(distant birds calling)
(Artie Shaw's "Moonglow" Playing)
NARRATOR: One evening in the summer of 1941,
several months before the United States would be drawn
into the Second World War,
in a little farming town in Alabama,
a 16-year-old high-school boy named Glenn Dowling Frazier
discovered that the girl he loved
was interested in someone else.
(crickets chirping)
Frazier was so angry and upset
that when the owner of a juke joint refused him service,
he stalked outside, climbed onto his motorcycle,
and roared through the door,
shattering bottles and smashing furniture.
As he raced away,
the bar owner chased him down the street with a shotgun.
The next morning,
humiliated, scared,
and unable to face his parents,
Glenn Frazier went to the nearest recruiting office,
lied about his age and joined the peacetime army.
He volunteered to serve in the Philippines.
FRAZIER: When I volunteered for the Philippine Islands,
I had no idea that we would actually be in a war.
I was thinking that probably Germany was
the most likely place that there would be a war,
so in my mind, I thought it'd be safe over there.
I never thought Japan would be attacking us.
NARRATOR: Over the next four years,
Frazier would find himself in the midst of war--
desperate hand-to-hand combat,
a forced march so brutal the world would never forget it,
and nightmarish prison camps
where simply surviving required
luck and bravery and unshakable will.
Back in Alabama, those who loved him would be told he was dead.
All Glenn Frazier would be able to do was cling to the hope
that one day he could come back home.
(artillery shell whooshes, explodes)
(gunfire, men shouting)
I don't think there is such a thing as a good war.
There are sometimes necessary wars.
And I think one might say just wars.
And that, never...
I never questioned the necessity of that war
and I still do not question it.
It was something that had to be done.
NARRATOR: The greatest cataclysm in history
grew out of ancient and ordinary human emotions:
anger and arrogance and bigotry,
victimhood and the lust for power.
And it ended because other human qualities--
courage and perseverance and selflessness;
faith, leadership, and the hunger for freedom--
combined with unimaginable brutality
to change the course of human events.
(air raid siren wailing)
The Second World War brought out the best and the worst
in a generation, and blurred the two
so that they became, at times, almost indistinguishable.
In the killing that engulfed the world from 1939 to 1945,
between 50 and 60 million people died...
...so many, and in so many different places,
that the real number will never be known.
More than 85 million men and women served in uniform,
but the overwhelming majority of those who perished
were civilians--
men, women, and children obliterated
by the arithmetic of war.
(distant explosion)
The United States of America was relatively fortunate.
More than 405,000 soldiers and sailors,
airmen and marines died, but that figure represented
proportionately fewer military casualties
than were suffered by any of the other major combatants.
American cities were not destroyed.
American civilians were never really at risk.
But without American power,
without the sacrifice of American lives,
the struggle's outcome would have been very different.
The American economy only grew stronger
as the fighting went on, and by the time it ended,
the United States would be the most powerful nation on earth
and a once isolated and insular people would find themselves
at the center of world affairs.
The war touched every family
on every street in every town in America--
towns like Luverne, Minnesota;
Sacramento, California;
Waterbury, Connecticut;
and Mobile, Alabama--
and nothing would ever be the same again.
(gunfire and artillery fire)
HYNES: I'm not sure I can speak
about why human beings in general go to war.
I think that's a pretty large category.
I can only speak
about why 18-year-olds from Minneapolis go to war.
They go to war because it's impossible not to,
because a current is established
in the society so swift, flowing toward war,
that every young man who steps into it is carried downstream.
AL McINTOSH (dramatized): Luverne, Minnesota, August 1941.
"Miss Aagot Rylund, who is in town visiting her brother,
"knows what it is to see vast sections of a city
"ripped to ruin by German bombs
"and she remembers the nights that London burned,
"how she could read a letter
"by the unbelievable glare of the far-off flames.
"She knows what it is to have high explosive bombs blast
"their big craters right outside the doorway
of the shelter in which she was sleeping."
"She has had her best friends killed."
"Looking out at the peaceful countryside
"from the Thompson porch, she said it was hard to believe
that the rest of the world was at war."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star.
NARRATOR: Much of the world was already at war
in the fall of 1941.
But for most Americans,
finally beginning to recover from the Great Depression,
events overseas seemed impossibly far away.
In Luverne, Minnesota, the biggest town in Rock County,
in the state's southwestern corner,
the autumn harvest was only a memory...
and its 3,000 citizens had begun the long winter wait
until they could sow their fields again.
Al McIntosh, the editor of the Rock County Star,
lived at 517 North Kniss Avenue.
He was a newcomer from North Dakota
who had turned down big city jobs
to run his own small-town paper.
He would soon find himself trying to explain
the unexplainable to his new neighbors.
Six-year-old Jim Sherman lived with his family
at 503 North Estey Street.
SHERMAN: I think it was a pretty close-knit community.
Uh, there was a saying that
if you don't want people to know about it,
you don't do it-- sort of thing.
And everybody knew pretty much everybody else in town.
NARRATOR: Four miles south of town,
near the Rock River,
was the 120-acre farm of the Aanenson family.
There they raised cows and grew barley, oats, and corn.
Their middle son,
who would face the most fearful odds in the skies over France,
was named Quentin.
QUENTIN: And literally,
sometimes I would be on a piece of farm machinery plowing corn
and a lonely airplane would fly over
and I would look up and my spirit would soar.
"That's where I want to be sometime.
"I want to live that way.
I want to do those things."
NARRATOR: In Sacramento, California, the state capital,
Okies, refugees from the Dust Bowl,
still camped on the edge of town
and worked the fields and orchards and vineyards
of the surrounding Sacramento Valley.
The city had been the gateway to the California Gold Rush
and the western anchor of the transcontinental railroad.
Although it was home to some 106,000 people,
Sacramento still seemed like a small town.
Tom and Earl Burke,
who would be asked to sacrifice everything for their country,
lived with their parents at 3240 Lassen Way,
just north of town.
EARL: It was a tremendous town; everybody knew each other.
All, all ethnic groups were just perfect.
I mean it was... you could go out on the streets at night
at 11:00, 12:00 at night
and, you know, you could walk home in the dark.
Nobody looked the doors.
Nobody even thought of it.
It was a nice, clean, little town.
BURNETT MILLER: The lower end of town was rather colorful to us.
There were lots of whorehouses.
As you got up towards the nicer part of town,
towards Tenth Street, uh,
the houses of prostitution were quite fancy.
And as kids, we used to run down there
and run through the place, just raising hell.
NARRATOR: 18-year-old Burnett Miller lived with his family
in a comfortable neighborhood at 3643 West Lincoln Avenue.
He would discover, in the last days of the war,
why it had to be fought.
Almost 7,000 Japanese-Americans also lived in Sacramento
and the surrounding county.
Doctors, lawyers, teachers, and shop owners,
as well as some of the most productive farmers in America.
Susumu Satow and his family grew strawberries, grapes,
and raspberries on their 20-acre farm, east of the city.
SUSUMU SATOW: My mother didn't speak English.
My father spoke, uh, broken English.
As a youngster, at the age of about eight, nine, I guess,
I used to walk down the railroad track to a place called Mills.
And Mills had a semipro baseball team.
And so I grew up in sort of a baseball environment, I guess.
NARRATOR: In Waterbury, Connecticut,
on the banks of the Naugatuck River,
a skilled workforce,
mostly immigrants and immigrants' children,
turned out screws and washers and buttons,
shower heads and alarm clocks,
toy airplanes and lipstick holders,
and cocktail shakers.
Since the 19th century,
its citizens had proudly called their town "Brass City."
Ray Leopold, the son of a Jewish immigrant from Latvia,
lived on Route Eight on the southern edge of the city.
Waterbury was a center for high-quality craft.
There were individuals there who could do 1/10,000 of an inch
on anything and if there was zero tolerance required,
they could do that, too.
OLGA CIARLO: Well, Waterbury, where we lived,
there were a lot of Italian people.
They had made a good business for themselves
and were very well liked.
We had a wonderful neighborhood.
We had parties every single Sunday.
Every Sunday was a picnic for us.
NARRATOR: The Ciarlo family lived at 1032 North Main Street,
in the Italian section of town.
Their father had recently died.
His loss would be only the beginning of their troubles.
And in Mobile, Alabama,
population 112,000,
the only real industry was shipbuilding,
as it had been since the Great War, a generation earlier.
Once a center of cotton and slave trading,
Mobile was best known for its annual Azalea Festival,
and its leisurely Southern air.
John Gray and his family lived on the south side of town,
near the L & N Railroad tracks at 407 Royal Street.
He would soon be asked to fight a war for freedom,
though his own country's definition of freedom
did not include him.
GRAY: Whites and blacks got along pretty good,
as long as you had the status quo.
But you could not, uh, eat at the counter at Woolworth.
You'd have to go down to the end
and order your sandwich and take it out.
Out to eat.
NARRATOR: Across town,
Katharine Phillips and her family
lived at 1555 Monterey Place.
PHILLIPS: Daddy said Mobile made its living
by taking in each other's wash.
And it was absolutely true.
The pace of life was slow.
On a hot summer evening--
of course there was no air-conditioning--
so Daddy would load us in the car and we'd drive downtown
to Brown's Ice Cream and he'd buy us an ice cream cone
and then we'd drive out to Arlington
and park out by the bay,
and all sit there and enjoy the sea breeze.
