A soldier's duty is not to reason why.
A soldier's duty is to do or die.
This is the story
of the doing and the dying.
In the defining conflict
of the 20th Century.
I saw some of the most horrible incidents
which a person would have
to experience themselves
before they would believe me.
The massive casualties of the w*r weighed
heavily on my grandfather.
It wasn't theory to him.
It was people's children.
This is also the story of the reason why.
Of knowing why you fight.
Had we not won that w*r,
then life as we know it would
never have existed again.
It's your father's story, or grandfather's.
But it's also yours.
You don't forget the horrors of the w*r.
As I tell some of my closest friends,
if you run over a cat while driving,
would you ever forget that incident,
that little bump when
you ran over this cat?
Most people would say no, I'll
remember that for the rest
of my life.
What about a human being if you
shot him or blew his head off?
Would you forget that?
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
In Berlin, a Jewish boy named Ernest Conrad
sits around the dinner
table with his parents,
who reassure each other
that Hitler is a fad,
destined to fail.
This cannot last.
That was the feeling; this
man coming is crazy, nuts.
How can the Germans listen to him?
What does he have to give?
Hitler's gift to Germany is a campaign
of r*cist terror.
My dad had his citizenship;
we all had our citizenships taken away.
His bank accounts confiscated
his businesses totally
near dissolution.
It's not only Jews who face persecution.
In March, 1936 Hitler's troops
sweep into the Rhineland,
a German region demilitarized
after World w*r One.
Nazis sterilize hundreds
of mixed race children
whom Hitler calls the Rhineland b*stards.
Born to a German mother
and an African father,
Hans Hauck is 16-years old
when he is forcibly sterilized
by a vasectomy.
It couldn't escape from anybody
how increasingly the country
was not only militarized,
but terrorized.
In the summer of 1936,
Berlin hosts the Olympics.
Hitler and his Nazis look
to showcase the superiority
of the Aryan race.
they don't count on the
lightning fast American
Jesse Owens.
When Jessie Owens came into the stadium,
he got a bigger ovation than Hitler.
Owens obliterates the competition,
winning four gold medals.
His teammate Louis Zamperini
competes in the five-thousand
meter and loses.
But he runs a gutsy race, finishing strong.
Hitler insists on meeting him.
He shook my hands and said, Oh, the;
ah, the boy with the fast finish
I mean his face, his mustache,
the way he combed his hair.
I mean he looked like
somebody purposely uh,
did cosmetics on him for a comedy.
he was uh, to us, a dangerous comedian.
Japanese forces
overwhelm Shanghai and sweep
across Nanking.
In an orgy of violence, Japanese
soldiers brutalize the defeated
Chinese.
Chang Zhi Qiang watches in
horror as a Japanese soldier
stabs his mother in the chest.
When the m*ssacre
ends after six terrifying weeks,
nearly two hundred thousand
corpses line on the streets
of Nanking.
In Washington, President
Roosevelt responds by cutting
back trade with Japan.
But the Japanese ignore the US
and keep expanding their empire.
In January, 1938, US ambassador
to Germany William Dodd returns
home and tries to sound the
alarm on the global threat
posed by Hitler.
Living in Europe these days is profoundly
discouraging.
Nazism and Fascism are
gaining ground everywhere.
This is a world crisis.
Dodd's words fall on deaf ears,
as most Americans would
rather turn a blind eye
to Europe's problems.
Armin Lehmann is a member
of the Hitler Youth,
being groomed as a future Aryan superman.
He says he was completely
unaware of the mayhem taking
place throughout the
expanding German empire.
People always ask, you know,
how could it have happened?'
you must have seen the
trucks drive up and loading
the Jewish people, et cetera.
I lived in a n*zi rent controlled area.
There was not a single Jewish family.
You couldn't see what happened
to the people who were not
in tune with the Nazis.
September, 1938.
European leaders convene in Munich.
They appease Hitler and let him
keep half of Czechoslovakia.
The settlement
of the Czechoslovakian problem,
which has now been achieved is,
in my view, only the prelude
to a larger settlement in which
all Europe may find peace.
Just six months
later, Hitler thumbs his nose
at the world and occupies what
is left of Czechoslovakia.
Beginning in 1939 Jews under
n*zi control must wear arm bands
identifying them as sub humans,
what Hitler calls Untermenschen.
To the east, in Moscow, Soviet
Dictator Josef Stalin decides
to join forces with Hitler, and
builds up a huge military force.
Behind closed doors, the two
powers draw up plans to carve up
Eastern Europe.
Poland sits in the cross-hairs.
The German w*r machine-the
infamous Wehrmacht-unleashes
a Lightning w*r of
overwhelming speed and power.
It's called Blitzkrieg.
Fast moving tanks punch gaping
holes in the Polish front lines,
while the German Air force, the Luftwaffe,
pummels the nation's Capital, Warsaw.
Within days, France and the British Empire
including India, Australia and
Canada declare w*r on Germany.
We were all very naïve,
and we always thought the w*r
would last only a limited period
of time.
After all we had powerful allies,
Great Britain and France and
they are going to make sure that
the w*r doesn't last very long.
In fact, the Allies
have no intention of saving
Poland, and abandon her to the enemy.
Hitler's ally Stalin now
orders his army to join
the n*zi invasion.
In just four weeks, 66-thousand
Polish corpses litter
the landscape.
On September 27th, Warsaw surrenders.
British and French Armies mass
on Germany's Western border.
In London, people wear gas
masks, anticipating an attack.
But the Allies stand down, and, once again,
hope to avoid conflict by doing nothing.
London residents like Rick
Brown steel themselves for w*r.
Instead he is surprised at what follows.
There were times during those early months,
which we call the phony w*r
because nothing went on.
And, we relaxed, the
home guard was disbanded,
people came back from being evacuated,
it was a very peculiar time.
The phony w*r soon yields to the real one.
To the South, along
their border with Germany,
the French man a series of
forts called the Maginot Line.
The defenses-supposedly
impenetrable-prove useless.
The Germans simply bypass
them and streak into France.
One more deadly thrust, and
Hitler will demand the surrender
of both France and Great Britain.
You ask, what is our policy?
It is to wage w*r, by sea, land and air,
with all our might and
with all the strength that
God can give us; to wage w*r
against a monstrous tyranny,
never surpassed in the dark
and lamentable catalogue
of human crime.
That is our policy.
By late May, 1940
hundreds of thousands of allied
troops huddle here near the
Northern French town of Dunkirk.
They're pinned down and
surrounded by the Wehrmacht,
their backs flush against
The English Channel.
It is absolute chaos.
You could not believe what a w*r is like,
'till you see what happened at Dunkirk.
Harry Garrett is
one those trapped soldiers.
It was just perpetual bombing, shelling,
strafing, and the-the sand dunes
where most of the boys were,
as was all being sprayed all day long.
Hitler and his Luftwaffe commander
Hermann Goring believe that
German air power alone
will force a massive and
devastating Allied surrender.
So just outside Dunkirk, the Germans halt
their ground advance.
Churchill seizes the moment,
calling on all British boat
owners to help the Royal Navy
rescue the trapped soldiers.
Over the course of nine days,
a ramshackle fleet of private
boats, as well as Royal Navy vessels,
rescues more than 330-thousand soldiers.
Harry Garrett escapes
from Dunkirk on a small
British destroyer.
We rushed onboard and we were lucky
we're some of the last onboard,
I think there must have been
about five-hundred,
four or five-hundred people
on this destroyer, I mean
this is a destroyer!
It was like a sardine can.
I believe there were about
270 ships sunk in the harbor.
That was so, so so sad.
You saw destroyers laying over
the side and ships laying over
the side.
And then uh, away we went.
Up to England it was so peaceful.
And there, were the cliffs of Dover.
I still feel that now.
