(waves lapping)
QUENTIN AANENSON: We were all granted about ten days' leave
for our final visit to our homes.
This was around the middle of April, 1944.
So I went up to Luverne
to see my parents, my brothers and sisters.
And it was a very difficult time, because I knew...
I had the orders in my possession
that would be sending me
to the European theater of operations,
and I knew that we had been assigned
to fly this terribly dangerous type of combat mission.
So...
when I was leaving
and saying good-bye to my mother and dad,
we went to the train station in Luverne
to catch the midnight train.
My sister Mavis was with me,
and I took her aside and we walked down the platform
for a ways, and I told her what my assignment had been...
And that the odds were pretty great
that, uh, I would be killed.
So I had told her...
to be very much aware of this possibility
and that she should be...
prepared to help my parents.
(dramatic newsreel fanfare)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: This immense piling up of war supplies in Britain
is massed for the giant blow designed to knock out the Nazi--
an astounding panorama
of everything that you can think of... and more.
Invasion shipping massed in British harbors
along the English Channel-- barges and boats.
Imagine those stacked-up amphibious craft
when they stream in swarms for the landing.
Bombers, which, in the ground invasion
must keep on hammering,
gliders for airborne troops,
and myriad fighter planes for the monster air battles
of the offensive designed to be
the final phase of the European war.
Acres of planes reaching far into the distance.
("I'm Confessin" by The Benny Goodman Sextet plays)
NARRATOR: By the late spring of 1944,
on both sides of the world,
there were signs that the tide of war had begun to turn.
The Allies had stopped Japan's expansion in the Pacific.
They had taken Guadalcanal in the Solomons
and Tarawa in the Gilberts,
had savaged the enemy fleet at Midway,
and had begun the long climb from island to island
toward the Japanese homeland.
In the European theater,
the Allies had cleared North Africa
of Axis forces and taken Rome.
Allied warplanes were still bombing Germany night and day.
The Battle of the Atlantic had been won,
the sea lanes were now open,
and men and weapons and supplies were flooding into Britain.
And in the east, the Red Army
had driven the Germans from the Ukraine
and was moving into Poland.
Back home, in places like Luverne, Minnesota;
Waterbury, Connecticut;
Mobile, Alabama;
and Sacramento, California,
Americans did their best to go about their normal lives.
(intro to "It's Been a Long, Long Time" plays)
BING CROSBY: ♫ Kiss me once, then kiss me twice ♫
♫ Then kiss me once again ♫
♫ It's been a long, long time ♫
♫ Haven't felt like this, my dear ♫
♫ Since I can't remember when ♫
♫ It's been a long, long time... ♫
NARRATOR: But in the back of everyone's mind,
hope was combined with dread.
In spite of the progress that had been made,
everything that had happened so far in the war
had been a mere preliminary.
The Japanese empire had begun to shrink,
but its rulers seemed determined
to defend to the death every island that remained.
Rome may have fallen,
but everyone knew that Hitler's grip on Europe
could not be broken
until Allied troops crossed the English Channel,
smashed the German defenses
and drove the Nazis out of France.
Hundreds of thousands of sons and fathers and husbands
would be called upon to gamble their lives
for the sake of victory.
CROSBY: ♫ You'll never know ♫
♫ How many dreams I dreamed about you ♫
♫ Or just how empty they all seemed without you ♫
♫ So kiss me once... ♫
NARRATOR: Naval Ensign Joseph Vaghi of Bethel, Connecticut--
just up the road from Waterbury--
went home to say good-bye to his family that spring.
He had his orders to go overseas,
and it seemed to him and to them,
that he would likely be one of those
who would be asked to run that terrible risk.
VAGHI: It was very difficult
because I had two other brothers already in the service
and my poor mother,
she knew all of us were going to go eventually.
And, as it turned out, we all did go.
All of us were in the service.
And that... that was kind of rough.
But leaving, she had chin up,
you know, she... we spoke in Italian.
She spoke English very well,
but she said all of the sentimental things in Italian.
She said, "Mio caro figlio, Dio stai con lei.
Non dimenticare mai tuoi genitori,"
and, uh, it goes on like that.
(newsreel fanfare plays)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Hundreds of miles of invasion coast
are heavily fortified, bristling with gun emplacements,
defense in depth,
as Hitler prepares for the coming test of supremacy,
battle for the greatest of beachheads.
Gigantic coastal guns go into place,
ready to rise up when the zero hour comes,
when the Allies move on Hitler's Europe.
(explosions)
No room for complacency.
Hitler is prepared.
(explosions)
NARRATOR: The Germans had known for months
that the Allies were going to open the second front
that Soviet leader Josef Stalin had been demanding since 1941.
Hitler had used that time to construct his Atlantic Wall,
1,670 miles of fortified gun emplacements,
radar and observation towers
and bunkers that stretched from Denmark
all the way south to the Spanish frontier.
Meanwhile, across the English Channel,
more than a million and a half Americans
were now in Britain waiting for the signal
to start the invasion,
an invasion that would determine the success or failure
of the Allied effort in Europe.
General Dwight Eisenhower was in overall command.
The assault was to proceed in three phases.
First, paratroopers would be dropped
behind the beaches in the dead of night
to confuse the enemy and seize the roads and bridges
that led inland from them.
Then, wave after wave of airplanes
were to batter German defenses, destroying enemy emplacements
and creating craters on the beaches
in which assault troops could take shelter.
Finally, a massive flotilla was to ferry thousands
of British, Canadian and American troops
toward the French coast.
Allied commanders planned five coordinated landings
along a 45-mile stretch of the Normandy coastline
between the Cotentin Peninsula and the Orne River.
Canadian and British troops under General Bernard Montgomery
would fight their way ashore
at beaches code-named "Gold," "Juno," and "Sword,"
where they were also meant
to take the city of Caen, nine miles inland.
Americans, under General Omar Bradley,
would assault "Utah" and "Omaha" beaches.
AL MclNTOSH (dramatized): Luverne, Minnesota.
May 25, 1944.
"Outwardly, things haven't changed here.
"The lilacs are out in full bloom.
"The countryside was never greener.
"At night there are a million stars
"winking in the sky, with a couple of million bullfrogs
"parked along the edges of the bank-full ditches
"croaking a mighty chorus.
"But things are different.
"The staffs of daily newspapers all over the country
"are on alert in case news of the invasion of Europe breaks.
"Key executives don't stir very far from a telephone,
"day or night.
"The belief is that the long-awaited flash
will come sometime after 11:00 p.m. but before 5:00 a.m."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
(drum beating slowly)
PAUL FUSSELL: We tend to call it the real war.
The rest of it's just the show-biz war.
The real war involves getting down there and killing people,
and being killed yourself or just barely escaping it.
And it gives you attitudes about life and death
that are unobtainable anywhere else.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force,
you are about to embark upon the great crusade,
toward which we have striven these many months.
The eyes of the world are upon you.
The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere
march with you.
NARRATOR: The greatest invasion in history began just after midnight
on June 6, 1944--
D-Day.
as the first of 24,000 paratroopers,
flown over the Channel in more than 1,000 aircraft,
were dropped behind enemy lines in Normandy.
The Germans' theory of the defense of the continent
was they put, they built pillboxes along the coastline
and they put their old troops in it.
Then they put their Panzer divisions
and their SS divisions and their good divisions
back in central points,
the theory being that when we hit the beach,
they would come in from those points and drive us off.
Our job was to get in between them and the beach
and to have them hit us instead of the beach.
NARRATOR: Most of the men of the British 6th Airborne dropped on target,
reassembled, and within an hour had achieved their objectives,
seizing bridges across the Orne and Dives Rivers
to keep German tanks from mounting a counterattack
along the coast.
On the western flank,
the 16,000 Americans belonging to the 101st
and 82nd Airborne divisions were less fortunate.
Low-hanging clouds blocked the moonlight
and obscured the landing zones.
The narrow neck of the Cotentin Peninsula
was hard to hit from the air.
Many paratroopers fell helplessly into the sea.
Others landed in fields and river valleys
flooded by the Germans and drowned.
Some were blown from the sky as German tracer bullets
set off the explosives they carried.
Still others were dropped so low
their parachutes had no chance to open.
They hit, one man remembered,
with "a sound like ripe pumpkins
being thrown down against the ground."
The men of the 101st Airborne were scattered over an area
25 miles long by 15 miles wide.
Most of them got lost.