And when we'd cooled down enough, he'd bring us home
and everybody could go to bed and go to sleep.
Or we sat on our porch in the evening
and the children played in the yard.
It was a wonderful way to grow up.
And we were completely away from the rest of the world
down in Mobile.
NARRATOR: No one in Mobile, Waterbury,
Sacramento, Luverne, or anywhere else in America
was prepared for what was about to happen
to them and their country.
DANIEL INOUYE: Pearl Harbor was a Sunday
and, together with the family,
we're all getting ready to go to church.
And the disc jockeys going on with Hawaiian music,
and suddenly he sounded hysterical.
For a moment, I thought this was an act.
So I stepped out into the street and sure enough...
there are puffs and smoke coming out of that Pearl Harbor area.
And so I called my father out,
said, "Look at that."
And all of a sudden, three aircraft flew right overhead.
They were pearl gray with red dots.
I knew what was happening.
(artillery shells whistling, explosions booming)
And I thought my world had just come to an end.
(explosion)
(siren wailing)
NARRATOR: At 7:55 a.m.
on Sunday, December 7, 1941,
hundreds of Japanese warplanes,
launched from aircraft carriers far out at sea,
attacked the American Pacific Fleet
anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
(explosion)
The attack took a terrible toll--
so terrible a toll that the War Department
kept secret the exact details for years.
(explosions)
Eight battleships, including the USS Arizona,
three light cruisers, three destroyers,
and four other naval vessels were either sunk or damaged.
164 American aircraft were also destroyed.
Most hadn't even gotten off the ground.
And 2,403 Americans were dead.
Nothing like this had ever happened
to the United States of America before.
17-year-old Daniel lnouye, the son of a Japanese immigrant,
was a senior at William McKinley High School in Honolulu
and a Red Cross volunteer.
INOUYE: A call came in that we had casualties nearby,
One haunts me every so often.
It was a woman clutching a child.
Her head was severed,
but here she was with her arms around her baby.
And, uh...
So this is what I had to pick up, at 17.
ANNOUNCER (over radio): One, two, three, four.
Hello, NBC. Hello, NBC.
This is KBU in Honolulu, Hawaii.
PHILLIPS: I was a sophomore at Auburn
when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
ANNOUNCER: It is no joke, it is a real war.
I came home from church, went to the dormitory
and heard all this screaming and crying.
And I went down the hall, I said,
"What's the matter? What's wrong?"
They said, "Turn the radio on."
So we turned our radio on and, of course,
he said, "The Japs have attacked Pearl Harbor."
ANNOUNCER: We have been on the telephone with our station KGMB,
which is in Honolulu, and they report to us
that the antiaircraft fire can be heard
in a steady drone as the attacking planes come in.
As Mr. Davis told you...
PHILLIPS: But we comforted each other,
and the girls all cried and wept
because they had boyfriends or relatives
that were already in the armed forces.
And we realized immediately
that this would be war.
NARRATOR: Katherine Phillips's younger brother Sid
was back home in Mobile.
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: I was in a drugstore, drinking a milkshake,
and this lady burst in the side door and screamed,
"Turn on the radio!"
They were talking about Pearl Harbor on every station.
ANNOUNCER: And London now awaits Prime Minister Churchill's promise
to declare war on Japan within the hour.
We knew this meant we were in the war.
And we just...
all sat there quietly.
The radio kept giving the same information again and again.
ANNOUNCER: ...8:30 p.m. tonight...
BARBARA COVINGTON: I remember I was home eating breakfast
with my mother and my two brothers.
I was the youngest,
and we were getting ready to go to Sunday school.
I remember the fear coming in my mother's eyes,
because she knew my brothers
were probably going to be called, and they were.
ANNOUNCER: From Washington, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
today ordered the entire Army into uniform,
effective tomorrow.
ASAKO TOKUNO: That was about the time we had finals at school,
and this was my first semester at UC Berkeley.
And, uh, heard the news first.
Of course, I traveled by bus to go to school.
And as I'd stand on that corner...
(clears throat)
I would get this terrible feeling
that people were watching, looking at me.
And, um, you just get so self-conscious, you know,
so much more aware.
I'd never been aware of my...
you know, my ethnicity.
And so, that was very strange.
That was the first time I really felt, you know,
"This is not good."
ANNOUNCER: For the latest news on the Pacific situation,
keep tuned to this station.
LEOPOLD: It seemed so incredible.
2,400 innocent people
blown off the face of the earth was an atrocity.
It was something that had to be corrected--
perhaps the word might be "avenged."
And, um... we had to get busy with it.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT (on radio): Yesterday...
December 7, 1941...
NARRATOR: The following afternoon, people in Sacramento,
Waterbury, Luverne, Mobile,
and everywhere else in America
gathered around their radios to hear
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
ask a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: The attack yesterday
on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage
to American naval and military forces.
I regret to tell you that very many American lives
have been lost.
In addition, American ships have been reported torpedoed...
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We gathered outside of Langdon Hall at Auburn,
and they had a loudspeaker truck,
and we stood there quietly
and listened to President Roosevelt declare war.
(voice breaking): And, of course, our whole life changed.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: With confidence in our Armed Forces,
with the unbounding determination
of our people,
we will gain the inevitable triumph,
so help us God.
(applause)
NARRATOR: Three days after Congress declared war on Japan,
Japan's allies, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy,
declared war on the United States.
All across the country,
anxious Americans asked themselves,
"How did this happen?"
For more than a decade, they had had glimpses of a world
descending into chaos--
in their newspapers, over the radio
and in newsreels shown in movie theaters.
The Strand and the State in Waterbury.
The Crest and the Alhambra in Sacramento.
The Roxy and the Pike in Mobile.
And the Pix and the Palace in Luverne.
ANNOUNCER: For the first time, we saw great cities squashed flat,
civilians bombed and killed.
NARRATOR: They had hoped they could stay out of it all.
EMMA BELLE PETCHER: You couldn't fathom across the ocean,
you know, and you couldn't fathom
what it was really like.
But they would show these newsreels,
and I'd sneak in the back of the theater and see these newsreels,
and they were horrifying.
NARRATOR: Throughout the 1930s, country after country
had been held hostage to the ruthless ambitions
of the leaders of what would be called "the Axis."
Benito Mussolini, the swaggering dictator of Italy,
dreamed of restoring the ancient Roman Empire and becoming
master of the Mediterranean.
Adolf Hitler built his monstrous Nazi regime
and the mightiest army on earth
on the German thirst for revenge--
revenge against the victors of the First World War,
but also against those at home who he claimed had stabbed
their armed forces in the back:
Socialists, Communists, and the Jews.
Above all, the Jews,
who he said were both evil and subhuman.
The German people were superior to all others, he assured them,
and he had been chosen to lead them to their great destiny--
a Reich that would rule over the Old World
and the New for a thousand years.
CROWD (chanting): Heil! Heil!
The fact is that I am a Jew.
I was aware of what was going on in Europe,
perhaps a little more than the average person might have known.
And I did feel that, somehow or other,
that Hitler had to be stopped.
Not only for the Jews, but for everybody in the world.
QUENTIN AANENSON: We knew the war in Europe
was going to affect us eventually.
After Czechoslovakia had been taken over by Germany...
We knew that the war was coming our direction,
one way or the other.
ANNOUNCER: The beginning of the Blitzkrieg, "the lightning war,"
ripping deep into a nation not equipped to meet it.
NARRATOR: On September 1, 1939,
Hitler's forces stormed across the border of Poland.
In response to the attack, Britain and France
declared war on Germany.
The Second World War had begun.
Denmark and Norway fell.
Holland had surrendered.
Belgium was crushed.
French defenses had collapsed.
And in June of 1940,
Paris fell.
Adolf Hitler was the master of Western Europe.
Then he set his sights on Britain.
For more than a year, she would stand alone
against relentless attack from the air.
EDWARD MURROW (over radio): Hello, America.
This is Edward Murrow speaking from London.
They came over shortly
after blackout time and opened the attack
with a veritable shower of flares and incendiaries.
NARRATOR: American public opinion,
which had been steadfastly against being pulled
into Europe's troubles again, had begun to change.
We had a built-up resentment to Hitler.
We had been watching the news since 1939,
so we knew what Hitler was doing in Europe.
The way he had attacked Poland,
the way he had tried to bring England
to her knees with that constant bombing--
we just disliked Hitler and everything he was doing.
NARRATOR: But as plans for Britain faltered,
Hitler had turned his attention to the east,
ordering three million troops in a surprise attack
on his supposed ally, the Soviet Union,
setting in motion the worst slaughter of the war.
Meanwhile, on the far side of the world,
the military men who ruled Japan in the name of the emperor
believed their people superior, too.
Their small, crowded island nation had moved
from medieval feudalism to the modern era
in less than a century,
and they dreamed of Japan's becoming a mighty,
self-sufficient power.
With extraordinary brutality,
they had set out to seize the resources of China.
And they coveted the French and Dutch
and British colonies in Southeast Asia as well.
ANNOUNCER: From Shanghai to Nanking,
Japan still spreads destruction from the skies
upon a score of Chinese cities.
