(DISTANT GUNFIRE)
MAN: In the process of this battle
we took about 18 or 19 German prisoners.
A young man approximately 24 years of age turned to me,
and in a voice completely accent-free,
he said, "Where are you from?"
I said, "I'm from the United States."
"Where in the United States?"
"The north-east," I said.
"Where north-east?"
I said, "I'm from Connecticut."
"Where in Connecticut?" He was persisting.
I said, "Yes, I'm from Waterbury, Connecticut."
"Ah, yes," he said. "Waterbury.
"At the junction of the Naugatuck and Mad rivers."
Now, you have to know a bit about the area.
The Naugatuck is a fairly substantial river,
but the Mad River is a little stream
that you can jump across without any trouble.
Anyone who knew this, um... I was puzzled.
I said, "How did you possibly know that?"
He said, "I was in training for the administration."
"The administration of what?" I said.
He said, "The administration of the territories."
My blood ran cold.
I couldn't imagine that Hitler,
in his wildest imagination,
not only had figured he practically had Europe in his grasp,
but he also figured that he would control America too.
NARRATOR: By December of 1944,
Americans were growing weary of the war
their young men had been fighting for three long years.
In Europe, it was supposed to be over by now.
The generals who had directed the fighting from far behind the lines
had been predicting victory for months.
It had not happened.
In the Pacific, American progress had been slow and costly.
The enemy showed no sign of giving up.
For the people of Luverne, Minnesota and Waterbury, Connecticut,
Sacramento, California and Mobile, Alabama,
and every other town struggling to absorb it all,
the stream of telegrams and newspaper headlines
telling of new losses
seemed endless and unendurable.
For their sons overseas it was, of course, far worse.
(EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE)
For them, there was no option but to fight on and try to stay alive.
Ray Leopold, a mortgage broker from Waterbury,
who had been trained to kill people,
would find himself trying to save them instead.
Glenn Frazier, from Alabama,
who had been a prisoner of war for more than two years,
would begin to lose hope of ever seeing his home again.
And Burnett Miller, the only child of a prosperous Sacramento family,
would be caught up in the biggest and least expected battle
on the western front.
MAN: Basically, getting shot at or shelled is just plain scary.
You just hope that it misses you.
When the artillery's coming in, you think, "Oh, God.
"It's covering such an area and I hope it doesn't hit me."
We would wish they'd just start using rifles, you know?
Well, when you get to where a bullet whizzes by your head...
...you know that's personal. (Laughs)
You know? You better get out of the way.
Since the summer of 1944,
Hitler had been secretly planning a massive counterattack,
an all-out attempt to divide and destroy the Allied armies
before they could move further into Germany.
His target would be the Ardennes -
rolling, forested hills in Belgium and Luxembourg
through which German troops had advanced toward France twice before,
in 1914 and again in 1940.
It was now thinly defended.
His armies were to break through the unsuspecting Americans,
race for Antwerp,
cut off the British Army in the north and drive it into the sea.
Most of Hitler's commanders thought it madness.
They had lost nearly 4 million men since the war began.
They had too little fuel for a major mechanised advance.
The once mighty Luftwaffe had largely been destroyed.
But Hitler was implacable.
"The coming battle", he said, "would decide whether we shall live or die."
Every able-bodied German male between the ages of 16 and 60
was made eligible for service.
25 new divisions called the People's Infantry were formed.
250,000 fresh troops -
convicts and the infirm, old men and young boys,
and conscripts from occupied countries who didn't speak a word of German.
Preparations for the attack would take time and demanded utter secrecy.
Hitler would not launch it until he was certain
winter weather and dense fog would keep Allied aircraft on the ground.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Tom Galloway, of Mobile, and his division
were among the American troops
who happened to be stationed in the Ardennes.
GALLOWAY: We were in Luxembourg, rebuilding after Hurtgen Forest,
because the losses were kind of heavy.
There, like, we had a front - the division had a front of some 20 miles.
