Original subtitles

This tiny island, less than one square mile,

cost more than 4,000 lives.

This is Tarawa, typical of some of the most concentrated fighting of the war

as the Americans drive the Japanese back island by island

across the Pacific.

In February 1942, Japanese bombers attacked the Australian mainland.

The raid temporarily knocked out the naval base of Darwin.

With the Japanese advancing across New Guinea,

some Australians thought this was the prelude to invasion,

but the Japanese army and navy were unable to agree.

Their invasion plans were shelved.

In fact, the Japanese found they were overextended.

In the appalling conditions of the New Guinea jungle,

the Australians, with American support,

turned back the Japanese advance on the vital base of Port Moresby.

Along the Kokoda Trail the Allies counter-attacked.

Sickness and disease were obstacles as formidable as Japanese bullets.

By the end of 1942, the threat to Australia had been removed.

The stage was set for the long and bitter struggle

to push the Japanese back to their homeland.

The Allied offensive came under the separate command of two rivals,

General Douglas MacArthur in the southwest Pacific

and Admiral Chester Nimitz in the central Pacific.

American strategy was to mount a two-pronged attack on an enemy

whose conquests extended

over thousands of square miles of land and ocean.

MacArthur's task was to thrust upwards from the Solomons and New Guinea

to the Philippines.

The forces under Nimitz

were to make a series of giant leaps from island to island -

the Marshall Islands, the Marianas, Iwo Jima, Okinawa.

They would start in the Gilberts in November 1943 at Tarawa.

Each one of you is much better than the Jap.

You're better physically. You're better mentally. You have better weapons.

You'll have better support so that you'll be able to lick him hands down

when it comes to individual fighting.

Let me repeat again what the general said.

If you have to run any chances whatsoever to get a prisoner,

then don't get him.

The first objective

of Nimitz's island-hopping armada's Tarawa atoll

had become a Japanese fortress

from whose airstrip planes could strike at the US fleets.

Tarawa had to be taken.

This was the first time a seaborne attack had been launched

against a heavily defended atoll protected by a coral reef.

No one in the initial assault force of 5,000 marines realised

just how strong the defences of Tarawa were.

They thought they would level the island and demolish everything,

that there wouldn't be a living soul on the island.

I remember him telling us,

"This is gonna be the easiest invasion we ever had."

He says, "We'll only need two men - one with a rifle and one with a slate."

"One to shoot 'em, one to chalk 'em up."

"It's gonna be real easy."

I turned to the major standing next to me on the deck and said,

"Some of our people aren't aiming very well today."

He said, "You don't think those are our shells, do you?"

I realised then that we're being shot at and there were Japanese on Tarawa.

Everyone was confident that you could kick hell out of the Japanese.

The marines would have no problem with them

if we could get our feet on the beach.

Let's go! Let's go!

Remember that the island was only 800 or 900 yards wide

and when you put 20,000 men on an island like that, it's quite crowded.

There were Japs in front of the lines, behind the lines, all over.

We were told that perhaps we could take this island

within a very short time

and it was quite evident within hours of landing that this would not be so.

The foxholes that had been covered up with the naval gunfire,

the next morning, within about 20 yards of where I was,

I watched the Japanese digging out.

They were digging the sand out of the place so that they could see out.

The battle raged for three days

with the Japanese gradually pinned back into one end of this tiny island.

The Japanese commander boasted that Tarawa could not be taken in 100 years.

If you can imagine the effect of nearly 6,000 dead men

on an island this small,

and considering it's one degree from the equator,

the amount of heat you have there,

you can imagine the smell you get within a day or two

from all this rotting flesh.

It was a sort of sweet smell -

sickly sweet, I described it -

and I don't know anywhere in World War ll

where there was such a concentration of death.

When it was all over, of 3,000 Japanese, only 17 surrendered.

The Americans lost over 1,000 dead and 2,000 wounded.

Public opinion in the United States was shocked

that such heavy losses had been incurred in so short a period of fighting.

After Tarawa, American invasion forces headed for the Mariana Islands

of Saipan, Tinian and Guam.

The naval task force protecting the landings

was positioned to the west of Saipan.

Approaching from Okinawa in June 1944 was Japan's mobile fleet,

looking for a naval success that would yet turn the war in their favour.

Suddenly, from their radar, the Americans realised

that they had been spotted by the Japanese.

Every available American fighter was put into the air

to meet wave after wave of Japanese carrier-borne planes.

Many Japanese pilots were comparative novices with no battle experience.

Their aircraft were poorly armoured.

For the American flyers swooping down on their opponents,

it was as easy as shooting turkeys.

After the first encounter, all but one of the American planes returned.

Rearmed and refuelled, the Americans were ready for the next Japanese move.

