Shooting War Page #8

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along that road.

When I looked in, I was so shocked.

Could you imagine, not having seen

anything like that before,

to see a boxcar full of dead,

emaciated people?

At that moment,

I forgot I was a photographer.

I was just overcome by it all.

I was on an assignment with Ellis Carter.

We went into Germany to cover

bomb damage by the Allied airpower.

On April 11th, the 3rd US Army

liberated Buchenwald.

When we heard of this,

we immediately drove over there.

What the cameramen found

was beyond their imagining,

but the inhumanity they recorded

is literally undeniable.

As a solider, I had no knowledge

of these camps.

I had not heard anything about it.

It was horrible. There were bodies

stacked up like cordwood.

We judged them to be

about 60 to 80 pounds in weight.

People were actually dying day by day,

even after the camp was liberated.

Many of the prisoners

could not speak English,

but they raised their hands and showed

their gratitude for us freeing them.

This camp had about 20,000 survivors

at the time of liberation

and about 8,000 of 'em were children.

There was a section

where they displayed tattooed skins,

which were made

into lampshades and book covers.

The German commandant's wife

would select tattooed men

to be doomed to die

and then use their skin.

After a few days, the German civilians

of the town next to Buchenwald,

called Weimar, were paraded through

on a tour of the camp

to show the atrocities and to show them

what the Germans had done.

Many of them wouldn't even look

at the torture or the bodies.

Some of them were crying and some

had their mouth and nose covered,

especially the women.

So, in the filming that we did,

it's evident they just kept going through

because they had to.

They weren't too interested

in looking at the atrocities.

There was a lot of people

that didn't believe it happened.

Here we had it on film.

In all the time I was over there,

this experience stood out in my mind.

It took a while to get over it.

It was something

that you wouldn't wanna see,

you wouldn't wanna go through again.

The horrors of the camp had

a more immediate effect on Art Mainzer.

After what he had seen,

he yearned for normalcy.

I met her in Paris, the day before

the Battle of the Bulge started.

Believe it or not, we were walking down

the boulevard, it starts snowing,

and my buddy and I saw these two

lovely ladies under an umbrella.

So we sneaked in under the umbrella

and introduced ourselves.

I made the decision after I covered

the Buchenwald assignment.

I said, "If I ever get back to France alive,

I'm gonna ask Germaine to marry me."

Being a camera unit,

we had three 16mm cameras

and a couple of Speed Graphics

for the still photos.

We had some cases of champagne that

the Germans looted from the French,

so we got it back to France.

A lot of French people showed up.

In this suburb of Paris, they had not had

a formal wedding during the occupation.

It was quite an event for them.

It was a June wedding,

the month after VE day.

The pictures were his unit's gift to them.

The Mainzers lived together

in the United States

until Germaine passed away in 1998,

after almost 53 years of marriage.

Iwo Jima, February 1945.

As the Americans came closer to Japan,

fighting in the Pacific

grew still more bitter.

The bombardment crumbled one side

of lwo's key bastion, Mount Suribachi,

but it took five bloody days

to reach its summit.

When the marines set out

to place a flag on Suribachi,

they still encountered resistance,

but they persevered

and the flag was raised.

It lacked properly heroic proportions.

Something would have to be done.

It was too small to be seen.

The commanding general figured

we gotta get a bigger flag.

They got some of the LSTs

that were there.

One LST commander said, We've

got a big flag but we've never flown it."

My boss said to me, "Make sure

you send photographers up.

"This will be the official flag raising."

I got in touch with Genaust

and Bob Campbell.

Bill Genaust and Bob hooked up

with Rosenthal going up the hill.

That was Joe Rosenthal

of the Associated Press,

a civilian photographer who had taken

these pictures of the landing.

These are the shots

Genaust took on that climb.

A few days later he was killed in action.

He would not live

to see the images he made.

People would always contest whether

this was the first or the other one.

Bob Campbell didn't like the position

the other two cameramen were in.

So he moved and got a picture

of the first flag coming down

and the second one

going up at the same time.

Rosenthal, however, got the immortal

shot, and a lifetime's controversy,

for he shipped all his pictures back

unseen and undeveloped.

Joe gets on a boat about four days later

and goes to Guam.

He's bombarded by the press

saying, "What was this picture?"

They wanna know

what he thought about it.

He says, "Maybe

it's that picture I posed

"with all the men under the flagpole

raising their rifles."

That word "posed" got

into the lexicon of the problem.

It's hung in there for years and years.

We have fought for 50 years

to try to straighten it out.

I thought at the end of the 50th

anniversary, we got it resolved,

but I think it'll probably go on

for another 50.

The comparison with

the movie footage is definitive.

Rosenthal took the same shot Genaust

did from virtually the same position.

This controversy masks the real story

of lwo Jima, its cost.

Almost 7,000 marines died here,

along with 21,000 Japanese.

The marines won 27 medals of honour,

more than in any other engagement.

Manila, spring of 1945.

It was now "war without mercy",

as one historian called it.

The fires the Japanese set

destroyed 70% of the city.

They killed 100,000 civilians

in an orgy of destruction.

This vengeance on the innocent

was recorded by Don Honeyman.

Next day, the infantry

was moving into the city.

We got some very good street fighting.

Honeyman then joined forces

surrounding the presidential palace.

We were going to the gardens, which

included the other side of the river.

We had the north bank of the river

and they had the south bank,

so we made a crossing of the river

in assault boats.

One wave of boats went over.

They didn't have any trouble.

I figured it was safe

to go on the second run.

We got out in the middle

and the Japanese began to shoot at us

from the side of the river we thought

was ours, which was hardly fair.

Armoured amphibious vehicles

brought the troops safely to shore.

Came across a BAR man

who happened to be down on his elbows,

next to a sign saying,

"Please do not pick the flowers."

In the city, fighting remained intense.

A Japanese strong point

was the legislative palace.

Eight-inch howitzers lined up

side by side, practically,

firing point-blank...

...simply taking down the building

stone by stone, practically.

Despite the firepower levelled at them,

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