Original subtitles

Some 54 million people died in the Second World War,

enough men, women and children to people all of Great Britain,

equal to one third of the entire population

of the United States of America.

During the six years of the war,

many millions of ordinary men took up arms to kill each other.

Say after me: Teach us, good Lord...

...to serve thee as thou deservest.

To give and not to count the cost.

To fight and not to heed the wounds.

To toil and not to seek for rest.

To labour and not to ask for any reward.

Save that of knowing that we do thy will.

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen.

I'm honoured to be one of those first called,

and I'll try very hard to make a real good soldier.

And I'm proud of you.

Here we teach you how to kill, get the opponent down on the ground,

in the quickest manner possible, snuff out his life by kicking with both feet,

one foot, a rabbit punch, gouging the eyes out, ripping the mouth.

The gentle art of killing a man is to get him on the ground

and kick in this manner.

The job also takes muscle and just plain guts.

The infantryman has to be as hard as the steel in the barrel of his rifle.

It takes toughness and courage to battle forward and parry on your own.

You can't teach a man courage,

but you can toughen him for the big job ahead.

♪ Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

♪ Cheerio, here I go, on my way...

In the back of all our minds,

this is the answer, the finish of all wars.

And none of us ever comprehended what it could be like.

You see? This was the point.

You realise you're going in to kill,

and we were always taught that we had to kill or be killed.

When you're faced with the situation as a young man, I was only 19,

it's confusing.

You're built to take orders and to obey orders,

but, at the same token, you're still a human being.

We were psychologically trained, as well as militarily trained,

to such a point where you're doing everything by instinct.

You sort of just move.

If you're told to do something, there's no questioning the lieutenant.

You get up and you start moving up.

You tried to do it the safest way possible, but you did it.

If they give you an order, you have to follow it. You do it by rote.

They'll say, "Move up, first squad."

The first squad will move up like robots.

And your squad leader is God. I was a corporal. I was a squad leader.

And I'd give the boys an order, they'd do it.

I think they fear their squad leader more than they do the enemy.

When you start going on nerves, you no longer function as a human being.

You start functioning as a machine.

In a sense, in combat everybody's on their own.

You become your own general, your own corporal, your own sergeant.

You're exhausted to a point that's indescribable.

There's so much going on in battle,

you don't have time to concentrate even when you see a friend die,

as I have, because you have yourself to think about.

When you're scared, you're more alert.

It's like you're playing a game with somebody.

You've got a gun and he's got a gun. Who's gonna pull the trigger first?

Very often you shot together.

Who shot who? You really don't know.

You don't know that somebody else shot at the same time,

so I guess that may give you a cop-out.

You don't know whether you really took the life at the time.

When it's down to where two of you are firing on about 14 people,

you know that you must be blamed for some.

It's not like a game of football or basketball,

you know who scored the point.

At 300 yards,

we couldn't tell whether they were Germans or Americans

and we started to fire, and that's one time I hope to God

that I missed every time I fired.

I don't think I was frightened. I was scared.

Some people, as you know, show fright more than others.

I don't believe that I showed fright. I may have.

I tried not to because of the people that I had with me.

But I assure you, I was afraid.

There's no brave men.

Everybody fights for theirself when the time comes.

I think the most significant factor is the desire to survive,

and by that I mean the desire to survive consistent of doing the decent thing,

by not tooling it in in front of your mates.

I think everybody was afraid,

and later one learnt to realise that basically this is what war is about,

that it's really two groups of very frightened men facing each other.

The first thing that I can remember

was the odour of the gunpowder, you know, the artillery fire.

It's a stink, an odour you don't forget,

and it was the first time I'd smelt anything exactly like that.

Of course, then you're aware of the crack, crack, crack of the machine-gun.

The noise of war, which is quite terrific,

it's a very funny position to be in, sort of in the roar of the tanks

and some high-velocity stuff going off, machine-guns, shells.

You imagine a large metal vessel and you are inside it,

and someone hits the outside with a hammer.

You then get this echoing of noise which really penetrates your eardrums.

It's a particularly nasty form of ending one's days

if one is trapped in a tank

and the tank blows up and is on fire.

You will never lose the awfulness

of screams of men trying to get out.

After a while we didn't hear the noise

the way we had heard it at the very beginning.

But it's just like anything else. It didn't bother you any more.

It's like my daughter playing some of the up-to-date music.

The first couple of minutes of it drives me crazy

and then after a while I don't know whether I do become completely crazy

and don't recognise it.

