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Transcript of "OVER HERE"
  
 

SEGMENT 1
SEGMENT 2

SEGMENT 3 - The Ultimate Sacrifice

NARRATOR: IN SEPTEMBER OF 1940, TWO MONTHS AFTER THE FALL OF FRANCE, CONGRESS PASSED THE SELECTIVE SERVICE ACT, REQUIRING ADULT MALES BETWEEN THE AGES OF 21 AND 35 TO REGISTER FOR THE DRAFT. NATIONAL GUARD AND RESERVE UNITS WERE ORDERED TO ACTIVE DUTY FOR ONE YEAR, PREPARING FOR THE WORST. BUT WHEN IT HAPPENED, WE WERE STILL CAUGHT OFF GUARD.

Pollard - And I think it was a cowardice thing on Japan’s part, but I also think that some of our military should have known that such a fleet was moving across the Pacific.
Desko - And I heard it on the radio... immediately I thought well, this little boy’s going to go to the Army...

OVER NIGHT, RECRUITING OFFICES WERE CRAMMED WITH ENRAGED CITIZENS READY TO DEFEND THEIR HOMELAND. KANSAS CITY QUICKLY FILLED DRAFT QUOTAS…BEGINNING WITH NOEL CRAVEN. NOEL AND HIS FAMILY WERE CELEBRATING HIS 17TH BIRTHDAY WHEN THEY HEARD THE DEVASTATING NEWS OF PEARL HARBOR. THE NEXT MORNING, NOEL WAS THE FIRST RECRUIT IN LINE AT THE NAVY ENLISTMENT OFFICE IN KANSAS CITY.

Holland... when I woke up the next day, Noel was gone... Then that was the last time I saw him was the day of his birthday.

NOEL SHIPPED OUT ON A TANKER AS A GUNNER’S MATE, AND DURING THE CORAL SEA BATTLE, BECAME ONE OF OUR FIRST CASUALTIES.

Holland…he was killed by a plane that they had shot down and it crashed on the ship…I had never seen my father cry until then.

MEN LIKE NOEL WERE KNOWN AS THE AVENGERS OF PEARL HARBOR, VOLUNTEERING FOR SERVICE. YET MEN WHO WERE DRAFTED DID NOT BEGRUDGE THEIR PATRIOTIC DUTY. EVEN THOSE EXEMPT FROM SERVICE, DECLARED EITHER 4-F OR AS AN ESSENTIAL WORKER, WISHED TO DO THEIR PART.

Winn …they didn’t want a fellow with one leg anywhere. Which I still think was a big mistake. They could have used me and let somebody, release somebody else for active combat if that was their concern
Miller... My father, I remember as a child having him come in this one evening all distraught, and actually almost in tears, he’d try to join the army and the army refused to take him…they said you’ll do more good staying on the farm right where you are, and dad was, he felt like he wasn’t doing his part.

THE NEW RECRUITS TRAVELED TO FORT LEAVENWORTH FOR INDUCTION, WHERE THEY TOOK PHYSICALS AND WERE ASSIGNED EITHER ARMY OR NAVY. FROM THERE THEY WENT TO BOOT CAMP OR OTHER TRAINING SITES THROUGHOUT THE STATES. THE CIRCUMSTANCES ALSO CALLED FOR ACCELERATED OFFICER’S TRAINING AT VARIOUS COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES. LOCALLY, THESE 90 DAY WONDERS COULD BE FOUND IN A NAVAL V-12 UNIT AT PARK COLLEGE OR ON THE CAMPUS OF KU, TRAINING IN THE MERCHANT MARINES, COAST GUARD AND NAVAL AIR CORPS. IN KANSAS CITY, THE ARMY SIGNAL CORPS SET UP SCHOOLS SPECIALIZING IN RADIO AND RADAR COMMUNICATIONS. AND AS A HOTBED FOR AVIATION, IT WAS NOT UNUSUAL TO SEE GLIDER PILOTS AND PARATROOPERS CIRCLING THE SKIES AROUND LOCAL AIR FIELDS LIKE FAIRFAX, GRANDVIEW AND RICHARD’S FIELD. NAVAL AVIATION CADETS ALSO RECEIVED PRIMARY TRAINING AT THE NAVAL AIR STATION IN OLATHE, KANSAS, 25 MILES SOUTH OF KANSAS CITY —1000 MILES FROM THE NEAREST COAST.

