Apocalypse 45 (2020) Movie Script
1
Bear with us here.
Okay?
- Okay.
- You good?
- Okay.
- Okay, and-
- Any time okay?
- And you're ready to go.
Any time's okay.
This
is a Japanese ballad,
which was written a few hundred years ago,
it means they want peace
on this whole world
for the sake of people around the world.
But, you know, I haven't
done this in how many years?
40, 50 years?
- It's good.
- Hai.
My name is Ittsei Nakagawa.
I was 15 years old when the
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
We were all Americans.
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.
We were one in those days.
And, you know, now at 93,
having been through the war
and a couple of other wars since,
I look back and I still feel the same way.
We had a strong belief in this country.
I was
sitting in Sunday school
and my mother came over and informed us
that the Japanese had
just bombed Pearl Harbor.
At 9:30 on a Sunday morning, 1941.
I was in a movie theater,
the Strand Theater on
47th Street and Broadway.
When I come out, 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."
Nobody in my town
knew where Pearl Harbor was.
Even my parents didn't know.
Never heard of it before.
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.
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.
How
could we stand for that?
Thinking, "Well, we'll be going to war,
and the draft will be
starting, and so forth."
And I thought,
"How soon is that gonna
be before they get to me?"
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."
And of course that proved to be wrong too.
I didn't think
of 'em as bad guys, I guess.
I thought of 'em as someone
who is trying to kill me,
and I'm just trying to
prevent that from happening,
and then of course maybe
Kill them, you know?
Oh, they're terrible people,
Horrible people.
Of course the Marine Corps
had to get you in the mood
of kill or be killed, you know,
and think nothing about it.
That was part of their
training, I suppose,
that you had to hate these people
to be able to go into battle
and kill 'em, I guess.
We all hated the Japs.
That's all they called them, Japs.
And we'd heard about the cruelty,
captured any of us, of our boys.
It's a scary thing when you stop and think
you have all those people
ahead of you that hate you.
Well, the
Japs, they were not like us.
They were some other kind of religion
and they were a war-like people.
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 deserve, to get killed.
Whether they were men, women, or children,
they were Japanese, and
they were not nice people.
They started a war.
We ended it.
You can only hate so much
and we realized the Japanese
were worthy of our hatred.
However, we couldn't help but
notice in fighting the Japs
that they were the bravest
damn people around.
I look back and I still feel the same way
over the enemy soldiers that we fought.
I think we were young
and it was the beginning of the war,
and our idea was to kill the enemy,
To kill as many of the enemy as we could.
I can't speak for other guys,
But I always felt that
I was doing a great job
if I killed the enemy,
killed the fighter that
was coming in to kill us.
He was that little son of a bitch,
forgive the expression.
They
told us that they were very
vicious people, that for
them to die was an honor.
They were not going to give up.
They just wouldn't do it.
They would find some
way to commit hara-Kiri
because in their philosophy,
in their culture,
to die for the emperor
was the highest honor they could have.
That was their belief,
so it made them very tenacious people
because even if they died,
they're going to be rewarded for that.
And we were just the opposite.
We, Marines, would do almost
anything to preserve a life.
They were tough.
They had a field day and took
all the territory around them.
And then we had to make
them divest themselves of it
and we divested them,
we got them out of the way.
It
Didn't bother me to shoot them
'cause if I didn't shoot
them, they gon' shoot me.
And being country so,
eye for eye, you know.
We went there
and we had a interpreter
with us. And he tried to talk to 'em,
to tell 'em.
"Come out, surrender.
The war is going to end.
Come out and save your lives."
Come on out and they can
surrender, but they wouldn't do it.
But whenever they'd come
out there and stand there
and then jump off the cliffs
or else shoot theirs elf
or stab theirs elf
"cause they were not
gonna be taken captive.
They were families.
Mothers and fathers and
children would join hands
and watch at the edge of the cliff.
They'd hesitate,
I guess they were saying
something to one another.
They'd hesitate a moment
and they knew the Japanese
soldiers were gonna shoot them
if they didn't jump, so they'd
just go over all together,
but there were a lot of mothers
that had babies strapped on
their backs, just little babies,
and they would go over the cliffs.
We couldn't stop them, you know.
There's nothing we could do.
They wanted to die rather
than to have us take them.
I remember them telling us
that we were going to a
place called two Jima.
And they told us the size of it,
2 1/2 miles wide and five miles long.
And most of us, as we talked afterwards,
why would you take such a little place?
Well, when they put us aboard ship,
they just go down to
the ocean and go aboard.
They told us we were going
to disembark before daylight.
We had our chow.
We had steak and eggs.
I haven't figured that, why
they give you steak and eggs
when you're going into
combat, but anyway, they did.
I got on an LCVP,
that's a small landing craft.
And so, they got a net
that goes over the side.
And of course, you've got
all your equipment on you,
your pack, and your rifle,
and your helmet, and all that.
You got that with you.
Well, you're over the side
and you step on the zips,
and you had to step in those
to get down to the landing craft.
And that was scary because, you know,
they're both so rocky, you know.
Of course,
they didn't tell us much,
the lower ranks 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 two Jima.
Well, where the hell was that?
You sort of
have the 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 like crazy.
And a lot of kids praying, mostly.
It's kind of a,
impending death is what it is.
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 it to a T.
When the ramp went down
on the Higgins boat,
and we ran out of there, hit the beach,
there's still artillery
and mortars coming around.
I looked down this beach to my left
and here are stacks of bodies.
Yeah, it was
not a friendly place.
A lot of thoughts going
through your mind, I know.
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.
It had 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
were all the machine guns
and the pillboxes over there.
You poke your head up over that,
you're a dead person right there.
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?
I've always said
that a corpsman was not very bright
because here's a guy that just got shot,
and the corpsman runs
to the very same spot
that this guy just got shot,
but they were the most
committed people in any outfit.
Got so that I didn't
know what my real name was.
Everyone was, "Doc, hey, Doc.
Pretty much calling
for doc, needed a doc.
