Original subtitles

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[ Explosions ]

[ Screaming ]

[ Whistling ]

[ Cheering ]

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[ Airplane engine whirring ]

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[ Explosion ]

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Man: We were all Americans.

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We had different religions, different faiths,

different political parties, but...

The most important thing of all was being an American.

We were unified in that.

That gave us a lot of strength.

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We were one in those days.

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And, you know, now at 93, having been through the war

and a couple other wars since,

I look back and I still feel the same way.

We had a strong belief in this country.

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Man #2: I was studying in Sunday school,

and a mother came over and informed us

that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl harbor

at 9:30 on a Sunday morning, 1941.

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Man #3: I was in a movie theater,

the strand theatre, on 47th street and Broadway.

So, I come out, and people are screaming and yelling

and saying, "what the hell?

We were attacked by the japs."

They were yelling,

"we were attacked by the japs, and we're at war."

Man #4: I was in San Diego, and I was seeing a girlfriend.

And then they said that the president

had an announcement to make, and he made the announcement.

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Man #5: As I was walking down the sidewalk,

the two men getting shoes shined looked really shocked,

and I heard it mentioned that Pearl harbor had been bombed.

It was very meaningful to me

because it screwed my whole life up from that moment on.

♪♪

Man #6: How could we stand for that?

Thinking, "well, we'll be going to war",

"and the draft could be starting," and so forth.

I said, "how soon is that gonna be before they get to me?"

Man #7: At 15, you really don't understand

what's going on or anything like that.

Most of the people that we associated with thought,

"no problem, be over in six months."

[ Chuckles ] Of course, that proved to be wrong, too.

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[ Explosions ]

[ Water sloshing ]

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[ Explosion ]

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Man #8: I didn't think of them as bad guys, I guess.

I thought of them as someone who was trying to kill me,

and I'm just trying to prevent that from happening

and then, of course, maybe kill them, you know?

♪♪

Man #9: Oh, they're terrible people,

horrible people.

Of course, the marine corps had to get you in the mood

to kill or be killed, you know, and think nothing about it.

[ Gunfire ]

That was part of their training, I suppose,

that you you had to hate these people

to be able to go into battle and kill them, I guess.

[ Gunfire ]

[ Airplane engine whirring ]

[ Explosion ]

Man #10: We all hated the japs, or so they called them, japs,

and we'd heard about the cruelty.

Captures of our boys, it's a scary thing.

When you stop and think.

You have all those people ahead of you that hate you.

Man #11: Well, the japs, they were not like us.

They were some other kind of religion,

and they were a warlike people.

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Man #12: They were bad people, so they deserved to get killed.

To tell you the truth, it's like a dream, yeah.

But I know I was doing it, and I was happy to do it

because that's what the bad people deserved...

To get killed.

Whether they were men, women, or children,

they were Japanese, and they were not nice people.

They started the war.

We ended it.

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[ Gunfire ]

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Man: I remember them telling us

that we were going to a place called Iwo Jima,

and they told us the size of it was 2 1/2 miles wide

and 5 miles long.

And most of us, as we talked afterwards,

"why would you take such a little place?"

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Well, when they put us aboard ship,

you just go down to the ocean and go aboard.

They told us we were going to disembark before daylight.

We had our chow,

had steak and eggs. [ Chuckles ]

Haven't figured out why they give you steak and eggs

when you're going into combat, huh?

Anyway, they did.

Man #2: I got on an lcvp. That's a small landing craft.

And so, they've got a net that goes over the side.

And, of course, you got all your equipment on,

your pack and your rifle and your helmet and all that.

You got that with you.

Man #3: You're over the side, and you step on this net.

And you have to step in those to get down to the landing craft,

and that was scary because, you know, the boats are

so rough, you know.

♪♪

Man #4: Of course, they didn't tell us much,

the low rank that we had.

We didn't even know where we were going.

But my squad leader finally came out

and told us we're going to Iwo Jima.

[ Laughing ] That was that.

[ Explosions ]

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Man #3: You sort of have an air of bravado about yourselves.

You acquire it

because the other ones haven't had any experience.

They're all scared to death.

They act brave.

A lot of tension in the air,

a lot of cigarettes being smoked... crazy.

And a lot of kids praying, mostly.

It's kind of a...