Here is the result:
innocent victims of the savagery that masquerades as modern war.
NARRATOR: Among the obstacles in Japan's way
were the U.S. Pacific Fleet based in Hawaii...
and American military outposts in Guam, Wake Island,
and in the Commonwealth of the Philippines.
The Axis leaders were united
in their scorn for the United States.
Its people were "timid, undisciplined scum,"
Hitler said, "under the influence
of Negroes and Jews."
He was certain such a mongrel people
could never win a war against his Aryan legions.
President Roosevelt had done everything he could,
short of war, to combat the aggressors.
Providing desperately needed aid to Britain and Russia...
...demanding that Japan withdraw from China.
Finally, freezing Japanese assets
in the United States, so that no American oil
could be used to fuel further aggression in Asia.
For the Japanese militarists,
that had been the signal to go to war with America.
They made General Hideki Tojo prime minister.
He thought that by destroying
the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor
in a single blow,
he could stun and demoralize the country long enough
to become so dominant in the region
that Japan could never be dislodged.
American intelligence officers
had broken the Japanese diplomatic code
and knew some kind of attack was coming.
(explosion, plane soaring)
But no one had known where or when
until December 7th.
GLENN FRAZIER: I was raised in a real Christian family
and, as a result, killing was not part of my training.
And, uh, that was a big hurdle for me to get over
because I had been taught not to kill.
NARRATOR: Within hours of Pearl Harbor,
the Japanese had also attacked
the main Philippine island of Luzon.
17-year-old Glenn Frazier was now in the middle of a war
he thought he would never have to face.
FRAZIER: And when the war started
and I was going to the field hospital,
a couple of Japanese planes-- Zeros--
bombed and strafed the hospital.
(gunfire, explosions)
And as we were approaching,
a friend of mine and I-- uh, we got into a ditch
and one of the dive bombers came back and strafed us
and dropped one bomb and hit him direct.
And all I ever found of him was his left foot in a shoe.
And when that Japanese Zero turned his wings
right above the trees and started to fly away,
I could see him with a smile on his face.
And at that point, I had no problem with killing people.
In fact, I got to the point where I hunted them.
(gunshot)
And if I didn't kill a Japanese in a day,
I felt I didn't do my job.
(gunshot)
NARRATOR: Glenn Frazier was one of 31,000 men
under the command of General Douglas MacArthur,
the best-known soldier in the American Army.
A frontline hero of World War I,
he was as self-absorbed as he was courageous.
But the news of Pearl Harbor had paralyzed him.
He had had nine hours' warning,
yet when the Japanese attacked
his airfields in the Philippines,
most of MacArthur's planes were still parked wing to wing,
easy targets for the enemy.
(bombs whistling, then exploding)
More than 50,000 Japanese soldiers would soon be ashore,
converging on Manila from the north and the south.
Neither the American troops,
nor the thousands of Filipino reservists MacArthur called up
would be able to stop them.
The Americans were being pushed out of the Pacific.
MacArthur eventually ordered all his forces to retreat
onto the mountainous, forest-covered Bataan Peninsula.
He withdrew with his family and his aides
to the heavily fortified island at the mouth of Manila Bay
called Corregidor.
Meanwhile, other Americans in the Philippines,
innocent civilians thousands of miles from home,
had been swept up in the war as well.
(siren wailing, bell clanging)
(clamoring)
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER: The day Pearl Harbor got bombed
was the seventh.
But in the Philippines,
with... over the international date line, it was the eighth.
Same day, and we were bombed a few hours later.
And I had polio when I was a baby,
so I used to go to Manila three times a week
for physical therapy.
And this is what I was doing on a Monday morning,
on the eighth, when the Japanese started bombing.
NARRATOR: Sascha Vveinzheimer was eight years old
in December of 1941,
the daughter and granddaughter of wealthy farmers
with enormous holdings in the Sacramento Valley
and in the Philippines.
As she would detail in a journal,
she lived with her mother and father,
her three-year-old sister and her three-month-old brother
on one of the largest sugar plantations
on the Philippine Island of Luzon.
("Auld Lang Syne" playing)
(explosions thundering in distance)
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "On New Year's Eve,
"Daddy brought home three soldiers.
"When they all had big glasses
"of whiskey and soda in their hands,
"they started telling stories about fighting the Japs.
"They always smiled when people wouldn't believe them
"when they said, 'Lady, we haven't got a chance.'
Mother scolded them for talking that way."
NARRATOR: After Japanese bombs fell near their plantation,
Sascha and her family moved into Manila--
now with the army gone, a neutral, "Open City" --
joining other refugees at the Bayview Hotel.
WEINZHEIMER: The Japanese came in
on the second of January.
That was the beginning of, you know,
this putting the people into camps and so forth.
And your life changed fast.
WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "The first thing I remember
"was looking across the street towards the bay
"and seeing Japanese soldiers and officers around the flagpole
"hoisting up the Japanese flag
where our Stars and Stripes had been."
(crowd cheering)
"Soon trucks came rolling down the boulevard,
"yelling, 'Banzai!'
"We were told to be calm and keep away from the windows.
Everyone was nervous, especially Mother."
NARRATOR: Japanese soldiers took Sasoha's father
from the Bayview Hotel
to the walled campus of Santo Tomas University,
which had been turned into a civilian internment camp.
WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "After Daddy started to say good-bye,
"I could just hardly stand it,
"and for the first time, I was afraid,
"so I screamed and held onto Daddy
"until I had to be pulled away.
"Then he ran out,
and that was the last we saw of him for a few months."
NARRATOR: Sascha and the rest of her family found shelter
first in one convent, and then another.
Wherever they were, the sound of the guns from Bataan--
where Glenn Frazier
and his comrades were still struggling
to stop the Japanese advance--
continued day and night.
(distant explosions)
(loud, rumbling explosion)
(Duke Ellington's "Perdido" Playing)
SAM HYNES: You have to imagine what it was like
to be a teenage, middle-class, lower-middle-class kid
in Minneapolis in 1941.
The chances for excitement were fairly limited.
You could drive a car fast, you could get drunk,
you could take a girl out
and try and get somewhere and fail.
That's local excitement.
But to have an exciting life--
it was hard to imagine what an exciting life would be.
And then, suddenly, you could be, uh, a pilot
or a submariner, or an artilleryman,
or any damn thing, but you'd be...
It was something exciting, and it was something adult.
All of a sudden, you could choose,
just choose to be an adult by writing your name.
I'm working for a bank in town and delivering checks.
I write my name, and now I'm potentially
a combat pilot, a fighter pilot, an ace.
Or I'm the commander of a submarine
going into Tokyo Bay.
These are incredible opportunities.
You see, they're-they're melodramatic,
exciting, like the movies.
And you might do it.
So that's terrific.
It has nothing to do with patriotism.
It has nothing to do, really, with who the enemy is.
It's the opportunity to be somebody more exciting
than the kid you are.
(Benny Goodman's "Wang Wang Blues" playing)
(music continues)
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: I came home for my Christmas holidays,
and that's when I found out
that my brother Sidney had gone down
and joined the Marine Corps.
And then, of course, life really took on meaning.
SIDNEY: My father was very patriotic, and...
I felt like really expected me to join the military,
so my friend W.O. Brown
said, "Sid, let's go join the Navy in the morning."
And I said, "Fine."
And the recruiting office was crowded
like you wouldn't believe,
so we walked up to the head of the line,
saw this Marine recruiting sergeant.
He came over and said,
"Do you boys want to kill Japs?"
And we said, "Yeah, that's the idea,
but we're going to join the Navy."
And he said, "No," he said, "You don't belong in the Navy.
"You belong in the Marine Corps.
"You can't get in the Navy, anyway,
because your parents are married."
And we, uh, ended up joining the Marine Corps.
KATHARINE: So Sidney joined the Marines.
Daddy told Mother, "You might as well sign the paper, Kate.
He's going to go anyway."
He was only 17 years old.
So the story in the family is,
the Marine recruiting officer crossed the street
anytime in the next year that he encountered my mother,
because she would give him a piece of her mind
for taking her little boy into the Marines.
NARRATOR: Unlike the professional armies of Germany and Japan,
the armed forces
that Sid Phillips and others rushed to join
had been totally unprepared to wage a world war.
In 1940, the U.S. Army had been smaller
than that of Rumania--
only 174,000 men in uniform,
wearing tin hats and leggings issued during World War I,
and carrying rifles designed in 1903.
The Army still owned tens of thousands of cavalry horses.
To make up for lost time,
Congress had federalized the National Guard.
In Luverne, 129 local boys--
members of the Minnesota National Guard--
were called to active duty.
The entire town had turned out at the depot to say good-bye.
Then, in the fall of 1940, Congress enacted the draft,
and every young man in America began to worry
when his number would come up.
WILLIAM PERKINS: Somebody got the greetings.
Long envelope, you know.
And when you opened it up, it would say,
"Greetings.
"The President of the United States and your neighbors
"have selected you to be drafted into the Armed Forces for...
to protect the country, et cetera, et cetera."
And I was down to a friend of mine's,
Howard Lopes, and he got the letter,
and he opened it up, and he was drafted.
And so, boy, we just laughed and roared,
and then I had to go home.
And when I walked in the house, my grandma says,
"There's a letter up for you up there."
