MAN: February 23, 1942.
"Out of Poland have come these appalling pictures
"of the end product of German conquest.
"They show mass misery and death carried by German thoroughness
"to an extreme rarely seen before in history.
"They also show the kind of thing
"the fighting foes of Nazism may expect
"if they really lose the war.
"The methodical massacre takes on
"an emotional quality of sadism,
"as applied by the Nazis to the Jews.
"Herded in Polish ghettos, forbidden to walk out
"or use a railway, machine-gunned in their synagogues,
"thrown by thousands into the rivers,
"stripped of clothing and food and possessions.
"The Jews of Poland are literally dying out.
"These are the grim statistical facts.
"The details of human agony are multiplied beyond the telling."
'Life' magazine.
NARRATOR: At the start of 1942,
almost all the news was bad.
The Soviet Union, the United States' new ally,
was under unceasing attack from the Germans,
who had encircled Leningrad
and reached the outskirts of Moscow.
Japanese troops had now taken Singapore,
the Gibraltar of the East,
and with it, all of Malaya.
They had seized Borneo and Burma and Hong Kong.
And they had taken Guam and Wake Island,
Makin and Tarawa.
There was not a single American base
between Hawaii and the Philippines.
But President Roosevelt
and British prime minister Winston Churchill agreed
that, for the time being, they would have to remain
on the defensive in the Pacific.
Germany, they decided,
with its vast armies and mighty industrial machine,
was the greatest danger.
Victory in Europe would require
not only the mobilisation of a generation of young men,
but also billions of rounds of ammunition,
millions of guns, hundreds of thousands of tanks and airplanes
and fleets of ships to bring them to battle.
Producing all of that would take time.
Meanwhile, the survival of Britain and the Soviet Union
depended on a steady stream of food
and fuel and weapons from America.
BURT WILSON: When I was seven years old, in Theodore Judah School,
a boy from England, an English refugee,
came into our class.
His name was William Murgathroid Buchanan.
We all called him Roid - Roid Buchanan.
And we developed a great friendship.
And, one day, Roid came over to my house,
and I was upstairs, and he called, "Burt! Burt!"
And I looked out the window,
and I said, "Hi, Roid. What's going on?"
And Roid said, "Do you know what
"a dirty German sub did to my father?"
And I said, "No. What?" He said, "It killed him."
And I don't...
I didn't know how to deal with that.
I went downstairs,
and we sat down under the tree and talked awhile.
But it was still something that
I'd never had any experience with, up until that time -
one of my best friends telling me
that his father was killed in a war.
NARRATOR: On the evening of January 13, 1942,
as American troops tried to stop the Japanese on Bataán,
a German U-boat surfaced silently off Manhattan.
Its commander was astonished but gratified to see that,
more than a month after Germany declared war
on the United States,
America's largest city was still ablaze with lights.
Using those lights to silhouette his target,
he sent a torpedo hissing toward the side
of an American oil tanker...
...then slipped back beneath the sea
and moved south in search of further prey.
Within 12 hours, he had sunk seven more unarmed vessels.
The United States seemed totally unprepared for this kind of war.
By the end of January,
U-boats would sink 25 tankers along the east coast,
continuing a fierce struggle for supremacy of the seas,
called the Battle of the Atlantic,
and threatening to choke off America's allies.
American beaches were black with oil.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: All along the Gulf Coast
and all on the shores of Mobile Bay,
we could go sit on the beach,
but we were not allowed to light a fire,
because of the U-boats.
We heard often in Mobile that ships were sunk
just as they went out of Mobile Bay.
And we know this to be true,
because the life preservers and the canned goods
washed up on our beaches.
NARRATOR: For a time, the waters from Jacksonville, Florida,
to Galveston, Texas, were considered
the most dangerous shipping lane in the world.
"The only safe run," said one wary merchant seaman,
"is from St Louis to Cincinnati."
GLENN FRAZIER: I really fought the first few days
for the good Old Glory...
you know, like everybody else,
you're saying, "Good old United States.
"We're going to fight, we're going to whip these Japanese
"in a matter of six months," and so forth.
But when it really hit me that this was not a short situation
and that they were hitting us hard,
then I think I changed pretty much to protect myself
and my fellow Americans, and I think I was fighting more
to save my own life.
NARRATOR: Nearly 80,000 American and Filipino troops
had managed to escape the Japanese around Manila
and take up positions on the Bataán Peninsula.