Hitler's failure to
push the ground attack against
the Allies at Dunkirk stuns
Luftwaffe Pilot Heinz Migeod.
I know that our Generals were fuming.
It was nonsense.
We had allowed them to travel up
to Dunkirk so they could escape
to England.
In the aftermath of Dunkirk,
Winston Churchill emerges
as the face and voice
of British and Allied resolve.
We shall go on to the end.
We shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas
and oceans; we shall fight with
growing confidence and growing
strength in the air.
We shall defend our island
whatever the cost may be;
we shall fight on beaches,
we shall fight on the landing
grounds, we shall fight in the
fields, and in the streets,
we shall fight on the the hills.
We shall never surrender.
On June 10th, Italian
fascist leader Benito Mussolini
throws in with the Nazis
and declares w*r on France.
Four days later, German
troops march into Paris.
Triumphant German soldiers
unfurl the swastika
from the Eiffel Tower.
And France surrenders to Hitler.
The luftwaffe begins bombing
runs over the British coast
and shipping convoys.
Britain's Royal Air Force
alerted to impending attacks
by a sophisticated new radar
network-takes to the sky.
Including the deadly Hawker
Hurricane and the Supermarine
Spitfire.
From his secret underground
headquarters in London,
Churchill runs the w*r
and rallies his troops.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our
duties, and for a thousand
years, men will still say,
this was their finest hour.
Bob Foster and
Geoffrey Wellum are barely out
of flight training when they're
ordered to protect the skies
from the invading Luftwaffe.
We were, I hesitate to say, the amateurs,
but we were, compared to the Germans,
a crowd of chaps pulled
together at the last minute.
With a desire to fly.
To protect the country.
You then looked at it and thought,
Good God, what are they doing over here?
Where do we start on this slaughter?
What do you do?
There's only one thing to
do, it's go straight in.
Have a quick squirt and then away.
Get down and think, God,
I got away with that one.
Let's go back and do it again.
And it was only after you
finished you thought, Whoa,
blymie, this is, this is bloody dangerous!
You can hear our own g*ns,
going like anything now.
Somebody's hit a German and he's
coming down in a long streak,
he coming down completely out of
control, a long streak of smoke.
Ah! There, you can hear our
anti-aircraft going at them now.
There are one, two, three, four, five, six
there are about ten German
machines dive-bombing the
British convoy, which is just
out to sea in the Channel.
Then, on September 7th, 1940,
the Nazis begin terror
attacks-indiscriminate bombing
of England's civilian population.
Londoners have a word
for it: the blitz.
In September 1940, the
Luftwaffe begins the merciless
bombing of London and
its civilian population.
By and large, people were very fatalistic,
what can we do?
If there's one up there with
my name on it, that's it.
Before it's over, nearly 40,000 men women
and children will be dead.
Not just in London, but throughout England.
It was up close and personal.
Very much so... when
you're 16, 17,
and you're asked to help
out in the docks of London,
which were devastated, lots of
casualties, bodies lying around.
Rick Brown is a
teenage member of the British
Home guard.
His job is to assist with the
rescue and recovery teams.
Immediate impressions are the ones
that stay.
I don't really believe that
any of us young kids realized
the enormity of what was happening.
German aircraft
relentlessly blast London and
other cities, but the British
fighters strike back hard.
And inflict enormous casualties.
After weeks of stunning losses,
Hitler realizes his Luftwaffe
alone cannot beat the British.
And while the blitz continues,
Hitler begins to turn
his attention on his supposed ally, Russia.
In September, 1940, Japan,
Italy and Germany sign
the tripartite pact and
forge the so-called Axis powers.
Their goal, quite simply,
is to rule the world.
And they seem well on their way.
In the summer of 1941, President
Roosevelt takes his biggest step
The US embargoes all metal shipments
and oil deliveries to the Japanese Empire.
The move cripples the Empire's industry,
and Japan now sees few options except w*r.
We Americans were looking at a threat
in Europe and a threat in the Pacific.
There was always the hope that
the oceans would protect us
on either side, but I don't
think my grandfather ever
believed you could rely on that.
Instead FDR prepares
for the oceans to become
battlefields.
On June 22nd, 1941 one brutal
Dictator double crosses another,
as Adolph Hitler breaks his
treaty with Josef Stalin
and invades the Soviet Union.
A vast army of 3 million German
troops unleashes a torrent
of death and destruction.
In the North, the Germans
lay siege here at Leningrad
and pound it into rubble.
Food supplies quickly dry up.
As the Russian winter sweeps in,
the city's survivors are forced
into desperate measures.
There were so many dead bodies out there.
And other people would rush to
the bodies like scavenger birds,
and they stripped them off clothes...
and they also cut flesh,
made ground meat out of it
and sold it or they ate it themselves.
But those who ate it ended up going insane.
Further South, German
troops battle to within fifteen
miles of the Capital, Moscow.
But temperatures descend to 25 below.
Weapons will not fire, and
soldiers freeze to death.
In early December, with
Hitler's armies withering,
the Soviets launch a vicious counterattack.
For the first time in the
w*r, the Germans retreat.
Moscow is saved.
The Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii,
houses the bulk of America's Pacific fleet.
130 vessels rest on the placid waters.
390 aircraft park on adjacent airfields.
Sailors and pilots enjoy the
hospitality of nearby Honolulu,
as the first Sunday in December,
1941 dawns with light breezes
and clear skies.
The first thing I heard was music
and the disc jockey...
Daniel Inouye-a 17
year old high school student
living on Oahu-sits at
home listening to the radio.
I didn't know what he was talking about;
I thought it was just part of the show.
So I called my father,
and we looked out there.
And then three planes came
up, flying back from a run,
gray with red sun drop dots on the wing,
then I knew w*r was on.
At 7:48 AM, the
first of over 350 Japanese
dive-bombers, fighters and
torpedo planes sweep out
of the Hawaiian sky.
Some target the airfields where
planes, parked wing to wing,
are blasted into oblivion.
Others head to battleship row.
We could see that torpedo planes come up
and peel off you could pretty
much reach out and touch them;
we could see em in the planes
when the dive bombers were
hitting us, strafing us.
At Pearl Harbor, Don
Stratton and Clint Westbrook are
aboard the USS Arizona when an
enemy b*mb penetrates the deck
and hits the ship's a*mo dump.
We felt that, it shook the whole ship,
and then the ship exploded, then
we were caught in a ball of
flame that went about four,
five hundred feet in the air.
All I remember
is suddenly you see the whole
front of the ship disappear.
And then it was blank after
that because we were picked up,
spun around, dropped and everything else.
For two hours, the
Japanese air squadrons hammer
Pearl Harbor.
At 9:45AM, the
attack finally ends.
The local hospitals overflow
with the human carnage.
Japanese-American teenager
Daniel Inouye is a volunteer
assisting in the grisly cleanup.
I saw this body that was left over,
no head, I got myself a
box, put the parts in a box.
The father came back, he was out
doing some work, and he says,
I want to see my wife, and they
told me my wife is wounded.
And I told the man in
charge, the doctor, I said;
don't show it to him.
Well, he has the right to see his wife.
Okay. So he went into the
morgue, I opened the box,
he looked at that, he screamed
and spent the rest of his life
in the insane asylum.
The sneak attack destroys 188 aircraft,
sinks four battleships
and three destroyers.
Almost every US ship suffers some damage.
But luckily, the all important
fleet of aircraft carriers
are out to sea.
When the Arizona sinks to
the bottom of the harbor,
it takes 1102 trapped and
drowned seamen with it.
The next day, the United
States Congress declares w*r.
Yesterday, December 7th, 1941
a date which will live in infamy
the United States of America
was suddenly and deliberately
attacked by naval
and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
Always will our whole nation
remember the character
of the onslaught against us.
No matter how long it may take
us to overcome this premeditated
invasion, the American people in
their righteous might will win
through to absolute victory.