24 hours later, their commander had still been unable to find
more than half his surviving men.
(rapid gunfire)
Elements of the 82nd Airborne came down in and around
the little town of Sainte Mére-Eglise,
just behind Utah Beach.
The fighting was already raging
when a glider carrying Dwain Luce of Mobile, Alabama,
headed toward the landing zone.
A survivor of the invasion of Sicily
and the landing at Salerno, he was a captain
in the 320th Glider Field Artillery Battalion.
LUCE: We had been in combat before
and we knew kind of what we were getting into,
but, uh, we knew this was the big bang
and it was... it was kind of... worrisome, you might say.
NARRATOR: Gliders were something new in warfare:
silent, ideal for clandestine landings behind enemy lines,
and capable of ferrying equipment and vehicles
too heavy to be dropped in any other way.
But they were also fragile, covered with flammable fabric,
and hard to control.
And in some landing zones,
the Germans had placed forests of sharpened poles
to tear them apart and impale the men aboard.
More than half the gliders missed their drop zones
and scores of pilots and passengers were crushed
when vehicles and artillery pieces slammed forward
during crash landings.
LUCE: I remember, in my glider, I was sitting up next to the pilot
and I leaned over his shoulder to look at it
and we dove over those trees, we were doing 110 miles an hour
and I thought, this is no speed to land.
But it was too late to change.
I fortunately did not land in front of any antitank guns,
which were vicious.
I had a friend that landed in front, in front of one
and he was cut in half.
And, uh, those are things
you don't like to think about or talk about.
NARRATOR: Dwain Luce somehow made it out of his glider
and quickly found himself part of the continuing battle
to hold Sainte Mére-Eglise.
LUCE: Oh, we had a fight,
and the Germans moved people in in a hurry.
(machine gun fire)
You see, we didn't have heavy weapons...
and we were fighting heavy weapons.
NARRATOR: The fighting was confused.
There were no established lines.
LUCE: There was some guy up on a hill
above me trying to disrupt my life.
He was, he was shooting at us and trying to, trying to get us.
And it's kind of like cops and robbers in a degree because,
I mean, you were in there mixed up all with them.
I mean, they wasn't,
they wasn't on one side and we were on the other;
we were all like scrambled eggs.
NARRATOR: Surrounded, isolated, out of communication with one another,
Dwain Luce and his unit struggled to hold their ground
and block German tanks,
while they waited for the landing force
to take Utah Beach and come to their rescue.
LUCE: Whenever we went in behind the lines,
they always gave us, uh, morphine.
The morphine was a little thing like a toothpaste tube
except it had a sharp, uh, point when you unscrewed it, you know,
and you could then stick the needle and break it
and then you pop it in your arm.
We were back there where if you really got hit bad,
nobody could take care of you.
Sainte Mére-Eglise, it was a mess.
Terrible.
AANENSON: Early in the morning
we were awakened from our bunks--
about 25 or 30 of us--
at the air base that was just above London,
and we were told to get in our flight gear
and meet in the briefing room.
And so we assembled in there, just barely awake,
and we knew it was something serious.
We could tell by just the atmosphere.
There were two or three briefing officers up at the front.
They had a large map that was covered,
and as we took our seats and they pulled the curtain back,
they said, "Gentlemen, this is it.
The invasion of France has begun."
NARRATOR: At 4:30 a.m.,
Quentin Aanenson of Luverne took off for France
as part of the flight of 11,000 warplanes...
Lightnings and Lancasters and Liberators;
Mosquitos and Marauders and Mustangs;
Spitfires and Thunderbolts and Flying Fortresses,
assigned to bomb and strafe and batter German defenses
before the first troops landed on the beaches.
It was Quentin Aanenson's first combat mission.
As we came in over Normandy, I looked off to the left,
and it was just a short look,
and I realized later I was looking at Omaha Beach.
We had to be very careful of our timing,
and we had to be very careful
that we didn't go inland too far,
because the paratroopers had been dropped in there.
And we didn't know exactly where they were.
And as it turned out they didn't know where they were either.
NARRATOR: Aanenson dropped his bombs and headed back to England.
AANENSON: It was a mixture of some clouds,
but we could see down into the Channel
and it was impossible to understand
really what we were seeing.
There were ships everywhere.
ERNIE PYLE (dramatized): "The best way I can describe this vast armada
"and the frantic urgency of the traffic
"is to suggest that you visualize New York Harbor
"on its busiest day of the year
"and then just enlarge that scene
"until it takes in
"all the ocean the human eye can reach,
clear around the horizon."
"And over the horizon.
There are dozens of times that many."
Ernie Pyle.
NARRATOR: More than 5,300 ships, carrying 176,000 men,
were streaming across the Channel:
battleships and tugboats, cruisers and barges
and rusty freighters;
gunboats and hospital ships
and converted ocean liners; ships filled with ammunition
and ships equipped to lay down screens of smoke
to mystify the enemy--
and a fleet of more than 2,000 landing craft
to ferry men and supplies to the beach.
Joseph Vaghi was assigned to be a beachmaster that morning.
It would be his job to use flags, blinkers, and a megaphone
to get men, vehicles, and supplies
safely ashore on Omaha Beach.
It was his first combat, too.
VAGHI: I had no fear.
We prayed as a platoon, we prayed together.
And said, "Well, it's God's will.
"They want us to go over there
"and get this devil off the thing.
"We're gonna do it.
We know what to do, and we're ready."
I wasn't scared only because I had not experienced this before.
WALTER EHLERS: The more you're in combat,
the more tension you get as time goes on,
because the odds are
that you may not be going to make it
because you've seen so many other people die.
I'd get so sick when I was going into combat,
I'd... until that first shot was fired,
why I thought I was...
my stomach was going to turn inside out or something,
but when the first shots went, all that goes away.
NARRATOR: Among the thousands of men moving toward the beaches
were two veterans of earlier invasions
in North Africa and Sicily.
They were from Manhattan, Kansas--
Staff Sergeant Walter Ehlers and his older brother, Roland.
EHLERS: He was a little bit shorter than I.
He had red hair, and he had blue eyes and a beautiful smile.
And he was a perfect gentleman all the time.
And he, uh, he was immaculate in dress and everything.
And he tended to keep me that way, too.
(chuckles)
NARRATOR: At 6:30 a.m., the invasion force began landing in Normandy.
Utah Beach came first.
Drifting smoke that obscured the target
and strong currents that drove their landing craft off course
brought the Americans into shore more than 2,000 yards
from the spot chosen by the planners.
But General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.,
armed only with a cane, rallied his men
and took the beachhead anyway in less than an hour.
Of the 23,000 men who went ashore at Utah Beach,
only 197 were lost.
By late morning, American tanks were moving off the beach
to rendezvous with the embattled 82nd Airborne
at Sainte Mére-Eglise.
DWAIN LUCE: We were back there and we didn't know
what was going on on the beach, for sure.
We knew that the beach would hold
if we'd have got our job done.
We also knew that if the beach didn't hold,
we would probably be left there, we would be abandoned,
they couldn't get us out.
So naturally, it was of great interest to us
to get our job done and see the beach hold.
One of the things I will always remember,
with a great deal of emotion,
is that first tank that came through.
Because that first tank came through,
I knew the beach had held
and I knew help was on the way.
NARRATOR: British troops would take
the Gold and Sword beaches almost as fast,
though German tanks prevented them
from capturing their next objective, the city of Caen.
Canadian troops took Juno, too,
although 90 of their 306 landing craft were destroyed
by German obstacles, and one in every 18 men
in their invading force was killed or wounded.
Still, they managed
to fight their way seven miles inland
by nightfall.
But for the Americans in the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions
approaching Omaha Beach,
the most difficult landing site,
almost everything would go wrong.
Omaha was the broadest of the five beaches,
and the deepest, with 100 yards of pebbles,
then sand dunes, barbed wire and thick undergrowth,
all of it heavily mined.
Behind all that loomed formidable bluffs
fortified by 2,000 German troops,
many of them battle-seasoned veterans.
Stiitzpunkts, or strongholds, overlooked the four gullies
that led inland-- each manned by 70 Germans with machine guns,
mortars, and armor-piercing howitzers,
all zeroed in on the men about to try to come ashore.
During Phase Two,
American pilots had dropped most of their bombs miles inland.
There were no bomb craters in which to take shelter,
and the naval bombardment had barely dented German defenses.
VAGHI: As we are approaching it, we see ships to the right of us,
ships to the left of us.