There were two more onslaughts to be faced.

However, the Americans had nearly 900 carrier planes,

twice the number of the Japanese.

The Marianas turkey shoot lasted just eight hours.

In one day, Japanese naval air power was virtually destroyed.

The original force of 430 planes was reduced to about 100.

American losses were comparatively light.

Pilots mattered more than machines.

At the end of the day, the Americans had won the air battle,

but had yet to locate the Japanese fleet, now retiring.

The following day, the Americans continued their search for the enemy.

It was not until late afternoon

that their aircraft sighted the mobile fleet over 200 miles away,

at the extreme limit of the range of the American bombers.

But the order was given - attack.

In the fading light, the principle objective of the strike -

the Japanese carrier force - was badly mauled.

One carrier was sunk and two others damaged.

This great naval battle, in which neither fleet fired on the other,

ended with the Japanese reduced to only 35 aircraft

retreating to their bases in Japan.

The American planes now faced the problem of getting back to the carriers.

The decision to attack had meant that they might easily run out of fuel

on the journey home.

First to return were the fighters which had been protecting the task force.

Landing in the dusk was difficult enough,

but later on the torpedo planes and bombers

would have to find their carriers in pitch darkness.

Some would never make it.

Then it turned into probably the blackest night I've seen in my life.

And over the ocean... I guess we were at about 7,000 feet flying home,

kind of our best altitude for fuel, and it was black as the ace of spades.

And we could hear nothing, just ourselves, except the cries of...

I won't say "cry", but a very perfunctory call,

"I'll have to land in the water. I'm out of fuel."

And this continued just constantly

until all the torpedo planes that had survived the strike went into the water.

Then about 100 miles from the force, the dive bombers began to run out of fuel

and they called out, "This is..."

whatever the call was. I don't really remember.

"I'm going in. Out of fuel."

And then it became quite quiet until we got within range of the force

and then you could start to make out what was happening at the task force

and what the recovery course would be -

we'd not yet seen it as the ships were blacked out,

which was a normal operating procedure, so it couldn't be detected from the air.

The admiral knew that we'd have an awful problem getting aboard.

We didn't have time to really look for the force. A decision was made.

The command was given to the carriers to turn their lights on.

The task force succeeded in rescuing the majority of the air crews

who had been forced down in the ocean.

Victory in this, the Battle of the Philippine Sea,

meant the Mariana landings could go ahead

without interference from the Japanese navy.

At a cost of 3,000 American dead, Saipan fell.

Tinian was less heavily defended.

Guam held out for three weeks.

Get out of there! Move back quick!

Moving west from the Marianas,

a US amphibious force was switched by Nimitz to MacArthur's command

as the two rival prongs began to come together.

The objective was the Palau group of islands.

These had to be taken before the invasion of the Philippines.

On one island, Peleliu, the Americans again ran into fanatical resistance

from a crack force of 10,000 Japanese troops.

Instead of meeting the Americans on the beaches,

the Japanese had withdrawn into a labyrinth of caves and tunnels.

The Americans had to contest every yard

against an enemy determined to fight to the death.

In the bloody battle for Peleliu,

four out of every ten Americans taking part were killed or wounded.

It was months before all the Japanese had been winkled out.

There were no easy victories on these Pacific islands.

Some of the dead marines could only be identified by their fingerprints.

On October 20, 1944, MacArthur fulfilled his promise.

He returned to the Philippines.

The landings were virtually unopposed.

The Japanese had retired inland to their main defences.

But the invasion touched off the largest

and most complex naval battle in history.

The Battle for Leyte Gulf was to last for four days.

Four Japanese forces converged on the Philippines

from Borneo, Formosa and mainland Japan.

The Americans had two fleets - the Seventh and the Third.

The Japanese aim was to destroy the American invasion shipping

in Leyte Gulf.

After a series of confused engagements hundreds of miles apart,

the Imperial Japanese Navy suffered heavy losses.

It ceased to be an effective fighting force.

On land, torrential rain had delayed the progress of MacArthur's men

fighting against a Japanese army numbering nearly 400,000.

By February 1945, three months after the Leyte landings,

the Americans were closing in on the Philippines capital Manila.

For the first time in the Pacific war,

the Americans were fighting their way into a big city.

The battle raged from street to street, house to house.

Many civilians lost their lives,

some executed by the retreating Japanese.

MacArthur's second hour of triumph - his return to the Philippines capital.

Americans taken prisoner during the Japanese invasion

were released after three years in captivity.

With the capture of the Philippines,

supply routes carrying war materials for Japanese industry would be cut.

The Japanese command knew that when they had lost the Philippines,

they had lost the war.

