(BIRDS SCREECH IN DISTANCE)
(HORN HONKS)
NARRATOR: Early in 1943, an envelope from the War Department arrived
at 1032 North Main Street in Waterbury, Connecticut,
the home of the Ciarlo family.
They knew it was coming.
There were three boys in the family.
Two were exempt from the draft -
Dom, married with one child and another on the way,
and Tom, just 16 and still too young to go.
But the middle son, Corado, was 19 and single,
working at Waterbury Steel Ball,
a perfect candidate for the army.
His family and friends called him 'Babe'.
OLGA CIARLO: And he was the one to go.
Course, it was a shock to all of us,
and my mother cried forever.
Forever.
But that's the way the war was.
So... it was a tough time.
And not only that, but my father had passed away
in, uh, 1937.
My mother was very, very heartbroken
at that time already.
My mother would take the bus
and go up to the cemetery all by herself.
She couldn't speak a word of English.
And all she could tell the man on the bus was, "Cemetery."
And then to know that my brother was going off to war,
she was scared.
She didn't want to go through this all over again, so...
It was hard times, very hard times.
(HARP PLAYS ARPEGGIOS)
(BIG BAND PLAYS 'LET'S GET LOST' INTRO)
RADIO ANNOUNCER: Here's number six,
a song by Frank Sinatra.
(Sinatra sings) # Let's get lost... #
MAN: "May 9, 1943.
"Dearest Mom and family,
"We are listening to the Lucky Strike program,
"and Frank Sinatra is singing 'Let's Get Lost',
"and what a voice he's got.
"Tell Mom not to worry about me,
'cause I'll be home soon enough.
"I am calling Mom to give her Mother's Day greetings.
"I will have to wait five or six hours
"for the call to go through, but it is worth it."
# Let's defrost... #
"From now until I get through with my basic training,
"I will be pretty busy,
"so if Mom doesn't hear from me for a few days,
"you explain to her that I am alright,
"but just busy.
"Love, Babe."
(Sinatra scats softly)
(DISTANT GUNFIRE)
NARRATOR: By January of 1943,
Americans had been at war for more than a year.
US Navy warplanes had stopped the Japanese advance
at the Battle of Midway,
destroying four enemy carriers
and inflicting the first defeat on the lmperial Navy in 350 years.
The marines had taken Guadalcanal
in the Solomon Islands...
...and American and Australian forces
had defeated the Japanese at Buna
on the island of Papua New Guinea.
But the 4,000-mile march toward the Japanese home islands
was just beginning.
And thousands of Americans
were still held prisoner by the Japanese,
including 9-year-old Sascha Weinzheimer,
whose family came from the Sacramento Valley,
and Corporal Glenn Frazier, from Ft Deposit, Alabama.
Meanwhile, in the snows around Stalingrad,
Hitler's dream of expanding his empire eastward across Russia
was ending in catastrophe
as the Red Army annihilated his surrounding armies.
But the Germans, with their vast war machine,
still occupied most of western Europe,
and the Allies had not yet been able to agree on a plan
or a timetable to dislodge them.
For the time being, they would have to be content
to nip at the edges of Hitler's enormous domain.
American troops were now ashore in North Africa,
ready to test themselves for the first time
against the German and Italian armies.
For the people of Mobile, Alabama,
Luverne, Minnesota,
Sacramento, California,
Waterbury, Connecticut,
and every other town in America,
the war would dictate the rhythm and pace of life
in ways they could not have imagined a year before.
And the sense of national purpose
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had brought to the battle
against the Great Depression
was now fully focused on winning this war.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: I do not prophesy
when this war will end.
But I do believe that this year of 1943...
will give to the United Nations a very substantial advance
along the roads that lead to Berlin
and Rome and Tokyo.
(APPLAUSE)
A tremendous, costly, long enduring task,
in peace as well as in war,
is still ahead of us.
But as we face that continuing task,
we may know that the state of this nation is good,
the heart of this nation is sound,
the spirit of this nation is strong,
the faith of this nation is eternal.
(APPLAUSE)
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Roosevelt carried
a real message of confidence with his voice.
He gave us all the confidence
that we could do anything he asked us to do,
and certainly the boys could do anything he asked 'em to do.
And he was the powerful, driving force.
Now, England had Churchill...
...but we had Roosevelt.
And from the time he announced Pearl Harbor,
and announced that we would go to war,
we were all behind him.
