MAN: The world contains evil.
And if it didn't contain evil,
we probably wouldn't need to try to construct religions.
No evil, no God, I think.
No, of course, no evil, no war.
But this is not a human possibility that we need to entertain.
There will always be plenty of evil. And there'll always be wars.
Because human beings are aggressive animals.
NARRATOR: The hard-won Allied victory in Europe
had delighted Americans back home.
But the hundreds of thousands of men still fighting in the Pacific
knew that the war was far from over.
Eugene Sledge, of Mobile,
who had endured the horrors of the Battle of Peleliu,
would once again be forced to enter what he called 'the abyss'.
Glenn Frazier, from Fort Deposit, Alabama,
who had survived three and a half years of brutal captivity,
would find that the Japanese were not his only enemy.
And the people of Sacramento and Luverne,
Waterbury and Mobile,
and every other American town,
knew that there would be more bad news from the battlefield
before they could dare hope to know
what it would be like to live once again
in a world without war.
HYNES: It didn't really make much difference on Okinawa.
The Japanese were not going to fight any less hard
because Hitler was out of it.
I suppose there was a certain satisfaction that we'd beaten that lot
and could now turn our attention entirely to this lot,
but aside from that, I don't think there was much excitement.
MAN: "Nazi Germany might as well have been on the moon.
"On Okinawa, no-one cared much.
"We were resigned only to the fact
"that the Japanese would fight to total extinction, as they had elsewhere,
"and that Japan would have to be invaded,
"with the same gruesome prospects."
Eugene Sledge.
The battle for Okinawa was not going well.
The marines had cleared the northern and central parts of the island
by mid-April.
But in the south, the army had been unable
to blast the Japanese from their main defensive positions,
a succession of limestone ridges around the walled town of Shuri.
The navy, battered daily offshore
by Kamikazes and other Japanese warplanes,
demanded that the army undertake a landing behind the Japanese lines
so that they could be attacked from two sides simultaneously.
The army commander refused.
And on 1 May, the 1 st Marine Division, Eugene Sledge's outfit,
was sent south to shore up the centre of the American line.
MAN: "A column of men approached us on the other side of the road
"from the 106th Regiment, 27th Infantry Division
"that we were relieving.
"Their tragic expressions revealed where they had been.
"They were dead beat, dirty and grisly,
"hollow-eyed and tight-faced.
"As they filed past us, one tall, lanky fellow caught my eye
"and said in a weary voice, 'lt's hell up there, marine.'
"I said with some impatience, 'Yeah, I know. I was at Peleliu.'
"He looked at me blankly and moved on."
Japanese shells shrieked down as the marines struggled to find cover.
Friends died - old friends who had fought alongside Sledge on Peleliu.
"Replacement lieutenants were killed or wounded
"with such regularity," he remembered,
"that we rarely saw them on their feet more than once or twice
"and never got to know their names."
The marines inched their way toward Shuri,
blasting and burning the enemy out of their hiding places
one ridge, one village, one gulley at a time.
MAN: "I found it more difficult to go back
"each time we squared away our gear to move forward.
"The increasing dread of going back into action obsessed me.
"It became the subject of the most torturous and persistent
"of all the ghastly war nightmares
"that have haunted me for many, many years.
"The dream is always the same -
"going back up to the lines during the bloody month of May on Okinawa."
HYNES: Terrible things happened at Okinawa.
But a man in an airplane above the battle doesn't see the terrible things.
What I saw was drifting smoke, explosions.
You see destruction -
you can imagine the devastation, but you don't exactly see it.
You don't see the dead civilians who died in their thousands.
You don't see the dead Japanese.
You don't even see your own dead.
I dropped some bombs on buildings that blew up,
and if there was anybody in them, I suppose I killed somebody.
I don't know. I'd like to think I didn't.
But that's what I was being paid for, was to kill people.
In late May, the Japanese began a carefully staged withdrawal
from the Shuri line,
slipping back 10 miles or so to their last redoubt,
another series of ridges at the island's southern end.