Cox... One of the reasons was that it was in the center part of the United States. Obviously if the Japanese had wanted to come in and bomb, they could not have made it from the West Coast to here. … who would believe the navy would be in the middle of the United States to support ships…

IN THE FIRST TWO YEARS, NEARLY 4500 CADETS WERE PHASED THROUGH NAS-OLATHE, INCLUDING JOHN GLENN AND BOB BARKER. THE CADETS TRAINED IN TWO-SEATER BI-PLANES, NICKNAMED "YELLOW PERILS," WHICH PREPARED THEM FOR THEIR NEXT ASSIGNMENT. IN 1942, WOMEN WERE FINALLY GIVEN THE CHANCE TO JOIN THE MILITARY, IF ONLY TO PROVIDE NON-COMBAT JOBS IN OFFICE AND COMMUNICATIONS WORK.

Lackey …we weren’t trying to take the place of soldiers, we were just trying to do the jobs behind the lines…where an able body man could pick up the gun and go.

JUST AS THEIR MALE COUNTERPARTS, FEMALE RECRUITS WERE SENT TO BOOT CAMP FOR TRAINING.

Lackey... Our basic training was very similar to the same that the men got at that time. We did the same calisthenics, only not quite so many.… we all saluted the officers and then stuck our tongues out at the sergeants when they were passed us.

350,000 WOMEN SERVED THEIR COUNTRY UNDER THE UNUSUAL ACRONYMS OF WACS, WAVES, WASPS AND SPARS. NAS-OLATHE WAS HOME TO FORTY WAVES, OR WOMEN ACCEPTED FOR VOLUNTEER EMERGENCY SERVICE.
Miles... I was a flight orderly, Naval Air Transport service. …and we carried supplies, cargo and if we had room, we carried passengers in the bucket seats.… if we had weight room, we would carry boys, Army, Navy or Marines that were trying to get across the United States.

NOR WERE THE WOMEN AIR SERVICE PILOTS AT FAIRFAX RELEGATED TO DESK JOBS. INSTEAD OF TOTING CARGO, THE WASPS ACTUALLY PILOTED PLANES FRESH FROM AREA FACTORIES TO THE WAR FRONT. THE WOMEN HAD TO BE SKILLED IN FLYING EVERY TYPE OF PLANE IMAGINABLE, INCLUDING THE HUGE B-29S AND B-17S.
Desko …women flew our B-25s out of Fairfax out to the coasts where they were loaded and …flew them right to the field … And some of them are still alive and still bragging about it.

WHETHER THEY WERE FRESH RECRUITS ON THEIR WAY TO TRAINING, OR SEASONED SOLDIERS HEADING TO THE FRONT, IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT MOST WOULD PASS THROUGH UNION STATION. … AND NO MATTER HOW LONG THEIR STAY, THE SERVICEMEN COULD ALWAYS FIND A HOME AWAY FROM HOME WITH THE LOCAL USOS.

  Cox... I believe the USO served one of the great purposes of morale. It was a place that an individual who was in a strange area, and knew basically no one could go and relax. … It took your mind off of what was happening…
Dungans… there were about 10 or 12 schools, there were airline schools and radio school. And there must of have been 10,000 or more servicemen attending these schools in KC. So we had a lot of local fellows who were here….And we were of course out numbered.
 

LOCAL WOMEN VOLUNTEERED AS SENIOR AND JUNIOR HOSTESSES AT THE VARIOUS CLUBS, LENDING A TOUCH OF HOME BY SEWING ON PATCHES OR CHEVRONS, OR BY SIMPLY TALKING TO THE LONELY RECRUITS. THE USO WAS ALSO A PLACE TO DANCE.

  Dungans... Oh, I never learned to dance until after I went to the Canteen. But out of desperation I guess they taught me how to dance. It was either that or not have anyone to dance with.
 

ALTHOUGH THE USO PROVIDED RELIEF FROM THE WAR, IT WAS WHILE OUR BOYS WERE OVERSEAS THAT THEY MOST YEARNED FOR A SENSE OF HOME.
  Dungans …I wrote to some that I never knew, never saw. Just writing letters, because my brother had asked me to write to some of his friends. …
Smith, P... I wrote to him everyday. He wrote to me, maybe once or twice a month. And that was understandable …when they were in combat.
 

MINIATURIZED V-MAIL ENCOURAGED PEOPLE TO WRITE, AND HELPED MINIMIZE POSTAL BULK. REGARDLESS, CENSORSHIP PROVED AN OBSTACLE FOR MOST PEOPLE.

  Ellis ...every so often, apparently they would write something that was censored and then would be blacked out. And sometimes whole sentences, you know. And you, no matter how you held it up to the light, you couldn’t read it.
Irvin, J …and that’s why a lot of military guys never wrote home because what could you say? You couldn’t say what you were doing , you couldn’t say where you were…
 

ALL TOO OFTEN LETTERS WERE RETURNED TO SENDER.
 

Ellis…And you wondered, did they lose the address, did they, were they not living anymore or what. You just never knew.
Kozak... And then there were the sad scary times when you’d receive a telegram.
 