(BENNY GOODMAN'S BAND PLAYS 'IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD')
WARD CHAMBERLIN: The lucky thing was that...
the American Army didn't get its first taste of battle
going across the Channel, the way some people wanted us to.
They had to go through that... that North African thing,
which was a learning experience and a very expensive one.
Our army got to be goddamn good,
but at the beginning they were like anybody else -
they weren't too good at it.
NARRATOR: At an Allied conference in Casablanca in January, 1943,
everything went well for the cameras,
and President Roosevelt
and British prime minister Winston Churchill
announced they would accept nothing less
than unconditional surrender from the enemy.
NEWSREEL: ...unconditional surrender.
NARRATOR: But behind the scenes, both men were concerned.
The Allies were still trying to find ways to work together.
The previous November,
Allied troops under General Dwight Eisenhower
had made coordinated landings in Morocco and Algeria
without meeting much resistance.
But Hitler strengthened his forces in neighbouring Tunisia.
Eisenhower's troops were meant to race east
to engage the enemy,
while British general Bernard Montgomery
and his Eighth Army
pursued German general Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps
westward from Egypt.
NEWSREEL: Tunisia, next door to Italian Libya,
is at the rear of the Axis Army.
It's the next objective for the American half
of the nutcracker campaign, closing in on Rommel
from the west as the British smash from the east.
The aim is to chase the Axis out of North Africa,
threaten Italy and other Nazi-dominated
territories in Europe,
and open shorter supply lines to Russia.
That's the meaning of the American drive to Tunis.
(WIND WHISTLES)
NARRATOR: After two months of sporadic fighting,
the battle for North Africa suddenly intensified.
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
(MEN SHOUT, EXPLOSIONS)
On February 14, Rommel sent his seasoned veterans
against the untested, poorly led, and ill-equipped Americans.
His goal, he said, was to instil in them
"an inferiority complex of no mean order".
And for a time,
he succeeded.
With the American forces was Private Charles Mann,
a farmer's son from Luverne, Minnesota.
CHARLES MANN: It was good, I guess, that you were afraid,
but it did not interfere with what your real thinking was
because you had one idea
and that was that you was gonna make it.
NARRATOR: Rommel's forces quickly overwhelmed the Americans
whose armour proved no match for German Panzers.
Some soldiers called the Allied tanks Ronsons,
after the cigarette lighter,
for their propensity to burst instantly
into flame when hit.
(HEART BEATS RHYTHMICALLY)
Stuka dive-bombers screamed down upon the Americans.
Some men held, others panicked.
Survivors fled westward across the open plain.
They would not stop for 50 miles.
CHAMBERLIN: They didn't know what the hell they were doing.
Guys never been under fire before,
and, uh, when they got hit, they didn't know what to do,
and they retreated,
and they had terrible leadership.
It was chaos. And war's always chaos.
The commander of the American troops there
was a visible coward.
He built a... a, uh...
headquarters for himself in a rock chamber
some 20 miles back from the line
with the argument that he could communicate better from there.
So, he was appalling.
NARRATOR: After beating back two American counterattacks,
the Germans poured westward through the Kasserine Pass,
gateway to Algeria,
threatening the Allies' main supply base at Tébessa.
(ARTILLERY FIRE)
(EXPLOSIONS, MEN SHOUT)
(AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE)
(MEN SHOUT)
In two weeks of fighting, 6,000 Americans were lost.
45 soldiers from the little town of Red Oak, lowa,
were killed or reported missing.
A third of those who lived
were victims of neuropsychiatric disorders
brought on by the first experience of battle
for which they were totally unprepared.
2,400 surrendered.
The Americans simply didn't know how to fight,
a British commander said,
and if they didn't learn quickly,
they "will play no useful part whatsoever"
in the invasion of Europe.
General Eisenhower agreed.
"Our operations to date," he confided grimly to a friend,
"will be condemned, in their entirety,
"by all war college classes for the next 25 years."
The correspondent Ernie Pyle was with the troops
and struggled to make sense of what he'd seen.
MAN: "You folks at home must be disappointed
"at what happened to our American troops in Tunisia.
"Personally, I feel that some such setback as this -
"tragic though it is for many Americans,
"for whom it is now too late -
"is not entirely a bad thing for us.
"It's alright to have a good opinion of yourself,
"but we Americans are so smug with our cockiness
"we somehow feel that just because we're Americans
"we can whip our weight in wildcats."
