Price for Peace Page #5

and an arm moving with the water

like this.

I remember thinking, "He's beckoning me

to join him in death."

I found one of my sergeants

with a leg so badly wounded,

I thought he'd lose it.

He said to me,

"Captain, please help me."

I said, "I'll give you a shot of morphine,

then I got to go."

'Cause I'd been trained,

as all marine officers,

that when you have a single casualty

like that, give him quick attention,

call for somebody else and then you go.

I had another 220 marines

to worry about.

Oh, my God, I'm facing Japs

three or four foot away,

and I can't fire any more.

As I'm looking at my rifle

to see about unjamming it,

I see grenades to my right.

So I dove for them,

covered them with my body,

shoving the grenades

into the volcanic ash

to try to save the lives

of the three buddies that are with me.

And it blew me over on my back.

My guys left me.

They thought I was dead.

Another outfit

moving up discovered me.

They picked me up

and took me back to this place

where a lot of others were lying on cots.

Wounded.

I woke up when they were moving me

to a hospital ship headed to Honolulu.

My radio man

was a six-foot-two cowboy, Avery.

We went out on patrol and a Japanese

shell landed right next to us.

It cut Avery's leg off at the groin.

He did not pass out. There was

nowhere to put a tourniquet on it.

He cradled his own leg and he kept

saying to me, "Do something."

I sat with him until he died.

You soon learn that...

you're going to lose your buddies.

The question is which ones,

when, and when's it your turn?

When it was your buddy,

you'd sit down and cry.

It really was tough.

You hated to have to leave his body.

If your buddy gets killed,

you've got to have detachment and say,

"It's just a thing of the war.

"I really had nothing to do with it."

'Cause if you let it eat your guts out

then you're endangering your own life.

You've got to be practical about it.

It was our duty to fight the enemy.

It was war.

If we didn't kill them,

they would have killed us.

There was no time to regret our actions.

We went there to kill Japanese.

That's what we did.

And they were trying to kill us.

People were getting

blown to pieces on the beach,

some bodies evaporating

that were direct hits.

Are you going to lie down

on the beach and cry about it?

Back out and swim back to the boat?

You came here to fight.

It's either kill or be killed. It's no joke.

There's no use trying to dress it up.

You didn't worry about who he was

or how many kids he had,

who his granddaddy was.

Just blow him away and save myself.

When I pulled the trigger,

it was a target.

It was afterwards, that the impact

of what I'd done, taken a life, that...

...things started coming back to me

and I thought about them.

The hate in you begins to dissipate

because you realise

you've taken somebody's life

and it affects you.

I had to talk to somebody

and I talked to our sergeant.

And he said,

"Well, you get used to it after a while."

That was an answer, I guess.

"You get used to it."

I never did. Never did get used to it.

4th of July, we had killed 350.

I had three men wounded.

That is 350 dead bodies.

And when the sun comes up,

the gas in the body expands,

and the bodies are covered

with white maggots and black flies.

Then you got your cold ration and tried

to eat with the flies going in your mouth.

And as the gas expanded,

it would pass over the dead vocal cords,

and you'd hear the dead bodies

making weird groans

as the gas went over the cords.

We used to go to the caves with one

of those bullhorns with a speaker on it.

We went to see whether we might

talk any Japanese into surrendering.

Every morning,

the Americans tried to entice us

with chocolates and water to come out.

I don't think any of us had any hope

we could get 'em out alive,

but we thought we'd try.

What have we got to lose?

We'd say...

"Come on out. Don't be afraid.

Take off your uniform."

We would say,

"You fought honourably.

"We'll take good care of you

and your men."

We thought it was honourable

to stay underground.

The Americans

thought the opposite.

There was no food to eat

or water to drink.

So we all decided that, since

we hadn't seen the sun in three months,

we would go outside and get killed.

And when we went out,

we were captured by the Americans.

I was so weak.

I couldn't even hold up my arms

to surrender.

Then I realised

others were captured before me.

When I looked around,

there were other men I knew.

I thought we would all be

machine-gunned to death together.

I was glad I was not alone.

That's how I was captured.

We were out of medical supplies,

so the Americans treated our injured.

Life in the prison camps

was much better than I expected.

The people that got killed, we'd come

back later and pick up the remains.

And they'd be transferred

to the rear area to a temporary cemetery.

Before we loaded ship, they had

a big ceremony at the cemetery.

It was probably the most

heart-wrenching time of all.

We had an opportunity

to go and view all the crosses,

pick out our buddies.

Then a chaplain gave a service,

and it was the most solemn scene

of the whole operation.

We went aboard ship and were told

there'd be a beautiful meal for all of us.

The bakers had baked fresh loaves

of bread the night we got there

and a buddy of mine went and got a loaf,

hot out of the oven.

I'd never had anything as good

in my life.

It was just plain old white bread,

but it was good.

That's when we learned

that President Roosevelt had died.

On April 121945,

President Franklin Roosevelt died.

For most of the fighting men, he was

the only president they'd ever known.

Now Harry S Truman, the vice-president,

became their leader.

And the ending of this war fell to him.

So they took us way back to our base

on the island of Hawaii.

We re-formed and were getting ready

for the next operation,

which would've been landing

on Japan mainland.

The plan was to land a large number

of marine and army divisions

on the west coast of Kyushu, Japan,

on 1 November 1945.

There were going to be millions of people

involved in this

because we knew the Japanese

would use their women,

their children, anybody, to kill us.

In preparation for the arrival

of the US forces,

we made swords, spears

and sickles to fight with.

They were digging out foxholes

all across Japan.

They'd brought their best troops

to defend the home island,

and it was going to be

this horrendous battle.

It never happened.

Of course, the reason it never happened

is the atomic bomb.

The culmination of the American

production process

in the Second World War

was the atomic bomb,

which the Americans

had started working on in 1942,

and had completed by summer 1945.

President Truman ordered it used.

These are the bomb pits where the

atomic bombs were loaded on the B-29s.

This is where Paul Tibbets took off

in the B-29 he named Enola Gay

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