Within 24 hours of attacking Pearl Harbor,
the Japanese also strike Hong
Kong, Guam, the Philippines,
Wake Island and Midway Island.
On December 11th, Adolph Hitler
declares w*r on the U.S.,
officially drawing America
into the European conflict.
Everything sort of starts with
Pearl Harbor, right after that happened,
Well you know if you see an
able-bodied guy with two arms
and two legs, uh, of the right
age without a uniform on,
I'd wonder what was wrong; what
was wrong with you, you know?
I couldn't wait to get into the service
to do something to stop Hitler.
He was really gobbling up a
lotta countries and he had
to be stopped.
At a conference in
January 1942 outside Berlin,
the Nazis establish their
so-called Final Solution
for dealing with enemies of the Aryan race.
This document from the
conference catalogues
11-million Jews from 31
Countries to be k*lled.
The Nazis build three types of facilities.
Concentration camps house
n*zi enemies and are located
in Germany.
sl*ve labor camps imprison
civilians in n*zi-occupied
territory.
Extermination camps-mostly in
Poland-are designated to k*ll
as many Jews as quickly as possible.
These camps include medical
laboratories to perform
horrifying experiments on the prisoners
As well as data centers
to track the results.
They sent our group down east to talk
with Jimmy Doolittle.
Pilot Thomas Griffin trains in Columbia,
South Carolina where Lieutenant
Colonel Jimmy Doolittle comes
looking for volunteers.
Doolittle came and said that we were gonna
train to take these B25
Mitchell bombers off the deck
of a carrier.
We're gonna go across the Pacific,
and b*mb targets in Japan.
And that's the first we knew of it.
In April 1942, Doolittle leads his pack
of 16 B-25 bombers as they
prepare to launch here,
from the deck of the USS Hornet.
The carrier closes to within 650
miles of Japan when an enemy
patrol boat spots the Americans
and relays their position
to Tokyo.
Doolittle's cover is blown.
His next decision changes
the face of the w*r.
Without hesitation.
Doolittle, Choses to go all in.
On this aircraft carrier,
he orders his raid on Tokyo.
Jimmy Doolittle, of course,
flew the first airplane off.
Now it was a very stormy
morning, high seas.
So, we were very fortunate
on that short takeoff,
four hundred feet that all of us
stayed on the deck and got off.
Doolittle's bombers
reach Tokyo at high noon.
The target that we had was a factory
making tanks.
Right on Tokyo Bay and
our plane did not hit
that assigned target.
We hit its immediate neighbor,
Tokyo Gas and Electric Company,
and flattened it.
But the early launch
burns through the raider's fuel,
and some of the B-25's begin
to fall into the Pacific.
Two people were drowned,
eight of them, got ashore.
Most of Doolittle's
raiders make it to China,
but crash well short of their objectives.
We flew on till we got to where
we thought we were as close as
we could get to where we wanted
to go... we weren't precisely
there, and then we all jumped.
The damage in Tokyo is negligible,
but the Doolittle operation
delivers a huge boost
to a demoralized American public.
Everything was going the other way.
All bad news.
down in North Africa, Rommel was
driving the British back towards
Cairo, and they were sinking
our ships in the Atlantic,
submarines, wholesale.
In the Pacific, things were
even worse after Pearl Harbor.
Everything was bad news on our side,
until our little mission of bombing Tokyo.
Allied forces in the
Philippines are no match for the
battle-tested Japanese invaders.
Even so, the American and
Filippino troops hold out
for four months during the
bloody battle of Bataan.
In early April, 1942, 75-thousand starving,
disease-ridden soldiers finally surrender.
From that time, they marched a distance
of approximately 140 miles.
Among the POW's is US Army Air Force
Captain Samuel Grashio,
a survivor of what becomes known
as the Bataan Death March.
En route, many Americans were bayoneted,
and run over by Japanese equipment.
They were not only starved
to death, and wanted water,
but were beaten up.
In temperatures approaching 100 degrees
the Japanese force the
prisoners to bake in the sun.
They used to gather the American
and Filipino troops in the
rays of the tropic sun.
Many of the boys suffering from
malaria were forced to sit there
for hours consuming the sun.
Many of them were bareheaded due
to the fact that the Japanese
soldiers in their cruelty took
the hats away from the Americans
and just threw them away.
This treatment was one of the
tortures which is upper most
in my mind, a t*rture which
I'll never be able to forget.
After five days, the
first of the marchers arrive
at an abandoned military outpost.
Here, the tourture continues.
It includes the beheadings of
American and Filipino soldiers.
I saw the most horrible incidents which a
person would have to experience
themselves before they would
believe me.
I hate to think of the many
Americans and Filipinos who will
never get back, to tell the
t*rture that was given to them
before God blessed them with death.
The Japanese Empire
now spreads across much of
East Asia, and the threat to
Australia grows by the day.
The Allies need Australia
as a base of operations,
and Japan hopes to isolate her
by cutting her shipping lanes.
To accomplish the mission,
Tokyo organizes a large force
to occupy the Coral Sea.
But Admiral Chester Nimitz,
Commander of the US Pacific
Ocean area, operates with
a remarkable advantage:
US intelligence operators
crack the Japanese Naval code
and intercept enemy orders.
Nimitz now knows that a huge
Japanese fleet is steaming
into the Coral Sea.
The American commander boldly
counters force with force.
Well, we spotted fifteen ships
in the Coral Sea heading south.
There were four of us, Flying Fortresses.
After his bombs fail to drop,
Bombardier Meyer Levin convinces
his pilot to make another run.
He spots a Japanese transport
ship filled with infantry.
They were throwing up just as much ak-ak
as I had ever seen at one time in my life.
Well, let my eggs go, eight 500s,
spaced them all around the bow.
I believe I probably sunk her.
After five days of intense fighting,
both sides withdraw.
Japanese Commander Yamamoto
believes the US Navy is now
on the ropes.
He dispatches nearly his entire
fleet to as*ault Midway Island,
a critical steppingstone
on the way to Hawaii.
There was some debate as to what
their target was.
Mac Showers toils as
a code breaker in a basement
at Pearl Harbor.
People Washington
felt that such a large Japanese
operation would not go to
such a small island as Midway.
But Mac and his fellow
code breakers at Pearl Harbor
are certain that midway is the target.
They need proof. And fast.
They devise a scheme to send
a fake message to smoke out
the Japanese.
We proposed that we send a message,
to the commanding officer
of our base at Midway,
so it would be sure to be
seen and read and understood
by the Japanese.
The Japanese pick up
the fake communication and radio
new orders to the fleet, which
Mac Showers and his team
intercept and decode.
The message pinpoints Midway
as the target of the Japanese
as*ault.
We knew it would be Midway,
and that settled the
dispute with Washington.
As June begins, the
Japanese steam toward Midway,
unaware they are sailing right into a trap.
Bombs landing on either side of the runway;
The Japanese didn't want to b*mb
the runways because they wanted
to use them.
So they were bombing the a*mo dumps and uh,
fuel dump and the mess halls.
Returning planes crowd
the decks of Japanese air craft
carriers.
Admiral Yamamoto is unaware
that US carriers tipped off
by American code breakers lurk nearby.
Suddenly, waves of planes
launched from the American
carriers fill the sky.
Second day we hit the carriers.
Any luck with them? Oh,
yes. socked em right in there!
The Japanese still
manage to blast 147 US aircraft
out of the sky.
But the Americans sink four
enemy aircraft carriers,
throwing the Japanese navy on
the defensive for the first time
in the w*r.
In one day on Guadalcanal, the
Marines seize the landing area
and rename it Henderson Field.
Platoon Sergeant Ned Steele
is taken aback by the ease
of the mission.
It was a piece of cake.