FUSSELL: But I think every ground war has to begin that way
because what's going to happen to people is so unthinkable.
So it's only after you've been in a little while
that you're capable of understanding
what's happening well enough to do well at it.
And you have to do well at it.
NARRATOR: The Americans pulled themselves together.
Air strikes staggered the German advance.
American artillery
moved in to hammer German tank columns
with howitzer shells.
The enemy was running out of ammunition, food, gasoline,
while the Allies were well-supplied
with everything they needed to keep fighting.
Fearing a counterattack,
Rommel pulled back through the Kasserine Pass.
Eisenhower replaced his inept commander
with a major general named George S. Patton,
who would transform the beleaguered 2nd Corps
into a determined, capable force.
MANN: It was purely a matter of Patton
using different tactics to beat them suckers.
That's what it amounted to.
We'd done so poorly towards, uh, Rommel's forces,
but next time around we'd done it right.
NARRATOR: Now the Allies pushed forward,
surrounding the German and Italian armies
on Cape Bon in northern Tunisia.
(LOUD EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE)
On May 12, after three more months of fighting,
the last Axis troops in North Africa surrendered -
a quarter of a million men.
(BENNY GOODMAN'S BAND PLAYS 'IN A SENTIMENTAL MOOD')
The lessons the Allies had learned had come hard -
76,000 men had been lost,
including Captain Richards Aldridge,
a flyer from Mobile, who was reported missing,
and Private Charles Mann from Luverne,
who had been wounded in the neck by shrapnel.
MANN: It bled like a stuck hog.
If that had been an inch higher or lower,
I'd have had it.
NARRATOR: The prolonged 6-month campaign in North Africa
had forced the Allies to postpone the planned invasion
of France once again -
from August until spring of the following year.
But the Allies had proven
that they could work together toward victory.
And the inexperienced Americans
were beginning to learn how to fight.
MAN: "The most vivid change in our men
"is the casual and workshop manner
"in which they now talk about killing.
"They have made the psychological transition
"from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful
"over to a new, professional outlook
"where killing is a craft.
"To them, now, there is nothing morally wrong about killing.
"In fact, it is an admirable thing.
"So you at home need never be ashamed
"of our American fighters.
"The greatest disservice you folks at home can do
"for our men over here
"is to believe we are at last over the hump.
"For actually - and over here we all know it -
"the worst is yet to come."
Ernie Pyle.
NEWSREEL: An army of 150,000 men, women and children
invaded an American city -
whites, Negroes, Indians, Creoles, Cajuns.
They came from every corner of the land,
their roots in every curve of the globe -
Moscow, Indiana, Warsaw, North Dakota, Hamburg, California,
Milan, Missouri, Baghdad, Kentucky.
Some came out of patriotism, some out of grim necessity,
some for a richer life.
All came to do a warjob.
This could be any one of a hundred
great American war centres.
It happens to be Mobile, Alabama,
but the story is the same in every war town in America.
NARRATOR: The chronic unemployment that had eaten at Mobile
and every other American town for more than a decade
during the Depression was over.
(DRUMS BEAT INTRO TO 'SING, SING, SING')
Idle factories were back in business.
(BENNY GOODMAN'S BAND PLAYS 'SING, SING, SING')
Mass production was an American invention,
but now it reached levels
its inventors could never have imagined.
Nearly all manufacturing was converted to the war effort.
In 1941, more than 3 million cars had been manufactured
in the United States.
Only 139 more were made during the entire war.
Instead, Chrysler made fuselages.
General Motors made airplane engines,
guns, trucks and tanks.
And at its vast Willow Run Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan -
67 acres of assembly lines under a single roof
that one observer called
"The Grand Canyon of the mechanised world" -
the Ford Motor Company performed something like a miracle
24 hours a day.
The average Ford car had some 15,000 parts.
The B-24 Liberator long-range bomber had
1,550,000 parts.
One came off the line at Willow Run every 63 minutes.
If the American military wasn't yet quite equal
to the Germans or the Japanese,
American workers would soon be able to build ships and planes
faster than the enemy could sink them or shoot them down.
By the end of the war,
more than one-half of all the industrial production
in the world would take place in the United States.
(COUNT BASIE'S 'THE BASIE BOOGIE' PLAYS)
Mobile was among
the fastest-growing of all American war towns.
Even before the war began,
powerful Democratic congressman Frank Boykin landed his city
a $26 million defence contract that transformed
the Municipal Airport into Brookley Field,
a major army air force supply depot
and bomber modification centre
that provided 17,000 civilian jobs.