And I... so I picked it up, and I looked at it.
And it said, "Greetings.
"The President of the United States
and your neighbors..."
I flew out the house, run down the street, you know,
back up the street where Howard lived,
and I walked in with the paper in my hand.
Everybody looked at me,
and they had a good time laughing,
because I had been drafted.
They knew. I didn't have to tell them.
I just hold up... the letter up.
NARRATOR: Nearly 50 million men
would register for the draft during the war.
To serve, they had to be five feet tall,
weigh 105 pounds, have correctable vision
and at least half their teeth.
Of the 18 million men examined by Army doctors,
five and a half million were rejected on medical,
or dental, or what was called moral grounds--
usually because they'd given what the Army considered
the wrong answer to the question,
"Do you like girls?"
At first, the men also had to be able to read and write,
but when hundreds of thousands were rejected
on that score, the requirement was dropped,
and the Army set up special schools
to make its citizen soldiers literate.
The goal of basic training
was to turn undisciplined boys into fighting men,
whose comradeship and loyalty to their unit would help them
withstand the worst that battle had to offer.
No one who went through it would ever forget it.
WALTER THOMPSON: Well, I was 18-- I was real young.
I actually cried the first night
'cause I was scared, you know?
It was strangers.
(wry laugh)
Never saw any of those guys in my life.
From all walks of life, all sizes and all shapes.
And lonely for your parents,
your home, your friends.
No one in the barrack that I knew.
And so, it was just an eerie feeling
to be in that situation.
NARRATOR: Despite a growing chorus of protests by black citizens
outraged at the idea of fighting bigotry abroad
while it was tolerated at home,
the military continued to insist
on segregating African-American servicemen into all-black units.
Even blood supplies for saving the lives of the wounded
were kept separate.
WILLIE RUSHTON: Oh, we thought that one day,
our country would be better for everybody,
'cause I knew I saw a lot of things
that my father had to go through
that I didn't have to go through,
so I figured that when my children come on,
we'd still have something better than what I had,
so that's why I wanted to go fight for my country.
FILM ANNOUNCER: For this is what we are fighting.
Freedom's oldest enemy,
the passion of the few to rule the many.
This isn't just a war.
This is a common man's life-and-death struggle
against those who would put him back into slavery.
BURNETT MILLER: You know, we had lots of propaganda at films...
...showing us how bad the enemy was
and how evil and so forth.
We were all quite cynical about these.
We thought, these are training films.
It's an awful lot of propaganda and baloney.
ANNOUNCER: For the Nazi master race theory
calls for the complete wiping out of so-called inferior races.
And in village after village, local Judases point out
loyal Polish neighbors.
MILLER: We didn't believe
in the brand of evil that they were propagandizing.
We didn't think we were fighting to save the world.
But we thought that, you know,
it was our country against that country,
and that country had been the aggressor,
and, uh... the Japanese, their allies,
had started us in it, and we had to win it.
And it was that simple.
We didn't realize 'til later how important it really was.
(sighs)
I was fairly close to being a pacifist.
I believed that there is
mostly negotiated solutions
to most problems of this sort.
But I couldn't fathom that there was ever
a solution to the confrontation that Hitler was giving
to us and the rest of the world.
I felt that I belonged in the service,
um, because the threat,
while it was directed at the entire rest of the world,
was particularly directed
at the origins that I came from.
(Duke Ellington's "Echoes of Harlem" playing)
If I didn't know it
at the particular moment I went in,
13 weeks later, after I had finished my basic training,
I knew, expertly, how to kill.
Kill with a bayonet, kill with a bullet,
kill with your hands.
Yes, I could kill.
HYNES: I left Minneapolis for the service
on a dank, wet, cold,
March Minneapolis evening.
My father drove me to the station
in the car that he almost never let me drive
(chuckles): as a kid,
downtown, past all the...
places that had been the, uh,
stations of my childhood and growing up,
to the Rock Island Railroad.
It was dark.
The long platform was dark
with hanging arc lights at distance,
so that, as you walked,
it was dark, light, dark, light, dark, light.
And at the far end was a Navy yeoman
with a clipboard and a gathering of young men
or boys around him.
And we stopped, and my father shook my hand.
It seemed very strange to me that my father and I
were on handshaking terms.
Then he turned around and walked back toward the entrance--
dark, light, dark, light, dark, light--
and out into the street and was gone.
And I turned to the yeoman and went up
and said, "Present," when my name came up,
and I was in the Navy.
LIFE REPORTER (dramatized): February 23, 1942.
"Out of Poland have come these appalling pictures
of the end product of German conquest."
"They show mass misery and death carried by German thoroughness
to an extreme rarely seen before in history."
"They also show the kind of thing
"the fighting foes of Nazism may expect
if they really lose the war."
"The methodical massacre takes on
"an emotional quality of sadism,
as applied by the Nazis to the Jews."
"Herded in Polish ghettos, forbidden to walk out
"or use a railway, machine- gunned in their synagogues,
"thrown by thousands into the rivers,
"stripped of clothing and food and possessions.
The Jews of Poland are literally dying out."
"These are the grim statistical facts.
The details of human agony are multiplied beyond the telling."
LIFE magazine.
NARRATOR: At the start of 1942,
almost all the news was bad.
The Soviet Union, the United States' new ally,
was under unceasing attack from the Germans,
who had encircled Leningrad
and reached the outskirts of Moscow.
Japanese troops had now taken Singapore,
the Gibraltar of the East,
and with it, all of Malaya.
They had seized Borneo and Burma and Hong Kong.
And they had taken Guam and Wake Island,
Makin and Tarawa.
There was not a single American base
between Hawaii and the Philippines.
But President Roosevelt
and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill agreed
that for the time being they would have to remain
on the defensive in the Pacific.
Germany, they decided,
with its vast armies and mighty industrial machine,
was the greatest danger.
Victory in Europe would require
not only the mobilization of a generation of young men,
but also billions of rounds of ammunition,
millions of guns, hundreds of thousands of tanks and airplanes
and fleets of ships to bring them to battle.
Producing all of that would take time.
Meanwhile, the survival of Britain and the Soviet Union
depended on a steady stream of food
and fuel and weapons from America.
("American Anthem" playing)
BURT WILSON: When I was seven years old, in Theodore Judah School,
a boy from England, an English refugee,
came into our class.
His name was William Murgathroid Buchanan.
We all called him Roid-- Roid Buchanan.
And we developed a great friendship.
And one day, Roid came over to my house,
and I was upstairs, and he called,
"Burt! Burt!"
And I looked out the window,
and I said, "Hi, Roid. What's going on?"
And Roid said, "Do you know
what a dirty German sub did to my father?"
And I said, "No. What?"
He said, "It killed him."
And I-l don't...
I didn't know how to deal with that.
I went downstairs,
and we sat down under the tree and talked awhile.
But it was still something that
I'd never had any experience with, up until that time--
one of my best friends telling me
that his father was killed in a war.
NARRATOR: On the evening of January 13, 1942,
as American troops tried to stop the Japanese on Bataan,
a German U-boat surfaced silently off Manhattan.
Its commander was astonished but gratified to see
that more than a month after Germany declared war
on the United States,
America's largest city was still ablaze with lights.
Using those lights to silhouette his target,
he sent a torpedo hissing toward the side
of an American oil tanker...
...then slipped back beneath the sea
and moved south in search of further prey.
Within 12 hours, he had sunk seven more unarmed vessels.
The United States seemed
totally unprepared for this kind of war.
By the end of January,
U-boats would sink 25 tankers along the East Coast,
continuing a fierce struggle for supremacy of the seas
called the Battle of the Atlantic
and threatening to choke off America's allies.
Still, from Boston to Miami,
city fathers stubbornly resisted the idea of blackouts.
Turning the lights off would hurt tourism, they said.
The last light would not wink out until May.
But the Germans continued to sink
two or three merchant vessels every day.
More than 230 Allied ships
and almost five million tons of desperately needed materiel
went to the bottom of the sea in the first six months of 1942.
American beaches were black with oil.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: All along the Gulf Coast
and all on the shores of Mobile Bay,
we could go sit on the beach,
but we were not allowed to light a fire,
because of the U-boats.
We heard often in Mobile that ships were sunk
just as they went out of Mobile Bay.
And we know this to be true,
because the life preservers and the canned goods
washed up on our beaches.
NARRATOR: For a time, the waters from Jacksonville, Florida,
to Galveston, Texas, were considered
the most dangerous shipping lane in the world.
"The only safe run," said one weary merchant seaman,
"is from St. Louis to Cincinnati."
(distant gunfire)
(closer gunfire)
(shouting)
GLENN FRAZIER: I really fought the first few days
for the good Old Glory.
You know, like everybody else,
you're saying, "good old United States.
"We're going to fight, we're going to whip these Japanese
in a matter of six months," and so forth.
But when it really hit me that this was not a short situation
and that they were hitting us hard,
then I think I changed pretty much to protect myself
and my fellow Americans, and I think I was fighting more
to save my own life.
NARRATOR: Nearly 80,000 American and Filipino troops
had managed to escape the Japanese around Manila
and take up positions on the Bataan Peninsula.
Once again, General MacArthur's planning had faltered.
Most supplies had been left behind.
Rations had to be cut in half.
Bataan's humid forests bred malarial mosquitoes.
