Original subtitles

I think Roosevelt was convinced for a long time before Pearl Harbour

that we needed to get in.

He did everything he could in a divided country,

such as the deal on the destroyers and all of that kind of thing.

But he didn't have a united country behind him until Pearl Harbour.

Then he did.

So that before Pearl Harbour, while I'm pretty sure that he was convinced

that we must get in,

he couldn't openly take that position.

After Pearl Harbour, he could.

The country turned around absolutely, at once.

Before that time, this country was pretty divided

and there was a pretty hot argument

as to whether we needed to get into it, whether we should,

whether our interests were really involved and so forth.

After Pearl Harbour, all opposition disappeared overnight.

The White House became the place

from which all orders on every subject emerged

and became the centre of an enormous structure

for fighting the war.

The way in which that happens in this country is extraordinary.

The president is a far more powerful man

in time of war, in many ways, than is the prime minister.

You see, he has no… His cabinet has no power.

They're simply his appointees and his representatives.

His power becomes almost absolute in time of war,

and no one questioned it.

Now, I think Roosevelt used this power with great discretion.

For one thing, I don't think he ever interfered improperly with his military,

and his military men made mistakes,

but he kept the power centred in the combined chiefs of staff

and in our own chiefs of staff.

Of course, there's a nice story if somebody would write it up.

Never was a war in history

where allies, the military part of allies,

worked together with such mutual confidence

and such integration of efforts as in that war.

And that was centred in the combined chiefs of staff.

It wasn't a piece of decoration.

That's where the great decisions were made.

And that operated with great skill.

I think Sir John Dill should have the credit for a good part of that.

(interviewer) As well as knowing Roosevelt, you knew Churchill.

What were relations like between Churchill and Roosevelt

when Churchill came to Washington?

—Many people think he dominated. —Oh, I don't think he did.

I don't think anybody ever dominated Roosevelt,

not even his wife.

But I think Churchill had a great influence on Roosevelt,

and quite properly so.

In general, a very good influence indeed.

What influence did the British have on the strategy of the war?

Well, as I said a moment ago,

every great decision of a military type

was worked out in the combined chiefs.

Now, of course, for most of the war,

the strategy in the Pacific was an American strategy.

It had to be.

The British were there but had very minor power.

But as far as the war in Europe was concerned,

the strategy was worked out jointly,

and it was genuine joint discussion, consideration.

You know the long arguments about the timing of Overlord.

There was disagreement on that timing. But how did it get worked out?

It got worked out in the combined chiefs of staff,

approved by Churchill and Roosevelt, and that was it.

(interviewer) What was the mood like in the White House

during this period of early disasters?

(Bush) Well, of course, it was a pretty gloomy thing after Pearl Harbour.

But it didn't take long for it to recover.

And it's strange to look back on those days.

I knew, all of us that were in the middle of it knew,

that we were very close to losing that whole damn war

on account of the submarine.

We nearly lost the first war that way, and we nearly lost the second one.

I don't think the people in this country had any idea

that we were close to the rim, but we were,

and anybody that was in the act knew it.

What were the problems getting that particular antisubmarine device to…?

The problem was getting new weapons into operation.

At the height of the anti… at the height of the submarine war,

there were about 40 ships being sunk for each submarine that was being sunk.

The Germans were building submarines faster than they were being sunk.

We were losing ships faster than we were replacing them

and it looked very bad indeed.

Six months later, the ratio of sinkings had dropped down to nearly one to one,

submarine to merchant ship.

What had happened in the meanwhile?

The British introduced their antisubmarine rocket

in the Bay of Biscay,

which was a magnificent weapon against the submarine.

I saw it tested in Britain and it scared the tripe out of me.

Terrifying.

Americans introduced the Mark 10 mine, so-called,

which was a target-seeking torpedo,

which you could drop on where a submarine sank

and it would hunt it out and run into it.

Centimetre radar, which could pick up a periscope in the sea.

Magn… Magnetic detection.

Forward-thrown depth charges.

And there were three or four more.

A dozen weapons came in right at that time and changed the tide.

And also the introduction of hunter-killer groups.

Now, on that the British were ahead of us.

