From the NBC News room in New York.

President Roosevelt said in a statement today that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, from the air.

I repeat that President Roosevelt says that the Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii from the air.

Paul was riding on a streetcar to go to a Sunday dinner at my aunt's place.

At one of the stops, a fellow jumped over onto the streetcar and said, The drops have bombed Pearl Harbor and nobody knew what he was talking about and didn't pay any attention to him.

I was driving down Pennsylvania.

Avenue, going south almost to Mt.. Hope when they announced Saddam.

The radio.

That's when we heard that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

Of course, we had no idea where Pearl Harbor was in those days.

I listened to it and told the rest of the family what was going on.

They didn't believe me.

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

My sister was on the couch listening to the.

Casualties that were coming out of Hawaii.

Very upset.

And I knew then, it's going to be bad.

Bad.

The United States entered World War Two following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Over 650,000 Michigan men and women served in the military during World War Two, including all major conflicts in Africa, Europe and the Pacific.

44,735 Michigan citizens were casualties of the war, including 15,414 who died.

Here are some of their stories about conflict and sacrifice.

Stories too important to ignore and too moving to forget.

My principal in my high school had heard of my draft board, the White ridge, and he called me in the office and he said, Bill, we're going to move your head a half a year and draft you.

And I was six foot one and weighed £125.

I want to go to do I told my mother and she said, well, I'll never take you too skinny wrong.

When I'm trying to volunteer.

I had a call from an uncle in Mexico to remind me that the country was attacked.

We should go and support.

And I was told, Would I tell you Mexicans at this time?

I enlisted in the National Guard when I was 15 years old.

I had some friends in Grand Rapids.

We all got together and decided to join the Navy.

I was very scared for a little 18 year old boy from Michigan.

I'm not a hero myself, but I fought with a lot of heroes and a lot of my buddies.

There's a fellow named Warren Laffey who, after we went to classification, he didn't make pilot, he made navigator, but he only had a short term period and he went overseas.

I wrote him and he wrote me right back.

He says, Jack, whatever you do, learn all you can, because I'm going overseas now and I don't know what the hell I'm getting into.

He says, Really work hard and learn on your career.

Well, I wrote him right back.

Letter back, Killed in action.

You're all pumped up, First Nation.

And it was easy.

Then the reality finally.

Set in as the missions grew longer, harder, deeper.

Saying was that you.

Fly until you die.

Unless you could finish your tour.

The first ten missions were, in effect, missions through which you proved yourself to have, if you want to use the word the courage and the guts and the ability not to fall apart when things got bad.

And once you got over that, then you start worrying about the more real simplistic things of life.

And that was survival.

When you found out where you were going, you went into the Quonset hut and they would have the big map in front of you covered with a sheet.

And then all the crew would get in there and then they'd close the door behind and put a guard there because they didn't want anybody knowing.

And so then they would raise a sheet and then it would either be relief or a loud gasp saying, my gosh.

Kind of quiet.

Or you get across the channel or the German lines are on the coast.

Then you start getting little flak.

And the closer you get to that target, the more flak again you get on the bomber on.

That's when you you've got to fly straight and lower.

The bombardier has control of the plane, not outside of altitude.

And he stirs and plane and winds up to target with a bombsight.

No, not one drops of bombs.

When you drop your bombs, they go follow a trajectory along with you for a while and then they go down.

Well, we suddenly were in a updraft.

It was like being at a black elevator.

We had gotten over that burning inferno and it was carrying us up.

And so after that, when we went over the target, as soon as we dropped our bombs, we turned and got out of there.

We bombed a.

The IG Farben chemical plant in Little Carbon Germany.

We were at 28, 30,000 feet.

It was camel.

Ceiling and visibility unlimited.

You could see to the galaxy.

It was so clear and beautiful.

We were on this bomb run and one year on a bomb and you can't do evasive action.

Evasive action is dodging the fighters.

It's like the charge of the light brigade.

You can't shoot back.