Well, [chuckles] Impending death is what it is.

Man #1: General kuribayashi issued this order.

He said, "we're here to defend this island"

to the limit of our strength.

We must devote ourselves to that task entirely.

Each of your shots must kill many Americans.

We cannot allow ourselves to be captured by the enemy.

"Long live the emperor."

And, of course, they followed that to a "t".

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[ Airplane engine whirring ]

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Man: When the raft went down on the Higgins boat

and we ran out of there, hit the beach there,

there's still artillery and mortars coming around.

I looked down this beach to my left

and here are stacks of bodies.

[ Gunfire ]

Man #2: Yeah, it was not a friendly place. [ Chuckles ]

A lot of thoughts going through your mind, I know.

[ Airplane engine whirring ]

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Man: It was so chaotic. Absolutely...

There were jeeps blowing up, tanks stalled.

The thing that I've never been able to eradicate from my mind

are the dead.

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Man #3: It'd been a slaughter,

because what kuribayashi had done is

crammed us up against the beach

and also kept us from going up over the top

because when we get up on top, it's flat.

But on the other side of that top

are all the machine guns and the pillboxes over there.

You poke your head up over that,

you're a dead person right there.

Man #4: It was horrible.

All kinds of carnage, guys with arms blown off

and heads blown off and everything.

It was pretty bad, but we just had to keep on going

because we couldn't stop, you know.

[ Gunfire ]

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We were thinking about saving our asses.

[ Laughs ]

That is true because, well, it scared us,

it scared us tremendously.

Yeah.

Man #5: It's a horrible feeling.

It's a horrible feeling,

like the end of the world or something.

Man #6: Many marines will say,

"the bullet has never been made yet

that has my name on it."

I think most of us were not concerned about getting killed.

I think most of our concerns were about getting hit

and losing an arm or half of our face or something like that.

That probably was mostly in the back of the mind,

but getting killed... never.

There's no way I would have been killed there.

Man $5: It took forever and a day to get it off the beach,

and I kind of blocked all that out of my memory.

I don't like to remember a lot of that stuff.

A lot of the boys were praying,

18, 19-year-old.

They were calling for...

[ Voice breaking ] Sorry.

I think about it.

You're calling for their mother.

Man #3: Pulling the bodies out of the water,

and the body parts,

that was the first shock I had.

Man #6: All we wanted to do is leave there alive. That's all.

There was no big, esoteric reason why we were there.

We just wanted to be alive, that's all, stay alive.

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Man #7: One guy lost his foot,

and he was the happiest guy in the world at that time

because he says, "I'm getting off of this island."

Losing a foot let him get off of that island,

and he was real happy that it had happened to him.

Man: Well, the first one, I remember very well.

I saw some smoke coming out of the top of this pillbox,

so I just took my flamethrower nozzle,

began to pipe, and let it go.

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I'm told that death is instantaneous

because the flame just envelops them,

and there's no oxygen, so they don't even have anything.

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The second thing I remember vividly

is I was approaching the pillbox

and the enemy came out charging toward me

with rifles and bayonets.

I'm lying on my belly,

and here they come charging around the pillbox.

I just hit them in the leg, you know?

And that gets them.

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I'm laying there with some kind of a hole,

when marines around me

began yelling something about a flag.

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And I looked up, and a couple of them

were standing there shooting their weapons into the air.

So I fired my weapon in the air a few times, too, you know.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah."

[ Laughs ]

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[ Sniffs ]

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[ Airplane engine whirring ]

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Man: Curtis lemay had no reservations about killing crews

and lemay's position was,

and I heard him say this,

"wars don't end until enough people are killed."

And he said,

"this thing will end when we kill enough Japanese."

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Man #2: Well, when you're ready to take off,

you're pretty busy up on top,

while looking out the bomb bay, tell a captain or whatever was.

[ Airplane engine rumbling ]

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Man #1: You use every bit of the runway [chuckles]

And maybe a little bit of the threshold at the other end.

It's almost as dramatic to get all these airplanes off

as being over the target.

[ Engines whirring ]

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Man #2: I swear, but now, I think I remember Tokyo Rose.

I think I remember listening to that.

And somehow, I seem to remember

that they know when we were coming

and who we were at the time.

I don't know how.

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Man #1: When you flew to a target,

you all flew separately to the I.P.