A lot of casualties.
I never like to remember any of those.
I always try to put it behind me.
But I managed to survive.
The good Lord was on my shoulder.
Legs, arms,
heads, bodies all torn up.
You could hardly dig a
foxhole in order to hide in,
so we were terribly exposed there.
We were thinking
about saving our asses.
That's true.
Because boy, well, it scared us.
It scared us tremendously, yeah.
It's a horrible feeling.
It's a horrible feeling.
Like in another world or something.
I was dumb.
I didn't think too much about it.
When you're young like that,
you're not gonna get killed.
How are they gonna kill you?
I guess that's what
really carried a lot of us
through the battle,
thinking that we weren't
gonna get killed or nothing.
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,
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've
been killed there.
It took forever
and a day to get 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 boys were praying,
18, 19-year-old literally calling, sorry.
I think about it.
They were calling for their mother.
Pulling the
bodies out of the water
and the body parts, that
was the first shock I had.
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.
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 the foot let
him get off that island
and he was real happy that
it had happened to him.
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 and the pipe
and let it go.
And 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, you know.
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 with the flame, yeah.
And that gets them.
I'm laying there with some kind of a hole
when Marines around me began
yelling something about a flag.
And I just looked up
and a couple of them were standing there
shooting their weapons into the air.
So, I fired my weapon into the air
a few times too, you know.
We left
two, we passed the cemetery.
Thousands, thousands of white crosses.
It shook me up.
I got so emotional seeing all those,
honest to God, I'm not lying to you.
It bothered me to see all
those heroes, those Marines,
it bothered me, you know what I mean?
It did, it really chewed me up.
That's the only time I
ever got really emotional.
It was sad.
When I was told
that I was to go to the General's tent,
I couldn't imagine what I had done
that would require me to go as a Corporal.
If he used the term Medal of Honor,
it didn't mean a thing 'cause
I never heard tell of it.
I didn't even know such thing existed.
So, on the day that I eliminated the enemy
with them seven pillboxes,
that is the beginning of a
time when my life changed.
I didn't know it at the time.
I didn't know that four
hours of time in my life
was going to generate a
whole new life for me.
And that's what it did.
Curtis
LeMay had no reservations
about killing crews.
And LeMay's position was, and
I've 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."
Well, when
you're ready to take off,
you're pretty busy, up on top,
or I was looking out the bomb bay,
tell the captain or whatever it was.
You use
every bit of the runway
and maybe a little bit of the
threshold at the other end.
It's almost as dramatic to
get all these airplanes off
and being over the target.
I said wait a minute now.
I think I remember Tokyo Rose.
I think I remember listening to that.
And somehow I seem to remember
that they knew we were coming
and who we were at the time.
I don't know how.
We lost close to
18 to 20% of our bombers
over a period of the time
that we were in combat.
When you flew to a target,
you all flew separately to the IP.
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 ready to attack,
and the bombardier was
getting ready to bomb.
Everybody was tense.
When you had a frontal attack
and you had 12 airplanes
with the total number of guns
come to I think 92, forward
firing 50-caliber guns,
every fifth bullet is a tracer.
Four guns at
the top, two at the back.
He says, "Fire, fire, fire."
You say, "Thank
God, you spared me,"
because they come in,
sometimes with three
or six fighter planes,
and sometimes one poor son
of a bitch were coming at you
because there were no other fighter planes
left in his particular group.
And they
got the son of a gun.
Yeah, he got fired.
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.
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 were going to bomb.
Of course the toughest place
to bomb was Tokyo, the capital.
Everything
I did, I enjoyed doing.
I really shouldn't say
that I was killing people,
but I really didn't mind
doing it at the time
because the people we was bombing, Japan,
and they were not nice
people, so I didn't mind.
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.
Tokyo was burning.
I saw an apartment building right there.
Would you believe it?
I was counting the
floors, one, two, three.
And sometimes I sit there and I say,
"I wonder how many people I killed
each time we dropped a bomb.
100? 300?
I didn't mind doing it at
the time, but today, I worry.
And did I feel sorry? Yes.
I felt sad for the people
'cause you're not killing all soldiers.
You're killing people.
My co-leader,
a fellow by the name of Shorty Hull,
he was on my right wing.
When we got hit, Shorty
pulled out and started down.
The airplane went off and crashed.
And we found out after the war,
he landed near a military installation.
They court martialed him
for being an invader,
and beheaded him right there.
I always wanted to fly.
And I guess because of
that, I flew the airplane.
The airplane didn't fly me.
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.
We felt we were superior
when we were out there.
We didn't worry about them so
much as being a problem to us.
We figure we're
indestructible.
We'd go up and watch the
other guys land.
Yeah, we'd go up and watch everything.
Probably if
you weren't in combat,
you have a good book and read it.
Our bathrooms
were just a trough
running down on sea water.
And there was 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 boys.
The guy had to get out of there fast
or he'd have got killed.
I used to
sit up on the capstans
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.
I was a fire
control man on the USS Intrepid.
And my job was firing the guns,
that's what the fire control man did.
And they had charge of maintenance
of the radio equipment.
The aircraft carriers
were the prime target
because they were doing the most damage.
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.
Their 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.
I was combat air
patrol over the Franklin.
And Franklin was loaded,
airplanes all gassed.
They hadn't launched yet.
All the planes are gassed.
I saw this plane coming in
and I thought he was coming to us,
but it turned towards the Franklin.
And I saw him come down and kaboom.
It went through the flight deck.
Between the
conning tower and the stern,
some place in there.
We watched it.
It was just like a water fall
of gasoline over the side.
People say,
"Well, were you scared?"
Well, no, you're busy.
There's probably two
to three more coming in
that you have to keep track of.
They'd come
around dropping their bombs.
After the bombs were dropped,
a lot of 'em would come
in to dive into the ship.
We had
4,500 sailors killed with
those things. And when we were at anchor,
we had a kamikaze come right over,
and 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.
