Original subtitles

Down this road, on a summer day in 1944,

the soldiers came.

Nobody lives here now.

They stayed only a few hours.

When they had gone,

a community which had lived for a thousand years... was dead.

This is Oradour-sur-Glane in France.

The day the soldiers came,

the people were gathered together.

The men were taken to garages and barns.

The women and children were led down this road...

and they were driven into this church.

Here, they heard the firing as their men were shot.

Then they were killed too.

A few weeks later,

many of those who had done the killing were themselves dead -

in battle.

They never rebuilt Oradour.

Its ruins are a memorial.

Its martyrdom stands for thousand upon thousand of other martyrdoms

in Poland, in Russia,

in Burma, in China,

in a world at war.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War, Britain and her Commonwealth lost 480,000 dead.

120,000 of them were from the Commonwealth.

60,000 were civilians - men, women and children -

killed in air raids on Britain.

Compared to the slaughter of the First World War, the total is not great.

But remember the dead,

each one a son, father, husband,

lover... brother.

We had a telegram to say that he was missing on operations.

And it reads:

"Regret to inform you that your husband,

Squadron Leader Thomas Henry Desmond Drinkwater

is missing as the result of air operations

on Thursday the 18th of May, 1944."

"Letter follows. Any further information received

will be immediately communicated to you."

"Pending receipt of written notification from the Air Ministry,

no information should be given to the press."

It's very funny, a battlefield. The other day I watched a duck shoot.

The actual area extended to about four square miles,

of which a fifth was in action.

All the rest was waiting. And a battlefield is like that.

It's extraordinary how inanimate the whole thing seems.

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

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

And waiting, and sleeping...

and waiting,

and waiting.

It's one of the things that films and books don't bring out-

Tolstoy, perhaps, is the exception -

a battlefield where nothing seems to be happening.

The action is always over a hedge somewhere else,

and it's the decisive thing.

And then they ask you if you were there. Well, you weren't.

Paris. June, 1940.

They were there all right.

But for these soldiers, no parade, no triumph.

Not the way we're used to seeing it on the newsreels.

All rather quiet, really.

Nothing much to write home about.

Or perhaps this actually was the scene that would stay with them,

the moment the soldiers would always remember.

Looking back, you know, it's even 28 years now.

I can hear it and I can see it,

I can smell it.

And I think anybody who was there must have exactly the same impression,

that, you know, it is something that they will always remember.

There's much soldiers don't want to forget.

At Mainz in West Germany, veterans of the Deutsches Afrikakorps meet,

as they do every couple of years, to relive the past.

There are wives and camp followers

and guests from Australia, from Britain, from Italy.

Old comrades, old enemies,

old memories,

and plenty of beer.

It's a funny thing about marines,

or maybe a funny thing about fighting men of all kinds,

their minds have a tendency to cloud out all of the unhappy things

and you think only of the happy things.

When I'm with other marines and we talk about the war,

we talk about some of the funny things.

We never really dwell on the unhappy ones.

And I think that would be true of fighting men all over the world.

One of the things about being in a tank battalion

was that you lived completely with the crew of your tank

and completely with your troop.

And so, at night, for example, when one came in to laager,

one would dig a hole and drive the tank over it

and you ate, slept and did everything with your crew,

so that one got enormously fond of them

and one got to know each other extremely well.

You knew they were making the right decisions and you just drove on.

Apart from the fact you were young and daft and would have gone anywhere.

We didn't really find time to, um,

well, have the sort of conversation that we might have now sitting here.

I certainly never remember discussing, well, the outcome of the war,

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

It was just day to day, honest-to-goodness living together,

and very pleasant it was.

We had a chap who was an experienced butcher as the co-driver,

and he always arranged that there should be two jerry cans of water

behind where the exhaust pipes came out.

They'd be constantly more or less on the boil.

And if, it seemed to me, in the middle of a battle,

whatever was happening, and he spied a pig,

he would leap out, unscrew the great hammer you have for breaking tracks,

and rush off, bash this pig on the head,

drag it back, bring it in through the side pannier door, um,

and get hold of these two cans of water and light up the stove,

and boil the water and scrape the pig.

