I am the Ennist of Uga. We'll have a fight. We'll have a fight. Ask God what your country can do for you. Northern Canada has been shot.
The world has been shot. We choose to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
On the first Sunday in December 1941, Americans were doing what Americans did on any normal Sunday. I'd been to see another string of interminable westerns at the Plaza, which we went every Saturday and Sunday, and Guns of the Pecos was the movie that was playing. My father and I were in the living room listening to the Giants football game.
My father... was sitting next to me suddenly when they announced that Pearl Harbor was attacked. We interrupt this program to bring you a special news bulletin. The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor by air.
I came home to a household that was somber and quiet, and the radio was on, and was told that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, which I had no idea where it was. I'll tell you what struck my mind. I thought it was somewhere in Oregon. Soon every American would know that over 2,000 of their countrymen had perished in the Japanese attack on Hawaii's Pearl Harbor, and that nearly half the U.S. fleet had been destroyed. Well, it was absolute horror.
People were just shocked. When it happens... You don't know what to think.
You're just standing there wondering, what happens now? And it was terrifying. We sat down and looked at each other for a couple of minutes, and Max said, no more civilian clothes.
It was a very bad time. Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory. President Roosevelt told an America shocked out of its isolation and innocence that in order to win this war every man woman and child would have to become part of the fight.
Never before have we been called apart for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much. We may forget at the end of the century that America in the early 1940s was far from a superpower.
Its army was ranked 19th in the world behind Holland and Portugal. Its industry was still in the grip of a lingering depression. The war, of course, would change all that and many other things as well.
It would unite the country in a way never known before or since. To understand the American home front during the war years, you have to understand the texture of the times. naive that most Americans didn't know their president couldn't walk.
Certainly a time before television, an instant satellite transmission, when war news took days or weeks to reach newspapers and the newsreels. The survival of democracy was by no means assured. I remember as a young boy, fear of the Japanese, that submarines were going to come up in Santa Monica.
There was a lot of fear then. Just four days after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany and fascist Italy declared war on the United States. The world was a very dark place. The German U-boats were sinking tankers right off the...
coast of Florida and New Jersey, within sight of the bathers on the beach. The oceans, which had historically kept America invulnerable, had been penetrated by enemies from both east and west. We had to destroy those people to save ourselves and to save the United States. Then we all rushed off to the recruiting stations. Everybody I knew who was my age or close to it was in the services.
If you were brave, you were in the Marine Corps. Everybody was in one thing or another, and almost all of us were in the Army. The Axis had to be defeated, and we knew that nobody was going to do it except us. Yeah, my father went to war and he was a manager of a little grocery store, IGA grocery store.
And he went to Springfield, Missouri to go through basic training. Volunteers and draftees share their stories. who had their civilian identities in basic training camps that united grocers from Kansas with mechanics from Monterey and bookkeepers from Brooklyn. Within six months, many would be sent to battlefields around the world, leaving behind behind parents, wives, and children.
I really adored my father. I mean, it was a, you know, I admired him, I loved him. He was a wonderful father.
And, you know, the thought of life without him was, you know, unimaginable to me. It was sort of the hand one was dealt, and your father was going to war on a good cause. And I was very proud of him. We got married and then he enlisted. His goal was to be a pilot on a B-24.
He achieved it. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He got his wings the same week his son was born. We were taught when your husband becomes an officer, you're an officer's wife. And you do not show any emotions when they go overseas.
You hold it back no matter what. No crying. And we did that. It was tough, but we did it.
From an army of 300,000 in 1940, American armed forces would swell to 15 million. At the beginning of the war there was considerable fear that these hastily assembled citizen soldiers could hold their own against a highly trained and heavily equipped enemy. News from the front had not been good. Three months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had inflicted a series of humiliating defeats on an America whose confidence was shaken. On February 23, 1942, the President tried to calm and to rally a frightened nation.
This is war. The American people want to know and will be told the general trend of how the war is going. The President had asked every American to follow his speech on a map.
I had huge memories. It's on my wall from the backs of newspapers. I marked it with crayon, and, you know, putting arrows and X's and circling towns.
We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it. I remember his confidence and the tone of his voice and the closeness that you felt to him. He was a beacon of light.
Oh boy, when he came on the radio... Soon we and not our enemy will have the offensive. We, not they, will win the final battle. He had the capacity of moving us with words, of inspiring the country, of lifting the country to do more than it might do otherwise. There is one thought for us here at home to keep up among.
