(GUNFIRE)
(PLANE ENGINES ROAR)
(GUNFIRE)
QUENTIN AANENSON: It was on one of my very early missions
that I first knew I had... I had killed men.
We caught a group of Germans that were on a road
in an area where there were no trees,
and so there was no place for them...
to... to run and hide.
And we caught them before they could really get off the roads
and run toward the ditches.
(GUNFIRE)
And I remember the impact it had on me
when I could see my bullets just tearing into them,
and... and, uh, we had so much firepower
that the... the bodies would fly,
uh, some yards, and, uh,
as I... as I was doing this,
I was doing it knowing I had to do it, that it was my job.
This is what I'd been trained to do,
and I dealt with it fine.
But when I got back home to the base in Normandy
and landed...
I got sick.
I had to think about what I had done.
Now, that didn't change my resolve for the next day.
I went out and did it again.
(GUNFIRE)
And again and again and again.
The Allies were on the offensive now
in western Europe as well as the Pacific.
But the enemy was making them pay dearly
for every inch of territory they tried to take.
Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne,
for whom flying had once seemed the carefree symbol of freedom and escape,
would find himself confronting death daily in the skies over France.
While Ray Pittman, of Mobile,
would witness the unimaginable on the Japanese-held island of Saipan.
MAN: "June 6, 1944, the Philippine Sea.
"At 6:30pm this evening
"the announcement came over the loudspeaker,
"that the Allies landed in France.
"Everyone gave a big cheer when they heard this.
"I won 40 bucks from the boys because some time ago,
"I bet the invasion would come off about the middle of June."
James A. Fahey.
NARRATOR: Seaman First Class James A. Fahey
of Waltham, Massachusetts
was the youngest of four orphaned children.
His brothers, John and Joe, had been in the navy at Pearl Harbor
when the Japanese attacked, and had been spared.
James had signed on the following year,
assigned to the light cruiser 'Montpelier'.
Against navy regulations, he would record what happened
every day he spent aboard in a little diary.
MAN: "It was a great feeling as I staggered up the gangway
"to the ship with my sea bag in one hand
"and the mattress cover loaded with blankets, mattresses, etc,
"over my shoulder.
"At last I have a home,
"and a warship at that."
NARRATOR: Fahey went to sea in hopes of seeing action,
and he saw plenty of it as a member of a gun crew.
The 'Montpelier' shot down Japanese planes
and sank Japanese ships off Guadalcanal,
bombarded Japanese defences at Munda,
and survived an enemy bomb and two torpedo hits
off Bougainville.
A week or so after hearing the news of D-day,
Fahey and the men of the 'Montpelier'
prepared again for battle.
She was now a part of an 800-ship fleet,
steaming toward the next American objective
in the Pacific - the Marianas,
a chain of volcanic islands
from which the US B-29 Superfortress bombers
could begin to attack the Japanese homeland.
The fleet's three most important targets in the Marianas
were Guam, Tinian, and Saipan,
where the marines would land first.
MAN: "June 13.
"In about 14 hours now, we will start bombarding Saipan.
"We are only about 1,200 miles from Tokyo.
"I guess I will go down and buy some candy.
"The candy has been our old stand-by
"when we have nothing to eat
"at battle stations, for long hours."
NARRATOR: Saipan was unlike many of the tiny, flat coral atolls
the marines had taken previously.
It was 14 miles long, featured all kinds of terrain
and was defended by more than 30,000 Japanese troops.
It was also home to somewhere between
16,000 and 20,000 Japanese civilians.
(ALARM BLARES)
(BOSUN'S WHISTLE SHRILLS)
The shelling of Saipan went on for two days.
Among the marines of the 4th Division
waiting to go ashore
was Corporal Alvy Ray Pittman of Mobile, Alabama.
He'd been working as a carpenter alongside his father
when he decided to join the marines.
RAY PITTMAN: I'd made up my mind
I want to get in the toughest outfit they had.