In 1940, Gulf Shipbuilding had had 240 employees.
By 1943, it had 11,600.
In the same period,
Alabama Dry Dock went from 1,000 workers to almost 30,000.
They included Hank Williams, the future country music star,
and the parents of future home run hitter Hank Aaron.
CLYDE ODUM: It was seven days a week.
And during the war when it was so strong,
it was 12-hour days, five days a week.
10 hours on Saturday, 8 hours on Sunday.
You felt like you've had a week off.
There was such an influx of people
that they got on each other's nerves.
And there wasn't enough, uh, watering holes
to entertain everybody.
And so they'd get out and have fights and drink
and all that kinda stuff.
NARRATOR: African-Americans streamed into Mobile
from all over the South in search of defence work
and a fresh start.
They found both.
But they also found the same kind of discrimination
they had known at home.
JOHN GRAY: Mobile was a pretty fair-minded city.
And before this time, whites and blacks got along pretty good
as long as you had the status quo.
Uh, but when blacks began to get homes,
to buy homes and to ride in big cars,
uh, it, it turned some people off.
The policemen would stop you and give you a ticket.
My cousin got a ticket
for driving 16 miles an hour in a 15-mile zone.
NEWSREEL: 150,000 people, 10 full military divisions -
the civilian equivalent of Rommel's entire African army -
bivouacked without warning in the narrow confines
of one peaceful Southern city.
Less then three years ago, you might have walked blocks
in Mobile without encountering a person.
Today you stop to scratch your head
and a line forms behind you.
No wonder there's such a chaos and congestion of traffic.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Mobile became so crowded
in six months
that people were living in vacant lots.
They put up tents in vacant lots.
People went into the boarding houses,
and one room would hold as many as four men.
They would sleep
for so many hours,
get up and leave the bed,
go to work and another man would take the bed.
NEWSREEL: This was a neighbourhood grocery store.
These girls - welders, checkers, and machinists.
NARRATOR: Emma Belle Petcher was from the tiny town of Millry, Alabama.
Most of her girlfriends had taken secretarial jobs
once they'd gotten out of high school,
but Emma Belle, like her father, loved to take things apart.
PETCHER: I always fixed my own appliances at home, growing up.
If the washing machine got a nail in the pump
I took the pump apart and took the nail out
of the housing of the pump and, you know, run...
I didn't have the patience to call in a repairman
who would be, maybe three days later and he wouldn't tell you
morning or evening, so I'd empty the washing machine,
turn it upside down, take the screwdrivers
and, course I, I knew how to do all this stuff.
('PISTOL PACKIN' MAMA' BY JIMMIE LUNCEFORD & HIS ORCHESTRA PLAYS)
So, I packed my little cardboard suitcase and got on the bus
and went to Mobile.
So they put me in a school to learn airplane accessories -
that was starters, generators,
alternators and some other thing.
So we did those parts, just those little instruments,
over and over and over and over until graduation.
We had to almost put them together blindfolded.
NARRATOR: Petcher breezed through all her tests
and got a job working on airplanes.
By 1943, 6 million women had entered the work force,
and nearly half of them were working in defence plants.
'Life' magazine paid tribute to the mythical "Rosie the Riveter"
as "neither drudge nor slave, but the heroine of a new order".
In Mobile, 2,500 women worked at Alabama Dry Dock,
1,200 at Gulf Shipbuilding and 750 at Brookley Field
where Emma Belle Petcher worked her way up to inspector,
responsible for quality control.
PETCHER: You would be assigned 'X' number of planes
to be responsible for.
I was to inspect the torque in the screws in the wings,
and go into the gas tanks,
and crawl up in the wings with flashlights.
Well, I was so conscientious, I just didn't make the mistakes.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: I worked at the government nursery school
which was downtown
in Christ Church Rectory, and we had the children
of the women that worked in the shipyards.
Rosie the Riveter would come bring her child
in all of her headgear and her togs that she did
her riveting in and drop her precious little baby off
and go down and work all day and come back at 5:00
and pick the child up.
NEWSREEL: And the story of Mobile
is the story of every American war town.
MAN: "Dearest Mom and family,
"I am feeling fine
"and I hope to hear the same from all of you, always.
"I am at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia.
"I would have called you up,
"but there are no public telephones at the camp.
