(DISTANT EXPLOSIONS)
MAN: You had no possessions at all.
You would cut everything down to the simplest,
'cause you had to carry everything.
When we were marching from one horror to another
I had shoepacs on because the ground was always wet or frozen.
I had two pairs of woollen socks.
In my pockets I carried probably a couple of boxes of K-rations.
I had never had a toothbrush at all. I didn't take a shower for six months.
No change of underwear at all.
No change of clothes at all for months.
And I had a sleeping-bag which I carried with a rope over my shoulder,
like a tramp.
And that's all I had.
NARRATOR: More than 16 million Americans served in the armed forces
during the war.
The vast majority of them never saw serious combat.
The infantry represented just 14% of the troops overseas.
But wherever they fought -
in North Africa or the South Pacific or western Europe -
the infantry bore the brunt of the fighting on the ground
and suffered 7 out of 10 casualties.
And they endured hardships and horrors
for which no training could ever have prepared them.
MAN: You know, you get hardened to it.
I stayed in a hole for an hour and a half
or something like that - it seemed like that anyway -
with a dead German.
And it's kind of an eerie feeling.
But you're so worried, really,
about yourself at that time
that you didn't think too much about it.
But you get really hardened to seeing
a lot of gruesome sights.
And that worries you as much as anything.
You think, "My gosh, I saw so-and-so get killed today,
"and then he got run over by a tank and just a horrible mess,
"and it didn't bother me at all."
In western Europe in early 1945,
Allied troops had gained back every snowy inch of the territory they'd lost
during the Battle of the Bulge,
and vast American and British armies were probing enemy defences,
seeking a way across the Rhine and into the German heartland.
Meanwhile, their Soviet allies were rolling westward towards Berlin,
driving the Nazis before them.
In the Pacific, US forces were readying an assault on a tiny volcanic island
that would be remembered forever as a symbol of war's worst savagery -
Iwo Jima.
Behind enemy lines on both sides of the globe,
German and Japanese cities were disappearing in flames
and American prisoners dared begin to hope for rescue.
11 -year-old Sascha Weinzheimer, a captive of the Japanese,
whose fondest dream was that her life might simply return to normal,
would have the happiest day of her life.
While in Germany,
Tom Galloway, of Mobile, would also taste freedom for a time,
and then have it cruelly snatched away again.
On January 8, an American plane had flown low
over Santo Tomas Prison Camp in Manila
and dropped leaflets addressed to the people of the Philippines.
"General MacArthur has returned," they said.
"He will tell you over the radio,
"in proclamation and leaflet,
"exactly how and when you can help.
"Watch closely for these instructions."
GIRL: "Gosh! Maybe soon we can sing 'God Bless America' out loud.
"Maybe we can see our flag flying again.
"What a thrill it will be when our first boys come through that gate.
"Mother says we fought this war too,
"like soldiers.
"People are dying every day from starvation.
"Fred Fairman and Mrs Everett yesterday.
"We have such a short time to go.
"What a pity they couldn't hang on to life just a while longer.
"Mother weighs only 73 pounds.
"She used to weigh 148.
"And Dr Allen says she has to stay in bed from now on
"because she can't walk."
WOMAN: When I'd get bouts of really severe hunger -
it comes over you like waves -
and then I'd do something to distract me.
Like drumming on the side of the shanty, or making noise,
or even go screaming a little bit,
just to get it out of your system, and then I'd go on.
But the kids would cry
and grab their throat,
or they'd grab their belly and go up to my mother.
That probably was a very bad thing,
you know, to see your kids do.
GIRL: "January 17.
"Buddy's favourite expression is, 'Let's talk about food.'
"He has a favourite suit too, which he calls his 'gate suit'.
"He's been taking this suit out almost every day for months,
"putting it on the bed and saying,
"'I'll put my gate things right here, Mummy, so I can be ready.'
"All of us have something saved to wear out the gate -
"all of us except Daddy, who has been barefooted now for six months.
"'I don't need a thing for the gate except two good legs to walk out with,' he said.
"February 1.
"This morning, Aunty Bee came to visit.
"She works in the hospital.
"She says the doctors expect seven more to die today, all from starvation."
MAN: To me, the real heroes of the war were those who very seldom get medals.
They're the medics.
Whenever a man gets injured,
he very, very seldom calls out for his sweetheart or his mother.
First thing he calls out is the medic.
He always says, "Medic!"
And whenever that word is heard, the medic rushes over.
And to rush over, he is just dodging bullets.
That takes guts.
MAN: Munitions are a terrible thing.
It tears a person apart.