And I was afraid the war was going to get over
before I got over there.
So, I joined the Marine Corps.
Course, they sent me to Parris Island for boot camp.
And I remember going in,
all these guys standing out on the grass.
They said, "You'll be sorry. You'll be sorry."
NARRATOR: Ray Pittman was in the first wave,
part of a 16-man demolition team,
assigned to destroy enemy strong points wherever they were found,
using explosives, grenades,
and flamethrowers.
PITTMAN: You never think about getting hurt yourself.
You think about maybe some of your buddies
are going to get hurt.
And you wonder who it's going to be.
I mean, I, I really didn't ever think about getting hurt myself.
Of course, when you, when you...
slugs start bouncing off your amtrack going in,
you know it could happen.
NARRATOR: The naval bombardment had failed.
Concentrated Japanese mortar and artillery fire
rained down among the amtracks
and on the men fighting for a toehold on the beach.
All four commanders of the assault battalions
were hit within minutes.
By evening, 20,000 marines had made it ashore,
but they could go no further.
The Japanese planned to keep the Americans pinned down
until their own fleet could steam in
from the Philippines and destroy them.
Despite the rain of shells,
the marines began slowly to fight their way off the beach.
PITTMAN: I know I was scared a lot...
...and losing a lot of friends really hurts you.
It's, it's really hard for me to describe,
really, just how I felt the whole time
'cause there's something happening every day
and you're so tired and you can't lift your eyelids hardly.
And something happens,
you get a call to blow a pillbox here, blow a pillbox there.
I mean, you wake up and go and do your job.
But it's hard for me to tell just how bad it was -
how I felt.
NARRATOR: The battle for Saipan had just begun.
MAN: "June 23, 1944.
"This Norman countryside
"looks exactly like the rich, gentle land
"of eastern Pennsylvania.
"It is too wonderfully beautiful to be the scene of war.
(BIRDS CHIRP)
"Some day, I would like to cover a war in a country
"that is as ugly as war itself."
Ernie Pyle.
NARRATOR: Normandy's beauty was deceptive.
Allied planners had failed to understand the landscape
through which their men would have to fight
before they could begin to drive the enemy out of France.
(GUNFIRE)
Normandy was quilted with small, irregularly shaped fields,
walled from one another by hedgerows,
earthen ramparts four feet high, topped with dense hedges
whose tangled roots turned them into natural fortifications
and made it impossible to see into
from one field to the next.
In one area that measured just two miles by four,
there were 4,000 such fields.
Here and there, ancient sunken wagon tracks
twisted between the hedgerows,
ideal for ambushes and often concealed
from air attack by overarching trees.
The Germans took full advantage of all of it.
American Sherman tanks could not break through the hedgerows,
and when they tried to roll over them,
exposed their unprotected underbellies to deadly fire.
(GUNFIRE)
Each field became what the newspaperman Ernie Pyle called
"a separate little war", fought mostly
by companies of riflemen.
DWAIN LUCE: The Germans were good troops.
They did not give up ground easily,
there or any other place I saw them.
You had to respect them for the fact
they were excellent troops.
(Chuckles) They were too damn good, and...
or they wouldn't have caused us so much trouble.
(EXPLOSION)
NARRATOR: Progress was measured in yards.
Now the pace was far slower
than the Allied commanders had anticipated,
and the cost in dead and wounded was far higher.
Unarmed C-47 s,
cargo planes stripped down
so that as many litters as possible could be lifted aboard,
carried the worst hit to hospitals
in England, just 20 minutes away...
...then turned around and came back for more.
Emily Lewis was one of hundreds of nurses
who did all they could for the wounded.
LEWIS: All those wounded soldiers, they were scared to death.
Really frightened half out of their minds.
I hugged 'em, I was teary-eyed.
It makes me cry to think of it.
(GROANS)
Got 'em on my plane, talked to them.
Some of them were...
so unnerved...
that I-I just had to put my arms around them and hold 'em.
I was 23, and they were 22, 21,
24, 18, you know.
