(birds chirping)
(quiet piano music playing)
NARRATOR: On August 3, 1944,
in the skies over the town of Vire, in France,
the law of averages caught up
with fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson of Luverne, Minnesota.
AANENSON: I was flying the "Tail-End Charlie" position,
which means the last one in the line of flight,
which is the most vulnerable position,
because that's the one they'll start with first.
And suddenly the, uh, 88's
and 20 millimeters started coming up
in heavy amounts and just... Bruuum!
I heard this roar through my airplane,
and fire came into the cockpit...
just all in... in an instant.
My airplane was shaking.
I thought, "I'm gone."
So I tried to bail out.
I tried to move the canopy back,
and a piece of flak had come up through the glide
and so I couldn't get the canopy open.
Couldn't get it open.
The fire was still coming at me, and so I put the plane in a dive
because we'd always discussed
that we didn't want to die by burns.
And so...
I put the plane in a dive--
I was only at 4,000 feet so I could hit the ground fast--
and that move, literally, saved my life
because the, uh, air pressure changed
and so the flames were sucked out
through that opening in the canopy, and that fire died out.
I got back to the base.
I would stall if my speed dropped below 160 miles an hour
sollanded at 170 miles an hour,
and I didn't know that one of the 20 millimeters had come up
through my left wheel well, and I had a flat tire there.
So when the landing gear collapsed on one side
I was still going about 100 miles an hour,
and I was spun around by the force.
My shoulder harness on the right broke loose.
The left one held.
I was spun around and the back of my head hit the gunsight.
So I was unconscious.
Then a couple of enlisted men had pulled me out
and pulled me away from there.
NARRATOR: After medics tended to his dislocated shoulder
and the burns on his legs,
a British photographer from Picture Post magazine
asked Aanenson to pose with his plane.
AL McINTOSH (dramatized): Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.
"Lieutenant John Stavenger, bomber pilot now in England,
"has decided it's a mighty small world after all.
"He hadn't hardly landed
"before he bumped into Lt. Howard James of Luverne.
"Then, he leisurely settled back and read an English magazine.
"He looked at one big picture of a wrecked plane.
"The picture carried the caption:
"'The man who was lost returns to base.'
"The pilot in question was none other
"than Lt. Quentin Aanenson of Luverne.
"His family knew nothing of the incident.
"And the picture showed the Luverne youngster walking away
"from his wrecked plane as blithely unconcerned
as if he'd just bought a nickel's worth of candy."
(engine sputtering)
NARRATOR: A week after his close call,
Aanenson was back in the air,
providing ground cover
for the Americans advancing toward Germany.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: It's 7:00 in the morning
and steaming along the western coast of Peleliu Island.
In just about an hour and a half,
the Marines will hit the beaches there.
Before that the warships of this task force,
which have been pounding the island for three days,
will give it a final terrific softening up.
EMMA BELLE PETCHER: Everybody had a radio during the war.
No TVs.
And three times a day, you got the national news
and three times a day, you did not be far from that radio.
And, of course, my mother had about a four-by-four map.
I really don't know where she got it.
It was a map of all of Europe.
And she had a big, long rule stick
and that map hung right there
and it covered that little wall where the, um, buffet is.
And when news time came,
she followed all of the battles with the rule stick on the map.
She would have been a great historian.
She would have been.
NARRATOR: Before the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941,
most Americans could not have found Pearl Harbor on a map.
In the two and a half years that followed,
they had had to learn a host of new names
of the places their sons were fighting--
Kasserine Pass and Monte Cassino and Anzio,
Utah Beach and Omaha Beach,
Sainte Mére-Eglise and St. Lo and the Falaise Gap;
and, on the other side of the world,
Guam and Bataan and Guadalcanal,
Midway and Saipan and the Philippine Sea.
Before the war could end,
the citizens of Mobile, Alabama, and Sacramento, California,
Luverne, Minnesota, and Waterbury, Connecticut--
and every other town in America--
would be forced to learn still more names:
Arnhem and Aachen and the Hurtgen Forest,
the Vosges Mountains and the Ardennes and Remagen,
Peleliu and Luzon and lwo Jima, and more.
And young men from those towns would learn lessons
as old as war itself--
that generals make plans, plans go wrong, and soldiers die.
For Tom Galloway, a college student from Mobile,
a strategic mistake would put him in an unwinnable battle
where the only victory to be had was survival.
Robert Kashiwagi of Sacramento,
who had had everything taken from him by his country,
would be asked to give even more.
And Quentin Aanenson, of Luverne,
who had lost so many friends and seen so much death,
would endure still more horror
and nearly lose all hope.
EUGENE SLEDGE (dramatized): "To the noncombatants
"and those on the periphery of action,
"the war meant only boredom or occasional excitement.
"But to those who entered the meat grinder itself,
"the war was a netherworld of horror
"from which escape seemed less and less likely
"as casualties mounted and the fighting dragged on and on.
"Time had no meaning;
"life had no meaning.
"The fierce struggle eroded the veneer of civilization
and made savages of us all."
Eugene Sledge.
NARRATOR: The men coined names
for the chaos in which they often found themselves
and the ineptitude of some of the officers
who sent them there,
employing language they would never have used
in front of their mothers or their wives back home:
SNAFU-- "Situation normal, all fucked-up."
And FUBAR-- "Fucked-up beyond all recognition."
PAUL FUSSELL: General Patton is a very wise person,
despite his personal eccentricities.
He said a number of memorable things about war
that only real soldiers know.
He said, "All plans last only
until the time of the first shot."
Then they're set aside.
Then you just have to go on sheer invention and guts
and not running away and various other things
that are never, never mentioned.
(Benny Goodman's "On the Alamo" plays)
NARRATOR: By September of 1944,
the Allies seemed to be moving steadily toward victory
in Europe.
On the Eastern Front,
the Russians had taken parts of Estonia, Latvia,
Lithuania, and Poland
and inflicted 700,000 more casualties
on the retreating Germans.
And in the 11 weeks since D-Day,
American, British, and Canadian forces had freed most of France
and Belgium and parts of Holland
and were arrayed along the 350-mile belt
of concrete fortifications the Germans called the "West Wall."
Beyond it lay the heart of Germany itself.
Allied planners had not expected their forces to get that far
for another eight months.
George Patton's Third Army had set the pace--
covering 400 miles in less than 30 days,
though he had outrun his supplies
and was desperately short of fuel.
His armored columns alone required some 600,000 gallons
of gasoline every 50 miles.
On September 11,
an armored unit of the U.S. First Army
crossed the German frontier near Stalzenburg.
"Militarily,"
General Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff told the press,
"this war is over."
Post exchanges were ordered to halt all holiday packages
for the men on the European front.
Nearly everyone was certain
the war would be over by Christmas.
There was no room in the supply trucks
for winter clothing, either.
Besides, the men wouldn't need it.
Meanwhile, the British had taken the important Belgian port
of Antwerp,
but no fuel or supplies could be landed there,
because the Germans still held the estuary
that lay between the city and the North Sea.
Eisenhower ordered
British General Bernard Montgomery
to clear them out.
That would have taken weeks,
and Montgomery proposed a daring alternative
designed to speed the Allied advance into Germany--
Operation Market Garden.
First, American and British airborne troops would be dropped
behind German lines
to seize bridges along a 65-mile highway
from Belgium, through Holland to Arnhem.
Then, the British Second Army would race along that highway,
cross the Rhine at Arnhem,
go around the northern end of the West Wall,
and drive into the Ruhr Valley,
the center of German industrial might.
For the risky plan to succeed,
everything had to go perfectly
and quickly.
Eisenhower thought the gamble was worth it.
If it did succeed, the war could end in weeks.
"I not only approved of Market Garden,"
he said later, "I insisted on it."
♫
On Sunday, September 17, 1,481 C-47 transports
took off in broad daylight from 24 British airfields
with 20,000 paratroopers on board.
Towed behind the transports were hundreds of CG-4A gliders
carrying men and matériel.
Let's talk about the combat glider-- the CG-4A.
An 85-foot wingspan.
It would carry a ton and a half--
3,000 pounds-- plus the two pilots up front.
(artillery rumbling)
(laughing): But they were flying coffins.
I mean, there was no return, so,
the idea was to get your people down
or get your load down, whatever it is,
and then become an infantryman, which is what we became.
NARRATOR: Harry Schmid of Sacramento had been studying accounting
when he was drafted in 1942,
and first planned to become a medic.