It would be three more weeks before its last defenders were killed
and their commanders committed suicide.
By then, 92,000 Japanese soldiers
and as many as 100,000 Okinawan civilians were dead.
Of the 235 members of Eugene Sledge's Company K
who landed on Okinawa,
just 26 emerged unhurt.
Of the 254 men brought in to replace those who had fallen,
only 24 remained.
In the end,
more than 12,000 Americans died,
60,000 were wounded -
the worst losses of the Pacific war.
Among the dead were Private First Class J.J. McCarthy, of Waterbury,
Sergeant Jeff Fleming, of Sacramento,
Private First Class Lowell Reu, of Luverne,
and Private Ernest Roy, of Mobile.
As the Allies prepared to move on to Japan itself,
still more terrible losses seemed inevitable.
HYNES: We were told that, in the invasion of Japan,
we would be the first land-based single-engine bombing squadron.
To go in, be in on the invasion of the Japanese home island,
that would be heroic stuff - we all felt that.
But at the same time,
by then, our sense of the strangeness of the Japanese opposition
had become stronger.
And I could imagine every farmer
with his pitchfork coming at my guts,
every pretty girl with a hand grenade strapped to her bottom or something -
that everyone would be an enemy.
The Allies planned to begin with the island of Kyushu on November 1, 1945.
More than 500,000 Japanese troops were already in position to repel them
and another 6 million were either under arms or ready to be called up.
Women and schoolchildren were drilling with sharpened bamboo spears.
The Americans did not expect
to be able to move against the larger island of Honshu
until April of 1946.
Former president Herbert Hoover headed a commission
that suggested half a million Americans might die
before the islands could be taken,
along with perhaps 7 million more Japanese.
Military planners came up with different estimates,
but all anyone knew
was that the cost in casualties was likely to be astronomical.
The end of the war in the Pacific still seemed very far away.
Gls who had once talked of "getting home alive in '45",
began to coin new slogans -
"Back in the sticks in '46",
"Back to heaven in '47",
even "Golden Gate in '48".
NEWSREEL: The Soviet Premier,
the remaining member of the original Roosevelt-Churchill-Stalin Big Three.
Now President Truman greets Prime Minister Attlee
and the conference of the Big Three at Potsdam
sets the policy of the Allied powers.
In mid-July, the Allies met in Germany, at Potsdam,
and set forth the terms under which they would agree to end the war.
Japan's leaders would have to abandon every inch of their empire,
face trial for war crimes, submit to being disarmed,
and agree to American occupation
until a new, democratically elected government could be established.
Unless they agreed to all of it, the declaration warned,
they could expect "the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland".
Japan chose not to respond to the Allied ultimatum,
and tried instead to persuade Russia, which had never declared war on Japan,
to broker more favourable surrender terms.
For most of Japan's leaders,
despite the agony the Japanese people were enduring,
despite the even greater agony that seemed sure to come,
unconditional surrender still remained unthinkable.
On August 5 on the island of Tinian,
a secret object was placed aboard a B-29
named for the mother of its pilot -
the 'Enola Gay'.
It was an atomic bomb.
It had originally been intended for use against the Germans,
who had been feverishly working to make a bomb of their own,
but it had not been ready for delivery before they surrendered.
The American bomb had been developed under such strict secrecy
that the new president had never heard of the project before he assumed office.
But once he was told about it,
Truman approved the bomb's use as soon as it was ready.
At 8:15 in the morning on August 6, 1945,
the bomb tumbled through the bomb-bay doors of the 'Enola Gay'.
43 seconds later, six miles below,
but still high above the city of Hiroshima,
it detonated, changing the world forever.
(EXPLOSION)
With a single bomb,
40,000 men, women and children were obliterated in an instant.
100,000 more would die within days of burns and radiation.
Another 100,000 would succumb to radiation poisoning
over the next five years.
