They were enacting a little scene from the war.
One of them had been wounded, apparently.
And they had a medic
who was wearing a tabard with a big red cross on it,
and he was crawling towards them.
Especially towards the man who'd been wounded.
And in his left hand he held a roll of bandages.
In his right hand he had a pair of surgical scissors.
He was gonna crawl forward somehow and help this guy,
and at that point this shell must have gone off above them.
So, it was like a waxwork - utterly incredible.
And I stood there for a second wondering,
"What am I supposed to make of this?
"What's the symbolic meaning of this little grouping?"
That was the big question.
And they were perfect.
It was as if it were a sculpture done by the most sophisticated artist.
(EXPLOSIONS)
RAY LEOPOLD: We were ordered to take the town of Colmar...
...in Alsace-Lorraine.
We were ordered to take it in afternoon, daylight.
Jim Thomas, our wonderful captain,
said we could do this so much easier at night,
with much less casualties.
The Colonel said, "You have your orders - go."
We went.
Halfway up the hill, Jim...
...Jim got a bullet through his head.
This is one of the people that I had a great affection for,
a tremendous respect.
He was a young 24-year-old Mormon.
And we talked very often.
And... Jim was dead.
No, Jim was the only case I can remember in the service
that I had to cry.
ANDY ROONEY: The fact is that reporters...
...one of their jobs is to create heroes for the American public.
I guess you're a little dishonest.
You do not write anything,
if you are following your own army,
you do not write anything that might be interpreted as
being unfriendly or not patriotic.
I think it is very difficult to be
a critical, tough, honest reporter during a war.
(Ken Burns narrates) Private Andrew A. Rooney
was a very junior war correspondent
with 'Stars and Stripes', the new army newspaper.
One of thousands of reporters
dispatched to the far corners of the world,
who struggled under tight official censorship
and an honest, personal desire
to report nothing that might undermine the war effort.
NEWSREEL: Ready to go on an all-American exploitive war.
(Ken Burns narrates) Many war correspondents
were little more than cheerleaders,
offering mostly upbeat, optimistic accounts of events they'd never seen
from miles behind the lines.
But some risked their own lives
to get at least a little closer to the truth.
(EXPLOSION)
(Ken Burns narrates) Ernie Pyle from Dana, Indiana,
was a seasoned columnist working for the Scripps Howard papers
who saw it as his duty to tell American families back home -
as much as the censors and his own sensibilities would allow -
of what life for their men was really like.
MAN: "So, I don't know. Is war dramatic or isn't it?
"Certainly there are great tragedies, unbelievable heroics,
"even a constant undertone of comedy.
"It is the job of us writers
"to transfer all that drama back to you folks at home.
"Most of the other correspondents have the ability to do it.
"But when I sit down to write...
"...here's what I see instead.
"Men at the front suffering and wishing they were somewhere else.
"Men in routine jobs just behind the lines
"bellyaching because they can't get to the front.
"All of them desperately hungry for somebody to talk to
"besides themselves.
"No women to be heroes in front of.
"Damn little wine to drink.
"Precious little song.
"Cold and fairly dirty.
"Just toiling from day to day in a world full of insecurity,
"homesickness and a dulled sense of danger.
"The drama and romance are here, of course.
"But they're like the famous falling tree in the forest.
"They're no good unless there's somebody around to hear."
Ernie Pyle.
PAUL FUSSELL: The first time I killed anybody was really in self-defence...
...when I saw a German leading a patrol, coming towards me.
I mistook him, because of the way he was dressed,
for one of my own men.
So I waved to him to indicate, "I'm here.
"Come on, you can come to me. It's safe here."
All of a sudden I saw him...
He looked at one of his fellows.
He took his rifle off his shoulder.
He was wearing it strapped to his shoulder.
And as he raised it, I raised mine and I hit him first.
And he was terrified and died on the spot.
And the rest of his patrol fled, and we captured them later on.
But that was the first time I ever killed anybody.
I did it with the greatest delight, because it saved my life.
And I knew I could do it. I could perform.
That's what I was supposed to do.
I was supposed to kill people and lead others in killing people.
(Ken Burns narrates) The Seventh Army overran Strasbourg,
but 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 Hürtgen Forest.
(FLIES BUZZ)
MAN: "Each morning, just before sunrise,
"when things were fairly quiet,
"I could hear a steady humming sound like bees in a hive
"as the bluebottle flies became active with the onset of daylight.