You hear
the five-inchers go off
and then it goes boom, boom, boom.
Five-inch shells, right? You don't worry.
And you hear the 40-millimeters
going boom, boom, boom, boom.
Then 20-millimeters,
and you hear boom, boom,
boom, boom, boom, boom.
Uh-oh, it's coming closer.
Then the 50-calibers and you get brr.
They had to be fanatics.
They were fanatics in fact.
Oh, they're all
going to heaven.
At least that's what they thought.
When they
started that stuff,
boy, that's all they wanted
to do was to crash into us.
So we were lucky 'cause we could zigzag
and that would screw their firing.
He's coming up
the fantail.
And the carrier turns, and
when he gets right,
They're gonna let him have it.
When you're firing,
you've got tracer bullets
that you see out there.
And you gotta try to get
ahead of them and so forth.
And just like shooting pheasant, you know,
you gotta give them
lead time and so forth.
And you'd think wasn't really any trouble
shooting them down, but they
keep flying until they crash.
They were different
than the Japanese Zero fighters
that were the professional aviators.
Kamikazes didn't seem
to take evasive action.
Sometimes
they'd come in real high
and come diving at ya.
And sometimes you're right
on the water, you know,
and then they'd come up and down
when they'd get close to you.
When we'd knock a plane
down before, it got to you.
There was always a big hurrah, so forth,
just like a football game.
They blew
the Jap up on our deck.
And the skipper said,
"Man the brooms and sweep
him overboard."
One time we were firing
and 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.
And then it spewed fire all
over the islands and the hangar
and the flight deck.
If you can imagine all
our stuff catching on fire
and blowing up.
It just raised havoc to
the whole hangar deck.
I lost a couple of good
buddies in that one.
That's when I got hit and
my clothes caught on fire
and my back was burnt and so forth.
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.
I spent 17 days
and ah... stuck in a Georgia hospital,
and I saw so many Navy
boys burned, in bad shape.
It's a terrible sight
to see these legs and stuff torn off.
And so then, after
everything is settled down,
we got all of these guys that are dead.
Well, then it comes time to bury them,
and they put them in hammocks,
and put a five-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.
It's so sad they have
to lose 'em that way.
Well, if you
talk to any of the Marines,
they would have answered you this way.
Golden Gate in '48, bread line in '49.
We all knew we couldn't possibly
win the war before 1948.
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?
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.
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.
The caves and
tunnels that they had,
most of them were open.
But our procedure was
that to get a flamethrower
and fire that flame in there
for eight or 10 or 15 seconds.
Hopefully that will go back in there
and keep the Japanese from coming out.
And we were back
and to shoot any of the come running out
'cause they better off
us shooting 'em dead
rather than them burn up that way.
But it's something that always
struck in my mind, you know.
You never dream of something like that.
When they fire that flamethrower
into the cave,
two or three Japs would come running out
and they're totally burning,
trying to escape it.
They could run about 20
yards and that was it.
It was all over, yep.
The smell was terrible.
Especially when the
flamethrower hits them.
It's a smell you can remember.
You not only smelled it
but you could see the
hide running off of them.
Just running off of them.
It's something you don't
wanna keep thinking about it.
There was
more than just flames.
The sounds were terrible,
but then when someone said,
"Okay, you guys, we're moving
out," and you're taking fire
and knowing the only way
you can avoid being killed
was sheer luck.
There wasn't anything
you personally could do.
No heroics or no
intelligent move, nothing.
You had to move. You were told to move.
The rest of the troops are moving.
And if the enemy was firing at you,
you just had to be lucky.
Yeah,
it was raining, muddy,
always muddy there.
You get used to it.
And, of course, when you're
young, 18 and 19 and 20,
you can take a lot,
and you're surprised
what all you can take.
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 what we had to
do to get 'em out of there.
It was hard
to move around on Okinawa.
There was mud everywhere
and that just exacerbated everything.
If you had to march somewhere,
you were slipping and
sliding and you were in mud.
Some of the vehicles couldn't
operate because of the mud.
That made it more difficult.
You can't describe death,
nor can you forget it.
Right now, as soon as you
mentioned it, I can smell it.
You're so thankful for
when there's a little wind
that's blowing the stuff away from you.
It's very hard to carry on
when you're smelling that.
It affects the way you think and move.
Some of it, like the smell
that is there forever,
you get away from it, but
just thinking about it,
it'll come back to ya, 78
years later or whatever it is.
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,
and 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.
I think the
worst part of combat,
and the whole time, on all the islands,
the worst part was picking
up your buddies' pieces
and trying to fit a body together
that you can wrap in a poncho.
That got to you a lot
'cause you always knew how
close it was to yourself.
There were a lot of things
that bothered us a great deal,
but I think that was really the worst.
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.
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.
It's like a ballgame,
like a football game.
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, strafe.
Anything that moved, we strafed it.
We were coming in.
At the time, we dove down to 15,000 feet.
We were really going.
And with a lot of throttle
on it, we were going fast.
And I think they were shooting behind us.
Sometimes you'd go
down almost ground level.
Trains you'd hit them guys
and blow up a bunch of
steam and everything.
Go right on over and pull back up,
and come back around and
make another pass on.
You had to be careful
because if you shoot a
target that blows up on you,
you don't wanna be caught
in the middle of it.
Oh, accurate, very accurate.
If you picked a target and
you fired with the rocket,
it's gonna hit whatever you aim for.
I liked rockets, no problem at all.
I strafed trains,
I strafed water buffaloes,
anything on the ground that moved.
It was
exciting time, of course,
to dive down from that altitude.
Once we get down to couple hundred feet,
we would get down sometimes a lot closer.
You'd come down.
You could go well over 400, I'm sure.
But I never looked at
speedometer.
The fighters,
every one of them had a
gun camera in the wing.
It would be activated
by the same switch that you
were firing the guns with.
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 watch him burn.
I had 20/10 vision
and I could see the airplanes
before anybody ever saw,
and I could put myself in position.
It didn't take you long
and then you just give 'em a squirt.