The skies are loaded with these flying balloons.
The battleships are shooting and you could see the projectiles,
the 14-inch projectiles from the battle wagons,
going through the air.
The smell of powder.
We didn't know what we were going to hit
when we got in there.
NARRATOR: Men had been transferred to their landing craft
12 miles from shore and while it was still dark,
so that many boats lost their proper positions going in.
The sea was rough.
The men, most of whom had had no sleep,
were wet and cold and seasick.
The amphibious tanks that were supposed to lead the way
and provide cover for the infantry
were released too far out at sea;
32 tanks rolled off the vessels that carried them,
and all but five went straight to the bottom.
Most of their crews were trapped inside.
Landing craft were swamped;
scores of men, burdened with equipment,
slowly drowned, screaming for help
as other boats wallowed past them.
Commanders were forbidden to stop and pick them up.
Along the bluffs, the Germans held their fire
until the first landing craft shuddered to a stop
and the ramps went down.
Many men were ripped apart by German machine guns
before they could step off.
Hundreds more were hit in the water.
Some badly wounded men made it to the waterline, collapsed,
then lay helpless as the tide rose over them.
Those who managed to push past
the dead and dying in the shallows
found they had nowhere to go once they reached the shore.
Some scrabbled at the sand and shale, trying to dig foxholes.
Others huddled together behind wrecked landing craft
or German obstacles--
only to find themselves under concentrated fire.
EHLERS: We were about a hundred yards out and we hit a sandbar.
We asked the pilot of the boat, "ls this as far as it's going?"
And he says, "As far as it can go."
So he lets the ramp down and so we rush out the front,
and we go in the water and it's clear up to my neck like this.
(continuous gunfire)
But we got all the guys up onto the beach.
And we saw bodies on the beach, and bodies in the water,
and there's bodies laying up on the beach.
Most of them that we saw were dead.
They've wiped out a whole company.
They've wiped out whole platoons.
They wiped out whole squads, and so forth.
NARRATOR: A second wave of frightened men came ashore
and stalled behind the remnants of the first.
"Except for one tank that was blasting away on the beach,"
one of the newcomers remembered,
"the crusade in Europe was, for all practical purposes,
"disarmed and naked before its enemies.
A single company of riflemen could have descended,"
he said, "and swept us up."
(explosion, rapid gunfire)
Joe Vaghi's platoon came ashore at 7:35.
VAGHI: Things happened so fast
that you saw men who were being shot,
you saw them fall.
These things you saw.
The fact that, uh, this is for real.
NARRATOR: Somehow, everyone in Vaghi's platoon
managed to make it onto the beach,
but it remained a killing zone,
choked with shattered and burning equipment
and desperate men unable to move inland
or retreat from enemy fire.
Joe Vaghi did what he could to bring order out of the chaos,
directing his men, struggling to clear a path off the beach,
helping the wounded and the dying.
VAGHI: I was bending down.
There was a corpse on the stretcher,
and as I bent down, this shell hit.
Well, when I came to, my clothes were on fire.
NARRATOR: Vaghi was hit in the right knee.
He kept at it,
struggling to remove cans of gasoline from a burning jeep
before they could explode
and kill the wounded men lying all around him.
Far off-shore, General Bradley considered abandoning Omaha
rather than sending in more men to die.
Then, the Americans began to improvise.
Commanders defied orders and risked
tearing the bottoms from their ships,
to bring them within a thousand yards of the beach
and use their guns to finally knock out
the German pillboxes and gun emplacements.
And on the beach itself, officers and enlisted men alike
began taking their survival into their own hands.
"They're murdering us here!"
one wounded officer shouted to his men.
"Let's move inland and get murdered there instead!"
Here and there,
individuals got to their feet and started forward.
Then small groups began to follow.
VAGHI: This officer came up to me
and saw that I was a beachmaster
and I had the power megaphones
and he said, "Tell these guys to get the hell off the beach."
So I said, "Got orders here
that you're to get the hell off the beach now."
The beachmaster said, "Well, you follow that path there,
"because if you go to the right or left of it,
you'll be stepping on mines."
VAGHI: This one soldier, he got up, and he put a bangalore torpedo
under the barbed wire, blew a gap in it.
He said, "Come on, follow me," and he led the way.
EHLERS: I rushed my squad through it.
We got off of the beach,
and it was probably the biggest thing
I ever did in my life was get those 12 men off of the beach.
NARRATOR: When the Germans continued to block the gullies
that led inland,
the Americans hurled themselves right at the bluffs,
clambering to the top
and attacking enemy positions from the side and rear.
EHLERS: We went up, right up the hill into the trenches,
and we were chasing the Germans then.
We captured four of them and sent them back down,
and then we got behind the pillbox
and what we didn't kill--
some escaped because they were running from us--
but we got that particular pillbox that day.
NARRATOR: By 1:00, after more than six hours of desperate fighting,
German resistance had begun to weaken.
(explosion)
And as the afternoon went on,
combat engineers managed to clear a safe boat path
through the shallows,
bulldozed five new exits from the beach...
and built a road that men and vehicles could follow inland.
35 engineers died doing it.
It had been the bloodiest day in American history
since the Battle of Antietam in the Civil War.
Many of the survivors were in shock,
unable to comprehend what they'd just been through...
unsure of what they'd accomplished.
Some 2,500 American soldiers lay dead on French soil.
Walter Ehlers's brother, Roland, was among the missing.
EHLERS: I thought about looking for my brother, but then,
when we looked at that beach,
there were so many things down on the beach,
it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
I figured he was either wounded or in a hospital
and they just didn't have a record of it.
NARRATOR: It would be five weeks before Walter Ehlers found out
what had happened to his brother.
EHLERS: I never saw him die.
He got killed as he was coming down the ramp on his LCI.
His whole squad got, uh, wounded... or killed.
I would have rather come back without my arms and legs
than to come back without my brother.
That's, uh... that's what it meant to me.
Well, that stayed with me for over 50 years.
I had nightmares about that.
He'd come back every night,
and, uh, we'd... he'd be all neatly dressed
and smiling like he usually does,
and we'd have a conversation, and first thing, he'd disappear.
Or I'd go to do something and he'd disappear.
NARRATOR: In less than 24 hours,
the Allies had torn a 45-mile gap in Hitler's Atlantic Wall.
They had lost far fewer men than their commanders had expected.
More than 150,000 men were now ashore in France,
and more men and more equipment and supplies
were coming ashore every hour.
(phone ringing)
RADIO ANNOUNCER: This is Robert St. John
in the NBC newsroom in New York.
Ladies and gentlemen, all night long
bulletins have been pouring in from Berlin
claiming that D-Day is here,
claiming that the invasion of Western Europe has begun.
MclNTOSH (dramatized): "When we stumbled sleepily down the hall
"to answer the ringing telephone,
we made a mental note that it was shortly before 3:00 a.m."
ST. JOHN: ...heavy fighting is taking place between the Germans and...
MclNTOSH (dramatized): "We picked up the receiver
"thinking it was Sheriff Roberts calling
"to say there had been an accident.
"Instead, it was Mrs. Lloyd Long,
"playing the feminine counterpart
"of Paul Revere, saying,
"'Get up, Al, and listen to the radio.
The invasion has started.“
ST. JOHN: ...says the British-American landing operations
from the sea and from the air are stretching over...
MclNTOSH (dramatized): "We sat by the radio for over an hour,
listening to the breathtaking announcements."
ST. JOHN: Casualties may reach a dreadful toll.
MclNTOSH (dramatized): "And then we went to bed,
"to lie there for a long time,
"wide-eyed in the darkness,
"thinking, 'What Rock County boys
are landing on French soil tonight?"'
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
NARRATOR: Americans woke up on June 6, 1944,
to newspaper headlines and radio bulletins.
It was the news they'd been waiting for.
But there were no further details,
no live radio reports from the beaches.
No one knew where their sons and brothers
and fathers had landed...
or how those landings were going.
In Philadelphia, the mayor gently tapped the Liberty Bell
for the first time in more than a century.
In New York, traders on the stock exchange
observed two minutes of silence
and then went back to work,
sending the Dow Jones average soaring 142 points
to a new high for the year.
Major League baseball canceled all games.
Everywhere, church bells rang, calling people to prayer.
They knelt or bowed their heads
in factories and schoolrooms and public parks.
In Waterbury, special masses were said
at the Church of the Immaculate Conception.