And you go around, and these airplanes join you.

And pretty soon, you have a formation of 12 airplanes

or 24 or 36,

and then you all fly from there to the target,

which is usually about 50 miles.

Everybody had a job.

The gunners were at their position and ready to attack,

and the bombardier was getting ready to bomb.

Everybody was tense.

♪♪

When you had a frontal attack, you had 12 airplanes,

but the total number of guns come to,

I think, 92 forward-firing, .50-caliber guns.

Every fifth bullet is a tracer.

[ Engine whirring ]

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[ Gunfire ]

Man #2: Four guns in the top, two in the back.

It's just, "fire, fire, fire!"

Man #3: They had balls,

or they had plenty of sake, either one.

They'd come in at you in the daytime.

I used to wonder at them. They had to be crazy.

[ Gunfire ]

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Every mission was scary because if we weren't attacked

by fighter planes before we hit Japan,

we were attacked at different spots,

depending on where we're going to bomb.

Of course, the toughest place to bomb was Tokyo, the capital.

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Man #2: Everything I did, I enjoyed doing.

I really shouldn't say that I was killing people.

But I really didn't mind doing that it the time

because the people we was bombing, Japan,

and they were not nice people, so I didn't mind.

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[ Explosions ]

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Man #3: Personally, and, of course,

I did not say anything to my fellow crew.

I felt heartsick to see the cities burning

because we were bombing with 1,000

to 1,500 bombers at a time.

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Man #2: Tokyo was burning.

I saw the parliament building right there.

Would you believe it? I was counting the floors.

One, two, three..

Sometimes, I sit there and I say,

"I wonder how many people were killed

each time we dropped a bomb?"

100? 300?

I didn't mind doing it at the time,

but today I worry.

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Man #3: Did I feel sorry?

Yes.

I felt sad for the people,

'cause you're not killing all soldiers.

You're killing people.

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[ Airplane engine whirring ]

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[ Indistinct chatter ]

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Man: I always wanted to fly, and I guess because of that,

I flew the airplane, the airplane didn't fly me.

[ Airplane engine whirring ]

You always flew with the same guys,

so you're looking out for each other.

You're pretty much involved

in doing what you're supposed to do.

[ Radio chatter ]

We felt we were superior when we were out there.

We didn't worry about them,

so much as being a problem to us.

[ Laughs ] We figured we're indestructible.

[ Chuckles ]

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[ Metal scraping ]

[ Radio chatter ]

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[ Airplane approaching ]

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We'd go up and watch the other guys land. [ Laughs ]

Yeah, we'd go up and watch everything.

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[ Airplane approaching ]

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Probably, if you were in combat,

you'd have a good book and read it.

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Man #2: Our bathrooms were just a trough

running down on seawater.

And there were always some joker that would come in

and light a piece of paper on this end of it

and let it float down underneath the buoys.

[ Laughs ]

The guy had to get out of there fast or he'd have got killed.

[ Laughs ]

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Man #3: I used to sit up and look out over the sea,

and I'd watch the flying fish come aboard.

The water could be like a glass tabletop,

just wonderful.

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Man #2: I was a fire controlman on the USS intrepid,

and my job was firing the guns.

That's what the fire controlman did.

And they had charge of maintenance

of the radio equipment.

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The aircraft carrier for the prime target

because they were doing the most damage.

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Man #3: They were kamikazes were after the ships.

They didn't care about us,

they were there to sink the ships, pure and simple.

They weren't there to kill me. That's not their reason.

They're reason was to kill the ships

so that we would be prolonged to a point

that we'd say, "we're having too much trouble,

and so we'll go ahead and declare a truce."

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Man: I was combat air patrol over the Franklin.

And Franklin was loaded, their planes all gassed.

[ Engine starts ]

They hadn't launched yet.

All the planes are gassed.

Man #2: I saw this plane coming in, and I thought he was

coming to us when he turned towards the Franklin,

and I saw him come down, and ka-boom.

[ Explosion ]

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Went through the flight deck.

Man: Between the conning tower and the stern,

some place in there.

[ Explosions ]

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We watched it.

It was just like a waterfall of gasoline over the side.

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[ Indistinct shouting ]

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Man #2: People say, "well, were you scared?"

Well, no, you're busy.