Clean water was in short supply.
There was little medicine on hand.
One field hospital had eight operating tables...
and 1,200 battle casualties in need of surgery.
Still the men struggled to hold on...
...fighting off one attack after another,
then retreating halfway down the peninsula.
For weeks, the men on Bataan continued to hope
that rescuers were coming.
Again and again, MacArthur had assured them of it.
"Help is on the way," he promised.
FRAZIER: On the Voice of America, one time, I remember it,
we were getting it on short-wave radio.
It said, uh, as far as the eye can see,
there's ships and planes coming to the Philippines.
We were told continuously that we were getting reinforcements.
We were told that when we retreated back into Bataan,
it would only be for a few weeks.
NARRATOR: But no troops, no planes had ever been dispatched.
They could not have made it through, anyway.
The Japanese now controlled the South Pacific.
"There are times," Secretary of War Henry Stimson confided
to his diary, "when men must die."
By early March, three out of four of Bataan's defenders
were incapacitated in some way--
sick, exhausted, wounded, weak from hunger,
suffering from beriberi.
FRAZIER: At the end, close to the end, there was one can of salmon
issued to 35 men
and some rice and very little rice,
so our situation was getting...
deteriorating and getting worse every day.
NARRATOR: MacArthur managed to leave his quarters on Corregidor
to visit his men on Bataan precisely once.
They began calling him "Dugout Doug."
The soldiers' bitterness intensified when,
acting under direct orders from the president,
MacArthur, his wife, four-year-old son
and 17 members of his staff
slipped out of Corregidor in a PT boat.
From Australia, he issued a brief statement:
"I came through," he said, "and I shall return."
FRAZIER: When he left and went to Australia,
that's what I call doomsday for Bataan,
because we knew then that we had to fight,
and he issued orders to fight to the last man,
and that's, we knew what our fate was going to be.
(projectile whistling through air)
NARRATOR: On April 9, 1942, Major General Edward L. King
sent a soldier forward with a white flag.
It was the largest surrender by the United States Army
in its history--
78,000 American and Filipino troops.
General King asked a Japanese officer just one question:
Would his men be treated decently?
Yes, said the officer.
"We are not barbarians."
But Japanese tradition held that those who surrendered
rather than die on the battlefield
were cowards, unworthy of respect.
The prisoners were prodded northward,
300 at a time.
They were to walk from Mariveles to San Fernando,
then be loaded onto railroad cars
for the journey to Camp O'Donnell in central Luzon.
What followed would be remembered
as the Bataan Death March.
FRAZIER: If we had known what was ahead of us at the beginning
of the Bataan Death March, uh, I would have taken death.
It was very, very difficult for us to understand,
because we had had no contact with the Japanese whatsoever
as to what these people are all about
and what they're like.
And they immediately started beating guys
if they didn't stand right or if they were sitting down.
We didn't know where we were going.
We didn't know anything.
And we were stopped on the way,
some of us were, and searched and beat again.
And all our possessions were taken away from us.
Some of them had rings that they just cut the fingers off
and take the rings.
They poured the water out of my canteen
to be sure that I didn't have any, any water.
I saw them buried alive.
When a guy was bayoneted or shot,
laying in the road and the convoys were coming along,
I saw trucks that would just go out of their way
to run over the guy in the middle of the road.
And when by the time you have 15 or 20 trucks run over you,
you look like a smashed tomato or something.
And I saw people that had their throats cut,
because they would take their bayonets
and stick it out through the corner of the truck at night
and it would just be high enough to cut their throats.
And beating with a rifle butt
until there just was no more life in them.
I saw Filipino women cut.
Their stomachs were cut open.
Their throats were cut.
I saw Filipinos and Americans beheaded
just with one swipe of a saber.
I marched six days and seven nights, never stopped.
I did not have but one sip of water and no food.
Now, they say that you can't do this, but I did.
When I got to the end of the march after,
uh, at the end of the entire march where I stopped
to get on a train-- they put us on a train--
my-my tongue wouldn't even go back in my mouth.
And if you look and talk to somebody about that,
they'll tell you that's how close to death I was.
NARRATOR: No one knows precisely how many men died
on the Bataan Death March--
somewhere between 6,000 and 11,000 Filipinos and Americans.
And at the end of the march,
Camp O'Donnell provided no relief.
An unfinished Philippine Army base,
surrounded by barbed wire and machine gun towers,
with little water and little shelter from the sun,
it would eventually hold nearly 60,000 miserable, desperate men.
Food was nothing but lugao, watery rice soup
filled with weevils and worms.
It was best to try and swallow it after dark,
one man recalled, so as not to have to look at it.
Some 16,000 more Filipinos and Americans would die
at Camp O'Donnell-- of dehydration, malnutrition,
malaria, beriberi, scurvy, dysentery, hopelessness.
"Their bodies went by in an endless column,"
one sergeant remembered.
"Day and night, they were carried to the cemetery."
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We had all been so distressed
about leaving our boys in the Philippines.
There was no way of rescuing them, we know now,
but at the time, we didn't know that there were no ships.
Remember, they didn't tell us how much had been sunk
at Pearl Harbor, and we kept thinking,
"Why don't you go in there
and get the boys out of the Philippines?"
NARRATOR: One day, Glenn Frazier volunteered for burial detail.
FRAZIER: On some days, we buried 250 men,
so I didn't know but what one day that might happen to me.
So my idea was I had two sets of dog tags.
And I said to myself,
"Well, I think I'll just throw one of these sets of dog tags
"in the mass grave, so if I'm alive when the war ends,
there's no problem."
But if I'm missing or dead, I didn't... I wanted my family
to know and have some kind of ending, and so forth,
so they would think that I was in this grave.
(artillery explosion)
NARRATOR: On May 6, 1942,
Corregidor, the last American stronghold in the Philippines,
fell to the Japanese.
(men speaking Japanese)
(seagulls cawing)
(distant foghorn blows)
SAM HYNES: I went to Seattle in 1942.
One memory is very clear and strong.
It's a Saturday, and I'm taking a bus into the center of town
and across the public square
in front of the town hall, I guess it is...
And I see ahead of me
a line of people standing patiently by a bus stop.
And as I approach, I see that they're all Japanese
and that they're getting onto buses.
And I realize that these are the Japanese-American citizens
of Seattle and the neighborhood who are being sent off
to what amounted to a concentration camp.
And I think, "Well, those are my enemies."
But they don't look like enemies standing there
in their American clothes with their cardboard suitcases
waiting to be sent off into the desert.
NARRATOR: On February 19, 1942,
President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066.
Its tone was carefully neutral.
It authorized the War Department to designate "military areas"
and then exclude anyone from them
whom it felt to be a danger.
But it had a specific target...
...the more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry
living along the West Coast.
They were about to be forced
from their homes and moved inland.
Thousands of German and Italian aliens were also locked up,
but millions of German and Italian-American citizens
remained free to live their lives as they always had.
Only Japanese-Americans on the West Coast
were singled out.
"A Jap's a Jap," said General John L. DeWitt
of the West Coast Defense Command.
"It makes no difference
"whether he is an American citizen or not.
I don't want any of them."
Almost no one protested the government's plan,
which also classified all Japanese-Americans
as unfit for military service.
DANIEL INOUYE: 1-A is physically fit,
and 4-F, something's wrong with you.
But 4-C means enemy alien.
And here I was, 17 years of age.
I considered myself a good American but, uh...
made into an enemy.
NARRATOR: In Sacramento, soon after Order 9066 was issued,
hand-lettered signs went up all over town,
saying "Japs must go."
The orders to leave arrived in May.
Susumu Satow and his family could scarcely believe it.
They were given one week's notice.
It was middle of the harvest and...
but still, yet we had to abandon it and leave.
And so, of course, we made arrangement with our friends.
"Hey, come and pick the strawberries
because it's ready to be marketed."
And so I imagine they did that.
BURT WILSON: There was an area of town
here in Sacramento that was mostly where the Japanese lived.
And it was empty almost overnight.
And we wondered, you know, what happened?
They took somebody out of eighth grade,
a Japanese boy who did wonderful cartoons.
His name was Sammy.
And one day he was there, and the next day he was gone.
And that was very difficult for us to understand,
because we didn't see Sammy or any Japanese--
at least I didn't-- any Japanese-American as the enemy.
(train whistle blows)
SATOW: We were allowed to bring
whatever you could carry, that's it.
And so you put just essentials in your suitcase.
You know, first day,
when we had to pack up our things and go to the train,
I really wondered, what's going to happen to us?
You know, that, uh, this is just the beginning
and, uh, they may very well send us back to Japan.
And that, to me, was horrible.
I, in my heart, knew my loyalty belongs to America.
I went to school, pledged allegiance every morning
in grammar school and so forth.
And for me to think
that I may be sent to Japan was... was horrendous.
NARRATOR: Asako Tokuno was still a freshman
at Berkeley that spring.
Her parents and her grandfather were evacuated first,
because they had been born in Japan.
She and her sister were left behind for a time
to close the family flower business.
We all somehow gathered the flowers,
bunched them and got them to the market,
to the flower market in San Francisco.
And so we were able to keep the business going.
And all those flowers didn't go to waste, you know.
They were just in the height of their beauty
at that time of the year,
getting ready for Easter and all the holidays.