"They rose up off the corpses, rocks, refuse, brush
"and wherever else they had settled for the night
"like a swarm of bees.
"Their numbers were incredible."
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota.
"The death of Private Russell Wilder in France
"should be a sobering reminder for all of us
"that grim and tragic days lie ahead.
"The days of kisses and cheering for the Americans are over.
"No longer are they going to be welcomed with flowers.
"They are to the point now
"where they come as invaders of the land of the enemy.
"The casualties are going to be many.
"We can have no reason for relaxing.
"The toughest going lies ahead."
Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'.
(Ken Burns narrates) Sid Phillips did his best
to hide his fear from his family.
SID PHILLIPS: "August 17, 1942.
"Dear folks,
"Nothing much to say, except that I'm OK and doing fine.
"Haven't heard from you yet.
"I hope everybody is doing OK.
"I'll have plenty to tell you.
"I guess you can read the papers.
"Love, Sid."
SID PHILLIPS: "October 24, 1942.
"Dear family,
"I received a V-mail letter from Mother yesterday.
"It was the first mail from home in a long time.
"I'm still OK.
"I don't have any pictures from home with me now,
"so if you can send me some, I'd really like it.
"Some of the things that happen here
"seem like a fantastic tale, even before your eyes.
"Hunting season isn't over yet by a long shot.
"Tell Eugene I want him to take four years of college without stopping
"and to join nothing.
"Lots of love, Sid."
My friend Eugene Sledge and I were very close -
all through grade school, all through high school.
We were full of nonsense and pranks.
But I warned him to join nothing.
I told him not to join the Salvation Army,
the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts or anything,
just to join nothing.
And to prove he was demented,
he went on and joined the Marine Corps.
(Ken Burns narrates) Back in Mobile,
Sid Phillips's best friend didn't want to miss any of the action.
MAN: "Prompted by a deep feeling of uneasiness
"that the war might end before I could get overseas into combat,
"I enlisted in the Marine Corps at Marion, Alabama.
"The recruiting sergeant asked me lots of questions
"and filled out numerous official papers.
"When he asked, 'Any scars, birthmarks
"'or other unusual features? '
"I described an inch-long scar on my knee.
"I asked, 'Why such a question? '
"He replied, 'So they can identify you on some Pacific beach
"'after the Japs blast off your dog tags."'
Eugene Sledge.
MAN: "I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the west coast
"to a point deep in the interior.
"Let him be pinched, hurt, hungry and dead up against it.
"Let us have no patience with anyone whose veins carry his blood.
"Personally, I hate the Japanese, and that goes for all of them."
Henry McLemore, 'Sacramento Union'.
(Ken Burns narrates) Order 9066
was the result of decades of ugly west coast history.
State law and community custom had barred Japanese immigrants
from marrying whites, from eating in white restaurants
or living in white neighbourhoods.
Federal law had prohibited Japanese immigrants
from ever becoming citizens
and, in 1924, cut off immigration from Japan altogether.
Only the American-born descendants of Japanese immigrants,
called Nisei, were citizens.
And some now owned the land
their families had farmed so successfully for years.
A fact many whites bitterly resented.
MAN: "We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs
"for selfish reasons.
"We might as well be honest - we do.
"It's a question of whether the white man lives
"on the Pacific coast, or the brown man.
"They came into this valley to work and they stayed to take over.
"If all the Japs were removed tomorrow,
"we'd never miss them in two weeks,
"because the white farmers can take over
"and produce everything the Jap grows.
"And we don't want 'em back when the war ends either."
Frank J. Taylor, California Vegetable Growers.
I was in the dead centre of the country, east and west,
among people who had left Europe to get away from it -
Germans, Scandinavians, Irish.
They didn't really want to know about Europe, I think.
I don't remember concern about what is going to happen to Europe.
They call Europe the 'old country' - all of Europe. (Chuckles)
They didn't want it.
They also felt that nobody was threatening them -
and they were right.
Hitler wasn't going to invade Minnesota. That was fairly sure.
So that as long as Japan was being aggressive
on the far side of the Pacific
and Hitler was being aggressive on the far side of the Atlantic,
there wasn't really anything to worry about.
