(BIRDS CHIRP)
(ARTIE SHAW'S 'MOONGLOW' PLAYS)
NARRATOR: One evening in the summer of 1941,
several months before the United States would be drawn
into the Second World War,
in a little farming town in Alabama,
a 16-year-old high school boy named Glenn Dowling Frazier
discovered that the girl he loved
was interested in someone else.
(CRICKETS CHIRP)
Frazier was so angry and upset
that when the owner of a juke joint refused him service,
he stalked outside, climbed onto his motorcycle,
and roared through the door,
shattering bottles and smashing furniture.
As he raced away,
the bar owner chased him down the street with a shotgun.
The next morning, humiliated, scared,
and unable to face his parents,
Glenn Frazier went to the nearest recruiting office,
lied about his age, and joined the peacetime army.
He volunteered to serve in the Philippines.
FRAZIER: When I volunteered for the Philippine Islands,
I had no idea that we would actually be at a war.
I was thinking that probably Germany was
the most likely place that there would be a war,
so in my mind, I thought it'd be safe over there.
I never thought Japan would be attacking us.
NARRATOR: Over the next four years,
Frazier would find himself in the midst of war -
desperate hand-to-hand combat,
a forced march so brutal the world would never forget it,
and nightmarish prison camps
where simply surviving required
luck and bravery and unshakable will.
Back in Alabama, those who loved him would be told he was dead.
All Glenn Frazier would be able to do was cling to the hope
that one day he could come back home.
(ARTILLERY SHELL WHOOSHES, EXPLODES)
(GUNFIRE, MEN SHOUT)
I don't think there is such a thing as a good war.
There are sometimes necessary wars.
And I think, one might say, just wars.
And that, never...
I never questioned the necessity of that war
and I still do not question it.
It was something that had to be done.
NARRATOR: The greatest cataclysm in history grew
out of ancient and ordinary human emotions -
anger and arrogance and bigotry,
victimhood and the lust for power.
And it ended because other human qualities -
courage and perseverance and selflessness,
faith, leadership, and the hunger for freedom -
combined, with unimaginable brutality,
to change the course of human events.
(AIR RAID SIREN WAILS)
The Second World War brought out the best and the worst
in a generation, and blurred the two
so that they became, at times, almost indistinguishable.
In the killing that engulfed the world from 1939 to 1945,
between 50 and 60 million people died...
...so many, and in so many different places,
that the real number will never be known.
More than 85 million men and women served in uniform,
but the overwhelming majority of those who perished
were civilians -
men, women, and children obliterated
by the arithmetic of war.
(DISTANT EXPLOSION)
The United States of America was relatively fortunate.
More than 405,000 soldiers and sailors,
airmen and marines died, but that figure represented
proportionately fewer military casualties
than were suffered by any of the other major combatants.
American cities were not destroyed.
American civilians were never really at risk.
But without American power,
without the sacrifice of American lives,
the struggle's outcome would have been very different.
The American economy only grew stronger
as the fighting went on, and by the time it ended,
the United States would be the most powerful nation on earth
and a once isolated and insular people would find themselves
at the centre of world affairs.
The war touched every family
on every street in every town in America -
towns like Luverne, Minnesota,
Sacramento, California,
Waterbury, Connecticut,
and Mobile, Alabama -
and nothing would ever be the same again.
(GUNFIRE AND ARTILLERY FIRE BOOMS)
HYNES: I'm not sure I can speak about why human beings
in general go to war.
I think that's a pretty large category.
I can only speak
about why 18-year-olds from Minneapolis go to war.
They go to war because it's impossible not to,
because a current is established
in the society so swift, flowing toward war,
that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.
MAN: Luverne, Minnesota, August 1941.
"Miss Aagot Rylund, who is in town visiting her brother,
"knows what it is to see vast sections of a city
"ripped to ruin by German bombs
"and she remembers the nights that London burned,
"how she could read a letter
"by the unbelievable glare of the far-off flames.