There's probably two or three more coming in

that you have to keep track of.

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Man: They'd come around dropping their bombs.

After the bombs were dropped,

a lot of them was coming to dive into the ship.

[ Gunfire ]

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Man #2: We had 4,500 sailors killed

with those things, and when we were at anchor,

we had a kamikaze come right over.

We were watching a movie on the fantail.

That was scary.

Here you are sitting on the fantail of your ship

watching a movie,

and then this plane comes right over your head.

♪♪

Man #3: You hear the five-inchers go off.

It goes boom, boom, boom.

5-inch shells, right? You don't worry.

Then you hear the 40-millimeters going boom, boom, boom, boom.

Then 200-millimeters, and you hear

boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Uh-oh. [Chuckles] It's coming closer.

Then there's .50-calibers.

And you hear brrr!

[ Engine whirring ]

[ Explosion ]

Man: They had to be fanatics. They were fanatics, in fact.

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Man #3: Oh, they're all going to heaven. [ Laughs ]

At least, that's what they thought.

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Man: When they started that stuff,

boy, that's all they wanted to do was crash into us,

boom, so we were lucky

'cause we could zigzag, and that would screw the fire.

[ Indistinct shouting, gunfire ]

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[ Engine roars ]

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Man #3: He's coming up the fantail. [ Chuckles ]

And the carrier turns.

And when he gets right... They'll let him have it.

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[ Gunfire ]

Man: When you're firing,

you got tracer bullets that you see out there.

You got to try to get ahead of them and so forth,

just like shooting pheasants, you know.

You got to give lead time and so forth.

And you'd think it wouldn't be any trouble shooting them down,

but they'd keep flying until they'd crash.

Man #4: They were different than the Japanese zero fighters

that were the professional aviators.

Kamikaze didn't seem to take evasive action.

[ Whistling ]

[ Explosion ]

Man: Sometimes, they'd come in real high

and come diving at you.

[ Gunfire ]

[ Explosion ]

And sometimes, you're right on the water, you know.

Then they'd come up and down, and they'd get close to you.

[ Explosion ]

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[ Explosion, gunfire ]

Whole time we were firing, it was coming in on us

and we had the thing pretty well shot up,

and it got just along the port side of us and blew up.

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And then it spewed fire all over the island

and the hangar and the flight deck,

if you can imagine all that stuff

catching on fire and blowing up.

It just raised havoc to the whole hangar deck.

I lost a couple good buddies in that one.

That's when I got hit, and my clothes caught on fire,

and my... oh, my back was burnt and so forth.

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Man #3: I lived in a 42-man bunk right under the flight deck,

and since they didn't have a morgue, the dead bodies...

I can remember walking in blood.

Man: It's a terrible sight to see

these legs and stuff torn off.

So then after everything is settled down,

you got all of these guys that are dead.

Then it comes time to Bury them, and they put them in hammocks

and put a 5-inch shell in with them

and take them out to the elevator deck right at the edge.

And line them up there

and then play "taps" for them.

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It's so sad to have to lose them that way.

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[ Explosion ]

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[ Gunfire ]

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Man: Well, if you talk to any of the marines,

they would eventually do this way.

"Golden gate in 48, red line in 49."

We all knew we couldn't possibly win the war before 1948.

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Man #2: We had no idea how long the war was gonna last.

Most of us understood that what we were doing is working

our way toward the ability to be able to bombard Japan

for an eventual landing on the Japanese homeland.

That was in everybody's mind.

"How long is it gonna take, and how are we gonna do it?"

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We were fighting because we were marines,

and we were fighting because we were Americans.

Yeah, we cared a hell of a lot about our buddies.

They were watching our back. We were watching theirs.

And when you lost a buddy, it hurt bad.

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The Japanese were extremely fanatical,

and there were lots of them on okinawa.

We couldn't stop them, you know. There's nothing we could do.

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The caves and tunnels that they had...

Most of them were open.

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But our procedure was to get a flamethrower

and fire that flame in there for eight or 10 or 15 seconds.

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Hopefully, that will go back in there

and keep the Japanese from coming out.

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Man #3: And we were back to shoot in at them running out,

so they were better off us shooting them dead

rather than burn out that way,

but that's something that always struck in my mind, you know.

You'd never dream of something like that.

