(distant birds calling)
(distant car horn honking)
(birds chirping)
NARRATOR: Early in 1943, an envelope from the War Department arrived
at 1032 North Main Street in Waterbury, Connecticut,
the home of the Ciarlo family.
They knew it was coming.
There were three boys in the family.
Two were exempt from the draft:
Dom, married with one child and another on the way;
and Tom, just 16 and still too young to go.
But the middle son, Corado, was 19 and single,
working at Waterbury Steel Ball,
a perfect candidate for the army.
His family and friends called him "Babe."
OLGA CIARLO: And he was the one to go.
Course, it was a shock to all of us,
and my mother cried forever.
Forever.
But that's the way the war was.
So... it was a tough time.
And not only that, but my father had passed away
in, uh, 1937.
My mother was very, very heartbroken
at that time already.
My mother would take the bus
and go up to the cemetery all by herself.
She couldn't speak a word of English.
And all she could tell the man on the bus was, "Cemetery."
And then to know that my brother was going off to war,
she was scared.
She didn't want to go through this all over again, so...
It was hard times, very hard times.
(harp playing arpeggios)
(big band playing "Let's Get Lost" introduction)
RADIO ANNOUNCER: Here's number six,
a song by Frank Sinatra.
♫ Let's get lost... ♫
CORADO (dramatized): "May 9, 1943.
"Dearest Morn and family,
"We are listening to the Lucky Strike program,
"and Frank Sinatra is singing 'Let's Get Lost,'
"and what a voice he's got.
"Tell Mom not to worry about me,
'cause I'll be home soon enough."
"I am calling Mom to give her Mother's Day greetings.
"I will have to wait five or six hours
for the call to go through, but it is worth it."
♫ Let's defrost... ♫
"From now until I get through with my basic training,
"I will be pretty busy,
"so if Mom doesn't hear from me for a few days,
"you explain to her that I am all right,
"but just busy.
Love, Babe."
(Sinatra scatting softly)
(song ends)
(distant gunfire)
(nearby gunfire)
NARRATOR: By January of 1943,
Americans had been at war for more than a year.
The Navy had stopped the Japanese advance
at the Battle of Midway.
The Marines had taken Guadalcanal
in the Solomon Islands,
and American and Australian forces
had defeated the Japanese at Buna
on the island of Papua New Guinea.
(artillery fire)
But the 4,000-mile march toward the Japanese home islands
was just beginning.
And thousands of Americans
were still held prisoner by the Japanese,
including nine-year-old Sascha Weinzheimer,
whose family came from the Sacramento Valley;
and Corporal Glenn Frazier, from Ft. Deposit, Alabama.
Meanwhile, in the snows around Stalingrad,
Hitler's dream of expanding his empire eastward across Russia
was ending in catastrophe
as the Red Army annihilated his surrounded armies.
(artillery fire and automatic gunfire)
But the Germans, with their vast war machine,
still occupied most of Western Europe,
and the Allies had not yet been able to agree on a plan
or a timetable to dislodge them.
For the time being, they would have to be content
to nip at the edges of Hitler's enormous domain.
American troops were now ashore in North Africa,
ready to test themselves for the first time
against the German and Italian armies.
And American airmen,
including Earl Burke of Sacramento, California,
would defy preposterous odds
and begin to bring the war to the heart of Germany itself.
For the people of Mobile, Alabama,
Luverne, Minnesota,
Sacramento, California,
Waterbury, Connecticut,
and every other town in America,
the war would dictate the rhythm and pace of life
in ways they could not have imagined a year before.
And the sense of national purpose
Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal had brought to the battle
against the Great Depression
was now fully focused on winning this war.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: I do not prophesy
when this war will end.
But I do believe that this year of 1943...
will give to the United Nations a very substantial advance
along the roads that lead to Berlin
and Rome and Tokyo.
(applause)
A tremendous, costly, long enduring task,
in peace as well as in war,
is still ahead of us.
But as we face that continuing task,
we may know that the state of this nation is good,
the heart of this nation is sound,
the spirit of this nation is strong,
the faith of this nation is eternal.
(applause)
(applause fading)
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Roosevelt carried
a real message of confidence with his voice.
He gave us all the confidence
that we could do anything he asked us to do,
and certainly the boys could do anything he asked them to do.
And he was the powerful driving force.
Now, England had Churchill...
...but we had Roosevelt.
And, from the time he announced Pearl Harbor
and announced that we would go to war,
we were all behind him.
(Benny Goodman's band playing "in a Sentimental Mood")
WARD CHAMBERLIN: The lucky thing was that...
the American army didn't get its first taste of battle
going across the channel, the way some people wanted us to.
They had to go through that... that North African thing,
which was a learning experience and a very expensive one.
Our army got to be goddamn good,
but at the beginning they were like anybody else--
they weren't too good at it.
(song ends)
(fanfare plays)
NARRATOR: At an Allied conference in Casablanca in January 1943,
everything went well for the cameras,
and President Roosevelt
and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
announced they would accept nothing less
than unconditional surrender from the enemy.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: ...unconditional surrender.
NARRATOR: But behind the scenes, both men were concerned.
The Allies were still trying to find ways to work together.
(distant artillery fire) The previous November,
Allied troops under General Dwight Eisenhower
had made coordinated landings in Morocco and Algeria
without meeting much resistance.
But Hitler strengthened his forces in neighboring Tunisia.
Eisenhower's troops were meant to race east
to engage the enemy,
while British General Bernard Montgomery
and his Eighth Army
pursued German General Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps
westward from Egypt.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Tunisia, next-door to Italian Libya,
is at the rear of the Axis army.
It's the next objective for the American half
of the nutcracker campaign, closing in on Rommel
from the west as the British smash from the east.
The aim is to chase the Axis out of North Africa,
threaten Italy
and other Nazi-dominated territories in Europe,
and open shorter supply lines to Russia.
That's the meaning of the American drive to Tunis.
(wind whistling)
NARRATOR: After two months of sporadic fighting,
the battle for North Africa suddenly intensified.
(artillery fire)
(men shouting, explosions)
On February 14, Rommel sent his seasoned veterans
against the untested, poorly led, and ill-equipped Americans.
His goal, he said, was to instill in them
"an inferiority complex of no mean order."
And for a time,
he succeeded.
(explosions and gunfire become distant)
With the American forces was Private Charles Mann,
a farmer's son from Luverne, Minnesota.
CHARLES MANN: It was good, I guess, that you were afraid,
but it did not interfere with what your real thinking was
because you had one idea
and that was that you was gonna make it.
NARRATOR: Rommel's forces quickly overwhelmed the Americans
whose armor proved no match for German panzers.
Some soldiers called the Allied tanks "Ronsons,"
after the cigarette lighter,
for their propensity to burst instantly into flame when hit.
(heart beating)
Stuka dive-bombers screamed down upon the Americans.
Some men held, others panicked.
Survivors fled westward across the open plain.
They would not stop for 50 miles.
CHAMBERLIN: They didn't know what the hell they were doing.
Guys never been under fire before,
and, uh, when they got hit, they didn't know what to do,
and they retreated,
and they had terrible leadership.
It was chaos.
And war's always chaos.
The commander of the American troops there
was a visible coward.