It's not a clean cut - it tears, it rips.
I can't imagine what the medics went through.
You know, they were right there,
and they were patching people up who were bleeding to death.
So my heart goes out to those boys.
Medics were paid $10 less per month than the men they tried to save.
Many were pacifists and conscientious objectors,
unwilling to take lives, but willing to risk their own lives to save others.
Like the men they tended, they learned to improvise in combat.
During the Battle of the Bulge,
they kept morphine and plasma inside their shorts to keep it from freezing.
In the Pacific, some dyed the red crosses on their helmets green
to make themselves less likely targets for the Japanese.
And everywhere, they were forced to make terrible choices.
MAN: If you're in a firefight
and you see a party that is wounded
in a way that you know he cannot survive,
you must pass him by,
even though he may be calling to you for help,
and you must doctor somebody whose life you potentially can save.
And it's a terrible decision you have to make
to pass somebody by who is in need of comfort
but is not going to live.
It's never pleasant to do the work of a medic.
But it's one of the essentials of civilised behaviour.
There were some wounds no medic could treat.
What were you afraid of?
(Mumbles) Dead people. I can't stand seeing them.
I can't hear you. I can't stand seeing dead people.
There were many names for it -
'shell shock', 'battle fatigue', 'combat exhaustion'.
One out of four of all the army men
evacuated for medical reasons in Europe and the Pacific
suffered from some form of neuropsychiatric disorder.
(EXPLOSION, GUNFIRE)
Army planners determined that the average soldier
could withstand no more than 240 days of combat
without going mad.
By that time, though,
the average soldier was more than likely dead or wounded.
(JAUNTY JAZZ PIANO MUSIC)
(Nat King Cole sings) # Knock me a kiss
# You'll never miss
# When I'm ready to go
# But if you can't smile and say yes
# Please don't cry and say no
# Squeeze me a squoze in these fine clothes
# Mmm, I love you so
# But if you can't smile and say yes
# Please don't cry and say no. #
WOMAN: During that time, they had a lot of pin-up girls.
Betty Grable had a picture of herself in her bathing suit,
and she's glancing back over her shoulder.
And it's a back view and, oh, it was gorgeous.
So I says, "My Norman is going to have his own pin-up picture."
And I had a red and white polka-dot bikini.
But you could either wear it low,
if you had enough nerve to do it,
or you could wear it all the way to the top.
Well, anyway, I put on my red and white bikini
and went out in the backyard and I gave my mother my camera.
I says, "Here. Take a picture.
"I want to send it to Norman.
"I'm going to be his pin-up girl."
And he carried that through the war with him,
and he said that he received a lot of comments
from his buddies when they saw that picture,
because after some of them saw it,
they looked at him, and they looked back at the picture,
and they looked at him again, and they says, "What does she see in you?"
(Laughs)
And I had a picture of him on my desk, one that he took in France,
so I was with him and he was with me.
GIRL: "February 3, 1945.
"At about five o'clock last night, 10 of our planes came over our camp.
"One pilot dropped his goggles with a note tied to them.
"It fell in the main building patio where there weren't any Nips,
"and a lucky friend of ours found it,
"because we found out right away what it said -
"'Roll out the barrel! Your Christmas will be here today or tomorrow.'
"Shortly, we heard guns and tanks in the distance.
"Everyone thought it must be the Japs, except Daddy.
"He was sure it was the Americans."
(GUNFIRE)
The liberation was the most exciting thing in my life.
And if I cry, you'll forgive me.
So, on 3 February, my father walked me to the main building.
But while we were walking, we heard these big rumblings in the distance.
And usually when that happened, we could...
...alright, we had trained ears by this point.
We knew it was the big bombers coming overhead.
But as we walked, we noticed the...
...the noise was getting louder and louder but there was no planes appearing.
And we thought that was weird.
And people were coming out of their shacks
and saying, "Gee! This is a different thing."
And we heard guns going off.
The Brits were saying, "Oh, it's the Brits! The Brits are coming!
"They're here! The limeys are here!"
And the Americans said, "Don't be silly. This is the Americans coming."
So, we were doing... rushing back and forth,
and because of the fire - the firing and the noise -
people were just running around, you know?
They weren't staying put.
All of a sudden - and we didn't know this till later -
it was, like, three minutes to 9:00 in the evening,
they came through, crashed through the front gates with their tanks.
And it was wonderful.
People went crazy.
You'd think the war was over, but it wasn't.
My mother was bedridden and 73 pounds.
My mother always said,
"Now, let's always keep one item to wear when our boys come in."