(Ken Burns narrates) In the weeks after D-day,
American pilots, including Quentin Aanenson,
continued to fly their missions over the fields and hedgerows
of Normandy every day,
trying to focus on the help they were giving to the men on the ground.
And to avoid thinking too hard about the losses in their own ranks.
Below them, the Americans were still inching towards St-Lô
and the flat, open country that lay just beyond it.
Sergeant Curtis Cullen Junior, an inventive former Chicago cabbie,
had shown that sharp prongs fashioned from Rommel's beach obstacles
fitted onto Sherman tanks
could slice through the matted roots of the hedgerows.
Allied armour could now cut and blast its way from field to field.
Weary riflemen were no longer expected to do it on their own.
NARRATOR: The operation was called Cobra.
QUENTIN AANENSON: The day that the Cobra attack,
which was July 25, 1944...
...there were 3,000 American airplanes
that attacked the front along St-Lô.
And we were in the first group.
I was, I think, number 8 in the attack of 3,000.
NARRATOR: The correspondent Ernie Pyle was down below,
watching from a battered French farmhouse
with officers from the 4th Infantry Division.
MAN: "The first planes of the mass onslaught
"came over a little before 10am.
"They were the fighters and dive-bombers.
"Our front lines were marked by long strips of coloured cloth
"laid on the ground,
"and with coloured smoke to guide our airmen.
"We stood in the barnyard of a French farm
"and watched them barrel nearly straight down out of the sky.
"They were bombing about a half a mile ahead of where we stood.
"And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears -
"a sound deep, all-encompassing
"with no notes in it,
"just a gigantic, faraway surge of doom-like sound.
"It was the heavies, coming on with a terrible slowness
"in flights of 12, 3 flights to a group.
"And in groups stretched out across the sky.
"I thought it would never end.
"And then the bombs came.
"They began up ahead as the crackle of popcorn...
"...and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise
"that seemed surely to destroy all the world around us."
NARRATOR: The bombs continued falling for 1.5 hours.
The bright day grew dark with smoke, Pyle remembered,
and the steady roar seemed to fill all the space for noise on earth.
Then the wind shifted.
The coloured smoke began to move toward the American lines.
So did the bombs.
MAN: "We dived. (EXPLOSION)
"Some got in a dugout, others made for foxholes and ditches.
"The feeling of the blast was sensational.
"The air struck you in hundreds of continuing flutters.
"Your ears drummed and rang.
"You could feel quick little waves of concussion on your chest
"and in your eyes."
NARRATOR: American bombs killed 111 American infantrymen that day
and wounded nearly 500 more.
Their desperate fellow soldiers
struggled to free them from the earth into which they'd been blasted.
An American lieutenant general,
who had come to France to observe the bombing,
was hurled 60 feet.
When his body was found,
it could be identified only by a fragment of collar with three stars.
It was the worst American friendly fire incident of the war.
The bombing also blasted and burned and mangled
thousands of German troops.
Some maddened men shot themselves rather than endure any more of it.
Tanks were tossed into the air and landed upside down.
"My front lines looked like the face of the moon,"
the German commander remembered.
"And at least 70% of my troops were out of action...
"...dead, wounded, crazed or numb."
Two days later, on July 27,
the First Army poured through the newly opened gap in the German lines,
out into the countryside, beyond the hedgerows.
That same day,
Quentin Aanenson found himself back in the air over Normandy.
QUENTIN AANENSON: I was flying with Lieutenant Paul Bade.
He was the element leader and I was on his wing.
We were at about 1,000 feet over the trees.
And suddenly I saw him start into a dive, a gradual dive.
And as he started to go down, I was just close to him,
I literally pulled up so our wings overlapped
and saw him desperately trying to disconnect everything -
his oxygen hose, his radio hose, his seatbelt, and bale out.
But he was already too low.
But in that instant, while I'm overlapping with him,
and he knows, in his mind he knows he's dead,
he looked over at me and glanced at me for just a minute
and then crashed into the tree.
I had pulled off just enough so I wasn't caught in the explosion.
But in that instant, he knew he was dead.
And I remember so many times thinking about that.
He was an only son. His mother lived in, I believe, Richmond, Virginia.
And I remember thinking,
"She does not know that her son was killed today."
My friends were being killed off
and I was sending letters home to their parents.
The day they were killed, we grieved for them
and we packed up their things.
And maybe at the officers' club that night
we talked about the circumstances,
what the angle of the flak had been
so we could try to avoid certain approaches on targets.