He built a... a, uh...
headquarters for himself in a rock chamber
some 20 miles back from the line
With the argument that he could communicate better from there.
So, he was appalling.
NARRATOR: After beating back two American counterattacks,
the Germans poured westward through the Kasserine Pass,
gateway to Algeria,
threatening the Allies' main supply base at Tebessa.
(artillery fire)
(explosions, men shouting)
(automatic gunfire)
(men shouting)
In two weeks of fighting, 6,000 Americans were lost.
45 soldiers from the little town of Red Oak, Iowa,
were killed or reported missing.
A third of those who lived
were victims of neuropsychiatric disorders
brought on by the first experience of battle
for which they were totally unprepared.
2,400 surrendered.
The Americans simply didn't know how to fight,
a British commander said,
and if they didn't learn quickly,
they "will play no useful part whatsoever"
in the invasion of Europe.
General Eisenhower agreed.
"Our operations to date," he confided grimly to a friend,
"will be condemned in their entirety
by all War College classes for the next 25 years."
The correspondent Ernie Pyle was with the troops
and struggled to make sense of what he'd seen.
PYLE (dramatized): "You folks at home must be disappointed
at what happened to our American troops in Tunisia."
"Personally, I feel that some such setback as this--
"tragic though it is for many Americans,
"for whom it is now too late--
is not entirely a bad thing for us."
"It's all right to have a good opinion of yourself,
"but we Americans are so smug with our cockiness.
"We somehow feel that just because we're Americans
we can whip our weight in Wildcats."
FUSSELL: But I think every ground war has to begin that way
because what's going to happen to people is so unthinkable.
So it's only after you've been in it a little while
that you're capable of understanding
what's happening well enough to do well at it.
And you have to do well at it.
NARRATOR: The Americans pulled themselves together.
Air strikes staggered the German advance.
American artillery
moved in to hammer German tank columns
with howitzer shells.
The enemy was running out of ammunition, food, gasoline,
while the Allies were well-supplied
with everything they needed to keep fighting.
Fearing a counterattack,
Rommel pulled back through the Kasserine Pass.
Eisenhower replaced his inept commander
with a Major General named George S. Patton,
who would transform the beleaguered Second Corps
into a determined, capable force.
MANN: It was purely a matter of Patton
using different tactics to beat them suckers.
That's what it amounted to.
We'd done so poorly towards, uh, Rommel's forces,
but next time around we'd done it right.
NARRATOR: Now the Allies pushed forward,
surrounding the German and Italian armies
on Cape Bon in northern Tunisia.
(loud explosions and gunfire)
On May 12, after three more months of fighting,
the last Axis troops in North Africa surrendered--
a quarter of a million men.
(Benny Goodman's band playing "in a Sentimental Mood")
The lessons the Allies had learned had come hard:
76,000 men had been lost,
including Captain Richards Aldridge,
a flyer from Mobile, who was reported missing,
and Private Charles Mann from Luverne,
who had been wounded in the neck by shrapnel.
MANN: I bled like a stuck hog.
If that had been an inch higher or lower,
I'd have had it.
NARRATOR: The prolonged six-month campaign in North Africa
had forced the Allies to postpone the planned invasion
of France once again--
from August until spring of the following year.
But the Allies had proven
that they could work together toward victory.
And the inexperienced Americans
were beginning to learn how to fight.
("In a Sentimental Mood" continues playing)
PYLE (dramatized): "The most vivid change in our men
"is the casual and workshop manner
"in which they now talk about killing.
"They have made the psychological transition
"from the normal belief that taking human life is sinful
"over to a new, professional outlook
"where killing is a craft.
"To them, now, there is nothing morally wrong about killing.
"In fact, it is an admirable thing.
"So you at home need never be ashamed
"of our American fighters.
"The greatest disservice you folks at home can do
"for our men over here
"is to believe we are at last over the hump.
"For actually-- and over here we all know it--
the worst is yet to come."
Ernie Pyle.
(Aaron Copland's "Music for Movies" plays)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: An army of 150,000 men, women, and children
invaded an American city--
whites, Negroes, Indians, Creoles, Cajuns.
They came from every corner of the land,
their roots in every curve of the globe--
Moscow, Indiana; Warsaw, North Dakota; Hamburg, California;
Milan, Missouri; Baghdad, Kentucky.
Some came out of patriotism, some out of grim necessity,
some for a richer life.
All came to do a war job.
This could be any one of a hundred
great American war centers.
Ithappens to be Mobile, Alabama,
but the story is the same in every war town in America.
NARRATOR: The chronic unemployment that had eaten at Mobile
and every other American town for more than a decade
during the Depression was over.
(drums beating intro to "Sing, Sing, Sing")
Idle factories were back in business.
(Benny Goodman's band playing "Sing, Sing, Sing")
Mass production was an American invention,
but now it reached levels
its inventors could never have imagined.
Nearly all manufacturing was converted to the war effort.
("Sing, Sing, Sing" continues playing)
In 1941, more than three million cars had been manufactured
in the United States.
Only 139 more were made during the entire war.
Instead, Chrysler made fuselages.
General Motors made airplane engines,
guns, trucks, and tanks.
And at its vast Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan--
67 acres of assembly lines under a single roof
that one observer called
"the Grand Canyon of the mechanized world"--
the Ford Motor Company performed something like a miracle
24 hours a day.
The average Ford car had some 15,000 parts.
The B-24 Liberator long-range bomber had 1,550,000 parts.
One came off the line at Willow Run every 63 minutes.
If the American military wasn't yet quite equal
to the Germans or the Japanese,
American workers would soon be able to build ships and planes
faster than the enemy could sink them or shoot them down.
By the end of the war,
more than one-half of all the industrial production
in the world would take place in the United States.
(Count Basie's "The Basie Boogie" playing)
Mobile was among
the fastest-growing of all American war towns.
Even before the war began,
powerful Democratic Congressman Frank Boykin landed his city
a $26 million defense contract that transformed
the municipal airport into Brookley Field,
a major Army Air Force supply depot
and bomber modification center
that provided 17,000 civilian jobs.
In 1940, Gulf Shipbuilding had had 240 employees.
By 1943, it had 11,600.
In the same period,
Alabama Dry Dock went from 1,000 workers to almost 30,000.
They included Hank Williams, the future country music star,
and the parents of future home run hitter Hank Aaron.
CLYDE ODUM: It was seven days a week.
And during the war when it was so strong,
it was 12-hour days, five days a week, ten hours on Saturday.
Eight hours on Sunday-- you felt like you've had a week off.
There was such an influx of people
that they got on each other's nerves.
And there wasn't enough, uh, watering holes
to entertain everybody.
And so they'd get out and have fights and drink
and all that kind of stuff.
NARRATOR: African-Americans streamed into Mobile
from all over the South in search of defense work
and a fresh start.
They found both.
But they also found the same kind of discrimination
they had known at home.
JOHN GRAY: Mobile was a pretty fair-minded city.
And before this time, whites and blacks got along pretty good
as long as you had the status quo.
Uh, but when blacks began to get homes,
to buy homes and to ride in big cars,
uh, it turned some people off.
The policemen would stop you and give you a ticket.