"She knows what it is to have high explosive bombs blast
"their big craters right outside the doorway
"of the shelter in which she was sleeping.
"She has had her best friends killed.
"Looking out at the peaceful countryside
"from the Thompson porch, she said it was hard to believe
"that the rest of the world was at war."
Al Macintosh, 'Rock County Star'.
NARRATOR: Much of the world was already at war
in the fall of 1941.
But for most Americans,
finally beginning to recover from a Great Depression,
events overseas seemed impossibly far away.
In Luverne, Minnesota, the biggest town in Rock County,
in the state's south-western corner,
the autumn harvest was only a memory...
and its 3,000 citizens had begun the long winter wait
until they could sow their fields again.
Al Macintosh, the editor of the 'Rock County Star',
lived at 517 North Kniss Avenue.
He was a newcomer from North Dakota
who had turned down big city jobs
to run his own small town paper.
He would soon find himself trying to explain
the unexplainable to his new neighbours.
Six-year-old Jim Sherman lived with his family
at 503 North Estey Street.
SHERMAN: I think it was a pretty close-knit community.
Uh, there was a saying that
if you don't want people to know about it,
you don't do it - sort of thing.
And everybody knew pretty much everybody else in town.
('AMERICAN ANTHEM' PLAYS)
NARRATOR: Four miles south of town,
near the Rock River,
was the 120-acre farm of the Aanenson family.
There they raised cows and grew barley, oats, and corn.
Their middle son,
who would face the most fearful odds in the skies over France,
was named Quentin.
QUENTIN: And literally, sometimes,
I would be on a piece of farm machinery ploughing corn
and a lonely airplane would fly over
and I would look up and my spirit would soar.
That's where I want to be sometime.
I want to live that way.
I want to do those things.
NARRATOR: In Sacramento, California, the state capital,
Okies, refugees from the Dust Bowl,
still camped on the edge of town.
And worked the fields and orchards and vineyards
of the surrounding Sacramento Valley.
The city had been the gateway to the California gold rush,
and the western anchor of the transcontinental railroad.
Although it was home to some 106,000 people,
Sacramento still seemed like a small town.
Tom and Earl Burke,
who would be asked to sacrifice everything for their country,
lived with their parents at 3240 Lassen Way,
just north of town.
EARL: It was a tremendous town, everybody knew each other.
All, all ethnic groups were just perfect.
I mean it was, you, you could go out on the streets at night
at 11:00, 12:00 at night
and, you know, you could walk home in the dark.
Nobody locked the doors.
Nobody even thought of it.
It was a, a nice, clean, little town.
BURNETT MILLER: The lower end of town was rather colourful to us.
There were lots of whorehouses.
As you got up towards the nicer part of town,
towards Tenth Street, uh,
the houses of prostitution were quite fancy.
And, as kids, we used to run down there
and run through the place, just raising hell.
NARRATOR: 18-year-old Burnett Miller lived with his family
in a comfortable neighbourhood at 3643 West Lincoln Avenue.
He would discover, in the last days of the war,
why it had to be fought.
Almost 7,000 Japanese-Americans also lived in Sacramento
and the surrounding county.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers and shop owners,
as well as some of the most productive farmers in America.
Susumu Satow and his family grew strawberries, grapes
and raspberries on their 20-acre farm, east of the city.
SUSUMU SATOW: My mother didn't speak English.
My father spoke, uh, broken English.
As a youngster, uh, at age about eight, nine, I guess,
I used to walk down the railroad track to a place called Mills.
And Mills had a semipro baseball team.
And so I grew up in sort of a baseball environment, I guess.
NARRATOR: In Waterbury, Connecticut,
on the banks of the Naugatuck River,
a skilled work force,
mostly immigrants and immigrants' children,
turned out screws and washers and buttons,
showerheads and alarm clocks,
toy airplanes and lipstick holders,
and cocktail shakers.
Since the 19th century,
its citizens had proudly called their town "Brass City".
Ray Leopold, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Latvia,
lived on Route Eight on the southern edge of the city.
Waterbury was a centre for high quality craft.