There were prayer services at Temple Israel
and Beth El Synagogue, and on the town green, as well.
In Sacramento, workers at the Pacific Fruit Express Cannery
prayed for the safety of 100 former employees
now in the service.
In Mobile that day, no liquor was sold,
and at the railroad station
girls walked up and down the platforms
holding up the morning newspapers
so that traveling soldiers could read the headlines.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: First of all, here's another quick news summary
in the eighth hour of invasion news coverage.
Prime Minister...
MclNTOSH (dramatized): "And so the invasion news came to Luverne, quietly.
"There were no whistles, no sirens...
"no demonstrations.
"Not much was said.
"The coffee shops were filled almost to standing room
"as the 10:00 morning news approached.
"There were sober faces on the men
"as they listened to the news,
"but there was a smile of exultation
"when they heard that the Allied forces
had penetrated ten miles inland."
"One mother dropped in the coffee shop.
"She shook her head and pushed the cup of coffee
"placed in front of her aside.
"'I just want to listen to the radio, ' she said.
"Her boy, by all the odds, was there.
"One didn't have to be psychic to know
"what was in her mind-- or her heart.
"The prayer that she was uttering right then,
"as she listened to the announcer,
"was multiplied a thousand times and more in Rock County
countless times during the day."
NARRATOR: That evening, President Roosevelt spoke to the country.
ROOSEVELT: Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation,
this day have set upon a mighty endeavor,
a struggle to preserve our republic, our religion
and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.
Lead them straight and true;
give strength to their arms,
stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
They will need Thy blessings.
Their road will be long and hard...
for the enemy is strong.
He may hurl back our forces.
Success may not come with rushing speed,
but we shall return again and again;
and we know that by Thy grace,
and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.
(Benny Goodman Orchestra playing "The Wang Wang Blues")
JAMES A. FAHEY (dramatized): "June 6, 1944, the Philippine Sea.
"At 6:30 p.m. this evening,
"the announcement came over the loudspeaker,
"that the Allies landed in France.
"Everyone gave a big cheer when they heard this.
"I won 40 bucks from the boys because some time ago,
I bet the invasion would come off about the middle of June."
James A. Fahey.
NARRATOR: Seaman First Class James A. Fahey
of Waltham, Massachusetts,
was the youngest of four orphaned children.
His brothers, John and Joe, had been in the Navy at Pearl Harbor
when the Japanese attacked, and had been spared.
James had signed on the following year,
assigned to the light cruiser Montpelier.
Against Navy regulations, he would record what happened
every day he spent aboard in a little diary.
FAHEY (dramatized): "It was a great feeling as I staggered up the gangway
"to the ship with my sea bag in one hand
"and the mattress cover loaded with blankets, mattresses, etc.,
"over my shoulder.
"At last I have a home,
and a warship at that."
NARRATOR: Fahey went to sea in hopes of seeing action,
and he saw plenty of it as a member of a gun crew.
The Montpelier shot down Japanese planes
and sank Japanese ships off Guadalcanal,
bombarded Japanese defenses at Munda,
and survived an enemy bomb and two torpedo hits
off Bougainville.
A week or so after hearing the news of D-Day,
Fahey and the men of the Montpelier
prepared again for battle.
She was now a part of an 800-ship fleet,
steaming toward the next American objective
in the Pacific-- the Marianas,
a chain of volcanic islands
from which the U.S. B-29 Superfortress bombers
could begin to attack the Japanese homeland.
The fleet's three most important targets in the Marianas
were Guam, Tinian, and Saipan,
where the Marines would land first.
FAHEY (dramatized): "June 13.
"In about 14 hours now, we will start bombarding Saipan.
"We are only about 1,200 miles from Tokyo.
"I guess I will go down and buy some candy.
"The candy has been our old standby
"when we have nothing to eat
at battle stations for long hours."
NARRATOR: Saipan was unlike many of the tiny, flat coral atolls
the Marines had taken previously.
It was 14 miles long, featured all kinds of terrain
and was defended by more than 30,000 Japanese troops.
It was also home
to somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 Japanese civilians.
(alarm blaring)
(bosun's whistle blaring)
The shelling of Saipan went on for two days.
Among the Marines of the Fourth Division
waiting to go ashore
was Corporal Alvy Ray Pittman of Mobile, Alabama.
He'd been working as a carpenter alongside his father
when he decided to join the Marines.
RAY PITTMAN: I'd made up my mind
I want to get in the toughest outfit they had.
And I was afraid the war was going to get over
before I got over there.
So I joined the Marine Corps.
'Course, they sent me to Parris Island for boot camp.
And I remember going in,
all these guys standing out on the grass.
They said, "You'll be sorry. You'll be sorry."
NARRATOR: Ray Pittman was in the first wave,
part of a 16-man demolition team assigned to destroy
enemy strongpoints wherever they were found,
using explosives, grenades,
and flamethrowers.
PITTMAN: You never think about getting hurt yourself.
You think about maybe some of your buddies
are going to get hurt.
And you wonder who it's going to be.
I mean, I really didn't ever think about getting hurt myself.
Of course, when you, when you...
slugs start bouncing off your amtrack going in,
you know it could happen.
NARRATOR: The naval bombardment had failed.
Concentrated Japanese mortar and artillery fire
rained down among the amtracks
and on the men fighting for a toehold on the beach.
All four commanders of the assault battalions
were hit within minutes.
By evening, 20,000 Marines had made it ashore,
but they could go no further.
The Japanese planned to keep the Americans pinned down
until their own fleet could steam in from the Philippines
and destroy them.
Despite the rain of shells,
the Marines began slowly to fight their way off the beach.
PITTMAN: I know I was scared a lot...
And losing a lot of friends really hurts you.
It's really hard for me to describe,
really, just how I felt the whole time
'cause there's something happening every day
and you're so tired and you can't lift your eyelids hardly.
And something happens,
you get a call to blow a pillbox here,
to blow a pillbox there.
I mean, you wake up and go and do your job.
But it's hard for me to tell just how bad it was--
how I felt.
NARRATOR: The battle for Saipan had just begun.
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): Santo Tomas, Manila.
"The rumor about the Japanese army
taking over the camp was true."
"If we thought we had reason to complain
"about how awful our life was in a concentration camp,
"we soon changed our minds
"and knew we had been on a picnic 'til then.
"From now on, we would be the same as military war prisoners
and not civilian prisoners."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
NARRATOR: After the Japanese army assumed control
of Santo Tomas camp in Manila in the Philippines,
they had taken propaganda photographs
of some of the prisoners
to show how well they were being treated.
Sascha Weinzheimer and her younger brother
were forced to pose for the photographer.
Things were not as they appeared.
For 11-year-old Sascha, her family
and 4,000 other civilian prisoners,
life had gone from bad to worse.
Prisoners-- including children-- were made to bow to the officers
and were beaten if they failed to go low enough.
Food and supplies from friends outside the camp were cut off.
There was no more meat, just rice and dried fish.
WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "So almost everything was taken away from us at once.
We began to know how bad things could be."
"Even though Mummy and Daddy kept telling us kids
"to eat everything on our plates because the day would come
"when we might have very little to eat,
we didn't really believe them."
Being without food, I think, is, it...
is one of the worst things ever,
because without that, nothing is functionable.
We'd lie down in bed, in the shanty-- we lived in a shanty--
and I had a mattress on the floor,
my mother and my father and my sister had one mattress,
and my brother had a small mattress.
And we'd lie there; we'd have to go to bed early
because of blackout.
We used to lie down on the floor and you'd stick your finger
in your stomach and feel your backbone.
And we'd say,
(in singsong): "Yeah, I feel my backbone."
And we'd, you know, this would be a game.
These are the games that we played all the time.
And ironically enough, it helped.
NARRATOR: In the late spring of 1944,
John and Glennie Frazier of Fort Deposit, Alabama,
received a telegram from the War Department.
Their son Glenn had been missing in action in the Philippines
for two agonizing years,
and since nothing had been heard from him since May of 1942,
he was now officially presumed dead.
Frazier had joined the army in 1941
in part because he believed that the young woman he loved
loved someone else.
He was wrong; she had remained loyal to him all that time.
Now with the latest news,
she began to give up hope of ever seeing him again.
But Glenn Frazier was still alive,
a prisoner of the Japanese.
FRAZIER: When I'd think about home,
I would think about the things that I missed most
like ice cream and potato salad and some ambrosia
that my mother used to make for Christmas and so forth.