My cousin got a ticket
for driving 16 miles an hour in a 15-mile zone.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: 150,000 people, ten full military divisions--
the civilian equivalent of Rommel's entire African army--
bivouacked without warning in the narrow confines
of one peaceful Southern city.
Less than three years ago, you might have walked blocks
in Mobile without encountering a person.
Today you stop to scratch yourhead
and a line forms behind you.
No wonder there's such a chaos and congestion of traffic.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Mobile became so crowded
in six months
that people were living in vacant lots.
They put up tents in vacant lots.
People went into the boarding houses,
and one room would hold as many as four men.
(newsreel narration continues)
They would sleep
for so many hours,
get up and leave the bed,
go to work and another man would take the bed.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: This was a neighborhood grocery store.
These girls: welders, checkers, and machinists.
NARRATOR: Emma Belle Petcher was from the tiny town of Millry, Alabama.
Most of her girlfriends had taken secretarial jobs
once they'd gotten out of high school,
but Emma Belle, like her father, loved to take things apart.
PETCHER: I always fixed my own appliances at home, growing up.
The washing machine got a nail in the pump.
I took the pump apart and took the nail out
of the housing of the pump and, you know, run...
I didn't have the patience to call in a repairman
who would be, maybe, three days later and he wouldn't tell you
morning or evening, so I'd empty the washing machine,
turn it upside down, take the screwdrivers
and... because I knew how to do all this stuff.
("Pistol Packin' Mama" by Jimmie Lunceford & His Orchestra plays)
So, I packed my little cardboard suitcase and got on the bus
and went to Mobile.
So they put me in a school to learn airplane accessories.
That was starters, generators,
alternators and some other thing.
So we did those parts, just those little instruments,
over and over and over and over until graduation.
We had to almost put them together blindfolded.
NARRATOR: Petcher breezed through all her tests
and got a job working on airplanes.
By 1943, six million women had entered the workforce,
and nearly half of them were working in defense plants.
LIFE magazine paid tribute to the mythical "Rosie the Riveter"
as "neither drudge nor slave, but the heroine of a new order."
In Mobile, 2,500 women worked at Alabama Dry Dock,
1,200 at Gulf Shipbuilding and 750 at Brookley Field,
where Emma Belle Petcher worked her way up to inspector,
responsible for quality control.
PETCHER: You would be assigned X number of planes
to be responsible for.
I was to inspect the torque in the screws in the wings,
and go into the gas tanks,
and crawl up in the wings with flashlights.
Well, I was so conscientious, I just didn't make the mistakes.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: I worked at the government nursery school
which was downtown
in Christ Church Rectory, and we had the children
of the women that worked in the shipyards.
"Rosie the Riveter" would come bring her child
in all of her headgear
and her togs that she did her riveting in
and drop her precious little baby off
and go down and work all day and come back at 5:00
and pick the child up.
NARRATOR: So many children flooded into Mobile that its overrun schools
were pronounced the worst in the nation
by the U.S. Office of Education.
Some native citizens of Mobile were openly scornful
of the newcomers.
A schoolteacher called them "the lowest type of poor whites,
"these workers flocking in from the backwoods.
"They prefer to live in shacks and go barefoot.
"They let their kids run wild on the streets.
I only hope we can get rid of them after the war."
PETCHER: No one did it verbally, or to you,
but the air of the old aristocratic Mobile people
were really, you know... had to put up with a lot.
PHILLIPS: Well, in Mobile, the people that came here
to work in the shipyards came from the small towns.
So we considered them rednecks.
And they really weren't; they were very fine Americans.
But they were more of our farming type of Southerner.
But they adjusted quickly.
PETCHER: But, you know, everybody was thrown into it together.
Whether they liked it or not.
We were all together.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: And the story of Mobile
is the story of every American war town.
(stirring music plays)
BABE CIARLO (dramatized): "Dearest Mom and family,
"I am feeling fine
"and I hope to hear the same from all of you, always.
"I am at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia.
"I would have called you up,
"but there are no public telephones at the camp.
"I feel bad because I didn't call Mom up,
"but I thought for sure
"that I would go to New York or Massachusetts.
"I would have done anything in the world
"to be home that weekend.
"From here I don't know where we are going and when we are going,
"but I am almost positive it is overseas.
"There is nothing to worry about,
"because I will not see action for a long time
"and the war will be over soon.
Love, Babe."
LUDWIG WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "To the War Department, Washington, D.C.
"Can you furnish me with the exact status of my two sons--
"Walter Weinzheimer and Conrad Ludwig Weinzheimer--
"who were American citizens but resided in the Philippines
"at the outbreak of the war?
"Stop.
"Are they military or civilian prisoners,
"dead or alive or missing?
"Stop.
"Such information is urgently needed.
"Ludwig Weinzheimer--
Thornton Farms; Thornton, California."
NARRATOR: Ludwig Weinzheimer was a well-to-do farmer
in the Sacramento Valley.
Just before Pearl Harbor,
his daughter-in-law had written to him from Manila,
asking if his sons and their families,
including his granddaughter Sascha,
shouldn't come home to California.
War seemed very close.
The old man told them all to stay where they were.
The rumors of war were exaggerated, he said.
Now, filled with guilt, he was frantic to find out
what had happened to his two sons and their families.
He wrote to everyone he could think of--
old friends, the Red Cross,
the War Department, the State Department.
In October,
the State Department told him
the family had been reported
to be in the Santo Tomas internment Camp in Manila,
but it could provide no further information.
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "On February 15, 1943,
"a few days after my tenth birthday,
"we moved into the Santo Tomas Camp.
"We left Nila, our amah, crying loudly.
"After bowing to the sentry on duty,
we went through the gate, where Daddy was waiting for us."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
NARRATOR: For almost 14 months after Manila fell to the Japanese,
Sascha Weinzheimer, her mother, her sister Doris,
and her younger brother Buddy, had managed
to stay out of the camp the Japanese had established
for foreign civilians on the campus of Santo Tomas University
on the city's outskirts.
But after Sascha reported having seen
Japanese soldiers drowning a small Filipino boy,
her mother decided they would be safer
in the prison than outside it.
Their father had been imprisoned there for more than a year--
so long that his young son no longer recognized him.
There were now some 4,000 prisoners at Santo Tomas--
American and British, Dutch and Norwegian, Polish and French.
Immediately, the Japanese didn't want
to have anything to do with us.
They weren't going to feed us.
They weren't going to follow the Geneva Convention rules.
So you were left to fend for yourself.
NARRATOR: The Philippine Red Cross provided rice.
Filipino friends of the internees
passed canned foods and fresh vegetables through the fence.
Families were permitted to build themselves bamboo shanties
with palm leaves for roofs in which to spend the day.
At night, they were herded into crowded dormitories
in the main building.
Everyone was assigned a job.
SASCHA (dramatized): "It was funny to see bank presidents
"and other men like that
"cleaning toilets and garbage cans.
"Mother had toilet duty four times a week.
"There were all kinds of people in camp.
"Some were hard workers, like Daddy.
"Others were gripers who liked to talk a lot
and goldbricks who didn't do anything at all."
NARRATOR: The prisoners organized churches, schools, police,
even a "morality patrol,"
meant to keep teenagers from disappearing together
into dark corners.