We were really... kind of caught in the middle
when the war happened, although no question about our loyalty
to our country, you know, and how we felt.
(voice breaking): This is our country,
and when this whole evacuation thing happened, I mean,
it was like we had no country, because we weren't from Japan
and they took away our... our rights, actually.
We couldn't protest, and we wouldn't have protested,
because we had to do what the government told us to do.
And so, uh, I think our parents realized, of course,
they were, you know, not citizens,
so they accepted the whole thing.
But for us, I think it was a lot harder,
the fact that we had no rights.
(Japanese flute playing)
(band plays upbeat march)
(projector clacking)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Action pictures made by Movietone cameraman Al Brick,
when a big enemy invasion fleet drove to seize Midway Island
and was heavily defeated.
A hostile cruiser on fire, bombed and ablaze,
filmed from an American plane as it lies
like a smoking volcano on the sea.
One of the greatest blows of devastation...
NARRATOR: By June of 1942, Americans were desperate for good news.
And the victory at Midway--
the westernmost of the inhabited Hawaiian lslands--
was just what they had been waiting for.
It turned out to be a great triumph,
but it had almost been a total disaster.
The Japanese had hoped to smash what was left
of the Pacific Fleet, take Hawaii, hold its people hostage
and force the United States to sue for peace.
But American cryptographers had deciphered their plans,
and the Navy was waiting for them.
Still, when the battle began,
all but six of the first 41 American torpedo-bombers
sent to attack the Japanese fleet were shot down...
...without scoring a single hit on the enemy warships.
But then, American dive bombers
swooped down on four Japanese carriers.
And eventually, all four of them were destroyed.
Midway marked the first defeat for the Japanese Navy
in 350 years.
(projector clacking)
(band plays upbeat fanfare)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Hollywood's most famous movie stars
leave the film capital to help the government sell war bonds.
The country has asked the people to invest a billion dollars
in one month to help pay for the war.
And here's the start of the drive.
They'll tour 300 cities from coast to coast.
This is the people's way of saying,
"From the home front to the battlefront,
"from movie stars to sales clerks,
America's 130 million citizens are in the war."
The war-- the single greatest coordinated effort
in American history--
would eventually cost the United States $304 billion.
More than three trillion dollars in today's terms.
Taxes alone could never pay for it all.
That required a series of annual War Bond drives.
The whole country got involved.
In Mobile, John Cottingham, a worker at Brookley Field,
invested all but eight cents of his paycheck each month
in war bonds.
The Black Bears, the local Negro League baseball team,
staged a doubleheader that raised $100,000.
The citizens of Sacramento were asked
to buy $16 million worth of bonds
during one particular drive.
They were told it would pay for 96 minutes of the war.
In Waterbury, bonds were sold from "Liberty House,"
set up in the middle of the town green
on the site where similar bonds
had been sold to help defeat Germany
during the First World War.
People turned out to gaze at a giant barrage balloon,
to see a German plane that had been shot from the sky,
and ride a tank.
AL McINTOSH (dramatized): Luverne, Minnesota.
"They can send all the movie stars they want
"on countrywide war bond sales drives,
"but for our part, we'll take Maude Jochims
as the best bond salesman-- or saleswoman-- of them all."
"We stopped in at the Palace Wednesday afternoon,
"and they were going to fall $8,000 short.
"Then Maude, as a one-woman campaign,
"waded in to canvass Rock County patrons.
"The bond orders poured in
and the total was boosted over $48,000."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star Herald.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: This was the Russian front in 1942.
The Germans advanced, looting,
torturing, murdering as they went.
The casualties ran into the millions.
They had driven 1,000 miles deep into Russian territory,
but Russia, with her "scorched earth" policy,
left nothing of value behind.
Wheat, which could not be harvested, was set afire.
Bridges were blown up, dams, railroads, power plants.
NARRATOR: Although the German invasion of the Soviet Union
had stalled outside Moscow,
with both sides suffering unspeakable losses,
a new Nazi offensive in the spring of 1942
had sent more than 225 divisions
steadily advancing across Russia.
Millions of civilians and soldiers died.
Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was demanding that the Allies
immediately open a second front in the west
to relieve the pressure on his beleaguered people.
But there was as yet
not a single Allied soldier fighting in Western Europe,
and there would not be for a long time.
They simply weren't ready.
American planners had a straightforward idea
of how to beat the Germans:
invade France in the spring of 1943
and drive right for Berlin.
But the British were wary of moving too fast.
"A defeat on the French coast," Winston Churchill warned,
was "the only way in which we could possibly lose this war."
Instead, he favored attacking
German and Italian forces in North Africa.
American commanders thought invading Africa
would be a dangerous and wasteful diversion...
...but Congressional elections were coming up.
American voters were eager
for more offensive action against the Axis.
President Roosevelt overruled his generals.
The invasion of occupied France would be delayed.
Instead, preparations were made for American troops
to land in North Africa at the end of 1942.
A bitter General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff,
wrote privately that he and his fellow commanders
had "failed to see that the leader in a democracy
has to keep the people entertained."
("American Patrol" by Glenn Miller playing)
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: I did notice repeatedly during the war that there would be
a sense of pride in what you were a part of.
You would feel the power of the military.
You would feel the power of the convoy you were in,
the warships that were surrounding you,
the weapons that you were responsible for.
It was a strange feeling.
You knew you were in great danger,
but you somehow felt safe
in that you were a part of this great, powerful group.
NARRATOR: In early August of 1942,
Private Sidney Phillips of Mobile, Alabama,
and the 19,000 men of the First Marine Division
steamed out of Wellington, New Zealand,
in a large convoy, including all three
of America's carriers in the South Pacific.
Their target was so remote, so obscure,
that some of their officers had trouble saying its name.
But that summer, Guadalcanal, a 90-mile-long island
at the eastern end of the Solomon chain,
covered with dense jungle and coconut plantations,
had suddenly become
one of the most strategically important spots in the Pacific.
Two separate commands
had the task of pushing back the Japanese.
General Douglas MacArthur
was in command of the Southwestern Pacific,
assigned to drive from New Guinea
toward the Philippines and Formosa.
Admiral Chester W. Nimitz would use the Marines
to climb a longer ladder-- up the Solomons, the Gilberts,
the Marshalls, the Marianas,
the Volcano Islands, the Ryukus.
He would begin in the Solomons.
The Japanese had made landings there, and construction crews
were hard at work on an airstrip on Guadalcanal.
If they were allowed to complete it,
Japanese warplanes could choke off shipping lanes
between the United States and Australia
and make the Allied campaign impossible.
The Marines, including 17-year-old Sid Phillips,
now a mortarman, had been sent to stop them.
Their commander had assumed his green troops would receive
another six months of training before they saw combat.
They were armed
with old single-shot, bolt-action rifles.
They had only ten days' worth of ammunition,
and in order to get them into the fight as fast as possible,
their supply stocks had been reduced from 90 days to 60.
The men called it "Operation Shoestring."
(projectiles whistling through air)
At dawn on August 7, 1942,
American land forces went on the offensive
for the first time in the Second World War.
No one had any idea how long, how bloody
and how consequential the battle for Guadalcanal would be.
Sid Phillips' platoon was part of the second wave
of Marines to go ashore.
"We had been repeatedly told
"this would be the first
ship-to-shore landing," he remembered,
"and nobody could more than guess if such an idea
"would be successful.
"We braced ourselves, and the craft slid up on the beach.
We charged out, ready to do or die," Phillips said,
"and there was the first wave sitting, laughing at us."
There was virtually no opposition.
The first American casualty on Guadalcanal was a Marine
who cut his hand with a machete,
trying to open a coconut.
The Marines moved off the beach.
A combat photographer caught Sid Phillips
relieving himself.
PHILLIPS: There were times of sheer boredom
and just plain hard work.
The war is actually planned by the officers,
but it is fought by the privates,
and the privates do 99% of all the hard work.
NARRATOR: Americans seized the unfinished airstrip
with little trouble and renamed it "Henderson Field"
after a Marine pilot who was killed
during the Battle of Midway.
They began to prepare it for American planes
with signs that read "Under New Management."
Their orders were to hold the field at all cost.
The enemy couldn't be allowed to retake it.
Then... the Japanese attacked.
The American fleet offshore was their first target.
PHILLIPS: The Japanese Navy came in and sank all of our escorts.
(artillery fire)
NARRATOR: Four heavy cruisers were lost,
along with more than 1,800 American sailors.
PHILLIPS: They could have sunk
our supply ships, too, but they didn't-- it was at night,
and they didn't know how successful they had been.
But the next day, all of our supplies left,
and we were... we were there without ever unloading
even our ten days of supplies that we had brought in with us.
We would have starved to death if there hadn't have been
a big supply of Japanese rice there.
NARRATOR: The Marines found themselves alone
and began to wonder if they, like the men on Bataan,
had simply been abandoned.
(gunfire)
With no support from the sea or the air,
the men were strafed and bombed daily...
...pounded by shells from Japanese ships offshore
and under attack from enemy troops
hidden in the jungle.
PHILLIPS: We understood that we might be expendable.
It had become sort of the established thing,
and, uh, we knew our country was not yet, uh, heavily armed.
And yes, we did, uh, feel that we might be expendable.
