(MACHINE-GUN FIRE)
(SHELL WHISTLES)
(EXPLOSION)
MAN: "Here lie three Americans. What shall we say of them?
"Shall we say that this is a fine thing,
"that they should give their lives for their country?
"Why print this picture anyway of three American boys,
"dead on an alien shore?
"The reason is that words are never enough.
"The eye sees.
"The mind knows.
"The heart feels.
"But the words do not exist to make us see, or know,
"or feel what it is like, what actually happens."
NARRATOR: In the September 20, 1943 issue of 'Life' magazine,
the editors had published a photograph
taken on a New Guinea beach in the South Pacific,
ten months earlier.
It was the first image of dead American servicemen
that American civilians had been allowed to see
in the 21 months since Pearl Harbor.
MAN: "And so here it is.
"This is the reality that lies behind the names
"that come to rest at last on monuments in the leafy squares
"of busy American towns.
"The camera doesn't show America,
"and yet here on the beach is America.
"Three parts of 130 million parts.
"Three fragments of that life we call American life.
"Three units of freedom.
"So that it is not just these boys who have fallen here,
"it is freedom that has fallen.
"It is our task to cause it to rise again."
'Life' magazine.
WILSON: The war was always around us.
We had an air raid warden, uh, a block warden on the street,
who wore a white hat and a gas mask.
None of the rest of us had any.
Uh, across the street from my house on 46th Street
there was an empty lot, so we built a victory garden there.
And of course we all relished the vegetables
that came up the fastest.
NARRATOR: The war was now being felt by every citizen
in every town in America.
In fast-growing Sacramento, California,
and quiet Luverne, Minnesota, even children found themselves
caught up in the effort to win victory.
Waterbury, Connecticut and Mobile, Alabama
had been transformed into war towns almost overnight,
and in Mobile that transformation
would lead to confrontation and ugly violence.
Overseas, victory seemed a very long way off.
Americans had landed in Italy
and then found themselves stopped by terrain and weather
and an implacable enemy.
There was still no firm date for the cross-channel invasion,
without which, the Nazi grip on Western Europe
could never be broken.
In the Pacific theatre,
more than a million Japanese troops
were on the offensive in central and southern China
against the nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek
and his sometime ally Mao Zedong.
The Americans were fighting on Bougainville
and preparing to attack the Gilbert Islands.
But Tokyo was almost 4,000 miles away
and the Japanese seemed ready to defend
every island chain in between.
Over the coming months, Robert Kashiwagi,
a Japanese-American from the Sacramento Valley,
whose family had been interned by their country
simply because of their ancestry,
would nonetheless demonstrate his devotion to that country
as few Americans ever have.
Family memories of heroism in an earlier war
would help propel a Princeton man from Connecticut,
named Ward Chamberlin, to find a way to serve
despite handicaps that could have kept him safe at home.
And Babe Ciarlo, a factory worker from Waterbury,
would see things no-one should ever have to see,
and say nothing about them in his optimistic letters home.
Everywhere, the war was tearing Americans apart,
and bringing them together,
and infusing every detail of daily life with a new intensity.
FUSSELL: Every family had somebody in the war.
And almost every household
had somebody wounded or killed or missing.
Everybody had some bad news they didn't want to talk about.
And it was very bad to bring up the subject among strangers.
You'd say, "How you doing?"
Well, he'd say, "Well my son was killed in Anzio last Thursday."
And so your relation to strangers was different
from what it is now.
People were likely to tell you if things were intolerable.
NEWSREEL: By January 1, Congress had appropriated over $2 billion
for emergency housing in America's war boom towns.
Here's how some of it was spent in Mobile.
These are the slums we have seen.
Slum clearance projects had been the local, private enterprise
of a few high-minded, far-sighted individuals.
But in Mobile, such projects as these
have become one of the obligations of good government.
They are rented only to certified, coloured war workers
and are equipped with auditoriums, playgrounds,
and day nurseries to take care of the children
while their parents are working in the war plants.
NARRATOR: To relieve the desperate overcrowding in Mobile,
the National Housing Agency provided 14,000 units for white workers,
but fewer than 1,000 for blacks.
There were 30,000 African-Americans in the city now,
and just 55 hospital beds that would take them.