The Germans know where our bomb release point is going to be.

And for 12 minutes you're on the bomb run straight for the bomb release point.

We got hit by a slew of Germans yelling those fighters, the noses of them all painted yellow.

These were his elite and they came in high out of the south of the sun on a tail end attack.

And it's a say You're moving this way.

They were coming down behind you and in the sun so you could couldn't see them as they kept getting closer, I got a glimpse of one and I thought to myself, What in God's name is that P-51 doing this close, close to our formation.

So many of the pilots were just young kids, too.

That didn't.

We really didn't know what the heck we were doing with the times.

The rule was any enemy aircraft or friendly aircraft pointing his nose at you, you shot at because the Germans had a lot of our captured aircraft and they could fire them up, sneak into your formation and race car and so it's kind of horror and you never know when something's going to happen.

I yelled out on them like enemy aircraft, 6:00, and I swung my guns around and I was firing and I saw his canopy shatter and oil started pouring out of the side of his plane.

And I lost that.

I went crazy.

I started hit them like I got I got him, I got him, I got a rolled over and he went straight down.

And I was just virtually ecstatic, absolutely ecstatic.

We were escorted by the Tuskegee fliers.

They were the black fighter pilots.

And boy, they really came right in around us and made us feel very good.

Tuskegee planes were painted with red tail and they got a reputation of never.

Having.

Lost a bomber that they were escorting or to any planes fire.

They couldn't do anything about.

Ground fire.

Downing bombers.

When the black guys were escorting the bombers on their missions, the ones they were escorting got back, except those who were knocked out by ground fire.

So it got to the point where these kind.

Of these various bomber.

Missions were requesting the Red Tails because they got the reputation they would get back.

Sometimes we did not have, Fredricka, because they could not take that range.

They couldn't go that far.

I found out whatever aircraft really was that because it seemed to grow so thick, you could just walk on it.

And then we got hit with many problems, got hit.

But if you didn't get hit in the world part way, you could keep going.

One of the Tuskegee fliers had to bail out.

For some reason, he opened the chute.

We must have been about 20,000 feet.

He shouldn't have opened it so soon because he could get anoxia because you went on oxygen at 13,000.

And I often wonder what happened to him.

And later on in my career, I worked with the Atomic Energy Commission and interviewed a black gentleman.

And he and I told him that and he says, that guy, I know who you mean.

He landed okay.

And he got out and he's got a family in Chicago.

So that made me feel good.

We were hit by shore batteries, they call them shells and jumped firing at us.

And I was out of 20.

Millimeter gun and aircraft then.

And all of a sudden there were water splashing or something splashing in.

The water in front of me.

And I.

Wasn't sure what it was, but it was the Japs firing at us.

And they were two you too low.

When they adjusted the second time they hit our mast up there where the captain was.

They didn't get him but they got a steamer.

Destroyer is very fast, very maneuverable, but has no armor whatsoever, but plenty of armament.

And in this engagement the Japanese were coming up with their fleet.

And in order to get to the shores of later to help or relieve their troops, they had to go through this circle straits.

So they chose five destroyers to intercept these two battle wagons.

And the idea was that these Japanese ships would come through and we would lay torpedoes from both sides, which we did, and successfully.

We hit one battleship and broken two and the other one was slowed down after what was left of them.

They went on through the Surigao Straits and then the Navy had already lined up their.

Battleships and finished them off in Okinawa.

That's when the kamikazes, the Japanese planes, were at their very worst, as I understand it.

They had their funerals before they left Japan.

I don't know how many got through.

All of them were shot down before they got through, but a lot of them did get through.

And I remember the first time I saw one and I couldn't believe it going into a dive and you're waiting for it to come out of its dive.

And it didn't.

It dove into another one of our ships.

And I thought, My God, here's a kamikaze.

So I fired at them.

My memory is such that I could damn or see them.

I think I did see them.

Even with all the training you went through, you have no idea whether you're hitting him or you're not hitting him.