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Man #2: When they'd fire that flamethrower into the cave,

two or three japs would come running out of there,

totally burning, trying to escape it.

They could run about 20 yards, and that was it.

It was all over.

Yeah.

Man #3: The smell was terrible.

Especially when a flamethrower hits,

and it's the smell that you can remember.

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Well, it's something I still, you know,

I can't understand in my mind,

but we had a job to do, and we had to do

what we had to do to get them out of there.

[ Explosion ]

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[ Explosions ]

[ Indistinct shouting ]

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[ Explosion ]

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Man #4: We killed every one of those Japanese soldiers.

And then a couple of guys started to walk over to them

and look down at them, and I joined in.

We were all looking down at them.

And one guy said, "well, this guy couldn't run very much

'cause he had 40 pounds of lead in his back."

And everybody laughed.

And I laughed, also.

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[ Voice breaking ] I still can't forgive me,

because there's no joy,

there's no glamour in killing someone.

I don't give a damn who he is.

And I'm 94 years old.

That means I'm gonna be...

I'm sorry.

I'm gonna be standing in front of god,

and I have to answer for that.

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[ Engines rumbling ]

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[ Camera shutter clicks ]

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[ Engine starts ]

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Man: You always flew with the same guys,

so you're looking out for each other.

That's what you're doing.

We were all fighting to get in combat. [ Laughs ]

It's like a ball game, like a football game.

♪♪

Man #2: I went up six or seven times to escort b-29s.

They never showed up,

so we had a secondary mission.

We'd go down straight.

Anything that moved, we striked it.

[ Gunfire ]

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Man #1: We were coming in... That time, we drove down.

We're really going, and with a lot of throttle.

We were going fast, and I think they were shooting behind us.

Man #2: Sometimes, you'd go down to almost ground level.

Trains would hit them guys and blow up a bunch of steam

and everything, and go right on over

and pull back up and come back around

and make another pass on them.

[ Gunfire ]

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Man #1: You have to be careful, because if you shoot a target

that blows up, you're gonna be caught in the middle of it.

Man #3: Oh, accurate, very accurate.

If you picked a target and you fired with the rocket,

it's going to hit whatever you aim for.

I liked rockets... No problem at all.

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Man #2: I strafed trains,

I strafed water buffaloes,

anything that was on the ground and moving.

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Man #1: It was the exciting time, of course, to dive down

from that altitude.

Once we get down to a couple hundred feet,

then we would get down, sometimes, a lot closer.

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[ Engine whirs ]

[ Gunfire ]

Man #3: You'd come down.

You'd go well over 400, I'm sure.

But I never looked at a speedometer. [ Laughs ]

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[ Airplane engine whirring ]

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Man #2: The fighters, every one of them,

had a gun camera in the wing.

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It would be activated by the same switch

that you were firing the guns with.

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Man #3: The gun camera takes a picture of whatever you're

shooting at, and if you shoot a jap and you fire him,

if he's on fire, then you get credit for it

'cause you're not gonna stay around and watch him burn.

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Man #2: I had 20/10 vision, and I could see the airplane

before anybody ever thought.

And I could put myself in position.

♪♪

Man #3: It didn't take you long.

You know, you just give him a squirt.

That .50-caliber just rips things all apart

when it hits. [ Chuckles ]

It does a beautiful job, I'll put it that way.

Man #1: We could out-dive them.

Our protection, mainly, would be to dive away from them.

If we tried to turn with them, they could turn inside of us.

Means they've got to make a real tight turn.

They could do that with a zero.

[ Explosion ]

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Man #2: I just fired long enough for that guy to, you know,

catch on fire, and then I release that

and pulled up behind that other one,

and when I got it in my sights,

upside down, I pulled the trigger and blew him up.

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[ Gunfire ]

Man #3: Four or five rounds and, baby, she's coming apart,

almost invariably.

You never thought one iota about the guy in it.

At least, I never did.

I don't think any of the other guys did, either.

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It's very, very impersonal.

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[ Insects chirping ]

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[ Heartbeat ]

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[ Heartbeat intensifies ]

[ Heartbeat stops ]

[ Explosion ]

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My name is ittsei nakagawa.

I was 15 years old when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,

August 6th,

8:15 A.M., 1945.