That 50-caliber just rips
things all apart when it hits.
It does a beautiful
job, I'll put it that way.
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,
which means they gotta
make a real tight turn.
They could do that with a Zero.
I just fired long enough
for that guy to, you know, catch on fire,
then I released 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.
Four or five
rounds in that baby
and she'd come 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.
It's very, very impersonal.
My name
is Ittsei Nakagawa.
I was 15 years old when the
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
August 6th, 8:15 a.m., 1945.
Our family, Nakagawa family,
lived in a little village
area called Moroki-Ochiai,
which is approximately seven miles away
from the city of Hiroshima.
I could only remember
what was the 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.
And the kids, all the
students were trained
to become lathe operators, drillers,
I mean, they were all
manufacturing something.
Well, anyway, we were outside
walking toward our destination
and we heard the air raid go on.
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,
the signal came back and
said, "It's clear here."
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.
And meanwhile I was inside
a building then already.
And that's when
the whole thing just blew up.
You know, just everything went black.
Dust.
You can't see anything.
I mean, I didn't hear anything.
I didn't know it was a bomb.
Nobody knew what it was.
Only thing you look at is the person
and he's no longer a person anymore.
He's a burned person
with face swelling up,
hands swelling up.
Only thing I could see
is the button hanging from the clothes.
I mean, you can't help him.
You can't even touch him.
And, you know, one thing about burn,
you ever tender a burned person?
It's not one time, you know,
especially when their
skin is gone and so forth.
I mean, it peels off every time,
it's just like new skin comes off.
You gotta take it off
and wash it down with,
what do you 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 at back and I say,
"Ay, why did I survive this thing here?"
And it's very simple.
Just nature's the only way
that you can describe it,
but there's more than nature.
It's there's other people that dying
that becomes part of you.
Yeah, but I should have still
tried to save those guys.
I can tell you
something about that bomb.
Every Marine in my outfit
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.
I think the
Japanese should thank us.
They should thank us for
dropping the atomic bomb
because we probably would've
killed 30 or 40 million of them
in the end, you know.
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.
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.
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.
It was all bombed out
and probably it looked like
flatland and no trees, nothing.
Just a bombed out place, you know?
But there
was one thing standing,
a big long chimney going up in the air
that it must have been 200 feet high.
First of
all, it was like burned,
it was black.
It was pretty much all down the buildings.
Things sticking up here and there.
And this here and there, there's a wall,
just a wall of a building.
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 dropped atomic bomb
so anybody else in the world
can drop the atomic bomb.
Had we not dropped atomic bomb,
we wouldn't have this hanging
over our head that we did it
so anybody else can do it.
Well, I
met Frank Oppenheimer,
who's the brother of Bob Oppenheimer,
who is the designer for
the Manhattan Project
for the development of the atomic bomb.
If you know the story
of genie in the bottle?
I says, "Yeah, I sort
of remember that story.
"Well," he says, "the
genie's 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."
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 didn't, 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 other people that you talked to?
Thank God that I didn't have
to stare somebody in the face
and kill 'em because if I may,
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.
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.
One last question.
Are you guys the greatest generation?
Yes, I believe that myself.
Not because I'm part of it, but...
everything changed after World War Two.
I think we were
the greatest generation
because some advertising man
decided it sounded pretty good to say it,
it was a lot of damn propaganda,
but really, we were a
different generation,
not greater, but different.
If you went
through the Depression,
as I did from ten years old to going into
the service at 19,
that was such a harsh period
in the life of American people.
You know, I always say
that we were taught to
get along as best we could
in what you had,
and probably that's what
made American soldiers great,
because they improvise almost all of 'em.
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.
You can talk
to any veteran you want to
and they don't understand at all, why?
'Cause most divisiveness
going on in our country
between politics, it's crazy.
Well, when 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 gone to waste,
and all these guys that cause the war,
how can they justify all that?
Just let them fight amongst themselves
and see how long it would last.
Well, I think
we've lost something,
the way we look at war today.
Who would have ever thought
that we would be in Vietnam for 16 years?
That's almost criminal.
I can hardly believe it.
That's something that I
would never have dreamed of.
Our war was on World
War I and World War I,
had a beginning and an end.
If I could do it again,
I would, for this country.
I do anything for this country.
I love this country.
I'm just getting teared up.
Now why you make me...
- Okay, have him clap.
- Let's just get all ready.
If you can
just tell me your name,
your age, and your rank in 1945.
My name is George M. Boutwell.
I was born July the 19th, 1924.
I'm retired Sergeant Major,
United States Marine Corps.
My name is George Vouros, born 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 18th, 1924.
My name is Monroe Ozment.
I was a Corporal, born
December 24th, 1925.
I was 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 two Jima,
and I'm 98 years old now.
Delbert Treichler.
I was a PFC in the Marine Corps.
My birthday is June 17th,
Richard Spooner, I'm 93.
And during World War I'll, when
we were in Okinawa in 1945,
I was a Private First Class.
George Puterbaugh, I was
a Water Tender First Class,
Acting Chief in the Navy.
Charles Schlag.
Hold on a second,
we got people walking on the stairs.
Okay.
My rank is Lieutenant
Commander, and I'm 97 years old.
I was a Sergeant in B-29 in top turret.
I was a Sergeant at two Jima
and a 19 years old.
I was a Buck Private on Okinawa
in the 184th Infantry Division
I was a gunner on a B-29.
I was the right gunner.
Just keep
looking at the camera.
Al Nelson, PFC
in 12-17-25.
Johnny Dean Page 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'm 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 I'll
from 1943 to 1946.
What else would you like to know?
Ralph C. Simoneau, Private.
My birthday is July 5th, 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 two Jima, and on
two Jima, did an action
that eventually earned
me the Medal of Honor.
Now | I'm
gonna take some pictures.
Just give me a sec.
My name is
Maurice Joseph Hubert.
I was a first mate,
Pharmacist's Mate, First Class.
I did five landings during World War II.
