All language subtitles for The World at War 29 - Soldiers.en

(narrator) Some 54 million people
died in the Second World War,

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

equal to one third
of the entire population

of the U nited States of America.

During the six years of the war,

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

(priest) Say after me:
Teach us, good Lord...

(congregation repeats)

..to serve thee as thou deservest.

(congregation repeats)

To give and not to count the cost.

(congregation repeats)

To fight and not to heed the wounds.

(congregation repeats)

To toil and not to seek for rest.

(congregation repeats)

To labour and not to ask for any reward.

(congregation repeats)

Save that of knowing
that we do thy will.

(congregation repeats)

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

(congregation repeats)

Amen.

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

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

And I'm proud of you.

(marching band drumming)

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

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

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

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

and kick in this manner.

(newsreel narrator) The job also
takes muscle and just plain guts.

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

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

You can't teach a man courage,

but you can toughen him
for the big job ahead.

♪ Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye

♪ Cheerio, here I go, on my way...

(man) In the back of all our minds,

this is the answer,
the finish of all wars.

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

You see? This was the point.

(upbeat military music)

(ship guns continue firing)

(man) You realise
you're going in to kill,

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

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

it's confusing.

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

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

(man) We were psychologically
trained, as well as militarily trained,

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

You sort of just move.

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

You get up and you start moving up.

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

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

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

The first squad will move up
like robots.

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

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

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

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

You start functioning as a machine.

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

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

(man) You're exhausted
to a point that's indescribable.

(man) There's so much
going on in battle,

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

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

(man) When you're scared,
you're more alert.

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

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

(man) Very often you shot together.

Who shot who? You really don't know.

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

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

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

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

you know that you must be blamed
for some.

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

you know who scored the point.

(man) At 300 yards,

we couldn't tell whether they were
Germans or Americans

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

that I missed every time I fired.

(man) I don't think I was frightened.
I was scared.

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

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

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

But I assure you, I was afraid.

(man) There's no brave men.

Everybody fights for theirself
when the time comes.

(man) I think the most significant
factor is the desire to survive,

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

by not tooling it in
in front of your mates.

(man) I think everybody was afraid,

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

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

(man) The first thing
that I can remember

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

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

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

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

(man) The noise of war,
which is quite terrific,

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

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

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

and someone hits the outside
with a hammer.

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

(man) It's a particularly nasty form
of ending one's days

if one is trapped in a tank

and the tank blows up and is on fire.

You will never lose the awfulness

of screams of men trying to get out.

(man) After a while
we didn't hear the noise

the way we had heard it
at the very beginning.

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

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

The first couple of minutes of it
drives me crazy

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

and don't recognise it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

you didn't do too much about it.

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

(man) You get used to anything
after a while,

even getting shot at.

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

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

(man) It's an idea
of kill or be killed.

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

in one's thinking at the time.

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

It was the man's job.

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

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

I remember four.

(man) Them guys did some job.

(man) Yeah,
we seen the people as they fell.

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

out there in front of us at that time.

(man) I saw people layin' out there
with no head

and some with their arms blown off

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

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

(man) If several thousand men
are killed,

in the process of death, they do bleed.

There was quite a lot of blood around.

(man) The odour you'll never forget.

The odour you'd never want
to smell again.

Dead bodies. I couldn't describe it.

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

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

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

making them smell and turn black.

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

You get callous to dead bodies
and bloated bodies,

but you never get callous
to your own friends.

(man) You could have a sandwich
any time,

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

(man) You see them drop
or scream with pain.

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

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

One was completely dead
of blast concussion.

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

Another fellow,
I had to take off his leg.

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

(man) And see my friends falling around

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

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

the next minute, they're gone.

(man) I heard people hollering
and crying out for help.

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

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

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

It has quite an effect on you.

(man) The reaction is terrifying
in a sense.

It only wants you to live more.

You wanna live more yourself.

(man) Afterwards is when your knees
go to jelly and you shake

and you sit down and you cry.

(man) After the operation,

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

We mourned that more than anything

and we were so happy
to be alive ourselves.

We were just so grateful.

To the Almighty.

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

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

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

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

I was involved in taking some prisoner,

and I realised
that they were human beings.

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

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

They showed a lot of kindness
to their own wounded

and would tote 'em on their back,

although they had enough trouble
just carrying theirself.

But they would find the strength

to carry their wounded
the same as we would.

So they were people just like us.

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

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

(man) I was sort of disappointed,
because in my own mind

I was gonna see somebody
in the peak of condition,

who looked like everything
a soldier should look like

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

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

(man) The anger I think
that most soldiers feel in war

is a very personal anger.