Well, because it was a quiet area and nothing was going to happen,
I fired 25 rounds a day.
I'd go up in the morning and fire just one at the time...
(ARTILLERY FIRES)
...just to let them know we were there.
There were only four US infantry divisions in the Ardennes -
80,000 men stretched out along a front
that ran some 80 miles from north to south.
Two of the divisions had seen little combat.
The other two - the 4th and Galloway's 28th -
had been battered by weeks of desperate fighting in the Hurtgen Forest
and had been sent to the Ardennes to rest.
Ray Leopold, of Waterbury, was serving with the 28th too.
He had been trained as a sniper.
LEOPOLD: We were in a place called Malmedy-St Vith,
at a little place called Sevenig Hill.
You could put one foot in France, one foot in Belgium, and spit into Germany
at this particular spot.
One frosty morning, after several hours of guard duty,
Leopold stood up to stretch.
A German sniper shot him in the left thigh.
(GUNSHOT)
As chance would have it,
I had picked up a German medic's kit a couple of days before,
lying in the field,
and I doctored my own wound
because our own medic had been killed.
And with the German equipment, I probed for the bullet.
I extracted it. I cleansed the wound.
I doctored it myself.
Two days later, when I got to battalion aid station,
the captain looked at the wound and said, "This is wonderful. Who did it?"
I told him that I had.
He then told me, "Leopold, I have a proposition for you.
"I'm going to make you a medic."
I, thereafter, never carried a gun.
(SOFT THUD) Man: Strike!
(Men cheer)
('LILI MARLENE' PLAYS)
For the most part, the war seemed a long way away from the Ardennes,
and the men took full advantage of the facilities for rest and recreation.
Life there was so quiet, so uneventful,
that some of the men called it the 'ghost front'.
(Marlene Dietrich sings) # Outside the barracks, by the corner light
# I'll always stand and wait for you at night
# We will create a world for two
# I'll wait for you the whole night through
# For you, Lili Marlene
(ACCORDION SOLO)
# It's you
# Lili Marlene. #
But just a few miles to the east, hidden beneath the trees,
Hitler's army was making the final preparations for its surprise attack.
There were signs that something was going on.
Civilians slipped through the lines
to report growing numbers of German troops.
Spotter planes noted hospital trains
and massive Tiger tanks loaded on flatcars.
At night, Gls heard the distant rumble of motors.
GALLOWAY: I did know that the roads
would not have snow on them in the morning,
which meant there was traffic on those roads at night.
Report it, but I didn't put any significance to it.
Allied headquarters paid little attention.
General Omar Bradley remained convinced
the German Army had been wrecked.
(EXPLOSIONS)
Then, at 5:30am on December 16,
thousands of guns opened up.
The shells fell on and around the American positions for an hour.
A few moments later, the enemy began to emerge
out of the dense fog that shrouded the forest.
(RAPID GUNFIRE)
And, of course, the Bulge broke right there.
And, as I say, when they fired the first round, it darn near hit me.
From then on, it got worse.
But they came barrelling over there,
and just right into us.
20 German infantry divisions were moving forward along a 50-mile front -
a quarter of a million men.
Behind them roared 600 tanks.
On the adjoining ridge, which was only a half-mile from us,
sitting up as bold as brass,
several German tanks in line,
with the driver sitting in his black uniform,
were coming down paths that could not, in our opinion,
possibly have taken a tank.
Footpaths.
But there it was.
These gigantic tanks, with their 88mm guns,
were coming down this path in single file.
GALLOWAY: You just had waves of Germans coming at you.
We had one machine gun just mowing them down.
They'd keep coming right down the road, right into that machine gun.
But there were waves of them.
The Germans kept coming at the Americans,
pushing them back or flowing around them.
As Hitler had hoped, thick clouds and ground fog
kept Allied warplanes out of the sky.
Some men simply fled.
Surrounded by the enemy, cut off from one another,
out of ammunition and unable to fight back,
others were forced to surrender - more than 10,000 men.