And of course it was always a thought
of if we would get back home.
But it got a time that we were so weak at...
I had got a time with me that I was so weak
until I couldn't even remember
whether I had sisters or brothers.
I couldn't even remember their names.
And it comes to a time when you think,
"Did I have a home back...
Did I have a home, did I have a family?"
NARRATOR: Frazier had come close to death several times.
He had endured the Bataan Death March and nightmarish conditions
at Camp O'Donnell and Bilibid Prison in the Philippines,
and he had been forced to perform slave labor
in prison camps in Japan itself,
where he had survived double pneumonia, torture,
a week of isolation in a covered pit
and beatings so frequent they became routine.
Once, when he failed to lift his feet high enough
while marching, a guard drove a bayonet into his knee.
FRAZIER: It started getting infected and it finally got gangrene,
and Dr. Campbell, which was our American doctor in there,
had nothing to treat me with except iodine.
I would hold a cup
to catch all the... the blood, and he cut it open
with a pocket knife and would get to the point
to where he would pour pure iodine in there
to kill the gangrene.
They were thinking about taking my leg off.
So I told Dr. Campbell I'd just rather die
than have my leg taken off.
So he fought it and we won.
At one point, there was only a space in the back of my leg
about a inch-and-a-half across
that the flesh was just like regular, normal flesh.
The rest of it was decayed.
I could open that wound up and see my bone.
NARRATOR: Frazier's leg eventually healed and he went back to work
on the waterfront at Tanagura, where he and his friends did
all they could to sabotage the Japanese war effort.
They risked their lives
to drill holes in the bottoms of oil barrels,
poured sand into gas tanks, wrecked machinery,
destroyed a dock and loosened blocks
so that a submarine under repairs
slid into the bay upside down.
And through it all, Frazier thought of home
and of the girl he still hoped somehow to see again.
FRAZIER: But the thing that really kept me going
is seeing if that girl was still there
and see if, you know, if I still in my heart was crazy about her
and the fact that I wanted to live.
I did not want my body pushing up Japanese daisies.
And I, I just felt that way, and I thought,
"They gonna have a heck of a time getting me in a casket."
NARRATOR: Ten days after D-Day,
bodies were still washing up onto Omaha Beach,
and because the graves registration crews
had moved inland with the advancing troops,
no one was gathering them for burial.
Finally, men from Quentin Aanenson's fighter squadron
did the job themselves.
They retrieved the corpses with long poles,
heaped them with driftwood soaked with gasoline
and set them ablaze.
A few days later, Aanenson looked down from the bluff
and saw that the problem had not been solved.
"More bodies were rolling in the surf," he remembered,
"as the English Channel continued to give up its dead."
(vehicles rumbling)
Aanenson's outfit had recently moved to new quarters,
Advanced Landing Strip A-1,
a freshly built airfield near Omaha Beach.
Their mission was to provide close air support
for American infantry
and armor struggling to fight their way inland.
By June of 1944,
the Allies dominated the air.
(gunfire)
Whenever the Germans on the ground
broke into the open,
they were subject to strafing and bombing
from American P-47 Thunderbolts,
the kind of aircraft Aanenson flew.
(gunfire)
Attacks so relentless, the Germans came to call them
"steel weather."
(rapid gunfire)
AANENSON: It was on one of my very early missions
that I first knew I had... I had killed men.
We caught a group of Germans that were on a road
in an area where there were no trees,
and so there was no place for them
to... to run and hide.
And we caught them before they could really get off the roads
and run toward the ditches.
(gunfire)
And I remember the impact it had on me
when I could see my bullets just tearing into them,
and... and, uh, we had so much firepower
that the... the bodies would fly,
uh, some yards,
and as I... as I was doing this,
I was doing it knowing I had to do it,
that it was my job.
This is what I had been trained to do,
and I dealt with it fine.
But when I got back home to the base in Normandy
and landed.
I got sick.
I had to think about what I had done.
Now, that didn't change my resolve for the next day.
I went out and did it again.
(gunfire)
And again and again and again.
(piano playing "It's Been a Long, Long Time")
ERNIE PYLE (dramatized): "June 23, 1944.
"This Norman countryside
"looks exactly like the rich, gentle land
of eastern Pennsylvania."
"It is too wonderfully beautiful to be the scene of war."
(birds chirping)
"Someday, I would like to cover a war in a country
that is as ugly as war itself."
Ernie Pyle.
(song ends)
NARRATOR: Normandy's beauty was deceptive.
Allied planners had failed to understand the landscape
through which their men would have to fight
before they could begin to drive the enemy out of France.
(gunfire, artillery fire, indistinct shouts)
Normandy was quilted with small, irregularly shaped fields,
walled from one another by hedgerows,
earthen ramparts four feet high, topped with dense hedges
whose tangled roots turned them into natural fortifications
and made it impossible to see into
from one field to the next.
(explosion)
In one area that measured just two miles by four,
there were 4,000 such fields.
Here and there, ancient sunken wagon tracks
twisted between the hedgerows,
ideal for ambushes and often concealed
from air attack by overarching trees.
The Germans took full advantage of all of it.
American Sherman tanks could not break through the hedgerows,
and when they tried to roll over them,
exposed their unprotected underbellies to deadly fire.
(gunfire)
Each field became what the newspaperman Ernie Pyle called
"a separate little war," fought mostly
by companies of riflemen.
(bullets whizzing by)
LUCE: The Germans were good troops.
They did not give up ground easily
there or any other place I saw them.
You had to respect them for the fact
they were excellent troops.
(chuckles): They were too damn good, and...
or they wouldn't have caused us so much trouble.
(explosion)
NARRATOR: Progress was measured in yards.
Now the pace was far slower
than the Allied commanders had anticipated,
and the cost in dead and wounded was far higher.
Unarmed C-47s, cargo planes stripped down
so that as many litters as possible could be lifted aboard,
carried the worst hit to hospitals in England,
just 20 minutes away,
then turned around and came back for more.
Emily Lewis was one of hundreds of nurses
who did all they could for the wounded.
LEWIS: All those wounded soldiers, they were scared to death.
Really frightened half out of their minds.
I hugged 'em, I was teary-eyed.
It makes me cry to think of it.
(sighs)
Got 'em on my plane, talked to them.
Some of them were...
so unnerved...
that I-l just had to put my arms around 'em and hold 'em.
I was 23,
and they were 22, 21,
24, 18, you know.
It was...
it was just... terrible.
But it had to be done, you know?
NARRATOR: By July 1,
hundreds of thousands of troops were onshore.
The Cotentin Peninsula
and the port of Cherbourg had been taken,
and the beachhead stretched for some 70 miles.
(explosions, artillery fire)
But after three weeks of combat,
it remained, at most, 20 miles deep.
The plan to liberate France was stalled.
General Bradley feared
that unless something drastic were done,
the Allies would face the same sort of ghastly stalemate
they had endured during the First World War.
To avoid disaster, his men had to get out of the hedgerows
and find the kind of wide-open countryside
American armor needed to make real progress.
The region just beyond the town of Saint-Lo
was what Bradley had in mind.
It was just 15 miles away...
but to his exhausted men,
it seemed as distant as their ultimate target--
Germany.
♫ If I could be with you one hour tonight ♫
♫ If I were free to do the things I might ♫
♫ I want you to know that I wouldn't go ♫
♫ 'Til I told you, honey, that I love you so ♫
♫ If I could be with you, I'd love you long ♫
♫ If I could be with you, I'd love you strong ♫
♫ I'm telling you, too, I'd be anything but blue ♫
♫ If I could be with you for an hour ♫
♫ If I could be with you... ♫
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: During the war, you just kept thinking
that life cannot begin until this is over.
You just had to see again all the boys
that you had known and been fond of,
and know they were home safely.
Especially for me.
I was not married,
so I was still anticipating my life ahead of me,
but I didn't know who it would be spent with.
But I felt, if I could just
get my brother Sidney back home again...
In fact, I talked to one
of my old boyfriends two years ago,
and I said, "Why didn't you propose to me?"
He said, "You wouldn't have listened to me.
"'Til you got Sidney home,
you wouldn't have listened to anybody."
And he said, "By the time that occurred,
I had lost all my nerve."
♫ I'd be anything but blue ♫
♫ If I could be with you for one hour ♫
♫ If I could be with you. ♫
(alarm blaring)
JAMES A. FAHEY (dramatized): "Sunday, June 18, off Saipan.