But then, he said,
he didn't want to change bedpans for the whole war,
and volunteered to become a pilot.
When his weak eyes kept him out of a fighter cockpit,
he settled for flying a glider with the 82nd Airborne instead,
and found himself part of Operation Market Garden.
Captain Dwain Luce of Mobile
was also on his way to Holland aboard a glider.
The father of two small children,
he had left his family's cannery business
to join the 82nd Airborne when the war started,
and had survived Sicily and Italy
and 33 days of fighting in Normandy.
LUCE: I got out over the North Sea there,
and that pilot had a parachute on.
I told him, I said,
"Look, you might as well take that parachute off,
because you're not leaving here without me."
And, uh, I... uh... I said,
"Now, you get your ass shot, who's going to land this thing?"
He says, "You are."
SCHMID: Too fast a speed with a CG-4A will kill you,
because you're talking about a fabric airplane
with nothing but little aluminum struts.
And these guys come in at 90 miles an hour
and crash into something and, boy, they just disintegrate.
In all my combat missions,
I never came in at more than 50 miles an hour.
I took the chance of getting hit by ground fire and flak,
but I wanted to get my people down and get down on the ground.
(static-filled radio broadcast): This is Edward R. Murrow.
In just about 30 seconds now...
these 19 men will walk out onto Dutch soil.
There he goes! Do you hear 'em shout?
Three, four, five... six, seven, eight,
nine, ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15...
16, 17, 18...
(engine roaring)
There they go. Every man out.
I can see their chutes going down now.
Every man clear...
hanging there very gracefully,
like nothing so much as khaki dolls
hanging beneath a green lampshade.
The whole sky is filled with parachutes.
They're all going down so slowly.
It seems as though they should get to the ground much faster...
(broadcast fades)
(swing music plays)
NARRATOR: Things went well at first.
Dutch citizens poured into the streets
to greet the Americans.
(cheering and whistling)
The 82nd Airborne, including Harry Schmid
and Dwain Luce,
seized three bridges near Nijmegen, then dug in
and waited for the British armor to race up from Belgium
and relieve them.
The 101st Airborne took
four bridges near Eindhoven,
and when the Germans blew up a fifth,
managed to rebuild it overnight.
They, too, waited to be relieved.
But when the 10,000 men of the British First Airborne
came down seven miles from Arnhem,
the Dutch crowds that turned out
to greet them slowed their advance.
Only 500 of the soldiers
managed to reach the all-important bridge
across the Rhine.
Meanwhile,
word of the Allied plan had fallen into enemy hands,
and by the end of the day,
German panzers had surrounded the outnumbered British
at Arnhem.
(explosive gunfire, bullet ricochets)
(gunfire)
Bad weather delayed airborne reinforcements
for several days,
and when a parachute brigade of free Poles
was finally dropped in, it was shot to pieces.
(gunfire)
(shouting)
(gunshots)
The British armor
that was meant to meet up with the paratroopers
on the ground and then spearhead the advance into Germany
soon found itself under attack from enemy artillery.
(explosion)
Smashed tanks and vehicles caused massive traffic jams
that took hours to clear.
SCHMID: The idea of the whole mission, of course,
was to control the bridges
while Montgomery came up with his tanks.
Well, they shot him all up,
and he didn't get there for seven days.
(laughs)
So we were in the front lines all that time.
We were not attacking the enemy,
but we were defending perimeters.
NARRATOR: This was not the way it was supposed to go.
Harry Schmid, Dwain Luce and the men of the 82nd Airborne
found themselves struggling
just to hold on, with no tanks and no heavy weapons.
MAN: Fire!
SCHMID: And they had two ways of going after you.
They'd either do shells that exploded on the ground,
or they used airbursts.
You worried about those airbursts,
because they would... they would burst
about 20 feet above you,
and there was just shrapnel everywhere.
And just a little piece of shrapnel could hit you,
you know, and you're gone.
LUCE: They had better weapons, in many cases, than we did.
You're talking about their 88's.
They were great weapons.
Very high velocity.
It was so damn fast
that the bullet got there before... before the sound did.
It was zoop, bang.
You know, man, it was just...
It was a terrible weapon to...
We all dreaded the 88's, I guess.
(rumbling explosions)
SCHMID: And when you're in a mission where you're behind enemy lines,
you're worried because nobody knows anything.
You don't know whether the Germans are coming
or they aren't coming,
and that's probably the most thing that mentally bothers you,
is that you don't know what's going on.
NARRATOR: As the Americans held their ground near Nijmegen
and Eindhoven,
the surrounded British at Arnhem were being slaughtered.
(rapid gunfire)
(explosions and shouting)
(shouting and gunfire)
(rapid gunfire and shouting)
(explosive gunfire)
NARRATOR: Finally, after nine long days,
Montgomery abandoned his plan
and ordered the survivors to withdraw by boat.
Market Garden had been
the largest Allied airborne operation of the war...
and the most disastrous.
17,000 Britons and Canadians,
Americans and Poles were killed or wounded
or captured before the operation was abandoned.
More casualties than the Allies had suffered on D-Day.
LUCE: You don't like to see what you see. No...
You don't like to see what you see.
I mean, it's-it's very disquieting to...
have your friends gone and some of them
pretty terribly mauled and things, and...
But that's part of it.
War is not a pleasant activity.
And you kind of need to keep your sense of humor
a little bit to... to get through it.
NARRATOR: The Allies had won themselves
a narrow 65-mile corridor across Holland,
but the rest of the British and American troops,
including Dwain Luce and Harry Schmid,
had to stay where they were to hold it,
battling the deepening cold
as well as the relentless German shelling.
They would be left there for weeks.
LUCE: As a boy, I spent a good deal of time in the woods.
And I think my experiences with that
helped me survive.
And I think the little man upstairs
had his hand on my shoulder.
And I got hit once, across the helmet.
And it didn't penetrate my helmet,
but it'll make you change your underwear if you have any.
But that's the only time I got hit.
No, it's...
it's kind of like a bad dream, I guess.
Wouldn't want to do it again.
Nope.
Couldn't do it again, I don't guess.
NARRATOR: It was clear now that the war in Europe
would not end before winter.
In Waterbury, Connecticut, just before Pearl Harbor,
Miss Virginia Fleming had married
Staff Sergeant John Soden,
who had worked at the U.S. Rubber Company in Naugatuck.
They had a daughter, born while Soden was in training,
and he had been home to see her just once before leaving
for France in the summer of 1944.
On September 10, after volunteering to lead a patrol
across the Moselle River, he was hit in the leg.
He had his "million dollar wound,"
his ticket home, he told a friend,
and was carried to a barn where he was to receive treatment.
(explosion)
Then, a German shell hit the barn.
A few days later, Virginia Soden got a telegram,
regretting to inform her that John was missing in action.
She wrote to him right away.
VIRGINIA (dramatized): "To My Dearest Husband and Daddy,
"I pray to God you will be okay and be back soon,
"as I don't know what I'd ever do.
"But you're coming home, darling.
"And we'll enjoy life
like we're supposed to be entitled to."
"Well, sweets, your daughter is okay.
"I still kiss her every night for her daddy.
"But the poor little dear doesn't know
"what it's all about.
She's so like you, darling, in every respect."
"The check you sent for $40 came.
"Thanks a million, darling.
Every little bit will help for our future, right?"
"Well, John, I can't seem to write anymore,
except I still love you more than ever."
"I pray you'll be safe and home soon.
Your wife, Virginia."
NARRATOR: A month later, a second telegram arrived.
John Soden would not be coming home to Waterbury.
The shell that had exploded in the makeshift hospital
had killed him.
Virginia's younger brother would always remember
that after she read the telegram,
his sister let out "an unearthly howl."
(indistinct, distant shouts)
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: War is mostly boredom, telling lies,
stealing from some other outfit if they've got
something better to eat than you have
and just making the best of a thousand of bad situations.
Uh, it's going to rain.
You're going to get wet.
It's going to get too hot.
It's going to get too cold.
I mean, you're always uncomfortable in the service,
it seemed like to me.
NARRATOR: By the spring of 1944,
Sid Phillips of Mobile had been stationed in the Pacific
for more than two years.
He had survived the fighting on Guadalcanal
and at Cape Gloucester and hoped to be sent to Australia,
with its plentiful beer and friendly girls,
until he got his orders to go home.
Instead, his First Marine Division
was sent to Pavuvu, a remote island so small
that when the men drilled,
one outfit had to march clockwise
and the next counterclockwise
to keep from blocking the only road.