Most struggled to hold on.
Clerks and truck drivers who had never fired a carbine
found themselves in combat.
Some officers acted like traffic cops,
trying to restore order to the chaos on the clogged roads.
GALLOWAY: At one point, I'm there and I'm trying to figure out tactics.
And to be perfectly honest, I figured, as a junior officer in the artillery,
I'd be a forward observer and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much.
As it ended up, here I am in charge,
and trying to say, "Why did you sleep through tactics?"
And... (Chuckles)... it makes you think.
The Germans continued to advance.
On December 17,
an SS panzer unit ambushed an American convoy
near a tiny village called Malmedy,
captured and disarmed 150 men,
and then gunned down at least 86 of them.
They also butchered scores of Belgian civilians.
News of the killing spread fast among the embattled Americans.
LEOPOLD: Archie Costran was the first sergeant of our outfit.
Came up to me within the hour
with word of what had happened at the Malmedy massacre
only two miles away from us.
He said, "If you are captured and identified as Jewish,
"you will not live."
He said, "Ray, why don't you do what I'm doing?
"Take your dog tags, with its big letter 'H' on it,
"wrap it around your hand, put your glove back on.
"Lf, by chance, you're ever forced to surrender," he said,
"as you raise your hand, throw the glove, together with the dog tag,
"into the snow and step on it."
For 12 days, my hand had the dog tag wrapped around it.
The Germans succeeded in smashing through the centre
and spreading out to create a 50-mile salient,
a bulge in the Allied line.
The Americans managed to keep the breakthrough from widening
by holding on to two villages -
St Vith to the north and Bastogne in the south.
GALLOWAY: The unit tightened up, and we held.
Until - we had about a day, two days -
and then we had to start dropping back.
So we'd drop back and fire, drop back and fire.
At that time I didn't know it,
but apparently we were trying to protect Bastogne.
I had never heard of Bastogne, I didn't know there was such a place,
but we were trying to protect Bastogne.
The little town commanded seven all-weather roads.
Keeping the Germans from gaining control of those roads
was now the Allies' highest priority.
I was asked to go out and ride recon, and that was a mistake.
And I reported that German tanks were coming.
And I could hear them speaking, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"
So I had to back up.
But it was too late.
Tom Galloway and his men were surrounded.
They hid in a house.
They brought a tank up, shot that house up pretty bad.
Left with no other option, Galloway surrendered.
Well, you never think you're going to get caught.
You think, "It's not going to happen to me."
He and some of his fellow captives were sent deep inside Germany
to a prison camp 40 miles east of Frankfurt.
Meanwhile, the 101 st Airborne was ordered to hold Bastogne
until other reinforcements could reach the Ardennes.
While elements of the First Army drove south toward the forest,
General George Patton's Third Army began a headlong rush north
to try to relieve Bastogne before the enemy could take it.
The Germans encircled the town and began to shell it.
The surrounded Americans
began running out of ammunition, food, medicine.
On December 22,
German officers under a white flag
approached the American commander at Bastogne,
General Anthony McAuliffe of the 101 st Airborne.
The Americans' situation was hopeless, they said. The town was surrounded.
They demanded the Americans surrender.
McAuliffe had a one-word answer - "Nuts!"
The Germans had no idea what he meant,
but they returned to their lines and the shelling started again.
But the next morning, the skies cleared and were quickly filled with Allied planes,
bombing and strafing German armour
and dropping supplies and ammunition to the besieged Americans.
They were still surrounded, still cut off from help on the ground,
but now at least they had food to eat and ammunition with which to shoot back.
And they were fast becoming a symbol back home of American resistance.
WOMAN: The Battle of the Bulge was publicised.
We knew they were holding out in Bastogne
and we were all cheering them on.
Again, we know now how dreadful it was,
but we were very conscious of the Battle of the Bulge,
because we felt like we had just about completed that campaign in Europe.
And when this counterattack came, it came as a blow to the entire nation.