Course that didn't last very long,
we were unpleasantly surprised
when we did finally meet
Jap resistance and found
out just what they were.
They were barbarians, uh; they
didn't have any code of honor
at all.
Steele's opinion
hardens when he comes across
his first Marine casualty.
We ran across him laying in the trail.
They had cut his head off, had
his arms folded and his head was
sitting on his chest.
They'd cut his p*nis off
and stuck it in his mouth.
I gotta take a break.
For the next three
months the Marines battle across
the jungle island.
The action ranges from small,
vicious firefights to large
scale attacks.
The conditions are appalling.
A lot of people that got sick, malaria,
dysentery, tropical ulcers, all kinds...
and that's what k*lled us.
You couldn't cure a lot of
things in the tropics there
unless you got out of the tropics.
There wasn't one
day or one hour that you weren't
in danger of being k*lled.
You were shot at, snipered, you
were bombed, shelled, strafed.
Everything, you were just,
you never could relax.
You didn't sleep.
If you got 2 to 3 hours a
night sleep you were getting it
in 10 or 15 minute increments
because you're always awake,
always aware.
Just after midnight on November 14th, 1942,
the bloodshed culminates on the
high seas North of Guadalcanal.
And about then all hell broke loose.
You could watch shells going down,
and some of those armor piercing
shells would go right through
a ship and come out the other
side, you could see them.
Japanese cruisers and
destroyers pound the battleship
USS South Dakota, and
knock her out of action.
It occurred to me that somebody had strewn
a hole lot of life jackets
on the floor, so I went,
what the hell are all these
life jackets doing here?
So I took a peak with my flashlight, uh,
and they were not lifejackets,
they were bodies that I was
trampling on.
Through grim determination,
the US Navy holds off the
Japanese fleet and forces them
to withdraw.
We went out after
the battle was all over with,
the next day, looking
for survivors to see what
we could find, and there was
ships all around burning.
oh there must have been hundreds
of Japanese floating around
in there, in the water.
By early February, 1943,
the last of the Japanese pull
off the island of Guadalcanal.
We were a bunch of
kids, we didn't know anything,
we actually never thought we
were gonna leave Guadalcanal.
When we invaded North Africa,
that was our first major action.
On November 8th,
1942, US General Dwight David
Eisenhower orders 63-thousand
American and British troops
to hit the beaches of Morocco and Algeria.
Ike is looking to break a
deadly stalemate between Allied
and Axis troops further east in Egypt.
Among the US troops wading
ashore is Chief Petty Officer
Wilbur Eidson.
This was a very frightening thing;
the first action is horrible.
Most of the enlisted men
were hiding under the table.
I don't know what they were
hiding from, if we got a shell,
they would sure get it.
The operation is
risky, the stakes enormous.
But here on the sands of North Africa,
Eisenhower decides to strike
the first American blow against
Germany and Italy.
In November 1942, Allied
forces land on the beaches
of North Africa.
Heavy fighting greets them,
But within a few days,
the Vichy French troops
in Morocco surrender,
allowing General
George S. Patton
and the Allies to move East with impunity.
And that was the beginning of the relief
of the British Eighth Army
that was fighting Rommel.
While Patton moves
East across Morocco and into
Algeria, the British, under
General Bernard Montgomery,
blast westward through General
Erwin Rommel's lines into Libya.
That leaves Germany's so called
desert fox no choice but
to retreat.
Six months later, the Axis will
abandon North Africa altogether.
In the summer of 1942, Hitler
orders his generals to retake
the ground lost after the Moscow debacle.
The resupplied Wehrmacht
fights its way to the gates
of Stalingrad, where German
a*tillery and the Luftwaffe
quickly level the city.
Sometimes you would go through the ruins,
rummage through, and then find a boy,
you would get him out and he
would be crying as he lost
his mother.
Stalin orders the Red
Army to defend the city
at all costs.
Any soldier retreating or
surrendering will be shot.
It was very scary.
I was simply, a wuss.
The b*ll*ts were flying all over
the place but it seemed like
they were all aimed at me.
That they all wanted to take me.
And it was quite a fright.
Hitler's forces are
exhausted and overwhelmed.
They have no answer to
the Russian onslaught.
On February 2nd, 1943, General
Friedrich Paulus becomes
Hitler's first Field Marshall to
choose surrender over suicide.
He gives up his 91-thousand
bedraggled German troops
to the Soviets.
Only five thousand will
survive in Russian captivity.
Hunted for almost two years,
the triumphant Red Army becomes
the hunter.
With able bodied Americans
volunteering in droves,
Earl McClung and Buck Compton
enlist in the 101st Airborne.
They are a new breed of American
warrior: the paratrooper
or airborne soldier.
They called us into a big building and
they gave us this spiel about
airborne troops and people jump
out of airplanes and everybody
wanted to know what did anybody
wanna do that for.
And they said, Well, you get
fifty dollars extra a month.
And my hand went up.
Well, it's the idea of gettin' behind
their lines, and gettin' into the interior.
I'm not sure it's a great idea.
but uh was the theory, that
you could get a lot of soldiers
in behind their lines and do mischief.
Battles now rage from
Southeast Asia to Western Russia
and from the Aleutian Islands to Africa.
Earl Mcclung and his buddies
hunger to join the fight.
Oh, I think we
had probably one of the biggest
egos in the world.
We was all young kids, you
know, and we thought we were
indestructible we were kinda
wantin' to get into combat
and then after we was there a few times,
then we's tryin' to figure
out ways of gettin' out of it.
US Army Ranger Ray
Sadoski rides in on the first
wave of troops invading Sicily.
They hit a sandbar.
So they dropped me off.
And I went to, to about
10, 12 feet of water.
So, I learned that if you ever
go into the water like that,
you're not gonna be able to swim
so just use your arms like this
and keep doing this and keep walkin'.
And I walked right up on shore.
So I look back and nobody's
comin' in but me. I says
I hope they don't call this beach head off
and leave me there.
Sadoski immediately comes under
heavy machine g*n fire from
two Italian enemy soldiers.
Twenty minutes pass before
fellow Army Rangers arrive.
And I hear 'em yellin', callin' my name,
Hey, Ray. Hey, Ray.
Where are ya?
I says, be careful when you
comin' over here, I says,
they got two machine g*ns cross firin'.
So they came in and they even
came up with a bazooka gunner,
and he knocked them both out.
In the Pacific, the
victory at Guadalcanal allows
the Allies to pursue two lines
of attack: one along New Guinea
focused on the Philippines,
another starting in the Gilbert
Islands aimed directly at Japan.
As the Marines close
in on the Tarawa beach,
a storm of fire erupts
from the Japanese defenses.
We didn't know what we were getting into.
We were too dumb to know.
And that may have been
a point in our favor.
We might not have gone.
There was heavy,
heavy shelling there on the;
you couldn't see the island, you know.
It was covered with smoke.
As the Marines approach,
it becomes clear that the us
has miscalculated the tides,
making it impossible to drive
their landing vessels to shore.
You could hear the noise of the,
tractor treads crawling across the coral.
And about that time you
began to sense that something
wasn't right.
Instead, Marines
Howard Frost and John Pease
find themselves stranded waist
deep in the water 500 yards
from shore, exposed to
withering enemy fire.
We jumped off the
side of the amphibious tractor
and ran ashore as quick as we
could, among the dead bodies.
Once ashore, the Marines realize they face
an entrenched enemy that would
rather die than give up one inch
of Tawara.
Combat Camerman Norman
Hatch narrates the footage
he shot in the heat of the action.
The Marines overcome
early mistakes and-after four
brutal and bloody days of
combat hammer out an important
victory.
It was, was totally destroyed.
The island was practically leveled.
Nearly two thousand
American dead are buried
near the airfield.
The island's defenders
are nearly all wiped out.
There was no, no vegetation.