You asked me a minute ago when the decision was made to build an A-bomb.

Well, there wasn't any such decision,

but there was a time when it first became recognised that it was possible.

And the thing that turned the tide on that,

there were any number of reports from the Academy of Sciences and so on,

but it was a British report

that really made everybody feel that, after all, it probably could be done.

Now, of course, we way underestimated

the time and the money that would be required.

But the first real conviction that the job could be done

came from a British report.

What would you consider the greatest scientific achievement of the war?

Scientific? Well…

You mean the one that involved the greatest technical difficulties.

Well, certainly you'd have to put the atomic bomb

as one of the greatest.

But next I'd put the proximity fuse

and after that, radar, and particularly centimetre radar.

Of course, you people were ahead of us on radar,

but when we got going, we produced the short-wave radar,

which was an enormous advance,

and the Germans, incidentally, never got it.

Made quite a difference.

Proximity fuse. Think of it.

When they first presented that to me,

it came up on appeal because some of my people had turned it down as impossible.

And I talked to four fellas and finally said to them,

“I think it's impossible, on the face of it,

but I will not stop four of you guys that think it can be done.”

“Go ahead and waste your time, beat your brains out trying to do it.”

But think of what they proposed to do.

They proposed to take a radio set as big as a baking powder can,

put it in a shell, fire it off,

so it would press down on its support with the force of a ton.

It would contain thermionic tubes,

little glass tubes with filaments in 'em,

and they'd expect it to be in operating condition

after it got out of the gun.

Now, on the face of it, it's…

…out of this world, yet they did it,

and I think it's the greatest technical accomplishment that I know of.

You must have been approached with several fanciful ideas.

Well, of course, we got any number of perfectly absurd ideas.

And the fact was this—

you couldn't make an intelligent suggestion

unless you knew the conditions in the field,

and of course the general public did not.

So that you wouldn't expect suggestions from the public to mean much,

and they didn't.

The suggestions that meant something

came from the groups of civilians and military men working together,

largely young men,

who knew the entire conditions of warfare in a particular field

and from that, saw where advances could be made.

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

And, fortunately, I think the atomic bomb has done just that

for the last generation,

and I hope and trust it'll do it for another ten generations.

And by that time, the world may have become sane,

so that we won't need that.

But you can be sure of this—

no country, no ruler,

no group of rulers,

is going to take its country into an atomic war.

For one reason, because they will know

that no matter what else happens in that war,

they themselves will not survive it.

If they're not eliminated by the enemy,

they'll be eliminated by their own people.

As long as we have an atomic standoff, as we have today,

I think we can rest in our beds with safety.

(interviewer) People have described the desert war as very gentlemanly.

(man) Well, it was, really, because it could be possible,

I get captured today or my company gets captured today,

and while we're moving up to a rendezvous with the Germans,

our people come and relieve us, away we went and they were the prisoners.

That often happened.

I can remember when we came back to the Gazala Line,

which you must have read about.

We'd got a chap on point duty there dressed up in a military police uniform.

As these chaps were getting up to him, he was directing 'em back.

They all thought he was a military policeman. It was a German dressed up.

The British officer went up and soon squared him up.

Spoke to him in German and he, thinking he was the same,

he told the officer what he was doing.

When we enclosed Tobruk,

we saw Tobruk couldn't be conquered by us,

and therefore some areas were mined

because we wouldn't have that the British attack us.

And one night…

Mines could be laid only during the night,

because otherwise they were a target for shooters.

And one troop of us was laying mines,

and in the darkness suddenly stood a figure,

and that figure talks in English.

“What are you doing here?”

And much surprised,

one of our soldiers answered,

“Wir legen Minen.” “We are laying mines.”

And the English answered calmly,

“That's exactly the same what we do.”

And then he returned to his troop

and both troops made their work calmly.

Nobody came the idea to start shooting.

And after the work was terminated,

both were away in the darkness.

(McGee) We were moving up from Derna to Benghazi one day,

and as we were going along the road, there were some Egyptians shouting out,

“Eggs for chai.”

So we pulled up and we fished out a couple of bags of tea

we've had in the toolbox for quite a while.

It'd got well soaked in diesel, so we hung it up in the sun for about an hour

and then we said to 'em, “Eggs for chai.”