After liberation, revenge. The settling of personal scores

against Filipinos accused of collaborating

during the years of Japanese occupation,

now at last at an end.

February, 1945.

Iwo Jima, eight square miles of volcanic rock

only 600 miles from the coast of Japan,

was the target for the next leap across the central Pacific.

From Iwo Jima,

American bombers could raid Japanese cities almost at will.

From the dominating heights of Mount Suribachi,

the Japanese could see practically everything that moved on Iwo Jima.

Once again, the main Japanese forces were inland, away from the beaches.

For 76 days before the landing, the Americans had bombarded Iwo Jima.

The waste, the barrenness of the place...

It was like a nightmare. It was the closest thing you could see to hell.

If ever hell looked like anything, it must look like Iwo Jima.

The minute you got in those boats you were scared.

You were scared until you hit the beach.

You realise that you're going in to kill

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

It was either us or the Japanese, one or the other.

And when you're faced with this situation as a young man -

I was only 19 -

it's confusing.

You're built, in the Marine Corps, to take orders and obey orders,

but at the same token you're still a human being and you're only 19 or 20.

Most of us were only 18, 19, 20, during those days.

I think the public has the idea that marines are supermen,

but I don't think there was a marine in the amphibious landing craft

that wasn't afraid, including the officers.

I was always taught to hate them in the Marine Corps, to detest them,

and that they were animals. We were the men, they were the animals.

By the same token, we were taught that they would die for the emperor.

We weren't taught to die for our president.

And to fight or to come up against an individual who wants to die,

or who doesn't care about dying, is a tough thing to combat in your mind.

We wanted to live. We wanted to kill him and we wanted to survive.

You keep your head down because there's too much fire above you

and it's that constant wondering, is somebody gonna drop a lucky one in there

and you're too far out to swim with all that gear on?

And what are you gonna get into when you get there?

That's a hell of a place to be.

And as you hit the island

and you saw the ash and nothing living,

it was... if there's ever been hell, this was it.

Well, we hit the beach itself.

Actually, there was a little incline

and everybody clung to the incline because the fire was that heavy.

And everything that hit the beach

was blasted out of the water as fast as it hit.

I was young then. This was my fourth operation. I was 18.

My first operation, I was 16.

They lay and waited for us

and rhythmically just kept on tattooing every man along the line.

And you just couldn't avoid it. The slaughter was fantastic.

We just walked into a web and there was no way out.

You couldn't get off the beach.

And getting in to the beach was a depressing scene.

It knocked your morale when you started to see people from your own team dead.

From the water's edge to a sort of a rise,

there was a tremendous amount of bodies just lying there.

We moved about...

possibly 300 yards in,

just as far as they, meaning the Japanese, decided for us to go.

There was no way of getting off the island, not that first night.

It was just too congested.

There was nothing that could move off that island the first night.

Dug in on Mount Suribachi,

the Japanese commander had concentrated his artillery.

The preliminary bombardment again failed to knock out the Japanese strong points.

They could only be taken one at a time by the men on the ground.

It would take longer to capture Iwo Jima

than the five days allowed for by the American command.

The entire vegetation was gone completely.

You woke in the morning

and you'd look out across this expanse of no-man's-land

and it was bubbling and seething with steam coming out of the ground.

In fact, we had to use cardboard from C ration packs

to put down in the foxhole so that your ass wouldn't burn up.

If there is a hell, I'm living through it now,

so I don't have to worry about going to hell in the future. I've been there.

One of the guys came up to me. He was a man with a family.

I never did even know him, just meeting him at that particular day.

I said, "We're in the mortar outfit back here."

"Fairly well safe, no problems."

Before the day was over, he and half of my other squad was dead.

I think the worst part was you get callous to dead and bloated bodies,

but you never get callous to your own friends in that way,

and I think that perhaps was the most terrible thing of Iwo Jima.

If everybody remembered all the tragic things that happened,

you'd go crazy. You wouldn't survive it.

Oh, you always think you're gonna make it.

You're scared, but you still think you're gonna make it.

It was just one of the biggest messes I myself had ever seen.

I don't know who the beach master was,

but he probably had the roughest job of any man I've ever heard of.

It may have looked confusing,

but the supply organisation backing the assault force was proof of the factor

that made America's victory over Japan inevitable

from the day of Pearl Harbour - her overwhelming industrial strength.

Only one thing seemed to permeate the men -

get that million-dollar wound and get off this damn place.

Inland from the beaches,

Iwo Jima became another battle of attrition.

Day after day, the Americans inched forward

against Japanese who preferred death to surrender.

Their leader still hoped the Americans might tire of their losses and the war.

Oh, my Lord. On Iwo, it was hand-to-hand fighting.

You didn't know who was even in the hole with you half of the time.

You went into the caves.