The fulfillment of our special task of production. Uninterrupted production. Oh, man!
Take your mind up when you get out of bed. Work your head off so you can keep your head. Government films pounded home the fact that America not only had to supply its own troops, but meet the needs of its allies as well. Workers in cities across the country responded.
During the war at night, the mills would be going full blast, and the sky would pulse red with the blast furnaces going on. And we were told at school and we heard, on the radio and saw in the newspaper. Pittsburgh was helping to win the war.
In Detroit, it took just nine months to convert the entire capacity of the American automobile industry to war production. They dubbed Detroit as the arsenal of democracy. The plants operated 24 hours a day, around the clock.
I had bombers coming off the line every five minutes. Worked till they almost fall out, then somebody take your place. I was working on the Jeeps.
I sprayed the Jeeps with this olive paint. Can you imagine? working 18 and 24 hours a day, staying in the shop.
You run home and look at your family and run back to the shop again. With existing manpower strapped to the limit, there was another pool of workers ready to be tapped. Factory owners were very reluctant to hire women. They argued they'll never learn how to operate these complex machines, and if they come onto the assembly line, they'll distract the men, productivity will go way down, and besides, they shouldn't leave their homes, it'll be the end of the home and the family.
But then by about 1942 or 1943, when so many men were in the armed forces, they had to turn to women. So suddenly the whole attitude toward women coming to work changed. Between 1940 and 1944, the number of women in war-related industries rose 460% to a high of 19 million, a full third of the entire civilian workforce.
Half of those women were wives and mothers who had never held jobs before. My mother was a nice lady. baked and cooked and cleaned house and whacked her kids around to make sure they stayed in line. And suddenly she's running a machine at an aircraft factory.
She felt she needed to do something. I think there was an underlying, unexpressed kind of patriotism, not the kind that waves flags, but it was the kind that loved our lives. that loved our country, and we all worked for one reason, to get those airplanes in the sky.
In Boeing, Seattle plant, half the workers were women. In just four years, they turned out over 12,000 B-17 bombers. They call it the Flying Fortress, most awesome plane. Oh, what a feeling of accomplishment.
Even if you only did the riveting on part of it, it was, they couldn't have done it without you. I became an ABS welder, top of the line. I wore a leather suit. I had a helmet with glasses through it. I pulled this down and I could see through the glass and the helmet.
I had a sutilene torch to join pieces of steel together. I was determined that I was going to build ships to show Japan that we would hit back. Thanks in large part to these women workers, American factories turned out 4,000 tanks and 4,500 planes every month.
And ships, which used to take one year to assemble, were now being completed in 17 days. Production expectations were not only being met, they were being surpassed. The war years at home, said First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, were no ordinary time and no time for weighing anything except what we can best do for the country.
Beyond the sacrifices, large and small, being asked of every American, the social fallout from the war's demand for men and material would change America forever. The American family would be restructured, as mothers now left their homes and children to do their part on the nation's assembly lines. There was this thing called the war effort, and it took on a life of its own. You had to be doing something for the war effort. Lights out up there!
My father was an air raid warden, and when Patrick Joseph She said on Lycast Street in his rich Irish tenor voice, lights out, the damn lights went out all over the neighborhood. Name, please. Hollywood stars left stateside did their part too, becoming pitchmen for war bonds.
You're saving your money by lending it to Uncle Sam. See, Uncle Sam needs that money to build ships and planes, tanks. What? Thanks.
You're welcome. Virtually everyone would do something for the war effort. At the very least, that meant adjusting to the rationing of a slew of items formally taken for granted. There was gas rationing, and you had either A stickers or B stickers or C stickers, which you put in the windshield of your car, and it told how much gas you were allowed. Cut the use of your car.
Save its tires. And by... The president appealed to a national sense of collective sacrifice, asking Americans not only to do without, but to actively collect the materials of war.
Turn. People sent in their rubber toys from their dogs that had died with a letter saying this was Snuffy's favorite toy and please contribute to the rubber scrap drive. Women cut up their girdles and sent them to Roosevelt personally. Kids would gather up the rubber, gather up the aluminum. There were kids'memories collecting tinfoil.
Everybody felt that what they did mattered, and that just was, as I reflect back on it, of just inestimable importance. And so too were the newsreels and the propaganda films which united the home front in its hatred of the enemy. I remember going and seeing the newsreels, you know, cock-a-doodle-doo, and there you were in the war. I saw it all.