So she had a half-eaten lipstick.
I had something, I forget, a sock, which is now, you know...
...no shoes, there's no point in wearing a sock.
My sister had a clip, a barrette.
And so when my father picked up my mother and ran out of the shanty,
she says, "Wait! Wait!"
So he couldn't understand why. She said, "Go back."
So she reached underneath her mattress
and pulled out her lipstick and put it on.
She said, "Now I'm ready for my boys."
(ROUSING FANFARE PLAYS)
NEWSREEL: At Santo Tomas Prison in Manila,
safe at last, the internees gather for evacuation back home.
Pitifully undernourished,
they can still chop wood to cook their new army rations.
News from home -
after three long years, the Red Cross distributes letters from loved ones
these internees had thought they might never hear from again.
(CHEERING)
As Gls escorted the Japanese guards out of the camp,
some of the children ran after them
shouting, "Make them bow, boys! Make them bow!"
Four days later,
General MacArthur himself visited Santo Tomas.
WEINZHEIMER: February 7 was my birthday.
I had turned 12.
And MacArthur came in for 20 minutes,
greeted the prisoners and left.
(EXPLOSION)
And as soon as he left, the Japs started shelling the camp.
And we had a lot of internees that were killed.
A lot of soldiers, Gls, that were killed.
And it was just one of those wild things that...
There was just blood everywhere and stretchers and people running.
There were two days of shelling.
We spent two days in the central kitchen
until they found the nest.
The battle for Manila would go on for a month.
Most of the city was destroyed.
1,000 Americans died.
So did 16,000 Japanese soldiers
and nearly 100,000 Filipino civilians
hit by artillery fire or slaughtered by their retreating captors.
MAN: The information that we were getting in Japan
was very sketchy.
We would see some of the maps on the paper,
on the newspapers on the stands as we were passing,
showing that the navy was... the navy battles were closer,
and that was encouraging for us.
But it was still a question as how we were going to get out of there.
Glenn Frazier, from Fort Deposit, Alabama,
was one of 168,000 Allied prisoners still in Japanese hands.
He had been captured in the Philippines
after the fall of Bataán in the spring of 1942.
Frazier had then been so certain he would die
that he had thrown his dog tags into a mass grave
so that when they were found
his parents would have some idea of what had happened to him.
Now, with the Philippines retaken,
American troops came upon the grave.
FRAZIER: So then they found the dog tags that I threw in the grave.
So they had absolute proof that I was in that mass grave.
So they take the dog tags
and the army gentleman goes to my mother and dad
and tried to show them the dog tags and tried to settle the insurance.
So my daddy said, "Well, if I take the $10,000 and he's not dead,
"what happens then?"
And he says, "You'll have to pay it back."
He said, "Well, you just keep it,
"because I'm sure if anybody can make it, my son can make it.
"And if he's dead, then I'll come back to you and get the $10,000."
NEWSREEL: The historic Yalta conference
as it arrives at decisions that will shape the future of the world.
The Big Three reaffirm the ideals of the Atlantic Charter.
They call for...
On February 4, 1945,
the day after Sascha Weinzheimer and her family were liberated,
the Big Three -
US President Franklin Roosevelt,
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill,
and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin -
met at Yalta, on the Black Sea.
In week-long talks, they pledged to hold free elections after the war
in the eastern European states captured by the Soviets,
and agreed to divide Germany and Austria into three zones of occupation.
But first, Germany had finally to be defeated.
The Nazis were still trying to reinforce their army on the eastern front.
Stalin wanted help from American and British air power to stop them.
The Soviet leader called for air attacks
on railroad stations and marshalling yards,
often located in the hearts of cities.
Dresden was the first target, a beautiful old city on the Elbe,
through which German reinforcements were said to be streaming east.
On February 13 and 14,
900 British and American bombers hit Dresden in two waves,
dropping incendiary bombs in hopes of setting off a firestorm.
They succeeded.
At least 35,000 civilians were burned or blown apart
or asphyxiated as they huddled in basements and bomb shelters.
The bombing went on, battering oil facilities, defence factories,
roads and railways, and more cities.
Pforzheim, Würzburg,
Essen, Dortmund, Potsdam.
In March alone,
Allied warplanes dropped 163,864 tons of bombs on Germany -
almost as many as they had dropped in the preceding three years combined.
By the middle of the next month, the air chiefs would call a halt.
They had run out of targets.
By then, 593,000 German civilians had died
under Allied bombs.
Most were women.
More than 100,000 were children.
(PLANE ENGINES DRONE)
NEWSREEL: Airborne, the B-29s head for Tokyo.