We got two tea cases full of eggs for two sandbags full of diesel tea.

Next day when we were coming back, the wogs turned out in force.

They were firing everything they could get hold of at us.

Before the fall of Tobruk,

in 1941,

when we lost the Battle of the Cyrenaica

and were on the way back,

one day I stood on the road

near the sergeant of the panzers.

And I asked him…

“Tell me the truth,

how many intact panzers you have still now?”

And he said,

“This morning we reported seven.”

“But the truth is,” and he whispered in my ear, “we have 16.”

“But if Rommel knows that, he attacks immediately.”

I worked for two years in a British prisoner of war camp.

And the first thing I learned that the British were human too,

because we had had quite a bit of propaganda,

“They are snobs and they consider themselves the lords of the world.”

Then I learned they had a wonderful sense of humour

which I liked very much, and I even copied nice little jokes

on the English politics, on German politics and…

What else did I admire? The many cheering remarks.

Every cloud has a silver lining. Cheer up, better days are coming.

I never forgot them all my life,

and I even used them later on.

And…

Well, they didn't bring so much political news.

They talked about Stalingrad being lost,

and since 1942, when I started in this job,

they always said, “Hitler has lost the war and Germany has lost the war

and we'll soon be home.”

But we thought it was just a sort of cheering up news

for the family at home and just to stand it all through.

I liked the wonderful love letters. I learnt quite a lot from them.

And later on, when I was in love, when I met my husband,

I never wrote love letters in German, always in English.

And when I wanted to give nice little messages to him—

he worked as export manager in another factory—

behind my reference, I put “I love you”, just initials,

or “te quiero mucho” in Spanish,

but I learnt it all from the English letters.

Yes.

(interviewer) You were very young girls.

Now, what was your attitude towards the British?

Well, at first it was a slight reserve.

We never had seen British…

I never had seen British soldiers before.

When I was at this language college in Hamburg,

I had English and American teachers, but teachers were different people

and, in Eichstedt or in Warburg,

there were 3,000 officers, very good-looking people.

And, well, despite all the propaganda—

“You mustn't fraternise and look at them, they are our enemies.”—

we did, we were young girls.

And we got acquainted with them,

with their ways of writing, with their ways of life,

because for two years I've always read the letters of the same people.

I knew Aunt Mary and cousin so-and-so

and I even knew when they were lying to other girlfriends

as being the only one.

And we learnt a lot from that.

It was the most interesting part of my life.

Young girls today have…

It was a tragic war, but still for us it was very interesting to have such a job.

In 1943, they were allowed parole walks.

All the officers signed a parole card and no guards,

just a German interpreter or an officer was accompanying them to the film.

They could see cinemas with German captions.

And the German actresses were considered very bad.

They all wrote it home. They whistled melodies.

They made sometimes nasty comments on the German newsreel,

sometimes also on British politics.

They called the British politicians “chimney politicians”

or “fire politicians” sitting by the fire.

And one day they went to the German forest with a German officer,

and he had a girlfriend in the woods and he said to them, “Just be good boys.”

“I'll be back in two hours, then we march back to the camp.”

And he didn't come back by the time agreed upon,

so they marched back alone, the British officers,

and reported to the German camp commandant, “One is missing.”

And he started shouting at them.

Because he was 180% Nazi, they always made fun of him.

And he was shouting, “I'm cancelling that” and all that.

And then they said, the senior British officer said,

“Oh, just pipe down. Sonderführer so-and-so is missing.”

And these incidents were reported home by all 3,000.

In 1943, there was a very, very big escape.

63 or 66 escaped.

They were celebrating the birthday of the English King,

and the German camp staff was invited

and we girls were allowed to look from the windows.

Normally we weren't, we mustn't look at the prisoners.

And there were sports games,

and the Scotch bagpipers were playing and waving their kilts,

and it was a big do.

And next morning there was all excitement in the Kommandantur

and we didn't know what was on,

and the German security officer said, “Good God.”

“Whilst the show was on, 63 prisoners escaped

and I'll be court-martialled,” and so on.

But within a week or a fortnight, they had them all back.

They didn't get punished.