The invasion of Europe and Africa. You could go there and watch two and a half hours of newsreels. And it was wonderful. It was all bombs and shells.
You were immersed in it. You had to hate the enemy. I mean, the Germans were despicable.
The Japanese were indefensibly horrible. For the soldiers of Japan who tossed Chinese babies on their bayonets, slaughtered the Chinese people. We knew that unless we were vigilant, it could happen to us. For these men, who would be committing these same crimes today, in San Francisco.
Chicago, or any town. I was 10 years old. To me, a Jap was a Jap, and the only good one was dead. I suspect that I pretty well reflected most people in this country in the response to the depiction of the Japanese. The American government's portrayal of the Japanese was as if they were cockroaches, monkeys, beasts, subhuman.
The fear and loathing of the Japanese brought on by Pearl Harbor had immediate and drastic consequences for Japanese Americans. Notices were posted on the telephone poles saying that all persons of Japanese ancestry were to be removed by such and such a date. It was a sickening feeling. We were quaking in our boots, not knowing what was going to happen to us.
What happened was Executive Order 9066, which mandated that all Japanese Americans be removed from the west coast of the United States, where it was feared they might assist any invading force from Japan. In In 1941, one of my classmates was George Murakami, and his little brother Roy was at the school. When we did the school play, I played Thomas Jefferson, and George Murakami played George Washington.
And we wore the white wigs and did the patriotic speeches. And two weeks later, George Murakami and Roy were taken off to the camp for the Japanese. Some 120,000 Japanese Americans were taken from their homes and businesses and sent by rail to 10 internment camps around the country. I was beginning to settle down on the train, and all of a sudden I saw my dad, and he is a very unemotional man, a gentle man.
But I saw him take out this hanky and go like this, and it just overwhelmed me, it just crushed me to think that he was taking it so hard. It was called Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and that was our camp. It had barbed wire all around, and those camps, desolate.
And no sign of any beauty, life, green, anything at all. It was just total absence of everything. One of the few government officials who objected to the internment of Japanese Americans was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He said the camps were the unnecessary result of wartime hysteria. The fact that we were going to be incarcerated in these camps is a devastating feeling.
These images are from home movies taken by Japanese Americans forcibly held in the camps. They reveal glimpses of what historians would later call one of the greatest civil rights violations in all of American history. While defense plants were running around the clock during the war, so were the USO dance halls. I was in Seattle.
port of embarkation. We were up to our ears in men. All of the services came through there on their way to wherever they were going.
We had a great time. If they couldn't dance, we taught them. And if we didn't know their steps, they taught us. We knew those guys were on their way overseas. This was going to be maybe their last big party.
The departure of so many men changed the normal rhythms and patterns of American social life. For teenage girls, those changes often meant growing up very quickly. Teenage girls were more precociously sexual in some ways in the 40s than they'd been in the 30s, in part because their young boyfriends were going off to the war and they might never see them again. One young man who was not away, kept out of the service by a broken eardrum, would begin a career about now that remained a social phenomenon for half a century.
They were able to project some of that newfound sensuality onto this Franklin Sinatra character who came emerging on the scene. He came at exactly the right moment to become such a cultural figure. He was an idol.
I mean, he was my heartthrob, my swoon man, everything. I was a true Bobby Sox screamer. The men at the time were less enamored of Sinatra. The army newspapers, Stars and Stripes observed, mice make women scream too. For young boys on the home front, all the heroes were in uniform.
I remember being jealous that I didn't have an older brother. And I remember seeing these kids come to school with patches on their faces. on their jackets that their brothers had sent them in, and souvenirs that they had sent from overseas. And I thought, God.
I felt deprived because I didn't have an older brother who would send me patches and send me souvenirs and send me a German helmet. We lived for the war movies. We fought that war in the East End Theatre, in the Plaza Theatre, in the Lakewood Theatre.
We'd go to Saturday serials, and at that time there were a lot of war movies, like Wake Island. On December 7th they struck by the bows from land, from the sea. Anything from So Proudly We Hail to The Purple Heart to Operation Burma. I got fired up in the movies. I remember once during a movie called Batan.
Losing battle, Taylor was trying to hold the Japanese back. Lefty Brosnan, one of the kids in the neighborhood, stood up and threw a golf ball at the screen to try to stem the Japanese onslaught. And all he did was mess up the screen for the rest of the war because it had a big patch in it that you could always see there, you know, and that was Lefty's patch.