And the smoke starts coming out of a plane.

And of course, you're not the only person shooting at him anyway, so you're not sure that your shells are getting to him or not.

So you just keep trying.

This one Japanese plane went right straight up and it had been hit.

It was burning and and then he turned and he dove down.

And when he drove down, he put the fire out and and I saw that he was heading for my head.

There's a saying these.

Come on, I better get right and jump over the side.

A lot of us thought that, too.

Nobody did it.

We had a lot of.

Decisions that were really you know, you go through this front, you get out, you can't turn back cause you're halfway to the islands and you got only enough gas to go the rest of the way.

And maybe a half a tank left.

You've got to find the island and the radio was all shut off because there was an alert for Japanese coming in.

So you got to find it and there's rain.

This is standard operating over there and you're flying all over the Pacific.

We were nervous about engine problems.

You read in the paper about recalls on automobiles.

Well, when you're out over the Pacific carrying on 4500 pounders and a tank car, gasoline engine, you're not in a real good position for a recall.

The Japanese had a pretty good runway around the end of one of the islands.

It was nice runway and it was a troop emplacement deal where they had the reserve troops.

Well, we used to bomb that quite a lot and drop bombs on the runway.

500 pounders, so that they couldn't take their planes off.

But we always used to come over a low level bomber.

Leon Dabrowski, was a air search person from Saipov.

And he has this little joke about you could find Japan.

All you had to do is follow the floating B-29s.

We spotted this belly in the belly.

The bomber comparable to ours.

We finally hit his gas tank and I think it's the starboard side.

And then the wing caught fire in the plane.

But it it was.

It was fun to chase him.

He would shoot at us, and then it spread ahead.

We would spurt ahead and tell the love shots on him.

It took about an hour and a half to chase him.

The longest flight we ever made is one time we were flying, searching all over.

We got low on gas and I happened Look out.

I saw a triangle just way out there and it's What's that?

So the pilot says, What do you think?

And I says, Better look.

And he says, I agree with you.

Let's go and look.

And now you're just you got to get gas.

You just got to get home.

Now you got a ship.

Are you going to.

We went over and there it was.

Is it run up on a reef and it broken in half.

The guys were alive.

We flew over them, let them know, and we headed back and we we didn't go back to our squadron.

We just got in the way and took them, which gets.

It 18,000 feet.

It's 30 people.

You buy time, you go to 30,000, you go down to 35, 40, 45 degrees below zero.

And we probably had more injuries due to frostbite than we have everything else because the planes at that time had open side windows.

You had to be very careful about it because if you took off your gloves to do any repair on a jammed gun or whatever, if you touch anything metal and didn't have a silk wire on your skin would stick to the metal and that was it.

You couldn't get it off.

You'd have to skin to to release yourself.

I froze.

Like they were like literally every mission ever.

After about the 1520 mission, I said to myself, Whatever, get out of here.

I want to live south of the Mason-Dixon.

You know, wherever I live.

Milwaukee, Michigan.

One day I went up to see my buddy up to Osaka.

There were 2000 of our fliers buried there, 2000 people didn't know it was going on back here in the States.

Just airman know him.

They were just sort of their two guys.

We had 14 killed and we had 56 wounded out of a crew of only 300.

So approximately 30 of us were either wounded or killed.

And so that night that we got everything, a lot of it taken care of.

I they gave us all a shot of whiskey, which we needed.

President Truman stated that American servicemen will not stay married on enemy soil as soon as we get ships to the moon, they will all be sent home.

That that was good to know that they wouldn't live on the enemy soil.

Operation Overlord was the codename for the Allied invasion of Hitler's Fortress Europe.

The D-Day invasion began during the early morning hours of June 6th, 1944, with parachute and glider landings behind enemy lines.

That was followed by the largest seaborne invasion in history.

That morning, approximately 3 million troops crossed the English Channel from England to Normandy, France, and.