They only were punished

for abusing German uniforms, you know, with Hakenkreuz,

or if they tried to escape as German generals,

then they got solitary confinement.

But most officers were happy

when they had had a little bit of solitary confinement

because they were getting on each other's nerves.

Same people living together in a small place for years.

And they always wrote home, “I just returned from a little holiday.”

During the first days of April, the Americans came to my village.

I was watching on the window.

When I saw the first khaki-clad figures crouched, coming into the village,

I cried because I thought, “Everything is lost now.”

And a moment later there were voices downstairs,

we were living in a school building, and they called me down

because I was the only one in that village speaking English.

And American reporters were there, and the first thing they asked,

“Are there any hidden German soldiers here?”

I said no. “Have there been soldiers?”

I said, “Yes, dead soldiers and dying soldiers in our church,

but nothing else.”

Wounded soldiers, they were brought from fights to the church.

Then they asked, “Where did you learn your English?” I said, “At school,

and I worked for two years in a British prisoner of war camp.”

Then they wanted to know how they were treated.

Then they said, “Come on, can you work for us?”

And they threw all the farmers out of their houses

and I was fully engaged from early morning to late at night

helping farmers here and doing interpreting and so on.

They were searching everything

because this village was surrounded by heavy, large forest,

and there was an underground movement, Werewolf,

and there was talk that Werewolf was hiding in the forest.

And whilst I was doing office work in this Kommandantur,

the American soldiers had to search the woods every day.

And when they had walked for a few kilometres,

they came home, they came back to the office

and were dead tired and blisters on their feet and…

Then we thought, well, you know, they are not good.

And sometimes rough manners, putting their legs on the desk in front of me

and rolling the stockings down and scratching their legs.

Then I was a bit furious in working

and then I thought to myself, “Wait and see.”

“We still have V-2 and we still have Hitler.”

“He will teach you a lesson.”

But that was stupid, but it was just out of…

I couldn't stand that behaviour.

They gave weapons to the Russian civil workers working with the farmers

and every day there was trouble.

Can you tell me what your reaction was when you heard of Hitler's suicide?

Yes… I was working in the American Kommandantur

when it was announced via the German radio.

I thought, “What a lousy bloody coward.”

“He sacrificed them all just for his madness.”

And I wouldn't go through it again

and I am perfectly with my son when he says,

“I refuse to be a soldier.”

I'm anti-war and anti-military.

I told my husband once, “Thank God that you weren't in the SS.”

“I never could love you if I knew that you had been an SS soldier.”

We hit the beach around 6:30 in the morning.

I think we were 12 minutes off schedule, late.

And on the way in to the beach,

we had quite a few people that got seasick.

They were these little landing craft.

It was very rough, and we pottered around

from two o'clock in the morning till about four, just going round in circles,

waiting for everything to get organised,

and then finally made the run in to the beach.

I've forgotten what time it was, but it was a long time out there.

It was very cold and very uncomfortable.

And we had quite a few people seasick then.

We landed at…

Our landing area was dictated by the presence of the beach obstacles,

and we had to land to the seaward side of them,

so that we were about 400 yards from the actual sea wall.

And there were quite a few areas where, of course,

I don't know what you call 'em, channels of some sort

where there was quite deep water.

People would get up to their necks before they knew how deep it was.

We had a great deal of difficulty getting the men to move,

because there was a great deal of enemy fire,

and they would take cover behind some of these assault craft

obstacles that were there to catch assault craft.

They were… They were, oh, about the size

of a 10 or 12-foot telegraph pole or telephone pole,

with a telemine on the top of it.

And people just would try to take cover behind one of these poles.

Well, it didn't provide any cover,

so you just had to force 'em to move. Didn't matter how you did it.

I had… It so happened I'd sprained my ankle in the marshalling area.

I had to go ashore carrying a cane instead of a… rifle,

and I used it to very good effect, to just whack people till they moved.

And it was… It was not much fun, obviously.

But it was very rough getting up there because the sand was wet and deep

and people would sink in, and everybody had a heck of a large load to carry,

so that the men just were worn out when they got up there.

And, of course, we lost quite a few on the way up.