Your world becomes very small.
And you don't think beyond your little environment,
because everything that's important to you is right there.
It's not in the States.
It's not back at the plantation.
It's right there.
So you have to make do with what you can in this small sphere.
SASCHA (dramatized): "We got our chow from the lines in tin cans.
"Then we would eat in our shanty,
"and Mother said that no matter what happened
"we would eat off our bridge table
"with a tablecloth with our colored dishes
and a small bowl of flowers so long as we could."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
ROBERT KASHIWAGI: As far as I'm concerned, I was born here.
And according to the Constitution
that I studied in school, that I had the Bill of Rights
that should, should have backed me up.
And until the very minute I got
onto the evacuation train,
I says, "It can't be.
How can they do that to an American citizen?"
(Duke Ellington's "Solitude" plays)
NARRATOR: Robert Kashiwagi was the 23-year-old son
of an immigrant farmer, but he spoke no Japanese,
knew no other Japanese-American family,
and had grown up in the California countryside,
15 miles from Sacramento.
He had been in a sanitarium
being treated for a lung condition
when Executive Order 9066 went into effect.
KASHIWAGI: Then my doctor approached me and says,
"I don't know what to do," he says.
"You're bedridden, but I can't keep you here.
The law won't allow me."
And I said, "Well, okay, I'll make it easier for you.
"I'll join the family
and I'll go to camp with my family," which I did.
And I couldn't help the family pack.
All I could do was just go along as excess baggage.
NARRATOR: All 110,000 Japanese-Americans from the West Coast
were now living in ten hastily-constructed
inland "relocation centers."
KASHIWAGI: The camp that I had to go to was Amaohe, out in Colorado.
And it hit at 25 below zero.
All we had was one little potbellied stove
in each little apartment
with a 60-watt light bulb on the ceiling.
The barracks were just makeshift barracks,
and the boards were not matching together.
And there were big cracks, and the wind was coming in.
And we stuffed newspapers and things
in the cracks to keep the elements out.
We had to learn how to live all over again.
NARRATOR: Armed guards and barbed wire insured that no one got out.
Several who tried were shot.
SUSUMU SATOW: To walk into a double-security fence
with guard tower looking down
with guns...
It's not a good feeling.
You know, you wonder, "Gee, how, how could this be happening?"
But it's happening.
And so you kind of accept that, I guess.
("Body and Soul" by Benny Goodman plays)
NARRATOR: Wherever they were sent,
however they were made to live,
the internees acted like the Americans they were.
SATOW: You, of course, meet new people...
and you play cards...
and play baseball.
First thing we did was to form a baseball league.
We had games almost every night.
ASAKO TOKUNO: It was democracy
on a small scale in action.
And we made it work, you know, because everybody cooperated
and we knew we were going to be living together
for who knows how long.
NARRATOR: LIFE magazine claimed the evacuees had been
"cheerful" about giving up their homes and livelihoods.
After all, it said,
"All they forfeit is their freedom."
SAM HYNES: Dying is different for pilots,
for aviation personnel.
On the ground, in the infantry, there's a corpse.
It might be blown apart, but there's a foot
or an arm or something.
And it's very close.
In aviation, the planes tend to go away and not come back.
Even if someone dies in the air with you,
the plane explodes, it falls to the ground
at a place you'll never see.
I had a number of friends killed during the war...
...but I never saw any of their bodies.
EARL BURKE: The war came home to my family
on a very gut level.
Uh, my uncle, Earl,
who lived in Sacramento called me one night and said,
"I want you to come over to my house."
He was only a couple blocks away, so I went over there.
And he showed me an article in the newspaper that said
there was a crash in Puerto Rico.
And my only brother I had, older brother,
was listed as killed in an airplane accident.
And we tried for 12 hours on the telephone to try to get
to Puerto Rico to confirm that this was, indeed, my brother.
And finally, somebody says,
"Yes, it was a Tom Burke from Sacramento."
Well, five days later, we got the telegram
telling that he had been killed.
So that's how my war came to us.
And there was no talking
about what had happened.
My parents were very stoic.
And I only heard my mother cry once.
It was in her bedroom, since she never cried in front of me.
So it was a tough thing for those two people.
For me, I lost a brother.
Yeah, damn it.
We're gonna do something about it.
Then I got the crazy idea that I was going to enlist
and win the war.
It was kind of for Tommy...
in a way.
Not so consciously.
I didn't say, "This is for you, Tom."
No, I never did that.
But, uh, I enlisted.
I'm glad I did.
(Benny Goodman's "On the Alamo" plays)
(troops shouting cadence)
NARRATOR: Earl Burke joined the Army
and trained first at Fort Lewis in Seattle,
where, he remembered, he learned "how to pick up cigarette butts,
"paint anything that didn't move
and salute anything that did."
Like his late brother,
he wanted to take part in the air war.
After serving at a base outside Reno, Nevada,
where he loaded bombs onto heavy bombers,
he was sent across the country to Camp Shanks, New Jersey,
and then on June 1, 1943,
boarded the Queen Mary,
part of the seemingly endless stream of Gls now headed
for England to prepare for the invasion of France.
Soon after he got there, he happened upon
two old friends from Sacramento,
twin brothers named Richard and Robert Egger.
BURKE: I was in a Red Cross hut on a base.
It was kind of a PX type of thing.
So as we were drinking beer and all that,
having a good time, they said,
"Well, why don't you get with us?"
They were tail and ball turret gunners on a B-17.
It sounded like fun.
What the heck, you know?
I was 19.
I could've had a lot of fun.
They seemed to be having a lot of fun.
They were not scared at all.
So I says, "Okay," so the next day I went down
and got an application and filled out the application.
And at that time, they were losing a lot of bombers.
They were losing 60 at a time.
They were losing over 600 men in a raid.
So they were taking anybody.
They were taking cooks.
They were taking truck drivers,
mechanics-- anybody they could get into an airplane.
Nothing was going to happen to me-- no way.
I'm 19 years old.
I'm going to conquer this world.
Nothing was going to happen to me, you know... no.
NARRATOR: Until the Allies were able to launch
their long-planned invasion of Europe,
the only way to weaken German power
on the continent was from the air.
Since bombing during the day attracted anti-aircraft fire
and swarms of German fighters,
the British preferred to fly their missions at night.
(explosion)
But when aerial surveys showed
that only one in five British bombs had fallen
within five miles of its intended industrial target,
their policy shifted
to what was called "area bombing."
Relentless nighttime raids on German cities,
intended to destroy not only factories,
but whole neighborhoods
and "break the spirit of the people."
While the British continued to bomb German cities at night,
the Americans decided to take on the much more dangerous task
of bombing defense industries by day.
The Americans believed the B-17--
their big, four-engine bomber--
superior to anything else their allies or the enemy had.
It was called the "Flying Fortress,"
because it was armed with as many as nine
.50-caliber machine guns,
and each plane was fitted out
with the revolutionary Norden bombsight,
said to be so accurate
it made it possible to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel
from 20,000 feet."
Around-the-clock bombing took a fearful toll.