RECEIVING A TELEGRAM USUALLY MEANT THE WORST FOR MOST FAMILIES. SO WHEN THE TELEGRAM CAME TO THE WISEMAN HOME, THAT MARTIN WISEMAN HAD BEEN TAKEN PRISONER BY THE GERMANS, THE FAMILY SIGHED WITH RELIEF.

 

Brown … everybody was happy that he was safe and thought, …"they must have to treat them right because of the Geneva convention," So, life just kind of went on. And we just waited for news and did get a few letters from him in there. All he could say was "They are treating me well... "…I’m looking forward to coming home and I want a date with my WAC. I’m very proud of her."
 

THE DATE, HOWEVER, NEVER TOOK PLACE. BARBARA’S FATHER DIED OF PNEUMONIA, STILL A PRISONER OF GERMANY. AS A SHOW OF ABSOLUTE COMMITMENT TO THE WAR, LIVING ROOM WINDOWS DISPLAYED BANNERS WITH A SILVER STAR FOR EACH LOVED ONE IN SERVICE. FAMILIES LIKE THE WISEMANS, CHANGED THEIR SILVER STAR TO GOLD, INDICATING THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE. DEDICATING THEMSELVES TO THE IDEOLOGY THAT WE LIVE BY TODAY, THE MEN AND WOMEN OF OUR MILITARY ACTUALLY FOUGHT THE BATTLES THAT WE ONLY KNOW BY NAME: NORMANDY, ANZIO, TRIPOLI, MIDWAY, CORREGIDOR. SO MANY BATTLES, SO MUCH TO GAIN, SO MUCH TO LOSE.

  Fracul... You have no idea what fear man has when he sees shells exploding all around and machine guns chattering…
Boyer... I don’t know how you describe when you’re going down the road as a platoon and you start to get fired upon …You run for the ditch, if you can make the ditch…
Fracul... there were times that we didn’t even take our clothes off for 60 days. No new socks, no nothing. No new underwear, no nothing for 60 days. … K-rations. Peeyew.
Pollard…You were frightened the majority of the time. And then you got used to combat, and used to artillery rounds, mortar rounds and machine gun firing …And you figure that today’s your last day, so you live the full day.
 

LIVING THE WHOLE DAY WAS THE ONLY LUXURY FOR OUR AMERICAN PRISONERS OF WAR.
  Boyer... We had rifles and pistols and they had tanks. Couldn’t very well fight a tank with a pistol…So they gave us the opportunity to give up and we decided to do that.
Woodson... And the fellows were pretty bad off from diarrhea , dysentery…I think there were taking them out fifty a day and burying them in one big hole.
Boyer... We were very downhearted and we didn’t know what was going to happen to us but I don’t believe we ever lost our patriotism.
 

AS OUR POWS HOPED FOR RESCUE, THE GLOBAL WAR RAGED ON. BY EARLY 1945, THE TIDE WAS TURNING FOR THE ALLIED FORCES, AND IT LOOKED AS IF THE WAR IN EUROPE WAS COMING TO A CLOSE. BUT ANOTHER ERA CAME TO A CLOSE FIRST WITH THE DEATH ON APRIL 12TH OF PRESIDENT FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT.

  Lackey… and he had been in office since the beginning of time, it seemed like.
Irvin, J…so it was quite a shock, because we knew no other president.
Palmer, D…Poor Mr. Truman was kind of the hayseed from Missouri..,
Boyer...No, a lot of people didn’t like him but you won’t find a service man in World War II that won’t appreciate what he did for us.
 

A MONTH LATER, NAZI GERMANY SURRENDERED. CELEBRATIONS ERUPTED THROUGHOUT EUROPE. BUT FOR MOST AMERICANS, IT WAS BITTERSWEET.

  Kozak... That first taste of victory, was wonderful.
Fracul …And I tell you, my knees shook. I had enough of that front line artillery stuff…
Dungans …Some of my girl friends and I went to church and that was about the size of it… I mean the battle in the Pacific was still going on…
Kozak... And we paid a high price in the Pacific. Every island we took was a tough fight
Lewis... We were told that these people are not going to give up. We’re going to have to invade Japan
Woodson... I know the Japanese were preparing themselves to fight to the last man.
Ellis... It looked like it was going to go on forever and ever and ever. Thank God for Harry Truman.
Palmer, D... When they dropped the atomic bomb, we all cheered. We, there were jokes, "I hope they have a dozen more" As far as we were concerned, we would have been happy to bomb the Japanese back to the stone age.
Davis …you hate to say it. You were glad it happened…
Smith, P …What happened in Nagasaki …was terrible but what was happening, what happened in the Battle of the Bulge was terrible. I don’t know anything about war that’s nice.
 