Once again, General MacArthur's planning had faltered.
Most supplies had been left behind.
Rations had to be cut in half.
Bataán's humid forests bred malarial mosquitoes.
Clean water was in short supply.
There was little medicine on hand.
One field hospital had eight operating tables...
and 1,200 battle casualties in need of surgery.
Still the men struggled to hold on...
...fighting off one attack after another,
then retreating halfway down the peninsula.
For weeks, the men on Bataán continued to hope
that rescuers were coming.
Again and again, MacArthur had assured them of it.
"Help is on the way," he promised.
FRAZIER: On the 'Voice of America', one time, I remember it,
we were getting it on short-wave radio.
It said, uh, as far as the eye can see,
these ships and planes coming to the Philippines.
We were told continuously that we were getting reinforcements.
We were told that when we retreated back into Bataán,
it would only be for a few weeks.
NARRATOR: But no troops, no planes had ever been dispatched.
They could not have made it through, anyway.
The Japanese now controlled the South Pacific.
"There are times," Secretary of War Henry Stimson confided to his diary,
"when men must die."
By early March, three out of four of Bataán's defenders
were incapacitated in some way -
sick, exhausted, wounded, weak from hunger,
suffering from beriberi.
FRAZIER: At the end, close to the end, there was one can of salmon
issued to 35 men
and some rice and very little rice,
so our situation was getting -
deteriorating and getting worse every day.
NARRATOR: MacArthur managed to leave his quarters on Corregidor
to visit his men on Bataán precisely once.
They began calling him 'Dugout Doug'.
The soldiers' bitterness intensified when,
acting under direct orders from the president,
MacArthur, his wife, 4-year-old son
and 17 members of his staff
slipped out of Corregidor in a PT boat.
From Australia, he issued a brief statement.
"I came through," he said, "and I shall return."
FRAZIER: When he left and went to Australia,
that's what I call doomsday for Bataán,
because we knew then that we had to fight,
and he issued orders to fight to the last man,
and that's, we knew what our fate was going to be.
NARRATOR: On April 9, 1942, Major General Edward L. King
sent a soldier forward with a white flag.
It was the largest surrender by the United States Army
in its history -
78,000 American and Filipino troops.
General King asked a Japanese officer just one question -
would his men be treated decently.
"Yes," said the officer,
"we are not barbarians."
But Japanese tradition held that those who surrendered
rather than die on the battlefield
were cowards, unworthy of respect.
The prisoners were prodded northward, 300 at a time.
They were to walk from Mariveles to San Fernando,
then be loaded onto railroad cars
for the journey to Camp O'Donnell in central Luzon.
What followed would be remembered
as the Bataán Death March.
FRAZIER: If we had known what was ahead of us at the beginning
of the Bataán Death March, uh, I would have taken death.
It was very, very difficult for us to understand,
because we had had no contact with the Japanese whatsoever
as to what these people are all about
and what they're like.
And they immediately started beating guys
if they didn't stand right or if they were sitting down.
We didn't know where we were going.
We didn't know anything.
And we were stopped on the way,
some of us were, and searched and beat again.
And all our possessions were taken away from us.
Some of them had rings that they just cut the fingers off
and take the rings.
They poured the water out of my canteen
to be sure that I didn't have any, any water.
I saw them buried alive.
When a guy was bayoneted or shot,
laying in the road and the convoys were coming along,
I saw trucks that would just go out of their way
to run over the guy in the middle of the road.
And when by the time you have 15 or 20 trucks run over you,
you look like a smashed tomato or something.
And I saw people that had their throats cut,
because they would take their bayonets
and stick it out through the corner of the truck at night
and it would just be high enough to cut their throats.
And beating with a rifle butt
until there just was no more life in them.
I saw Filipino women cut.
Their stomachs were cut open.
Their throats were cut.
I saw Filipinos and Americans beheaded
just with one swipe of a sabre.
I marched six days and seven nights, never stopped,
I did not have but one sip of water and no food.
Now, they say that you can't do this, but I did.
When I got to the end of the march after,
uh, at the end of the entire march where I stopped
to get on a train - they put us on a train -
my-my tongue wouldn't even go back in my mouth.
And if you look and talk to somebody about that,
they'll tell you that's how close to death I was.
NARRATOR: No-one knows precisely how many men died
on the Bataán Death March -
somewhere between 6,000 and 11,000 Filipinos and Americans.
And at the end of the march,
Camp O'Donnell provided no relief.