It was...
it was just... terrible.
But it had to be done, you know?
NARRATOR: By July 1,
hundreds of thousands of troops were onshore.
The Cotentin Peninsula
and the port of Cherbourg had been taken,
and the beachhead stretched for some 70 miles.
But after three weeks of combat,
it remained, at most, 20 miles deep.
The plan to liberate France was stalled.
General Bradley feared
that unless something drastic were done,
the Allies would face the same sort of ghastly stalemate
they had endured during the First World War.
To avoid disaster, his men had to get out of the hedgerows
and find the kind of wide-open countryside
American armour needed to make real progress.
The region just beyond the town of St-Lô
was what Bradley had in mind.
It was just 15 miles away...
...but to his exhausted men,
it seemed as distant as their ultimate target -
Germany.
(PIANO PLAYS 'IF I COULD BE WITH YOU (ONE HOUR TONIGHT)')
SONG: # If I could be with you one hour tonight
# If I were free to do the things I might
# I want you to know that I wouldn't go
# Till I told you, honey, that I love you so
# If I could be with you, I'd love you long
# If I could be with you, I'd love you strong
# I'm telling you, too, I'd be anything but blue
# If I could be with you for an hour
# If I could be with you... #
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: During the war, you just kept thinking
that life cannot begin until this is over.
You just had to see again all the boys
that you had known and been fond of,
and know they were home safely.
Especially for me. I was not married,
so I was still anticipating my life ahead of me,
but I didn't know who it would be spent with.
But I felt, if I could just
get my brother Sidney back home again...
In fact, I talked to one
of my old boyfriends two years ago,
and I said, "Why didn't you propose to me?"
He said, "You wouldn't have listened to me.
"Till you got Sidney home,
"you wouldn't have listened to anybody."
And he said, "By the time that occurred,
"I had lost all my nerve."
# I'd be anything but blue
# If I could be with you for one hour
# If I could be with you. #
(ALARM BLARES)
MAN: "Sunday, June 18, off Saipan.
"All hands got up at 4:45am.
"I had a swell sleep last night
"even if it was only for about six hours.
"We had church services topside this morning,
"even though we are so close to Japan,
"and the Jap fleet might be close by."
James A. Fahey.
NARRATOR: The Japanese fleet was close by.
Vice-Admiral Jizaburo Ozawa had formulated a new plan
to destroy both the American land forces,
still struggling their way inland on Saipan,
and the American fleet offshore.
He would send waves of carrier-based warplanes
against the fleet,
then reinforce the Japanese garrison on the island.
"The fate of our empire rests on this one battle," he said.
"Everyone must give all he has."
(ALARM BLARES)
But the Americans had intercepted coded messages,
and knew they were coming.
Hundreds of planes took off to engage the Japanese.
The Battle of the Philippine Sea
would be the greatest carrier battle of the Pacific War,
nearly four times as big as Midway.
It was clear the Americans now had an edge.
Their pilots were better trained than the enemy's.
Their planes were better, too.
And they had twice as many of them.
Maurice Bell, who had been working
in a Mobile shipyard when he was drafted,
and joined the navy rather than the army
because, he said, he didn't want to sleep
in a hole in the ground, was serving as a gunner
aboard the heavy cruiser USS 'lndianapolis',
now the flagship of the 5th Fleet.
MAURICE BELL: I was sitting up there with the binoculars
and, all of a sudden, I saw a torpedo plane
diving in on the ship right behind us.
And, just as he launched his torpedoes,
or was ready to launch them, they hit him with fire.
They was firing at him.
And the plane tumbled over and crashed.
Five seconds behind him was another one.
They hit him and he crashed.
About five more seconds, there's a third one come in,
and they hit him,
and it throwed that plane
in a twist, and the torpedoes fell end over end,
and hit the water, and the plane crashed.
I was watching all that with my binoculars.
NARRATOR: The Americans lost 29 planes that day,
but they shot down at least 273.