We played more constantly. We made our own rifles out of wooden boards. We made machine guns out of fence posts, cutting down the enemy. But we had no concept, absolutely none.
Nor did most of our parents. Absolutely how brutal it was. Families on the home front weren't likely to get much of the truth about the war from the letters that GIs wrote home.
What they were doing was assuring their people that they were okay, not in any danger, usually an intense lie, that we were going to win the war very soon and please send another pair of dry socks and things like that. Nobody ever told the truth. I'm sick to death of this. I think I'm going to have a breakdown. I think I'm going to get mad.
You didn't say that kind of thing, because it would have bothered the recipient. American soldiers were fighting and dying on three continents. There had been victorious but costly battles in the Pacific, North Africa, and Italy. By the end of 1943, American casualties had surpassed 100,000. People with fathers or brothers or sons in combat were always conscious that that someday that knock on the door and the Western Union man would be there with a telegram, you know, with the bad news.
Every time the doorbell rang and I didn't know anybody was coming, you said that is this my telegram, you know, and finally it came. We just couldn't believe it. They were coming back from Berlin.
As they were getting closer to England, again, near Bente, Germany, they were hit by a flag, and they shot the plane down. Officers had to wait to jump before the other fellas jumped out. So he was about one of the last ones out.
He jumped and his parachute never opened. It was too close to the ground. Out of 10 men, three of them came back. My whole world ended.
He was a pilot. We're proud of him. I still am.
This was increasingly familiar on the home front. The gold stars placed in the windows of families who had lost a loved one. The realization that this was not fun anymore came to us when the kids from the neighborhood started dying in the war. Two brothers of two of my classmates died in that war, and Jack Callahan being one and Jimmy Warkomski being the other.
It was a small neighborhood and it was a small parish. So then I found myself being thankful that I didn't have a brother who was at risk. Who, you know, had to sit with my mother while she wept in church while they played taps and folded the flag and gave it to her. As the death toll rose, so did American resolve.
With the fighting entering its third year, the home front was anxious for a deciding battle. One that would end... war and stop the killing.
By the spring of 1944, the home front was obsessed with questions over when and where the war's decisive battle would take place. I remember my great uncles, they all were wheat farmers, there were ten of them. I remember them all coming and being around literally the apple barrel, eating pickles and having toothpicks and having a map of the war and figuring what the next move was going to be. Those were big meetings.
The next move under the direction of General Dwight David Eisenhower would be the largest military operation in US history. Hundreds of ships, thousands of planes produced on the American home front would transport American and other Allied soldiers across the English Channel to the French beaches of Norman. The invasion the world had been waiting for began in the quiet early hours of June the 6th, 1944. It was cold D-Day, and it was a bold gamble that even if successful, would have an enormous cost in lives. Almighty God, our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor.
Leave them straight and cruel. It was a wonderful moment of national unity when Franklinlin Roosevelt read a prayer that had been printed in the afternoon editions of the newspaper so people could pray along with him. The impulse to pray was just overwhelming. The churches were filled from sea to shining sea, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.
The church bells clanged and the people were in the pews praying. Oh, it was a very big event. The country had pulled itself together to make this invasion possible. And it was the great achievement of the American Republic in the first half of the 20th century, the D-Day invasion.
And it was treated as such here in this country. Blasting big headlines, second front, D-Day invasion, invaded the European Union. And that was the beginning of the end.
Indeed it was. The Allies were now fighting their way across France. And just two months after D-Day, Paris was liberated. With national spirits lifted, FDR, who'd already won an unprecedented third term, began campaigning for yet a fourth. I don't want to exaggerate the amount that we depended upon Roosevelt, but from a child's point of view, he was very much a part of the celestial furniture.
There was God at the top level and then Roosevelt. The coming election temporarily distracted America. from events overseas, Republican opponents spread rumors of Roosevelt's failing health.
But when he answered charges that he'd sent a Navy cruiser to retrieve his dog, Roosevelt seemed in top form. These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me or on my wife or on my sons. No, not content with that.
They now include my little dog, Fowler. People in the know, of course, knew how sick he was, and I suppose anybody with eyes could have seen in the last campaign that this was a very unhealthy man, but Roosevelt had broken so many laws, in a way, already of limits, of human limits, that the idea that he would actually die was fairly shocking. The shock came on April the 12th, 1945, while Roosevelt was posing for this portrait at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia.
It was a real, real, real sad day. I've seen guys just... And just break down in tears right at the machine when the news came in the plant that he had died.