GRAY: You had white water fountain, and a black water fountain.
And a black would get into trouble
if he went and drank at the white water fountain.
My friend at Brookley Field had his head busted wide open
because he drank at the white fountain.
NARRATOR: 16-year-old John Gray of 407 Royal Street
was working as a carpenter's helper
at Alabama dry dock before the war began.
There had been then no way for a black employee
to be upgraded to the ranks of skilled workers.
Similar discrimination was found in defence industries
throughout the Jim Crow South
and in other parts of the country as well.
But black leaders had insisted on more jobs for black workers,
and President Roosevelt had established
a Fair Employment Practices Commission
to combat discrimination in defence plants.
Things were beginning to change
even for the African-American citizens of Mobile.
GRAY: A lot of black people who used to work in private homes
as cooks and chauffeurs and maids got jobs at Brookley Field.
And it created some tension.
One white person asked a black person,
"Do you know where I can find me a good girl?
"I'll give her $25 a week and car fare."
And the black woman told her, "If you can find one, I'll give her $35."
NARRATOR: With change came trouble.
In August of 1942, a city bus driver named Grover Chandler
shot and killed Henry Williams, a black private in uniform,
after he refused to move to the back of the bus.
GRAY: And they put the bus driver in jail,
but they boasted that he never stayed in a cell.
They let him sleep on a cot that the sheriff used.
And then they let him out.
Eventually it died down, but nothing was done to the man actually.
NARRATOR: Tensions continued to rise.
On Tuesday morning, May 25, 1943,
they exploded at the Alabama dry dock shipyard,
after management gave in to a federal directive
and agreed to let 12 black workers become welders.
ODUM: We were training them
to be burners and welders and become mechanics.
And the white people was resenting it.
NARRATOR: Shortly after the new welders had finished their first shift,
white shipyard employees
set upon the first blacks they could find, shouting,
"No nigger is going to join iron in this yard."
ODUM: I'm standing up there watching,
and I never saw people so mad and agitated in my life.
And they'd have sticks, like 3ft long.
They would knock them down to their knees.
I saw men and women bleeding, blood running down their face
and they didn't stand a chance coming down that gauntlet,
men and women on each side beating them with sticks.
And a good many of the blacks went out and jumped off the piers,
tried to swim the river.
Coastguard was out there picking them up.
JOHN GRAY: The riot upset the whole community.
Most people who worked were afraid to go back,
because there would be a bunch standing outside
and they would have their cars parked.
And in their cars they had monkey wrenches
and tyre irons and stuff like that.
NARRATOR: More than 1,000 black workers formally requested transfers
to other defence jobs.
The requests were denied.
Some left Mobile altogether,
but most were persuaded to stay on the job.
We had to send out and get them and haul them back
because we needed them to do the work.
And they came back because we begged them to come back.
GRAY: And they would not go back until they had some protection.
When they went back, this is when you had to separate them.
Normally, one ferryboat would take whoever came.
But after the riots, they had a ferryboat to take blacks over
and a ferryboat to take whites over.
NARRATOR: In the end, the shipyard itself was segregated.
Four separate shipways were created
where blacks were free to hold every kind of position, except foreman.
Blacks working in the rest of the shipyard
remained largely confined to the kind of unskilled tasks
they had always performed.
The African-American newspaper the 'Pittsburgh Courier'
denounced the compromise as "a victory for Nazi racial theory
"and another defeat for the principle embodied
"in the Declaration of Independence."
In the following months, there were racial confrontations
in industrial areas all across the country -
Springfield, Massachusetts and Port Arthur, Texas,
Hubbard, Ohio and Newark, New Jersey,
and in Detroit where 34 people were killed and more than 200 wounded.
Despite the violence,
the war was profoundly altering life for African-Americans.
Membership in the NAACP increased ninefold.
The Committee of Racial Equality demanded the desegregation
of restaurants, theatres, bus lines.
And the 'Pittsburgh Courier' campaigned for double victory -
over the enemies of freedom at home as well as overseas.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Going back through these letters
written to me during the war,
I find almost every letter will mention "We had a V-mail from Sid."
He was the main concern of the entire family.
