NARRATOR: On August 3, 1944,
in the skies over the town of Vire, in France...
...the law of averages caught up
with fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson of Luverne, Minnesota.
MAN: I was flying the 'tail-end charlie' position,
which means the last one in the line of flight,
which is the most vulnerable position
because that's the one they'll start with first.
And suddenly the 88s and 20mm started coming up in heavy amounts,
and just "Brmm!"
I heard this roar through my airplane and fire came into the cockpit,
just all in an instant.
My airplane was shaking. I thought, "I'm gone."
So I tried to bale out.
I tried to move the canopy back,
and a piece of flak had come up through the glide
and so I couldn't get the canopy open.
Couldn't get it open.
The fire was still coming at me, and so I put the plane in a dive,
because we'd always discussed that we didn't want to die by burns.
And so I put the plane in a dive -
I was only at 4,000 feet, so I could hit the ground fast -
and that move literally saved my life
because the air pressure changed
and so the flames were sucked out through that opening in the canopy
and that fire died out.
I got back to the base.
I would stall if my speed dropped below 160 miles an hour
so I landed at 170 miles an hour,
and I didn't know that one of the 20mm had come up through my left wheel well,
and I had a flat tyre there.
So when the landing gear collapsed on one side,
I was still going about 100 miles an hour,
and I was spun around by the force.
My shoulder harness on the right broke loose.
The left one held.
I was spun around, and the back of my head hit the gunsight.
So I was unconscious.
Then a couple of enlisted men had pulled me out
and pulled me away from there.
After medics tended to his dislocated shoulder and the burns on his legs,
a British photographer from 'Picture Post' magazine
asked Aanenson to pose with his plane.
MAN: Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'.
"Lieutenant John Stavenger, bomber pilot now in England,
"has decided it's a mighty small world after all.
"He hadn't hardly landed
"before he bumped into Lieutenant Howard James, of Luverne.
"Then he leisurely settled back and read an English magazine.
"He looked at one big picture of a wrecked plane.
"The picture carried the caption, 'The man who was lost returns to base.'
"The pilot in question was none other
"than Lieutenant Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne.
"His family knew nothing of the incident.
"And the picture showed the Luverne youngster walking away
"from his wrecked plane
"as blithely unconcerned as if he'd just bought a nickel's worth of candy."
A week after his close call, Aanenson was back in the air,
providing ground cover for the Americans advancing toward Germany.
By the autumn of 1944,
the Allied advance across western Europe had stalled,
crippled by continuing problems with supplies,
confusion among commanders
and stubborn German defence of the fatherland.
The people of Mobile, Alabama and Sacramento, California,
Luverne, Minnesota and Waterbury, Connecticut,
who had hoped the D-day invasion and capture of Paris
would bring a swift victory,
remained anxious about their sons and brothers,
husbands and fathers overseas.
A strategic mistake would put Tom Galloway,
a college student from Mobile,
in an unwinnable battle where the only victory to be had was survival.
Robert Kashiwagi, of Sacramento,
who had had everything taken from him by his country,
would be asked to give even more.
And Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne,
who had lost so many friends and seen so much death,
would endure still more horror and nearly lose all hope.
Meanwhile, for those held captive by the Japanese in the Pacific theatre,
rescue still seemed a long way off.
GIRL: "Santo Tomas Camp, Manila.
"Daddy is now out of tobacco.
"He dries papaya leaves on the roof and smokes that.
"People use anything to roll their cigarettes.
"Some even use pages from the Bible because the paper is so fine.
"Every day I hear of some person doing strange things.
"A Catholic priest did a mortal sin by going around with a lady,
"then falling in love with her,
"acting so mushy in front of everybody that he was kicked out of the church.
"I heard a husband and wife fighting loudly.
"She yelled at him, 'lf I hadn't married you, I wouldn't be in this camp now."'
Sascha Weinzheimer.
11 -year-old Sascha Weinzheimer and her family were still imprisoned,
along with 4,000 other civilians rounded up by the Japanese,
on the grounds of the Santo Tomas University in Manila,
on the island of Luzon.
As the war went on, conditions had steadily deteriorated.
WOMAN: Once the food started going down, everything went down.
And toward the end, my mother was 73 pounds.
And she nursed my brother until he was three.
So if you see a picture of him during that time, he is chubby.
And that's because of mother's milk.
But that depleted her.
(AIRPLANE ENGINES BUZZ)
GIRL: "September 21, 1944.