We really did.
(automatic gunfire)
(bomb whistling through air)
NARRATOR: Phillips was among those sent out to help recover
the bodies of Marines killed in an enemy ambush.
PHILLIPS: And it was about five miles out to the ambush site.
Well, the American bodies had been mutilated.
They had been beheaded and, uh,
had their genitals, uh, stuffed in their mouths, and...
(artillery fire, gunfire continue)
Uh...
our battalion never took a prisoner
that I know of after that.
I really... I really don't remember
that we ever took a prisoner.
(artillery fire)
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: On the late afternoon of August 20,
(aircraft approaching) - after 13 harrowing days on the island,
Phillips heard the sound of approaching aircraft
and took cover as usual.
But this time, the planes were American.
(man whistling) The Marines cheered.
They were no longer alone.
PHILLIPS: It looked like Uncle Sam was going to fight
for that miserable place, after all.
(distant gunfire)
NARRATQR: But at 2:00 a.m. the next morning,
just hours after the first American planes arrived,
a Japanese commander sent 900 fresh troops
against Marine positions along the western bank
of a twisting jungle creek.
(gunfire)
Its name was the llu River, but because the maps
the Marines had been issued had it wrong,
the fierce firefight that followed
would be remembered as the Battle of the Tenaru.
(artillery fire)
PHILLIPS: At that time on Guadalcanal,
almost every night there would be some event
that would arouse everyone, would keep everyone awake.
But this night it was different.
The whole world erupted,
and, uh... the lines became just a wall of fire.
We knew it was the real event.
NARRATOR: The Japanese commander was so certain
he could destroy the Marines
that in his diary he had filled in the entry for the day:
"21 August.
Enjoy the fruits of victory."
The Japanese kept coming all night.
"Banzai," they screamed.
"Marine, you die!"
The Marines just kept shooting.
(gunfire, echoed yells)
(gunfire continues)
PHILLIPS: We killed, I think, over 900 Japanese
and lost something like 34 Marines.
So it did our morale a great deal of good.
NARRATOR: For the first time,
the supposedly invincible Imperial Army had been stopped.
The humiliated commander,
who had predicted victory, shot himself.
But the Battle of the Tenaru settled nothing on Guadalcanal.
Japanese reinforcements poured onto the island,
and the fighting just went on and on.
(gunfire)
A confusing, vicious war of ambush
and counterattack.
A terrifying world
where random Japanese shells would explode
among the entrenched and embattled Americans.
PHILLIPS: Some men could take it,
and, uh, some just physically could not take it.
The sheer terror of knowing that the next one
is going to have your name on it--
when that goes on and on and on and on,
you... you get a strange feeling
in which you seem to become detached,
and you just think, "Well, maybe this will end
"and maybe it won't, and maybe we'll all be blown up
and maybe we won't, but who cares?"
And you... you learn to sort of live with it.
(explosion) It is just a matter of fate.
You will either survive if the Lord is willing
or you will not.
So there's really nothing you can do.
(explosions)
And you just take it.
(gunfire and artillery fire in distance)
NARRATOR: Private Sid Phillips turned 18 on September 2.
The next day, he got his first letter from home
since he'd sailed for Guadalcanal.
It was, he wrote back,
"the best birthday present possible for me."
In late September,
some American reinforcements finally made it through.
But nightly visits by fast-moving Japanese ships
the Marines called the "Tokyo Express"
kept the enemy on the island
supplied and reinforced as well.
(artillery fire)
NARRATOR: Twice, the Japanese,
determined to retake Henderson Field,
mounted full-scale assaults on the airstrip.
(artillery fire)
Twice, the Marines beat them back.
Thousands of Japanese were shot dead or blown to pieces.
(flies buzzing)
Week after week,
the battle for Guadalcanal ground on.
The Japanese were not the only enemy.
The stench of rotting vegetation and decomposing corpses
hung in the humid, lifeless air, clung to the men's clothes,
remained as a taste in the mouth.
Torrential rains turned campsites into swamps,
jungle paths into rivers of mud.
Clouds of mosquitoes spread malaria,
leaving hundreds helpless with chills and fever.
To the men on Guadalcanal,
Operation Shoestring had become Operation Pestilence.
"The typical Marine on the island,"
Sid Phillips remembered, "ran a fever,
"wore stinking dungarees, loathed twilight,
and wondered whether the U.S. Navy still existed."
On November 12,
the Japanese navy mounted one last major offensive,
aimed at reinforcing their forces
and dislodging the Americans on Guadalcanal.
A much smaller number of American ships steamed in
to try to stop them.
The naval battle that followed
went on for three days and three nights.
PHILLIPS: You could see the salvos of the ships,
and you could see the naval shells
going through the air like lightning bugs.
And you could see ships explode.
We didn't know if they were American or Japanese.
We didn't know who was winning or who was losing.
Sometimes when a ship would explode, it would...
the concussion would actually flap your clothes
miles and miles away.
But we did know that our fate was being decided
and we would, uh, we would...
sit there sort of mystified and horrified
by what was going on, because we knew
thousands of sailors were dying on one side or the other.
NARRATOR: Some 5,000 American sailors lost their lives
in the fighting off Guadalcanal--
so many that the casualty figures
were again kept from the public.
Among those who died
were five brothers from Fredericksburg, Iowa,
who all served on the cruiser Juneau--
Joseph, Francis, Albert,
Madison and George Sullivan.
But Japan lost two battleships,
23 other warships,
600 aircraft,
and thousands of sailors and airmen.
And most important to Sid Phillips
and the men on Guadalcanal, the enemy was no longer able
to resupply its forces on the island.
The Japanese continued to fight,
but it was clear the Americans would eventually prevail.
The last starving, desperate Japanese troops on the island
would not be killed, captured or evacuated
until February 1943.
21,000 Japanese soldiers were lost.
Guadalcanal would prove a crucial victory.
After six long months,
the Americans were beginning to learn how to beat
the Japanese-- not only in the air
and on the sea, but in the jungles,
where, over the next three years,
the fighting would only get worse.
Allied shipping lanes to Australia remained open.
And there was more good news.
American and Australian forces had also taken
the most important Japanese strongholds on New Guinea.
Japan's expansion had been stopped.
PHILLIPS: By the time we left Guadalcanal,
which was December 22nd of 1942--
we had been there since August the 7th--
everybody had lost at least 25 pounds.
Our clothes were in rags.
We were covered with sores.
And we had nearly starved to death two or three times.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We did not realize
how desperate the Marines were on Guadalcanal,
because the news never told us.
In fact, it was not 'til years later when Sidney came home
that we found that their food was down to fish heads and rice
and that he was down to 125 pounds
when they took him off of Guadalcanal.
NARRATOR: More than 1,700 Americans had died on Guadalcanal.
Another 4,700 were wounded,
and thousands more were seriously ill.
Sid Phillips had survived.
But his uncle Charles Tucker, a Navy pilot
who had flown in and out of Henderson Field, had not.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: When we lost Charlie, it made it very real to all of us.
And by that time, we had started losing boys in the neighborhood.
The boy up here on the corner was a Navy pilot
and he was killed.
The boy down the street was an Air Force pilot
and he was missing in action.
We just... they started disappearing all around us.
And my mother spent her time
going to visit the other mothers, consoling them.
And it was a very, very fearful time.
It really was.
You don't expect death among people your age.
Old people die.
And then, you begin to see
that it's your contemporaries are dying.
And therefore, it is just conceivable
that you might die, too.
("American Anthem" playing)
NARRATOR: Luverne, Minnesota, had been lucky so far.
No local family had lost a son in the war.
But in Sacramento,
Mrs. Lillian Cole had received news
that her son David had perished on the USS Arizona
at Pearl Harbor.
She had been asked by the government
"to keep secret for the present
the name of the ship on which he served."
Another Sacramento native, Airman Tom Burke,
died on a training mission in Puerto Rico,
devastating his younger brother, Earl.
In Waterbury, the family of Marine private Albert Boulanger
learned that he had been killed on Guadalcanal,
not far from where Sid Phillips of Mobile had been fighting.
Glenn Frazier was still a prisoner of the Japanese,
but the girl he loved back in Alabama had changed her mind
and was now waiting for him to come home to her.
Back in the summer of 1942,
a movie called Holiday Inn had opened.
In it, Bing Crosby introduced a new song by Irving Berlin.
(introduction to "White Christmas" playing)
♫ I'm dreaming ♫
♫ Of a white Christmas ♫
♫ Just like the ones I used to know... ♫
NARRATOR: It was an instant hit, and at Christmastime
American servicemen heard it
wherever they happened to be posted.
♫ ...and children listen ♫
♫ To hear sleigh bells in the snow ♫
♫ I'm dreaming ♫
♫ Of a white Christmas ♫
♫ With every Christmas card I write ♫
♫ May your days be merry and bright... ♫
NARRATOR: Japan's advance across the Pacific had been stopped
at Midway and Guadalcanal,
but at the end of America's first year at war,
Japan's Pacific empire still stretched 4,000 miles.
♫ I'm dreaming of a white Christmas ♫ On the other side of the world,
the Red Army had stopped the Nazi advance deep into Russia
at Stalingrad.
Allied troops had finally landed in North Africa.
But there they would soon face the full might
of the German army for the first time.