Daddy would try to anticipate
where he thought Sid would be sent next.
And when the Battle of Tarawa occurred, we lived in horror for five days.
We thought Sidney was in the Battle of Tarawa.
NARRATOR: Katharine Phillip's brother, Sid,
who had endured four harrowing months on Guadalcanal,
was actually in New Guinea in November of 1943, not Tarawa,
preparing for an assault on Cape Gloucester,
on the western tip of New Britain.
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: It rained the entire time we were at Cape Gloucester.
Everything rotted.
Clothes rotted, your shoestrings rotted.
All the wounded were brought right by our position,
and that was when I decided I would like
to do something in life that would amount to something.
And I decided that I wanted to study medicine that day.
Because here were all these wounded
and there was no way that I could help them.
NARRATOR: Cape Gloucester would be a rugged, bloody jungle campaign,
but Phillips was fortunate not to be among the marines
ordered to take Tarawa.
The hard-won victories at Midway and Guadalcanal
had ended Japan's expansion in the Pacific.
The Americans were free to begin their two-pronged offensive.
While General Douglas MacArthur's forces
moved north from Australia toward the Philippines,
the Navy, under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz,
began its advance across the central Pacific.
Tarawa was part of the Gilbert Chain, a coral atoll,
a ring of 38 tiny islands around a blue lagoon
that marked the easternmost edge of the perimeter
Japan had built to shield its new empire.
The main target was a heavily fortified island with an airstrip.
It was a only little larger than New York's Central Park,
but defended by 4,500 Japanese lmperial marines
hidden within a maze of rifle pits and trenches,
and hundreds of interconnected blockhouses and concrete pillboxes.
Tarawa was to be the test case
for a new theory of amphibious warfare -
any island, no matter how fiercely defended,
could be taken by an all-out frontal assault.
The official version for the people back home
was that everything was going smoothly.
NEWSREEL: The invasion force of warships and transports steams
for the conquest of the Gilbert Islands,
and aboard vessels crowded with troops, religious services are held.
The worshippers are fighting men
who know they are going into desperate peril,
where many are destined to give their lives.
And now, official navy motion pictures
of the bombardment of the Japs on Tarawa with giant salvos.
NARRATOR: But the bombing and shelling
yielded so much smoke and coral dust
that the fleet's view of the landing craft was obscured.
Firing was stopped for half an hour to clear the air,
plenty of time for the Japanese to ready themselves for the assault.
The landing craft, meant to ferry the marines
of the 2nd Division close to the beach,
hung up on the coral reef, easy targets for enemy guns.
(MACHINE-GUN FIRE)
Men were forced to wade shoulder-deep
for hundreds of yards under enemy fire.
The first wave suffered some casualties.
The second was badly hit.
(EXPLOSION)
The third, nearly destroyed.
By nightfall, 5,000 marines had made it to the beaches,
but some 1,500 of them had been killed or wounded.
Maurice Bell, a neighbour of Sid Phillips' from Mobile,
had watched the landings with his binoculars
from the deck of the USS 'lndianapolis'.
BELL: I could see the fighting going on on the island,
just like if it was just across the street here.
Looked like it was that close.
And soldiers and marines falling all over the place
and you could see bodies in the water.
And it's something that I hope never happens again
because it's just things that happened at that time I'll never forget.
NARRATOR: "A million men cannot take Tarawa in a hundred years,"
the Japanese commander had said before the battle.
It took 10,000 marines just four days.
But more than one third of them had been killed or wounded.
The marine commander told the press Tarawa had fallen
only because so many young Americans had been willing to die.
Outraged parents denounced him for callousness.
Eventually, the War Department reversed policy
and produced a film called 'With the Marines at Tarawa',
containing combat footage more brutal than anything
ordinary Americans had ever seen.
Some in Washington argued that its release would damage morale,
but President Roosevelt himself ordered that it be shown.
He wanted to give Americans a clearer sense of what their men were facing.
FILM: These are the men of the 2nd Marine Division,
who are now embarking
on a full phibious operation after many...
When we saw those first pictures of Tarawa
we were overcome, just overcome.
For three days before we moved in,
over four million pounds of explosives had been dropped on the island.
It was just devastating to us.