You might have had good training, but you don't get much under fire.

When that sorts itself out and you find out which way the shells are going,

and if you don't winged or knocked out altogether,

each time you come back, you've got more confidence.

You know when to duck and you don't make a fool of yourself.

And when you were quite satisfied they weren't going to be too near you,

you didn't do too much about it.

But when they came close, you just ducked and hoped for the best.

You get used to anything after a while,

even getting shot at.

You needed a number of weapons, and we used a great many weapons.

Flame-throwers, that was the best weapon I had.

It's an idea of kill or be killed.

The method of the killing did not make a great deal of difference

in one's thinking at the time.

It was just a job, whether you liked it or you didn't like it.

It was the man's job.

We had flame-throwers and there was one in each platoon.

I forget now if it was one, two...

I remember four.

Them guys did some job.

Yeah, we seen the people as they fell.

I seen 'em when I'd say there was about 14 bodies

out there in front of us at that time.

I saw people layin' out there with no head

and some with their arms blown off

and some of my friends, people that I'd been training with for years,

and then you see 'em get shot, you know, it's pretty sickening.

If several thousand men are killed,

in the process of death, they do bleed.

There was quite a lot of blood around.

The odour you'll never forget.

The odour you'd never want to smell again.

Dead bodies. I couldn't describe it.

So many days you were in one spot, you couldn't advance,

and with the casualties, you found yourself in a hole, more or less,

with your dead bodies, and the heat bloating them up,

making them smell and turn black.

And you had to just stay right in that hole with 'em.

You get callous to dead bodies and bloated bodies,

but you never get callous to your own friends.

You could have a sandwich any time,

but you can't eat with your buddy alongside of you, you can't.

You see them drop or scream with pain.

Some of the times it's just a fleeting glance.

I got it taking care of some men in a foxhole.

One was completely dead of blast concussion.

There wasn't a mark on his body, but he was dead.

Another fellow, I had to take off his leg.

There was nothing left of the leg except tendons that were tied to the body.

And see my friends falling around

with gaping wounds in their chest, their stomach, their arms and so forth.

Some of them even laying there, one minute they'd be talking to us,

the next minute, they're gone.

I heard people hollering and crying out for help.

You couldn't get to them. They'd lay there and holler.

It is a terrifying thought. You walk along with one guy

and turn around and look back, you see him in two pieces.

It has quite an effect on you.

The reaction is terrifying in a sense.

It only wants you to live more.

You wanna live more yourself.

Afterwards is when your knees go to jelly and you shake

and you sit down and you cry.

After the operation,

the only thing that we can say that we mourned our dead.

We mourned that more than anything

and we were so happy to be alive ourselves.

We were just so grateful.

To the Almighty.

One was terribly worried because one didn't know the enemy.

The only time I ever saw them was through field glasses,

and I saw them in uniforms and, you know, the dimensions of ants.

One was fearful until one had seen them at close quarters.

I was involved in taking some prisoner,

and I realised that they were human beings.

They showed kindness to their own people too which we didn't really think.

We thought life was cheap to them, but that's not true.

They showed a lot of kindness to their own wounded

and would tote 'em on their back,

although they had enough trouble just carrying theirself.

But they would find the strength

to carry their wounded the same as we would.

So they were people just like us.

Well, it struck me how much like us they were.

Apart from the clothes and the uniform, they could have been anyone.

I was sort of disappointed, because in my own mind

I was gonna see somebody in the peak of condition,

who looked like everything a soldier should look like

and be completely dignified, in fact even disdainful and arrogant.

And they were a mess when I saw them. They were filthy, dirty, beat up.

The anger I think that most soldiers feel in war

is a very personal anger.

They go into battle. They're frightened.

They lose a friend. The friend is killed.

And he's killed by that faceless fellow over there who was shooting at him.

There's where the anger comes in.

I don't think you become a German hater or a Japanese hater

or anything else.

The longer you stay in combat,

the more concerned you are about casualties

and impressing upon your commanders that when they're assigned an objective,

you're gonna hold them responsible

for doing it the easy way rather than the hard way.

Naturally, the longer troops remain in battle,

the more they want to be supported with artillery and air.

They're through with fearing they'll miss the war

and they're ready to go out and slug it out.

They said if we can do it with the air, let's not spill the blood.

It's what is known as saturation bombing.

You felt the Earth had come to an end.

It spouted in front of you, it shook, it shuddered. The whole landscape heaved.