American submarines sank two Japanese carriers, as well.
Those who took part in the one-sided contest
remembered it as the 'Great Marianas Turkey Shoot'.
(GUNFIRE)
MAN: "Today is the Fourth of July
"and a good way to celebrate it is by killing Japs.
"We fired star shells all last night and all morning
"until daylight today.
"It rained for a while this morning.
"Yesterday and today our artillery on the beach
"gave the Japs an awful pounding.
"The press news said that in the first couple of weeks
"of fighting on Saipan over 6,500 Japs were killed.
"There is a very strong odour from the beach.
"It smells like burnt flesh."
PITTMAN: Well, your Japanese soldier is probably the toughest soldier
that fought in World War II other than the marines.
And I mean, they were tough.
And you surround one, he's going to keep fighting.
In Germany, you surround 50,000 Germans and they'd surrender.
Or Italians, they'd surrender.
But you surround one Japanese,
he's going to keep fighting right on.
He's going to keep firing until you kill him.
And they had one thing in mind - it's killing you.
NARRATOR: The Japanese troops on Saipan, now without hope
of rescue or reinforcement from their shattered fleet,
were resolved to die rather than surrender.
American forces had cleared the airfield
and begun a slow, agonising march toward the north,
trying to keep from killing Japanese civilians
while flushing Japanese troops from their hiding places.
(GUNSHOT)
Again and again, Japanese soldiers threw themselves
at the American guns, shouting "Banzai!"
Apparently willing, even eager, to die for the Emperor.
PITTMAN: We'd hear the Japanese talking and drinking
and clanking bottles and everything.
And we knew there was one coming.
But they'd come at us and, and, uh...
we had machine guns set up doing crossfires every way.
They'd have to get through the crossfire
before we started shooting,
but then some of them would get through.
I had one that came at me with a bayonet
and I shot him in the face
and he fell in the foxhole with me,
and bled all over my pants
and the bayonet went down between my arm and my, my chest.
Nearly got me and him dead.
NARRATOR: Before dawn on July 7,
the Japanese launched a final banzai charge.
3,000 men, some forced from their hospital beds
and barely able to walk,
many armed only with clubs and rocks and shovels,
charged into the American lines.
Bulldozers buried all but a handful of them
the next morning.
It was the largest banzai charge of the Pacific War.
SAM HYNES: We thought of the Japanese
as... mysteriously unlike us.
We knew that they would fight to the death
where, probably, we would have surrendered.
We began to learn, though I don't think we...
gathered a lot of information about the prison camps,
but we had some and we knew that they were capable of,
of a cruelty and, and sadism in a way
that we hoped our people weren't,
though I've never been quite sure what Americans would do
in the... exactly the same situation.
NARRATOR: On July 10, Saipan was officially declared 'secured'.
In almost four weeks of fighting,
16,525 Americans had been killed, wounded
or reported missing,
the costliest battle in the Pacific to date.
Among them were several black marines
who had finally been permitted to fight.
"The Negro marines are no longer on trial,"
the marine commandant said, "they are marines, period."
Almost 30,000 Japanese soldiers were dead, as well.
In the final days of the battle,
some 4,000 terrified Japanese civilians,
mostly women and children, had fled
to the island's northern tip, a high plateau called Marpi Point.
Their government had convinced many of them
that it was their duty to kill themselves
rather than fall into the hands of the cruel Americans -
and the handful of Japanese soldiers who had survived
were prepared to shoot them if they hesitated.
Some marines risked their lives to halt the madness,
Japanese American interpreters with bullhorns
pleaded with civilians to give up.
But more than a thousand were either killed by Japanese troops
or chose suicide.
PITTMAN: When we got down to the end of the island,
they were jumping off the cliff at Marpi Point.
They thought we'd eat them.
They thought we'd kill them and eat them.
Stuff like that.
It's just the Japanese mentality -
they don't want to get captured.
I never did go down to look at the bottom of the cliff,
but it must have been a mess down there.