Those American boys' bodies floating in the surf.
The chaplain's assistants tend the dead.
We just sat around and cried,
and I know that's why they'd kept it from the American public for so long.
These are marine dead.
This is the price we have to pay for a war we didn't want.
Our dislike for the Japanese was very violent,
that they would do this to us, and would kill our boys like that.
And, course, the idea was "kill the Japs."
I'm ashamed to say, but that's the way it was.
We just had to get that war over with.
NARRATOR: Mrs Martina Ciarlo, a widow in Waterbury, Connecticut,
had two daughters and three sons.
The oldest boy and the youngest
were exempt from the draft and safely at home,
but the middle son, Corado, known as 'Babe',
was with the Fifth Allied Army, somewhere in Italy.
His letters home were the most important thing in his mother's life.
OLGA CIARLO: She'd wait every single morning on the porch
for the mailman to come to bring her a letter.
And he would go by sometimes, and he would say, "Mrs Ciarlo, not today."
So the following day she'd wait again for that letter
and finally she would get a letter, she'd be so happy.
She'd run upstairs and she'd let us read the letter,
'cause my mother couldn't read English.
And we would read the letter to her
and she'd be happy just knowing that she heard from him.
MAN: "Mom, how are you getting along?
"Fine, I hope, and keeping happy always.
"I know I haven't written to you for a long time
"and I hope you understand
"the Army has been keeping me pretty busy.
"I'm doing good, and always happy because I know you're OK.
"Love, Babe."
NEWSREEL: What is there we can all do on the home front
to help the men coming back and the men still over there?
Make your home an arsenal for victory
by fighting waste every day from now until the war is over.
('OPUS ONE' BY TOMMY DORSEY PLAYS)
NARRATOR: The Office of Civilian Defense
called upon each American family
to become a "fighting unit on the home front."
Everyone was asked to collect scrap metal
from which armaments could be made.
In one year alone,
Mobile's citizens amassed 22 million pounds.
In Sacramento, 22 big 'victory bins' were set up
on downtown street corners for the duration,
even though some people thought they were unsightly.
Luverne, Minnesota, had been founded by Civil War veterans,
but now the town council volunteered
to melt down the cannonballs that formed part of the memorial
to the Union dead to make munitions for the new conflict.
And in Waterbury, Connecticut,
281,135 pounds of tin were collected,
along with 65,000 pounds of rubber,
225,458 pounds of rags,
and 372,733 pounds of fat.
ANNOUNCER: Fats make glycerin and glycerin makes explosives.
Every year two billion pounds of waste kitchen fats are thrown away -
enough glycerin for ten billion rapid-fire cannon shells,
a belt 150,000 miles long, six times around the earth.
A skillet of bacon grease is a little munitions factory.
(MACHINE-GUNS FIRE)
INOUYE: Consider the fact that I'm 18, so...
...your emotions are that of a young person.
I was angered to realise that my government felt
that I was disloyal and part of the enemy,
and I wanted to be able to demonstrate,
not only to my government, but to my neighbours,
that, uh... I was a good American.
NARRATOR: After Pearl Harbor,
Washington had ordered some 110,000 Japanese aliens
and American citizens of Japanese descent
living along the West Coast,
out of their homes and into ten internment camps.
All Japanese-American men of draft age,
except those already in the Armed forces,
had been classified as enemy aliens, forbidden to serve their country.
Then, in early 1943, Washington announced a new policy.
Japanese-American men were now going to be permitted
to form a special segregated outfit, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
When the army called for 1,500 volunteers from Hawaii,
where Japanese-Americans had never been locked up,
10,000 turned up at recruiting offices,
including a freshman in pre-medical studies
at the University of Hawaii - Daniel Inouye.
INOUYE: And my father took time off.
And we got on the streetcar.
And he was very silent
until we got close to the point of departure.
He cleared his throat, and I knew something was coming.
He's not a scholarly person,
but I know he struggled, and he said,
"This country has been good to us.
"It has given me two jobs.
"It has given you and your brothers and your sister education.
"We owe a lot to this country. Do not dishonour this country.
"Above all, do not dishonour the family.
"And if you must die, die in honour."
You know, I'm 18 years old
and here he is telling me these heavy words.