We'd have delicious pork chops any time day or night and lived very well.

And it was partly the sort of... the sort of scavenging of the crews

and the finding of the wine and the jam and the eggs and all the other things,

which helped make the comradeship one of the things that made it such fun.

Fun. And fear.

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

You know, when you're scared, you're more alert.

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

You've got a gun, he's got a gun. Who's gonna shoot first? It's like a duel.

Who's gonna turn and pull the trigger first?

Fear and fun.

Moments, even, of beauty.

Well, I speak of the "lust of the eye", a biblical phrase,

because much of the appeal of battle

is simply this attraction of the, uh,

outlandish, the strange.

But there is, of course, an element of beauty in this,

and I must say that this is surely, from ancient times,

one of the most enduring appeals of battle.

One could be drawn into, absorbed, by the spectacle.

I think especially of southern France, the terrific bombardment of our planes

coming over the southern coast of France.

I literally expected the coast to detach itself

and... and go into the ocean.

But, uh, to watch this was to forget that you had to...

When it stopped, you had to get into landing boats

and make off for the shore.

It was, uh, just at dawn,

and a terrific spectacle in which I think everybody,

including, of course, myself, was drawn into it,

so that we forgot all about ourselves.

A city falls.

In an hour, a soldier, senses quickened, time speeded up,

might kill and make love and face death again.

One room had a piano and I was sitting at the piano playing with one finger.

This British soldier, a real, uh...

You couldn't have made a better cartoon of a typical British infantryman.

He was grimy, he was dirty, he had his helmet on,

he had his Enfield rifle,

he had grenades festooned on him,

and he had this young 15-year-old Italian chick with him,

a very buxom young lass who did not look inexperienced in spite of her age.

And he nodded very politely to me and then ignored me totally

and went to a cupboard over in the corner and found some, uh,

nice, uh...

lace, uh,

table napery or nappery. Whatever.

He found a, uh, doily, which he placed on the floor.

He was very delicate, because the room was full of plaster dust

and proceeded to cohabit with this girl on the doily.

It was very delicate of him, you know.

And I'm sitting there picking out a tune on the piano watching...

The whole thing was a weird scene.

And I felt, "Would it be better if I left?"

Then I felt, "It would be too..." I was trying to do the polite thing.

I was trying to, uh...

They never, in a sense, gave me a chance to leave, really.

And so, they left.

The girl smiled over her shoulder at me and the soldier said, "So long, Yank,"

or something like that, went back out and back to battle.

It was a weird sort of a... Probably, in many ways,

probably the weirdest and strangest and most sort of dreamlike thing

I can remember out of the whole war,

this little episode which lasted about five minutes.

Good to remember the good days.

The soldiers were welcome. Everyone was happy.

The wine was red.

Wynford Vaughan-Thomas

remembers the liberation of the Burgundy vineyards.

The French army paused.

The Americans couldn't understand it.

They were in the mountains. I remember General Patch saying,

"You know about the French. Why aren't they advancing?"

"They're at this place, Châlons." I looked at the map.

There's a Châlons sur Saône

at the beginning of the Burgundy vineyard country.

I go across and there was de Lattre de Tassigny,

Monsalbert and their staff looking at the problem.

They had Larmat's Atlas Vinicole de la France in front of them.

And they were studying it because it would be tragic

if they fought through Beaune and Nuits St George

and the great vineyards of Burgundy.

France would never forgive them. And they were paused.

A young sous-lieutenant said:

"Courage, my generals, I've found the weak spot of the German defences."

"Every one is on a vineyard of inferior quality."

De Lattre made his decision, "J'attaque."

And for three days, we fought our way through the cellars.

And on the third day I emerged bewildered, looking towards Dijon

and I realised we'd liberated Burgundy.

The poets saw beneath the skin.

Vergissmeinnicht - Forget me not.

"Three weeks gone and the combatants gone

returning over the nightmare ground we found the place again,

and found the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun overshadowing.