Sitting on his cot one hot afternoon,
Phillips was surprised to see a familiar figure:
his best friend from Mobile, Eugene Sledge.
(Glenn Miller's "Little Brown Jug" plays)
PHILLIPS: I saw him coming clown the company street, looking intense.
I recognized him and ran out,
screamed his name.
And we ran and beat on each other and embraced
and rolled around on the ground.
People thought we were fighting and a big crowd gathered.
But then, I introduced him around,
and it was just a great day.
NARRATOR: 20-year-old Eugene B. Sledge
was the grandson of Confederate officers.
Bookish and frail as a child, he had been taught
to fish and hunt by his physician father
and was a freshman at the Marion Military Institute,
studying to become an officer, when he decided to sign on
as a private in the Marines instead.
He told his anxious parents
that if he waited for graduation,
he might not get a chance at combat.
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: Eugene Sledge was just
an ordinary young man.
He was full of pranks, and full of tricks,
and he and my brother Sidney pulled every one of 'em
that they possibly could.
But they were such great friends
that what one did,
the other one followed suit.
He was a very gentle man,
as my brother Sidney was, to be thrown
into the middle of a fight like that.
NARRATOR: Not long after Sledge got to the Pacific,
he began keeping an unauthorized journal,
slipping tiny sheets of notes between the pages
of the small New Testament he carried,
so that no one else would know what he was doing.
Years later, those uncensored notes would form
the basis of a harrowing memoir
of his experiences in the Pacific.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "The awesome reality
"that we were training to be cannon fodder
"in a global war that had already snuffed out
"millions of lives never seemed to occur to us.
"The fact that our own lives might end violently
"or that we might be crippled while we were still boys
"didn't seem to register.
"The only thing that we seemed to be truly concerned about
"was that we might be too afraid to do ourjobs under fire.
"An apprehension nagged at each of us
that he might appear to be yellow if he were afraid."
Eugene Sledge.
SIDNEY: He had come in as a replacement,
and I was being rotated home
because I had been overseas over two years.
I certainly did think about what he was facing
because it was all bad.
Every campaign was bad.
Some were a little quicker and a little worse than others.
Some were, uh... uh... under worse conditions than others,
but they were all bad, and I knew he was... uh...
he was going to face some hard times.
NARRATOR: In late August of 1944,
Sledge and 16,458 other men of the First Marine Division
left Pavuvu for the Palau Islands,
more than 2,000 miles away.
The Marines were headed for the tiny island of Peleliu,
where the Japanese had constructed an airfield.
It was only 550 miles east of Mindanao,
which was to be the first stop
in General Douglas MacArthur's campaign
to recapture the Philippines.
MacArthur wanted Peleliu put out of action
to protect his flank.
But as Eugene Sledge and his fellow Marines
steamed toward their target,
playing poker and sunbathing on the deck to fill the time,
Allied plans changed.
After the decisive American victory
in the Battle of the Philippine Sea the previous June,
Admiral William Halsey
no longer considered the Japanese air force
a serious threat.
The Peleliu airfield had become largely irrelevant.
But no one canceled the invasion of the island.
Halsey was sure it would take only four days to secure it.
For three days, the Navy bombarded Peleliu.
(explosions)
The foliage that blanketed its jagged coral hills
was burned away.
The coral itself was bleached white by phosphorous.
Finally, the officer in charge told his superiors,
"We have run out of targets."
It was time to send in the Marines.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "It was hard to sleep
"that night before the invasion.
"I thought of home, my parents, my friends--
"and whether I would do my duty,
"be wounded or disabled, or be killed.
"I concluded that it was impossible for me to be killed,
"because God loved me.
"And then I told myself that God loved us all
"and that many would die
"or be ruined physically or mentally
or both in the days following."
"My heart pounded, and I broke out in a cold sweat.
"Finally, I called myself a damned coward
"and eventually fell asleep saying the Lord's Prayer
to myself."
NARRATOR: The invasion of Peleliu began at dawn on September 15, 1944.
At 6:30 in the morning,
Sledge and his comrades clambered into their amtracks
and started for the island.
(gunshots and explosions)
SLEDGE (dramatized): "The world was a nightmare of flashes,
violent explosions, snapping bullets."
"Up and down the beach, a number of amtracks were burning.
"Japanese machine gun bursts made long splashes on the water,
as though flaying it with some giant whip."
(explosions, men shouting)
(men shouting)
NARRATOR: Three Marine regiments-- more than 5,000 men--
went ashore side-by-side and quickly discovered
that the bombardment had done little damage
to the carefully-prepared warren of 500 fortified caves
and concealed gun emplacements--
some equipped with sliding doors of armored steel--
that honeycombed the coral ridges running up the center
of the island.
The Japanese poured fire down upon Eugene Sledge
and his fellow Marines.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "I turned my face away
"and wished that I were imagining it all.
"I had tasted the bitterest essence of war,
"the sight of helpless comrades being slaughtered,
and it filled me with disgust."
NARRATOR: Willie Rushton, also from Mobile, was on the beach, too,
now a member of the Eleventh Depot Company.
RUSHTON: And then the first day
we went in there, those people, they just,
they slaughtered us Marines like we were just a bunch
of hogs coming in the slaughter pen.
The Japanese were some tough customers.
They really, they really could fight.
They come at you with everything they had.
So we Marines, we were just as tough or tougher than they were.
So we, we always almost came out on top.
NARRATOR: The Americans lost 1,200 men,
but they clung to the beach
and some began fighting their way inland.
Eugene Sledge was a mortarman.
He fired round after round into the enemy,
while riflemen advanced ahead of him.
(explosions and artillery fire)
He and his regiment managed
to make it all the way across the narrow island,
then dug in for the night.
No one slept, for fear that Japanese infiltrators would slip
into their lines and slit their throats.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "It was the darkest night I ever saw.
"The overcast sky was as black as the dripping mangroves
"that walled us in.
"I had the sensation of being in a great black hole
"and reaching out to touch the sides of the gun pit
to orient myself."
"Slowly, the reality of it all formed in my mind:
"We were expendable!
"It was difficult to accept.
"We come from a nation and a culture
"that values life and the individual.
"To find oneself in a situation
"where your life seems of little value
is the ultimate in loneliness."
NARRATOR: The next morning,
the Marines were ordered to assault Japanese positions
in the cliffs that overlooked the airfield.
Tanks and artillery would go first.
Then, the infantry and Sledge would follow,
charging across the exposed gravel airstrip
to attack the high ground.
The temperature neared 100 degrees.
There was no shade.
The only water available,
hauled up from the beach in five-gallon cans,
turned out to be fouled by diesel oil.
Scores of men collapsed from heat exhaustion
before the signal was given.
As the Marines--
four battalions and 1,800 men-- moved forward,
the enemy opened up with everything they had.
(explosions in quick succession)
SLEDGE (dramatized): "I clenched my teeth,
"squeezed my carbine stock, recited over and over to myself,
"'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
"'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me."'
"The further we went, the worse it got.
"It seemed impossible that any of us would make it across.
"To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars
"is absolutely terrifying,
but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded."
(explosions)
NARRATOR: Sledge somehow made it across the airstrip safely
and took what shelter he could beneath a bush.
He was "shaking like a leaf," he wrote,
but took comfort from the fact
that a veteran of the fighting on Guadalcanal crouching nearby
was shaking, too.
(explosions and artillery fire)
Japanese tactics had changed since the beginning of the war.
Suicidal banzai charges,
like those on Guadalcanal and Tarawa
and Saipan, were largely a thing of the past.
Instead, Peleliu's 10,500 defenders
would contest every inch of the island
from their hillside strongholds.
They would have to be blasted or burned out of them,
one at a time.
(gunshot)
SLEDGE (dramatized): "Even before the dust had settled,
"I saw a Japanese soldier appear at the blasted opening.
"He drew back his arm to throw a grenade at us.
"My carbine was already up.
"When he appeared, I lined up my sights on his chest
and began squeezing off shots."
(gunshots)
"As the first bullet hit him, his face contorted in agony.
"His knees buckled.
The grenade slipped from his grasp."
"I had just killed a man at close range.
"That I had seen clearly the pain on his face
"when my bullets hit him came as a jolt.
It suddenly made the war a very personal affair."
NARRATOR: Willie Rushton was in the thick of it, too.
He wasn't supposed to be;
his outfit was assigned to just unload supplies and ammunition.
But when the fighting started,
he and some of his friends volunteered
for frontline duty.