NARRATOR: A few Japanese soldiers decided to swim out to sea,
rather than surrender.
PITTMAN: So we decided, well, they're going to die anyway,
we might as well shoot them.
So we set up there shooting at them.
We'd hear the slugs hitting around them
and sometimes somebody would hit one.
But it was a long shot,
trying to hit their head.
MAN: "Sunday, July 16.
"It was a warm, sunny day
"although it rained during church services.
"It was the first time I ever went to church
"and saw dead bodies floating by.
"It is nothing to see men, women and children floating.
"There must be thousands of Japs in the waters near Saipan.
"The ships just run over them."
NARRATOR: The Americans went on to take Tinian and then Guam,
the first US possession to be recaptured.
The fall of the Marianas
and the damage done to the Japanese fleet
in the Philippine Sea
forced Hideki Tojo to resign as the Japanese premier.
His successors - first a general,
then an admiral, vowed to fight on.
The Japanese had succeeded at one thing -
the willingness of their soldiers and civilians
to die rather than surrender had made Allied planners
painfully conscious of the bloodshed
that would surely accompany
the invasion of the Japanese homeland.
BARBARA PERKINS: During the war,
it was hard to keep track of your loved ones.
Mail was very slow.
And even the news media, if you knew
what-what company and troop and all that was in,
those things weren't published in any detail at all
as to pinpoint just where they were.
Well, you just never know.
We lived with that.
That was part of our part we had to play.
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota.
"July 20, 1944.
"Somehow, the gossip grapevine
"had heard that there was a telegram
"coming through after 6:00pm last Friday
"for Mr and Mrs Ray Lester of Magnolia.
"Ray Lester heard about it, and his heart was heavy.
"He started walking down the street.
"On the way he met Scotty Dewar, the depot agent.
"'Which one is it? ' Asked Lester,
"because there were four boys to worry about in that family.
"After being told, he went sorrowfully home
"to break the news to his wife.
"And it was a gracious gesture
"that was made at the dance in Magnolia that night.
"When the crowd heard the news, the dance was halted immediately
"out of respect to the memory of that fighting marine
"who died on Saipan."
Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'.
FRANK SINATRA ON RADIO: Gentlemen of the armed forces,
this is the 'Hoodlum from Hoboken'.
I'd like to sing a tune for you.
My name's Sinatra and I hope youse like it, hey.
(Sinatra sings) # Long ago and far away
# I dreamed a dream one day
# And now that dream
# Is here beside me... #
AANENSON: We would be, uh, sitting around our tent area
in the apple orchard in Normandy
and we would discuss what they would have to pay us
to really do what we had just done that day.
We agreed first that we might do it
for $1,000 a mission,
but less than 10 days later -
our losses had gone up heavily -
we decided that we wouldn't consider doing it
for less than $10,000 a mission.
And I think that it went off the radar screen in value
before the end of July, because there's no way
that you can be a mercenary enough,
they could pay you enough,
to do what we were doing on a volunteer basis.
(PLANE FLIES OVER)
NARRATOR: In the weeks after D-day,
American pilots, including Quentin Aanenson,
continued to fly their missions
over the fields and hedgerows of Normandy every day,
trying to focus on the help they were giving
to the men on the ground,
and to avoid thinking too hard
about the losses in their own ranks.
NEWSREEL: Dashing to a hedgerow to clear Nazis out
of another line of hedge across a meadow.
(EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE)
The enemy position's blasted
and the Germans occupying it have enough,
so out comes the white flag of surrender,
more prisoners taken in the drive
to the important city of St-Lô.
As the infantry pushes forward, the way is cleared
by the smashing power of tanks and heavy artillery.
NARRATOR: On July 18, St-Lô -
or what was left of it after six weeks of Allied bombing -
fell to the Americans.
General Bradley's forces had finally reached the line
Allied planners had expected his men to reach
just a few days after D-day,
And he was now ready to send his armour
roaring through the German lines beyond the city.