In fact, in that 400 yards,

I would say that I might have lost 25% of my command

before we even got to the sea wall, and…

…of the…

…four officers that were killed in that area on the beach,

from my company,

I think three of them were killed right almost at the water's edge.

They led the troops off and… except my executive officer

who followed me off the assault craft,

and he was the last one off, and he was… he was killed.

Well, there was a great deal of confusion.

In fact, we didn't realise what some of it meant.

For instance, we thought there'd been a lot of aircraft shot down

because the water was just covered with these little bright orange life rafts.

Well, they were actually survivors from the tanks, the wader tanks.

They weren't actually wader tanks. We called them DD tanks.

They had a canvas thing and they swam in the water

and used the motor of the tank to push themselves by means of a propeller.

Well, I think 99% of them swamped,

just went down into the drink.

And the troops,

the tank crews, had been able to get out in most cases

and were in these orange rafts

which we didn't realise… recognise the meaning of until we got ashore

and found that all these tanks that were supposed to be with us weren't there.

They later brought in a few of what they called wader tanks,

which were unloaded at the water's edge and then came in.

They'd been waterproofed and they could move up the beach,

but very few of those actually came…

had much influence on the initial situation.

It was actually just the assault infantry that…

that had to shoulder the burden.

(interviewer) General, could I ask you first about the tactics

that were used by Eighth Air Force fighter units,

firstly in defending the large bomber formations?

There was a… I'd like to break it out into two categories,

one we might call generalised tactics and another more specific.

The generalised tactics,

I don't recall the specific time during the war that this occurred,

but when I was first over there,

we had quite clear directives that the first job of Eighth Air Force fighters

was to protect the bombers.

And concomitant to that was that we would fly close to the bombers,

where they felt comfortable by seeing us and where the notion was

we could do a better job of protecting them from enemy attack.

Shortly after General Doolittle took command of the Eighth Air Force,

we in the fighter business made a plea to him

that that was not the correct general tactic,

that we could do a better job of defending the bombers

by getting out further away from the bombers

where we could engage the fighters

before they had a chance to get in so close,

and this was due to the high speeds that were involved.

When we were flying close escort to the bombers,

the fighters, German fighters, would appear and they moved so fast

that by the time we could drop our tanks and take any particular action,

they'd already… they'd already fired

with whatever degree of success they might have attained

and they're on their way home, on their way to the deck.

And we prevailed on General Doolittle to agree with that,

so that he changed our directive

from the first mission of the Eighth fighters,

Eighth fighter command fighters, to protect the bombers.

The first mission was to destroy the Luftwaffe.

Now, with that, we started moving way ahead…

…and quite a bit higher than the bomber stream.

In this way we were able to engage the enemy fighters

while they were forming up for the attack,

and we had considerable success in doing that

and it turned out to be a very significant tactical advancement

in our ability not only to wreak more havoc on the German fighter force

but also actually in protecting the bombers.

There was a temporary hiatus when we first started that,

where we had a slight increase in the bomber loss.

But after that, the bomber losses continued to go down

from there on right till the end of the war.

Now, in the particular sense, in our group, for example,

we experimented with various and sundry types of formations,

keeping whole squadrons together, separating in flights.

And we finally came to the conclusion,

although all other fighter units didn't do it the same way,

that as we would go into the bomber force, we would be in a group formation,

very much like the Royal Air Force started in the Battle of Britain,

and we'd fly a high squadron, a medium squadron and a low squadron,

and the squadrons in visual sight of each other

but each squadron fairly intact.

And when we rendezvoused with the bombers,

then we would then divide up into three squadrons,

one going well ahead of the bomber force

and usually up-sun from the bomber force, and high,

and another one fairly well behind the bomber force

and at about a level with the bomber force.

And then the other squadron we had a roving squadron,

and they would usually break down into two flights of eight ships

and fly around the bomber force

and a little closer than these other two formations.

Generally speaking, the squadron that went high and up-sun and a way out,

would always keep the bombers in sight but almost out of sight,

and that was the squadron that had most of the successes.

We would find the Germans would be coming up through the overcast,

they'd be forming with other units, getting ready for the attack,

and we would have altitude advantage, we would have the advantage of the sun,

and we had the advantage of being organised and ready and looking,

and at least initially they didn't expect it,

and they were very successful.