In late July, British bombs
set off a whirling firestorm that burned
or asphyxiated at least 40,000 German civilians
in and around Hamburg,
taking almost as many lives in one week
as the German Luftwaffe had taken
in eight months of bombing Britain.
But the German will to resist
only intensified, just as the will of Londoners
had intensified during the Blitz.
Hamburg's factories
were soon back in business.
Meanwhile, American airmen
were suffering terrible losses.
MAN: Planes, 9:00.
I got my sights.
(engine roaring)
(artillery fire)
MAN: 317 out of control at 3:00.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke's friends from Sacramento,
the Egger twins,
would both be shot down in the coming months.
BURKE: The number of missions that you had to fly
before you were returned to the States
and/or given a non-combat job
was 25 at that point.
The average number of missions
flown in 1943 for a combat person
was only 14.
If you got to 14, you were usually dead.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke was now a member
of the 854th Chemical Warfare Company,
part of the 384th Bomb Group
in the U.S. Army's Eighth Air Force.
On September 16, 1943,
he clambered into the ball turret
for the first time.
Their target was the German submarine facilities at Nantes,
on the French coast.
BURKE: The ball turret is underneath the aircraft.
You put your knees up against your ears... almost.
Almost like a fetal position,
'cause you're up in there jammed in that little thing,
and you got these horrendous guns
in front of you, two of 'em.
Didn't pass my mind that I was getting into trouble...
...'til the first mission.
We're flying about 28,000 feet.
And, uh, the first time I tried my turret
to see whether I could fire, you know, possibly, uh...
do a reasonable job of tracking a fighter plane,
I didn't know my right foot from my left foot.
I thought I wanted the gun to go that way,
and I'd press up my right foot, it'd go that way.
And I didn't know where it was going.
I was so scared.
I didn't know what I was doing.
And pretty soon,
you know, before we got to the bombing area,
and the fighters started to come out,
uh, I learned my right foot from my left foot.
MAN: Two fighters, 6:00 up, coming in, diving out, chief.
(artillery fire)
(pilots speaking indistinctly)
NARRATOR: Earl Burke survived his first mission.
The raid and others like it
reduced French coastal towns to rubble.
"Not a dog or a cat survived in them," a German officer said,
but the concrete submarine pens that had been
the Americans' target remained intact.
BURKE: Well, the accuracy of our bombing
left much to be desired.
They said you could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel.
We couldn't drop a bomb in France
that hit anything, any target, in the beginning.
We just couldn't hit 'em.
NARRATOR: In August,
376 B-17s had conducted a massive raid on Schweinfurt
and Regensburg, Germany, hoping to smash
the heavily-defended factories that supplied ball bearings
to the Nazi war machine.
AIRMAN: Fighters, 10:00.
NARRATOR: It had been a disaster.
(artillery fire)
60 Flying Fortresses failed to return.
600 crewmen were lost.
The battered factories were again
back working round the clock.
And so the Allied command
ordered a second strike on Schweinfurt for October 14.
BURKE: We were briefed that we were going to Schweinfurt.
And you could have heard
all the people groan and moan... swear.
Nobody wanted to go back to Schweinfurt.
NARRATOR: Burke's squadron was ready before dawn.
BURKE: You were getting ready to go.
Those were the times you were more nervous and scared
to get into that airplane.
You did not want to get into that airplane.
But you did anyway.
You got in the airplane because your friends were
getting in the aircraft.
You didn't want to let your friends down.
Even though, you know...
didn't want to go.
NARRATOR: 283 B-17s took off into the fog
and headed for Schweinfurt.
Fighter escorts shielded them across Belgium,
then turned back before their fuel ran out.
Within minutes, hundreds of German fighters
rose up to meet them.
(rapid artillery fire)
BURKE: They came in ten abreast.
(artillery fire)
You see these little things wink.
And, as they wink, you know what's coming.
You're talking about a quarter pound of lead
each time you saw one of those winks.
(artillery fire)
Then they would stay off, say a thousand yards,
and they would lob... lob rockets at you.
You couldn't reach them
because your .50 caliber machine gun couldn't touch them.
That's why we needed the fighter escorts.
We were sitting ducks.
PILOT: B-17 in trouble...
1:00 high.
BURKE: When the bogeys were coming in,
you heard nine voices,
almost at once, talking to each other.
(overlapping voices)
BURKE: "Holy shit, look at that son of a bitch!"
PILOT: Don't yell on that intercom.
BURKE: And that's what we were hearing over my headphones,
because I couldn't hear the battle sounds at all.
(rapid gunfire)
"That asshole's shooting at me?"
(rapid gunfire)
"No, no way that guy's gonna shoot me."
(overlapping voices)
And you're up there, you're pressing
the little red button here.
And, uh, hope that he flies into it.
And I was up there flying two .50 caliber machine guns,
shooting rounds of shells about half an inch in diameter.
(rapid gunfire)
Lots of lead in the air.
PILOT: Going out... and out...
Take the shot, you guys...
One shot...
(indistinct radio transmission)
NARRATOR: As Earl Burke's battered formation approached its target,
the German fighters withdrew,
and American crews braced for yet another terror:
antiaircraft fire--
exploding shells that filled the air
with thousands of metal shards.
The Germans called it "flak."
PILOT: B-17 out of control at 3:00.
NARRATOR: Many more planes were hit
and never reached their target.
BURKE: And over Schweinfurt...
Bang.
Plexiglas on my right-hand side exploded.
My left-hand side exploded.
And a 20-millimeter shell had come up through my turret,
hitting me in the left arm.
Not breaking the arm, but smashing the bone...
tearing my jacket off,
and went up into the waist window
on the left-hand side, hit the stanchion
of the .50 caliber gun, and blew up.
Killed the waist gunner.
And here I was down in this ball turret
trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.
And, I have to say this,
my training as an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America
saved my arm that day.
Because I put a tourniquet around it, knew how to do that.
You know, to stop the flow of blood.
And, uh, then everything hunky-dory then.
And continued on flying in the ball turret.
So it's about 35, 40 degrees below zero.
And when blood flows out,
it freezes and drops down and rolls around on the bottom.
So the idea is to make sure that when you're at altitude,
you pick your blood up and throw it out.
Because if you didn't,
you'd have to mop it up when you got down. (chuckles)
But I fly... I flew that way
for around four, four and a half hours.
When I got hit, immediately I says,
"Oh, my goodness... my parents.
"My parents will get another telegram
telling either I was wounded or dead."
At that point, I didn't know which.
That was the first time I ever thought
what my being in the service
did to my parents.
And I had second thoughts then.
But it was too late.
PILOT: 1:00 high... coming around...
NARRATOR: German fighters returned
and attacked the bombers in Earl Burke's group
again and again,
all the way back to the English Channel.
(rapid gunfire)
The survivors landed wherever they could,
at airfields scattered all across England.
The second Schweinfurt raid was just as disastrous as the first.
60 more Fortresses had been shot down.
600 more men were lost
and hundreds more were wounded.
Surviving airmen remembered that day
as "Black Thursday."
We, uh, first were sent
to a bomber base to meet the B-17s
coming in shooting off red flares,
which meant there were wounded aboard.
The first one came in just right over the treetops.
We thought it was going to crash.
It skidded on the runway.