Thank
you for your service.
Bear with us here.
Okay?
- Okay.
- You good?
- Okay.
- Okay, and-
- Any time okay?
- And you're ready to go.
Any time's okay.
This
is a Japanese ballad,
which was written a few hundred years ago,
it means they want peace
on this whole world
for the sake of people around the world.
But, you know, I haven't
done this in how many years?
40, 50 years?
- It's good.
- Hai.
My name is Ittsei Nakagawa.
I was 15 years old when the
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
We were all Americans.
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.
We were one in those days.
And, you know, now at 93,
having been through the war
and a couple of other wars since,
I look back and I still feel the same way.
We had a strong belief in this country.
I was
sitting in Sunday school
and my mother came over and informed us
that the Japanese had
just bombed Pearl Harbor.
At 9:30 on a Sunday morning, 1941.
I was in a movie theater,
the Strand Theater on
47th Street and Broadway.
When I come out, 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."
Nobody in my town
knew where Pearl Harbor was.
Even my parents didn't know.
Never heard of it before.
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.
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.
How
could we stand for that?
Thinking, "Well, we'll be going to war,
and the draft will be
starting, and so forth."
And I thought,
"How soon is that gonna
be before they get to me?"
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."
And of course that proved to be wrong too.
I didn't think
of 'em as bad guys, I guess.
I thought of 'em as someone
who is trying to kill me,
and I'm just trying to
prevent that from happening,
and then of course maybe
Kill them, you know?
Oh, they're terrible people,
Horrible people.
Of course the Marine Corps
had to get you in the mood
of kill or be killed, you know,
and think nothing about it.
That was part of their
training, I suppose,
that you had to hate these people
to be able to go into battle
and kill 'em, I guess.
We all hated the Japs.
That's all they called them, Japs.
And we'd heard about the cruelty,
captured any of us, of our boys.
It's a scary thing when you stop and think
you have all those people
ahead of you that hate you.
Well, the
Japs, they were not like us.
They were some other kind of religion
and they were a war-like people.
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 deserve, to get killed.
Whether they were men, women, or children,
they were Japanese, and
they were not nice people.
They started a war.
We ended it.
You can only hate so much
and we realized the Japanese
were worthy of our hatred.
However, we couldn't help but
notice in fighting the Japs
that they were the bravest
damn people around.
I look back and I still feel the same way
over the enemy soldiers that we fought.
I think we were young
and it was the beginning of the war,
and our idea was to kill the enemy,
To kill as many of the enemy as we could.
I can't speak for other guys,
But I always felt that
I was doing a great job
if I killed the enemy,
killed the fighter that
was coming in to kill us.
He was that little son of a bitch,
forgive the expression.
They
told us that they were very
vicious people, that for
them to die was an honor.
They were not going to give up.
They just wouldn't do it.
They would find some
way to commit hara-Kiri
because in their philosophy,
in their culture,
to die for the emperor
was the highest honor they could have.
That was their belief,
so it made them very tenacious people
because even if they died,
they're going to be rewarded for that.
And we were just the opposite.
We, Marines, would do almost
anything to preserve a life.
They were tough.
They had a field day and took
all the territory around them.
And then we had to make
them divest themselves of it
and we divested them,
we got them out of the way.
It
Didn't bother me to shoot them
'cause if I didn't shoot
them, they gon' shoot me.
And being country so,
eye for eye, you know.
We went there
and we had a interpreter
with us. And he tried to talk to 'em,
to tell 'em.
"Come out, surrender.
The war is going to end.
Come out and save your lives."
Come on out and they can
surrender, but they wouldn't do it.
But whenever they'd come
out there and stand there
and then jump off the cliffs
or else shoot theirs elf
or stab theirs elf
"cause they were not
gonna be taken captive.
They were families.
Mothers and fathers and
children would join hands
and watch at the edge of the cliff.
They'd hesitate,
I guess they were saying
something to one another.
They'd hesitate a moment
and they knew the Japanese
soldiers were gonna shoot them
if they didn't jump, so they'd
just go over all together,
but there were a lot of mothers
that had babies strapped on
their backs, just little babies,
and they would go over the cliffs.
We couldn't stop them, you know.
There's nothing we could do.
They wanted to die rather
than to have us take them.
I remember them telling us
that we were going to a
place called two Jima.
And they told us the size of it,
2 1/2 miles wide and five miles long.
And most of us, as we talked afterwards,
why would you take such a little place?
Well, when they put us aboard ship,
they just go down to
the ocean and go aboard.
They told us we were going
to disembark before daylight.
We had our chow.
We had steak and eggs.
I haven't figured that, why
they give you steak and eggs
when you're going into
combat, but anyway, they did.
I got on an LCVP,
that's a small landing craft.
And so, they got a net
that goes over the side.
And of course, you've got
all your equipment on you,
your pack, and your rifle,
and your helmet, and all that.
You got that with you.
Well, you're over the side
and you step on the zips,
and you had to step in those
to get down to the landing craft.
And that was scary because, you know,
they're both so rocky, you know.
Of course,
they didn't tell us much,
the lower ranks 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 two Jima.
Well, where the hell was that?
You sort of
have the 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 like crazy.
And a lot of kids praying, mostly.
It's kind of a,
impending death is what it is.
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 it to a T.
When the ramp went down
on the Higgins boat,
and we ran out of there, hit the beach,
there's still artillery
and mortars coming around.
I looked down this beach to my left
and here are stacks of bodies.
Yeah, it was
not a friendly place.
A lot of thoughts going
through your mind, I know.
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.
It had 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
were all the machine guns
and the pillboxes over there.
You poke your head up over that,
you're a dead person right there.
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?
I've always said
that a corpsman was not very bright
because here's a guy that just got shot,
and the corpsman runs
to the very same spot
that this guy just got shot,
but they were the most
committed people in any outfit.
Got so that I didn't
know what my real name was.
Everyone was, "Doc, hey, Doc.
Pretty much calling
for doc, needed a doc.