The giant bombers, equipped to range over 5,000 miles,
now swiftly cover the 1,500 miles from Saipan to their objective
to open the full-fledged air war against Japan.
Allied planners hoped the kind of bombing that had levelled German cities
would destroy the Japanese will to resist
and make unnecessary the bloody invasion
that otherwise seemed inevitable.
American B-29s could now reach the enemy's homeland
from Saipan and Tinian,
but roughly halfway between them and Japan itself
lay a tiny volcanic island - Iwo Jima.
It was an otherworldly place -
barely eight square, barren miles of rock and ash,
reeking of sulfur, without safe drinking water.
But it had an airstrip
from which Japanese fighters rose to harass American bombers
as they flew to and from their mainland targets.
American commanders wanted the island taken.
Then they could make it a haven for their crippled bombers.
For 72 straight days,
American bombers pounded lwo Jima and its defenders
with some 6,000 tons of high explosives.
Three more days followed of ceaseless shelling by the navy.
In the early morning of February 19, 1945,
the marines started toward the island.
Most were veterans of earlier landings -
Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu.
The first three waves met little resistance.
Some began to think this invasion would be different,
that for once the pre-invasion bombardment
really had knocked out the island's defences.
It had not.
Some 21,000 Japanese soldiers were waiting for the Americans
inside a virtually impenetrable network of tunnels and bunkers.
As the fourth wave neared the beach, the enemy opened fire.
Sergeant Ray Pittman, of Mobile, was there.
MAN: Going into lwo Jima,
I was a squad leader by that time.
And I always looked around and wondered,
"Now, how many men am I going to lose?"
Course, we didn't know it was going to be bad as it was.
The fighting would go on for nearly a month
before the Americans took the island.
The Japanese lost their entire garrison.
Once again, they had never intended to surrender.
Their mission was to kill as many Americans as possible
before they were killed themselves.
6,821 Americans died -
five times the number killed on Guadalcanal or Saipan.
Among the dead were Private David Harris, of Luverne,
Corporal John B. Zwanch, of Waterbury,
Private Zera Richards, of Sacramento,
and Sergeant James Albert Chambliss, of Mobile.
27 Medals of Honor were awarded to those who fought on lwo Jima.
13 of them had to be given posthumously.
So many of the men in one unit were lost
that it came to be called the 'X-Ray Company'.
Of the 16 men in Ray Pittman's squad, only he and two others were left.
PITTMAN: What I went through after the war,
the dreams and everything I had...
...it would be just like reality to me.
But, uh...
...it, uh... it's really...
...it's really hard to explain just how you feel,
because I came home and married and raised a family
and lived a real happy life after the war.
But so many of them left their blood on the sand
on lwo Jima, Saipan and Tinian,
that they didn't have that chance.
With the airstrip on lwo Jima in their hands,
the Americans were one big step closer to the Japanese homeland.
American bombers were now free to attack it at will.
(DRAMATIC MUSIC)
NEWSREEL: The new American firebomb,
the type that has been devastating Tokyo with flame.
This is how it was tried out - a blazing sweep of jellied gasoline.
That's the incendiary material, a newly developed form of ordinary gas,
gelled in a way that gives it a volcanic force of blazing devastation.
On the night of March 9, 1945,
firebombing came to the cities of Japan.
334 American B-29s roared in low over Tokyo
and dropped hundreds of thousands of 70-pound napalm bombs.
16 square miles of the city,
built largely of pine and paper and bamboo,
burst into flame.
Perhaps 100,000 people died.
More than a million were left without homes.
In the next 10 days, the Americans went on
to hit Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya again.
Some 50,000 more people were killed.
FRAZIER: When the bombing started in our area,
first it was about once every two weeks,
then it was a raid about every week, then it stepped up.
And most of the raids started at night with the B-29s,
and you could hear the B-29, you could distinguish their sound,
and all of a sudden you could hear these Zeros up there
trying to - and the gunfire - trying to shoot them down.
And we knew that Americans were getting closer.
But they also told us that if any American landed on their soil,
that we would all be shot, the POWs,
that all guards had the ability to shoot you.
American B-29s continued to firebomb Japanese cities,
eventually forcing more than 8 million people from their homes.
The Fifth Air Force printed up a pamphlet
to reassure pilots who might have felt uneasy about killing so many civilians.
"The entire population was a proper military target," it said,
"since the Japanese Government had ordered all men and women
"to enlist in a volunteer defence corps.
"For us," the pamphlet continued, "there are no civilians."
FUSSELL: The German Army had been beaten up very badly,
and not just in France, but other places they'd been.