And I was in the ambulance.
We ran over there and ran in...
You had to crawl.
There was no way to get back to a B-17 standing up.
The tail gunner was dead.
He'd been, you know, just shot right through the head.
The copilot and the pilot had been in a fire.
The belly gunner was hurt.
They were all injured.
I guess that the, uh, plane that...
the German plane that fired on them
just riddled the whole plane.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke's injury kept him out of action for weeks.
But each time he or anyone else
returned to the air,
their odds of surviving the war grew longer.
BURKE: I kept away from making friends.
I did not make friends.
The reason is,
if you met a guy at the... at the PX and bought him a beer,
tomorrow he would be gone.
You know, and you kept saying, "I'm losing people."
So you locked yourself up.
(typewriter clacking)
AL MclNTOSH (dramatized): "Luverne, Minnesota.
"All of us use the phrase 'after the war' so much
"it almost becomes meaningless.
"The motorist uses it when he thinks of new tires,
"a new model car,
"and the right to drive as fast and as far as he pleases.
"But for all of us, although the words aren't often spoken,
it means the day when you boys come home."
"It means, if you had witnessed it--
"a portion of a little drama as we did this week--
"the ecstatic happiness and the wild gladness
of thousands of family reunions."
"The other morning an unshaven, weary uniformed man,
"with a string of gaily-colored ribbons on his breast,
"slipped off the morning train and was driven to his home.
"Instead of going in the front way,
"he went around the back, unnoticed.
Probably he just wanted to feast his eyes on home."
"His children were watching at the front,
"their noses almost boring holes in the window panes,
as they watched for a sign of Daddy."
"Nobody needs to describe their shrieks of joy
"when he walked in from the backdoor to surprise them.
"If you could have seen them later,
"hanging on to his hands for dear life
"as though they could hold him home forever,
you couldn't have helped getting a bit misty yourself."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
JIM SHERMAN: I think, particularly in Luverne,
there was this general feeling of we're in the right,
we're doing the right thing,
and all of the things that we're doing, collectively,
sort of brought a lot of people together.
It was in a totally different feeling
that I don't think can ever be duplicated, ever.
I just don't think that you could have that sense of oneness
that, that we had when we were growing up.
("There Shall Be No Night" by Duke Ellington plays)
NARRATOR: Almost a year before Pearl Harbor,
129 National Guardsmen from Rock County, Minnesota,
had found themselves called to active duty.
They were eventually sent to Alaska,
to help protect Fort Greely on Kodiak Island.
SHERMAN: And I was totally confused.
I thought that was where they made cameras.
I thought it was Kodak.
And I couldn't, for the life of me,
figure out why all these guys from Luverne were going
to wherever they made Kodak cameras.
NARRATOR: An auto dealer named Ryal Miller visited the men of Battery E
while hunting in Alaska
and filmed them with an eight-millimeter camera.
When he got back,
he showed his home movies at the Pix Theater
on Main Street in Luverne,
and families crowded in for a glimpse
of how their boys were doing.
(projector clacking)
♫ ♫
Afterwards,
people were encouraged to make their own home movies,
and to write greetings to their faraway friends
on a wrapping-paper letter that stretched 120 feet.
The town barber, Kay Aanenson,
whose nephew Quentin had just joined the Army Air Force,
had helped organize the letter writing.
VERNON FREMSTAND (dramatized): "Dear Kay and everybody,
"I wanted to let you know
"that the battery received the swell letter.
"The boys are really having a time reading it.
"They're on their hands and knees and have the paper strung
"from one end of the barracks to the other.
"It's things like this that make us feel pretty darn good.
"In case you don't remember me,
"I used to sling hash in Gimm and Byrnes restaurant.
"I was the tall, slim fellow who used to work with Fred Gimm.
"Tell him hello for me.
"Well, Kay, I'll cut this off here.
"We'll promise to get all the damned Japs
"that stick their noses in around here.
"Thanks again from all of us.
"As ever,
Vernon A. Fremstand."
NARRATOR: Luverne, Minnesota, was about as far away from the action
as any place in America,
but each day the war's reality grew closer and closer.
SHERMAN: I delivered papers.
And all of the mothers who had somebody in the Army
would have a blue star in the window on the little flag.
And then, if... if the son or husband or whatever died,
they'd change that to a gold star.
The gold star mothers were those
who had lost a family member in the war.
And, uh, it was the fact that the star had changed.
But I was too young
to really understand the consequences of death.
(officer shouting in Japanese)
(troops shouting)
(officer shouting)
FRAZIER: We didn't know anything about the Japanese
when we were captured,
and they didn't know anything much about us.
We most certainly didn't know their language.
And to be able to be compelled or... or made obey an order
that you didn't even know what the order was--
a misunderstanding or not any, any idea--
and this depending on you maybe surviving...
NARRATOR: Glenn Frazier had endured the Bataan Death March
and weeks of imprisonment
at Camp O'Donnell in the Philippines,
where survival had seemed so unlikely,
he had thrown one of his dog tags into a mass grave
that held the bodies of many of his fellow prisoners.
That way, he thought, if they were ever recovered,
his family back in Alabama would find some comfort
in knowing what had happened to him.
As the Marines had struggled to take Guadalcanal,
Frazier was shipped all the way to Japan,
to a prisoner-of-war camp near Osaka.
FRAZIER: The number that the Japanese gave us
was like a serial number.
And mine was 6-32.
Roko naka san juni, is the number in Japanese.
And they put it on your clothes.
You had a little button saying, uh, 6-32.
And it was, uh, it was part of your records,
and I kept that number all the way through my days in Japan.
NARRATOR: The commandant told Frazier and his fellow prisoners
they would be treated well, as "guests of the Emperor."
They were not.
What little food they had was rotten.
Barracks were unheated.
The prisoners were divided into ten-man "shooting squads."
If one member tried to escape,
he and all the others would be shot.
Frazier developed double pneumonia and nearly died.
All the prisoners were made to work in Japanese foundries
or on the docks, loading and unloading ships.
Small children jeered and cursed
as they walked to and from the docks,
calling them cowards
for having surrendered, rather than fight to the death.
Guards beat the prisoners regularly,
and the smallest infraction of rules could prove fatal.
One day I was walking, coming back from a detail that day
on the streets of Osaka.
And the weather was cold.
And I put my hands in my pocket,
and I'm walking along with everybody else.
When we got to the camp and they checked us in,
this guard pointed me out and called me out.
And, uh, said, "Why did you have your hands in your pocket?"
I said, "Because I was cold."
So they took me in the commander's office
and the interpreter says,
"That's against the military code.
Soldiers do not walk with hands in pockets."
And I said, "Well, I'm not a soldier, I'm a prisoner of war."
So the commander banged his fist on his desk, and--
he was a major-- and got up and he says,
the interpreter said, "He don't like your attitude."
So he come up and he started arguing with me,
and I couldn't... I couldn't understand anything he said.
So he pulled his saber out
and he said "He was going to make an example of you,
"so that the other men will understand
they have to obey orders."
So he puts his sword to my throat, here,
and nicked me a little bit,
and I could feel a little bit of blood coming down.
So the interpreter said, "He's going to execute you."
So he asked me if I had any last words to say.