An unfinished Philippine army base,
surrounded by barbed wire and machine gun towers,
with little water and little shelter from the sun,
it would eventually hold nearly
60,000 miserable, desperate men.
Food was nothing but lugao, watery rice soup
filled with weevils and worms.
It was best to try and swallow it after dark,
one man recalled, so as not to have to look at it.
Some 16,000 more Filipinos and Americans would die
at Camp O'Donnell - of dehydration, malnutrition,
malaria, beriberi, scurvy,
dysentery, hopelessness.
"Their bodies went by in an endless column,"
one sergeant remembered.
"Day and night, they were carried to the cemetery."
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We had all been so distressed
about leaving our boys in the Philippines.
There was no way of rescuing them, we know now,
but at the time, we didn't know that there were no ships.
Remember, they didn't tell us how much had been sunk
at Pearl Harbor, and we kept thinking,
"Why don't you go in there
"and get the boys out of the Philippines?"
(MAN SHOUTS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE)
NARRATOR: One day, Glenn Frazier volunteered for burial detail.
FRAZIER: On some days, we buried 250 men,
so I didn't know that one day it might happen to me.
So, my idea was I had two sets of dog tags.
And I said to myself,
"Well, I think I'll just throw one of these sets of dog tags
"in the mass grave, so if I'm alive when the war ends,
"there's no problem."
But if I'm missing or dead, I didn't... I wanted my family
to know and have some kind of ending, and so forth,
so they would think that I was in this grave.
(EXPLOSION)
NARRATOR: On May 6, 1942,
Corregidor, the last American stronghold in the Philippines,
fell to the Japanese.
(SEAGULLS CRY)
SAM HYNES: I went to Seattle in 1942.
One memory is very clear and strong.
It's a Saturday, and I'm taking a bus into the centre of town
and across the public square
in front of the town hall, I guess it is...
And I see ahead of me
a line of people standing patiently by a bus stop.
And as I approach, I see that they're all Japanese
and that they're getting onto buses.
And I realise that these are the Japanese-American citizens
of Seattle and the neighbourhood who are being sent off
to what amounted to a concentration camp.
And I think, "Well, those are my enemies."
But they don't look like enemies standing there
in their American clothes with their cardboard suitcases
waiting to be sent off into the desert.
NARRATOR: On February 19, 1942,
President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066.
Its tone was carefully neutral.
It authorised the War Department to designate "military areas"
and then exclude anyone from them
whom it felt to be a danger.
But it had a specific target...
...the more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry
living along the west coast.
They were about to be forced
from their homes and moved inland.
Thousands of German and Italian aliens were also locked up,
but millions of German- and Italian-American citizens
remained free to live their lives as they always had.
Only Japanese-Americans on the west coast
were singled out.
"A Jap's a Jap," said General John L. DeWitt
of the West Coast Defence Command.
"It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.
"I don't want any of them."
Almost no-one protested the government's plan,
which also classified all Japanese-Americans
as unfit for military service.
DANIEL INOUYE: 1 -A is physically fit,
and 4-F, something's wrong with you.
But 4-C means enemy alien.
And here I was, 17 years of age.
I considered myself a good American but, uh...
made into an enemy.
NARRATOR: In Sacramento, soon after Order 9066 was issued,
hand-lettered signs went up all over town,
saying "Japs must go."
The orders to leave arrived in May.
Susumu Satow and his family could scarcely believe it.
They were given one week's notice.
It was middle of the harvest and...
but still, yet we had to abandon it and leave.
And so, of course, we made arrangement with our friends.
"Hey, come and pick the strawberries
"because it's ready to be marketed."
And so I imagine they did that.
And so you put just essentials in your suitcase.
You know, first day,
when we had to pack up our thing and go to the train,
I really wondered what's going to happen to us?
NARRATOR: Asako Tokuno was still a freshman
at Berkeley that spring.
Her parents and her grandfather were evacuated first,
because they had been born in Japan.
She and her sister were left behind for a time
to close the family flower business.
We all somehow gathered the flowers, bunched them and got
them to the market, to the flower market in San Francisco.
And so we were able to keep the business going.
And all those flowers didn't go to waste, you know.
They were just in the height of their beauty at that time
of the year, getting ready for Easter and all the holidays.
We were really... kind of caught in the middle
when the war happened, although no question about our loyalty
to our country, you know, and how we felt.