More than half a century later,
citizens of Hiroshima would still be dying
from the bomb's long-delayed side effects.
Despite the devastation,
the Japanese still would not accept the Allied surrender terms.
Then, on August 8, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.
The islands now faced invasion on two fronts.
At 11:02 the following morning,
an American plane dropped a second atomic bomb, on the city of Nagasaki.
Some 40,000 more civilians died instantly.
The Americans had no more such bombs
and would be unable to produce another for several months.
But the Japanese had no way of knowing that.
In Tokyo, the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War
remained split between those still determined to fight on
and those willing, finally, to give up.
That evening, all six members of the council called upon the emperor,
who broke the deadlock.
Japan would surrender.
WOMAN: Everything was set for the landings in Japan.
So when the atomic bomb was dropped
and it ended it so quickly,
we were stunned but rejoiced.
Our boys would come home!
There wouldn't be any more of them killed.
You can never convince anyone of my generation
that the atomic bomb was not the greatest thing
that they ever came up with,
because we'll defy you.
It was just finally the end of that horrible war.
MAN: I had very mixed feelings about it.
That the atom bomb...
...could be blasted on fellow humans
whose blood is as red as mine,
whose skin blisters as readily as mine does...
...was something I had hoped could be avoided.
Of course, there is the mathematical odds
that by killing
some quarter million Japanese
we may have saved half a million American lives.
Mathematically, that's a good thing.
But it's hard to give up someone else's life.
For nearly three years,
Glenn Frazier, of Alabama, had been a prisoner of war in Japan.
After the surrender, the guards at the prison camp simply walked away.
Frazier and his comrades wandered out among the dazed civilian population
and took the train to Tokyo and freedom.
MAN: "We thought the Japanese would never surrender.
"Many refused to believe it.
"Sitting in stunned silence, we remembered our dead.
"So many dead.
"Except for a few widely scattered shouts of joy,
"the survivors of the abyss sat hollow-eyed and silent,
"trying to comprehend a world without war."
Eugene Sledge.
(LIVELY JAZZ MUSIC)
MAN: VJ Day - I was in San Francisco,
and it just blew up!
People came out of everywhere,
out of every window, out of every door.
They came out of the sewer.
You could cop a feel going down the street and nobody would say a word.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Well, my dad was so excited,
that he ran in the room and he got his pistol from World War I,
and he filled it, and we went out of the front door,
and if you go dig around that azalea bush,
I know the bullets are still in the azalea bush.
He fired six rounds into the azalea bush, brought the pistol back in the house,
and said to my brother and I, "Come on, gang,"
and "We're going downtown."
And he threw Mother in the car
and we drove down to Admiral Semmes's statue.
And Daddy circled it three or four times, honking his horn.
So by the time we left downtown,
people were climbing up Admiral Semmes's statue
and the celebration had begun.
But I've always said my daddy started the celebration of VJ Day.
In Waterbury, Connecticut,
newsboys peddling a special "War's Over" edition
of the 'Waterbury American'
were on the street within 60 seconds of the president's formal announcement.
(SIRENS WAIL)
Every firehouse siren and factory whistle in town began to blow.
WOMAN: We didn't even know the people.
We were hugging them and kissing them.
We didn't know who they were and they didn't know who we were.
It was just a joyous time, it was a happy, happy time,
'cause we're thinking, "Well, now all our boys are going to come home."
(BELL TOLLS)
That evening, special services were held
at every Waterbury church and synagogue.
As a sign of profound gratitude for the good news,
some Italian-American women climbed the hill
to Our Lady of Mount Carmel church
on their knees.
MAN: We sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge
and into the San Francisco Bay.
And as we approached the pier, there - I get a little choked up -
there was the American flag flying high in the breeze over American soil,
and it was the most gratifying thing,
'cause we never dreamed that we would ever get back.
And there was a bunch of prisoners of war on there, and we stood there,
couldn't even say anything, with tears in our eyes.
And as we docked, I was the second one to get off.