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Our family, nakagawa family,

lived in a little village area called moroki ochiai,

which is approximately 7 miles away from the city of Hiroshima.

♪♪

I could only remember what was a usual day.

You just wake up and start cleaning up to get to work.

All the kids that go to high school

and above go to the city

because that's where the high schools are located.

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And the kids, all the students, were trained to become

lathe operators, driller.

I mean, they were all manufacturing something.

Well, anyway, we were outside walking toward our destination,

and we heard the air raid go on.

[ Siren wailing ]

And they saw one b-29 flying over,

so everybody took cover, waited until something happened.

But it seemed like nothing happens.

The air raid signal came back and said it's clear.

[ Clock ticking ]

Everybody came out, and this is when the b-29,

I think, dropped something like a parachute,

and there were a lot of people looking at it.

[ Clock ticking ]

And meanwhile, I was inside the building then already.

That's when the whole thing just blew up.

You know, just, everything went black.

[ Explosion ]

[ Rumbling ]

[ Wind whipping ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Dust.

You can't see anything. I mean, it was...

I didn't hear anything.

♪♪

I didn't know it was a bomb.

Nobody knew what it was.

♪♪

♪♪

Only thing you can look at is a person,

and he's no longer a person anymore.

He's a...

A burned person with face swollen up...

Hands swollen up.

Only thing I could see is a button hanging from the clothes.

I mean, you can't help them. You can't even touch them.

♪♪

And you know, one thing about burn...

You ever tend to a burned person?

It's not one time, you know,

especially when your skin is gone and so forth.

I mean, it peels off every time.

It's just like new skin comes off.

You have to take it off and wash it down with...

"what do we do?"

And the first thing you hear is, "water."

That's the only thing I could hear... "water, water."

But I couldn't even find myself a water to keep me cool,

to stay alive.

♪♪

And you know, when I look back and I say,

"I... why did I survive this thing here?"

And it's very simple.

Just nature is the only way that you could describe it.

But there's more than nature.

It's there's other people that are dying

that becomes part of you.

Yeah, but I should have still tried to save those guys.

♪♪

[ Train clacking ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Man: I can tell you something about that bomb.

Every morning in my house, they would say the same thing

that I'm saying, if they were still around.

The most humane thing the United States

ever did in warfare was drop those two atomic bombs.

♪♪

Man #2: I think the Japanese should thank us.

They should thank us for dropping the atomic bomb

because we probably would have killed

30 or 40 million of them in the end, you know.

♪♪

Man #3: Oh, my goodness.

That was like you were carrying a load

that you could hardly handle,

and all of a sudden, you dropped it off

and you were completely free.

♪♪

Man #4: Those bombs, I think, really caused the Japanese

to stop fighting.

That ended the war.

Had that not happened,

I wouldn't be talking to you now.

♪♪

♪♪

Man #5: I saw Nagasaki and Hiroshima,

and I was absolutely surprised and astounded

that we now had a weapon that would do that kind of damage.

Man #6: Lemay was against dropping the bomb.

And I'm against it. It's the worst thing that ever happened.

It put us in the position of we've dropped atomic bombs,

or anybody else in the world and drop atomic bombs.

Had we not dropped atomic bomb,

we wouldn't have this hanging over our head,

that we did it, so anybody else could do it.

♪♪

♪♪

Man #7: Well, I met frank Oppenheimer,

who's the brother of Bob Oppenheimer,

who was the designer for the Manhattan project

for the development of the atomic bomb.

"Do you know the story of a genie in a bottle?"

I says, "yeah, I sort of remember that story."

"Well," he says, "the genie is out of the bottle."

You can't put it back in the bottle again.

There is no way that you can get that guy in a bottle.

This is it.

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Man: It's a good thing they lost because

I didn't like them at all.

The United States won the war, and the Japanese lost.

But, you know, later on, you find out

as you get older that the bad guys were not bad.

They were just doing what they had to do.

♪♪

Somebody told them that they had to do it.

The poor guys did like, "who told me what to do?"

The guys above me... They tell me what I have to do."

So I guess maybe all the Japanese were nice people, too.

They just had to do what the idiots that started the war...

♪♪

Did you get all this stuff from all other people

that you talked to?

Man #2: I'm a Christian, and I believe in the ten commandments,

and I have a problem with this,

and this morning, I was starting to cry because...