('SILENT NIGHT' PLAYS)
FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT: It is not easy to say merry Christmas
to you, my fellow Americans,
in this time of destructive war.
Nor can I say merry Christmas lightly tonight to our armed forces
at their battle stations all over the world.
General Eisenhower, as surprised as anyone
by the success of the German advance,
nevertheless saw the opportunity embedded in the crisis.
The Germans were on the offensive for the first time since Normandy,
but that meant they were exposed
and could be themselves surrounded and cut off.
On Christmas Day, 30 miles west of Bastogne,
the Americans stopped the German advance.
The following day, American tanks broke through the German lines
and linked up with the 101 st Airborne inside Bastogne.
The men there celebrated a belated Christmas,
despite the shells and bombs that continued to fall around them
and the fighting that lay ahead.
('O HOLY NIGHT' PLAYS)
GIRL: "I am making a few Christmas gifts for Buddy and Doris
"and bookmarks for all my friends.
"Mother said it was best to forget it this year,
"but we can't, on account of the little kids.
"She told them, because of the anti-aircraft guns in Manila,
"Uncle Sam told Santa to keep away this year
"and leave his gifts for the kids in San Francisco."
(EXPLOSIONS)
"When you stop and think how hard our boys are fighting for us,
"I guess we can take it too.
"But just a little more rice would be all I can ask for.
"We always picture Opa and Oma on their farm in California.
"If they only knew how hungry we are, they would be very sad.
"I guess even when we tell them, they will never, ever believe it."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
The grandparents Sascha Weinzheimer called Opa and Oma
lived in the Sacramento Valley.
Her grandfather blamed himself for his family's captivity in the Philippines.
When they'd asked to go home in the weeks before Pearl Harbor,
he'd insisted they stay where they were, certain there would be no war.
Once he knew they had been imprisoned,
he had tried to get messages and Red Cross packages to them
month after month.
His health began to fail.
My dad walked me to the main building for my siesta
'cause the camp shut down for three hours in the heat of the day.
So he stopped at the desk,
and they said, "Oh, we have a Red Cross telegram for you."
It was from my grandmother.
And it said my grandfather, he had passed eight months prior,
and we were just getting it.
He stood there and cried,
and then walked me up to my room.
Everybody told us that my grandfather literally died of a broken heart.
That evening, the family did its best to celebrate the holiday.
They made a tree out of a palm branch stuck in a tin can filled with dirt,
and lined up at the canteen with the other prisoners for a special treat -
two tablespoons of jam and one bite of chocolate.
Sascha thought it all delicious,
even though there were tiny white worms in the chocolate.
During the night, American planes could be heard overhead again
and scores of leaflets fluttered out of the dark sky -
Christmas greetings from the troops fighting their way across the Philippines
toward Manila...
...toward them.
Back in the spring of 1944,
John and Glynnie Frazier, of Fort Deposit, Alabama,
received a telegram from the War Department.
Their son, Glenn, had been missing in action in the Philippines
for two agonising years,
and since nothing had been heard from him since May of 1942,
he was now officially presumed dead.
Frazier had joined the army in 1941,
in part because he believed that the young woman he loved
loved someone else.
He was wrong.
She had remained loyal to him all that time.
Now, with this latest news,
she began to give up hope of ever seeing him again.
But Glenn Frazier was still alive,
a prisoner of the Japanese.
MAN: When I'd think about home,
I would think about the things that I missed most,
like ice-cream and potato salad
and some ambrosia that my mother used to make for Christmas,
and so forth.
And of course it was always a thought of if we would get back home,
but it got a time that we were so weak,
it got a time with me, I was so weak until I couldn't even remember
whether I had sisters or brothers,
and I couldn't even remember their names.
And it comes to a time when you think, "Did I have a home?
Did I have a family?"
Frazier had come close to death several times.
He had endured the Bata�n Death March
and nightmarish conditions at Camp O'Donnell
and Bilibid Prison in the Philippines.