You know, as the years go by, you read so much story, you see Saving Private Ryan, you see all these kind of things and somebody starts talking and everything is embellished a little bit.

I think the further away we get from an activity, an event, the more sometimes we build it up just a little bit, you know, to make it more exciting.

It wasn't that excited about that day.

Well, D-Day was a real bad.

So Eisenhower and Churchill and they had their plans.

So six of June roll in.

We started going in, and I never seen so many planes in my life and ships.

There was a horrible noise in the air.

And I looked.

Out.

They came these hundreds of airplanes over.

And it was the scariest first test results ever.

In the end, defying in the end for a big raid.

But then, because I was the regiment staff, by 12:00, they announce the invasion have started.

Our last bulkhead going over was out in the water.

I swam to shore, had rough bodies lying all over.

Every day we got bad news or the people getting killed.

The first couple of days were were quite bad.

My uncle was with me, and you guys had shut off drivers who were going in.

I was right there beside him when he got to get off.

So many pieces of people all over the place.

The beach was was a terrible place to be of the living hell.

There's an expression we today that I hear the younger generation, they awesome I in Spanish.

There was a word at that time I would say.

It's a guy.

And just as I was down.

On the beach and I remember that I heard that expression and it was in the air.

So my speak Spanish at that point.

But he had seen me or something.

And just about then I heard this sound that metal, like a turn around, had a hole in his helmet.

I don't know who he was or anything, but that went on over and over again.

They had to get up and get out of there.

If not, they'd get killed.

They had to move.

And that's when the battalion colonel, he said, Listen, you want to die here, you stay and die here.

There's a lot of dead people here.

Now we better move.

Our commander said, okay, take cover.

And the Normandy have these hedgerows.

They are very high and very sick, and nobody knows what's going on.

You're not sure what was happening?

The hedgerow fighting.

At one point I remember we had a van saying I had to move out, head of the company, and we came to a little crossroad and I was with Gabrielle Mod and he said, Bob, I hear something up ahead.

And I said, It's hard to see around.

He's here in his I'll take off this one direction, see what you can see.

We looked at each other.

And this guy yelled, Is that where is Yankee Stadium?

So and the engine that came back there was not New York.

And the next thing is, only our grenades are just.

Flying in there.

And there were three Germans.

I heard a whistle and I went over there.

And sure enough, just as I went over, there was about five or six Germans came down towards us and they opened fire and.

This surrounded us all the way and they shot over us.

And after a while and one of our officers escort us, stand up and shoot.

But instead somebody took his towel out as out of his knapsack and started to wave.

But you see, that was that was a kind of fight that you did for quite a while going through France and the hedgerows.

And it took some time to get through there.

We had put up a hand like this and hit and behind behind us was the guys of the pistol.

Then we were told, don't get caught making it killing you.

But I had freedom.

I came because the management that my enemies, my enemies were the as the Gestapo, the party that's Americans.

When I landed by parachute and as I was cutting my way out of my chute, a plane went over me real low.

And the guys were jumping out the fire.

The whole plane was on fire, but they was too low.

They didn't make it.

So just off the flight.

But the second day we were off the beach and then now into some ravines and some gullies and some areas are sitting there with another soldier.

And I he had one of our smokeless little cups that you heat for coffee.

It was early morning.

We're sitting there both together hammering home and a cup of coffee.

No smoke given off, you know.

And he was sitting I was sitting here and I said, yeah, it's my birthday.

my God.

Just think, what would you be doing on your birthday?

And you try.

Well, I don't know.

And all of a sudden a shot came over and he fell off the top of a cup of coffee.

Snipers and all of you know, you post those things are pretty hard to take.

So I finally located and pointed out to a tank.

And the next time it fired us, we put a shell right through the room.

Europe's there in the building and getting more fire.

Every time I raised my glasses up to see where it was, he'd shoot the brush off around my head.

Everybody to have a house to go through.

I want this one house.

Have a look upstairs and looking at it.

And when I come back down, I seen a little girl.