Also, Russia was beating the hell out of them in the other direction.
It wasn't child's play beating them,
but it was clear they were going to be defeated.
And so we really had them in the bag.
And at that moment, I knew we were going to win this war.
As soon as the ice goes away and spring comes again,
we get on the attacking frame of mind again.
We're going to win.
By the middle of March 1945,
hundreds of thousands of Americans were crossing the Rhine
and driving into the heart of Nazi Germany.
When George Patton and his Third Army
began to cross near Frankfurt,
the general stopped halfway across the pontoon bridge.
He'd always wanted to piss in the Rhine, he said,
and in full view of his men, he did.
Then Patton learned that his son-in-law,
who had been captured in North Africa two years earlier,
was being held in a German POW camp near Hammelburg.
It was some 40 miles behind the German lines,
but Patton didn't care.
He dispatched a special task force -
16 tanks, 27 half-tracks, and 300 men -
to free his daughter's husband right away.
Meanwhile, at the POW camp,
the prisoners had heard that the Americans had crossed the Rhine,
and believed that it was only a matter of time before they would be liberated.
Tom Galloway, who had been forced to surrender
early in the Battle of the Bulge,
was among the prisoners.
GALLOWAY: But you couldn't get too excited about anything -
you were too hungry.
Hunger was just foremost in everybody's mind
when you just stay hungry all the time.
I probably lost about 50 pounds in just a few months.
MAN: Well, you're just cold all the time.
I went three months without ever taking my clothes off.
You just stayed in your clothes 24 hours a day.
You took your boots off - we had boots -
and you'd tie them to your bunk at night because they may get stolen.
Second Lieutenant Herndon Inge was also from Mobile.
He too had been captured at the Bulge.
INGE: When I was at Hammelburg,
I heard that there was a prisoner in another hut from Alabama,
so I looked him up.
A skinny, dirty fellow came up to me and wanted to know if I...
He said he heard I was from Mobile.
And it turns out it was Herndon Inge, whom we call 'Wanky'.
And he and I were raised probably about eight blocks from each other.
He knew my brothers and sisters, and we've been fast friends ever since.
On March 27, Patton's task force reached the prison camp.
INGE: Everybody was cheering and jubilant
over the fact that at last we were going to be taken to good food.
Then someone started shooting.
In the confusion, Patton's son-in-law was hit by a bullet
and rushed to the camp hospital,
too badly wounded to be liberated.
GALLOWAY: Then they said, "We're going to move out."
They said, "If you want to go, you can go,"
but some went back into prison and some took off.
I took off - two others and myself.
More than 1,200 Americans ran out of the camp,
but there were only enough vehicles to carry 250.
Thousands of Germans quickly surrounded them.
The freed prisoners scattered.
Most, including Herndon Inge, were recaptured right away.
But Tom Galloway and his two buddies had managed to escape
and were trying to make it to the American lines on foot.
GALLOWAY: We had passed a farmhouse
with barns, outbuilding and a small chapel.
So I told them, and I said, "Look..."
By the way, it was Good Friday - Friday before Easter.
And I said, "This is..."
That part of Germany, Bavaria, was mostly Catholic.
A matter of fact, I thought it was all Catholic.
I told them, "3:00 on Good Friday, they're going to be in church
"and we're going to go in there and get in that barn that we saw last night
"and get out of this weather."
Well, we broke across the field just as fast as we could go
and ran in that barn.
And I think we hit the only Protestant family in that part of Bavaria.
(Laughs) They were all in the barn!
So, our luck ran out at that point.
Soon, Tom Galloway too was back behind barbed wire.
He and Herndon Inge would have to wait to be freed once again.
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota, March 29, 1945.
"A number of the boys in service have mentioned in their letters
"they'd like to know how things are going back home.
"Dear gang...
"...today started off with a big mistake
"caused by an overenthusiastic radio broadcaster,
"who got the idea that a victory flash was coming up in a few minutes.
"To tell you the truth, it didn't cause much of a flurry on Main Street.
"People have had tentative dates for victory before
"and have seen their hopes dashed.
"So they've made up their minds to keep their heads down
"and keep working until there is no doubt of victory anymore."
By the end of March 1945,
American forces were steadily gathering for their next target in the Pacific war -
the big, densely populated island of Okinawa.
The British had taken back Mandalay in Burma.
The Russians were within 50 miles of Berlin.
But Hitler continued to exhort his people to resist,
and the militarists who governed Japan
were calling upon every man, woman and child to fight to the death
against the American invasion they knew was coming.