And he had been forced to perform slave labour
in prison camps in Japan itself,
where he had survived double pneumonia,
torture, a week of isolation in a covered pit,
and beatings so frequent they became routine.
Once, when he failed to lift his feet high enough while marching,
a guard drove a bayonet into his knee.
FRAZIER: It started getting infected and it finally got gangrene,
and the doctor, our American doctor in there,
had nothing to treat me with except iodine.
I would hold a cup to catch all the blood and he cut it open with a pocketknife,
and it would get to the point where he would pour pure iodine in there
to cure the gangrene.
They were thinking about taking my leg off.
So I told the doctor, "I'd just rather die than have my leg taken off."
So he fought it and we won.
At one point, there was only a space in the back of my leg
about an inch and a half across
that the flesh was like normal flesh.
The rest of it was decaying.
I could open that wound up and see my bone.
Frazier's leg eventually healed
and he went back to work on the waterfront,
where he and his friends did all they could
to sabotage the Japanese war effort.
They risked their lives to drill holes in the bottoms of oil barrels,
poured sand into gas tanks,
wrecked machinery,
destroyed a dock,
and loosened blocks
so that a submarine under repairs slid into the bay upside down.
And through it all, Frazier thought of home
and of the girl he still hoped, somehow, to see again.
But the thing that really kept me going is seeing if that girl was still there
and see if, you know, I still in my heart was crazy about her,
and the fact that I wanted to live.
I did not want my body pushing up Japanese daisies.
And I just felt that way,
and I thought, "They're going to have a heck of a time getting me in a casket."
MAN: I became a 'Sacramento Bee' news carrier at the age of 10,
and for me, the war was that little square map on the front page
where it showed wavy lines moving in some direction,
and then the next day you'd see them move a little more,
and arrows pointed here and there where different armies were going.
And then, all of a sudden, there was this bulge in the map
that was going back the other way.
That was the Battle of the Bulge.
And, "My God, what's happening here?
"Are we losing now that we're this close?"
We all took it seriously, because the lines had moved the other way.
(DISTANT SHOUTING, EXPLOSIONS)
MAN: "This is being written on the verge of the new year,
"when all along the western front the outcome still remains in doubt.
"When German parachutists were known
"to have been dropped behind American lines
"dressed in American uniforms,
"it became necessary to demand identification papers from everybody.
"But with coloured troops, it was only a matter of form,
"since the Germans have no known coloured soldiers.
"I was halted many times,
"but my face was my best identification."
Ollie Stewart, the 'Baltimore Afro-American'.
MAN: I think that we went to have a great experience.
And all of a sudden we were having more of a great experience
than we really had reckoned for.
We were scared to death, of course.
Burnett Miller, of Sacramento,
who had been raised a few blocks from where Burt Wilson lived,
was a private in the 21 st Armoured Infantry Battalion,
11th Armoured Division.
He was among the thousands of American troops
ordered into the Ardennes
to relieve Bastogne and drive the Germans back.
It would be Miller's first real taste of war.
We crossed France, went through parts of Belgium
and hit the Bulge in a big snowstorm.
Our vehicles became almost inoperable.
And the tanks, one after another, were blown up
and we could see dead tankers and wounded tankers
running for cover all over the place.
That was not a pretty sight.
We baled out of these tracks and started running through the snow
to get some kind of coverage...
...and actually retreated back up onto a hill,
dug in, and spent that night in a big snowstorm.
We were wet, and I thought, "Boy, I don't think we can make it."
And that night there were tracer bullets all over, lots of artillery -
very, very scary.
And you'd rationalise things,
like, "Nothing worse can happen but getting killed."
But there were things worse than being killed.
In the Ardennes, the fighting and the dying went on.
It was the coldest winter in memory.
Many men were without winter boots or winter coats.
Thousands lost fingers, toes or feet to frostbite.
MILLER: Lots of our equipment wasn't very good.
We always had frozen feet because our shoes were really very, very poor.