Then we're looking at that table all the time and I want to wear jerked tablecloth off here.

There's a guy underneath it.

He's getting ready to shoot his gun.

Do German plane came over and strafed the building we were in.

We were told not to return fire because this guy didn't really know anybody was there.

We marched all night and then we pulled into this farmer's courtyard where our cooks had set up breakfast for us.

And when the daylight came, you could see all the dead Germans laying around.

We were up there, a place in Luxembourg, in a stone barn and building, and in the morning it looked like the field had been plowed from enemy shells that came in.

They rattled off that stone wall pretty good.

And then we got counter-attacked by our own men.

Not a good day.

We go on patrols and they'd ambush us and shoot us.

A lot of things happened that day.

You were just lucky if you got out of it.

I didn't like going on patrols to a factory in a town you never been into.

We were in one place and we walked through the woods of this town and had a clearing to get to the town we crossed.

We ran across a clearing, and minute we got on to the town.

We looked and distinguished, full of Germans, and they spotted us.

And then they started counterattacking on us.

And we had to fire to keep them down.

So we get the hell out of there.

When we got there, you know, you start building bridges, you know, every little bridge they had, the Germans, you know, blow it up and blow it up and blow it up.

We built them up.

We built the bridge, the Rhine River.

And it was supposed to been at the time the longest.

The widest, the highest fixed military bridge in the world.

I said momentarily, and about two foot off the ground.

I'm going to wire to that one and that tree there, and I'm.

Going to write a wire into that grenade through my.

Foxhole.

That way, when I see these anybody crawling around.

At night, they're all like, I just pull.

That pin now that the grenade is going to go off.

My division had been totally decimated, had just almost destroyed because the Germans were where it was 10 to 1 in the how much they outnumbered my division, my battalion.

They destroyed all our tanks.

And so when I joined our division, that's a first story I was told.

And so I was very fearful going into combat.

And it being at night, I figured there was somebody going to shoot me at any moment.

And he threw 30.

Some grenades over the bank.

You know, he was a catcher and he can really throw that grenades.

And they threw the grenades way down you to get on the.

Down side and even throw them over the ridge.

Down to them.

You couldn't hear the projectile coming through the air when they would land and burst.

They were throw fragments of shells for 25, 40 yards in each direction.

And that's that's the one that we fear of the most.

Out there in front of the Hunter, the Japanese, due to the machine gun we got in before he got us that was enough to punch is I can tell you I never will forget that son of a gun.

And just before dusk the Japs made a mass run to come across the strip and we were able to pour all our fire into that area because we had a concentration at a mass grave of over 500 that we buried.

The next day.

The Japanese were holed up in caves.

They had they had their whole families with them in a cage, but they wouldn't we hadn't to surrender.

But they wouldn't surrender.

We were ordered to burn them out with the flames.

Ah.

Which we did is terrible.

As terrible war.

A war as hell.

You're scared.

Some of the guys I know.

We laughed about it later.

What?

The parents.

But.

All right.

Then.

How good a soldier you are.

Just how lucky you are.

That's all there is to it.

Just follow what they told you to do.

That's what I did.

And that was it.

And I run like hell.

I'm pretty good, right?

Pretty fast.

When I said cross the road, I was already cross.

I sat in the glass bubble as a bombardier.

The plexiglass was shattered so badly granules of the Plexiglas blinded my navigator shrapnel, cut my right shoulder and cut my pilot's left foot.

I was shot through the right leg from a distance, knocked down.

It knocked me right down.

I couldn't believe it or able to do that.

It was seen in movies, but I didn't think that happened.

I began to crawl and drag my leg.

I crawled probably five or six feet and I heard that right in front of my face.

The dust kicked up and he were still shooting at me.

I was looking back.

Over my shoulder all the time and hear a lot of explosion from the.

Bombs and all those big.

Jagged vines.

Caught me here in a sight.

It hit me open.

All of a sudden we got another burst of shells and.

I took a piece of shrapnel in.

My back, knocked me down.

