Price for Peace Page #2

There's no question about that.

They were physically fit,

knew how to use their weapons,

teamwork had been

built into them very well.

So, I think they were

very well-trained troops.

The training did prepare me

to do, professionally, my job,

but it didn't train me to do the

biggest job, and that's not be afraid.

I was scared to death, I tell you.

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto was

the top admiral in the Japanese navy,

responsible for laying out

the strategy of how to win the war.

Yamamoto thought the Americans

would be disheartened and negotiate.

And it all came crashing down

as the American people went to work.

The whole country went to war.

They rolled Red Cross bandages,

sorted buttons.

You wanted to be a part of the war effort

because they had attacked us.

The force at home turned out ships,

planes and bullets in record numbers.

This is the first time women

had left their homes and gone to work.

My wife was a welder. She worked

in the bottom of the ship, 40 feet down.

We built 741 ships.

We built one every four days

and sent them out to sea.

We felt like we was building ships

to bring our husbands home in.

We wanted to go to work.

We wanted to help win the war.

One of the most important things

was the building of the landing craft.

You could run it right onto the beach,

drop that ramp,

a platoon of men come out

and they're right there on the beach,

firing immediately when they get off

that Higgins boat, as it was called.

They made nothing except war stuff.

Whatever you had,

that's it until the war was over.

You can't get butter.

You can't get sugar.

It was very difficult getting new shoes.

Tyres were rationed, gas was rationed

to only so much a month,

and we all worked with it.

Everybody was sacrificing,

to make this a military that could

fight in both theatres, and we did.

The Philippines

was a complete loss to us

because this was one of the chain of

islands that was key to us in the Pacific.

We lost the Philippines,

they overran Bataan,

then they took Corregidor,

then the Bataan death march.

We lost Guam. Everything was loss.

Then came the Doolittle raid

that bombed Tokyo.

Jimmy Doolittle was appointed to head

the raid, and he was the man for it.

We took off about 8.

We were over the target about 12.30.

We hedge-hopped in

right on top of the water

and pulled up to our bombing altitude

of 1800 feet.

If you're dropping bombs at 1800 feet,

you just can't miss, period.

It was the first raid on Japan

and gave the US a shot in the arm.

It didn't do much damage,

it wasn't a big operation,

but it lifted spirits across America.

Perhaps the biggest decision

in the Pacific war was island-hopping.

We weren't strong enough yet

to go directly to Japan and leave

all these islands out in the Pacific.

So the islands in the Pacific,

we island-hopped.

Just as you would cross a stream,

and you jump from rock to rock to rock

to get to the other side.

And eventually get close enough to

launch our aircraft to bomb Japan.

It was the strategic decision that

guided the whole war in the Pacific.

It was one of the best decisions

ever made.

Aboard ship there was a lot of hours

where there was not much to do.

It was a long time on ship.

You'd lay on the deck in daytime.

We had some fun and games.

It mostly was boredom. You got up,

ate, worked and went to bed.

There are problems keeping troops

aboard ship who don't have room to run.

So you run in place.

Then you give 'em physical exercises.

We didn't know where we were going

until maybe two weeks at sea.

After we got out at sea,

they start to brief us as to what our

mission was and where we were going.

People had all kinds of thoughts

about what might happen.

There was a great deal of praying,

a lot of soul-searching,

and the anticipation of a battle,

never having been in it before,

and wondering

what they were getting into.

In order to make an invasion work, the

navy's job is to go in before the invasion

and soften up the beach.

You destroy all of the enemy

on that beach.

The planes are bombing and

everybody is doing the best they can

to make sure there's not a soldier alive

of the enemy when we get there.

The night before D-Day

we were very nervous.

And we'd go up

and watch the bombardment.

I looked around and said,

"Are you scared?"

He said, "You're damn right I'm scared."

I said, "Who isn't scared?" He said,

"If you're not scared, you're not human."

I remember waking at dawn

and all of a sudden, this is for real.

About five in the morning,

after little sleep, if any,

we had chow call

and we had steak and eggs.

That's the only time ever,

of all the time I spent overseas,

that I got steak and eggs for breakfast.

It was a very eerie experience

having breakfast in civilised fashion

and realising that day we were

going ashore and might all be killed.

We began at about 6 a. m.

Getting ready for the assault.

We clambered down these cargo nets

and I was nervous with all this gear.

One thing they did not tell us, that boat

can come up under you very quickly.

You gotta hit that just right

or you'll knock your knees out.

In fact, we had one boy break a leg.

We rendezvoused in the ocean

about four miles off of the beach.

The circles broke

and formed parallel lines.

We were moving in and D-Day

and H-Hour was there with us.

There were over a hundred D-Days

in the Pacific on big and small islands.

But always the objective was to begin

the process of taking that island.

As we approached the beach,

I could feel a real tenseness

in everyone aboard that craft.

It was complete quiet.

While you're going towards the beach,

you're doing an awful lot of praying.

And some of the guys got a little sick.

I watched the guys around me.

They were scared, I was scared.

We had no reason not to be.

You don't know what's waiting for you.

They could wait

until you got on the beach,

or start firing right away.

You don't know.

When we were getting close

to the beach,

then you begin to feel,

"My God, this is real."

And then as soon as they drop

that ramp and you're exposed,

you feel like you're the nakedest person

in the world.

And you knew that they're gonna

start to shoot, which they did.

Very soon after that, all hell broke loose.

There was a tremendous volume of fire

coming from the defences.

I had never seen anything like this

in my life. Absolute hell.

There were 600-800 ships out here.

I was on one of them.

We took landing craft to the reef.

On the other side of the reef,

we changed to amphibious tractors.

The reason for that was,

here in the lagoon,

as you can see, the water's too shallow

for landing craft.

We went over the side

in about three feet of water.

I had 100 Ibs on my back.

A flame-thrower,

a bedroll and my ammunition.

I remember sinking into the sand 4

or 5 inches as I crossed the beach.

It was a bloody mess.

People were getting blown to pieces.

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