(Voice breaks) This is our country,
and when this whole evacuation thing happened, I mean,
it was like we had no country, because we weren't from Japan
and, and they took away our, our rights, actually.
We couldn't protest, and we wouldn't have protested,
because we had to do what the government told us to do.
And so, uh, I think our parents realised, of course,
they were, you know, not citizens,
so they accepted the whole thing.
But for us, I think it was a lot harder,
the fact that we had no rights.
(PROJECTOR CLACKS)
NEWSREEL: This was the Russian front in 1942.
The Germans advanced, looting,
torturing, murdering as they went.
The casualties ran into the millions.
They had driven 1,000 miles deep into Russian territory,
but Russia, with her 'scorched earth' policy,
left nothing of value behind.
Wheat, which could not be harvested, was set afire.
Bridges were blown up, dams, railroads, power plants.
NARRATOR: Although the German invasion of the Soviet Union
had stalled outside Moscow,
with both sides suffering unspeakable losses,
a new Nazi offensive in the spring of 1942
had sent more than 225 divisions
steadily advancing across Russia.
Millions of civilians and soldiers died.
Soviet premier Josef Stalin was demanding that the Allies
immediately open a second front in the west
to relieve the pressure on his beleaguered people.
But there was as yet
not a single Allied soldier fighting in western Europe,
and there would not be for a long time.
They simply weren't ready.
American planners had a straightforward idea
of how to beat the Germans -
invade France in the spring of 1943
and drive right for Berlin.
But the British were wary of moving too fast.
"A defeat on the French coast," Winston Churchill warned,
was, "the only way in which we could possibly lose this war."
Instead, he favoured attacking
German and Italian forces in North Africa.
American commanders thought invading Africa
would be a dangerous and wasteful diversion...
...but Congressional elections were coming up.
American voters were eager
for more offensive action against the Axis.
President Roosevelt overruled his generals.
The invasion of occupied France would be delayed.
Instead, preparations were made for American troops
to land in North Africa at the end of 1942.
A bitter General George C. Marshall, army chief of staff,
wrote privately that he and his fellow commanders
had "failed to see that the leader in a democracy
"has to keep the people entertained."
('AMERICAN PATROL' BY GLENN MILLER PLAYS)
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: I did notice repeatedly
during the war that there would be
a sense of pride in what you were a part of.
You would feel the power of the military.
You would feel the power of the convoy you were in,
the warships that were surrounding you,
the weapons that you were responsible for.
It was a strange feeling.
You knew you were in great danger,
but you somehow felt safe
in that you were a part of this great, powerful group.
NARRATOR: In early August of 1942,
Private Sidney Phillips of Mobile, Alabama,
and the 19,000 men of the First Marine Division
steamed out of Wellington, New Zealand
in a large convoy, including all three
of America's carriers in the South Pacific.
Their target was so remote, so obscure,
that some of their officers had trouble saying its name.
But that summer, Guadalcanal, a 90-mile-long island
at the eastern end of the Solomon chain,
covered with dense jungle and coconut plantations,
had suddenly become one of the most strategically important
spots in the Pacific.
Two separate commands
had the task of pushing back the Japanese.
General Douglas MacArthur
was in command of the South-western Pacific,
assigned to drive from New Guinea
toward the Philippines and Formosa.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz would use the marines
to climb a longer ladder up the Solomons, the Gilberts,
the Marshalls, the Marianas,
the Volcano Islands, the Ryukus.
He would begin in the Solomons.
The Japanese had made landings there, and construction crews
were hard at work on an airstrip on Guadalcanal.
If they were allowed to complete it,
Japanese warplanes could choke off shipping lanes
between the United States and Australia
and make the Allied campaign impossible.
The marines, including 17-year-old Sid Phillips,
now a mortarman, had been sent to stop them.
Their commander had assumed his green troops would receive
another six months of training before they saw combat.
They were armed with old
single-shot, bolt-action rifles.
They had only 10 days worth of ammunition,
and in order to get them into the fight as fast as possible
their supply stocks had been reduced from 90 days to 60.
The men called it 'Operation Shoestring'.
At dawn on August 7, 1942,
American land forces went on the offensive
for the first time in the Second World War.
No-one had any idea how long, how bloody
and how consequential the battle for Guadalcanal would be.
Sid Phillips's platoon was part of the second wave
of marines to go ashore.
"We had been repeatedly told
"this would be the first
"ship-to-shore landing," he remembered,
"and nobody could more than guess if such an idea
"would be successful.