I thought, "There can't be a living German."

And the astonishing thing is, about three quarters of an hour later,

the Germans rose out of all this mess and came hopping towards us again.

We were bombed quite often by mistake.

We had a saying in the army that when the British bombed,

the Axis took cover.

When the Germans bombed, the Allies took cover.

But when our cousins, Americans, bombed, everybody took cover.

A battlefield is very funny.

It's extraordinary how inanimate the whole thing seems.

There's a little bit of an action going on in the right-hand corner.

For the rest, there are people lying about, smoking.

It's one of the very singular things that films and books don't bring out,

I think Tolstoy perhaps is the exception,

of a battlefield where nothing seems to be happening.

The action is always over a hedge in another corner,

and it's a decisive thing.

And then they ask you if you were there.

War is, of course, excruciatingly boring.

I think I've never been so totally, absolutely bored as I was in the army.

We were so preoccupied with the business

of eating, sleeping, fighting, surviving,

that I certainly never remember discussing the outcome of the war

or whether the Germans were right or we were right or anything like that at all.

The person who had lived well prior to the war

missed his steaks and chops and what have you,

but, I mean, I never missed 'em because I never had 'em.

You see, I was dragged up, as we would say,

lived in hovels, you know.

But the army, to me, people were looking after me,

I was elated, sort of thing, you know.

Well, it does seem mad, it seems incredible,

but I think if people get used to suffering

and living in slums and going without,

they adjust themselves to this environment.

And I think we did. We came to accept it.

It seems incredible.

To pick any of you men up now and drop you out there,

I'd be doubtful whether you'd endure it, but the change was gradual.

War is, of course, a study in extreme situations

and one's mood does shift at an astonishing rate.

An army has the morale of change,

of being taken out of the humdrum routine.

Myself, I always felt one good time made up for five bad times.

That's how I looked at it.

You can be scared to death one minute and laughing the next.

When you're an artilleryman and you help to fire shells,

at that time I guess about nine or ten miles away,

you're not really conscious of what sort of destruction you're creating.

We're all unable to imagine what people are feeling

a few hundred yards away.

Fire!

It is very much a lack of imagination,

one of the greatest human weaknesses, I think.

I didn't quite realise what it was until we moved through by convoy.

We had an opportunity to see massive destruction

on a wholesale scale.

Many soldiers, particularly artillerymen and flyers,

had to kill innocent women and children, non-combatants.

It seems to me an immoral sin.

There's been a great deterioration in modern warfare.

Civilians are always a nuisance.

Hungry, shivering Italians came to our mess for leftovers,

and we at first gave them a good deal, eating less ourselves.

But then came an order to bury all food that wasn't consumed

and we were forced to throw huge amounts of uneaten food

into a hole in the ground and cover it up.

This was an appalling thing for us

because the Italian civilians looked very hungry

and in fact were very hungry.

The Italians weren't our enemies at that time.

But when in doubt, don't do anything

that might cause trouble in higher headquarters.

It was a beautiful sight to see these different ships of war,

the tremendous power, the flashes, the roar.

Three one.

I used to get a big kick out of the tremendous power

of these battleships when they fired the 16-inch guns - what a crack.

I remember the action. I dream about it. There is a certain feeling.

I don't care who you are,

there's a certain feeling of exultation about combat.

You had mixed feelings there: pride and fear.

You're proud that you're part of an organisation.

You're afraid you're gonna get killed or wounded.

I guess it's man's nature.

You're scared, but there's a feeling of exultation too.

That's why there'd be so many wars.

At night, you don't know the strength of your enemy or anything else.

You may be fighting an enemy that's far superior to what you are.

It gives you rather a strange feeling. You're like fighting in the dark.

But, sure, you would open fire. Your guns were being fired by radar target.

You, in turn, were receiving fire. It's rather a weird sensation.

You would rather much be seeing what you were firing at

and what the odds were against you.

You wouldn't feel so helpless.

When you attack a major naval taskforce,

you come into the most dense firepower ever known in military history.

I can imagine being up in an aircraft and looking down

and seeing all that come up at me. It would be... unbelievable.

It'd be just like some kind of a dream.

You couldn't believe it was humanly possible

for a fly to get through something like that,

but some of them did.

We opened up and when we smashed our first plane,

it was like being at a football game - everybody forget we was at a war

and we all got up and started cheering.