And I've always thought to myself,
"Would I be able to say the same thing to my son?"
ASAKO TOKUNO: I think that they may not really have known it themselves,
but I think this feeling was instilled in them through all of our parents.
It's called 'yamata damashi',
and it's this, um, it's like a proving of yourself
and that your loyalty goes beyond just saying it or talking it, you know.
It's proving it,
giving it your all,
even if you die in the process by going to war.
And I think that's so strongly instilled
from when you're very young
that I think that was one of the things that pushed them on.
NARRATOR: Now, army recruiters went to work
inside the internment camps.
Robert Kashiwagi, from Sacramento,
was bed-ridden from a lung ailment
when recruiters turned up at Camp Amache, in Colorado.
KASHIWAGl: When the recruiting team came around,
they announced that this is going to be
a segregated combat infantry unit slated for front line duty.
And I protested very vigorously.
I don't mind volunteering, but it's really unfair for me
to volunteer only to an infantry unit that's slated for front line duty.
But we're only to have one choice -
volunteer to a segregated infantry unit, or don't and call yourself disloyal.
My feeling was
that the United States is our country
and if we disowned United States, we were a man without a country.
We had no other place we could go to.
So I more or less volunteered... from bed.
NARRATOR: Those Japanese-Americans
already in the armed forces when the war started
were reassigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team
and sent for training to Camp Shelby in Mississippi,
where the Governor assured them they would be treated as 'white' people.
KASHIWAGl: There were drinking fountains marked "colored"
and "white" and you had to adhere to the instruction.
"Can I go into that restaurant or will I not be served?" you know.
These are the difficult questions that entered my mind.
And then when I got on the bus,
why all the black people had to go to the rear of the bus,
and whites stayed in the front.
That's confusing to me,
because I didn't know where I was belonging to,
as far as a situation like that.
So I just, without any... without thinking,
I would always go towards the black section,
but they would turn me around and put me in the white.
NARRATOR: Early in 1944, the 442nd received its orders to head overseas.
Tim Tokuno, from the Sacramento Valley,
was granted leave to go and say goodbye to his parents.
TOKUNO: They gave us a 15-day furlough.
So I went back to visit my folks at Topaz, Utah.
As I entered the compound, the MP captain stopped me
and said, "Sergeant, have you got any liquor in your bag?"
I said, "Yes, I have a fifth of whiskey to take to my folks."
The captain shook his head and says, "Sorry, Sergeant.
"No liquor allowed in camp.
"Hell of a war, isn't it?" That's what he told me.
"Hell of a war, isn't it?"
I said, "It sure is, Captain.
"Look, you got machine-guns on all four corners,
"with live ammunition
"and you got the guards patrolling the perimeter,
"and here I'm going into combat
"with my folks behind barbed wire."
I said, "Yeah, it is a hell of a war."
(EXPLOSIONS)
MAN: "January 1, 1944.
"Dearest Vic and the babies,
"I am feeling fine
"and I hope to hear the same from you always.
"I didn't write sooner because I was very busy
"and there was no mail service where I was."
"I had a big turkey dinner for New Year's and it was very good.
"Don't worry about me.
"Love, Babe."
(LIVELY TRUMPETS PLAYING)
NEWSREEL: General Eisenhower,
named to command the gathering Allied invasion forces,
surveys the Italian front
with General Clark, 5th Army commander.
In the mountains of central Italy,
he observes artillery fire blasting the way toward Cassino.
NARRATOR: As 1944 began, the Allies continued
to slowly battle their way northward in Italy,
pushing the Germans out of one defensive position after another.
With them now was Ward Chamberlin, from Norwalk, Connecticut.
CHAMBERLIN: My father was in World War I.
He was at Belleau Wood and he was wounded twice,
got the Distinguished Service Cross, second-highest medal you can get.
After he died, I was walking by St Patrick's Cathedral,
and I saw Father Duffy out there, the famous chaplain from World War I.
But I'd met him with my dad a couple of times.
So I went up to him on the steps of the cathedral.
I said, "Father Duffy, my name is Ward Chamberlin."
He said, "That's a wonderful name."
He said, "Your father's one of the bravest men I ever knew."
That'll break your heart, yeah.