"This morning, about 9:30,
"there were seven Nip planes above us practising diving.
"It was a bright, sunshiny day.
"Then we heard the sound of many planes in the distance
"but didn't pay much attention.
"Mother said, 'That's a different sound. Can't you hear it?"'
(ENGINES DRONE)
"Mother ran outside and we heard her yell, 'Look, look!
"'There are hundreds of them! '
"We all ran out, and right over our heads were planes, planes, planes!
"Everyone was screaming and pointing up at them."
WEINZHEIMER: That was absolutely fantastic.
First of all, the engines were not Mitsubishi engines,
they were American - different-sounding, strong engines.
(GUNFIRE)
Waves of American planes launched from aircraft carriers
roared in over Manila,
bombing and strafing Japanese positions,
attacking Japanese warships anchored in the bay.
"Everyone was so excited.
"Of course, it was very dangerous for us
"because of the shrapnel falling all over the camp from the ack-ack guns,
"but everyone seemed to feel that our boys and our bombs couldn't hurt us."
('PENNIES FROM HEAVEN' PLAYS)
The Japanese were still in control of the Philippines,
but the American assault had begun,
and the next morning,
the prisoner who played music over the camp's loudspeaker
put on 'Pennies from Heaven'.
(Billie Holiday sings) #... the things you love, you must have showers
# So when you hear it thunder
# Don't run under a tree
# There'll be pennies from heaven
# For you and me... #
One month later, on October 20,
General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed on the island of Leyte...
...the first foothold in the struggle to win back the Philippines.
MacArthur's own landing craft got stuck 75 yards offshore
and he had no choice but to wade to the beach.
His publicity machine made the most of it.
NEWSREEL: When General MacArthur left his command of Bataán
by presidential order,
he gave the solemn promise, "I will return."
Now he tells the Philippine people, "I have returned."
WOMAN: So when he came wading through the water up on the beach,
there were great cheers in the movie theatre.
Because that's, of course, how we saw MacArthur returning.
I realise now it was staged, a lot of it,
but, man, it was good to see him walking back.
MacArthur's return thrilled Americans and Filipinos alike.
As his men began to fight their way across the islands of the Philippines,
what remained of the once-mighty Japanese fleet would be shattered
in the largest naval engagement in history -
the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
But 24 volunteer enemy pilots offered fresh evidence of Japan's resolve
to keep fighting, no matter the odds.
They deliberately crashed their planes into the decks of American carriers
in hopes of setting them ablaze.
They were called Kamikazes - Japanese for 'divine wind'.
(GUNFIRE)
Despite the victory at sea, months of bloody fighting lay ahead...
...before the Philippine islands, and the people imprisoned on them,
could be liberated.
MAN: Everybody was scared to death all the time.
And yet, you never said so, you never gave any signals that you were.
You just were, and you knew the other people were too.
You don't run away, because every alternative is impossible.
There's no way out of it, there's no way to change it,
and you are there until you get killed or wounded.
Or until you flee
and, you know, allow everybody to exercise their instinct for contempt,
which is unthinkable to most people.
So there's no way out, and that puts you in a situation
that you're never in, I think, in civilian life.
Back in Europe, the Allies were still stalled in the north,
suffering from supply problems,
the disaster of Operation Market Garden,
and intensified German resistance.
The American Seventh Army's drive northward from the south of France
had run into trouble as well.
They had landed at Marseilles in mid-August,
and at first things had gone better than anyone had anticipated.
Within a month, they had pushed almost 400 miles,
taken 89,000 German prisoners
and linked up with elements of Patton's Third Army
to finally complete the continuous line
Eisenhower now believed essential to the Allied cause.
But thousands of Germans had retreated into the Vosges mountains -
steep, thickly forested with evergreens,
shrouded in fog and drenched with cold autumn rains.
There they dug in, ordered to halt the Allied advance into Germany.
American units that had already fought in the mountains of Italy
were sent to France and ordered to battle their way through the Vosges.
One was the 36th Texas Division,
the same outfit that had nearly been destroyed
at Monte Cassino the previous winter.
Another, attached to it,
especially requested by headquarters,
was the 100th/442nd Combat Team -
Japanese-American troops,
most of them recruited from internment camps in the United States.
They had once been considered a problem by the army.
Now they were problem-solvers, called in when others failed.
MAN: It was bitterly cold.
That's when the 'lost battalion' campaign happened,
because our general was very, you might say, ambitious.
You say "blood and guts". Why was it our blood and his guts, you know?