The Germans still occupied most of Europe,
still had designs on Britain
and, eventually, on the United States as well.
For Americans in uniform, a hometown Christmas
seemed very far away.
(final phrase of "White Christmas" plays)
(gentle piano melody playing)
NORAH JONES: ♫ All we've been given ♫
♫ By those who came before ♫
♫ The dream of a nation ♫
♫ Where freedom would endure ♫
♫ The work and prayers of centuries ♫
♫ Have brought us to this day ♫
♫ What shall be our legacy? ♫
♫ What will our children say? ♫
♫ Let them say of me ♫
♫ I was one who believed ♫
♫ In sharing the blessings I received ♫
♫ Let me know in my heart ♫
♫ When my days are through ♫
♫ America, America ♫
♫ I gave my best to you... ♫
♫ America ♫
♫ I gave my best to you. ♫
(birds chirping, distant machine gun firing)
NARRATOR: Back on November 4, 1942,
as Sid Phillips and the First Marine Division
continued to try to hold Henderson Field on Guadalcanal,
a unique force began landing 31 miles to the east.
The Second Marine Raider Battalion--
best known as "Carlson's Raiders" --
had orders to slip into the jungle behind enemy lines
and harass the 3,000-man Japanese force hidden there.
With them was a young man named Bill Lansford
from the Boyle Heights neighborhood
of East Los Angeles.
His absent father was a policeman.
His mother, Rosalinda Melendez, had come to California
from Juarez, Mexico.
LANSFORD: As a boy, I was not really aware of the Anglo world at all.
Principally I lived in Latino neighborhoods
and spoke Spanish at home
and knew very little English
until I was about 14 years of age.
I had actually wanted to join the Navy
because it had that mystique of going to foreign lands
and all that kind of stuff.
But the fact of the matter is
that I was considered too skinny and too little
to be in the Navy
and they rejected me over and over until I got to be
like a fly hanging around a gravy bowl there,
you know, the Navy station.
And one day I came out
and there was this enormous Marine in blues
and standing there, and he gave me a real pep talk.
He said, "Why don't you join the Marines?
They're the best outfit there is."
And I thought, "Well, the Navy doesn't want me;
I'll try them," you know.
So in a way, it was the best choice I ever made in my life.
NARRATOR: At first, like many Latinos,
he did not feel entirely welcome in the Marine Corps.
I think it was Little Texas in the Marine Corps,
and as you know, Texans and Mexicans didn't...
weren't exactly bosom buddies in those days.
As the war advanced and we went on through,
these Texan guys began seeing
that we weren't what they thought we were.
And we began seeing
that they weren't what we thought they were.
And being Marines was kind of a melting pot,
and we all got together.
It was like the... a mini United States, you know,
where you got Jews, you got Italians, you got Indians,
and they all learn to live together.
(explosion, men shouting)
The Latinos have a culture just as the Japanese had, you know,
their own form of Bushido code, which is not as extreme
but certainly is just as firm in their nature.
And that's that they want to prove
that they're up to whatever job is given to them.
And they want to show that they're as patriotic as anybody,
as some blue-eyed blond guy.
NARRATOR: Lansford soon heard about the Second Raider Battalion,
an elite commando unit, and decided to volunteer.
Its commander, Lt. Colonel Evans F. Carlson,
was a minister's son with a crusader's zeal.
Carlson's motto was "Gung ho"-- Chinese for "Work together."
Officers were called by their first names
and lived just as their men did.
Decisions were made collectively, by consensus.
LANSFORD: Colonel Carlson was a visionary...
And he understood guerrilla warfare perfectly.
He had made a lifelong study of it and his...
I think his hero was Lawrence of Arabia.
NARRATOR: Carlson's second in command
was the oldest son of the president of the United States,
James Roosevelt.
LANSFORD: I think he may have been nearsighted,
and he had to wear special shoes,
but he certainly never asked and never got any special treatment.
PETE ARIAS: He used to stand in line with the rest of the troops.
When we went to eat, he'd stand in line
with his utensils and stuff like that,
and, uh, he was just another guy as far as I was concerned.
NARRATOR: Also serving with the Raiders
was a farmer's son from Los Angeles County,
Pete Arias of C Company,
who had joined up to get away from home.
Within hours of landing on Guadalcanal,
the Raiders moved into the jungle, already on the hunt.
Their objective was to terrify and bewilder the enemy,
mounting surprise attacks from the rear,
then melting away again, living off the land.
(explosion)
LANSFORD: The Japanese had never been defeated.
You know, they had defeated the Russians in 1904,
and from that time on they had been considered
the finest jungle troops and light troops.
They had a sense of being superior.
They held the American soldiers in contempt.
They thought we were a bunch of softies.
They thought that we could not make the sacrifices
that the Japanese could-- the Bushido code and all that stuff.
And that superiority on the part of the Japanese
is one of the things that defeated them,
because the last thing they expected
was any Americans to be behind their lines.
And they couldn't believe it.
And in the beginning
they thought we were just small patrols
that had bumped into them.
They didn't realize they were up against an organized force.
And we... we couldn't take them on, you know, face to face.
You know, there were too many of them.
So we kept hitting their flanks and hitting their rear end
and attacking them where they thought we weren't going to be,
and chopping away at them.
And it was just that simple.
It was like chopping pieces of an animal until the animal died.
NARRATOR: Most of the fighting was brief, violent and at close quarters.
Sometimes just a few feet separated the Americans
from the enemy.
ARIAS: The Raiders were in there,
we was in there to take care of people, you know.
If we ran into them, we'd take care of them,
and that... that's the way it was.
But there was a lot of Japs, though.
We used to run into them every other day.
Well, they used to tell us
that, uh... the Japanese couldn't see very far.
But I... they could see far enough to kill you.
NARRATOR: One day, Pete Arias and his squad
were ordered to cross a clearing
on the outskirts of a deserted village.
ARIAS: My corporal-he was our squad leader-- he says, uh,
"I don't think we ought to go across that field."
So here comes the captain, he says, the company commander,
he says, "Hey, what's the holdup?"
And this, uh, then this squad leader of mine says,
"Hey, Captain, I don't think we ought to cross this field."
And the captain says, "Aw, go ahead."
This machine gun opened up, right in front of us.
It wiped out my squad.
My platoon leader, he said, "Move your squad."
I says, "I ain't got no squad."
We lost a lot of people there.
NARRATOR: In the fighting that followed,
some of the Raiders were captured,
then tortured and mutilated.
LANSFORD: And we could hear them, you know, crying out
while they were being tortured.
And the following day, after the battle
and after we discovered our guys, our Raider guys,
staked to the ground and, you know,
in effect tortured, cut up,
we had captured, I think, five guys.
When we were assembled there after the battle, Carlson said,
"Did anybody lose a good friend in the battle yesterday?"
And some guys raised their hands.
And then he said, "Okay, take these guys out
and do what you have to do."
So some of the guys took them out and killed them.
Just took them in the jungle and shot them.
We were supposed to be good guys and...
there were no reporters with us.
So the word never got out until much later
that that had happened, and some people still deny it.
But I was there and I'm telling you that... that we did it.
NARRATOR: What came to be called the "Long Patrol"
went on for 30 brutal days.
Carlson's Raiders lost 34 men,
but they killed almost 500 Japanese.
A few months later, the American guerrillas would fight again
in the Solomon Islands, this time on Bougainville.
LANSFORD: Bougainville was the worst place I've ever been.
If there really is a hell,
I mean it's got to be like Bougainville.
It just... the island was a pile of pestilence.
One night we were moving into a position up the Piva Trail,
and it was very dark.
I mean you couldn't... literally couldn't see your hand
in front of your face.
We were moving in there and I had a machine gun
and, uh, my assistant gunner and I set up the gun.
And we didn't know where we were.
We didn't know where the enemy was
except that he was supposed to be right in front of us.
And as we were setting up the gun, we heard a shot,
just one shot.
And I heard a guy go... (grunts).
You know, he, like, caught his breath.
And, uh, you know, we lay there for a long time.
Then we began to hear this guy moaning.
The moans became louder and then he became delirious
and then he began to call for his mother.
I thought that was only in the movies, but it isn't.
And, uh, it was a terrible night.
And then, you know, we were trying to sleep and we couldn't,
and, uh, and I began thinking,
"Jesus Christ, why don't you die, goddammit.
You know, we got to sleep."
You know, your mind gets crazy after a while
under those conditions.
And he continued to moan and...
until near morning when he died.
When it was daylight, we were told to withdraw from there.
And they had this guy in a poncho,
and they were dropping him into one of the holes
that the people in the back had dug.
And I said, "Who is the guy?"
He told me the name of... of the guy
and it was, you know, my best friend.
And he had been about three or four guys away from me,
and it was an accidental discharge.
Somebody had accidentally fired a shot as he hit the deck,
and the rifle butt hit the deck and he fired
and it was the only shot fired that night
and he... it killed him.
And, you know, I just, you know, I felt like hell.
I really felt that.
Because of hearing him and the guilt feeling, you know,
that I kept saying, "Why don't you die, for Christ sakes."
And the other guys told me that they felt the same way.
We were so tired, we just wanted to sleep.
When you wish a guy dead
and it turns out to be your best friend, you know,
it's... the pits.