As we came on that day, he hit my tank with one

like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil the dishonoured picture of his girl

who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht. In a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content, abased, and seeming to have paid and mocked at

by his own equipment that's hard and good when he's decayed.

But she would weep to see today how on his skin the swart flies move;

the dust upon the paper eye

and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled

who had one body and one heart.

And death who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt.

Remember the war poet, Keith Douglas,

killed in Normandy in 1944.

Away from the front, beyond the battle,

the soldiers came and went as strangers.

After a few weeks in the line,

I got away one afternoon and climbed up into the Apennines

and met the old hermit.

We sat down and began to talk,

and of course the artillery in the valley below opened up

and he began to ask me questions about the war.

And I gradually became aware that he didn't know what was going on.

My attempts to explain what was going on faltered,

not only because of my... rather poor Italian,

but because I suddenly realised that I couldn't possibly explain to him...

why Americans, Britishers, were fighting in Italy against Germans

with Italians on both sides.

It seemed an impossible task.

Even had he been speaking my own language,

I wouldn't have been able to tell him what the war was about,

because I didn't really know myself,

in any deeper sense, what the war was about.

In a sense, the people I fought with in the war were, in my view, all heroes,

in the sense that they were...

tremendous believers in what we were trying to do.

There was an amazing spirit of dedication to the task in hand.

This was very moving, and a tremendous inspiration.

Whose idea it was, of course, you can never trace,

but it was a sort of infection.

This applied to people from all over the world,

and Bomber Command was an extraordinarily cosmopolitan command.

I think, by the time I was in it,

about 40% of it came from overseas,

mostly from New Zealand, Australia, Canada,

but also from many other countries and not all, by any means, British.

I mean, there were lots of Czechs and Poles serving in Bomber Command.

And the spirit of dedication was, as I say, moving.

But where it really came from is something I've never understood.

The task in hand inspired the idea.

In that sense, I think this was a heroic idea.

It's just now and again the nightmare in the night,

where you just remember somebody who...

You turn around on the deck of a destroyer

and next minute he wasn't there.

You know, he'd gone, swept away.

Casualties were bad at any time,

but particularly in the last two months of the war.

There were men you'd been with for five years. They were not just colleagues.

You were close. You knew all about them,

and you saw them getting knocked off in the last few days, particularly sad.

"I am commanded by the Air Council to state that in view of the lapse of time

and the absence of any further news regarding your husband,

Acting Squadron Leader THD Drinkwater DFC,

since the date on which he was reported missing,

they must regretfully conclude that he has lost his life

and his death had now been presumed for official purposes

to have occurred on the 18th of May, 1944."

I don't think any of us were, you know,

patriotic men in the sense

that we would stand rigidly to attention and wave flags.

We were just glad to be alive and, in some way, you know,

we were rather proud that this kind of army we'd been in for so long,

which had done so many daft things and where we'd been bellowed and shouted at

and, uh, generally mucked around

and spent thousands of hours on exercises

and standing about in the rain and the mud and the snow,

had finally managed to bring off what,

when you look at it in fairly cold light, was a pretty big adventure.

I couldn't understand why people went to Cenotaph ceremonies.

I go now, and I'm proud to go, because I remember the people who didn't come back

and out of it comes this terrible feeling in my mind

of waste and yet of proud comradeship.

You're lying in a trench and the shells come down.

You're frightened to death. The chap next to you says:

"Have a cigarette, mate. It'll go. It's like rain."

You realise he's a better man than you.

He's given you the strength to go on,

and that is what you remember out of the war.

It's the comradeship.

Remember the comradeship,

and remember the suffering.

Another road, another village -

same orders.

Soldiers.

Some seeing, not feeling,

others enjoying their work.

It's one of the melancholy aspects of human nature.

You notice it with boys who love to break windows to hear the glass tinkle,

but there are a great many soldiers

who take a great pleasure

in destroying people,

wasting things.

I find this aspect of human nature not discussed enough,

but it is surely one of the causes of warfare.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War she started, Germany lost nearly five million dead.