They go into battle. They're frightened.

They lose a friend.
The friend is killed.

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

There's where the anger comes in.

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

or anything else.

(man) The longer you stay in combat,

the more concerned you are
about casualties

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

you're gonna hold them responsible

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

Naturally,
the longer troops remain in battle,

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

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

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

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

(man) It's what is known
as saturation bombing.

You felt the Earth had come to an end.

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

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

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

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

(man) We were bombed quite often
by mistake.

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

the Axis took cover.

When the Germans bombed,
the Allies took cover.

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

(man) A battlefield is very funny.

It's extraordinary how inanimate
the whole thing seems.

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

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

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

I think Tolstoy perhaps
is the exception,

of a battlefield
where nothing seems to be happening.

The action is always over a hedge
in another corner,

and it's a decisive thing.

And then they ask you if you were there.

(man) War is, of course,
excruciatingly boring.

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

(man) We were so preoccupied
with the business

of eating, sleeping,
fighting, surviving,

that I certainly never remember
discussing the outcome of the war

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

(man) The person who had lived well
prior to the war

missed his steaks and chops
and what have you,

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

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

lived in hovels, you know.

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

I was elated, sort of thing, you know.

(man) Well, it does seem mad,
it seems incredible,

but I think if people
get used to suffering

and living in slums and going without,

they adjust themselves
to this environment.

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

It seems incredible.

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

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

(man) War is, of course,
a study in extreme situations

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

(man) An army has the morale of change,

of being taken out
of the humdrum routine.

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

That's how I looked at it.

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

(jaunty music)

(explosions)

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

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

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

(man) We're all unable to imagine
what people are feeling

a few hundred yards away.

(soldier) Fire!

(man) It is very much
a lack of imagination,

one of the greatest
human weaknesses, I think.

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

We had an opportunity
to see massive destruction

on a wholesale scale.

(man) Many soldiers,
particularly artillerymen and flyers,

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

It seems to me an immoral sin.

There's been a great deterioration
in modern warfare.

(man) Civilians are always a nuisance.

Hungry, shivering ltalians
came to our mess for leftovers,

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

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

and we were forced to throw
huge amounts of uneaten food

into a hole in the ground
and cover it up.

This was an appalling thing for us

because the ltalian civilians
looked very hungry

and in fact were very hungry.

The ltalians weren't our enemies
at that time.

But when in doubt, don't do anything

that might cause trouble
in higher headquarters.

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

the tremendous power,
the flashes, the roar.

Three one.

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

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

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

I don't care who you are,

there's a certain feeling
of exultation about combat.

(man) You had mixed feelings there:
pride and fear.

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

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

I guess it's man's nature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You would rather much be seeing
what you were firing at

and what the odds were against you.

You wouldn't feel so helpless.

(man) When you attack
a major naval taskforce,

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

(man) I can imagine being up
in an aircraft and looking down

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

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

(man) You couldn't believe
it was humanly possible

for a fly to get through
something like that,

but some of them did.

(man) We opened up
and when we smashed our first plane,

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

and we all got up and started cheering.

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

that this was for real, you know,

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

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

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

came in at wave height.

(man) It hit this carrier dead centre,

and as we went by,
men were abandoning ship,

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

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

The morning after at general muster,
there were 704.

(man) Of course, aboard ship
were over 3,000 men.

You can't know them all,

but you are bound to have lost

numerous of those that you did know.

The enormous amount of damage
that one plane did

by dropping those two bombs,

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

the number of lives that
that man was responsible for.

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

and just saw no way out,

and each succeeding explosion

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

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

that they couldn't talk
if they wanted to.

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

but they couldn't have said a word.

Others screaming and crying.

Such things as that tear you apart.

(man) I think that flying
is so impersonal,

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

if you see an airplane get shot down

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

right within arm's length.

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

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

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

If a fellow did go missing, it was just,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but not at that time.

(man) When you were fighting
a particular man in his machine

and you in your machine,
the sky became empty.

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

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

sometimes you knew he wasn't so good.

And you can assess the situation
fairly closely

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

(man) Shoot-down is simple,

but you had to calculate
the lead required,

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

So you had to estimate
the target's speed.

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

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

the airplane, your target,
would intercept 'em.

(man) I think we were just
getting on with the war,

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

that was all.

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

(man) Pilots and people who kill
at a distance

don't have any particular delight
in destruction.

They have a great delight
in their implements

and in precision bombing and so on.

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

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

- (man) lt'll weave a bit, Skip.
- (man #2) OK.

(man #2) 30 seconds.

(man) There's a flare
just to the left.

(man #2) OK.