Also, you know, we went into combat in the Bulge
in the same overcoats we went to London in,
and they were big, bulky, miserable things that would get wet.
And pretty soon we were looking for German prisoners or German dead.
They had nice, white, bunny-fur jackets that were just terrific -
not only comfortable and warm, but were white and camouflaged.
MAN: Morale, I thought, kept up because you were with people.
That as long as you were with other Gls in the snow and in the misery,
if you had somebody next to you,
you figured, "Well, they can handle it, I can handle it."
You just keep moving ahead.
In the chaotic fighting that followed, some towns changed hands four times.
Civilians hid in cellars as their homes were destroyed above them.
Allied troops had to recapture the ground they had lost inch by frozen inch,
sometimes reoccupying foxholes
they'd been forced from just a few weeks earlier.
The Americans lost an average of 1,600 men a day.
Among the dead were Private John Tavera, of Sacramento,
Corporal Lester Bendt, of Luverne,
Private First Class Domenic Derosimo, of Waterbury,
and Private First Class Jesse Leon Hattenstein, of Mobile.
Those who were killed and wounded were replaced
by thousands of green troops, mostly high school boys,
who had been rushed through basic training.
Many replacements died before officers could learn their names
and were replaced by still more frightened newcomers.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: I had a friend who claimed
he was sent into the Battle of the Bulge with six weeks training and a new rifle.
He said if he had not been shooting squirrels all his life,
he would have been completely lost.
But he shot the Germans like he would squirrels, and that was it. (Chuckles)
Some officers ordered their men to take no German prisoners.
The memory of the massacre of American troops at Malmedy
remained fresh.
MILLER: We had been held up at a little town.
We were supposed to just walk through it,
and the Germans stopped us dead.
We just couldn't crack it.
Eventually, artillery came in.
Sort of levelled the houses.
They finally surrendered, and they came out and sort of lined up,
and per usual, no-one knew what was going on.
We had a new battalion commander, just graduated from West Point,
and he lined them up and said, "I want you to shoot 'em."
And I was horrified.
Quite a few of us were horrified.
And I went to him and told him, you know,
that this was against all international law and humanity.
My good buddy, who I'd spent so much time with,
grabbed me and said, "This nut will shoot you.
"You'd better quit. Knock this off."
And he got enough guys and they shot these... about 25 prisoners.
It was a terrible thing to see,
and I talked to a lot of my buddies who had shot these guys
and they were horrified too.
By January 30, 1945,
six weeks after the German offensive in the Ardennes began,
six weeks after the start of the Battle of the Bulge,
the Allies had finally managed to regain all the ground they'd lost.
It had been the biggest battle of the war on the western front.
More than a million men took part.
19,000 Americans died.
60,000 more had been wounded or captured or listed as missing.
Hitler's enormous gamble had ended in disaster.
He had lost some 100,000 men and virtually all his tanks and aircraft,
and now had no way of replacing them.
And in the east,
the Russian army was blasting its way closer to Berlin every day.
LEOPOLD: They had blown up our chow truck.
So these big aluminum cans that contained the variety of food they had
were spaced about 40, 50 feet apart.
If a shell came in, it would only kill one or two men
instead of groups of us if we were all blocked together.
We walked down the line slowly and opened up our mess kits.
And in the big pan of your mess kit,
the first man placed two pieces of toast.
The second man put a nice half-inch-thick piece
of magnificent roast beef, covering most of the toast.
The third man, a ladle of gravy over all of it. Everything was fine.
The next man gave us a scoopful
of reconstituted dried peas and carrots.
It was proper. It was good. It was on one side.
And finally we came to the end of the line.
And the end of the line, the man reached in
and took a great big scoop of chocolate pudding
and covered this magnificent roast beef from one side to the other
with chocolate pudding.
I don't know how many of you have ever had chocolate pudding roast beef,
but I can tell you, despite this fact -
despite the insult that must have come to this beautiful piece of meat -
we loved every single bite.
I still remember chocolate-flavoured roast beef.