And I looked him straight in the eye and I said, "He can kill me,
"but he can not kill my spirit.
"And my spirit's going to lodge in his body
and haunt him until the day he dies."
And he had a frown come over his face
and took three steps backward and lowered his sword
and ordered me to be put
in a five-by-five-by-five cubicle in the ground.
I had never seen a Japanese back down
in front of any of his subordinates
until that particular time.
Because once they got to that point,
they went through with it, regardless of the results.
("One O'Clock Jump" by Count Basie plays)
NARRATOR: As the country mobilized for total war,
Americans at home were asked
by their government to do without
most of the luxuries and many of the necessities
they had begun to take for granted.
Everything seemed to be rationed or in short supply:
gasoline and fuel oil and rubber;
bobby pins and zippers and tin foil;
shoes and whiskey and chewing gum;
butter and coffee and nylons and tomato ketchup and sugar;
canned goods and cigarettes,
and the matches needed to light them.
SHERMAN: I guess the deep-down feeling I had
is that they made us sacrifice,
and if we were sacrificing,
we would somehow feel closer to the war effort.
And I think that's really what they were trying to do,
was to get your attitude in that our fighting men and women
don't have these, so you shouldn't have these,
and somehow you'll get tied into the war effort.
We did without during the Depression,
so doing without these commodities really was not hard.
Recipes were adjusted according to what you could get.
Now, there were shortages all over.
You could get very little white flour.
Cakes were all adjusted to no sugar,
very little fat or shortening of any sort.
So cakes took it as hard as anything.
To have a birthday cake was a real treat,
because it meant they had to save everything
to make one cake.
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Look, Miss.
See that?
You could drive a car from Los Angeles to New York
with the gas that plane burns up in just one hour of combat.
It takes two million gallons of gas
to send a single 1,000-bomber raid over enemy territory.
That's enough to drive 1,000 private automobiles
7,500 miles a year for four years.
Now, where would you rather see that "no gas" sign?
At his station?
Or here?
NARRATOR: But many people tried to get around rationing,
and a thriving black market grew up
to satisfy those who couldn't do without.
According to one study,
one in every four retail transactions
during the war was illegal.
BABE CIARLO (dramatized): "Dear Mom and family,
"I know you didn't receive mail from me for over a week,
"but circumstances prevented me from writing to you.
"Yes, that's right,
"I took a little boat ride and I didn't even get seasick.
"Well, I suppose you're wondering where I am.
"I think if I wouldn't tell you, you would never guess it.
"Okay, I'll tell you,
"because I know you will want to know in the worst way.
"I am somewhere in North Africa.
"Surprised?
"Well, I am, too,
"but I am very safe, so don't worry.
Love, Babe."
NARRATOR: At the Casablanca Conference
back in January, the Allies had publicly called
for the unconditional surrender of the Axis,
and privately decided upon an invasion of the island of Sicily
and then the Italian mainland,
what Churchill called "the soft underbelly of the Axis."
American commanders had impatiently insisted
on a cross-channel invasion of France,
but the British were wary,
still haunted by the memory of the losses
they had suffered there during the First World War.
They got their way.
Sicily would be first.
(dramatic newsreel music plays)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: American troops of General Patton's Seventh Army
move swiftly through western Sicily, taking town after town
as they drive to join
General Montgomery's British Eighth Army.
(explosions and rapid gunfire)
(men shouting)
DWAIN LUCE: And Patton came to see us and talk to us.
We all loved Patton.
We loved Ike, too.
But I mean, we loved Patton.
And, uh, he was something.
He says, "Now, some troops can move and some troops can shoot.
"But when you can move and shoot at the same time,
then you and Napoleon are pissing through the same straw."
NARRATOR: It took the Allies just 38 days to capture Sicily,
pushing the enemy from one town to another.
Thousands of civilians died,
and 25,000 Allied soldiers were dead or out of action.
The Axis lost 167,000 men,
the overwhelming majority of them Italian.
Tens of thousands of crack German troops
had managed to escape.
In Rome, Mussolini had been deposed
by his own generals and counselors.
The new Italian government surrendered on September 8
and declared war on Germany soon thereafter.
But there were now more than 132,000 German troops
waiting on the Italian mainland.
Another 460,000 were on their way to join them.
And a daring Nazi commando raid rescued Mussolini from captivity
and set him up in northern Italy as head of a puppet regime.
It was clear to the Allies
that the Germans were resolved to hold Italy
at all costs.
When we got through in North Africa,
we kept telling the Russians
that we were going to open up another front.
Uh, but we couldn't open up
the front across the channel at that point.
It would have been suicide.
The British were quite right about that.
And so, we had, we had to go into...
where were we going to go?
We went into Sicily; that turned out to be fairly simple.
And then we went across to Italy,
which we thought was going to be like Sicily,
and it turned out to be much more, much more difficult.
NARRATOR: "ltaly is like a boot," Napoleon once said.
"You must enter it like Hannibal, from the top."
The Allies planned to attack it from the bottom.
(alarms blaring)
(rapid gunfire and explosions)
At first, everything seemed to go according to plan.
The Fifth Army landed at Salerno on September 9.
(men shouting)
The British Eighth Army
seized the important airfields at Foggia.
And Naples fell to the Americans on October 1.
(applause and cheering)
Despite fierce resistance, in three months
the Allies managed to achieve two key goals:
They had forced Italy out of the war
and onto their side,
and they were keeping thousands of German troops busy
who might otherwise have been fighting in Russia
or preparing to defend France
against the invasion both sides knew was coming.
The Allies' target now was Rome,
only 150 miles away.
Getting there would prove harder than anyone could have imagined.
With the Allied forces
was Private Babe Ciarlo of Waterbury, Connecticut,
now a member of Company G,
Second Battalion, 15th Regiment, Third Infantry Division,
Fifth Allied Army,
under the command of General Mark Clark.
On September 18, nine days after the first elements
of the Fifth Army had landed at Salerno,
the Third Division had gone ashore to join them.
(distant gunfire)
BABE CIARLO (dramatized): "October 20, 1943.
"Dear family,
"I know I haven't written to you for a long time,
"and I hope you understand
"the Army has been keeping me pretty busy.
"I suppose you've been keeping up with the news lately,
"and by the way we're beating the Germans,
this war won't last much longer."
(distant artillery explosion)
"Eddie and I are dying for some nice raviolis,
"and I don't think it'll be long before we get them.
"Will you please send me Mom's brother's address
in your next letter?"
(shell explodes)
"Love, Babe.
NARRATOR: Babe was careful always to keep the details of what he was doing
from his family so as not to alarm his mother.
But her brother lived in Rome,
and Babe clearly wanted everybody back home
to know he'd made it to Italy.
SOLDIER: Fire!
(automatic gunfire, shouting)
As the Allies tried to move north,
the weather turned bad,
and the terrain grew more and more forbidding.
(artillery blast)
Crags, deep-cut valleys,
twisting mountain roads, blown bridges--
all under constant German fire
from hidden hillside strongholds.
(machine gun firing)
Bill Mauldin, from Mountain Park, New Mexico,
was a cartoonist for Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper.
Week after week, he managed to find laughs
in the lives of ordinary infantrymen,
even when, as he said,
"You don't think life could be any more miserable."