RUSHTON: But we were right there
where the fighting was going on, you know.
They was just, just knocking us off as we came forward.
That's what they were doing, knockin' us off.
They didn't make no... whether you was black or white
or whatever, they didn't care when you got into combat.
NARRATOR: 15 members of Rushton's depot company were hit.
He was one of them, wounded in the leg by shrapnel.
He was carried to a hospital ship offshore,
the only wounded black man aboard.
After his wounds were treated,
he asked if he could have a haircut.
The ship's barber refused.
When I got up there he told me, he said, uh,
"I can't cut your hair."
And so then, so a couple,
a couple of white Marines asked him, said,
"Why can't you cut his hair?"
Said, "You don't have to give him no style,
"just cut his hair off.
All he wants is some of that hair off his ears."
So he said, "No... I'm, I can't, I can't cut his hair."
NARRATOR: Then, the captain intervened.
RUSHTON: The captain of the Red Cross ship came down there
and told that barber, say,
"I'm telling you for the first and the last time," said,
"I don't care who comes on this ship,
"if he's an American soldier,
whether he's black or white, or whatever," said,
"I want you to cut his hair, you know, just cut his hair."
He said, "Don't ever make a remark like that anymore."
NARRATOR: Private Rushton got his haircut.
(artillery blast)
For Eugene Sledge
and the other Marines still fighting on Peleliu,
one day, one firefight, one terror-filled night
now seemed just like the next.
(artillery fire)
SLEDGE (dramatized): "During a lull,
"the men stripped the packs and pockets
of the enemy dead for souvenirs."
"The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes.
"It was a brutal, ghastly ritual the likes of which have occurred
"since ancient times on battlefields
"where the antagonists have possessed
"a profound mutual hatred.
"It was uncivilized, as is all war...
"and was carried out with savagery.
"It wasn't simply souvenir hunting
"or looting the enemy dead;
it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps."
"While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard
"from a dead Japanese,
"I noticed a Marine dragging what I assumed to be a corpse,
"but the Japanese wasn't dead.
"He had been wounded severely in the back
"and couldn't move his arms.
"The Japanese's mouth glowed with huge, gold-crowned teeth
"and his captor wanted them.
"He put the point of his Ka-Bar knife on the base of a tooth
"and hit the handle with the palm of his hand.
"Because the Japanese was kicking his feet
"and thrashing about, the knifepoint glanced off the tooth
"and sank deeply into the victim's mouth.
"The Marine cursed him
"and with a slash, cut his cheeks open ear to ear.
"I shouted, 'Put that man out of his misery.'
"All I got for an answer was a cussing out.
"Another Marine ran up and put a bullet
"in the enemy soldier's brain and ended his agony.
"The scavenger grumbled
and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed."
"There were certain areas
"we moved into and out of several times
"as the campaign dragged along its weary, bloody course.
"I became quite familiar
"with the sight of some particular enemy corpse,
"as if it were a landmark.
"It was gruesome to see the stages of decay
"proceed from just killed to bloated
"to maggot-infested rotting to partially-exposed bones...
"like some biological clock
marking the inexorable passage of time."
"On each occasion my company passed such a landmark,
we were fewer in number."
(trading gunfire)
NARRATOR: "The opposing forces on Peleliu
were like two scorpions in a bottle," Eugene Sledge wrote.
"One was annihilated, the other nearly so."
(artillery fire)
After six weeks of combat,
Sledge and the rest of the First Marine Division
were finally taken off the island.
It would be another month
before the Japanese commander finally radioed his superiors
that "all is over on Peleliu" and then committed suicide.
A handful of Japanese would go on fighting there
until February of 1945.
Securing Peleliu was supposed to take four days.
It took more than two months.
10,000 Japanese were killed,
nearly every man who had defended the island.
More than 1,200 Americans perished,
including Private John D. New,
who had grown up in Mobile just across town from Eugene Sledge.
He hurled himself onto a Japanese grenade,
saving the lives of two friends, but losing his own.
For his heroism, he received a posthumous Medal of Honor.
5,274 more Americans were maimed or missing.
Out of the 235 men in Eugene Sledge's company,
only 85 left the island without physical wounds.
And in the end, there had been no tactical need
for the little airfield
for which so many of Sledge's friends had died.
SLEDGE (dramatized): "As I struggled upward
"onto the boat with my load of equipment,
"I felt like a weary insect climbing a vine.
"But at last I was crawling up out of the abyss of Peleliu.
"I stowed my gear on my rack and went topside.
"The salt air was delicious to breathe.
"What a luxury to inhale
long, deep breaths of fresh, clean air."
"But something in me died at Peleliu.
"Perhaps it was a childish innocence
that accepted as faith the claim that man is basically good."
"Possibly I lost faith that politicians in high places,
"who do not have to endure war's savagery,
will ever stop blundering and sending others to endure it."
Eugene Sledge.
(film score from Flying Tigers Playing)
BURT WILSON: We couldn't wait for the next war film to come out
because it was filled with heroism
and everybody sacrificing for the war,
and everybody who died died for a cause.
The biggest audience response came like from a movie
Flying Tigers with John Wayne.
And when he shot down Japanese planes
and the Japanese pilot would hold his hands to his face
and the blood would come out of his fingers,
we would jump up and cheer
because the good guys were winning.
(engines roaring)
(Speaking Japanese)
(bicycle bell rings)
The big change that the war brought for me was
I was a businessman at the age of ten.
I was a Bee carrier, managing my own money,
managing my own route.
And what did I do with my first paycheck?
I went and bought a cardboard replica
of a .30 caliber machine gun
and went home and put it up in a tree in the backyard
and made believe I was mowing down the enemy like that.
That was my contribution to the war effort.
And we all played war to a certain extent,
but it's interesting the way we played war
because nobody ever died.
If you got shot, somebody came to your aid and fixed you up,
and then you could rise up and shoot again.
("Taxi War Dance" by Count Basie Playing)
NARRATOR: The war transformed Sacramento,
just as it had Waterbury and Mobile
and scores of other cities and towns all over the country.
Women now drove city buses and directed downtown traffic.
Some 12,000 local boys had gone away to war
since Pearl Harbor,
including Earl Burke, still recovering from the wounds
he suffered as a member of the Eighth Air Force,
and Harry Schmid, still fighting the Germans in Holland.
The city's 7,000 Japanese-American citizens
were missing, too,
sent to internment camps scattered across the West.
Others now occupied their homes and farms and businesses...
...some carefully protecting the interests
of their absent friends,
many eager to profit from their former neighbors' misfortune,
while new immigrants from Mexico harvested their crops.
28,000 defense workers streamed into Sacramento, as well.
Room had to be found for all of them
and for thousands of service personnel
at the city's three Air Force bases:
Beale, Mather, and McClellan.
The federal government built three housing developments,
but hundreds had to bunk in the city jail,
the basement of the Memorial Auditorium,
and in the Japanese Buddhist Association Hall
that stood empty now that its members had been taken away.
WILLIAM PERKINS: The first Sunday I came to town,
I walked down Capitol Avenue.
And on the way down toward the Capitol,
I looked up and I saw some oranges up in a tree--
way up there-- and I must have sat there for a long time.
Because this was in April,
and I sat there for quite a while just admiring
and couldn't believe I was looking at oranges in April
and back in my home it probably was snow drifts.
NARRATOR: Army Private William H. Perkins, from Newport, Rhode Island,
arrived at McClellan Air Force Base in the spring of 1944
to take up his duties as a member
of the all-black 4909 Aviation Base Unit--
truck drivers, mess hall workers,
guards, and MPs.
They were housed in substandard wooden shacks
they called "Splinter City."
One of Perkins' best friends in his outfit was
Corporal Walter Thompson, a college man from Pennsylvania
who had hoped to become a fighter pilot
but couldn't get into the Tuskegee Flight School,
the only one open to African-Americans.
WALTER THOMPSON: There was about 1,200, 1,500 men,
every walk of life and from all over the country.
Highly-educated individuals there
down to almost illiterates.
They were all assigned to that,
regardless of your intellectual abilities.
If you were colored, that's where you were assigned--
to the 4909th.
NARRATOR: There were separate facilities on the base
for black and white personnel--
separate theaters, chapels, even bowling alleys.
("The Basie Boogie" by Count Basie playing)
The unit had its own big band, the 4909 Barons of Swing.
Walter Thompson and William Perkins were both members.
JEROLINE GREEN: I had heard so much about California at that time.
And it sounded so glamorous, and...
and coming from a little hick town,
l thought, "Well, I'd better go," so I did.