"All hands got up at 4:45 a.m.
"I had a swell sleep last night,
"even if it was only for about six hours.
"We had church services topside this morning,
"even though we are so close to Japan,
and the Jap fleet might be close by."
James A. Fahey.
NARRATOR: The Japanese fleet was close by.
Vice Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa had formulated a new plan--
to destroy both the American land forces,
still struggling their way inland on Saipan,
and the American fleet offshore.
He would send waves of carrier-based warplanes
against the fleet,
then reinforce the Japanese garrison on the island.
"The fate of our Empire rests on this one battle," he said.
"Everyone must give all he has."
(alarm blaring)
But the Americans had intercepted coded messages
and knew they were coming.
Hundreds of planes took off to engage the Japanese.
The Battle of the Philippine Sea
would be the greatest carrier battle of the Pacific war,
nearly four times as big as Midway.
It was clear the Americans now had an edge.
Their pilots were better trained than the enemy's.
Their planes were better, too.
And they had twice as many of them.
Maurice Bell, who had been working
in a Mobile shipyard when he was drafted,
and joined the Navy rather than the Army
because, he said, he didn't want to sleep
in a hole in the ground, was serving as a gunner
aboard the heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis,
now the flagship of the 5th Fleet.
MAURICE BELL: I was sitting up there with the binoculars
and, all of a sudden, I saw a torpedo plane
diving in on that ship right behind us.
And, just as he launched his torpedoes,
or was ready to launch them, they hit him with fire.
They was firing at him.
And the plane tumbled over and crashed.
Five seconds behind him was another one.
They hit him and he crashed.
About five more seconds, there's a third one come in,
and they hit him,
and it throwed that plane
in a twist, and the torpedoes fell end over end
and hit the water, and the plane crashed.
I was watching all that with my binoculars.
NARRATOR: The Americans lost 29 planes that day,
but they shot down at least 273.
American submarines sank two Japanese carriers, as well.
Those who took part in the one-sided contest
remembered it as the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot."
FAHEY (dramatized): "Tuesday, June 20.
"At 4:00 p.m. this afternoon,
"we got the good news we have been waiting for.
"The Jap fleet is running away from us
"and heading for the Philippines.
We picked up speed and are after them."
NARRATOR: Late the following day, American spotter planes
located the retreating enemy fleet.
Within ten minutes, 216 U.S. warplanes
swarmed off the carrier decks to attack it,
even though darkness was falling
and fuel was likely to run out before they could return.
(rapid gunfire)
(explosion)
The Americans sank one carrier...
...and badly damaged three others,
destroyed 65 more Japanese planes
and then started for home.
(Duke Ellington's "Echoes of Harlem" plays)
FAHEY (dramatized): "The time dragged as we waited to hear from our pilots."
"Everyone kept his fingers crossed, hoping for the best.
It was like waiting in the death house for a pardon."
"Then something never before done in wartime happened.
"All the ships in this huge fleet put their lights on,
and flares were dropped into the water."
"This would make it easier for our pilots to land
"and if they did hit the water,
they could be saved."
NARRATOR: Only 20 American planes failed to return,
but 80 were lost within sight of the carriers,
sputtering into the sea
or crashing on the decks.
All but 49 pilots and crewmen were recovered.
FAHEY (dramatized): "A great job was done by everyone
to save our pilots' lives."
"The Japs would never do anything like this."
("Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp and Piano" by Aaron Copland playing)
AL MclNTOSH (dramatized): "Luverne, Minnesota.
"We've had a couple of letters
"from boys out in the South Pacific
"asking for more of those columns describing
"how life 'goes on' back in Rock County.
"Well, this is being written
"the evening of the Fourth of July,
"the quietest Fourth that Rock County has spent
"in many a decade.
"First, people hung out their flags
"either at their home or their place of business.
You never saw so many flags being displayed in Luverne."
"Then about noon they headed for the park
down by the river, under the big trees."
"Some of the others, with their elders,
"were busy in a softball game.
"The old-timers drifted over
"to the horseshoe pitching headquarters.
"As far away as the highway, you could hear
"the familiar 'clink' of the shoes
hitting the steel peg."
NARRATOR: By the Fourth of July, 1944,
more than a million men had landed in Normandy
and were struggling to make progress among the hedgerows.
That week, British planes
would drop 2,500 tons of bombs on Caen,
beginning a third attempt to take the city from the Germans.
When it was over, 2,000 French civilians
had been crushed or blown apart
and the Germans had withdrawn to new defensive positions
just south of what was left of the city.
Meanwhile, on the Eastern front,
the Red Army had 28 German divisions
encircled in Belorussia
and killed 40,000 men when they tried to fight their way out.
The Soviets then took Minsk, the capital of Belorussia,
and with it more than 2,000 tanks and 150,000 prisoners.
Winston Churchill wrote to Josef Stalin,
whose country had suffered the most
at the hands of the Germans,
"The enemy is burning and bleeding
"on every front at once...
and I agree with you that this must go on to the end."
MclNTOSH (dramatized): "We said the Fourth was a quiet day.
"There wasn't excitement--
"no speeches, no parades, no band music.
"Everybody spent the day quietly,
but they were all thinking of you boys"...
"And hoping and praying that this would be
the last Fourth of July you'd spend away from home."
"Well, that's about the story
as to how things are going back home."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
(gunfire)
JAMES A. FAHEY (dramatized): "Today is the Fourth of July,
and a good way to celebrate it is by killing Japs."
"We fired star shells all last night and all morning
"until daylight today.
It rained for a while this morning."
"Yesterday and today our artillery on the beach
"gave the Japs an awful pounding.
"The Press News said that in the first couple of weeks
"of fighting on Saipan over 6,500 Japs were killed.
"There is a very strong odor from the beach.
It smells like burnt flesh."
RAY PITTMAN: Well, your Japanese soldier is probably the toughest soldier
that fought in World War ll other than the Marines.
And I mean, they were tough.
And you surround one, he's going to keep fighting.
In Germany, you surround 50,000 Germans and they'd surrender.
Or Italians, they'd surrender.
But you surround one Japanese,
he's going to keep fighting right on.
He's going to keep firing 'til you kill him.
And they had one thing in mind-- it's killing you.
NARRATOR: The Japanese troops on Saipan, now without hope
of rescue or reinforcement from their shattered fleet,
were resolved to die rather than surrender.
American forces had cleared the airfield
and begun a slow, agonizing march toward the north,
trying to keep from killing Japanese civilians
while flushing Japanese troops from their hiding places.
Again and again, Japanese soldiers threw themselves
at the American guns, shouting "Banzai!"--
apparently willing, even eager, to die for the Emperor.
PITTMAN: We'd hear the Japanese talking and drinking
and clanking bottles and everything.
And we knew there was one coming.
But they'd come at us and, and, uh...
we had machine guns set up doing crossfires every way.
They'd have to get through the crossfire
before we started shooting,
but then some of them would get through.
I had one that came at me with a bayonet
and I shot him in the face
and he fell in the foxhole with me,
and bled all over my pants
and the bayonet went down between my arm and my chest.
Nearly got me and him dead.
NARRATOR: Before dawn on July 7,
the Japanese launched a final banzai charge.
3,000 men, some forced from their hospital beds
and barely able to walk,
many armed only with clubs and rocks and shovels,
charged into the American lines.
Bulldozers buried all but a handful of them
the next morning.
It was the largest banzai charge of the Pacific war.
SAM HYNES: We thought of the Japanese
as... mysteriously unlike us.
We knew that they would fight to the death
where, probably, we would have surrendered.
We began to learn, though I don't think we...
gathered a lot of information about the prison camps,
but we had some and we knew that they were capable of...
of a cruelty and sadism
in a way that we hoped our people weren't,
though I've never been quite sure what Americans would do
in the... exactly the same situation.
NARRATOR: On July 10, Saipan was officially declared "secured."
In almost four weeks of fighting,
16,525 Americans had been killed, wounded
or reported missing,
the costliest battle in the Pacific to date.
Among them were several black Marines
who had finally been permitted to fight.
"The Negro Marines are no longer on trial,"
the Marine commandant said.
"They are Marines, period."
Almost 30,000 Japanese soldiers were dead, as well.
In the final days of the battle,
some 4,000 terrified Japanese civilians,
mostly women and children, had fled
to the island's northern tip, a high plateau called Marpi Point.