Uh, there were individuals there who could do one-ten thousandth of an inch
on anything and if there was zero tolerance required,
they could do that, too.
OLGA CIARLO: Well, Waterbury, where we lived,
there were a lot of Italian people.
They had made a good business for themselves
and were very well liked.
We had a wonderful neighbourhood.
We had parties every single Sunday.
Every Sunday was a picnic for us.
NARRATOR: The Ciarlo family lived at 1032 North Main Street,
in the Italian section of town.
Their father had recently died.
His loss would be only the beginning of their troubles.
And in Mobile, Alabama,
population 112,000,
the only real industry was shipbuilding,
as it had been since the Great War, a generation earlier.
Once a centre of cotton and slave trading,
Mobile was best known for its annual azalea festival,
and its leisurely Southern air.
John Gray and his family lived on the south side of town,
near the L & N railroad tracks at 407 Royal Street.
He would soon be asked to fight a war for freedom,
though his own country's definition of freedom
did not include him.
GRAY: Whites and blacks got along pretty good,
as long as you had the status quo.
But you could not, uh, eat at the counter at Woolworth.
You'd have to go down to the end
and order your sandwich and take it out.
Out to eat.
NARRATOR: Across town,
Katharine Phillips and her family
lived at 1555 Monterey Place.
PHILLIPS: Daddy said Mobile made its living
by taking in each other's wash.
And it was absolutely true.
The pace of life was slow.
On a hot summer evening -
of course there was no airconditioning -
so Daddy would load us in the car and we'd drive downtown
to Brown's Ice Cream and he'd buy us an ice-cream cone
and then we'd drive out to Arlington
and park out by the bay,
and all sit there and enjoy the sea breeze.
And when we'd cooled down enough, he'd bring us home
and everybody could go to bed and go to sleep.
Or we sat on our porch in the evening
and the children played in the yard.
It was a wonderful way to grow up.
And we were completely away from the rest of the world
down in Mobile.
NARRATOR: No-one in Mobile, Waterbury,
Sacramento, Luverne, or anywhere else in America
was prepared for what was about to happen
to them and their country.
DANIEL INOUYE: Pearl Harbor was a Sunday
and, together with the family,
we were all getting ready to go to church.
And the disc jockey's going on with Hawaiian music,
and, suddenly, he sounded hysterical.
For a moment, I thought this was an act.
So I stepped out into the street and, sure enough...
there are puffs and smoke coming out of that Pearl Harbor area.
And so I called my father out,
said, "Look at that."
And, all of a sudden, three aircraft flew right overhead.
They were pearl grey with red dots.
I knew what was happening.
(ARTILLERY SHELLS WHISTLE, EXPLOSIONS BOOM)
And I thought my world had just come to an end.
(EXPLOSION THUNDERS)
(SIREN WAILS)
NARRATOR: At 7:55am, on Sunday, December 7, 1941,
hundreds of Japanese warplanes,
launched from aircraft carriers far out at sea,
attacked the American Pacific Fleet
anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
(EXPLOSION BOOMS)
The attack took a terrible toll.
So terrible a toll that the War Department
kept secret the exact details for years.
(EXPLOSIONS BOOM)
Eight battleships, including the USS 'Arizona',
three light cruisers, three destroyers,
and four other naval vessels were either sunk or damaged.
164 American aircraft were also destroyed.
Most hadn't even gotten off the ground.
And 2,403 Americans were dead.
Nothing like this had ever happened
to the United States of America before.
17-year-old Daniel Inouye, the son of a Japanese immigrant,
was a senior at William McKinley High School in Honolulu,
and a Red Cross volunteer.
INOUYE: A call came in that we had casualties nearby.
One haunts me every so often.
It was a woman clutching a child.
Her head was severed,
but here she was with her arms around her baby.
And, uh...
So this is what I had to pick up, at 17.
MAN ON RADIO: One, two, three, four.
Hello, NBC. Hello, NBC.
This is KBU in Honolulu, Hawaii.