And I get down on the ground and I kissed the ground.
And every one of the prisoners of war that was on that ship
got off the gangplank and kissed the ground.
And our audience out there was just clapping their hands every time
and welcomed us home.
And it was the greatest feeling in the world.
Glenn Frazier's family back in Fort Deposit, Alabama
had officially been informed that he had died in the Philippines.
(PHONE RINGS)
FRAZIER: We were told we could make a phone call home
at the expense of the government.
So I made my phone call to my home,
and the phone was answered by my mother,
and I told her who it was.
And, now, I didn't know anything about all the letters
and the guy coming there often, you know, telling them I was dead.
So she answered the phone, and then she fainted and the phone went dead.
And then her sister, who was there visiting,
and she fainted when I told her who it was.
And then my oldest sister came to the phone, and she fainted.
So then there was a long pause, and my daddy answered the phone.
He said, "Who in the world is this?" And so I told him.
And I used my middle name at home - Dowling.
I said, "This is Dowling."
And he said, "Well," he said, "I knew you weren't dead."
But he said, "Looks like I've got a bunch of dead women here."
He said, "I've got to get them up off the floor."
So he said, "Now, you hold on. Don't go away, now. I'll be back in a minute."
So he goes and gets a pitcher of water
and he's pouring some water in their face.
Comes back to the phone and he said, "I think they're waking up.
"Their eyes are moving. Some are moving a little bit."
He said, "They'll be able to talk to you in a little bit."
And that's when they knew I was in San Francisco.
By the fall of 1945, 750,000 service personnel
were returning to civilian life every month.
LEOPOLD: No matter how great, no matter how small,
no matter how indifferent,
no matter how stupendous,
regardless of the facts,
home has a unique quality that just cannot be exceeded.
Home is the ultimate value that humans venerate.
The war had rescued Waterbury, Connecticut
and the industries that had provided its nickname - 'Brass City'.
And at first, its workers returned
to making the screws and washers and buttons,
shower heads and alarm clocks,
toy airplanes and lipstick holders and cocktail shakers
they'd been making before Pearl Harbor.
But as the years went by, the brass industry declined.
So did Brass City.
Ray Leopold came home for a time, then moved away,
went into business, and eventually became a fundraiser for charity.
LEOPOLD: I ran into a young man
who was the brother of a young man I had known reasonably well.
He said, "What outfit were you with, Ray?"
And I told him that I was with the 28th Infantry.
"Really?" he said. "My brother was with that outfit."
And I said, "Where is your brother?"
He said, "Oh, he didn't make it. He's dead.
"He was killed in action."
And then he turned, he says,
"You were with the 28th too, and you are home and he isn't."
He couldn't get over the idea
that someone so dear to him as his brother couldn't make it...
...and someone who is more or less an indifferent third person
made it.
MAN: There are casualties in war
that they never show up as casualties.
They're internal casualties.
We all changed.
We went out as a bunch of kids.
Wars are fought by kids.
And we came back -
looked maybe the same, but inside we were so different.
They thought we were just odd, I guess.
"What's happened to Quent? What's wrong?"
And I was wondering, "Nobody knows, nobody understands,
"and I am not good enough with words to be able to tell them."
Quentin and Jackie Aanenson did not return
to his father's farm south of Luverne.
He went to Louisiana State University instead
and eventually entered the insurance business.
More than 1,000 citizens of Rock County, Minnesota
served in uniform during the war.
32 of them lost their lives.
The names of all those who served were carefully painted
on a wooden roll of honour in front of city hall in Luverne.
As the years passed, Minnesota winters wore away the names.
One year, the monument was taken down to be repainted and repaired.
Somehow, it was lost.
WOMAN: Our hope was we were going to have a new life.
And I remember driving up on the day that we drove through to the ranch.
And it was like being in 'Alice in Wonderland'.
It was absolutely amazing.
Sascha Weinzheimer and her family,
who had nearly starved to death as prisoners of the Japanese in Manila,
settled on their late grandfather's farm in the Sacramento Valley.