NARRATOR: Jeroline Green had come to Sacramento
from Coffeyville, Kansas,
just one of some eight million Americans
who migrated to the Pacific Coast
during the war, in search of defense jobs.
GREEN: And I realized that if I stayed at home,
of course I'd probably finish my schooling,
but I'd probably end up working
in some white woman's kitchen or something.
I had no growth or potential.
Then I was hired as an inventory clerk,
counting nuts, bolts, and screws.
NARRATOR: Jerri Green worked at McClellan Air Force Base,
side by side with her new best friend, Barbara Covington.
Covington was having a hard time coming up with the money
for tuition and books for college,
when she heard about the opportunities
being offered at McClellan.
COVINGTON: And we got jobs within a week.
That's the way it was in those days; you could walk into a job.
We got jobs as typists in a unit and, um,
at McClellan Air Force Base.
And I think my payjumped from the $24 a month to $65.
And I was making, considering, fairly good money.
They wanted the blacks to all be in one place.
You know, I marvel now at how well we took it.
You know?
We made the best of it.
We really did.
We made the best of it.
And we tried to get as much out of it as we could.
And we tried to have as much fun as we could.
NARRATOR: Barbara Covington and Jerri Green
sometimes performed with the 4909 Band,
dancing as the "Flora Dora Coras."
There they made friends with Walter Thompson
and William Perkins.
COVINGTON: And it was great times
to be able to go out to the base and listen to the fellows
that you knew play so many of these beautiful songs.
What was sort of funny about it, though,
so many of the guys that were in the band
had girlfriends in the audience,
and some of them couldn't hardly play
for watching their girlfriends
as they danced with some other serviceman.
NARRATOR: Barbara Covington and William Perkins
would marry years after the war was over.
Walter Thompson and Jerri Green didn't wait that long.
They were married at the end of 1944
at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California.
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "Santo Tomas Camp, Manila.
"Daddy is now out of tobacco.
"He dries papaya leaves on the roof and smokes that.
"People use anything to roll their cigarettes.
"Some even use pages from the Bible
"because the paper is so fine.
"Every day I hear of some person doing strange things.
"A Catholic priest did a mortal sin by going around with a lady,
"then falling in love with her,
"acting so mushy in front of everybody,
"that he was kicked out of the church.
"I heard a husband and wife fighting loudly.
"She yelled at him, 'If I hadn't married you,
I wouldn't be in this camp now."'
Sascha Weinzheimer.
NARRATOR: 11-year-old Sascha Weinzheimer and her family
were still imprisoned, along with 4,000 other civilians
rounded up by the Japanese,
on the grounds of the Santo Tomas University
in Manila, on the island of Luzon.
As the war went on, conditions had steadily deteriorated.
WEINZHEIMER: Once the food started going down, everything went clown.
And toward the end, my mother was 73 pounds.
And, um, she nursed my brother until he was, uh, three.
So, if you see a picture of him during that time, he is chubby.
And that's because of Mother's milk.
But that depleted her.
(airplanes passing)
WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "September 21, 1944.
"This morning, about 9:30,
"there were seven Nip planes above us practicing diving.
"It was a bright, sunshiny day.
"Then we heard the sound of many planes in the distance
"but didn't pay much attention.
"Mother said, 'That's a different sound.'
"'Can't you hear it?'
"Mother ran outside and we heard her yell, 'Look, look!'
"There are hundreds of them!'
"We all ran out
"and right over our heads were planes!
"Planes! Planes!
Everyone was screaming and pointing up at them."
WEINZHEIMER: That was absolutely fantastic.
First of all, the engines were not Mitsubishi engines,
they were American, different sounding, strong engines.
(gunfire)
NARRATOR: Waves of American planes launched from aircraft carriers
roared in over Manila,
bombing and strafing Japanese positions,
attacking Japanese warships anchored in the bay.
WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "Everyone was so excited.
"Of course, it was very dangerous for us
"because of the shrapnel
"falling all over the camp, from the ack-ack guns;
"but everyone seemed to feel that our boys
and our bombs couldn't hurt us."
WEINZHEIMER: And then, finally, the Japanese saw us going crazy,
looking up and everything, and they set down rulings
that we were to come into the main building,
and we were, if we were caught looking up at our own planes,
we would pay the consequences.
So, a lot of the, um, prisoners, a lot of the men,
would be sent down to the main gate and tied up at the stake
and made to look up at the sun for, you know, the whole day.
("Pennies from Heaven" playing)
NARRATOR: The Japanese were still in control of the Philippines,
but the American assault had begun,
and the next morning,
the prisoner who played music over the camp's loudspeaker
put on "Pennies from Heaven."
BILLIE HOLIDAY: ♫ ...the things you love, you must have showers ♫
♫ So when you hear it thunder ♫
♫ Don't run under a tree ♫
♫ There'll be pennies from heaven ♫
♫ For you and me. ♫
(instrumental interlude)
(song ends, airplane soars past)
NARRATOR: One month later, on October 20,
General Douglas MacArthur's forces landed
on the island of Leyte...
...the first foothold
in the struggle to win back the Philippines.
(explosions, gunfire)
MacArthur's own landing craft got stuck 75 yards offshore
and he had no choice but to wade to the beach.
His publicity machine made the most of it.
LOWELL THOMAS: When General MacArthur left his command of Bataan
by presidential order, he gave the solemn promise,
"I will return."
Now he tells the Philippine people, "I have returned."
KATHARINE PHILLIPS: So when he came wading through the water up on the beach,
there were great cheers in the movie theater.
Because that's, of course, how we saw MacArthur returning.
I realize now it was staged,
a lot of it, but, man, it was good to see him walking back.
NARRATOR: MacArthufls return thrilled Americans and Filipinos alike.
As his men began to fight their way
across the islands of the Philippines,
what remained of the once-mighty Japanese fleet
would be shattered in the largest naval engagement
in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
But 24 volunteer enemy pilots
offered fresh evidence of Japan's resolve
to keep fighting, no matter the odds.
They deliberately crashed their planes
into the decks of American carriers
in hopes of setting them ablaze.
They were called kamikazes-- Japanese for "divine wind."
Despite the victory at sea,
months of bloody fighting lay ahead
before the Philippine Islands,
and the people imprisoned on them,
could be liberated.
PAUL FUSSELL: Everybody was scared to death all the time.
And yet, you never said so,
you never gave any signals that you were.
You just were and you knew the other people were, too.
You don't run away because every alternative is impossible.
There's no way out of it.
There's no way to change it, and you are there
until you get killed or wounded.
Or until you... you flee and, you know,
allow everybody to exercise their instinct for contempt,
which is unthinkable to most people.
So there's no way out and that puts you in the situation
that you're never in, I think, in civilian life.
NARRATOR: Back in Europe,
the Allies were still stalled in the north,
suffering from supply problems,
the disaster of Operation Market Garden,
and intensified German resistance.
The American 7th Army's drive northward
from the south of France had run into trouble as well.
They had landed at Marseille in mid-August,
and at first, things had gone better
than anyone had anticipated.
Within a month, they had pushed almost 400 miles,
taken 89,000 German prisoners
and linked up with elements of Patton's 3rd Army
to finally complete the continuous line
Eisenhower now believed essential to the Allied cause.
But thousands of Germans had retreated
into the Vosges Mountains--
steep, thickly forested with evergreens,
shrouded in fog and drenched with cold autumn rains.
There, they dug in,
ordered to halt the Allied advance into Germany.
American units that had already fought
in the mountains of Italy were sent to France
and ordered to battle their way through the Vosges.
One was the 36th "Texas" Division,
the same outfit that had nearly been destroyed
at Monte Cassino the previous winter.
Another, attached to it,
especially requested by headquarters,
was the 100th/442nd Combat Team--
Japanese-American troops,
most of them recruited from internment camps
in the United States.
They had once been considered a problem by the Army.
Now, they were problem-solvers,
called in when others failed.
ROBERT KASHIWAGI: It was bitterly cold.
That's when the Lost Battalion Campaign happened,
because our general was very, you might say, ambitious.
You say "blood and guts" --
why, it was our blood and his guts, you know?
NARRATOR: Major General John E. Dahlquist,
commander of the Texas Division, was relatively new to combat
and had nearly lost his command twice
during the drive north from the Riviera
for allowing his men to lag behind.
But he was convinced he was a better tactician
than more seasoned soldiers.
And he would prove willing to use his detachment
of Japanese-American veterans to correct his own mistakes.