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: I was in a drugstore, drinking a milkshake,
and this lady burst in the side door and screamed,
"Turn on the radio!"
They were talking about Pearl Harbor on every station.
MAN ON RADIO: And London now awaits
Prime Minister Churchill's promise
to declare war on Japan within the hour.
We knew this meant we were in the war.
And we just...
all sat there quietly.
The radio kept giving the same information again and again.
BARBARA COVINGTON: I remember I was home eating breakfast
with my mother and my two brothers.
I was the youngest,
and we were getting ready to go to Sunday school.
I remember the fear coming in my mother's eyes,
because she knew my brothers
were probably going to be called, and they were.
LEOPOLD: It seemed so incredible.
2,400 innocent people
blown off the face of the earth was an atrocity.
It was something that had to be corrected -
perhaps the word might be 'avenged'.
And, um... we had to get busy with it.
NARRATOR: On December 8, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
asked Congress to declare war on Japan.
Three days later,
Japan's allies, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy,
declared war on the United States.
All across the country,
anxious Americans asked themselves,
"How did this happen?"
For more than a decade, they had had glimpses of a world
descending into chaos -
in their newspapers, over the radio
and in newsreels shown in movie theatres.
The Strand and the State in Waterbury.
The Crest and the Alhambra in Sacramento.
The Roxy and the Pike in Mobile.
And the Pix and the Palace in Luverne.
NEWSREEL: For the first time, we saw great cities squashed flat,
civilians bombed and killed.
NARRATOR: They had hoped they could stay out of it all.
EMMA BELLE PETCHER: You couldn't fathom across the ocean,
you know, and you couldn't fathom
what it was really like.
But they would show these newsreels,
and I'd sneak in the back of the theatre and see these newsreels,
and they were horrifying.
NARRATOR: Throughout the 1930s, country after country
had been held hostage to the ruthless ambitions
of the leaders of what would be called the Axis.
Benito Mussolini, the swaggering dictator of Italy,
dreamed of restoring the ancient Roman Empire and becoming
master of the Mediterranean.
Adolf Hitler built his monstrous Nazi regime
and the mightiest army on earth
on the German thirst for revenge -
revenge against the victors of the First World War,
but also against those at home who he claimed had stabbed
their armed forces in the back -
socialists, communists and the Jews.
Above all, the Jews,
who he said were both evil and subhuman.
The German people were superior to all others, he assured them,
and he had been chosen to lead them to their great destiny -
a Reich that would rule over the Old World
and the New for a thousand years.
(Crowd chants) Heil! Heil!
The fact is that I am a Jew.
I was aware of what was going on in Europe,
perhaps a little more than the average person might have known.
And I did feel that, somehow or other,
that Hitler had to be stopped.
Not only for the Jews, but for everybody in the world.
QUENTIN AANENSON: We knew the war in Europe
was going to affect us eventually.
After Czechoslovakia had been taken over by Germany...
we knew that the war was coming our direction,
one way or the other.
NEWSREEL: The beginning of the Blitzkrieg, "the lightning war",
ripping deep into a nation not equipped to meet it.
NARRATOR: On September 1, 1939,
Hitler's forces stormed across
the border of Poland.
In response to the attack, Britain and France
declared war on Germany.
The Second World War had begun.
Denmark and Norway fell.
Holland had surrendered.
Belgium was crushed.
French defences had collapsed.
And in June of 1940, Paris fell.
Adolf Hitler was the master of Western Europe.
Then he set his sights on Britain.
For more than a year, she would stand alone
against relentless attack from the air.
EDWARD MURROW ON RADIO: Hello, America.
This is Edward Murrow speaking from London.
They came over shortly
after blackout time and opened the attack
with a veritable shower of flares and incendiaries.
NARRATOR: When his plans for Britain faltered,
Hitler had turned his attention to the east,
ordering 3 million troops in a surprise attack
on his supposed ally, the Soviet Union,
setting in motion the worst slaughter of the war.
Meanwhile, on the far side of the world,
the military men who ruled Japan in the name of the emperor,
believed their people superior, too.
