kind of sense to us.
I'm not sure that made it any better - it may have made it worse -
to see that it was actually conducted
in defence of some noble idea.
As the Red Army had moved through eastern Europe the previous summer,
it had uncovered, at Majdanek in Poland,
the first evidence of the Nazis' industrialised barbarism.
The ashes of thousands of human beings were found in a crematorium.
The American and British press played it down,
assuming the Soviets were exaggerating.
Not even the Nazis could be so murderous.
By the end of April 1945,
more than 100 camps and subcamps would be liberated.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Ravensbrück,
Ohrdruf, Buchenwald,
Bergen-Belsen, Nordhausen, Dachau.
On May 5, advance patrols of the American 11th Armoured Division
came upon Mauthausen, in Austria.
There they found
more than 110,000 desperate so-called "enemies of the Reich" -
men, women and children confined behind barbed wire.
Many were too weak to stand.
Private Burnett Miller, of Sacramento, was there and saw it all.
And they had put some signs out -
"Welcome, Americans. You've saved us," and things like this.
And we surrounded the camp
and then there was a surge of people who were in fairly good condition
begging for food.
And we were giving them what food we had, concentrated food,
and in some cases it overwhelmed their systems and actually killed them.
I'm sure we were responsible for the deaths of several hundred people
just by feeding them concentrated food.
We went down in the basement and there were these big furnaces,
and it looked like cordwood piled around, and they were bodies in rigor mortis
that they had been preparing to burn in these big furnaces.
And the fellows that went into the other barracks
came away just shocked, some of them very, very sick.
The hospital there, people dying, just thick,
and people couldn't get out of their bunks
and people in terrible condition.
And then later there was a big trench, and it was filled with bodies.
Some were dying, some were trying to steal food.
And the guards were dispersed all over,
and we actually saw a guard move into a house, and we chased him in,
and he was an officer.
And the prisoners who were there tore him apart,
just killed him right there.
We lived in Mauthausen, which was an idyllic little Austrian town on the river,
but you could smell the camp in town.
And all the villagers of course said they didn't know anything about the camp,
and the local priest said he didn't know anything about the camp,
and I knew that was a lie because you could smell the camp.
You could just smell death.
So it was a horrible, horrible experience.
And then we came... at least I came to think,
"Well, you know, this effort has been worthwhile.
"There was a real reason to do this.
"These were inhuman things that were being done to people."
Other Americans were witnessing similar horrors at other camps.
Ray Leopold, a medic from Waterbury, and a Jew,
was with the 28th Infantry Division.
We were...
...near the Hadamar...
...concentration camp.
At the same time, we noticed that up on the hill there was a building
that the burgomaster described as an insane asylum.
We went up there and found that, true,
they did have an insane asylum there, at least initially,
but it was a place where there was
medical experimentation going on humans.
I really can't tell you what I saw there.
It affected me profoundly,
and I think all the men who were with me at that time
were equally affected.
I, um... I felt that it was too bad
that I was forbidden by the Geneva Convention to kill.
I... I felt that this was
the most horrible human experience
that had ever been visited on the face of the earth.
I saw one of those terrible places where they were...
...where they had the people that were dying and dead
and bodies stacked like cordwood.
That was the little town of Ludwigslust.
And we made the German people in that community go get those bodies,
and had a burial in the park in front of the castle
so that they would never forget it again.
And we gave them a Christian and Jewish burial.
But the people did it. We made the German people do it.
These people in this country who say it didn't happen - it happened.
I saw it. I know.
It happened.
In 1933, there were 9 million Jews in Europe.
By 1945, two out of three of them were dead.
Thousands of Jewish communities were wiped from the face of the earth.
Hitler's regime also slaughtered nearly 2 million non-Jewish Poles.
They murdered more than 4 million Soviet prisoners of war,
as well as hundreds of thousands
of handicapped people and political opponents,
homosexuals and Gypsies
and Jehovah's Witnesses and slave labourers
from all the countries they'd conquered.
LEOPOLD: How bad it was,
how wide it was,
we never really knew how fully extensive
this horror that Hitler had visited on Europe,
and in particular on the Jews,
how it was.
But here we began to see.
We had no idea
that there was going to be 6 million dead Jews as a result.
I think the horror is still with me.
I think there's no apology
that can ever atone for what I saw.
On May 8, three days after Burnett Miller's unit reached Mauthausen,
Germany finally surrendered.
The war in Europe had come to an end.
The Reich that Hitler had promised would endure for a thousand years
had lasted less than a dozen.
HARRY TRUMAN: General Eisenhower informs me
that the flags of freedom fly all over Europe.
This is a solemn but glorious hour.
I wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to see this day.
MAN: Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star-Herald'.
"Unlike New Yorkers, who whooped, hollered,
"and tore up tons of paper to throw in the streets,
"the news here was greeted with quiet dignity and reverent restraint.
"One by one, the flags blossomed out on Main Street,
"and store by store the employees quietly filed out
"and the business places were locked up for the day.
"But there was no shouting, no hilarious display of any kind.
"Most everybody went home.
"There was quiet exultation over the fact that a great victory had been achieved,
"but that rejoicing was tempered by the sobering knowledge
"that there was another great war yet to be won."