There was no; uh, just
nothing except equipment,
decomposed bodies,
it was, was something I don't
ever wanna see again.
After the fall of
North Africa and the capture of
Sicily, Allied troops continue
to pound the Axis forces.
In September, the Allies cross
onto the Italian mainland
at Salerno, and sweep north along the boot.
I was on a patrol soon after we landed
in Italy.
While I was walking on this
patrol on the next mountain
on the top I could see someone
squatting, moving his bowels,
defecating, you could tell he was a German.
Japanese American
soldier Daniel Inouye is part of
the 442nd Combat team.
He had on this German hat,
so I told the man, that's mine.
Just like that deer is mine.
I very carefully set my sights;
He was not only my first,
but when I think back, I think
back with horror because
I was proud; but I was
trained to hate the Germans,
all the propaganda films
we saw throughout training,
it made you feel good.
You're a good soldier.
That's w*r.
In January, 1944,
these mountains South of Rome
are the front lines of the European w*r.
at the center of the action
stands the 14-hundred year old
abbey at Monte Cassino.
They warned the Germans not to use
the monastery as a battle ground.
By international law,
this holy site is supposed to be
off limits for any military use.
But its bird's eye view
dominates the ground for miles,
and though the Germans
are not occupying it,
the Allies are convinced otherwise.
We saw the activity change from day to day
so the American forces bombed it.
On February 15th, 1944,
Allied air power levels the abbey.
The Germans occupy the ruins,
and the battle rages on.
And East of Monte Cassino, a
new element is about to be added
to the w*r effort.
For four months, Allied forces
struggle to gain the upper hand
in these mountains South of Rome.
Most of the time it was rainy,
and we were climbing the mountains there,
and it was mud and everything,
and we were taking a beating.
Finally, on June 4th, 1944,
the Allies crack the Axis
defenses And march into Rome,
where the Italian people
greet them as liberators.
But the battle for Italy is far from over.
The black airmen were trained in Tuskegee,
Alabama to be escort fighter
pilots under the hard eye
of Colonel Benjamin O. Davis.
He says, Gentlemen,
Your duty is to fly escorts,
which means you escort those
bombers from the time that
you pick your bombers up,
over the target.
Then you bring them all home safely.
That's your duty.
That's your responsibility.
Davis emphasizes the importance of mission
discipline.
He says;
If any of you ever for any
reason should leave a b*mber,
go off looking for a fighter,
you can sh**t down ten fighters.
But when you come back here,
I'll court marshal you.
If you are engaged by enemy fighters,
then you engage but you will
not go off looking for a fight.
Long range bombers
typically sustain heavy losses
from enemy attacks.
But the Red Tails, as they are called,
quickly earn a reputation
for protecting their bombing
squadrons, no matter what.
The bombers would ask me,
who's escorting us today?
Well, it's not the Red Tails.
What? The Red Tails isn't
the one escorting us today?
Aw, man, you know.
Yeah, they wanted us.
With the Redtails in action,
US b*mber losses fall dramatically.
In skies above Europe, the
famed black Army Air Force unit
delivers the goods.
In the months leading up to,
to the Normandy invasion,
Operation Overlord,
my grandfather was used
primarily as a ruse.
General Eisenhower
orders George Patton to help
create the illusion that the
Allies plan to cross the English
Channel not at Normandy, but at Calais.
And he was commanding a fictitious
Army group that was made up
of inflatable tanks and,
and cardboard vehicles, and tents,
and essentially a ghost Army if you will.
As 160-thousand soldiers steam across the
English Channel, the airborne
units still in England prepare
for action.
General Eisenhower
arrives to wish them luck.
Waves of planes then take off to
drop the 23, 400 paratroopers
at their landing zones in Normandy,
behind enemy lines.
General Dwight
Eisenhower: Soldiers,
Sailors and Airmen of the
Allied Expeditionary Force!
You are about to embark
upon a great crusade,
toward which we have
striven these many months.
The eyes of the world are upon
you. Your task will not be
an easy one.
Your enemy is well trained, well
equipped and battle hardened,
he will fight savagely.
We weren't scared to jump.
We were scared of gettin'
shot down in that airplane
When the planes cross into France,
German anti-aircraft fire turns
the skies into a death zone.
Paratroopers Buck Compton
and Earl Mcclung get caught
in the maelstrom.
Shrapnel and b*ll*ts were going through
the fuselage of those old C-47's like,
it's like a beehive in there
and everybody was hollerin',
Let's get the hell outta here.
In the chaos, Buck
Compton loses most of his gear
before he hits the ground.
So when I landed, I didn't have a weapon,
I didn't have any rations,
I didn't have anything on me
a couple of little chocolate bar
rations a canteen and a trench
knife and that's all I had
ready to fight the Germans.
Some of the Allied
paratroopers land in the village
of Sainte-Mere-Eglise and are
butchered before they even reach
the ground. Many are captured.
Most, however, wander the
countryside and slowly organize.
To their North, the g*ns
of Normandy explode.
At about 6:30 AM
on June 6th, 1944,
the Allied invasion comes ashore
on the beaches of Normandy.
83-thousand British and
Canandian troops land at Gold,
Juno and Sword beaches.
73-thousand Americans of the
US First Army Land at Utah
and Omaha beaches.
As soon as we hit
the beach, everybody was not
in ordinary panic, but
there was wild confusion when
you're trained to do a certain
thing, you do it automatically.
May hit a little resistance
and keep on moving.
But the resistance was
deadly and highly effective!
And we began to crumble.
When the landing
barge goes down and you have
to start running out, that's
when you realize you're being
shot at.
That whole beach was instantly wild.
The noise is deafening,
and I saw pink water and eventually
it turned red, just from blood.
All that water, there was blood red.
We got to the beaches and you crawl
and you lay down and you crawl.
I lay down next to a man who has
been hit, he was dead already.
Infantryman Sam
Fuller is trapped on Omaha Beach
with little cover.
Bombers dispatched early that
morning to blast fox holes
in the sand have missed their targets,
providing no cover for the
thousands of men pouring
onto shore.
It was like hitting,
a tornado against another tornado.
That's the way we felt.
There's nowhere to go.
You're stuck.
You start trying to go forward, you're hit.
If you're not, there's a sn*per
all over the place and a lot of
riflemen.
And we couldn't stop the
waves of men coming and coming
and coming, every five, ten,
twelve, fifteen minutes.
Fuller survives thanks
to the boldness of his colonel,
George A. Taylor.
He stood up, which is suicidal.
And he said, there are two
kinds of men on this beach.
Those who are dead and
those who are about to die.
So let's get off this
damn beach and die inland.
He stood up!
And hard to explain to you
what that little thing means.
And he led us off the beach,
right through the breach.
South of Utah Beach, behind enemy lines,
Buck Compton meets up with
several members of Easy Company
and acquires a machine g*n from
an injured American soldier.
they hear Germans firing at the beach.
So I got down
crawled on my belly about fifty
yards into a, trench works over
there and that's when I saw
these Germans so I thought I'd
jump through this bush and into
this trenchand I'd just take
'em down with the machine g*n,
you know.
Compton jumps into the
trench and pulls the trigger.
Nothing happens.
And they looked at;
looked at me and were surprised
and they took off running and,
um, lucky as hell I, I just
pulled out this hand grenade and
pulled the pin on it and let
it fly and it came down right
on top of one of their heads
and went off and k*lled 'em both
with one hand grenade.
Also behind enemy lines,
paratrooper Earl Mcclung
discovers the advantage
of capturing or k*lling German officers.
With the Germans,
if you could get their officers
they were, ah, confused.
they were good soldiers as long
as they had somebody tell them
what to do.
But, uh, if they had to do
somethin' on their own,
they weren't all that great.
And while Mcclung and
his comrades honor the rules
of engagement with the
ordinary German soldiers,
their courtesy does not
extend to the murderous Nazis
of Hitler's elite forces, the Waffen SS.