A lot of casualties.
I never like to remember any of those.
I always try to put it behind me.
But I managed to survive.
The good Lord was on my shoulder.
Legs, arms,
heads, bodies all torn up.
You could hardly dig a
foxhole in order to hide in,
so we were terribly exposed there.
We were thinking
about saving our asses.
That's true.
Because boy, well, it scared us.
It scared us tremendously, yeah.
It's a horrible feeling.
It's a horrible feeling.
Like in another world or something.
I was dumb.
I didn't think too much about it.
When you're young like that,
you're not gonna get killed.
How are they gonna kill you?
I guess that's what
really carried a lot of us
through the battle,
thinking that we weren't
gonna get killed or nothing.
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,
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've
been killed there.
It took forever
and a day to get 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 boys were praying,
18, 19-year-old literally calling, sorry.
I think about it.
They were calling for their mother.
Pulling the
bodies out of the water
and the body parts, that
was the first shock I had.
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.
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 the foot let
him get off that island
and he was real happy that
it had happened to him.
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 and the pipe
and let it go.
And 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, you know.
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 with the flame, yeah.
And that gets them.
I'm laying there with some kind of a hole
when Marines around me began
yelling something about a flag.
And I just looked up
and a couple of them were standing there
shooting their weapons into the air.
So, I fired my weapon into the air
a few times too, you know.
We left
two, we passed the cemetery.
Thousands, thousands of white crosses.
It shook me up.
I got so emotional seeing all those,
honest to God, I'm not lying to you.
It bothered me to see all
those heroes, those Marines,
it bothered me, you know what I mean?
It did, it really chewed me up.
That's the only time I
ever got really emotional.
It was sad.
When I was told
that I was to go to the General's tent,
I couldn't imagine what I had done
that would require me to go as a Corporal.
If he used the term Medal of Honor,
it didn't mean a thing 'cause
I never heard tell of it.
I didn't even know such thing existed.
So, on the day that I eliminated the enemy
with them seven pillboxes,
that is the beginning of a
time when my life changed.
I didn't know it at the time.
I didn't know that four
hours of time in my life
was going to generate a
whole new life for me.
And that's what it did.
Curtis
LeMay had no reservations
about killing crews.
And LeMay's position was, and
I've 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."
Well, when
you're ready to take off,
you're pretty busy, up on top,
or I was looking out the bomb bay,
tell the captain or whatever it was.
You use
every bit of the runway
and maybe a little bit of the
threshold at the other end.
It's almost as dramatic to
get all these airplanes off
and being over the target.
I said wait a minute now.
I think I remember Tokyo Rose.
I think I remember listening to that.
And somehow I seem to remember
that they knew we were coming
and who we were at the time.
I don't know how.
We lost close to
18 to 20% of our bombers
over a period of the time
that we were in combat.
When you flew to a target,
you all flew separately to the IP.
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 ready to attack,
and the bombardier was
getting ready to bomb.
Everybody was tense.
When you had a frontal attack
and you had 12 airplanes
with the total number of guns
come to I think 92, forward
firing 50-caliber guns,
every fifth bullet is a tracer.
Four guns at
the top, two at the back.
He says, "Fire, fire, fire."
You say, "Thank
God, you spared me,"
because they come in,
sometimes with three
or six fighter planes,
and sometimes one poor son
of a bitch were coming at you
because there were no other fighter planes
left in his particular group.
And they
got the son of a gun.
Yeah, he got fired.
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.
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 were going to bomb.
Of course the toughest place
to bomb was Tokyo, the capital.
Everything
I did, I enjoyed doing.
I really shouldn't say
that I was killing people,
but I really didn't mind
doing it at the time
because the people we was bombing, Japan,
and they were not nice
people, so I didn't mind.
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.
Tokyo was burning.
I saw an apartment building right there.
Would you believe it?
I was counting the
floors, one, two, three.
And sometimes I sit there and I say,
"I wonder how many people I killed
each time we dropped a bomb.
100? 300?
I didn't mind doing it at
the time, but today, I worry.
And did I feel sorry? Yes.
I felt sad for the people
'cause you're not killing all soldiers.
You're killing people.
My co-leader,
a fellow by the name of Shorty Hull,
he was on my right wing.
When we got hit, Shorty
pulled out and started down.
The airplane went off and crashed.
And we found out after the war,
he landed near a military installation.
They court martialed him
for being an invader,
and beheaded him right there.
I always wanted to fly.
And I guess because of
that, I flew the airplane.
The airplane didn't fly me.
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.
We felt we were superior
when we were out there.
We didn't worry about them so
much as being a problem to us.
We figure we're
indestructible.
We'd go up and watch the
other guys land.
Yeah, we'd go up and watch everything.
Probably if
you weren't in combat,
you have a good book and read it.
Our bathrooms
were just a trough
running down on sea water.
And there was 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 boys.
The guy had to get out of there fast
or he'd have got killed.
I used to
sit up on the capstans
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.
I was a fire
control man on the USS Intrepid.
And my job was firing the guns,
that's what the fire control man did.
And they had charge of maintenance
of the radio equipment.
The aircraft carriers
were the prime target
because they were doing the most damage.
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.
Their 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.
I was combat air
patrol over the Franklin.
And Franklin was loaded,
airplanes all gassed.
They hadn't launched yet.
All the planes are gassed.
I saw this plane coming in
and I thought he was coming to us,
but it turned towards the Franklin.
And I saw him come down and kaboom.
It went through the flight deck.
Between the
conning tower and the stern,
some place in there.
We watched it.
It was just like a water fall
of gasoline over the side.
People say,
"Well, were you scared?"
Well, no, you're busy.
There's probably two
to three more coming in
that you have to keep track of.
They'd come
around dropping their bombs.
After the bombs were dropped,
a lot of 'em would come
in to dive into the ship.
We had
4,500 sailors killed with
those things. And when we were at anchor,
we had a kamikaze come right over,
and 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.
You hear
the five-inchers go off
and then it goes boom, boom, boom.