The other two squadrons would pick off those that did get through,

and, well, their position was not quite as lucrative,

in the sense of numbers of enemy aircraft that they could get at.

They were still necessary and effective

in preventing such few as did get through

from actually getting to the bombers.

Generally, we would be assigned a time period

or a geographical portion of the bomber stream

in which our job was to stay in the air and to protect the bombers

in the way that I've just been discussing.

Then there would be a time somewhere in that bomber stream,

usually when you were taking them in,

or another fighter group would pick 'em up, say, in the target area,

take 'em through the target area and part of the way out,

and then somebody else would pick them up, take them the rest of the way out.

When we had the mission of the penetration portion,

where we would take the bombers into the target,

when it was our time to leave the bombers,

we would then descend to medium and lower altitudes

and form in a very wide group front.

How well organised that was would depend upon what had happened before,

but if we had not engaged the enemy at that time,

we'd have a wide group front

and we'd fly out usually at medium altitude.

Sometimes we would run into enemy fighter formations in the air.

They'd either be coming back or they'd be climbing up

and we would engage them at that time.

Many times, however, though, we would not run into any in the air

and we'd find an airfield which had a lot of planes on them,

usually fighters, and, as I told you just before the interview started,

in some cases you'd come to an airfield with several in the traffic pattern,

in the process of landing or in the process of taking off,

and of course they were particularly “duck soup”, as we used to say.

What, in your view, was the most memorable action that you undertook?

Well, the most memorable one to me is quite clear,

although there are a couple of others.

On the first of January of 1945,

the Luftwaffe made, during my tour over there,

the first and certainly the last major effort

to attack on our side of the lines.

And that, as you may recall, was during the Rundstedt's salient

or the Battle of the Bulge.

And a rather large fighter, German fighter force,

if I recall, it was in the neighbourhood of 600,

came over and attacked enemy… attacked our friendly airfields

in Belgium, France and Holland.

At that time, I was stationed at a base called Asch in Holland

and we were going out on a mission.

The weather was kind of bad on the ground

and there were only there at Asch a squadron that I was leading,

and a P-47 squadron on that same base had taken off just a little earlier,

and a Polish Spitfire squadron at Ghent,

I believe were the only ones that got airborne in all the Allied air forces.

Just as I was going… starting down the runway,

I saw a lot of flak off the edge of the field.

I called our control, asked if there were any enemy aircraft in the area.

He said, no, there weren't.

And about that time, I saw a 109 that was headed directly at me,

while I was still on the ground without flying speed,

and anyone who flies knows that an airplane is a pretty clumsy instrument

when it's still on the ground.

So that's memorable in the sense that I saw there was nothing I could do

and my view was that I'd had it.

Fortunately for me, this German pilot apparently saw a C-47

at a revetment just at the end of the runway,

so instead of continuing his attack on me,

he pulled up, did a wingover and started down, shooting at this C-47,

which put his tail right in front of me just about the time I get airborne.

I pulled the gear up immediately and had my sights on him

and shot him down before the wheels had fully retracted in the well.

By this time, there were enemy airplanes all over the airfield

attacking targets on the ground, which apparently had been their instructions.

And I got all 12 of my airplanes off the ground.

We had a very successful engagement with the enemy

almost entirely within sight of the field.

Up until the time that I was drafted, I was holding a shipyard job as a welder,

and I was doing real good, making good money,

working a lot of overtime.

We were building ships over in the harbour there in Terminal Island.

And then all of a sudden here comes the draft notice.

You're reclassified and report for induction.

And so there was nothing I could do.

I took care of my business and secured everything

and I had ten days in which to do it,

and I reported to the induction station and from there it was goodbye.

Well, I was very scared, which is normal in a situation like that.

And me, I…

My thoughts were, well,

that I was there for a purpose, to follow the orders of my superiors,

which I had been indoctrinated in.

I carried my rifle and ammunition and all,

and it was a matter of getting the enemy first before they got me,

and that was my feeling when I went in there.

Well, it all started when they told us to move into the lines

on the southern part of that island.