Their government had convinced many of them
that it was their duty to kill themselves
rather than fall into the hands of the cruel Americans,
and the handful of Japanese soldiers who had survived
were prepared to shoot them if they hesitated.
Some Marines risked their lives to halt the madness;
Japanese-American interpreters with bullhorns
pleaded with civilians to give up.
But more than a thousand were either killed by Japanese troops
or chose suicide.
PITTMAN: When we got down to the end of the island,
they were jumping off the cliff at Marpi Point.
They thought we'd eat them.
They thought we'd kill them and eat them.
Stuff like that.
It's just the Japanese mentality--
they don't want to get captured.
I never did go down to look at the bottom of the cliff,
but it must have been a mess down there.
NARRATOR: A few Japanese soldiers decided to swim out to sea,
rather than surrender.
PITTMAN: So we decided, well, they're going to die anyway,
we might as well shoot them.
So we set up there shooting at them.
We'd hear the slugs hitting around them
and sometimes somebody would hit one.
But it was a long shot, trying to hit their head.
FAHEY (dramatized): "Sunday, July 16:
"It was a warm, sunny day,
"although it rained during church services.
"It was the first time I ever went to church
"and saw dead bodies floating by.
"It is nothing to see men, women and children floating.
"There must be thousands of Japs in the waters near Saipan.
The ships just run over them."
NARRATOR: The Americans went on to take Tinian and then Guam,
the first U.S. possession to be recaptured.
The fall of the Marianas
and the damage done to the Japanese fleet
in the Philippine Sea
forced Hideki Tojo to resign as the Japanese premier.
His successors-- first a general,
then an admiral, vowed to fight on.
The Japanese had succeeded at one thing:
The willingness of their soldiers and civilians
to die rather than surrender had made Allied planners
painfully conscious of the bloodshed
that would surely accompany
the invasion of the Japanese homeland.
DANIEL INOUYE: The first man I killed.
I was then a sergeant.
I was leading a little patrol,
and I happened to glance up at the next hill,
and I saw this German.
And so I signaled the men,
and they all quieted down and I said, "That's mine."
I very deliberately got my rifle and set the sights,
got the wind,
and just squeezed the trigger, and bang.
You would think that at that moment,
after killing a human being,
you would feel a little remorseful.
I felt... pleasure.
And the men applauded.
"You were terrific, Dan," you know?
That was the early times in the war,
and, uh, we were taught to kill the enemy.
He was not a good person; he was an evil person.
So you felt you had accomplished something.
Before I became a soldier,
I sang in a choir.
I was a Sunday school teacher.
"Thou shalt not kill" was real to me.
And here I was,
killing someone and not feeling remorseful.
NARRATOR: The fall of Rome, just before D-Day,
had boosted morale,
but it had not ended the fighting in Italy.
The Allies had failed to destroy the German army,
and as it fell back, Hitler sent in reinforcements,
resolved to make the Allies pay
for every inch of territory they gained.
Among the Americans in closest pursuit
were the Japanese-American men
of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team,
fresh from training and eager to demonstrate their loyalty
to the government that had forced so many of them
and their families into internment camps.
It had not been easy to persuade the military
to give them that chance.
Eisenhower's staff had initially rejected the idea
of Japanese-American troops,
but General Mark Clark,
commander of the Fifth Army in Italy,
had said that he would "take anybody that will fight."
The 442nd would find themselves fighting alongside
the battle-tested 100th Infantry Battalion,
made up mostly of Japanese-Americans from Hawaii,
who had been in Italy for months.
(distant explosion)
They had fought so bravely and lost so many men,
that they came to be called the "Purple Heart Battalion."
Together, the newcomers of the 442nd
and the combat-wise survivors of the 100th
would be asked to spearhead
the Fifth Army's drive northward from Rome.
Among them were two men from Sacramento
whose families were still behind barbed wire
in the United States.
ROBERT KASHIWAGI: It was the last campfire gathering we had
before we went under fire,
and our company commander stood up
in front of us Japanese-Americans,
and he says that, "We're going under fire
"and the very first one of you guys
that turns your tail and run the other way,"
he says, "I'm gonna shoot you."
I says, "Oh, that's something.
"You don't ever say that to a Japanese,
because that's a very derogatory term."
(distant artillery fire)
NARRATOR: Private First Class Robert Kashiwagi was guarding
a crossroads the Germans had only recently abandoned
when he came under fire for the first time.
(explosions)
KASHIWAGI: That was a terrible situation to get into,
because the Germans would target that crossroad.
SOLDIER: Ready.
Fire!
KASHIWAGI: We were caught in that barrage.
The shell was popping all around us.
We didn't have time to dig a hole for a foxhole.
And we were digging the hole with our nose,
trying to get our head down below the ground.
NARRATOR: The white captain
who had insulted the men of the 442nd
was no longer with them.
KASHIWAGI: An artillery shell dropped...
killed his first sergeant,
his, uh, runner
and a radio man, all in front of his eyes.
This captain became shell-shocked.
He was just shaking and turned completely white,
and he was not hardly able to walk.
They almost had to lead him out.
(indistinct chatter)
(artillery fire, gunfire in distance)
Because of our action, there were two Germans,
young men...
(voice breaking): ...killed in action,
dead on the side of this... side of the hill,
and that affected me pretty... pretty bad.
Because, uh, they were 19 years of age, about,
they were the same age as me, and I thought to myself,
gee, if this was stateside,
we could've been going to school together, you know.
That was my first bad experience of the war,
you know, to see an enemy dead, still recognizing their youth,
and, uh, that this shouldn't be happening.
And so that hurted me.
(automatic gunfire)
NARRATOR: Over the next few weeks,
Japanese-Americans would distinguish themselves
at Belvedere, Sasetta,
Castellina, Pastina,
Loranzana, Luciana.
The 442nd 100th fought so well and so hard
that when General Mark Clark led his men
into the important city of Livorno,
he insisted that they march right behind him.
Now everybody wanted them.
Soon, they were back in action again.
MAN: Fire!
NARRATOR: Sergeant Daniel lnouye, from Honolulu, Hawaii,
was in Company E, 2nd Battalion.
(explosion, gunfire)
INOUYE: This one experience was so bad that I had to see the chaplain.
We had just attacked a farmhouse,
and I ran up there,
and sure enough, there were three Germans,
two dead and one alive.
He was leaning against the wall.
And he spoke in German, and I don't speak German,
and he was saying, "Kamerad, Kamerad,"
and he had his hand up there... to surrender.
Then all of a sudden,
he stuck his hand into his jacket,
and the only conclusion I could reach instantaneously
was that he was going for a... a gun.
So almost instinctively, I reacted,
and I hit his face with the butt of my rifle.
And his hand flew out,
and in his hand was a bunch of photographs.
He wanted to show me pictures of his wife and his children.
That's war.
(piano playing "It's Been a Long, Long Time")
(whistle blowing, engine chugging)
BARBARA PERKINS: During the war,
it was hard to keep track of your loved ones.
Mail was very slow.
And even the news media, if you knew
what company and troop and all that was in,
those things weren't published in any detail at all
as to pinpoint just where they were.
Well, you just never know.
We lived with that.
That was part of our part we had to play.
(song ends)
MclNTOSH (dramatized): "Luverne, Minnesota.
"July 20, 1944.
"Somehow, the gossip grapevine
"had heard that there was a telegram
"coming through after 6:00 p.m. last Friday
for Mr. and Mrs. Ray Lester of Magnolia."
"Ray Lester heard about it, and his heart was heavy.
"He started walking down the street.
On the way he met Scotty Dewar, the depot agent."
"Which one is it?' asked Lester,
"because there were four boys to worry about in that family.
"After being told, he went sorrowfully home
to break the news to his wife."
"And it was a gracious gesture
"that was made at the dance in Magnolia that night.
"When the crowd heard the news, the dance was halted immediately
"out of respect to the memory of that fighting Marine
who died on Saipan."
Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
FRANK SINATRA: Gentlemen of the armed forces,
this is the hoodlum from Hoboken.
I'd like to sing a tune for you.
My name's Sinatra and I hope "yiz" like it, hey.
♫ Long ago and far away ♫
♫ I dreamed a dream one day ♫
♫ And now that dream is here beside me... ♫
AANENSON: We would be sitting around our tent area
in the apple orchard in Normandy
and we would discuss what they would have to pay us
to really do what we had just done that day.
We agreed first that we might do it
for $1,000 a mission, but less than ten days later--
our losses had gone up heavily--
we decided that we wouldn't consider doing it
for less than $10,000 a mission.