Major General John E. Dahlquist, commander of the Texas Division,
was relatively new to combat
and had nearly lost his command twice during the drive north from the Riviera
for allowing his men to lag behind.
But he was convinced he was a better tactician than more seasoned soldiers.
And he would prove willing to use his detachment
of Japanese-American veterans
to correct his own mistakes.
The village of Bruyères was their first target.
Dahlquist assured them the surrounding hills were only lightly defended.
In fact, they were filled with well-dug-in Germans.
The 442nd cleared them off in four days,
despite the terrain, the steady icy downpour that filled their foxholes,
and the rain of artillery shells bursting among the treetops.
MAN: General Dahlquist was, uh...
...a very strict general.
And especially, it seems to me,
that he was trying to push the 442nd too hard, too far.
Telling us to "advance, advance", you know.
So he was hard in that way.
And I really didn't have any respect for him.
Meanwhile, General Dahlquist had sent a battalion of his Texans
along a densely forested ridge toward the important town of Saint-Dié.
Again, veteran officers warned him the woods were full of Germans.
Again, Dahlquist insisted there were none.
Within an hour, the Texans were under attack.
275 of them were cut off and surrounded by the Germans,
who zeroed in on them from three sides.
For two days, shells blasted their positions.
The Texans began to run out of food and ammunition.
Two attempts to break through to them failed.
Finally, on October 26,
Dahlquist ordered the exhausted men of the 442nd
to return to the wooded slopes, rescue the 'lost battalion' -
as the Texans would come to be called -
and restore his reputation.
MAN: One time, our regimental commander, Colonel Pence,
pleaded with the division commander, you know,
that we could pull back 'cause our men were so depleted.
But the division general said,
"No, we need to get those boys out, because every day counts.
"You get in there and get them out
"if it takes every damn last one of you to do it."
For five days, fighting from tree to tree in heavy fog,
they tried to get to the trapped men.
On the morning of October 30,
they were just 1,000 yards from the survivors
but pinned to the slope by artillery and machine-gun fire.
KASHIWAGl: We were stuck, because it's a terrain that was steep,
and so we were on our own, like a cowboy-and-lndian type of battle,
and so the other people couldn't help us.
Finally, they had had enough.
I Company and Robert Kashiwagi's K Company
rose to their feet and charged up the hillside,
hurling grenades into German machine-gun nests
and firing from the waist as they climbed.
KASHIWAGl: We just went hog-wild crazy.
We were mad at everybody and ready to kill anything that there was.
And finally we made contact with the lost battalion,
and we found only 230 or so surviving.
But we lost 400 men trying to rescue those 230.
What a terrible price we paid.
TOKUNO: After we rescued the outfit,
why, the first Caucasian fellow that came out
said, "I was never so glad to see a Jap in my life."
Ha!
That's the first thing he said.
I Company had started into the forest with 185 men.
Just 8 walked out unhurt.
Robert Kashiwagi's K Company had begun with 186 men.
Only 17 emerged on foot.
All the rest were dead or wounded or missing.
Kashiwagi had himself been hit by shrapnel
for a third and then a fourth time in the fighting.
A few days later, Mr and Mrs Kametaro Takeuchi,
formerly of Sacramento,
now living behind barbed wire at the Granada Relocation Center,
received a telegram.
Their son, Tadashi, had been among those killed
in the struggle to rescue the lost battalion.
On November 12,
General Dahlquist announced he wanted to review the 442nd
to thank them for what they had done.
KASHIWAGl: The general decided,
"Well, now, we want to award you people, recognise your deed."
And so he said, "We want the whole regiment in formation."
And when the general got there and looked at the formation,
he was so disgusted.
He said, "I asked you to get the whole regiment out there!"
And our colonel, with tears in his eyes, says, "General", he says,
"that's all that's left of that particular regiment.
"That's exactly what you did to us."
MAN: In the schools, we always talked about what was happening in the war
in all the grades that I remember.
Once in a while, we would have somebody come home, you know,
who had been overseas,
who would come up to the school
and talk about where they had been or...
You really... you know, again, you know, between 6 and 10 years old,
I wasn't into the geopolitical aspects of the war.
I was more impressed to see the guy.
(LIVELY JAZZ MUSIC)
MAN: I think every man that was in the service was well aware of the fact
that when you came home on furlough,
it was a very good chance that you would lapse
into a release of bad language, so...
It was dominant in your thinking.