The village of Bruyéres was their first target.
Dahlquist assured them the surrounding hills
were only lightly defended.
In fact, they were filled with well-dug-in Germans.
The 442nd cleared them off
in four days, despite the terrain,
the steady icy downpour that filled their foxholes,
and the rain of artillery shells bursting among the treetops.
As soon as they had taken Bruyéres,
General Dahlquist insisted
they push further into enemy territory,
to seize another heavily defended hill
overlooking Biffontaine,
a tiny village with no military importance,
and then to take the town itself.
They did it all in just two days,
but their losses were heavy
in part because the inexperienced Dahlquist
first gave them an unrealistic deadline for taking the hill,
then ordered them off it,
then forced them to retake it when the Germans returned.
SUSUMU SATOW: General Dahlquist was
a very strict general.
And especially, it seems to me,
that he was trying to push the 442nd too hard, too far.
Telling us to "Advance, advance," you know.
So he was hard in that way.
And I really didn't have any respect for him.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, General Dahlquist had sent a battalion
of his Texans along a densely forested ridge
toward the important town of St. Dié.
Again, veteran officers warned him
the woods were full of Germans.
Again, Dahlquist insisted there were none.
Within an hour, the Texans were under attack.
(artillery thundering)
275 of them were cut off and surrounded by the Germans,
who zeroed in on them from three sides.
For two days, shells blasted their positions.
The Texans began to run out of food and ammunition.
Two attempts to break through to them failed.
Finally, on October 26,
Dahlquist ordered the exhausted men
of the 442nd to return to the wooded slopes,
rescue the "Lost Battalion" --
as the Texans would come to be called--
and restore his reputation.
TIM TOKUNO: One time, our regimental commander, Colonel Penoe,
pleaded with the division commander, you know,
that we could pull back because our men were so depleted.
But the Division General said,
"No, we need to get those boys out because every day counts.
"You get in there and get them out
if it takes every damn last one of you to do it."
NARRATOR: For five days,
fighting from tree to tree in heavy fog,
they tried to get to the trapped men.
On the morning of October 30,
they were just 1,000 yards from the survivors,
but pinned to the slope by artillery
and machine gun fire.
KASHIWAGI: We were stuck because there's a terrain that was steep,
and so we were on our own
like a cowboy and Indian type of battle,
and so the other people couldn't help us.
NARRATOR: Finally, they had had enough.
"I" Company and Robert Kashiwagi's
"K" Company rose to their feet
and charged up the hillside,
hurling grenades into German machine gun nests
and firing from the waist as they climbed.
KASHIWAGI: We just went hog-wild crazy.
We were mad at everybody
and were ready to kill anything that there was.
And finally we made contact with the Lost Battalion,
and we found only 230 or so surviving.
But we lost 400 men trying to rescue those 230.
What a terrible price we paid.
TOKUNO: After we rescued the outfit,
why, the first Caucasian fellow that came out
said, "I was never so glad to see a Jap in my life."
(wry laugh)
That's the first thing he said.
NARRATOR: "I" Company had started into the forest with 185 men.
Just eight walked out unhurt.
Robert Kashiwagi's "K" Company had begun with 186 men.
Only 17 emerged on foot.
All the rest were dead or wounded or missing.
Kashiwagi had himself been hit by shrapnel for a third
and then a fourth time in the fighting.
A few days later, Mr. and Mrs. Kametaro Takeuichi,
formerly of Sacramento, now living behind barbed wire
at the Granada Relocation Center, received a telegram.
Their son, Tadashi, had been among those killed
in the struggle to rescue the Lost Battalion.
On November 12, General Dahlquist announced
he wanted to review the 442nd,
to thank them for what they had done.
KASHIWAGI: The general decided,
"Well, now, we want to award you people.
Recognize your deed."
And so he said, "We want the whole regiment in formation."
And when the re... when the general got there
and looked at the formation, and he was so disgusted,
he said, "I asked you to get the whole regiment out there!"
And our colonel,
with tears in his eyes, says, "General," he says,
"that's all that's left of that particular regiment.
That's exactly what you did to us."
NARRATOR: The 100th/442nd would spend the next four months
in the south of France--
and then receive new orders.
They were needed to lead still another assault--
back where they had started, in Italy.
The bitterness the survivors felt toward General Dahlquist
continued to smolder.
Many years later, at a review at Fort Bragg,
Dahlquist encountered a white lieutenant colonel
who had served with the Japanese Americans.
He offered his hand.
"Let bygones be bygones," Dahlquist said.
"It's all water under the bridge, isn't it?"
The colonel saluted--
but he would not shake the general's hand.
JIM SHERMAN: In the schools,
we always talked about what was happening in the war
in all the grades that I remember.
Once in a while, we would have somebody come home, you know,
who had been overseas who would come up to the school
and talk about where they had been or, in...
You really, you know, again, you know,
between six and ten years old,
I wasn't into the geopolitical aspects of the war.
I was more impressed to see the guy.
(Benny Goodman's "I Know that You Know" playing)
NARRATOR: While Eugene Sledge tried to recover
from the horrors of Peleliu,
his best friend Sid Phillips was back home in Mobile.
SIDNEY PHILLIPS: I felt like it was simply a dream,
that I actually wasn't coming home.
Even after I arrived in Mobile,
I kept thinking that... that I can't be here,
that I'm going to wake up.
The feeling that it wasn't happening,
I think, was overwhelming.
You just couldn't feel like
that you had actually survived the war
and that you were actually back in your hometown
and, uh, in your own house.
I don't think I slept for about three days.
I was astounded when I saw
how much change had come to the city.
It was so crowded and so much hustle and bustle,
I hardly recognized the place.
I think, uh, every man that was in the service was well aware
of the fact that when you came home on furlough,
it was a very good chance that you would lapse
into a release of bad language so...
uh, it was dominant in your thinking.
It made you speak slowly and deliberately
and almost, uh, repeat in your own mind
what you were going to say before you said it because,
you know, uh, in the service,
you just don't use any adjectives.
You forget all your adjectives and just use one or two.
Like?
Like I'm not going say.
My wife would come down from Heaven and hit me on the head.
(explosions thundering in distance)
FUSSELL: When you come on the line, you are very brave
because you know nothing about what's happening.
And it's easy for you to perform pseudo-brave gestures
and procedures because you don't know yet.
And gradually... this is because
you have a reservoir of courage when you arrive,
and each time you get badly frightened,
a little of it diminishes until you don't have any left.
And that is the worst moment.
NARRATOR: As the Lost Battalion was being rescued,
Paul Fussell, a newly-minted second lieutenant
in the 103rd Infantry Division, was bivouacked at Epinal,
at the foot of the Vosges Mountains.
He was 20 years old, from Pasadena, California,
fresh from 19 months of training,
and filled with excitement.
He had told his parents he felt "very confident and safe"
as he went off to war.
The reception he and his fellow soldiers had received
during their first few days in southern France
only added to his buoyancy.
As the division moved northward, up the Rhone Valley,
young women appeared along the road,
waving and passing out bottles of wine.
FUSSELL: We brought in good health-- very important--
youth, optimism...
That's why these 18-year-olds could pursue war at all.
They were kids.
They were optimistic.
And they really thought that if you did well, you'd be rewarded.
I mean, they're that innocent.
They had no idea about life's accidents.
NARRATOR: On the night of November 10,
he and the rest of the men of Company "F"
were ordered up to the front,
to a thickly forested hillside overlooking St. Dié,
the town toward which the Lost Battalion had been heading
when it was surrounded by the Germans.
They were to replace a weary company
that had been engaged with the enemy for weeks.
FUSSELL: I came across two German kids
dead, lying on their backs.
They'd been killed the day before
by the unit we were replacing.
And they were so young, I couldn't believe it.
I thought they were between maybe 12 and 14 years old.
And at the end of the war, of course,
the Germans were absolutely scraping the barrel
of everybody-- old men who could hardly walk
and little kids from late grammar school.
These kids had little uniforms on.
They were wearing caps, not helmets.
And each had been shot through the head.
And the blue, bluish-red brains
of one were coming out his nostrils--
they had their eyes open, too.
And the other one,
his bluish-red brain was coming out just from under his cap,
and sort of displacing his cap as he wore it.
And that really gave me a jolt.
I seldom refer to it.
But it was my introduction to some painful facts--
that this war is serious.
We are going to kill people regardless of their age,
as long as they're wearing German uniforms
and they are going to try to kill us.