So then we crawled under the tank.

My second squad corporal had climbed into the tank when the tank was hit.

Apparently, he must have got killed.

I mean, he must not had dog tags.

And to this day, he's still listed as missing in action.

The only road map by Thomas Mitchell at Tire Road Map Major Scott Head.

I said, give it to me that I'll head back.

He said, To hell with you.

He gave me a list of targets.

Unfortunately, one of those times was still a German handful.

I went through it.

That's when I got shot.

Well, I might have been grenade that burst in there right above my back as I was lying on the ground.

And that really hurt me.

But it left some fragments in my flesh and I didn't like that.

Emil Karl was one of the best parts of the day.

We would hear these fellows talking about the different things going on, and all of a sudden they would be very quiet.

They had their face into the pillow.

We'd go over and talk to them and and usually was a Dear John letter to me that was so cruel.

So many of them could take their wounds and things like that.

But a Dear John letter really was banned.

It just tore them apart.

I had stepped up on a dead tree trunk and just as I stepped off of that dead tree trunk, a bullet hit the tree right beside of where my head would have been.

That shook me up for a while.

There was a German fighter plane coming down to strafe us, and he was real close.

I just could see the fire coming out of the machine.

Guns and my jeep driver just quick whipped this off the autobahn down the embankment and flipped the sole over.

But the only one who was injured was the captain who was sitting in the front seat.

He got thrown out and bumped his head pretty bad.

I looked up an airplane flying around like this.

It has a red circle on the wing that's I got to get the heck out of here.

So I took off like this, ran towards the river.

Six guys who had to run and run the opposite.

Way were killed.

And I was part of the burying detailed.

Barium.

Stuff down behind a tree.

And he had a gun, which was a little machine pistol.

We called the guns.

He had Dad and his stepfather behind that tree and emptied it right in my face.

Luckily, he wasn't a good shot.

There's a white phosphorus shell, and at about 15 feet from me and white phosphorus, it burns have always been.

The horses are.

I'm a fool.

And all around me I just go from there and I look around my feel and everything must make the scene workers impossible.

Then Private Ricky says, Hey, Sarge, there's one in the hole here, but I think he's dead.

And I yelled at him to shoot him anyway.

And tried to shoot him.

And that stirred the Jap and he was alive.

And because he's alive, Private Adams came running over to help shoot him.

And the Japs set off a charge at the camp and blew a hole in the ground for put a and.

May 3rd is my birthday.

And I thought, I'm going to make it.

I'm going to be 19 and then the war will be over.

And the next day a grenade went off right beside me.

But I was lucky I didn't get hit.

I was so low that it went right over me.

The Japanese were shooting from the left.

Mauser are watching from the right of the northern part of the island rifle and machine gun fire.

It's looked like a fire.

Put my hand up in the air.

I got these bullets right through my and Japanese plane.

They were strictly business, I'll tell you.

They went right over us and they hit the second shift over from us.

I saw a pair of field glasses land up at the bank and and I thought to myself, Man, I'm going to get those field glasses if we ever go back by there.

When they come back, the next time there are guns taken on the ground, soldiers had had some somebody try to get and had booby trapped.

On Christmas Eve.

We were in Leon.

France, just over the border from Belgium.

And that was my first time somebody ever shot at me.

You ever been on the woods when a tree burst?

That whole tree explosion, the fire and the whole stuff comes down on top of you.

I go my whole down and back under.

He was just laying in a hole would get you.

I was lucky.

And a lot of the holes in the wintertime.

Yeah.

We're trying a hole and in the dirt in wintertime, that's pretty damn hard, I'll tell you that.

I said, I was lousy, that man get up because I. I was hunched over in my hole and they marched me over to the tank and German officer tank commander, I think it was spoke very good English.

And I told him that, sir, I can only give you my name, rank and serial number.

And so that was the beginning of my prisoner of war days.

I ran down the hill and ran around back behind the tank and I stumbled over something.