(man) OK. Keep weaving for a while.

- (man #2) 40 seconds.
- Then spread a little.

- (man #2) Bomb doors open.
- Bomb doors open.

(man) Steady.

- (man #2) 25 seconds.
- Steady. Bombs away.

- (man #2) 30.
- There goes the cookie.

(man #2) Lucky, lucky, lucky.

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

(man #3) That's not bad at all.

(man #2) Yes, not bad.

(man recites)
This is a damned unnatural sort of war

The pilot sits among the clouds

Quite sure about the values
he is fighting for

He cannot hear beyond his veil of sound

He cannot see the people on the ground

He only knows that on the sloping map

Of sea-fringed town and country

People creep like ants

And who cares if ants laugh or weep?

- Plane.
- On target.

Read first 12, 800.

- (man) That's 12, 800.
- (woman) 12, 800 set.

(man recites) To us, he is no more than
a machine shown on an instrument

What can he mean in human terms?

A man, somebody's son

Proud of his skill

Compact of flesh and bone

Fragile as lcarus

And our desire

To see that damned machine
come down on fire

- (man) They're firing at us now.
- (man #2) Hello, Skipper.

(man #2) We've been holed
in the front here.

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

(man) OK.

(man #3) I've never seen a thing
like this.

(man) Neither have l.

(man) I think my fear
manifested itself.

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

than I had been back in the States.

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

to make sure
I stayed in good graces with him.

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

so that you went around trembling,

but I think that it was pretty well felt

that our chances of surviving
were not particularly good.

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

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

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

(man) I think the overriding fear
is the fear of making mistakes.

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

So you sort of forget
that overriding fear

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

(man) It was generally understood
that the combat tour was 25 missions

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

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

(man recites) Suddenly at night
the bombers came

In the hard, reverberating bowl
of the sky

Destroying the factory
and the tall cathedral

The dock, the warehouse
and the railway station

The rich house in the leafy avenue

And the shouldering tenements
of the narrow streets

And the bodies and souls of men

I sought my son
among the smoking stones

Where I had crouched with him
clutched at my breast

U ntil the bomb burst
and the building shattered down

And the dark came
and severed my son from me

I cried out with a voice
harsh in my throat

My son

I have lost my son

And charred faces stared at me with pity

And I saw the city burning about me

And the flash of guns on the dark smoke

And I heard bombs burst in the fire

And in my heart

But no one came to seek my son

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

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

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

We accepted that there were people
in higher places

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

(man recites) These are facts

Observe them how you will

Forget for a moment
the medals and the glory

The clean shape of the bomb
designed to kill

And the proud headlines
of the paper's story

Bodies in death
are not magnificent or stately

Bones are not elegant
that blast has shattered

This sorry, stained and crumpled rag

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

Now he is just a nuisance

Liable to stink

A breeding ground for flies

A test tube for disease

Bury him quickly
and never pause to think

What is the future worth
to men like these?

(man) People talk about
morality in war.

Tell me some action of war
that is moral.

People say
you mustn't do anything to civilians.

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

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

What's the difference
between bombarding them with guns

and bombarding the cities

where they're manufacturing the weapons
and the ammunition?

♪ Praise the Lord
and pass the ammunition

♪ And we'll all stay free

♪ Praise the Lord
and swing into position

♪ Can't afford to be a politician

♪ Praise the Lord

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

(man) You could get
as much employment as you wanted,

and large families could really get
84 hours of employment.

Families which had never had
any money at all

were suddenly having lots of money.

(man) As far as the unions
are concerned,

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

The unions supported
the war considerably.

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

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

but without a shadow of doubt
or fear of contradiction,

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

♪ Praise the Lord
We're on a mighty mission

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

♪ Praise the Lord
and pass the ammunition

♪ And we'll all stay free

(man) The day was clear
when we dropped that bomb.

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

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

And we saw, off our right wing,

the cloud coming up from Hiroshima.

(man) Where before
there had been a city,

distinctive houses, buildings
and everything,

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

It was terrible to look at, really,

because you knew
there were people underneath,

and you could speculate
what the result was there.

As far as my personal feelings
are concerned,

I never let my personal feelings
enter into it.

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

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

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

I wouldn't be effective at all,

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

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

how you kill a man.

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

and how you do it
becomes pretty secondary.

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

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

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

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

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

(man) No war's worth fighting.

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

and the sadness it leaves behind.

Definitely not.

(man) My own viewpoint
was that the war for me

had been a complete failure

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

(man) I would fight
for the government again, definitely.

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

to fight for
the U nited States government.

(man) It was a terrible waste
of human life and money,

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