Their small, crowded island nation had moved
from medieval feudalism to the modern era
in less than a century.
And they dreamed of Japan's becoming a mighty,
self-sufficient power.
With extraordinary brutality,
they had set out to seize the resources of China.
And they coveted the French and Dutch
and British colonies in South-East Asia as well.
NEWSREEL: From Shanghai to Nanking,
Japan still spreads destruction from the skies
upon a score of Chinese cities.
Here is the result -
innocent victims of the savagery that masquerades as modern war.
NARRATOR: Among the obstacles in Japan's way
were the US Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii...
and American military outposts in Guam, Wake Island,
and in the Commonwealth of the Philippines.
The Axis leaders were united
in their scorn for the United States.
Its people were "timid, undisciplined scum",
Hitler said, "under the influence
"of Negroes and Jews".
He was certain such a mongrel people
could never win a war against his Aryan legions.
President Roosevelt had done everything he could,
short of war, to combat the aggressors.
Providing desperately needed aid to Britain and Russia...
...demanding that Japan withdraw from China.
Finally, freezing Japanese assets
in the United States, so that no American oil
could be used to fuel further aggression in Asia.
For the Japanese militarists,
that had been the signal to go to war with America.
They made General Hideki Tojo prime minister.
He thought that by destroying
the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor
in a single blow,
he could stun and demoralise the country long enough
to become so dominant in the region
that Japan could never be dislodged.
American intelligence officers
had broken the Japanese diplomatic code,
and knew some kind of attack was coming.
(EXPLOSION, PLANE SOARS)
But no-one had known where or when
until December 7.
GLENN FRAZIER: I was raised in a real Christian family
and, as a result, killing was not part of my training.
And, uh, that was a big hurdle for me to get over
because I had been taught not to kill.
NARRATOR: Within hours of Pearl Harbor,
the Japanese had also attacked
the main Philippine island of Luzon.
17-year-old Glenn Frazier was now in the middle of a war
he thought he would never have to face.
FRAZIER: And when the war started,
and I was going to the field hospital,
a couple of Japanese planes - Zeroes -
bombed and strafed the hospital.
(GUNFIRE POPS, BOMBS EXPLODE)
And as we were approaching,
a friend of mine and I - uh, we got in the ditch
and one of the dive-bombers came back and strafed us,
and dropped one bomb and hit him direct.
And all I ever found of him was his left foot in a shoe.
And when that Japanese Zero turned his wings
right above the trees and started to fly away,
I could see him with a smile on his face.
And at that point, I had no problem with killing people.
In fact, I got to the point where I hunted them.
(GUNSHOT)
And if I didn't kill a Japanese in a day,
I felt I didn't do my job.
(GUNSHOT)
NARRATOR: Glenn Frazier was one of 31,000 men
under the command of General Douglas MacArthur,
the best known soldier in the American army.
A front line hero of World War I,
he was as self-absorbed as he was courageous.
But the news of Pearl Harbor had paralysed him.
He had had nine hours warning,
yet when the Japanese attacked
his airfields in the Philippines,
most of MacArthur's planes were still parked wing to wing,
easy targets for the enemy.
(BOMBS WHISTLE AND EXPLODE)
More than 50,000
Japanese soldiers would soon be ashore,
converging on Manila from the north and the south.
Neither the American troops,
nor the thousands of Filipino reservists MacArthur called up
would be able to stop them.
The Americans were being pushed out of the Pacific.
MacArthur eventually ordered all his forces to retreat
onto the mountainous, forest-covered Bataán Peninsula.
He withdrew with his family and his aides
to the heavily fortified island at the mouth of Manila Bay
called Corregidor.
Meanwhile, other Americans in the Philippines,
innocent civilians thousands of miles from home,
had been swept up in the war as well.
(SIREN WAILS, BELL CLANGS)
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER: The day Pearl Harbor got bombed
was the seventh.
But, in the Philippines,
with over the International Date Line, it was the eighth.