So our battalion, the one that I was with,

was committed to take Sugar Loaf Hill.

So we organised ourselves, and…

…E Company, which I was a part of,

was given the task of assaulting the hill first.

So we moved up…

…and as we moved up, we found out that another regiment had been there before,

and they had been practically annihilated, so to speak.

There was very few survivors left from that original force

that went in there before us.

So… here we position ourselves

and we move in.

So E Company took the task of assaulting the hill, got up to the top,

and, hell, we sat over that night in those foxholes,

shelled every minute of that first night that we got there.

And it was intense, it was something out of proportion,

something that had never been experienced.

To me, it was something new that I had never been into before

and it was a very trying experience.

I couldn't gather myself at all.

I couldn't find myself sitting in that deep hole underground,

trying to get in deeper.

What was I doing there? And my mind was turning all over.

And every time a shell landed real close,

it seems like a gigantic hand or some big monstrosity

could pick me up and slam me at a thousand times my weight

square down on the ground again

and leave me practically senseless and passed out.

But I'd recover again and continue holding my own there,

trying to see the thing through.

Very little that I can remember as to what did happen after that first night,

outside of the fact that the Japanese counterattacked.

They came at us. We held our ground.

With grenades we stopped the force,

but we expended all our ammunition,

and the casualties had been so heavy,

due to all the shelling and due to all the exposure to the enemy fire,

that we were called to withdraw, so we went back down the hill.

By standards up until that time,

very few Japanese gave up.

They all met… If they were not killed by us, they killed themselves.

And…

Towards the… the middle of the campaign there,

in the southern part of the island there,

they begin to see more or less that it was a hopeless situation.

A lot of them begin to weaken and a lot of them begin to give themselves up.

Some of them were shot by their officers

when they were on the verge of turning themselves in or giving up.

But there were some instances where they just surrendered

and they didn't wanna have no more to do with the war.

They'd had it.

And…

They had… They still had in their system, though, the treachery.

There'd maybe be a group of Japanese walking with their white flag,

maybe three or four of 'em, so we'd let 'em come into our lines.

The next thing we know, they'd have a grenade on 'em or something

and as they approached us,

the thing'd blow up and maybe hurt a few of us guys, you know.

And I remember one instance, one group of Japanese that was giving up,

the guy in the middle had a Nambu machine gun strapped to his back.

We didn't know this.

As they were approaching, the guy waving the white flag,

as they were approaching, the one in the middle fell to the ground

and one on one side grabbed the… and he started firing at the marines,

at our group.

Of course, we were set for 'em

because we were told that they were so treacherous,

not to expect them to live up to any commitment

that they would surrender or give up or what have you.

Well, we wanted to take prisoners.

The main thing to get information

and another thing, the pride of the marines,

to try to show that they were vulnerable,

that they were weak, just the same as we were, they were human beings.

In other words, the fanaticism in 'em that they had,

in this imperial army of the Japanese, to die for their emperor,

was instilled in their minds so much that they were told not to give up,

and if they were seen in a situation they were gonna be captured

to kill themselves,

and that's what would take place.

Well, my feelings towards them were,

up until the time that my good friend got hit, well…

…I didn't think much outside of that they were our enemy.

But after my close friends begin to get hit and a couple of them getting killed,

I begin to develop a sense of a little discord towards them and anger,

because, well, they were doing all this to us.

And it seems like…

…they wouldn't… they wouldn't show any mercy towards us whatsoever.

They saw the situation where we had 'em surrounded

and they'd still continue to fight.

Now, why the situation was like that, I never could understand.

With all our force, the battleships out in the harbour

and all our airplanes and all the army and marines on land,

and they still wanna shoot back at us.

It would have been easier for them to give up and consider it that,

let the homeland take care of itself.

We were not invading their main islands yet.

But in their minds, I suppose,

that they thought they would be effecting a delaying action of some type

and they figured that the more they held us up

and the more that they got of us,

well, the easier it would be for their home islands to defend themselves

because they wouldn't have that extra power to contend with.

Something went wrong with me, you see.

Here I was, a perfectly healthy person,

going to war, defend my country,

with all my heart and all my power,

indoctrinated in all the ways of doing war and defending myself,

keep from getting killed.