It made you speak slowly and deliberately
and almost repeat in your own mind
what you were going to say before you said it,
because, you know, in the service, you just don't use any adjectives -
you forget all your adjectives and just use one or two.
WOMAN: Like? Like I'm not going say.
(Chuckles)
My wife would come down from heaven and hit me on the head.
FUSSELL: When you come on the line, you are very brave
because you know nothing about what's happening.
And it's easy for you to perform pseudo-brave gestures and procedures,
because you don't know yet.
And gradually -
this is because you have a reservoir of courage when you arrive -
and each time you get badly frightened,
a little of it diminishes until you don't have any left.
And that is the worst moment.
As the lost battalion was being rescued,
Paul Fussell, a newly minted second lieutenant in the 103rd Infantry Division,
was bivouacked at Épinal, at the foot of the Vosges mountains.
He was 20 years old, from Pasadena, California,
fresh from 19 months of training and filled with excitement.
He had told his parents he felt "very confident and safe"
as he went off to war.
The reception he and his fellow soldiers had received
during their first few days in southern France
only added to his buoyancy.
As the division moved northward, up the Rhône Valley,
young women appeared along the road, waving and passing out bottles of wine.
FUSSELL: We brought in good health - very important -
youth, optimism...
That's why these 18-year-olds could pursue war at all.
They were kids. They were optimistic.
And they really thought that if you did well, you'd be rewarded.
I mean, they were that innocent.
They had no idea about life's accidents.
On the night of November 10,
he and the rest of the men of Company F
were ordered up to the front,
to a thickly forested hillside overlooking Saint-Dié,
the town toward which the lost battalion had been heading
when it was surrounded by the Germans.
They were to replace a weary company
that had been engaged with the enemy for weeks.
FUSSELL: I came across two German kids,
dead, lying on their backs.
They'd been killed the day before by the unit we were replacing.
And they were so young, I couldn't believe it.
I thought they were between maybe 12 and 14 years old.
And at the end of the war, of course,
the Germans were absolutely scraping the barrel of everybody -
old men who could hardly walk...
...and little kids from late grammar school.
These kids had little uniforms on. They were wearing caps, not helmets.
And each had been shot through the head.
And the blue... bluish-red brains of one
were coming out his nostrils.
They had their eyes open too.
And the other one, his bluish-red brain was coming out just from under his cap,
and sort of displacing his cap as he wore it.
And that really gave me a jolt. I seldom refer to it.
But it was my introduction to some painful facts - that this war is serious.
We are going to kill people, regardless of their age,
as long as they're wearing German uniforms,
and they are going to try to kill us.
MAN: I often wondered why the Germans didn't quit.
I wondered why they didn't quit after Normandy.
Once we successfully landed on the Continent,
to me it was obvious we're going to win the war -
it was just how long, or how soon.
And all that we went through and the people that were killed.
But what's your alternative?
The Allied command in Europe
had not waited to see how Operation Market Garden turned out
before mounting four more or less simultaneous assaults on the Westwall,
which the Allies called the Siegfried line.
Each had fallen short.
The Seventh Army overran Strasbourg
but was halted on the Rhine's west bank.
Patton's Third Army took Metz
and secured three bridgeheads across the Saar,
but could proceed no further until it could get enough fuel to go on.
In the north, two attacks were launched by the American First Army.
One was aimed at the German city of Aachen.
The other intended to sweep the enemy
from the 50 wooded square miles just south of that city
called the Hurtgen Forest.
MAN: The Hurtgen Forest was the worst.
And you haven't heard much about it because... it was just a mess-up.
There was no reason to go through the forest,
but the generals kept wanting to go through the forest.
And you'd put a division in there and chew it up,
and they'd pull it out and put another division in and chew it up.
It was a nightmarish place to fight...
...with 100-foot fir trees that in some places grew just 4 feet apart.
"It was so dense and dark and shrouded in dank fog,"
one general remembered,
"that upon entering it, you want to drop things behind to mark your path,
"as Hansel and Gretel did with their breadcrumbs."
Two parallel lines of German pillboxes and log-and-dirt bunkers
were hidden among the trees, several miles apart.
The pine needles that blanketed the forest floor disguised trip-wires
and mines the Americans called 'Bouncing Betties'
that sprang into the air and went off at groin height.
The commanders who planned the battle knew almost nothing about the terrain
and never came to see it for themselves.
And no-one had been trained to fight in such a place.
"We're taking three trees a day," one officer said,
"and they cost us a hundred men apiece."