Same day, and we were bombed a few hours later.
And I had polio when I was a baby,
so I used to go to Manila three times a week
for physical therapy.
And this is what I was doing on a Monday morning,
on the eighth, when the Japanese started bombing.
NARRATOR: Sascha Weinzheimer was eight years old
in December of 1941.
The daughter and grand-daughter of wealthy farmers
with enormous holdings in the Sacramento Valley
and in the Philippines.
As she would detail in a journal,
she lived with her mother and father,
her 3-year-old sister and her 3-month-old brother
on one of the largest sugar plantations
on the Philippine island of Luzon.
NARRATOR: After Japanese bombs fell near their plantation,
Sascha and her family moved into Manila -
now with the army gone, a neutral, "open city" -
joining other refugees at the Bayview Hotel.
WEINZHEIMER: The Japanese came in on 2 January.
That was the beginning of, you know,
this putting the people into camps and so forth.
And your life changed fast.
WOMAN: "The first thing I remember
"was looking across the street towards the bay
"and seeing Japanese soldiers and officers around the flagpole
"hoisting up the Japanese flag
"where our Stars and Stripes had been."
(CHEERING)
"Soon trucks came rolling down the boulevard yelling, 'Bonzai! '
"We were told to be calm and keep away from the windows.
"Everyone was nervous, especially Mother."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
NARRATOR: Japanese soldiers took Sascha's father from the Bayview Hotel
to the walled campus of Santo Tomas University,
which had been turned into a civilian internment camp.
WOMAN: "After Daddy started to say goodbye,
"I could just hardly stand it,
"and for the first time, I was afraid,
"so I screamed and held onto Daddy
"until I had to be pulled away.
"Then he ran out,
"and that was the last we saw of him for a few months."
NARRATOR: Sascha and the rest of her family found shelter
first in one convent, and then another.
Wherever they were, the sound of the guns from Bataán -
where Glenn Frazier
and his comrades were still struggling
to stop the Japanese advance -
continued day and night.
(DISTANT GUNFIRE)
(LOUD, RUMBLING EXPLOSION)
(DUKE ELLINGTON'S 'PERDIDO' PLAYS)
SAM HYNES: You have to imagine what it was like
to be a teenage, middle-class, lower middle-class kid
in Minneapolis in 1941.
The chances for excitement were fairly limited.
You could drive a car fast, you could get drunk,
you could take a girl out
and try and get somewhere and fail.
That's local excitement.
But to have an exciting life -
it was hard to imagine what an exciting life would be.
And then, suddenly, you could be, uh, a pilot
or a submariner, or an artilleryman,
or any damn thing, but you'd be...
It was something exciting, and it was something adult.
All of a sudden, you could choose,
just choose to be an adult by writing your name.
I'm working for a bank in town and delivering cheques.
I write my name, and now, I'm potentially
a combat pilot, a fighter pilot.
Uh, an ace.
Or I'm the commander of a submarine
going into Tokyo Bay.
These are incredible opportunities.
You see, they're melodramatic,
exciting, like the movies.
And you might do it.
So that's terrific.
It has nothing to do with patriotism.
It has nothing to do, really, with who the enemy is.
It's the opportunity to be somebody more exciting
than the kid you are.
(BENNY GOODMAN'S 'WANG WANG BLUES' PLAYS)
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: I came home for my Christmas holidays,
and that's when I found out
that my brother Sidney had gone down
and joined the Marine Corps.
And then, of course, life really took on meaning.
SIDNEY: My father was very patriotic, and...
I felt like really expected me to join the military,
so my friend W.O. Brown
said, "Sid, let's go join the navy in the morning."
And I said, "Fine."
And the recruiting office was crowded
like you wouldn't believe,
so we walked up to the head of the line...
...saw this marine recruiting sergeant.
He came over and said,
"Do you boys want to kill Japs?"
And we said, "Yeah, that's the idea,
"but we're going to join the navy."
And he said, "No," he said, "You don't belong in the navy.
"You belong in the Marine Corps.