I looked down and there was a dead German laying on his back.

And his rifle was like this, pointing right at me.

I looked at the tank and I wrong run down the wrong hill and the tank had a swastika on the side.

My first saw, I'd get back to my hole.

I started up the hill and several voices said, Stop, Hoosier, stop.

Who's there?

I said, Don't shoot.

It's me.

It's me.

I couldn't remember my name.

I was so scared.

The Germans overrun two divisions and they had a lot of American equipment, trucks, Chevrolet trucks in there.

So they put about 25 of us in a truck.

They just pack this in a predator's and and then that star up on the cab and they come along and strafed us.

But we all jumped out and we was okay, except the truck was on fire.

And they kept yelling, Who's there?

So by then I'm on my belly going up the hill.

Then I heard a snicker.

Here and a snicker there.

And they they recognized my voice and they were giving me a hard time.

And, well, I finally made it the hole I stayed the rest of the night.

But every once in a while I'd hear a snicker and somebody whispering.

Back and forth.

But I would say, Well, I got scared.

But that that was the scariest I ever was at any time.

We took a five incher right through the right wing and the star, the insignia went right up to the middle of that star and six foot of the right wing stood right up in the air and we started falling.

And I thought we had gone and the copilot job both throttles right forward far as he could give us enough to hold us up.

That was one doors.

But we've had two others.

We had to get right up against the buildings.

And I look front and back and I could see that nobody was watching me.

So I ducked into a car bar.

So I stayed there.

And then 5:00 in the morning, I thought I'd get out of there because it might come I'd come out there to do George.

I looked over the hill and there was the Sherman tags.

All right.

That was a beautiful sight.

So I run, fell, run and fell just because I didn't want them to lead me down the road too far.

I went to the hospital and the doctor told me that I. I cheated death by one day, the Japanese overpowered one of our foreign observers.

A second Taliban dragged him into a cave, tortured him and two of his radio and telephone men right into that cave and and killed the enemy soldiers dragged the lieutenant out, but he was already dead.

That was a bad day.

I prayed the same prayer I'd prayed for three years.

Now, Lord bless Mom and Dad on the farm.

And my brother Ken and Fred, who had families, and my two brothers, charming, tough, who were married and had children and was in the army.

And if one of us boys needed to give his life, may it be me.

Now, that's not too hard to say when you're sleeping between clean sheets in San Diego.

We aboard ship.

But now I might be killed any moment.

And I pause and I come to save me just for a second.

And then I said, May it be me?

And when I did, I never been a more peaceful moment of more of my life.

I know what that was because I knew and God and I meant it.

Yes, I saw a pattern.

He was standing there.

He had those pearl handle revolvers on.

That's why I recognized him.

He looked immaculate.

You know, they're here.

The rest of us are pretty, pretty rough looking bunch.

And he was just look like.

Like, like the man who should be running the show.

And I was proud to be part of his his contingency.

And we did a great job for him.

I always had to keep my officer awake because Peyton was always checking columns in my office with all the sleep in.

If he was sleeping, Peyton took down the number and when he got in position, if there was a reprimand for him.

Or getting ready to leave and all of a sudden some somebody in the windows were taking potshots at us.

So we asked the lieutenant, what do you want to go and get?

Get up, go in a village and find those guys.

Let me call them headquarters.

They call it up and down his commander's command car with a siren.

Him stand up in the back on that thing.

He went and talked to the mayor.

He come out left.

He's only there about 10 minutes left, about a half an hour later, the shooting stopped.

So I said to Lieutenant, what the hell happened?

He said, I don't know.

We went down there and he went and talked to the mayor of the town, come out laughing like hell.

We said, What's what happened?

He told the mayor to stop him shooting.

Well, you take everybody in the town of all the town down.

That's the kind of guy Patton was.

We had one heavy cruiser was our escort, and it was the Indianapolis.

The Indianapolis was the one that delivered the atomic bomb.

And on the way back was sunk.