"I feel bad because I didn't call Mom up,
"but I thought for sure
"that I would go to New York or Massachusetts.
"I would have done anything in the world
"to be home that weekend.
"From here I don't know where we are going and when we are going,
"but I am almost positive it is overseas.
"There is nothing to worry about,
"because I will not see action for a long time
"and the war will be over soon.
"Love, Babe."
MAN: "To the War Department, Washington, DC,
"Can you furnish me with the exact status of my two sons -
"Walter Weinzheimer and Conrad Ludwig Weinzheimer -
"who were American citizens but resided in the Philippines
"at the outbreak of the war?
"Stop.
"Are they military or civilian prisoners,
"dead or alive or missing?
"Stop.
"Such information is urgently needed.
"Ludwig Weinzheimer -
"Thornton Farms, Thornton, California."
NARRATOR: Ludwig Weinzheimer was a well-to-do farmer
in the Sacramento Valley.
Just before Pearl Harbor,
his daughter-in-law had written to him from Manila,
asking if his sons and their families,
including his grand-daughter Sascha,
shouldn't come home to California.
War seemed very close.
The old man told them all to stay where they were.
The rumours of war were exaggerated, he said.
Now, filled with guilt, he was frantic to find out
what had happened to his two sons and their families.
He wrote to everyone he could think of -
old friends, the Red Cross,
the War Department, the State Department.
In October,
the State Department told him
the family had been reported
to be in the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila,
but it could provide no further information.
GIRL: "On February 15, 1943,
"a few days after my 10th birthday,
"we moved into the Santo Tomas camp.
"We left Nila, our amah, crying loudly.
"After bowing to the sentry on duty,
"we went through the gate, where Daddy was waiting for us."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
NARRATOR: For almost 14 months after Manila fell to the Japanese,
Sascha Weinzheimer, her mother, her sister, Doris,
and her younger brother, Buddy, had managed
to stay out of the camp the Japanese had established
for foreign civilians on the campus of Santo Tomas University
on the city's outskirts.
But after Sascha reported having seen
Japanese soldiers drowning a small Filipino boy,
her mother decided they would be safer
in the prison than outside it.
Their father had been imprisoned there for more than a year -
so long that his young son no longer recognised him.
There were now some 4,000 prisoners at Santo Tomas -
American and British, Dutch and Norwegian, Polish and French.
Immediately, the Japanese
didn't want to have anything to do with us.
They weren't going to feed us.
They weren't going to follow the Geneva Convention rules.
So you were left to fend for yourself.
NARRATOR: The Philippine Red Cross provided rice.
Filipino friends of the internees
passed canned foods and fresh vegetables through the fence.
Families were permitted to build themselves bamboo shanties
with palm leaves for roofs in which to spend the day.
At night, they were herded into crowded dormitories
in the main building.
Everyone was assigned a job.
GIRL: "It was funny to see bank presidents
"and other men like that
"cleaning toilets and garbage cans.
"Mother had toilet duty four times a week.
"There were all kinds of people in camp.
"Some were hard workers, like Daddy.
"Others were gripers who liked to talk a lot
"and goldbricks who didn't do anything at all."
NARRATOR: The prisoners organised churches, schools, police,
even a 'morality patrol',
meant to keep teenagers from disappearing together
into dark corners.
Your world becomes very small.
And you don't think beyond your little environment,
because everything that's important to you is right there.
It's not in the States.
It's not back at the plantation.
It's right there.
So you have to make do with what you can in this small sphere.
GIRL: "We got our chow from the lines in tin cans.
"Then we would eat in our shanty,
"and Mother said that no matter what happened
"we would eat off our bridge table
"with a tablecloth with our coloured dishes
"and a small bowl of flowers so long as we could."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
(OFFICER SHOUTS IN JAPANESE)
(TROOPS SHOUT IN JAPANESE)
(OFFICER SHOUTS IN JAPANESE)
GLENN FRAZIER: We didn't know anything about the Japanese
when we were captured,
and they didn't know anything much about us.
We most certainly didn't know their language.
(Speaks Japanese)
And to be able to be compelled or, or made obey an order
that you didn't even know what the order was -
a misunderstanding or not any, any idea -
and this depending on you maybe surviving...
NARRATOR: Glenn Frazier had endured the Bataán Death March
and weeks of imprisonment
at Camp O'Donnell in the Philippines,
where survival had seemed so unlikely,
he had thrown one of his dog tags into a mass grave
that held the bodies of many of his fellow prisoners.