The SS had already told us they wouldn't
take any airborne prisoners.
They wouldn't take us prisoner,
we wouldn't take them prisoner.
That's it; that was it.
And as far as I know we lived
up to it to the very end.
Uh, if you were SS you were dead.
Allied air forces rule
the skies, and by June 6th,
all of Normandy's beaches are secure.
The British and Canadians
begin their march inland.
The Americans at Utah Beach
face the lightest resistance
of the day
Losing only 197 of the 23-thousand troops.
They push forward and begin to
make contact with the scattered
paratroopers.
But the US forces at Omaha
beach have the roughest go,
losing 2,400 men.
I can remember
several young boys who came in,
stepped on landmines and both
of their legs were blown off.
And they just, was just a little
bit of despair that they'd never
be able to dance again.
And what would my wife think?
Or what would my girl think?
How's my mother going to accept this?
And often they didn't even live to go home.
If you allow yourself to weep
you would be in tears all the
time then you couldn't function.
After four years, the
Allies have returned to France.
We did one thing that was good.
We stopped the cancer from growing.
We eliminated it.
Saipan, one thing
that bothered me a little bit,
we lost, well the Marines that we,
that were hittin' the beach they
were being picked off like mad.
Radio operator Reby
Cary is stationed on an attack
transport off the coast of Saipan.
Let me tell ya,
that's a different ball game
when the bombs start fallin' and goin' on,
They even had bodies floating by our ship,
you couldn't even get 'em out.
You know it was something
that first day on Saipan.
The Japanese defend every inch of Saipan
with suicidal abandon.
For the first time, white and
black Marines fight together
to force the enemy from the
mountainous terrain one bloody
step at a time.
After three weeks of intense
combat the Marines claim
the island.
The Allies now dig in, just
11-hundred miles from Japan.
Normandy's beaches quickly
become the focal point
for the Allied w*r effort.
Within a few weeks, 600-thousand
troops come ashore to take on
the Germans.
South of the beachhead,
Normandy's narrow roads are
lined by walls of rock, dirt,
and thick vegetation called
hedgerows.
We start hitting the hedgerows,
and when we hit the hedgerows,
that's when we, we were losing
a lot of men.
Too tall to surmount
and too thick to penetrate,
these hedgerows provide perfect
cover for the outnumbered
Germans.
Hitler's armored divisions
arrive and stop the Allied
advance cold.
We'd be in one
hedgerow and the enemy would be
in the other hedgerow, which
the other hedgerow was about a
hundred feet, of open space.
We had to go in that open space
to crawl and get to the enemy
that was in the hedgerows firing at us.
These big you
know greedy hedgerows that were
not allowing them to breakout
or move with, great speed uh,
this was a big problem.
In order for armored
units to break through Normandy
and sweep across central France to Paris,
the hedgerows must be breached.
One ingenious American Sergeant
fashions iron-pronged extensions
that easily attach to
the front of the tanks.
The men call them rhinos.
The tanks were
able to plow through and make
openings for us.
And that's the way we
took over the hedgerows.
Then it started where you'd
be chasing the Germans,
the German Army were running backwards,
and as they fell back, we just
following them, firing at them.
Close air support
chews up German counterattacks,
while General George Patton
pushes his Third Army Hard.
His men don't disappoint.
And they did so with incredible success,
in three and a half weeks they
got all the way to Paris.
Louis Zamperini has come a long way since
the 1936 Olympics.
He completes five successful
missions as a bombadier
in the Pacific, But on
his sixth, his plane loses power
and crashes into the ocean.
The Japanese capture Zamperini
and toss him in a prison camp
on the island of Omori.
Louis finds himself in the
crosshairs of a sadistic guard
named Mutsuhiro Watanabe,
otherwise known as The Bird.
No matter where I was, he'd find me.
Oh, Zamperini, you come to attention last;
for no reason at all, I'm
punched out every day.
The Japanese do not
recognize the Geneva conventions
and brutalize their prisoners.
Over 27% of POW's die
in Japanese captivity.
Zamperini's misery serves as
amusement for the guards.
He line up five or six officers.
Then he'd get the enlisted
men to insult us and have
the enlisted men punch us out.
if they didn't hit us hard, they got hit.
So we'd say, Hey go ahead and hit us hard.
But that was the Bird.
At the end of August,
Patton was really at the
height of his powers.
He'd covered several
hundred miles of territory,
and conquered half of France,
and liberated Paris in less than
four weeks.
The, uh, tank conditions were ideal.
We had long nights, short
days, and the ground
was absolutely dry.
The tanks could go anywhere.
Patton press the German
border south of the Ardennes Forest.
But it was one of he worst winters
in Europe's history grips the front lines.
The Germans launch a surprise offensive.
They attacked in the
worst possible conditions.
But they knew they were going to
do it and they were ready for it
and we were not.
So the advantage went to them.
A massive German
force attacks the Allies on a
100 KM front centered in
the rugged Ardennes Forest.
Thick cloud cover keeps
Allied planes grounded,
unable to exploit their air superiority.
A German break-through here
could cr*pple or even reverse
the Allied push toward Germany.
The frontline SS troops
show their typical disdain
as they loot and burn across the area.
Near the town of Malmedy
they m*rder more than
300 American POW's.
The Allied lines scramble to firm up,
But German armored columns punch
a huge bulge in the American
defenses, threatening to split
the Allied advance in two.
For both sides no point is
more crucial than Bastogne.
All major roads intersect
this small Belgian town.
The 101st Airborne-including
Buck Compton and Earl Mcclung
is ordered into the breach.
But as they make their way into Bastogne,
they're confronted with their
fellow troops... in retreat.
We start going up the road, pretty soon,
we see these American soldiers
comin' this way with no weapons
and their eyes bugged out, They
had been overrun that division
just actually under
fire caved in and we had
to go and plug it up.
The 101st truck into
Bastogne and join the town's
ragged defenders.
We were just gettin' the hell shelled
out of us.
God-awful bombardment, you know,
I could taste the gunpowder in
in my mouth from the air.
They asked us how we survived.
Some of the guys didn't.
You know, they lost arms,
legs, feet, ears, hands,
they say I was out there
huntin' Germans all the time.
I was out there walkin' to keep warm.
That's what I was doing, to
keep from freezin' to death.
The Americans
defending the Belgian town earn
the nickname The Battered
b*stards of Bastogne.
We knew we was
surrounded..We were just,
one beat up division against seven.
In fierce fighting
the Germans fail to pierce
the American defenses.
When the Germans offer terms for surrender,
Brigadier General Anthony
Mcauliffe replies, Nuts!
When the Germans got
the word nuts, they said, nuts?
What that nuts?
They didn't understand that at all.
The only person who stood up and said
that he was able to do
so, is my grandfather.
He said, he said very famously
that he could engage
three divisions in forty-eight hours.
Now keep in mind that his troops
were about a hundred miles
south of Bastogne Eisenhower
just didn't believe it.
My grandfather passed along
the code words to his chief of
staff, 'play ball' and three
divisions turned and quickly
engaged the Germans near Bastogne.
We moved all night, all day,
and half the next night.
In these terrible, slippery,
icy roads, and we got within,
8 miles of Bastogne.
At close range, Irzak
recognizes the enormous scale
of the German effort.
Theirs was a massive, uh, attack that, uh,
not only affected us, it
affected the whole allied front.
This was infantry divisions.
This was tank divisions.
The Germans got everything
that was available to them
at that time.
The Third Army wades
into the action and presses
the German lines.
They kept going
and we finally stopped them and
then the fight continued because
we had to push them back.
So we opened the uh,
corridor into Bastogne.
Patton's Third Army
lifts the siege on the day after
Christmas, 1944.
