Shooting War Page #9

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the Japanese hung on in the palace.

Infantry would have to rout them out.

Next day I went to cover

the transfer of civil government

from MacArthur to the Filipinos.

He said very proudly

how Manila was now secure.

I said, "Except the legislative building."

Okinawa, Easter Sunday.

The idea was to stage the invasion

from this large island.

Rather innocently, Lloyd Durant decided

to shoot a film on combat cameramen.

What better subject to put on film than

the story of the combat cameraman,

who was practically

unknown at the time?

We knew our next operation

was in the Pacific.

I said, "Let me go out there

"and let me find the cameramen

we have out there,

"and presumably

they will be in on the action.

"I wanna be there photographing them

photographing the action."

So we hit the beach at Okinawa.

There I was working with these guys,

creeping in foxholes,

squirming along the beach,

and trying to keep the sand

out of the camera and my mouth.

They're trying to do the same thing.

Also, there were

a few bullets flying around.

The battle would continue

for three months.

Among the casualties,

the worst of the war, was a cameraman.

He was a navy cameraman.

Somehow or another

he was hit and blinded.

They had bandaged,

in the field, his eyes.

Some of it was still hanging down.

He could not see.

They brought him up

on the side of the ship.

He got to the top

and he's reaching for help.

He can't see a thing. His buddies

reached up and took him down.

Our commentary is,

"For this cameraman,

the picture was over."

And that's exactly what it was.

He never saw again.

Later that day, the kamikazes came in.

These were guys who were dedicated

to giving their lives for their country.

They crashed into us.

Our anti-aircraft guns

were working at them full time.

Our other problem was

our own flak coming down

did as much damage to many of us

as did the kamikazes.

It could go right through your helmet

if it hit you directly.

Bull Halsey said, "The kamikazes were

the only weapon I feared in the war."

In over 1300 of these suicide attacks,

they sank 26 ships and damaged 300.

This is some of the most

astonishing footage of the war.

There were many near misses,

but most of the navy casualties

at Okinawa are attributed to kamikazes.

They damaged some carriers

but sunk none, yet they persisted.

The last attack was mounted

after the surrender.

These B-24s are over

Balikpapan in Borneo.

The Ploieti of the Pacific,

the huge oil refinery was bombed

for 30 days in the summer of 1945.

They were softening it up for the last

amphibious landing of World War II.

The American coastguard

took Australian troops ashore.

Jerry Anker was there with

his buddy Jim, also a cameraman.

He wanted a picture of himself in action.

Anker obliged with a snap that

became famous in the photo histories.

When the landing craft

hit the beach at Balikpapan,

I said, "That idiot!" and I pulled up

my 4 x 5 and shot the picture.

I only took one picture

and it turned out to be a prize winner.

Here, in the war's waning days,

Anker was presented with

another more terrible photo opportunity.

I had been following this Australian

infantryman with a flame-thrower

for probably a half-hour.

It just so happened that when he shot

this flame-thrower into this cave,

this Japanese soldier

came running out in flames,

and I was able to photograph

the entire sequence.

To this day, I can still smell

the stench of that burning body.

That one unknown soldier dying in

agony, symbolises the waste of war.

Multiply his fate 100,000 times

and you begin to comprehend

Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But not entirely, for as many people

died later of radiation poisoning

as died in the initial blasts.

We are told these lives were traded

for those that would have been lost

in an invasion of Japan.

All we know for sure is the atomic bombs

brought the war to an abrupt end

and finally stopped

all the killing at over 40 million.

At Nagasaki,

as at the concentration camps,

the combat photographers

had one last service to render.

Dan McGovern speaks for all those

who entered this charnel house.

My effort was to show the world

what the atomic bomb

had done to a nation,

what it had done to human beings.

At the school in Nagasaki,

it sucked out hundreds of kids

through the windows.

I remember one particular scene

that I shot.

I couldn't figure out what was wrong

with this particular person.

He reminded me of a monk,

or Christ with his staff.

He was standing up on a rise

looking over the hill of Nagasaki

from the valley.

He was a radiologist

from the Nagasaki teaching hospital,

which is just down below the hill.

He told me then

that he had lost his wife,

that he was suffering

from radiation sickness.

Two days later he was gone.

Where people were sitting,

permanent shadows were burned.

It was the same way with things.

You can paint over the shadows,

but you cannot erase them.

That was my effort to it,

because we showed

the burned bodies of children.

People would cry out,

"Let's not do this again."

Yet we do. These pictures have been

duplicated in every war

for over a half-century.

The children reach out

in their abandonment,

their incomprehensible loneliness.

The soldiers offer

what comfort they can.

These men and these children

share the terrible bond of war.

But the soldiers will soon move on.

They will not know the fates of orphans

with whom they shared their humanity.

These pictures ought to assure

centuries of peace.

They do not.

But it may be

that after the shooting stops,

the combat cameramen

achieve their finest hour.

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