You could see the impact that his life had made on the American people when that famous train ride took place from Warm Springs, Georgia to Washington, D.C. Hundreds of thousands of people came out just to watch his body go by on the train, simply as a tribute to the fact that this man had been their leader through the two greatest crises of their lives, the Depression and then the war itself. That was the most mournful period that I'd ever seen. No hero that I knew of.
In America, I think, it touched Americans so much. I mean, I saw my mother crying, my father was weeping. It was a tragedy for everybody.
Franklinlin Roosevelt died. It was as if the presidency had died because we had never known another president. He'd been president all my life and just assumed he would always be president. It was shattering. Of course I was very sorry when he died, but I didn't burst into tears.
It didn't bother me as much as it bothered some people who didn't exist in an atmosphere of death as I did. For me the war was about death and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people important and unimportant were being killed all the time. He was just another casualty to me.
The weighty burdens and responsibilities of the presidency fell to Harry Truman, who had been vice president for only 82 days. To stunned and confused Americans who thought of Roosevelt as a father, the new president was at best a distant uncle. I wish that Franklinlin D. Roosevelt had lived to see this day. Truman had a chance to inspire some confidence when, less than a month after Roosevelt died, he announced Germany's surrender. Much remains to be done.
The victory won in the West must now be won in the East. A series of valiant American victories seemed to promise that the end might finally be near. Japan knew Japan was defeated, and we knew Japan was defeated. The question was, would they surrender?
And the Japanese did not surrender. The closer we got to the mainland islands of Japan, the higher the price became in blood. Suicidal kamikaze attacks suggested to Americans that the enemy would fight until the bitter end.
In July of 1945, the Allies met at Potsdam, and they issued an ultimatum to Japan. Unconditional surrender or utter destruction. As they spoke, millions of troops were gathering for the final assault on the Japanese homeland. I was in deep despair and regarded myself on, say, August 1, 1945. I regarded myself as dead already.
I knew I was going to be killed. Paul Fussell, who had been wounded in Europe and patched up to fight again, was one of a million Americans preparing to attack Japan. I knew that I would be running up the beach in Kyushu. It was all planned. My division was to be in the first wave.
I couldn't avoid being killed forever. As troops in the Pacific awaited their orders, a bomber named the Enola Gay took off from the island of Tinian. President Truman hoped it was on a mission that would end the war. The plane carried a new weapon that was the result of the most secret Home Front Defense Project. For four years, 160,000 people had labored at 37 sites, most of them unaware of the magnitude of what they were working on.
On July the 12th, the weapon was tested. The decision to use it came less than a month later. It was a decision made by people who also did not understand the magnitude of what they had. Who could?
We were at war. And we were fighting an enemy who had not shown any inclination toward mercy whatsoever. And we wanted the killing to stop.
Truman said, I dropped the bomb, I made the decision to stop the war. On August the 6th, the Enola Gay's mission was to drop the new bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. I remember hearing on the radio that an atom bomb had been dropped. And in my head I spelled it A-D-A-M and wondered what is this atom bomb and why is it so powerful. The world had never seen anything like it.
A single bomb that could level an entire city. Three days later, a second atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The almost inconceivable idea of Japanese surrender was now suddenly at hand.
The news came on August the 15th, 1945. Japan had surrendered. I was at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I was thrilled that the war was over, that I didn't have to fight.
They were going to send me to machine gun school, but there was nobody to machine gun anymore. It was awesome. It was crazy. Everyone was screaming and laughing and yelling and... It was wonderful.
The war was over. Done. Finished.
We won. I was so happy. I had to retire to my little tent, close the curtain, and just sit there and cry for several hours. Very powerful emotional feeling to be redeemed from certain death into life again. I was glad it was over.
I didn't go downtown or anything like that. For me it was over a long time ago, right? 292,000 Americans paid for democracy's victory with their lives. The 11 million veterans who did return came home to an America seemingly untouched by war.
Except for one thing, America's pre-war innocence and naivete. ...had disappeared. The day that the Japanese surrendered, I remember going next to our next door neighbor, I said, Mrs. Lesido, the war is over, the Japanese have surrendered.
And she threw open the kitchen window and said, Yeah, the next one will be with Russia. Closed the window and that was the conversation. In the sweet afterglow of victory, few could have imagined that peace indeed would be very short-lived.
America's returning veterans and their families would forge a prosperity the likes of which the world had never seen. That's on the next episode of The Century, America's Time. I'm Peter Jennings. Thank you for joining us.