The first two divisions to be ordered into the forest
would lose 4,500 men in three weeks
and move less than three miles.
On November 2, the 28th Infantry Division followed.
With them was Second Lieutenant Tom Galloway from Mobile, Alabama,
an acquaintance of Sid Phillips and his sister Katharine.
He had been a senior at Auburn University
and was now a replacement officer on the front lines,
a forward observer scouting targets for the 109th Field Artillery.
GALLOWAY: The man I replaced got shot,
and it just wasn't too good to think what happened to him,
but then you've replaced him.
Targets were almost impossible to spot from the ground.
Dense growth and constant fog hid them from the air as well.
Tanks could barely move
on the handful of narrow, muddy, heavily mined logging trails.
Soldiers could not see one another, let alone the enemy.
"If anyone said he knew where he was," one commander said,
"he was a damned liar."
Despite everything, Galloway's division took its first objective -
the little town of Schmidt -
in just two days.
The Germans took it back the following morning.
The battlelines became totally confused.
We were all mixed up. Give you an example - the medics.
There was only one building that I know about there
and both the German and American medics were using it.
They were just bringing in all the wounded
and both sides were using that one building.
A steady, cold rain began to fall,
followed by sleet, then snow.
Thousands developed trench foot.
When it was too painful to stand,
men took turns kneeling in the icy water that filled their foxholes.
German 88 shells burst in the fir trees above them,
showering the men with shrapnel and dagger-sharp shards of wood.
GALLOWAY: The artillery would hit those trees
and you didn't know if you were hit by artillery or flying wood.
There just was no place to get protection.
The Germans had it, they had it all mapped.
And you had to go down the firebreaks.
Of course, they would have guns at those firebreaks.
And it made it bad.
I just recall one morning I went in with the battalion,
and before nightfall the sergeant major came to me
and told me I was the only officer they had left.
And that's out of a battalion.
And it just chewed people up.
(EXPLOSIONS)
"The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,"
one private recalled,
"and the nights were so bad I would pray for daylight."
By November 13, the officers of every single rifle company in the 28th Division
had been killed or wounded.
After a night of continuous German shelling,
an entire company broke and ran.
Even officers with drawn revolvers could not stop them.
Hundreds of men shot themselves in the foot or hand
rather than endure any more.
Hundreds more collapsed psychologically,
sat staring into the distance as if no battle raged around them.
The reporter Ernie Pyle called it
"the accumulated blur, the hurting vagueness
"of being too long in the lines."
In mid-November,
fresh troops replaced what was left of Tom Galloway's division.
The fighting in the Hurtgen Forest would go on for weeks.
More than 33,000 American soldiers would be lost.
So many died,
and those who lived spent so much time desperately digging
for their own protection,
that there were few burials.
When the snow melted the following spring,
hundreds of bodies and parts of bodies would still litter the forest floor.
GALLOWAY: The men were... well, you were just all beat up.
You'd been in that mess. You'd been under that strain.
You just were glad to get out of there.
I like to think that probably the prettiest sight that I saw over there
was coming out of the forest, up on a hill, and looking down.
It had snowed, and the whole - these were big fir trees -
and they were all pretty, with snow on and everything.
And I couldn't decide whether the scene was pretty
or I was so glad to get out of there that made it look so pretty.
But I do remember that.
Galloway and his comrades were sent for rest and recovery
to the Ardennes Forest,
a quiet place where nothing much was thought likely to happen.
November 23, 1944 was Thanksgiving.
Defense workers in Mobile, Alabama and Waterbury, Connecticut
remained on the job to help speed the day of victory.
At noon, servicemen at McClellan Field, in Sacramento,
were serenaded by the glee club of the 4909 Aviation Squadron.
And in Luverne, Minnesota,
the local Lutheran church held separate Thanksgiving services
in English and in German.
Thanksgiving turkey was served to the men
on the forested slopes of the Vosges mountains,
though it was cold by the time it got to Lieutenant Paul Fussell.
That same afternoon,
he found himself part of a 12-man squad ordered forward
to scout the defences of the German-held town of Nothalten.
(GUNSHOT)
A burst of rifle fire
forced them to find what cover they could behind a small rise.
German snipers had them in their sights.
No-one seemed to know what to do.
Then a second lieutenant moved forward with his carbine.
"Let's get the sons of bitches," he said.
FUSSELL: His name was Abe Goldman.
And most of the people I fought with,
who were from the South and Texas, Oklahoma and so on,
had never seen a Jew in their lives.