But first, Allied warplanes
were called in to blast an opening.
The operation was called Cobra.
The correspondent Ernie Pyle was down below,
watching from a battered French farmhouse
with officers from the 4th Infantry Division.
MAN: "The first planes
"of the mass onslaught came over a little before 10:00am.
"They were the fighters and dive-bombers.
"We stood in the barnyard of a French farm and watched them
"barrel nearly straight down out of the sky.
"And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears,
"a sound deep, all-encompassing,
"with no notes in it,
"just a gigantic, faraway surge of doom-like sound.
"It was the heavies,
"coming on with a terrible slowness
"in flights of 12, three flights to a group
"and in groups stretched out across the sky.
"I thought it would never end.
"And then the bombs came.
"It began up ahead as the crackle of popcorn
"and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise
"that seemed surely to destroy all the world around us."
NARRATOR: The bombs continued falling for an hour and a half.
The bright day grew dark with smoke,
Pyle remembered, and the steady roar
seemed to fill "all the space for noise on earth".
Two days later, on July 27, the first army
poured through the newly opened gap in the German lines,
out into the countryside beyond the hedgerows.
For weeks, the Americans on the ground
had felt fortunate to gain 1,000 yards a day.
Soon they would be covering up to 40 miles
in the same amount of time.
The Germans were reeling.
On August 7, the Americans
stopped a counterattack cold at Mortain,
and after five days of battle, forced the Germans to retreat.
Then, on August 15, in the south of France,
American and Free French Forces landed,
fanned out in all directions
and began driving northward.
The following day, Hitler reluctantly agreed
to pull his battered Seventh Army
out of Normandy.
It began a desperate retreat toward Germany.
The Allies caught them near the town of Falaise.
For three days,
the Allies poured fire into the fleeing men...
...from the ground and from the air.
80,000 Germans ran the terrible gauntlet.
At least 10,000 died,
so many that the pilots of the Allied spotter planes
hundreds of feet above the battlefield
were nauseated by the stench.
So many that after the shooting had stopped,
General Eisenhower remembered,
"it was literally possible
"to walk for hundreds of yards at a time,
"stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh".
AANENSON: I had caught a bunch of Germans
in... in double tandem trucks,
and they were just massed in there.
There was so much, uh, firing into that
and I was the only one that was firing.
My wingman... his guns had been jammed, and, uh...
the effect on me was that my right hand quit working
and I was on the way home
and I couldn't grip with that hand.
So I had to put my left hand over on top of the stick
to maintain it and go and land with that.
When I'd have these nightmares
in years after the war, many years after the war,
if it was one relating to that mission
or missions like that,
when I'd get up in the morning,
go out to the kitchen, Jackie would be there
and she would have had the coffee made,
and she could tell when I walked in
that my right hand wasn't functioning right.
She'd pour a cup of coffee, not say a word.
She'd hand it to my left hand.
Never a word said.
We just went on.
NARRATOR: All across France, the Germans were in full retreat.
Since D-day, they had lost some 240,000 men...
...another 200,000 had surrendered.
Allied casualties were terrible, too.
256,000 soldiers and airmen
had been killed, wounded, captured,
or reported as missing in action.
At least 19,000 French civilians had died as well.
Countless French villages had been pounded into dust.
But most of France was free.
On August 25, 1944,
after four years of Nazi occupation...
...Paris, the City of Light, was liberated.
MAN: "I, Ollie Stewart, of sound mind
"and fairly sober character, do solemnly give my word
"that I have never been kissed so much in all my life.
"Almost every woman I meet on the street stops
"and kisses me on both cheeks.
"It is a beautiful custom."
AANENSON: We were flying a mission near Paris
and as I pulled off my strafing run
and I turned back over the city
and as I looked down, there were just thousands
of people jamming the streets of the Champs Élysées
and around the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe
and I realised that I was seeing something
that was basically the culmination
of why we were there.
We are winning this war.
The good guys are going to come out ahead.