Two and a half million were killed in action,

one and a half million died in Russian prison camps.

Half a million German civilians died in Allied bombing raids,

another half million at the war's end.

Remember the dead and the scarred survivors.

The effect of war on people who take part in it

is, of course, extremely various.

Lots of people are maimed, completely, either mentally or physically.

But I suppose the majority of those who survive, survive apparently intact.

But there must be marked effects,

and in some ways the effects are very good on people,

because they feel that they've been able to fulfil themselves.

A lot of people go through life without ever feeling a sense of fulfilment,

but those who take part in hectic war operations

usually get a sense of fulfilment,

to some extent, especially if they believe in what they're trying to do,

which I think in war people tend to do very readily.

On the other hand, I think there are very bad effects, obvious bad effects.

Perhaps one of the less obvious ones

is that people who undertake these operations

I think have a tendency to feel afterwards

that society owes them something very special.

And when the war is over, they tend to go home or back to where they came from

and expect people to look up to them and to look after them,

which is not what people are going to do at all, nor what people ought to do.

Remember the mud.

You get used to it, of course.

You get used to anything...

easily hardened to other suffering.

It's a curious thing. You could equate it to television

and what it's done to us, in many ways.

The realities of the situation

people are still wanting to sweep under the carpet.

I turned round to my kids during the napalm bombing in Vietnam and I said:

"Just don't sit there.

"That is a real child, that burning torch running across a field."

But it means nothing to them.

That is a real man scrambling for a potato, soon to starve to death.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War, two and half million Japanese died.

Among them, half a million civilians.

Japanese fighting men fought to the death.

Nearly 20 Japanese soldiers were killed for every one wounded or maimed.

We had this orthopod, or orthopaedic surgeon, from Baltimore,

and, uh... he gave me the definition that I've used all these many years

of sympathy for the disability.

He said, "Son, you know where you find sympathy?"

He said, "You find it in the dictionary between 'Shit' and 'Syphilis'."

And I've remembered that all these many years.

Remember the civilians who got in the way.

You could miss seeing them from a bomber,

but on the ground the soldiers knew.

One of the things that seemed to me to cause most guilt in World War II

was this failure to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants.

I felt, even then, as many other soldiers did,

that we were guilty of indiscriminate terroristic bombing.

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

In this sense, there is such a thing as collective guilt

insofar as this decision was made at the highest levels

and approved by many people,

both soldiers and... and civilians.

Remember the dead.

In the Second World War, America was not invaded or even bombed,

but the United States lost 300,000 fighting men,

killed in action far from home.

Well, what I found when I came home,

and I've been rather disgusted with myself ever since,

was that, uh...

the readjustment to their kind of life,

the life that I led before myself,

was virtually impossible,

because however much you hate being in a war,

the things that you come back to seem very, very trivial.

Reporting the council talking about a new gents' lavatory, things like this,

don't seem to matter at all.

And, of course, these things matter to the people around you.

And I shut up, I shut myself in, for about a year.

I must have behaved extremely badly, I'm well aware of it.

And I've never forgotten it, and I've never ceased to feel sorry for it,

because it must have made life pretty intolerable for the people around me.

But it was just that I couldn't... I couldn't... communicate.

I had lost my sense of communication

with the people that I had known for all those years,

because I had begun to understand an entirely new breed of people

who were all thrown together, um...

in a common thing. I think that was it.

More roads to more villages.

More orders to obey.

"Corporal, take two men and clear the village."

"Leave the men behind for now."

"Move the women and children."

"Corporal, hurry the goodbyes up, will you?"

I think it has taught me, all the rest of my life,

that there is a line which a man dare not cross,

a line which separates the reasonably just and human

from the mere functionary.

The corporal and the soldiers have wives and children too.

Remember the Russian dead.

In the Second World War, the Soviet Union, already bled by Stalin,

lost... 20 million dead.

Millions in action on Russian soil -

the bloody defeats of '41 and '42,

the bloody victories of '43 and '45.

And millions of prisoners of war died in German hands,

deprived of food, clothing, shelter.