"You can't get in the navy, anyway,
"because your parents are married."
And we, uh, ended up joining the Marine Corps.
KATHARINE: So, Sidney joined the marines.
Daddy told Mother, "You might as well sign the paper, Kate.
"He's going to go anyway."
He was only 17 years old.
So, the story in the family is,
the marine recruiting officer crossed the street
any time in the next year that he encountered my mother,
because she would give him a piece of her mind
for taking her little boy into the marines.
NARRATOR: Unlike the professional armies of Germany and Japan,
the armed forces
that Sid Phillips and others rushed to join
had been totally unprepared to wage a world war.
In 1940, the US Army had been smaller
than that of Romania -
only 174,000 men in uniform,
wearing tin hats and leggings issued during World War I.
Then, in the fall of 1940, Congress enacted the draft,
and every young man in America began to worry
when his number would come up.
WILLIAM PERKINS: Somebody got the greetings.
Long envelope, you know.
And when you opened it up, it would say,
"Greetings, The President of the United States
"and your neighbours have selected you
"to be drafted into the armed forces for...
"to protect the country, etc, etc..."
And I was down at a friend of mine's,
Howard Lopes, and he got the letter,
and he opened it up, and he was drafted.
And, so, boy, we just laughed and roared,
and then I had to go home.
And when I walked in the house, my grandma says,
"There's a letter up for you up there."
And, uh, I... so, I picked it up, and I looked at it.
And it said, "Greetings,
"The President of the United States and your neighbours..."
I flew out the house, run down the street, you know,
back up the street where Howard lived,
and I walked in with the paper in my hand.
Everybody looked at me,
and they had a good time laughing,
because I had been drafted.
They knew. I didn't have to tell them.
I just hold up... the letter up.
NARRATOR: Despite a growing chorus of protests by black citizens
outraged at the idea of fighting bigotry abroad
while it was tolerated at home,
the military continued to insist
on segregating African-American servicemen into all-black units.
Even blood supplies for saving the lives
of the wounded were kept separate.
WILLIE RUSHTON: I always thought that, one day,
our country would be better for everybody.
'Cause I knew I saw a lot of things
that my father had to go through
that I didn't have to go through,
so I figured that when my children come on,
we'd still have something better than what I had,
so that's why I wanted to go fight for my country.
I was fairly close to being a pacifist.
I believed that there is
mostly negotiated solutions
to most problems of this sort.
But I couldn't fathom that there was ever
a solution to the confrontation that Hitler was giving
to us and the rest of the world.
I felt that I belonged in the service,
um, because the threat,
while it was directed at the entire rest of the world,
was particularly directed
at the origins that I came from.
(DUKE ELLINGTON'S 'ECHOES OF HARLEM' PLAYS)
If I didn't know it at the particular moment I went in,
13 weeks later, after I had finished my basic training,
I knew, expertly, how to kill.
Kill with a bayonet, kill with a bullet,
kill with your hands.
Yes, I could kill.
HYNES: I left Minneapolis for the service
on a dank, wet, cold
March Minneapolis evening.
My father drove me to the station
in the car that he almost never let me drive as a kid,
downtown, past all the...
places that had been the, uh,
stations of my childhood and growing up,
to the Rock Island Railroad.
It was dark.
The long platform was dark
with hanging arc lights at distance,
so that, as you walked,
it was dark, light, dark, light, dark, light.
And at the far end was a navy yeoman
with a clipboard and a gathering of young men
or boys around him.
And we stopped, and my father shook my hand.
It seemed very strange to me that my father and I
were on handshaking terms.
Then he turned around and walked back toward the entrance -
dark, light, dark, light, dark, light -
and out into the street and was gone.
And I turned to the yeoman and went up
and said, "Present," when my name came up,
and I was in the navy.
NARRATOR: Nearly 50 million men
would register for the draft during the war.
Some 16 million Americans would eventually wear their country's uniform.
But during the days immediately following Pearl Harbor,
it was still anyone's guess where they would be sent
or how well they would fight when they got there.