"We braced ourselves, and the craft slid up on the beach.
"We charged out, ready to do or die," Phillips said,
"and there was the first wave sitting, laughing at us."
There was virtually no opposition.
The first American casualty on Guadalcanal was a marine
who cut his hand with a machete,
trying to open a coconut.
Americans seized the unfinished airstrip
with little trouble and renamed it Henderson Field
after a marine pilot who was killed
during the Battle of Midway.
They began to prepare it for American planes
with signs that read, "Under new management."
Their orders were to hold the field at all cost.
The enemy couldn't be allowed to retake it.
Then... the Japanese attacked.
The American fleet offshore was their first target.
PHILLIPS: The Japanese Navy came in and sank all of our escorts.
NARRATOR: Four heavy cruisers were lost, along with more than
1,800 American sailors.
PHILLIPS: They could have sunk our supply ships, too,
but they didn't - it was at night,
and they didn't know how successful they had been.
But the next day, all of our supplies left,
and we were... we were there without ever unloading
even our 10 days of supplies that we had brought in with us.
We would have starved to death if there hadn't have been
a big supply of Japanese rice there.
NARRATOR: The marines found themselves alone
and began to wonder if they, like the men on Bataán,
had simply been abandoned.
With no support from the sea or the air,
the men were strafed and bombed daily...
...pounded by shells from Japanese ships offshore
and under attack from enemy troops
hidden in the jungle.
PHILLIPS: We understood that we might be expendable.
It had become sort of the established thing,
and, uh, we knew our country was not yet, uh, heavily armed.
And yes, we did, uh, feel that we might be expendable.
We really did.
NARRATOR: Phillips was among those sent out to help recover
the bodies of marines killed in an enemy ambush.
PHILLIPS: And it was about five miles out to the ambush site
where all the American bodies had been mutilated.
They had been beheaded and, uh,
had their genitals, uh, stuffed in their mouths, and...
Uh... our battalion never took a prisoner
that I know of after that.
I really... I really don't remember
that we ever took a prisoner.
NARRATOR: On the late afternoon of August 20,
after 13 harrowing days on the island,
Phillips heard the sound of approaching aircraft
and took cover as usual.
But this time, the planes were American.
The marines cheered.
They were no longer alone.
PHILLIPS: It looked like Uncle Sam was going to fight
for that miserable place, after all.
NARRATOR: But at 2am the next morning,
just hours after the first American planes arrived,
a Japanese commander sent 900 fresh troops
against marine positions along the western bank
of a twisting jungle creek.
Its name was the llu River, but because the maps
the marines had been issued had it wrong,
the fierce firefight that followed
would be remembered as the Battle of the Tenaru.
PHILLIPS: At that time on Guadalcanal,
almost every night there would be some event
that would arouse everyone, would keep everyone awake.
But this night it was different.
The whole world erupted,
and, uh... the lines became just a wall of fire.
We knew it was the real event.
NARRATOR: The Japanese commander was so certain
he could destroy the marines
that in his diary he had filled in the entry for the day -
"21 August.
"Enjoyed the fruits of victory."
The Japanese kept coming all night.
"Banzai," they screamed. "Marine, you die!"
The marines just kept shooting.
PHILLIPS: We killed, I think, over 900 Japanese
and lost something like 34 marines.
So it did our morale a great deal of good.
NARRATOR: For the first time,
the supposedly invincible lmperial Army had been stopped.
The humiliated commander,
who had predicted victory, shot himself.
But the Battle of the Tenaru settled nothing on Guadalcanal.
Japanese reinforcements poured onto the island,
and the fighting just went on and on.
A confusing, vicious war of ambush
and counterattack.
A terrifying world
where random Japanese shells would explode
among the entrenched and embattled Americans.
PHILLIPS: Some men could take it,
and, uh, some just physically could not take it.
The sheer terror of knowing that the next one
is going to have your name on it -
when that goes on and on and on and on,
you... you-you get a strange feeling
in which you seem to become detached,
and you just think, "Well, maybe this will end
"and maybe it won't, and maybe we'll all be blown up
"and maybe we won't, but who cares?"
And you... you learn to sort of live with it.
It is just a matter of fate.
You will either survive if the Lord is willing
or you will not.
So there's really nothing you can do.
And you just take it.
NARRATOR: Private Sid Phillips turned 18 on September 2.
The next day, he got his first letter from home
since he'd sailed for Guadalcanal.