DWAIN LUCE: I often wondered why the Germans didn't quit.
I wondered why they didn't quit after Normandy.
Once we successfully landed on the continent,
to me it was obvious we're going to win the war.
It was just how long, or how soon.
And we, all that we went through and the people that were killed.
But... what's your alternative?
NARRATOR: The Allied Command in Europe had not waited to see
how Operation Market Garden turned out before mounting
four more-or-less simultaneous assaults on the West Wall,
which the Allies called the Siegfried Line.
Each had fallen short.
The Seventh Army overran Strasbourg
but was halted on the Rhine's west bank.
Patton's 3rd Army took Metz
and secured three bridgeheads across the Saar,
but could proceed no further
until it could get enough fuel to go on.
In the north, two attacks were launched
by the American 1st Army:
one was aimed at the German city of Aachen;
the other intended to sweep the enemy
from the 50 wooded square miles just south
of that city called the Hurtgen Forest.
TOM GALLOWAY: The Hurtgen Forest was the worst.
And you haven't heard much about it because...
it was just a mess-up.
There was no reason to go through the forest,
but the generals kept wanting to go through the forest.
And you'd put a division in there and chew it up.
And they'd pull it out
and put another division in and chew it up.
NARRATOR: It was a nightmarish place to fight.
With 100-foot fir trees
that in some places grew just four feet apart,
it was so dense and dark and shrouded in dank fog,
one general remembered,
that "upon entering it you want to drop things behind
"to mark your path,
as Hansel and Gretel did with their bread crumbs."
Two parallel lines of German pillboxes
and log-and-dirt bunkers were hidden among the trees,
several miles apart.
The pine needles that blanketed the forest floor
disguised tripwires
and mines the Americans called "Bouncing Betties"
that sprang into the air and went off at groin height.
The commanders who planned the battle
knew almost nothing about the terrain
and never came to see it for themselves.
And no one had been trained to fight in such a place.
"We're taking three trees a day," one officer said,
"and they cost us a hundred men apiece."
(rifle firing)
(machine-gun fire in distance)
The first two divisions to be ordered into the forest
would lose 4,500 men in three weeks...
...and move less than three miles.
On November 2, the 28th Infantry Division followed.
With them was Second Lieutenant Tom Galloway
from Mobile, Alabama,
an acquaintance of Sid Phillips and his sister Katharine.
He had been a senior at Auburn University
and was now a replacement officer on the front lines,
a forward observer
scouting targets for the 109th Field Artillery.
GALLOWAY: The man I replaced got shot, and, uh.
It just wasn't too good to think that, uh...
what happened to him, but then you've replaced him.
(explosion)
NARRATOR: Targets were almost impossible to spot from the ground.
Dense growth and constant fog hid them from the air, as well.
Tanks could barely move on the handful
of narrow, muddy, heavily mined logging trails.
Soldiers could not see one another, let alone the enemy.
"If anyone said he knew where he was," one commander said,
"he was a damned liar!"
Despite everything,
Galloway's division took its first objective--
the little town of Schmidt-- in just two days.
The Germans took it back the following morning.
The battle lines became totally confused.
GALLOWAY: We were all mixed up.
Give you an example.
The medics--
there was only one building that I know about there,
and both the German and American medics were using it.
They were just bringing in all the wounded
and both sides were using that one building.
NARRATOR: A steady, cold rain began to fall,
followed by sleet, then snow.
Thousands developed trench foot.
When it was too painful to stand,
men took turns kneeling in the icy water
that filled their foxholes.
German 88 shells burst in the fir trees above them,
showering the men with shrapnel and dagger-sharp shards of wood.
GALLOWAY: The artillery would hit those trees
and you didn't know if you were hit by artillery
or flying wood.
There just was no place to get protection.
The Germans had it, they had it all mapped
and you had to go down to firebreaks.
Of course they would have guns at those firebreaks.
And it made it bad.
I just recall one morning, I went in
with the battalion
and before nightfall, the sergeant major came to me
and told me I was the only officer they had left.
And that's out of a battalion.
And it just, uh, it just chewed people up.
(explosions thundering)
NARRATOR: "The days were so terrible that I would pray for darkness,"
one private recalled,
"and the nights were so bad I would pray for daylight."
By November 13, the officers of every single rifle company
in the 28th Division had been killed or wounded.
After a night of continuous German shelling,
an entire company broke and ran.
Even officers with drawn revolvers could not stop them.
Hundreds of men shot themselves in the foot or hand
rather than endure any more.
Hundreds more collapsed psychologically,
sat staring into the distance as if no battle raged around them.
The reporter Ernie Pyle called it
"the accumulated blur, the hurting vagueness
of being too long in the lines."
In mid-November, fresh troops replaced what was left
of Tom Galloway's division.
The fighting in the Hurtgen Forest would go on for weeks.
More than 33,000 American soldiers would be lost.
So many died
and those who lived spent so much time desperately digging
for their own protection
that there were few burials.
When the snow melted the following spring,
hundreds of bodies and parts of bodies
would still litter the forest floor.
GALLOWAY: The men were...
well, you were just all beat up.
You'd been in that mess.
You'd been under that strain.
You just... were glad to get out of there.
I like to think that probably the prettiest sight
that I saw over there was coming out of the forest,
up on a hill and looking down.
It had snowed and the whole-- these were big fir trees--
and they were all pretty with snow on and everything
and I couldn't decide whether the scene was pretty
or I was so glad to get out of there
that made it look so pretty.
But I do remember that.
NARRATOR: Galloway and his comrades were sent for rest and recovery
to the Ardennes Forest,
a quiet place where nothing much was thought likely to happen.
("Come Ye Thankful People, Come" Playing)
NARRATOR: November 23, 1944, was Thanksgiving.
Defense workers in Mobile, Alabama,
and Waterbury, Connecticut,
remained on the job to help "speed the day of victory."
At noon, servicemen at McClellan Field in Sacramento
were serenaded by the glee club of the 4909 Aviation Squadron.
And in Luverne, Minnesota,
the local Lutheran church held separate Thanksgiving services
in English and in German.
The commander in chief,
just reelected for an unprecedented fourth term,
celebrated the holiday with polio patients
at Warm Springs, Georgia.
SASCHA WEINZHEIMER (dramatized): "Thanksgiving.
"We had half a can of Spam, cooked one extra cup of rice,
"and got enough talinum from our garden
for a salad with three whole garlics chopped up in it."
"We thank God we are all together
"and not really sick like so many people in here are.
"As usual, we talked about our next Thanksgiving.
"Buddy wouldn't know what a turkey was anyway,
but I still remember what good food we always had."
Sascha Weinzheimer.
NARRATOR: Rumors of rescue swept through the Santo Tomas Prison Camp,
raising hopes, then dashing them.
But there had been no more signs that the Americans were coming.
MacArthur's Army was still 350 miles away
on the island of Leyte.
In Europe, morale among the troops was said to be sinking.
The men at the front, like their commanders,
had expected the war would be over by now.
To cheer them up,
Eisenhower declared that every man in the European theater
should have a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving
no matter how hard it was to organize.
In the Hurtgen Forest,
a major in the 8th Infantry Division went all the way up
to the division commander
begging that it not be permitted.
When his men gathered around to eat, he said,
German artillery would zero in on them.
But the division commander had his orders.
The cooks were on their way.
The major was right.
As his men grouped themselves
around the canisters of hot turkey, the enemy opened fire.
(explosion)
As many as ten men were blown apart at a time.
The major would survive the war,
but was never able to face a turkey dinner again
without weeping.
On the forested slopes of the Vosges Mountains,
Thanksgiving turkey was served to the men, too,
though it was cold by the time
it got to Lieutenant Paul Fussell.
That same afternoon,
he found himself part of a 12-man squad ordered forward
to scout the defenses of the German-held town of Nothalten.
A burst of rifle fire forced them
to find what cover they could behind a small rise.
German snipers had them in their sights.
No one seemed to know what to do.
Then a second lieutenant moved forward with his carbine.
"Let's get the sons of bitches," he said.
FUSSELL: His name was Abe Goldman.
And most of the people I fought with who were
from the South and Texas-- Oklahoma and so on--
had never seen a Jew in their lives.
And the idea of this Jewish kid, Abe Goldman,
who should have been-- in the view of
most of the other soldiers-- should have been
in the dry goods business,
to see him on the front line...
and he was very enthusiastic.
He knew what had happened to the Jews.
He was probably the bravest one in the whole platoon of 40 men.
And that's why he got himself shot.