That way, he thought, if they were ever recovered
his family back in Alabama would find some comfort
in knowing what had happened to him.
As the marines had struggled to take Guadalcanal,
Frazier was shipped all the way to Japan,
to a prisoner of war camp near Osaka.
FRAZIER: The number that the Japanese gave us
was like a serial number.
And mine was 6-32.
Roko naka san juni, is the number in Japanese.
And they put it on your clothes. You had a little button saying,
uh, 6-32.
And it was, uh, it was part of your records,
and I kept that number all the way through my days in Japan.
NARRATOR: The commandant told Frazier and his fellow prisoners
they would be treated well, as "guests of the Emperor".
They were not.
What little food they had was rotten.
Barracks were unheated.
The prisoners were divided into 10-man shooting squads.
If one member tried to escape,
he and all the others would be shot.
Frazier developed double pneumonia and nearly died.
All the prisoners were made to work in Japanese foundries
or on the docks, loading and unloading ships.
Small children jeered and cursed
as they walked to and from the docks,
calling them cowards
for having surrendered, rather than fight to the death.
Guards beat the prisoners regularly,
and the smallest infraction of rules could prove fatal.
One day I was walking, coming back from a detail that day
on the streets of Osaka.
And the weather was cold.
And I put my hands in my pocket,
and I'm walking along with everybody else.
When we got to the camp and they checked us in,
this guard pointed me out and called me out.
And, uh, said, "Why did you have your hands in your pocket?"
I said, "Because I was cold."
So they took me in the commander's office
and the interpreter says,
"That's against the military code.
"Soldiers do not walk with hands in pockets."
And I said, "Well, I'm not a soldier, I'm a prisoner of war."
So the commander banged his fist on his desk, and -
he was a major - and got up and he says,
uh, the interpreter said, "He don't like your attitude."
So, he come up and he started arguing with me,
and I couldn't... I couldn't understand anything he said.
So he pulled his sabre out
and he said he was going to "make an example of you,
"so that the other men will understand
"they have to obey orders".
So he puts his sword to my throat, here,
and nicked me a little bit,
and I could feel a little bit of blood coming down.
So, he, the interpreter said, "He's going to execute you."
So he asked me if I had any last words to say.
And I looked him straight in the eye and I said, "He can kill me,
"but he cannot kill my spirit.
"And my spirit's going to lodge in his body
"and haunt him until the day he dies."
And he had a frown come over his face
and took three steps backward and lowered his sword
and ordered me to be put
in a five-by-five-by-five cubicle in the ground.
I had never seen a Japanese back down
in front of any of his subordinates
until that particular time.
Because once they got to that point,
they went through with it, regardless of the results.
(TYPEWRITER CLACKS)
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota.
"All of us use the phrase 'after the war'
"so much it almost becomes meaningless.
"The motorist uses it when he thinks of new tyres,
"a new model car,
"and the right to drive as fast and as far as he pleases.
"But for all of us, although the words aren't often spoken,
"it means the day when you boys come home.
"It means, if you had witnessed it -
"a portion of a little drama as we did this week -
"the ecstatic happiness and the wild gladness
"of thousands of family reunions.
"The other morning an unshaven, weary uniformed man,
"with a string of gaily-coloured ribbons on his breast,
"slipped off the morning train and was driven to his home.
"Instead of going in the front way,
"he went around the back, unnoticed.
"Probably he just wanted to feast his eyes on home.
"His children were watching at the front,
"their noses almost boring holes in the window panes,
"as they watched for a sign of Daddy.
"Nobody needs to describe their shrieks of joy
"when he walked in from the back door to surprise them.
"If you could have seen them later,
"hanging on to his hands for dear life
"as though they could hold him home forever,
"you couldn't have helped getting a bit misty yourself."
Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'.
JIM SHERMAN: I think, particularly in Luverne,
there was this general feeling of we're in the right,
we're doing the right thing,
and all of the things that we're doing, collectively,
sort of brought a lot of people together.
It was in a totally different feeling
that I don't think can ever be duplicated, ever.
I just don't think that you could have that sense of oneness
that, that we had when we were growing up.
NARRATOR: At home and overseas Americans were slowly,
sometimes painfully, learning to work together.
But President Roosevelt warned the country in the summer of 1943
"it's not too much to say that we must pour into this war
"the entire strength and intelligence and willpower of the United States"
before victory could be won.