But then we never talked about them again.
We never talked about them again.
It's just as if they did not exist.
(Ken Burns narrates) Sam Hynes was based on Okinawa now,
close enough to the fighting so that from the doorway of his tent
he could see the battleships offshore shelling Shuri.
In one month,
he and his squadron mates flew more than 1,000 combat missions,
going after torpedo launchers, gun emplacements, submarines,
and dropping both propaganda leaflets behind enemy lines
and supplies to the Americans fighting below.
And Hynes too lost friends -
shot from the sky, victims of their own errors,
or simply lost somewhere over the sea.
But the enemy was rarely seen.
SAM HYNES: Souvenirs for pilots were hard to come by.
The infantrymen could pick something off a dead Japanese any time,
but we didn't see them very often.
So that one night
when a person seemed to be trying to enter our area...
...the guards fired on him and killed him.
And then everyone went down to see what was their first dead enemy,
if he was the enemy.
He might well have been an Okinawan who was simply driven mad by hunger
and was trying to get in to get something to eat.
He wasn't armed, he wasn't in uniform, but he was very dead.
The next morning, the pilot I flew wing on, a captain,
I went round to talk to him about something,
he reached in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief,
opened it up and there was the man's ear.
And he said, "Got me a souvenir."
DANIEL INOUYE: I had two silver dollars.
And one was almost split in half,
because I had it in my pocket and a bullet grazed on it...
...and it saved my life.
So that was naturally a good luck charm.
And on this morning, April 21, 1945,
I had lost my jacket, I lost these two coins.
And so I saw the platoon leader of the next platoon, and I said,
"I think today's my day."
He said, "What are you talking about?"
I said, "This is the day I'm gonna get banged."
Sure enough.
MAN: "Luverne, Minnesota. December 6, 1945.
"Remember when you went to a different city
"to meet some relative you might never have met before...
"...and you both agreed to wear a flower or something
"as a mark of identification for recognition purposes?
"They may have to revive that custom
"for the benefit of returning servicemen fathers
"who haven't seen their youngsters for a long time.
"Harry Brodin was returning the other day from Minneapolis
"after his discharge from the Seabees.
"His wife had gone up to meet him.
"Also returning was Jim Argetsinger.
"And down at the train to greet their fathers were the little tots -
"Judy Brodin and Julie Argetsinger.
"When Harry Brodin stepped off the train,
"in his excitement he grabbed the wrong youngster
"and smothered Julie Argetsinger with kisses and hugs.
"But the mistake was soon noticed
"and Judy Brodin got her quota of kisses."
Al Mclntosh, 'Rock County Star Herald'.
GIRL: "When we came to the ship's dining room,
"we could hardly believe our eyes.
"Long tables with white tablecloths, white plates, two spoons, two forks,
"and what chow!
"Ice-cream and red apples too."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
NARRATOR: 12-year-old Sascha Weinzheimer,
her brother and sister, mother and father
had nearly starved to death
during three years as prisoners of the Japanese in Manila.
Now they were at sea, sailing home aboard the USS 'Capps'.
And the sailors spared no effort to make them
and their fellow prisoners comfortable after their ordeal.
It took three weeks to reach the California coast.
GIRL: "April 8, 1945.
"I was up on deck with Mother when we passed the Farallon Islands.
"After a quick breakfast we came up again.
"And there, straight ahead,
"we saw the sight we had been thinking about, talking about
"and praying about for so long -
"the Golden Gate.
"Now we knew we were really home."
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER: We got to San Francisco early in the morning.
It was foggy.
And we went up on deck just as we were going under
the Golden Gate Bridge.
It was about nine o'clock in the morning,
but the gold tip of the bridge was sticking out
with the sun breaking through.
And then we cruised slowly in past Alcatraz,
and then docked just as the sun was just coming over the hills.
To me, that will always be a beacon.
That Golden Gate Bridge was a wonderful salvation for us.
That's just like the Statue of Liberty back east.
NARRATOR: The Weinzheimer family checked into a downtown hotel.
"Look at this," her father said, as he dialled room service.
"I never thought I'd be dialling a phone again."
They dined on steaks and potatoes and ice-cream.
Afterwards, Sascha's little brother, Buddy,
spent three hours turning the water on and off, on and off.
He'd never seen faucets before.