(gunshot)
And the fact that out of, say, 12 people,
he was the only one that crawled forward
to risk his life sort of changed, changed...
I'd say it changed a lot of minds.
NARRATOR: The fight for Nothalten
would take a terrible toll on Fussell's men.
Abe Goldman survived,
but by the time the battle was over,
the company had lost four of its six officers.
Fussell's platoon lost 13 of its 40 men.
The average life expectancy for a junior infantry officer
on the front lines was now just 17 days.
In the end, Lieutenant Paul Fussell
would beat those odds.
But they would haunt him for the rest of his life.
(engines droning)
QUENTIN AANENSON: Well, as we pushed the Germans back and as they retreated...
...they were able to take all of their flak guns
and most of their artillery with them.
So, as we would fly missions
into that area-- in the Hurtgen Forest
or into the Ruhr Valley--
we were facing a larger number of flak guns
than we had before.
So it was a terribly brutal time for us.
NARRATOR: Fighter pilot Quentin Aanenson of Luverne, Minnesota,
had been helping provide air cover for American troops
on the ground ever since D-Day.
Through all that time, his anchor to sanity had been
the belief that Jackie Greer, the girl he'd met
while in training in Louisiana,
would marry him if he survived the war.
GREER: Following that war was
the best history lesson leverhad.
I got a big map,
and every day, I'd get... I had my crayons out.
Every day-
Certain colors meant this group is here,
certain colors are this.
And I kept up with that war.
I learned more about Europe
than I had ever learned in school.
It was very important that I stay with it.
NARRATOR: Aanenson and Greer exchanged letters every two or three days,
each trying to keep the other's spirits up
till they could be together again.
Aanenson had survived a bad fire in his plane,
was haunted by the fear that he had once mistakenly
fired on British or American troops,
nearly died when his plane hurtled toward its target
so fast his instruments froze.
When he managed to pull
out of his dive at 600 miles per hour,
blood vessels in his eyes burst
and blood trickled from his ears.
Meanwhile, his friends kept dying.
AANENSON: Two of the guys that lived in my tent were killed.
There was just four of us in there,
and two of them were killed.
I had been listed as missing in action
because I had been so badly shot up I had to land
on a temporary airfield closer to the front lines.
Johnny Bathurst and I, who were the survivors in Duffy's Tavern,
our tent there,
decided that we couldn't deal with that anymore.
So we quit making friends, new friends.
NARRATOR: On December 5, 1944,
the impact of all that Aanenson had seen
and experienced overcame him,
and he started writing Jackie a very different kind of letter
from the ones he had sent before.
AANENSON: "Dear Jackie,
"For the past two hours, I've been sitting here alone
"in my tent trying to figure out just what I should do
"and what I should say in this letter in response
to your letters and some questions you have asked."
"I have purposely not told you much about my world over here,
"because I thought it might upset you.
"Perhaps that has been a mistake,
"so let me correct that right now.
"I still doubt if you will be able to comprehend it.
I don't think anyone can who has not been through it."
"I live in a world of death."
"I have watched my friends die in a variety of violent ways."
"Sometimes, it's just an engine failure on takeoff,
"resulting in a violent explosion.
"There's not enough left to bury.
"Other times, it's the deadly flak
"that tears into a plane.
"If the pilot is lucky, the flak kills him.
"But usually he isn't,
and he burns to death as his plane spins in."
"Fire is the worst.
"In early September, one of my good friends crashed
"on the edge of our field.
"As he was pulled from the burning plane,
the skin came off his arms."
"His face was almost burned away.
"He was still conscious and trying to talk.
You can't imagine the horror."
"So far, I have done my duty in this war.
"I have never aborted a mission or failed to dive on a target,
"no matter how intense the flak.
"I have lived for my dreams for the future.
"But like everything else around me,
"my dreams are dying, too.
"In spite of everything, I may live through this war
"and return to Baton Rouge.
"But I am not the same person you said good-bye to on May 3.
"No one could go through this and not change.
"We are all casualties.
"In the meantime, we just go on.
"Some way, somehow,
"this will all have an ending.
Whatever it is, I am ready for it."
NARRATOR: When he had finished his letter,
Aanenson folded it up
and put it away in his footlocker.
Mailing it home would only have been cruel
to the woman he loved and hoped to marry--
if he happened to make it through what was still to come.
(geese calling)
(explosion)
NARRATOR: Fighting in France with the same 103rd Infantry Division
in which Paul Fussell served
was a soldier with an unusual name: Joseph Medicine Crow.
(man singing, drum beating)
Born on the Crow Indian reservation
near Lodge Grass, Montana, in 1913,
he attended a Baptist mission school,
was the first of his people to graduate from college,
and was studying for an advanced degree in anthropology
when the war began.
But he had also been raised by his elders
in the warrior tradition.
JOE MEDICINE CROW: My grandfather trained me to be a warrior.
The Crow Indians were so-called warlike.
They are militaristic from way back.
NARRATOR: The Crows had defended their lands
against the Lakota and Cheyenne for generations
and had allied themselves with the United States
during the Plains wars.
One of Joe Medicine Crow's grandfathers had been a scout
for George Armstrong Custer
before the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
JOE MEDICINE CROW: My paternal grandfather, great war chief Medicine Crow,
he was considered the bravest warrior of all time.
So he was also my inspiration to follow in his footsteps.
He kept training me to become a warrior.
In order to have status in becoming a warrior,
climbing up the ladder of success to become a chief,
you must perform certain dangerous war deeds.
NARRATOR: To be considered a chief,
a Crow warrior had to touch a living enemy,
take an enemy's weapon,
steal an enemy's horse, and lead a victorious war party.
Whenever he went into battle in Europe,
Joe Medicine Crow would paint red stripes on his arms
beneath his uniform, and he carried in his helmet
a sacred yellow-painted eagle feather
provided by a Sun Dance medicine man to shield him from harm.
He would need that power.
He was asked to lead a seven-man squad carrying explosives
through a wall of artillery fire
to blast German positions along the Siegfried Line.
Then, he helped capture a German village.
JOE MEDICINE CROW: We hid in a German town, and I was assigned
to take the back alley and come behind the Germans
who were in the main street.
So I did; I ran up there and I saw an opening there,
a gate there-- there was a wall there.
So I ran up there and a German soldier was running there.
We bumped heads... (chuckles)
helmets.
So I swung my rifle and knocked his rifle off his hands.
There he was standing.
All I had to do was pull the trigger.
But for some reason, I put my gun down and tore into him.
Then we had it out, you know.
He had me down, but I turned him over
and grabbed him by the throat, you know.
I was ready to kill him.
Then, his last words were, "Mama, mama."
When he said that word, "Mama," opened my ears.
I let him go.
NARRATOR: Without quite meaning to, Joe Medicine Crow had performed
three out of the four traditional war deeds he needed
to become a war chief like his grandfather.
He had led a successful war party;
he had touched an enemy warrior and taken away his weapon.
The only thing left was to capture some horses.
I was a scout for my company.
We were going along the road on top of the mountain,
small mountain.
And I was ahead of my company,
and I caught up with some horseback riders,
and I had my field glasses.
I looked at them.
They were Germans, you know, so I followed them.
NARRATOR: The Germans took over a farmhouse.
The horses were pastured outside, some 50 of them.
JOE MEDICINE CROW: So we surrounded the place there
and we were going to attack early in the morning.
So I was sitting there with a C.O.,
and, uh, we waited.
Finally, towards morning, I said, "Captain."
I said, "I have an idea."
I said, "If you give me five minutes before jump-off,
I'll stampede their horses."
So we went in there, opened that gate.
There were some guards sitting in a shed there,
so I went behind there and got a horse
and I put my little rope,
made an Indian bridle, you know, double half hitch.
I got on it and I stampeded the horses out of there.
So I headed out and then, soon as I left,
why, they... they opened fire over there.
But I took off.
So, these were not ordinary horses.
And I looked at them.
They were beautiful.
And the one I was riding was a sorrel with a blaze.
So I felt pretty good.
So I looked around.
Pretty soon, I sang a song, you know.
Praise song.
(singing in Crow language)
NARRATOR: When Joe Medicine Crow returned home after the war,
a tribal ceremony was held to welcome him.
JOE MEDICINE CROW: The old elders wanted to know what... my war deeds.
And I started thinking about it, you know,
and I mentioned those horses.
"You have completed the four deeds."
Well, I never thought about it.
(chuckling)
So I guess you're looking at the last Plains Indian war chief.