Then it dawned upon us, when we seen this one ship get hit,

that this was for real, you know,

and then we all kind of woke up to the fact that we were at a war, you know.

It was a cloudy, overcast day. It was seven o'clock in the morning.

And the duty that came in and dropped the bombs on us

came in at wave height.

It hit this carrier dead centre,

and as we went by, men were abandoning ship,

the whole ship just seemed to explode. There was nothing there.

When we were hit, there were 3226 men on the roster of the ship.

The morning after at general muster, there were 704.

Of course, aboard ship were over 3,000 men.

You can't know them all,

but you are bound to have lost

numerous of those that you did know.

The enormous amount of damage that one plane did

by dropping those two bombs,

it's something that you just can't understand,

the number of lives that that man was responsible for.

I believe the worst thing for me was the time when we were trapped

and just saw no way out,

and each succeeding explosion

accentuated the fact that you weren't gonna get out of there.

I can remember men that were, many of them, so tense

that they couldn't talk if they wanted to.

Their inner souls, their inner minds, may have been working overtime,

but they couldn't have said a word.

Others screaming and crying.

Such things as that tear you apart.

I think that flying is so impersonal,

that is to say combat flying, that you don't get that intimate sense of loss

if you see an airplane get shot down

that you'd have if your buddy on a battlefield had his head blown off

right within arm's length.

I don't think anyone ever considered that he would be killed.

Death was something which was just put at the back of your mind.

If it was not, you'd have just got the jitters about it and been very worried.

If a fellow did go missing, it was just,

"Poor old so-and-so, he's had it," and that was that.

Inwardly, of course, you'd feel it tremendously if you lost a pal.

But you didn't dwell on the subject of death at all.

Exhilaration? I don't know if that's the word.

It's almost, "We've gotta do it."

You never think of getting shot down, or your safety.

You do after you're hit, you start thinking of self-preservation,

but not at that time.

When you were fighting a particular man in his machine

and you in your machine, the sky became empty.

You didn't see anyone else. 200 or 300 aircraft and then suddenly nothing.

It was just one against one, and sometimes you knew he was very good,

sometimes you knew he wasn't so good.

And you can assess the situation fairly closely

as to whether he might be lucky and hit you, but otherwise you could get him.

Shoot-down is simple,

but you had to calculate the lead required,

that is how far you would lead your guns or bore-sight line ahead of the target.

So you had to estimate the target's speed.

You had to estimate the angle that you are from the target.

In other words, you fired so that when your rounds got there,

the airplane, your target, would intercept 'em.

I think we were just getting on with the war,

as one would play a game of rugby or cricket, to win,

that was all.

You just played your hardest. The other man had to come down.

Pilots and people who kill at a distance

don't have any particular delight in destruction.

They have a great delight in their implements

and in precision bombing and so on.

The further you are from the target, the less likely you are

to have any understanding of what deviltry your weapons are causing.

- It'll weave a bit, Skip. - OK.

30 seconds.

There's a flare just to the left.

OK.

OK. Keep weaving for a while.

- 40 seconds. - Then spread a little.

- Bomb doors open. - Bomb doors open.

Steady.

- 25 seconds. - Steady. Bombs away.

- 30. - There goes the cookie.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

- 4,000lb have just gone off. - And good show.

That's not bad at all.

Yes, not bad.

This is a damned unnatural sort of war

The pilot sits among the clouds

Quite sure about the values he is fighting for

He cannot hear beyond his veil of sound

He cannot see the people on the ground

He only knows that on the sloping map

Of sea-fringed town and country

People creep like ants

And who cares if ants laugh or weep?

- Plane. - On target.

Read first 12, 300.

- That's 12, 800. - 12, 800 set.

To us, he is no more than a machine shown on an instrument

What can he mean in human terms?

A man, somebody's son

Proud of his skill

Compact of flesh and bone

Fragile as Icarus

And our desire

To see that damned machine come down on fire

- They're firing at us now. - Hello, Skipper.

We've been holed in the front here.

Oil's leaking out of the front carriage. Still, it's nothing to worry about.

OK.

I've never seen a thing like this.

Neither have I.

I think my fear manifested itself.

First of all, I found myself being a little more religious

than I had been back in the States.

I thought more about my creator and what I ought to be doing

to make sure I stayed in good graces with him.

I don't say that the fear was an acute one,

so that you went around trembling,

but I think that it was pretty well felt

that our chances of surviving were not particularly good.

But after all, it was what we felt we had to do,

and I felt if you were gonna die, that was the best way to die.