We lost most of our people in this particular fashion.

You went into the caves and fought it out with the guy.

One of you came out.

I don't think anybody realised they were underground so deeply.

You know, it was so heavily defended, really.

After three days' fighting on Mount Suribachi,

the Stars and Stripes flew on the summit.

One of the boys started to holler, "There goes the flag,"

and I don't care where you were on that island,

you could see right up to Suribachi that the flag was raised.

And everybody started to howl,

because we figured, well, the island was secure.

It was far from secure.

We had a long way to go yet.

But it was nice to see the flag up there anyway.

They always told you to take prisoners,

but we had some bad experiences on Saipan taking prisoners.

You'd take 'em and as soon as they'd get behind the lines they'd drop grenades

and you'd lose a few more people.

You're a bit leery about taking prisoners

when they're fighting to the death and so are you.

OK, you can kick off right now!

Very few of 'em came out on their own. When they did,

one in the front would come out with his hands up

and one behind him, he'd come out with a grenade.

One of the West Virginia boys, he was sitting against a stone wall

with his knees up under his helmet, as we used to sit quite often,

when one of the enemy ran out onto the top of the stone wall

and held a small explosive charge to his abdomen.

And a chunk of his torso,

the lower torso,

went spiralling into the air and came down on John's knees

with the absolute posterior devoid of any clothes

staring him right in the face.

And he looked at that and he says, "God, am I hit that bad?"

And that was the trigger that released the tensions of the previous night.

And there were several of us

that were perfectly useless for as much as an hour.

We were just laying on the ground in convulsions.

Of 21,000 Japanese troops on Iwo Jima when the attack began,

only 200 were taken alive.

I was on the island a total of six days

and it seemed like 6,000 years.

Iwo Jima's airfields were functioning before the island was taken

thanks to the American construction battalions, the CBs.

They played a key role here and indeed in the whole Pacific war.

Now the time had come to penetrate the inner ring of Japan's defences.

350 miles from the mainland was the last great barrier

between the Allies and the planned invasion of Imperial Japan -

the Japanese island of Okinawa.

On April 1, 1945, the Americans attacked.

Japan's young suicide pilots, the kamikazes,

swarmed to the defence of Okinawa.

Many flew their fatal missions in obsolete aircraft, even trainers.

So many things were happening and so quickly,

that it was a little bit like a big boxer in a ring

when he's being hit to the chin, face, body and everywhere else,

cos we were catching it from so many different angles.

In a regular attack, it's a sporting chance you've got.

With regular bombs and bullets, you think you've got a very good chance,

but war is not so much of a sport when you're fighting human bombs.

Over 2,000 kamikaze pilots met their deaths.

But they destroyed 30 US warships and damaged 200 more.

You were praying that you could survive

whatever kind of explosion would come about.

Your life flashed in front of you,

as you didn't know if it would be seconds or minutes

until your life would be snuffed out.

US casualties were so severe,

at one point it seemed the invasion of Okinawa might be stopped in its tracks.

The gunners can't turn it off.

Once they gear themselves up to fight man against man bomb,

even though the plane is down, it's hard for the gunner to stop.

One man, he was in a 40 millimetre mount,

and he had been fighting against quite a number of planes that had come in,

but we had been hit in his area also two or three times,

and all of a sudden, with nobody understanding why,

he yelled, "It's hot today," jumped over the side

and that's the last we ever saw of him.

But had he stayed aboard, he might have survived.

But of course, we couldn't find his body or anything after that.

But it was an unusual type of reaction.

He stayed with it just as long as he could, until he broke.

And then that was the end of his fighting.

But every man, I believe, has a breaking point.

And the kamikaze, I would estimate,

probably tests that breaking point more than any other form of combat.

Initial landings on Okinawa were unopposed,

but as they pushed inland,

they came up against a Japanese army of 100,000 troops,

withdrawn into a heavily fortified central area.

The steep hills and narrow ravines of Okinawa

formed a natural citadel for Japanese defenders.

Outnumbered two to one,

they made the Americans pay in blood for every foot of Japanese soil.

With Japan herself close to surrender,

not every Japanese soldier wanted to fight on to the end.

The civilians of Okinawa suffered appalling losses.

24,000 were killed. Many thousands more injured.

Once they found out

we weren't going to do the things that they had heard,

they could understand, "Hey, this is just another human being."

Possibly they felt the same as we did,

that we weren't there because we wanted to be there,

we were told that this is what we had to do.

To many Americans,

at the end of their great advance across the Pacific,

it now seemed that the animals,

the faceless fanatics eager to die for their emperor,

were human beings like themselves.

They showed kindness to their own people, 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,

and two or three would carry 'em, although they were weak themselves.

So they were people just like us.