And I think that it went off the radar screen in value
before the end of July, because there's no way
that you could be a mercenary enough,
they could pay you enough,
to do what we were doing on a volunteer basis.
(plane flies over)
NARRATOR: In the weeks after D-Day,
American pilots, including Quentin Aanenson,
continued to fly their missions
over the fields and hedgerows of Normandy every day,
trying to focus on the help they were giving
to the men on the ground,
and to avoid thinking too hard
about the losses in their own ranks.
NEWSREEL NARRATOR: Dashing to a hedgerow to clear Nazis out
of another line of hedge across a meadow.
(explosions and gunfire)
The enemy position's blasted
and the Germans occupying it have enough,
so out comes the white flag of surrender,
more prisoners taken in the drive
to the important city of Saint-Lo.
As the infantry pushes forward, the way is cleared
by the smashing power of tanks and heavy artillery.
NARRATOR: On July 18, Saint-Lo--
or what was left of it after six weeks of Allied bombing--
fell to the Americans.
General Bradley's forces had finally reached the line
Allied planners had expected his men to reach
just a few days after D-Day.
And he was now ready to send his armor
roaring through the German lines beyond the city.
But first, Allied warplanes
were called in to blast an opening.
The operation was called "Cobra."
The correspondent Ernie Pyle was down below,
watching from a battered French farmhouse
with officers from the 4th Infantry Division.
PYLE (dramatized): "The first planes
"of the mass onslaught came over a little before 10:00 a.m.
They were the fighters and dive-bombers."
"We stood in the barnyard of a French farm and watched them
barrel nearly straight down out of the sky..."
(airplanes flying over)
"And then a new sound gradually droned into our ears,
"a sound deep, all-encompassing,
"with no notes in it,
just a gigantic far-away surge of doom-like sound."
"It was the heavies,
"coming on with a terrible slowness
"in flights of 12, three flights to a group
and in groups stretched out across the sky."
"I thought it would never end."
"And then the bombs came."
"It began up ahead as the crackle of popcorn
"and almost instantly swelled into a monstrous fury of noise
that seemed surely to destroy all the world around us."
NARRATOR: The bombs continued falling for an hour and a half.
The bright day grew dark with smoke, Pyle remembered,
and the steady roar seemed to fill
"all the space for noise on earth."
Two days later, on July 27,
the First Army poured through the newly opened gap
in the German lines,
out into the countryside beyond the hedgerows.
For weeks, the Americans on the ground
had felt fortunate to gain 1,000 yards a day.
Soon they would be covering up to 40 miles
in the same amount of time.
The Germans were reeling.
On August 7, the Americans
stopped a counterattack cold at Mortain,
and after five days of battle, forced the Germans to retreat.
Then, on August 15, in the south of France,
American and Free French forces landed,
fanned out in all directions,
and began driving northward.
The following day, Hitler reluctantly agreed
to pull his battered Seventh Army
out of Normandy.
It began a desperate retreat toward Germany.
The Allies caught them near the town of Falaise.
For three days,
the Allies poured fire into the fleeing men...
...from the ground and from the air.
80,000 Germans ran the terrible gauntlet.
At least 10,000 died,
so many that the pilots of the Allied spotter planes
hundreds of feet above the battlefield
were nauseated by the stench.
So many that after the shooting had stopped,
General Eisenhower remembered,
"it was literally possible
"to walk for hundreds of yards at a time,
stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh."
AANENSON: I had caught a bunch of Germans
in... in double tandem trucks,
and they were just massed in there.
There was so much, uh, firing into that
and I was the only one that was firing.
My wingman... his guns had been jammed and, uh...
the effect on me was that my right hand quit working
and I was on the way home
and I couldn't grip with that hand.
So I had to put my left hand over on top of the stick
to maintain it and go and land with that.
When I'd have these nightmares
in years after the war, many years after the war,
if it was one relating to that mission
or missions like that,
when I'd get up in the morning,
go out to the kitchen, Jackie would be there
and she would have had the coffee made,
and she could tell when I walked in
that my right hand wasn't functioning right.
She'd pour a cup of coffee, not say a word.
She'd hand it to my left hand.
Never a word said.
We just went on.
(explosions, mortar fire)
PAUL FUSSELL: A soldier's letter I was reading recently
is in answer to his mother's letter.
He was fighting in Europe somewhere
and his mother was very frightened
that he was going to be killed.
And she wrote him and said, "Be careful.
For God's sake, be careful."
And he said, "You can't be careful.
You can only be lucky."
Absolutely true.
There's no way, whatever, to escape it by... by technique
or care or attitude or fast movement
or by athletic skills and so on.
You're just lucky.
The shell hits somebody who is not yourself.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: We lived in constant fear of the telegrams.
Each day we would read the lists in the newspaper
to see if we could identify any of the names that were there.
We just never knew when we'd lose someone that we loved.
BURT WILSON: During the war, it was kind of surreal;
we never saw anybody die,
we never saw anybody maimed or wounded or anything like that.
What amounted to a surrealistic feeling about the war
came to an end one day when our neighbors, um,
put a gold star in the window and pulled all the blinds down.
Their oldest son had been killed in Italy.
In Sacramento in those days,
the way you dealt with something like that
was pulling all the shades down
and never coming out of the house.
And so every time you walked past that house,
the whole idea of death was brought home to you
because of the shades drawn and the gold star in the window.
NARRATOR: Since D-Day, telegrams from the War Department
had been arriving on doorsteps all across America
at a rate inconceivable just a year earlier.
Mrs. Augusta Niland of Tonawanda, New York,
received three of them.
One son had died on Omaha Beach, a second at Sainte Mére-Eglise;
a third was missing in action in Burma.
A fourth son would be pulled out of the line,
so that at least one of her boys was sure to survive the war.
28 men from the tiny town of Bedford, Virginia,
had landed on Omaha Beach.
19 of them died.
Three more died fighting in Normandy.
Private First Class James Donohue
and Staff Sergeant Frederick Smith,
specially trained Army Rangers, were lost on June 6,
the first of ten boys from Waterbury, Connecticut,
who would be buried in Normandy.
MclNTOSH: (dramatized): "Here is one of life's tragedies.
"Mrs. Henry Smook went over to Sioux Falls
"with her youngest boy, Harold, 17.
"It wasn't a shopping expedition or a long-planned day of fun.
"She had gone with her youngest son
"to give her consent to his joining the Navy.
"She didn't know that while she was there,
a telegram had come to her home in Luverne"...
"Telling her of the death of her son in France,
Private First Class Herman Smook."
NARRATOR: Herman Smook had died four days after D-Day,
the first Rock County death on European soil.
("Concerto for Clarinet, Strings, Harp and Piano" by Aaron Copland playing)
All across France, the Germans were in full retreat.
Since D-Day, they had lost some 240,000 men;
another 200,000 had surrendered.
Allied casualties were terrible, too.
256,000 soldiers and airmen
had been killed, wounded, captured,
or reported as missing in action.
At least 19,000 French civilians had died, as well.
Countless French villages had been pounded into dust.
But most of France was free.
("Echoes of France [La Marseillaise]" by Django Reinhardt playing)
On August 25, 1944, after four years of Nazi occupation,
Paris, the City of Light, was liberated.
OLLIE STEWART (dramatized): "I, Ollie Stewart, of sound mind
"and fairly sober character, do solemnly give my word
"that I have never been kissed so much in all my life.
"Almost every woman I meet on the street stops
"and kisses me on both cheeks.
It is a beautiful custom."
AANENSON: We were flying a mission near Paris,
and as I pulled off my strafing run
and I turned back over the city
and as I looked down, there were just thousands of people
jamming the streets of the Champs Elysees
and around the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe,
and I realized that I was seeing something
that was basically the culmination
of why we were there.
We are winning this war.
The good guys are going to come out ahead.
("American Anthem" by Gene Scheer playing)
NORAH JONES: ♫ Each generation ♫
♫ From the plains to distant shore ♫
♫ With the gifts they were given ♫
♫ Were determined to leave more ♫
♫ Battles fought together ♫
♫ Acts of conscience fought alone... ♫
♫ These are the seeds ♫
♫ From which America has grown ♫
♫ Let them say of me ♫
♫ I was one who believed ♫
♫ In sharing the blessings ♫
♫ That 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... ♫
("The Wang Wang Blues" by the Benny Goodman Sextet playing)