WEINZHEIMER: It was some sort of cultural shock, coming back,
because your body's here but your mind isn't.
And to have to put up with the stupidity
of some of the Americans that have been living here.
They'd walk into a room and say, "Oh, tell us about your experience."
And then immediately they'd say, "Oh!
"We had these coupons that had to be rationed,
"and then we couldn't go here because of gasoline."
And so we just sort of avoided everything.
And when people were talking to us about our experience,
we just clammed up,
because it... they didn't want to hear it anyway.
Sacramento's wartime transformation from small-town state capital to big city
would prove permanent.
State government grew too.
So did the military bases on Sacramento's outskirts
as the world war was eventually supplanted by the Cold War.
Among the Sacramentans returning home
were thousands of Japanese-Americans newly freed from the inland camps
in which they had been imprisoned for no other reason than their ancestry.
They struggled to recover their property and rebuild their lives.
The men of the 100th/442nd Combat Team came home too.
Robert Kashiwagi, wounded four times in Italy and France,
got a job with the California Highway Department.
MAN: When I showed up in the shop,
this one fellow from the floor went to his foreman.
He says, "Hey, look, if that Jap is gonna work here," he says, "I'm quitting."
And this foreman told me that.
And I says, "Well, you know, I passed my test and I served overseas
"and I think I did what I was supposed to do,
"so I'm going to hold my position and I'm going to remain here, you know?"
And I did. And so, as I remained there, why, he quit.
And then everything turned a little bit better as time went on,
and it got easier and easier for me.
And so I was able to serve 32 years and retire.
The war had made Mobile into a boom town.
But only a few years after it ended,
some 40,000 defence jobs had already disappeared.
Some workers left the city for the small towns
where they'd been living when the war began.
Others moved north and west, to bigger cities, in search of work.
Returning black veterans, who had fought for freedom overseas,
found themselves facing the same segregation they had left behind.
MAN: It would be a matter of disgust and distaste with you
when you found out that the fruits of victory were not yours.
I never did appreciate going to work at night.
And the police officer would stop you at night and say,
"Hey, boy, where you going?"
And you come up to answer him -
"You got your hat on. Take your hat off when you talk to a white man."
And that kind of stuff, uh...
And I'd worked all night, just about, at the railroad,
and didn't have a car, so I had to walk home.
I cried all the way home. It was... it was hurt.
John Gray eventually went on to college, became a teacher
and then a beloved school principal and community leader
for 50 years in Mobile.
Katharine Phillips briefly became an airline stewardess
and married a former navy pilot.
Her younger brother, Sid,
who had encountered terrible suffering
while serving with the 1 st Marine Division
and vowed to find a way to do something about it,
went on to medical school and became a doctor.
But there was one person for whom he could do nothing.
MAN: My friend Eugene was probably as good a friend
as I've ever had in my whole life,
but he could not throw off the war.
He could not forget it. It seemed to haunt him.
MAN: "As I strolled the streets of Mobile,
"civilian life seemed so strange.
"People rushed around in a hurry about seemingly insignificant things.
"Few seemed to realise how blessed they were to be free
"and untouched by the horrors of war.
"To them, a veteran was a veteran - all were the same,
"whether one man had survived the deadliest combat
"or another had pounded a typewriter while in uniform."
Eugene Sledge had been an enthusiastic hunter before the war.
Now he found he no longer had the heart for it.
In combat, he had felt the same terror his targets felt
when he fired at them, he said,
and he couldn't bear it that they could not shoot back.
Nightmares plagued him.
He earned a business degree under the GI Bill,
tried the insurance business and abandoned it,
eventually became a biologist and teacher.
"Science was my salvation," he remembered.
"It helped keep at bay the flashbacks from Peleliu and Okinawa."
"Close, constant study of nature," his wife said,
"kept him from going mad."
But the war remained with him nonetheless.