Well, at a particular instance, suddenly I wasn't there any more.

When I came to, I was lying in a bed dressed in white,

white sheets, white clothing,

and I'm groping around for my rifle.

And I see myself all in white and I see other guys around me

laying in bed, also in white,

and I'm trying to remember, “What happened? Where am I?”

“Where's my rifle? What am I doing in white here?”

And I'm trying to remember how I got there, but I can't.

Vaguely, vaguely, far away,

I can remember that a flash of lightning struck, and that was all.

From there on, it was touch and go.

Sometimes I would be myself and sometimes I wouldn't.

Well, time went on.

The next thing I knew, I was in Texas.

How I got there, I'll never know.

Whether it was a plane or whether it was a ship,

or how, I don't know, but I was in Texas.

And I was there for several months,

and the records show that I was discharged there at Texas,

at Fort Worth, Texas.

From there, I was transferred down here to the Veterans Hospital in Los Angeles

and I spent another year or so there, better than a year, recovering.

But after I got in LA, I began to pull myself together

and I was beginning to realise that I was in the wrong place.

What was I doing in a hospital? There was nothing wrong with me.

But there was other guys in there with me, in this ward,

that seemed to be…

…silly persons, you know.

And at the time, I had never had any contact

with persons that were mentally affected or what have you.

But I suppose that they had a little of everything there, you see.

Well, I was finally… I was finally discharged from the hospital,

not… not because I had anywhere to go.

It was that my family, my family, my immediate family,

my aunt, to be truthful about the whole thing,

she investigated about me and found out where I was at.

She said, “We're taking you home now.”

And I fell into her arms, crying and sobbing,

and I said, “What has happened? Where's my family?”

She says, “Well, you've gotta know it sooner or later.”

“Your wife is running around with other men

and I've been over pleading with her

to come down here to the hospital and get you out of here,

but her remarks are that you're not getting out of there,

you're staying there until she says so and you're gonna rot there.”

“That's when I thought I'd take the situation into my own hands.”

So when I found that out, well, I was very depressed.

It didn't affect me mentally,

but I felt very sad and heartbroken, and I did go to see my wife.

I met her and she told me that… she was out with other men,

but it wasn't her fault, that the situation just worked itself that way.

And I said, “Well, look, I wasn't here.”

“For the sake of our two children, well, I'll forgive you

and I'll forget about all this.”

“We'll never talk about this.”

So she says, “Well, OK. We'll try to make a go of it.”

And so later on she said, “Well, I have to go over to this house

where I have some things to bring over.”

So she took off with the two children, which were at that time five and six,

and she never returned.

From the time that I was…

…well, I call it wounded…

…you see…

This was in 1945,

and I was discharged from the hospital in 1947.

And finally, after I gathered myself together,

after the… disappointment with my wife,

well, I begin to…

…to realise that I had to live a life and do the best of it.

If things would have been normal with my wife,

maybe she would have waited for me.

But the war did break up our home.

We tried to realise that…

…at any rate, anything good can come out of a war.

I would say yes.

This was is a historical question,

but what came out of that war

was that we former soldiers of German army…

…certainly of the Afrika Korps,

we got the experience that our former enemies…

…respected our kind of…

…of fighting in that war,

the like… the same manner as we respected their way to fight.

The fairness of that war on the African… in the African desert

was the reason why we now have

a growing and good friendship

which will be better and better from year to year,

and has been…

…has been built up already five, six years after the war

between us, the old former soldiers of the Afrika Korps

and the British Middle East forces, the Australian, the New Zealand…

…the Free French troops and soldiers round the world,

and as just this meeting of the Afrika Korps has shown,

by 500 guests of foreign countries

from our former enemies,

which are real, real good friends to us now,

like, vice versa, we to them.

This I would think and I am convinced is a very important thing

to form and to fasten the peace round the world.

And that's what we not only are wishing

but what we are prepared to fight for.

As seriously as we fought as soldiers during the war,

fighting for the peace now in the world,

for we who have been on the front in this war,

on many fronts, different fronts, we know what the war means.

And we are convinced

that no possibilities must be avoided

to ensure that peace, enduring peace, round the world.