As soon as the sky
cleared there was a C-47 and
P-51 sittin' right there and,
when that sky cleared and those
fighters got in there?
They, they just devastated that.
Pounded from every direction,
The great n*zi gamble to split
the Allies in half fails.
Private First Class Ralph
Martire comes across a teenage
German soldier-one of the many
boys Hitler is now sending
to the front.
I overtook him, I hit him with a r*fle,
and he fell down, and I was
going to bayonet him when
he start, he start calling for his mother.
He starts going Mommy, mommy, mommy.
I say why are you calling for your mother?
He says I don't want to die.
He says I want my mommy.
I said All right.
I'll tell you what.
I'm going to make it
look like I stabbed ya.
Pretend you're dead when
I move away from you.
Okay, he said, Okay.
And I did it.
In Manila, the local
Japanese Commander tries to save
the huge capital city from
destruction and orders
an evacuation.
But 20,000 rogue soldiers
refuse, and remain behind.
The Americans find themselves
in a raging street fight.
The Japanese unleash a reign
of terror on the civilian
population.
The Allies finally prevail;
the city destroyed,
one hundred thousand of her
inhabitants dead in the streets.
By January 1945, the Allies
have fought through the Marshall
and Mariana Islands.
They now target Japan's last
two strongholds: Iwo Jima
and Okinawa.
This lieutenant says well you guys got
a piece a cake
he said, Within about 5-7 days
we should be home. Yes sir.
We took his word for it.
He lied.
The Japanese have
spent years preparing Iwo Jima
for battle.
The island is on the doorstep of
their mainland and they intend
to fight for every inch.
I figured when I went into Iwo Jima
that my chances of coming out were nill.
Marines Bill Emerson,
Richard Fiske and 70-thousand
other Americans hit Iwo
Jima's beaches in February,
1945.The Japanese stop
them dead in their tracks.
Especially deadly is the fire
crashing down from the looming
slopes of Mount Suribachi.
The Japanese were imbedded,
they were up at Mount Suribachi
and they were firing an 8 inch
coastal g*n point blank at
the troops on the beach.
As long as they held that, why,
they controlled the island.
For three days, the
Marines ruthlessly battle across
the island and isolate Suribachi
from the rest of the defenders.
US patrols soon find a route
to the crest of the mountain.
It took us four
days to take Mount Suribachi,
we haven't even touched
the rest of the island.
At the cost of about,
almost a thousand Marines.
On the fourth day, the
Marines on Mount Suribachi send
a message to the enemy
and Americans back home.
I just turn around and looked, you know;
glance that way, every now and then.
And I can see that something's
happening back there.
And they're puttin' up this big flag.
We were only there uh,
four days, up to that point,
and uh, casualties had been bad.
Well, it's hard to describe that moment.
The battle for Iwo Jima is not over.
Japanese defenses are a
forbidding maze of underground
bunkers, sn*per nests, and fortified caves.
They wouldn't come out in the open.
The underground part of this
island is hard to comprehend,
it was really a case of they
had to be rooted out of every
cave or burned.
Finally after five weeks,
the Marines take the island.
They lay sixty-three hundred
of their dead comrades
in long trenches.
Just over one thousand Japanese surrender.
The rest are dead.
If there was a hell,
we went through it on Iwo Jima.
I have never in my life been
through anything like that.
The carnage, the death was
you'd have to be there to see it
All across the Western front,
the Allies swarm into Germany.
We were in the Ruhr Valley,
the Ruhr Valley was cut off
and our-our division's job was
to cut the Ruhr Valley in half.
Sgt. Jacob Baroff
marches with the 121st
Infantry Division as they
cross the Rhine, and trap
hundreds of thousands of
demoralized Germans
near the Ruhr River. He
finds shocking remnants
of n*zi fanaticism, known as
the lebensborn program,
or spring of life.
We captured a baby factory.
A baby factory was,
a lot of little cottages,
and they would bring in the German Arians,
they had to be six foot tall,
blonde, blue-eyed,
six generations of being Germans, at least.
And uh, they brought in the women,
the women became pregnant, the
men were sent back to line,
the women were havin' the babies,
and then when the babies, I
think it was three months,
they left and the babies were
gonna be raised by the state.
They were the Praetorian
guard of the German Army
for the future.
13-hundred Allied
aircraft appear in the night
skies over the German city of Dresden.
Wave after wave drop 4-thousand
tons of expl*sives and
incendiaries, igniting an epic
firestorm that turns the city
a major rail hub into an ocean of fire.
You'd see people sitting there as though
they were on a street car or
as though they were on a tram.
And they had, what had k*lled
them was lack of oxygen.
And they didn't even know
it was happening to them.
22-year-old US Army
Private and future novelist
Kurt Vonnegut is being held
in Dresden as a POW.
Well, we had never seen anything like it
before.
And, had no idea that, uh
our side was capable of such
indiscriminant destruction.
The results were just a total
calamity of civilization.
One estimate places civilian casualties
at one-hundred thousand.
The Allied bombs turn Dresden,
like most of the third reich,
into rubble.
EAGER TO STRIKE HARD
BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE,
GENERAL CURTIS LEMAY INTRODUCES
A NEW STRATEGY TO ATTACK JAPAN:
RISK GREATER AMERICAN
LOSSES BY FLYING IN LOW;
HIT THE TARGETS
WITH MORE PRECISION,
AND k*ll AS MANY
JAPANESE AS POSSIBLE.
LEMAY ORDERS THE USE OF
INCENDIARIES TO CREATE
FIRESTORMS SIMILAR TO
THE DRESDEN OPERATION.
Tailgunner Richard Vanden Heuve
is assigned to Lemay's unit.
You
burn. If it's an area so you saw
wasn't burning, that's where
they dropped their bombs.
The as*ault groups sweep in anywhere from
4 to 5,000 feet over Tokyo,
and drop their loads.
We just burned out the,
the cities just completely
and put, put them on fire.
The firestorm incinerates more than
80-thousand civilians.
Less than 350 miles from
the Japanese mainland,
Okinawa is defended by over
a hundred-thousand troops.
Here too, Japanese soldiers
battle to the end.
But the Americans encounter great numbers
of civilians, including this
woman who would also rather
jump to their deaths than risk
capture by the hated enemy.
On April 12th, 1945, with w*r still raging,
FDR suffers a stroke and dies.
Vice President Harry S. Truman,
with whom Roosevelt rarely spoke,
is hastily sworn in as President.
When he came to see us, he was in very,
very bad physical shape.
Hitler Youth Armin
Lehmann is part of a delegation
that is allowed to meet Der
Fuhrer on his 56th birthday.
He was shaking so
badly that he had to grasp uh,
his jacket just to control his shaking.
So then he brought his arm
forward and shook my hand.
And he said, Wieder ein
brave Junger, which meant,
Again a brave boy.
The company commander called all
the officers together, And he
made a startling announcement.
He says, The w*r is over.
Don't tell your men about it.
In Tuscany, 2nd Lt.
Daniel Inouye's Commander warns
him to keep his men on alert.
We'll keep on fighting with the same
intensity
because if we slack, he said,
it's going to prolong the w*r
and more people will die.
On April 21st, 1945,
Inoyue and his platoon are under
heavy fire trying to take
a ridge in San Torenzo.
I had a b*llet through my abdomen,
somehow it didn't strike
anything precious, just flesh,
then all of a sudden, there
were three machine g*n nests.
I told the men stay down.
I got blood all over the place,
and so I said, Get back there.
Knowing the w*r will
soon be over matters little
to Inouye.
He has been trained to lead his
men and to destroy the enemy.
He can do no less.
In a blistering firefight with
Axis troops in Northern Italy,
2nd Lieutenant Daniel Inoyue
takes a b*llet through
the stomach.
Ignoring the pain, he tosses
grenades at two enemy machine
g*n nests.