NARRATOR: Chamberlin had been captain of the Princeton soccer team
when the war broke out, and he was eager to do his part.
But there was a problem.
CHAMBERLIN: I couldn't serve in the army or the air force
because I'd lost my eye, my right eye, with meningitis
when I was about ten.
And so I was 4-F
as far as the military services were concerned.
Then I heard about this organisation called the American Field Service,
which at that point were with the British in the North African desert.
NARRATOR: The American Field Service was a relief organisation
that had been formed during the First World War,
and now Chamberlin signed on as a volunteer ambulance driver.
He had originally shipped out for North Africa,
only to find himself hospitalised there for six weeks
with a mild case of polio.
CHAMBERLIN: And after I did that for six weeks,
I was in pretty good shape.
And I got some orders to report back to my Cairo headquarters,
and I read them and they said,
"You're supposed to have desk duty for a year."
So I just tore those up and never gave 'em to anybody, so...
And ten days later I was in Italy.
Exactly where I wanted to be, exactly.
Wasn't so sure once I got there.
NARRATOR: In early January, 1944,
Chamberlin had his first taste of war.
CHAMBERLIN: We were in a forward position
probably, you know, a half a mile from the actual front line,
if you could call it that.
And the first guy that they brought in who was so badly shot up...
...we got him into the ambulance on a stretcher,
and I've... I don't think I've ever said this to anybody,
I went around the side of the ambulance
and just let everything out.
I just... sick, sick as I could be for about 30 seconds.
And it's just... l'd never seen a body cut up as badly as that guy was.
NARRATOR: The Allies now came up against new
and still more formidable German defences - the Gustav Line.
It combined three rivers -
the Sangro, the Garigliano and the Rapido -
and a chain of mountains honeycombed with mines, pillboxes
and sheltered gun emplacements.
Its keystone was the 1715-foot Monte Cassino.
Looming above the village that gave the hill its name,
stood the most important monastery in Europe,
a Benedictine abbey whose origins went back to the sixth century.
Behind it lay the broad Liri Valley and the road to Rome.
Time and again, Allied forces tried to fight their way
around its edges and were stopped cold.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
proposed a daring solution to the impasse -
a surprise landing behind the German lines at Anzio,
35 miles south of Rome.
It was a risky idea that would take time to plan and execute.
Meanwhile, the Allies - including American, British,
Canadian, New Zealand, French, North African, Indian,
and Free Polish troops -
would mount a series of all-out assaults on Cassino
aimed at somehow breaking through.
CHAMBERLIN: It was a horrible battle
because... we kept throwing divisions,
new tactics...
You couldn't get through there.
And we'd lost an awful lot of casualties.
The guys that I admired most
were the guys that were really scared to death,
and did what they had to do.
Some of us were too stupid to, uh, feel so scared,
or you just had some protective armour, psychologically,
that you put on.
(GUNFIRE, BULLETS WHIZZING)
But the guys I admired were the guys who really were frightened
and went on and did what they had to do,
whether they were soldiers or ambulance drivers or whatever.
NARRATOR: In the early morning hours of January 21,
Chamberlin watched as the 36th Texas Division
tried to cross the fast-moving Rapido
in the centre of the line.
"We might succeed,"
its commander had written in his diary,
"but I do not see how we can."
He was right.
There was no cover.
The men stumbled into mine fields,
drawing torrents of machine-gun and mortar fire.
Every man who managed to make it across the Rapido
was killed, wounded or captured.
Some, who tried to swim back to safety, drowned.
CHAMBERLIN: How anybody could have sent people through that
I just can't imagine.
They were shot to pieces.
I saw them come out of the line.
They were walking, uh, when I was, first came up,
they were coming out of the line,
walking down the side of the road just, eyes shut,
just... plodding ahead one foot after the other.
They looked like they'd been through the worst stuff,
and they had been, they had been.
Germans just sat across the river and sprayed 'em off.
NARRATOR: On January 22, 1944,
the same day Ward Chamberlin watched the men of the 36th Division
stagger back from the Rapido,
36,000 Allied troops were scheduled to land far behind the German lines
at Anzio.
Their fate, and that of the whole Allied effort in Italy,
hung in the balance.