And the idea of this Jewish kid, Abe Goldman,
who should have been - in the view of most of the other soldiers -
should have been in the dry goods business,
to see him on the front line, and he was very enthusiastic.
He knew what had happened to the Jews.
He was probably the bravest one in the whole platoon of 40 men.
And that's why he got himself shot.
(GUNSHOT)
And the fact that out of, say, 12 people
he was the only one that crawled forward to risk his life,
that sort of changed...
...l'd say it changed a lot of minds.
The fight for Nothalten would take a terrible toll on Fussell's men.
Abe Goldman survived,
but by the time the battle was over,
the company had lost four of its six officers.
Fussell's platoon lost 13 of its 40 men.
The average life expectancy for a junior infantry officer on the front lines
was now just 17 days.
In the end, Lieutenant Paul Fussell would beat those odds.
But they would haunt him for the rest of his life.
AANENSON: Well, as we pushed the Germans back and as they retreated...
...they were able to take all of their flak guns
and most of their artillery with them.
So, as we would fly missions into that area -
in the Hurtgen Forest or into the Ruhr Valley -
we were facing a larger number of flak guns than we had before.
So it was a terribly brutal time for us.
Fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson of Luverne, Minnesota
had been helping provide air cover for American troops on the ground
ever since D-day.
Through all that time, his anchor to sanity had been the belief
that Jackie Greer, the girl he'd met while in training in Louisiana,
would marry him if he survived the war.
WOMAN: Following that war was the best history lesson I ever had.
I got a big map, and every day I'd get... I had my crayons out.
Every day.
Certain colours meant this group is here, certain colours are this.
And I kept up with that war.
I learned more about Europe than I had ever learned in school.
It was very important that I stay with it.
Aanenson and Greer exchanged letters every two or three days,
each trying to keep the other's spirits up till they could be together again.
Aanenson had survived a bad fire in his plane,
was haunted by the fear
that he had once mistakenly fired on British or American troops,
nearly died when his plane hurtled toward its target so fast,
his instruments froze.
When he managed to pull out of his dive at 600 miles per hour,
blood vessels in his eyes burst and blood trickled from his ears.
Meanwhile, his friends kept dying.
AANENSON: Two of the guys that lived in my tent were killed.
There were just four of us in there, and two of them were killed.
I had been listed as missing in action
because I had been so badly shot up
I had to land on a temporary airfield closer to the front lines.
Johnny Bathurst and I,
who were the survivors in Duffy's Tavern, our tent there,
decided that we couldn't deal with that anymore.
So we quit making friends, new friends.
On December 5, 1944,
the impact of all that Aanenson had seen and experienced overcame him...
...and he started writing Jackie a very different kind of letter
from the ones he had sent before.
AANENSON: "Dear Jackie,
"For the past two hours, I've been sitting here alone in my tent
"trying to figure out just what I should do
"and what I should say in this letter
"in response to your letters and some questions you have asked.
"I have purposely not told you much about my world over here
"because I thought it might upset you.
"Perhaps that has been a mistake, so let me correct that right now.
"I still doubt if you will be able to comprehend it.
"I don't think anyone can who has not been through it.
"I live in a world of death.
"I have watched my friends die in a variety of violent ways.
"Sometimes it's just an engine failure on take-off,
"resulting in a violent explosion.
"There's not enough left to bury.
"Other times it's the deadly flak that tears into a plane.
"If the pilot is lucky, the flak kills him.
"But usually he isn't, and he burns to death as his plane spins in.
"Fire is the worst.
"In early September, one of my good friends crashed on the edge of our field.
"As he was pulled from the burning plane, the skin came off his arms.
"His face was almost burned away.
"He was still conscious and trying to talk.
"You can't imagine the horror.
"So far, I have done my duty in this war.
"I have never aborted a mission or failed to dive on a target,
"no matter how intense the flak.
"I have lived for my dreams for the future.
"But like everything else around me, my dreams are dying too.
"In spite of everything, I may live through this war and return to Baton Rouge,
"but I am not the same person you said goodbye to on May 3.
"No-one could go though this and not change.
"We are all casualties.
"In the meantime, we just go on.
"Some way, somehow, this will all have an ending.
"Whatever it is, I am ready for it."
When he had finished his letter,
Aanenson folded it up and put it away in his foot locker.
Mailing it home would only have been cruel
to the woman he loved and hoped to marry -
if he happened to make it through what was still to come.