He prepares to throw a third grenade.
My grenade struck home, but the second one,
uh, somehow had a r*fle grenade
and my elbow disappeared.
An enemy projectile
shreds Inouye's right arm,
but his lifeless hand still
grips his live grenade.
My only concern was the grenade
in that right hand, and I pulled
it out and then used my g*n
to wipe out the third one.
Then I got hit in the leg, and that was it.
Inouye remains at
the front for six hours until
he is finally evacuated.
I had to make certain that the men were
assigned to their right places.
I told my sergeant, I'm gonna
tell you a secret you don't tell
anyone else.
I told him about the w*r being over.
No heroics.
Next day he got k*lled.
Italian partisans capture Benito Mussolini,
his mistress, and a few of his supporters.
They are immediately ex*cuted
and hung upside down from meat
hooks at a gas station in Milan.
In his fortified bunker, deep
beneath his bombed out offices,
Adolph Hitler learns that Soviet
troops are only a mile away.
The following day, Hitler and Eva Braun,
his wife of only two days, k*ll themselves.
After giving the corpse of
his Führer a final salute,
propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels poisons his
six children.
Then he and his wife order
an SS officer to sh**t them
in the back of the head.
What is left of the German
high command surrenders
to the Allies.
After five years and eight
months of unbridled violence,
the w*r in Europe is over.
The first time
we heard about it was through
the radio from head-, uh, from
our company area that the w*r,
Germany surrendered.
And I can tell you one thing.
That was the biggest drunk
we ever had. We were drunk.
The n*zi concentration
camps house death on a massive
scale.
Some living skeletons emerge
from the darkness, -naked,
their hair shorn, their gold
teeth ripped from their mouths.
And piles of corpses remain.
Of the 11 million Jews Hitler
planned to exterminate,
he succeeded in k*lling
six million of them.
The SS and Gestapo
had hurriedly buried many of
their victims in mass graves
to keep the bodies from falling
into allied hands.
They were not successful.
German civilians were forced to
dig them up and give them decent
burial.
I mean, it was a, a terrible damn thing to,
to even s-see.
A lot of Germans got k*lled
telling us that didn't happen.
With Germany and Italy out of the w*r,
Japan now feels the full
brunt of Allied power.
All those that you see in w*r movies,
you see those big puffs of black smoke,
that's that shell exploding and
it raised hell with our engine
and our wings and everything else.
On his 6th mission over Japan,
Tailgunner Richard Vanden Heuvel
sees an anti aircraft shell
explode just feet from his plane.
The pilot radioed and said,
We lost six foot off the right wing.
Engine number four is out.
Three is out.
b*mb bays are shot out.
And uh, we had some tail damage.
And that's uh, when we jumped.
As the B29 loses altitude,
a US submarine patrolling
the area films the crash
of Vanden Heuval's B-29...
...and the crew's
subsequent rescue,
Including Vanden Heuvel himself.
That's the first time in B-Twenty-Nine
history that they picked up the whole crew.
That was unheard of.
Usually, you pick up three or four.
They just don't pick up the whole crew.
But they did pick up the whole crew.
The Japanese military
now decides to fully implement
its policy of kamikaze or divine wind.
Suicide pilots toast their
homeland and Emperor;
board planes loaded with expl*sives,
and fly those planes into Allied ships.
Albert D'Amico witnesses
the horror firsthand.
The kamikaze was bombarding and sinking
our ships, left and right.
The policy proves terribly effective.
kamikazes sink 27 Navy vessels,
k*lling almost 5-thousand
sailors.
They were attacking us every day,
day and night.
They wouldn't let us sleep, in other words,
we were up all night and all day,
some of us fell asleep while
on our anti-aircraft g*ns.
Back on Okinawa, flame throwers, tanks,
air and ground assaults slowly annihilate
the Japanese defenders.
150,000 civilians die in the maelstrom.
When it finally ends on June
22nd, 1945, 12,500 Allied troops
are dead and 64,000 are
wounded or shell shocked
Okinawa stands as the bloodiest
battle in the Pacific w*r.
At the allied conference at Potsdam,
President Truman learns the
atomic b*mb was successfully
tested.
The Allies calculate the costs
of invading Japan's home
At least a quarter of
a million American casualties.
After discussing it with Churchill,
Truman decides to use this
new weapon against Japan.
Our takeoff was perfectly routine.
We climb up to our altitude
started on our way to
rendezvous at Iwo Jima.
A specially-fitted
B-29 named the Enola g*y carries
Little Boy, a b*mb that uses
a uranium b*llet to cause
a nuclear expl*si*n.
My navigator had me perfectly
lined up with the target.
When I clutched in with my sight,
I could clearly see the city of
Hiroshima within my b*mb site.
The b*mb was finally released,
exactly at the designated hour,
and the expl*si*n occurred
as planned.
We saw this
cloud of boiling dust and debris
below us with this
tremendous mushroom on top.
Beneath that was hidden the
ruins of the city of Hiroshima.
70-thousand civilians die in the expl*si*n.
Another 70-thousand are injured.
Japan's fanatical leaders
debate possible responses,
but do not surrender.
A second nuclear b*mb called
Fat Man uses plutonium to create
a nuclear blast.
It's loaded onto a B-29 named
Bockscar and flies toward Japan.
The primary target is the
Japanese city of Kokura,
which is shrouded in cloud cover.
We made, uh, three runs on it,
but were unable to get into it.
We, uh, picked our route
into the secondary target,
which was Nagasaki.
When the clouds opened up our target was
there, pretty as a picture.
I made the run, let the b*mb go.
Fat Man detonates over
an industrial area in a valley
in the city.
The hilly geography limits the damage.
Nonetheless, the expl*si*n
kills 75,000 Japanese.
My reaction was horror
in the fact that it could
devastate a whole city,
but I didn't blame the President
at all. you either use this,
k*ll a ton of people or not
use it and lose a ton of people
on our side. That's no choice.
Six days later, Emperor Hirohito,
Noting Russia's declaration of
w*r on Japan and the presence
of a new and terrible weapon,
finally orders his military
to surrender all Japanese
forces to the Allies.
The battleship USS Missouri
steams into Tokyo Bay.
On September 2nd, Japanese
diplomat Mamoru Shigemitsu
and General Yoshijiro Umezu sign
the formal surrender documents.
General Douglas MacArthur
leads the Allied delegation.
From this solemn occasion a better world
shall emerge out of the blood
and carnage of the past,
A world dedicated to the dignity of man,
and the fulfillment of his most
cherished wish, for freedom,
tolerance, and justice.
More than 50 countries
suffer casualties during
World w*r Two.
Over 24 million military deaths
And 45 million civilians k*lled.
I'm glad I
did it. I wouldn't trade it
for anything.
Not that it was fun, but I think
of it as it's a part of my life
And just lucky that I lived through it.
Had we not won that w*r,
then life as we know it would never,
would never have existed again.
Somebody says, Well,
what are you over there fighting for?
I said, So you wouldn't have
to learn to speak German.
They knew why they fought.
They knew every day could be their last.
But they kept on doing...
...and dying.
You couldn't imagine, young boys,
faces shot off. Legs
blown off from land mines.
And they never complained.
w*r is hell.
And we saw it firsthand.
Our generation was an odd generation.
We came home from the w*r and
everyone wanted to resume
his life and uh, there was no
patting them on the back uh,
look what all that I did.
They, they bore in, they got jobs,
they went on with their business.
So they didn't talk much about the w*r.
I just took it for granted.
We all figured we'd come out alive.
But down deep, we knew we wouldn't.
I'm very proud
that I was able to do what I did
help out this country
as much as I did, if I did,
and I'm proud of all the
veterans that served with me
and all the veterans that didn't
come home, they're the heroes.
I'm not.
I came home.
That's all I can say I guess.
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Inside World w*r II (2012)
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