I'd much rather die in an airplane than in the mud on some battlefield.

I think the overriding fear is the fear of making mistakes.

There's the confusion of battle. Everything goes topsy-turvy.

So you sort of forget that overriding fear

and you just try to take care of whatever's right at hand.

It was generally understood that the combat tour was 25 missions

because it was anticipated you'd be dead by the end of that time,

so there wasn't any point in asking you to stay around any longer.

Suddenly at night the bombers came

In the hard, reverberating bowl of the sky

Destroying the factory and the tall cathedral

The dock, the warehouse and the railway station

The rich house in the leafy avenue

And the shouldering tenements of the narrow streets

And the bodies and souls of men

I sought my son among the smoking stones

Where I had crouched with him clutched at my breast

Until the bomb burst and the building shattered down

And the dark came and severed my son from me

I cried out with a voice harsh in my throat

My son

I have lost my son

And charred faces stared at me with pity

And I saw the city burning about me

And the flash of guns on the dark smoke

And I heard bombs burst in the fire

And in my heart

But no one came to seek my son

It's alright looking back in hindsight at a lot of this action,

but we as boys from school in most cases, in fact,

joined the air force because we felt this was the best service.

We accepted that there were people in higher places

who knew the actual facts and were directing us in the right way.

These are facts

Observe them how you will

Forget for a moment the medals and the glory

The clean shape of the bomb designed to kill

And the proud headlines of the paper's story

Bodies in death are not magnificent or stately

Bones are not elegant that blast has shattered

This sorry, stained and crumpled rag

Was lately a man whose life was made of little things that mattered

Now he is just a nuisance

Liable to stink

A breeding ground for flies

A test tube for disease

Bury him quickly and never pause to think

What is the future worth to men like these?

People talk about morality in war.

Tell me some action of war that is moral.

People say you mustn't do anything to civilians.

Good Lord, what's happened to civilians in every besieged city of the past?

Haven't they always been starved into surrender and bombarded into surrender?

What's the difference between bombarding them with guns

and bombarding the cities

where they're manufacturing the weapons and the ammunition?

♪ Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

♪ Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

♪ Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

♪ And we'll all stay free

♪ Praise the Lord and swing into position

♪ Can't afford to be a politician

♪ Praise the Lord

♪ We're all between perdition and the deep blue sea

You could get as much employment as you wanted,

and large families could really get 34 hours of employment.

Families which had never had any money at all

were suddenly having lots of money.

As far as the unions are concerned,

it was a happy war, it was a popular war, it was supported.

The unions supported the war considerably.

They were busy turning out planes and ships and war materiel.

There was quite a lot of money made in the factories,

but without a shadow of doubt or fear of contradiction,

a lot of people made a lot of money out of the war.

♪ Praise the Lord We're on a mighty mission

♪ All aboard We're not a-goin' fishin'

♪ Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition

♪ And we'll all stay free

The day was clear when we dropped that bomb.

It was clear, sunshiny day, and visibility was unrestricted.

A white light just obliterated the whole sky. I'll never forget it.

And we saw, off our right wing,

the cloud coming up from Hiroshima.

Where before there had been a city,

distinctive houses, buildings and everything,

now you couldn't see anything except a black, boiling barrel of tar.

It was terrible to look at, really,

because you knew there were people underneath,

and you could speculate what the result was there.

As far as my personal feelings are concerned,

I never let my personal feelings enter into it.

I knew there were people down below and getting hurt by this,

and I felt that if I let my emotions get carried away

and I get to worrying about who's gonna get hurt,

I wouldn't be effective at all,

so I had to school myself not to think about it.

A weapon is a weapon, and it really doesn't make much difference

how you kill a man.

If you have to kill him, that's evil to start with,

and how you do it becomes pretty secondary.

I think that your choice should be which weapon is most efficient

and most likely to get the whole mess over with as early as possible.

The lesson the Second World War taught us was to keep out of war.

I think had we not have fought that war in 1939 to 1945,

we would not have had the world as we know it today.

No war's worth fighting.

All these lives, these thousands of lives that are lost,

and the sadness it leaves behind.

Definitely not.

My own viewpoint was that the war for me

had been a complete failure

because there were 60 million square-headed bastards still living.

I would fight for the government again, definitely.

And I would fight again tomorrow, if I had to go back in again,

to fight for the United States government.

It was a terrible waste of human life and money,

but it had to be done and there was no way we could have avoided it.