He still had the tiny sheets of paper
on which he'd kept a journal in the Pacific,
and finally, at his wife's urging,
he turned it into a combat memoir called 'With the Old Breed'.
Describing the horrors he had endured
eventually allowed him to begin to put them behind him.
Eugene Sledge died in 2001.
MAN: "Until the millennium arrives and countries cease to enslave others,
"it will be necessary
"to accept one's responsibility to, and to be willing to make sacrifices for,
"one's country,
"as my comrades did."
"War is brutish, inglorious and a terrible waste.
"Combat leaves an indelible mark on those who are forced to endure it.
"The only redeeming factors were my comrades' incredible bravery
"and their devotion to each other."
Eugene Sledge.
FRAZIER: My home town just gave me a hero's welcome.
Couldn't ask for anybody to be any nicer to you.
But little did you know what was ahead,
and I didn't until it started happening to me.
Glenn Frazier and his brother,
who had served with the army in North Africa and Italy,
happened to arrive home in Fort Deposit, Alabama the same day.
Their mother, Frazier recalled, seemed dazed to have both her boys back,
but she remembered to give each of them
the little pile of Christmas packages she'd bought and wrapped
but had been unable to send them during the war.
When the boys stepped out into the street,
they were mobbed by friends and neighbours happy to have them home.
Before Frazier joined the army in 1941,
he had confessed to a high school classmate that he loved her.
She had waited patiently for him for over three years,
until the army formally told his family Glenn was dead.
Frazier now eagerly asked after her.
Hope that he and she would one day marry
had helped sustain him in captivity.
"I hate to tell you this," a friend told him,
"but she's getting married this coming Sunday."
That night, the nightmares began.
FRAZIER: It was just like real life again. It was just so real.
It sort of kept me from sleeping.
I got to the point where I didn't even want to go to sleep.
My nerves were bothering me.
You couldn't tell anybody. You couldn't tell...
In those days, if you were seeing a psychiatrist,
it didn't make any difference whether it was military or what,
nobody'd give you a job.
Psychiatrists working for the Veterans Administration
were of little help.
"Just act normal and you'll feel normal," they told him.
Frazier eventually married, had two children,
ran his own trucking business.
But the war would not go away.
I hated the Japanese as hard as anybody, I believe, could ever hate
for so long.
And mine was as deep. I think I was justified in the hate that I had.
But it come a time when... It wasn't affecting them.
They didn't even know I existed.
They were over there and having their fun
and getting their things, their country straightened out.
And here I am over here, I'm hating and hating and hating,
and having the nightmares and so forth.
And it... I had to get rid of it.
I had to throw it off because it was just completely destroying me.
And I prayed, and with the preacher's help
I got to the point to where I woke up one morning
and I felt a little bit more rested.
But my war lasted, actually, another 30 years.
MAN: To forget the war would be not just impossible -
it would be immoral.
It doesn't get to me very often, except when I talk about it like this,
and I seldom do that, actually.
It's just something, it never goes away.
It's something you have to endure the way you endured the war itself.
There's no alternative. You can't wipe out these memories.
You can't wipe out what you felt at that time
or what you knew other people felt.
It's just part of your whole possession of life.
And I suppose it does some good.
For all those Americans who lived through the terrible conflict,
for those whose fathers and sons and brothers were lost or maimed,
as well as for those whose only contact with combat
was listening to the radio and reading the local paper,
it remains to this day simply "the war".
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota.
"All week long, with 'Silent Night' running through my head,
"I've been groping for a Christmas story.
"Somehow, the story always eluded me.
"A lot of servicemen have been in.
"They told us where they spent last Christmas overseas.
"But you didn't need to write a story about them.
"The story of their happiness about being home
"was written all over their faces for the world to see.
"And now comes the time when it comes our turn
"to extend our Christmas greetings to each and every one of you.
"May the joy of Christmas and a big share of its peace and beauty
"be with you all,
"every single day of the new year to come."
Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star-Herald'.