Five-inch shells, right? You don't worry.
And you hear the 40-millimeters
going boom, boom, boom, boom.
Then 20-millimeters,
and you hear boom, boom,
boom, boom, boom, boom.
Uh-oh, it's coming closer.
Then the 50-calibers and you get brr.
They had to be fanatics.
They were fanatics in fact.
Oh, they're all
going to heaven.
At least that's what they thought.
When they
started that stuff,
boy, that's all they wanted
to do was to crash into us.
So we were lucky 'cause we could zigzag
and that would screw their firing.
He's coming up
the fantail.
And the carrier turns, and
when he gets right,
They're gonna let him have it.
When you're firing,
you've got tracer bullets
that you see out there.
And you gotta try to get
ahead of them and so forth.
And just like shooting pheasant, you know,
you gotta give them
lead time and so forth.
And you'd think wasn't really any trouble
shooting them down, but they
keep flying until they crash.
They were different
than the Japanese Zero fighters
that were the professional aviators.
Kamikazes didn't seem
to take evasive action.
Sometimes
they'd come in real high
and come diving at ya.
And sometimes you're right
on the water, you know,
and then they'd come up and down
when they'd get close to you.
When we'd knock a plane
down before, it got to you.
There was always a big hurrah, so forth,
just like a football game.
They blew
the Jap up on our deck.
And the skipper said,
"Man the brooms and sweep
him overboard."
One time we were firing
and 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.
And then it spewed fire all
over the islands and the hangar
and the flight deck.
If you can imagine all
our stuff catching on fire
and blowing up.
It just raised havoc to
the whole hangar deck.
I lost a couple of good
buddies in that one.
That's when I got hit and
my clothes caught on fire
and my back was burnt and so forth.
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.
I spent 17 days
and ah... stuck in a Georgia hospital,
and I saw so many Navy
boys burned, in bad shape.
It's a terrible sight
to see these legs and stuff torn off.
And so then, after
everything is settled down,
we got all of these guys that are dead.
Well, then it comes time to bury them,
and they put them in hammocks,
and put a five-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.
It's so sad they have
to lose 'em that way.
Well, if you
talk to any of the Marines,
they would have answered you this way.
Golden Gate in '48, bread line in '49.
We all knew we couldn't possibly
win the war before 1948.
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?
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.
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.
The caves and
tunnels that they had,
most of them were open.
But our procedure was
that to get a flamethrower
and fire that flame in there
for eight or 10 or 15 seconds.
Hopefully that will go back in there
and keep the Japanese from coming out.
And we were back
and to shoot any of the come running out
'cause they better off
us shooting 'em dead
rather than them burn up that way.
But it's something that always
struck in my mind, you know.
You never dream of something like that.
When they fire that flamethrower
into the cave,
two or three Japs would come running out
and they're totally burning,
trying to escape it.
They could run about 20
yards and that was it.
It was all over, yep.
The smell was terrible.
Especially when the
flamethrower hits them.
It's a smell you can remember.
You not only smelled it
but you could see the
hide running off of them.
Just running off of them.
It's something you don't
wanna keep thinking about it.
There was
more than just flames.
The sounds were terrible,
but then when someone said,
"Okay, you guys, we're moving
out," and you're taking fire
and knowing the only way
you can avoid being killed
was sheer luck.
There wasn't anything
you personally could do.
No heroics or no
intelligent move, nothing.
You had to move. You were told to move.
The rest of the troops are moving.
And if the enemy was firing at you,
you just had to be lucky.
Yeah,
it was raining, muddy,
always muddy there.
You get used to it.
And, of course, when you're
young, 18 and 19 and 20,
you can take a lot,
and you're surprised
what all you can take.
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 what we had to
do to get 'em out of there.
It was hard
to move around on Okinawa.
There was mud everywhere
and that just exacerbated everything.
If you had to march somewhere,
you were slipping and
sliding and you were in mud.
Some of the vehicles couldn't
operate because of the mud.
That made it more difficult.
You can't describe death,
nor can you forget it.
Right now, as soon as you
mentioned it, I can smell it.
You're so thankful for
when there's a little wind
that's blowing the stuff away from you.
It's very hard to carry on
when you're smelling that.
It affects the way you think and move.
Some of it, like the smell
that is there forever,
you get away from it, but
just thinking about it,
it'll come back to ya, 78
years later or whatever it is.
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,
and 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.
I think the
worst part of combat,
and the whole time, on all the islands,
the worst part was picking
up your buddies' pieces
and trying to fit a body together
that you can wrap in a poncho.
That got to you a lot
'cause you always knew how
close it was to yourself.
There were a lot of things
that bothered us a great deal,
but I think that was really the worst.
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.
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.
It's like a ballgame,
like a football game.
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, strafe.
Anything that moved, we strafed it.
We were coming in.
At the time, we dove down to 15,000 feet.
We were really going.
And with a lot of throttle
on it, we were going fast.
And I think they were shooting behind us.
Sometimes you'd go
down almost ground level.
Trains you'd hit them guys
and blow up a bunch of
steam and everything.
Go right on over and pull back up,
and come back around and
make another pass on.
You had to be careful
because if you shoot a
target that blows up on you,
you don't wanna be caught
in the middle of it.
Oh, accurate, very accurate.
If you picked a target and
you fired with the rocket,
it's gonna hit whatever you aim for.
I liked rockets, no problem at all.
I strafed trains,
I strafed water buffaloes,
anything on the ground that moved.
It was
exciting time, of course,
to dive down from that altitude.
Once we get down to couple hundred feet,
we would get down sometimes a lot closer.
You'd come down.
You could go well over 400, I'm sure.
But I never looked at
speedometer.
The fighters,
every one of them had a
gun camera in the wing.
It would be activated
by the same switch that you
were firing the guns with.
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 watch him burn.
I had 20/10 vision
and I could see the airplanes
before anybody ever saw,
and I could put myself in position.
It didn't take you long
and then you just give 'em a squirt.