MAULDIN (dramatized): "Dig a hole in your backyard while it is raining.
"Sit in the hole while the water climbs up around your ankles.
"Pour cold mud down your shirt collar.
Sit there for 48 hours..."
(shell explodes)
"And so there is no danger of your dozing off,
"imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance
to club you on the head or set your house on fire."
(shell explodes)
"Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks,
"pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand,
and walk on the muddiest road you can find."
"Fall flat on your face every few minutes,
"as you imagine big meteors streaking down
"to sock you.
"If you repeat this performance every three days
"for several months, you may begin to understand
why an infantryman gets out of breath..."
(men shouting)
"...but you still won't understand
how he feels when things get tough."
(somber music plays)
NARRATOR: The men learned to sleep while marching--
it was "a kind of coma," one remembered--
and when they got a chance to lie down,
preferred to sleep on rocks rather than bare ground
because rocks were relatively dry.
Hundreds of mules were used to carry up supplies...
...and to carry back the dead.
Boulder by boulder, hill by hill,
the Allies battered their way through the German defenses--
the Volturno Line...
the Barbara Line...
the Reinhard Line...
(gunfire)
On November 17,
Babe Ciarlo's Third Infantry Division
was pulled back to rest.
In 58 straight days of combat since the landing at Salerno,
they had lost 3,265 men and moved less than 50 miles.
The Third Division would cycle through 76,000 men
before the war was over.
BABE CIARLO (dramatized): "November 17, 1943.
"The reason why I didn't write
is because I don't have much to say and I am a little lazy."
"I hope you have a good time over the holidays,
"and I hope you eat up at Mom's house for Christmas
so that Mom might be happier."
"Your loving brother, always, Babe."
(explosions, gunfire)
(engines humming)
(pilots speaking indistinctly over radios)
(artillery fire)
(bombs whizzing)
NARRATOR: The terrible losses suffered
during the second assault on Schweinfurt in October of 1943
and other raids that week
in which 88 more American bombers had been shot down
helped persuade the Allies to cut back
on daytime raids over Germany
until they could design and produce enough fighters
capable of escorting bombers
all the way to their targets and back again.
The targets themselves were changed, as well.
Bombers continued to bomb cities, including Berlin,
and to batter war industries,
but the destruction of the German air force on the ground,
as well as in the air, now took top priority.
AIRMAN: Right to your left.
(artillery fire)
Ten o'clock.
GUNNER: I got my sights on him.
NARRATOR: The Allies were determined to dominate the skies
before the planned invasion of France.
AIRMAN: Keep your eye on him.
NARRATOR: Before D-Day.
EARL BURKE: Of course, being an enlisted man,
we didn't think the officers knew what they were doing.
We could have fought it a little bit better than they did.
(soldiers cheering)
But occasionally, the missions came off proper.
We finally realized
that these guys knew what they were doing.
They were fighting the right war.
It was not an economical thing to do in terms of life.
You'd lose ten bombers,
you'd lose 100 men.
(airplane engine roaring)
NARRATOR: Earl Burke was no longer flying.
He had been wounded again,
this time by shrapnel
from a bomb that exploded while he was on the ground.
BURKE: They put me in a hospital.
And there they told me
that I had to have my arm removed.
But fortunately,
the chief of surgery came upon me in a hallway
as I was going into the operating room.
Says, what was I doing in there?
I says, "Well, I'm...
guess I'm going to have a little problem with my arm."
"What's wrong with your arm?"
"I-l... I got wounded,
and I got what they call osteomyelitis."
And that was the scourge of World War I.
If you got wounded in the bone, that's what happened.
He says, "That... no... not going to do it.
Back in the ward."
They put me back in the ward, bring me back in a cast,
cut a hole in the cast, put a little wire net across it.
I said, "What are you doing?"
He says, "I'm making a little home for somebody."
I said, "What is that little home going to do?"
He says, "I'm going to keep these little guys in on your arm
so they can eat all that stuff out of your bone."
And I said, "Well, what kind of things are they?"
He says, "They're little white things,
you know, like this."
Had a handful of maggots, flipped them in there,
and put the wire cage back on it.
Says, "Now those little guys are going
"to eat that stuff out of you,
"'cause we can't get it out of you.
No way we can get that out of you."
So there I was with this little thing over there,
and watching those guys having a meal.
I was in the hospital 15 months.
NARRATOR: Earl Burke's air war was over.
He returned to California,
helped rescue pilots lost at sea on training missions,
and finally, went home to his parents in Sacramento.
♫ ♫
NARRATOR: Despite the all-out Allied raids,
German aircraft production would actually increase.
"We are virtually drowning in aircraft,"
wrote one German flyer.
But the Luftwaffe was now losing trained crews far faster
than they could be replaced.
And Allied bombing had also denied the Germans
the precious fuel they needed to train new ones.
"The time has come,"
the chief of the German fighter wing told his superiors,
"when our force is within sight of collapse."
(engines humming)
When the time finally came to invade France,
the Allies would own the skies.
AL MclNTOSH (dramatized): "Luverne, Minnesota.
"For our Rock County Boys.
"Dear Gang,
"Who'd have thought four years ago
"that you'd be reading this in all the states of the Union,
"maybe in Africa, India,
"Iceland, England,
"Alaska, New Guinea,
"Australia, Caledonia, Hawaii,
"New Zealand,
"and a score of other places with funny names?
"Up until late Monday,
"it didn't look much like winter,
"and then the white flakes began to fall silently,
"swirling in white clouds,
"almost blotting out the streetlights at night.
"But it didn't last very long,
"just enough to throw a little mantle of white
"in patches over the dark, bare, dirty-looking ground.
"Tuesday morning, the snapping cold came,
"and by Wednesday morning,
"the smoke from the chimneys was hanging like white plumes
in the clear, quiet, frosty air."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
NARRATOR: Americans could now look back
on some real progress in the war against the Axis.
In the Pacific Theater of Operations,
Americans had recaptured Attu in the Aleutian Islands
and were fighting on Bougainville and New Guinea.
But the Japanese were still on the march in Burma,
intent on invading northeastern India.
And the long campaign to take the Gilberts,
the Marshalls and the Carolines,
to liberate the Philippines
and eventually attack the Japanese home islands
had only just begun.
In the European Theater,
improved radar,
new, long-range Allied aircraft,
and ever-growing numbers of escort ships
sailing from American shipyards
reduced the threat from German U-boats.
More and more weapons and equipment
were now reaching the embattled Soviet Union.
When the Red Army began to sweep the enemy from the Ukraine,
thousands of newly-manufactured American trucks
helped make possible their deadly pursuit.
The Axis had been driven from North Africa, too,
and Sicily was now in Allied hands.
But the Germans were fighting back hard in Italy.
And in secret,
they had already begun to implement a policy
of systematized murder
that would one day persuade even the most cynical G.l.
that the war had to be fought.
As Allied leaders drew up plans
for the long-delayed invasion of the continent,
Hitler put tens of thousands of laborers to work
strengthening his coastal defenses.
For the men of Luverne, Sacramento,
Mobile, Waterbury, and every other American town,
things were bound to get still tougher.