Because I did something that's not me.

Because of my belief in the ten commandments

that says, "thou shalt not kill."

And I don't know of any exception to that.

It just says, "thou shalt not kill."

♪♪

Man #3: It's been said many times by many people

that war is hell.

♪♪

It really is hell.

But I never visualized hell being that bad.

[ Indistinct chatter ]

♪♪

Director: One last question.

Are you guys the greatest generation?

Man: Yes, I believe that myself, not because I'm part of it,

but...

Everything changed after world war ii.

♪♪

Man #2: I think we were the greatest generation

because some advertising man decided it sounded pretty good

to say, and it was a lot of damn propaganda.

But really, we were a different generation,

not greater, but different.

Man #3: If you went through the depression,

as I did from 10 years old, going into the service at 19,

that was such a harsh period in the life of American people.

♪♪

Man #4: No, I would say that we were taught to get along

as best you could with what you had,

and, probably, that's what made American soldiers great,

because they improvised, almost all of them.

♪♪

[ Horn honking ]

♪♪

♪♪

Man #5: We had democrats and Republicans,

but they sure as hell worked together well and cooperated

for the good of the nation.

Oh, how I wish we had politicians like that now

that cared about the country

more than themselves or their party.

♪♪

Man #6: You can talk to any veteran you want to.

They don't understand at all why.

The most divided nonsense going on

in our country between politicians.

It's crazy.

♪♪

Man #3: What do you think, in terms of all that money

that we could use for medicines?

We have people that have all the diseases

that we could accomplish and conquer,

and they just aren't doing it.

All that money going to waste,

and all these guys that caused the war,

how can they justify all that?

Just let them fight amongst themselves,

and see how long it would last.

♪♪

♪♪

Man #7: If I could do it again, I would, for this country,

I'd do anything for this country.

I love this country.

I'm getting teared up. Now, why are you making me...

[ Laughs ]

[ Crowd whistling, cheering ]

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

♪♪

Director: Okay, have him clap.

Man: Let's just get all of them right in here.

[ Clapboard clacks ]

Man: If you can just tell me your name,

your age, and your rank in 1945.

My name is George n. Boutwell.

I was born July 19, 1924.

I'm a retired sergeant major, United States marine corps.

My name is George vouros. Born in 1925.

My rating in the Navy was seaman, first class.

My name is James m. Blane.

I was a corporal, U.S. marine corps.

Born November 18, 1924.

My name is Monroe ozment.

I was a corporal.

Born December 24, 1925.

I was a corporal in the United States marine corps.

My name is William m. Braddock Jr.

My name is abner m. Aust Jr.

I was a captain in the army air corps on Iwo Jima,

and I'm 98 years old.

Delbert treichler.

I was a p.F.C. In the marine corps.

My birth date is June 17, 1924.

Richard spooner. I'm 93.

And during world war ii,

we were on okinawa in 1945.

I was a private first class.

George puterbaugh.

I was a watertender, first class,

acting chief, in the Navy.

Charles schlag.

Hold on a second. We got people walking on these stairs.

Okay.

My rank is lieutenant commander, and I'm 97 years old.

I was a sergeant and b-29 top turret.

I was a sergeant at Iwo Jima and 19 years old.

I was a buck private on okinawa in the 184th division.

I was a gunner on a b-29. I was the right gunner.

Just keep looking at the camera.

Al Nelson.

P.f.c. In 12-17-25.

Johnny Dean pace Jr.

My age is 93.

I'll be 94 in July.

My name is ittsei nakagawa.

Age 95.

I was a first lieutenant

in 1945 in the army air corps at the age of 20.

I am 101 years old, and I'm still kicking.

I expect to kick another three years.

The government said I'm gonna live to be 103.

I was on the USS intrepid during world war ii

from 1943 to 1946.

What else would you like to know?

Ralph c. Simoneau... private.

My birthday is July 5, 1925.

My name is hershel Woody Williams,

and I was a marine in world war ii.

I participated, or took part, in the campaign

at Guam and Iwo Jima, and on Iwo Jima,

did an action that eventually earned me the medal of honor.

My name is Maurice Joseph Hubert.

I was a first mate... Pharmacist's mate, first class.

I did five landings during world war ii.

Director: Thank you for your service.