RIGHT OR WRONG, THE WAR WAS OVER. WHEN THE ANNOUNCEMENT CAME ON AUGUST 15, OF JAPAN’S CAPITULATION, A SPONTANEOUS SPREE ERUPTED THE WORLD OVER.

  Bongino... and there was this parade at 6 o’clock in the morning, and church bells ringing in the background.
Ellis …we went downtown and it was like New Year’s Eve. I mean, everybody was in the streets. And everybody was hugging everybody and kissing everybody. And if you didn’t kiss somebody, they grabbed you. …
Dungans... Somebody got up on the marquee at Jones Store down there with a trombone and was playing and singing. … So, it was kind of wild night…I do think the most destruction anybody did was some of the hotels down there of slashing pillows and shaking the feathers out the windows down there.
 

OTHERS OBSERVED THE WAR’S END IN REMEMBRANCE.
  Winn …we had a very nice dinner and we had a few drinks and we had a short prayer for all the boys we knew that were never going to be able to come back and party with us anymore.
 

EVEN WITH THE WAR OVER, THERE WAS WORK TO BE DONE. INTERNATIONALLY, AMERICA ASSISTED IN THE RECONSTRUCTION OF EUROPE AND JAPAN. NATIONALLY WE BEGAN THE DECONSTRUCTION OF WAR TIME INDUSTRIES. THE WAR ASSETS ADMINISTRATION CHOSE KANSAS CITY AS ONE OF THREE SITES TO ACCOUNT FOR AND PROCESS EXCESS SUPPLIES COMING IN FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. THE GOVERNMENT’S CONTRACT WITH THE MANUFACTURERS PREVENTED ANY EQUIPMENT GAINED OR PRODUCED DURING THE WAR FROM RETURNING TO THE OPEN MARKET AFTER THE WAR, PROTECTING THEIR PEACETIME PROFITS.

  32Lewis … And then depending upon what the instructions were from the gov’t, sometime, it seemed bad, but you would stand there while the guard would literally destroy a lot of new machinery 24Cantrell And the poor parts, they hit them with sledge hammers, and throwed in a box car and away they went. We worked like the Devil on them and then they just throw them away in a boxcar. Hit it with a sledgehammer and let it go.
 

BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY, THE END OF THE WAR BROUGHT OUR BOYS HOME.

 

Miles …that’s really when we started flying the boys, the wounded boys back from the Pacific. And, so we had many hospital flights. And they were really the most rewarding work that we did in the service…they were very ill, they were in litters, many of them could not walk. … And they never complained no matter how hot it was, or how cold it was. They were so happy to be coming home.
Ervin, I …what was fun was to see the women…when their husbands and friends would come home. That was just a show all on it’s own.
 

THE RETURN OF THE GI’S MEANT READJUSTMENTS FOR MANY.
  Kozak... How do you assimilate 6 million people back into a society that has changed a great deal in the time they’d been gone? How do you do that?
Spain... Women got to get out in the work force and course they had to get back out of it when the war over, because we had all these men coming home lickety-split with no jobs, you know.
Smith, P... The war was over. You know, that’s why we were there was because of the war…. And we expected not to have a job when the war was over.
 

BUT THE WAR OPENED THE DOOR TO NEW ROLES FOR WOMEN AND MINORITIES IN SOCIETY, SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE SOCIAL REFORM IN LATER DECADES. THE END OF THE WAR BROUGHT ABOUT OTHER CHANGES AS WELL.

  H.Smith... We began to move away from a primarily rural society to an urban society. The housing developments that were built after the war became a pattern for the rest of the century.
Laycock... Well, a lot of those factories disbanded but others started making products that people never even knew they needed until WWII. I mean, we had ice boxes for years…But everybody had a refrigerator as soon as they can get one after the war… And then, ‘course television came along. We became a consumer society for sure.
 

FIFTY YEARS LATER, WE LOOK BACK ON WORLD WAR II WITH MIXED EMOTIONS.
  Laycock... It was the only war in my lifetime that everybody felt like we had to get into to win.
Ervin, I …I heard less complaining then from people, than any time since in my life. Cantrell... In fact, if it wasn’t for the war, I never would have been anything but a little old half-way mechanic…
Bongino... When it was over, a little color and interest went out. And there was a kind of a plateau of living. …
Thomas …I think the romance is in the history of it.
Lewis …we fought the war so that… all of us would have the right to be able to say and do the things that we do. …
Palmer, D …The cost was horrible. But at the time there was no choice.
Fracul …the men that were wounded and that were killed did more than I ever done. Noble... When I was out on my roller skates enjoying my youth, they were out and saving us.
Lackey... I felt like, maybe, that I was doing something that was really right, not only for my country and for me, but for the world.
Dungans …I think at the time it really brought out the best in everybody. I think it really did.