It was, he wrote back,
"the best birthday present possible for me".
In late September,
some American reinforcements finally made it through.
But nightly visits by fast-moving Japanese ships
the marines called the Tokyo Express
kept the enemy on the island
supplied and reinforced as well.
Twice, the Japanese,
determined to retake Henderson Field,
mounted full-scale assaults on the airstrip.
Twice, the marines beat them back.
Thousands of Japanese were shot dead or blown to pieces.
Week after week,
the battle for Guadalcanal ground on.
On November 12,
the Japanese Navy mounted one last major offensive,
aimed at reinforcing their forces
and dislodging the Americans on Guadalcanal.
A much smaller number of American ships steamed in
to try to stop them.
The naval battle that followed
went on for three days and three nights.
PHILLIPS: You could see the salvos of the ships,
and you could see the naval shells
going through the air like lightning bugs.
And you could see ships explode.
We didn't know if they were American or Japanese.
We didn't know who was winning or who was losing.
Sometimes when a ship would explode, it would...
the concussion would actually flap your clothes
miles and miles away.
But we did know that our fate was being decided
and we would, uh, we would...
sit there sort of mystified and horrified
by what was going on, because we knew
thousands of sailors were dying on one side or the other.
NARRATOR: Some 5,000 American sailors lost their lives
in the fighting off Guadalcanal -
so many... that the casualty figures
were again kept from the public.
Among those who died
were five brothers from Fredericksburg, lowa,
who all served on the cruiser 'Juneau' -
Joseph, Francis, Albert,
Madison and George Sullivan.
But Japan lost two battleships,
23 other warships,
600 aircraft,
and thousands of sailors and airmen.
And most important to Sid Phillips
and the men on Guadalcanal, the enemy was no longer able
to resupply its forces on the island.
The Japanese continued to fight,
but it was clear the Americans would eventually prevail.
The last starving, desperate Japanese troops on the island
would not be killed, captured or evacuated
until February 1943.
21,000 Japanese soldiers were lost.
Guadalcanal would prove a crucial victory.
After six long months,
the Americans were beginning to learn how to beat
the Japanese - not only in the air
and on the sea, but in the jungles,
where, over the next three years,
the fighting would only get worse.
Allied shipping lanes to Australia remained open.
And there was more good news.
American and Australian forces had also taken
the most important Japanese strongholds on New Guinea.
Japan's expansion had been stopped.
PHILLIPS: By the time we left Guadalcanal,
which was December 22 of 1942,
we had been there since August 7 -
everybody had lost at least 25 pounds.
Our clothes were in rags. We were covered with sores.
And we had nearly starved to death two or three times.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We did not realise
how desperate the marines were on Guadalcanal
because the news never told us.
In fact, it was not till years later when Sidney came home
that we found that their food was down to fish heads and rice.
And that he was down to 125 pounds
when they took him off of Guadalcanal.
NARRATOR: More than 1,700 Americans had died on Guadalcanal.
Another 4,700 were wounded,
and thousands more were seriously ill.
Sid Phillips had survived.
But his Uncle Charles Tucker, a navy pilot
who had flown in and out of Henderson Field, had not.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: When we lost Charlie, it made it very real to all of us.
And by that time, we had started losing boys in the neighbourhood.
The boy up here on the corner was a navy pilot
and he was killed.
The boy down the street was an air force pilot
and he was missing in action.
We just... they started disappearing all around us.
And my mother spent her time
going to visit the other mothers, consoling them.
And it was a very, very fearful time.
It really was.
You don't expect death among people your age.
Old people die.
And then, you begin to see
that it's your contemporaries are dying.
And therefore, it is just conceivable
that you might die, too.
('AMERICAN ANTHEM' PLAYS)
NARRATOR: Luverne, Minnesota, had been lucky so far.
No local family had lost a son in the war.
But in Sacramento,
Mrs Lillian Cole had received news
that her son David had perished on the USS 'Arizona'
at Pearl Harbor.
She had been asked by the government
"to keep secret for the present
"the name of the ship on which he served."
Another Sacramento native, airman Tom Burke,
died on a training mission in Puerto Rico,
devastating his younger brother, Earl.
In Waterbury, the family of marine private Albert Boulanger
learned that he had been killed on Guadalcanal,
not far from where Sid Phillips of Mobile had been fighting.
Glenn Frazier was still a prisoner of the Japanese,
but the girl he loved back in Alabama had changed her mind
and was now waiting for him to come home to her.