That 50-caliber just rips
things all apart when it hits.
It does a beautiful
job, I'll put it that way.
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,
which means they gotta
make a real tight turn.
They could do that with a Zero.
I just fired long enough
for that guy to, you know, catch on fire,
then I released 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.
Four or five
rounds in that baby
and she'd come 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.
It's very, very impersonal.
My name
is Ittsei Nakagawa.
I was 15 years old when the
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
August 6th, 8:15 a.m., 1945.
Our family, Nakagawa family,
lived in a little village
area called Moroki-Ochiai,
which is approximately seven miles away
from the city of Hiroshima.
I could only remember
what was the 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.
And the kids, all the
students were trained
to become lathe operators, drillers,
I mean, they were all
manufacturing something.
Well, anyway, we were outside
walking toward our destination
and we heard the air raid go on.
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,
the signal came back and
said, "It's clear here."
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.
And meanwhile I was inside
a building then already.
And that's when
the whole thing just blew up.
You know, just everything went black.
Dust.
You can't see anything.
I mean, I didn't hear anything.
I didn't know it was a bomb.
Nobody knew what it was.
Only thing you look at is the person
and he's no longer a person anymore.
He's a burned person
with face swelling up,
hands swelling up.
Only thing I could see
is the button hanging from the clothes.
I mean, you can't help him.
You can't even touch him.
And, you know, one thing about burn,
you ever tender a burned person?
It's not one time, you know,
especially when their
skin is gone and so forth.
I mean, it peels off every time,
it's just like new skin comes off.
You gotta take it off
and wash it down with,
what do you 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 at back and I say,
"Ay, why did I survive this thing here?"
And it's very simple.
Just nature's the only way
that you can describe it,
but there's more than nature.
It's there's other people that dying
that becomes part of you.
Yeah, but I should have still
tried to save those guys.
I can tell you
something about that bomb.
Every Marine in my outfit
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.
I think the
Japanese should thank us.
They should thank us for
dropping the atomic bomb
because we probably would've
killed 30 or 40 million of them
in the end, you know.
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.
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.
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.
It was all bombed out
and probably it looked like
flatland and no trees, nothing.
Just a bombed out place, you know?
But there
was one thing standing,
a big long chimney going up in the air
that it must have been 200 feet high.
First of
all, it was like burned,
it was black.
It was pretty much all down the buildings.
Things sticking up here and there.
And this here and there, there's a wall,
just a wall of a building.
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 dropped atomic bomb
so anybody else in the world
can drop the atomic bomb.
Had we not dropped atomic bomb,
we wouldn't have this hanging
over our head that we did it
so anybody else can do it.
Well, I
met Frank Oppenheimer,
who's the brother of Bob Oppenheimer,
who is the designer for
the Manhattan Project
for the development of the atomic bomb.
If you know the story
of genie in the bottle?
I says, "Yeah, I sort
of remember that story.
"Well," he says, "the
genie's 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."
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 didn't, 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 other people that you talked to?
Thank God that I didn't have
to stare somebody in the face
and kill 'em because if I may,
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.
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.
One last question.
Are you guys the greatest generation?
Yes, I believe that myself.
Not because I'm part of it, but...
everything changed after World War Two.
I think we were
the greatest generation
because some advertising man
decided it sounded pretty good to say it,
it was a lot of damn propaganda,
but really, we were a
different generation,
not greater, but different.
If you went
through the Depression,
as I did from ten years old to going into
the service at 19,
that was such a harsh period
in the life of American people.
You know, I always say
that we were taught to
get along as best we could
in what you had,
and probably that's what
made American soldiers great,
because they improvise almost all of 'em.
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.
You can talk
to any veteran you want to
and they don't understand at all, why?
'Cause most divisiveness
going on in our country
between politics, it's crazy.
Well, when 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 gone to waste,
and all these guys that cause the war,
how can they justify all that?
Just let them fight amongst themselves
and see how long it would last.
Well, I think
we've lost something,
the way we look at war today.
Who would have ever thought
that we would be in Vietnam for 16 years?
That's almost criminal.
I can hardly believe it.
That's something that I
would never have dreamed of.
Our war was on World
War I and World War I,
had a beginning and an end.
If I could do it again,
I would, for this country.
I do anything for this country.
I love this country.
I'm just getting teared up.
Now why you make me...
- Okay, have him clap.
- Let's just get all ready.
If you can
just tell me your name,
your age, and your rank in 1945.
My name is George M. Boutwell.
I was born July the 19th, 1924.
I'm retired Sergeant Major,
United States Marine Corps.
My name is George Vouros, born 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 18th, 1924.
My name is Monroe Ozment.
I was a Corporal, born
December 24th, 1925.
I was 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 two Jima,
and I'm 98 years old now.
Delbert Treichler.
I was a PFC in the Marine Corps.
My birthday is June 17th,
Richard Spooner, I'm 93.
And during World War I'll, when
we were in Okinawa in 1945,
I was a Private First Class.
George Puterbaugh, I was
a Water Tender First Class,
Acting Chief in the Navy.
Charles Schlag.
Hold on a second,
we got people walking on the stairs.
Okay.
My rank is Lieutenant
Commander, and I'm 97 years old.
I was a Sergeant in B-29 in top turret.
I was a Sergeant at two Jima
and a 19 years old.
I was a Buck Private on Okinawa
in the 184th Infantry Division
I was a gunner on a B-29.
I was the right gunner.
Just keep
looking at the camera.
Al Nelson, PFC
in 12-17-25.
Johnny Dean Page 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'm 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 I'll
from 1943 to 1946.
What else would you like to know?
Ralph C. Simoneau, Private.
My birthday is July 5th, 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 two Jima, and on
two Jima, did an action
that eventually earned
me the Medal of Honor.
Now | I'm
gonna take some pictures.
Just give me a sec.
My name is
Maurice Joseph Hubert.
I was a first mate,
Pharmacist's Mate, First Class.
I did five landings during World War II.
Thank
you for your service.