For these prisoners, no escape.

About a million were shot.

And millions of Russian civilians died from shooting, bombing, shelling,

forced winter marches, engineered starvation.

20th-century total war.

Remember the Russian dead...

the 20 million.

Soldiers, remember the dead.

Remember all the others.

15 million Chinese died in the Second World War, most from starvation.

And in occupied Europe, more than a million and a half Yugoslavs died

for a country that never stopped fighting.

And three million Poles and more than five million Jews.

And over half a million Frenchmen and women, many in the Resistance.

And brave men and women in Norway and Holland and Denmark and Belgium.

And hundreds of thousands in Czechoslovakia,

Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary.

And over 300,000 Greeks.

And half a million Italians

in a country that was fought over and fought on both sides.

And Spaniards in Russia and Indians in Burma.

Remember them all.

55 million dead.

"I did not know death had undone so many."

Mothers and daughters,

fathers and sons.

The young are too young to remember,

perhaps too young to understand.

One of the great effects of war upon people who take part in it

is the extent to which it tends to cut them off

from both their elders and their own children.

And, um, the same thing applies, in a different way,

as between a father and a son.

I mean, I feel this myself in my own relationship with my parents

at the time of the war and with my children today,

that, in a sense, they neither can nor wish to envisage

the circumstances in which we lived in the war.

And we have a rather arrogant feeling that they ought to wish to understand

these dreadful things that happened, but they don't.

And this cuts one off both from the older and the younger generation.

People are, in any case, cut off from these generations.

There is a generation gap under any circumstances,

but I think war, as in so many other aspects of life,

tends to emphasise those sort of considerations,

and very much so in creating and nourishing a generation gap.

Nuremberg.

Here on this ground, Adolf Hitler spoke to the National Socialist Party

and to the German nation, 40 years ago.

40 years on, West Germany's chancellor,

twice elected by popular vote, is Willy Brandt.

Brandt was a traitor to Hitler's Germany.

He fought in the Norwegian Resistance.

In Warsaw, as in Jerusalem,

he remembers the dead.

Of all Germans alive today,

half were not born when the Second World War began.

We have things to remember him by.

We've got one here from Buckingham Palace.

"The Queen and I offer you our heartfelt sympathy in your great sorrow."

"We pray that your country's gratitude for a life so nobly given

in its service may bring you some measure of consolation."

1939-45.

E Bickerstone, J Curtis,

E Fraser, L Humphrey,

G Nixon, A Schofield,

I Chandler, A Flower,

S Horan, C Nixon...

They were very young.

They did not ask to die as heroes.

They would rather have lived for those that loved them,

those they loved.

And this was the last letter he ever wrote to his wife...

"Darling, let me tell you again I love you."

"This past weekend has made me so pleased that you are my wife

because I am so in love with you

and I know I shall love you for the rest of my life."

"And darling, thank you for loving me."

"My sweet, I am sure you have got something belonging to me

because I am always so happy when I am with you,

but as soon as we are apart, I just go as flat as can be."

"I am like a man with no brain, but only a memory for you."

"Oh, darling, it is terrible."

"Please don't think I am sloppy or stupid,

though I may be, but I just can't get over it."

"Perhaps I am a bit tired tonight,

and after a night's rest I shall be better

and able to write you a nice letter."

"Anyway, I'll see."

"I'm afraid, darling, my operational flying days are nearly over."

"The wing commander has told me twice already this evening

that I can't go on so many shows in future,

and he is very concerned about it."

"He said, 'Out of fairness to you and your wife,

I don't intend for you to stay on ops much longer, even if you want to."'

"You see, there was something in what I said."

"But, hell, I am going to miss this life."

"I have had over three years of it

and the trouble is now that I know nothing else."

"My sweet, I must off to bed now."

"I can hardly see what I'm writing."

"I love you, my own precious darling,

more than anything else in this world."

"Yours forever, Tom."

At the village of Oradour-sur-Glane,

the day the soldiers came,

They killed more than 600 men, women and children.

Remember.