And the crew was in the ocean for days and days and days and days.

In July of 1945, the USS Indianapolis delivered the components for the atomic bomb to the island of Tinian on its way back to the Philippines.

It was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine.

It sunk in about 12 minutes about 900 crewmen survived the sinking.

Some were in lifeboats, but most bobbed in the water with only lifejackets.

Only 317 survived.

The elements and the sharks.

A lot of people asked me, would you jump off the ship?

And I didn't jump off the ship.

The shift left me a difference.

And the second 12 minutes, which is very, very fast, Tuesday afternoon, the water calm down that from the sharks move in, we try to stay in a group and swim away from the group.

Why were Long Shark had him Thursday afternoon.

Four of us, including myself, decided to swim toward the raft.

It was hard to judge because your eyes were about that far over from some blind salt water friend, probably 50, maybe 75 yards of this raft.

I was the only one many, but I got to the raft.

The men around the raft, wherever, 5 to 6 of them.

They were too weak to help me.

I was too weak to get on the raft.

I just tied myself to the raft.

Stayed there to Friday morning.

They picked me.

I spent four days and five nights in the Cape, our life jacket without food or water.

You know why I made I don't know.

We got pretty close to the prisoner, the camps, the Jewish camps that Hitler had put together.

They had a lot of prisoners in there and there all come up to the fence.

And the Marseilles, Russians and Jews.

My, they look very sad.

I'll tell you.

They're waving at us who want us to get them out of there.

I'd say, and probably still thousands of people in there.

And to see the way these people were tortured, that was quite a sight.

That was that was unnerving to see that kind of thing in a war, those people weren't fighting back.

We had to fight to get into that camp and we didn't we didn't take many prisoners, just got into the camp and then released these people.

We finally did.

We finally broke down the front gates and got in.

I remember when they released them, we shot the German guards and their guys coming out of the compound there.

They took their boots right off All the Germans.

That's the first thing you do is grab your boots, because they didn't have any of their own.

When we broke through the Panzer division, then we got behind the Germans completely.

That really ended it right there because the British refused to come down from the north and moves coming up from the south.

And Pat was real mad because Montgomery took his damn sweet time.

The British got to stop twice a day and have their tea.

It was announced in San Francisco half an hour ago by a high American official not identify.

And they're saying that Germany has surrendered unconditionally to the Allies.

No strings attached.

The boat came in New.

York Harbor.

Wall and boys were home while.

Here we are.

And look at all them girls.

And there was a boat load with.

A girls band and everybody on that ship all went over to tried to look at all the girls in the damn boat.

I thought going go over and I think crew begin to think Sure do goes over the P.A.

has to measure everybody back inside.

You were so happy to be back.

we could couldn't stand it.

I remember when we shipped down and passed the Statue of Liberty.

I'm sure everybody on that ship was saying it himself.

I hope I see you again, you know, and and we did.

This is one of the greatest celebrations that we have ever seen.

CHEERING and screaming, making noise with sound makers, throwing confetti and bits of paper and streamers and all sorts of things that they can find to celebrate this greatest of all victories, the surrender of the Japanese.

Like Bull Halsey came out on the deck.

I'll never forget it.

And he had the bullhorn and he said.

Gentlemen, gentlemen, the Japanese have just surrendered.

I had a soldier come to me and he said, Captain, he says, I've talked to the conductor and we're going to stop.

And I think it was in Ashtabula.

And he says, That's my home town.

I've been gone for three years, my folks.

And where I am, you see my house from the railroad, he said, I'd like to go up, say hello and be back on the train, okay?

Sure.

But.

And he rang all the way up right in the house, and they were just sitting there eating.

He gave me a kiss and come out the door.

They didn't know what happened.

They followed him all the way to the train, yell and scream it funny.

And we came in and we pulled up to this dock.

We got off and the first thing I did was get home and the secretary was so glad to get back.

These stories of service to our country allow us to understand the honor, courage and sense of duty these men and women and other veterans displayed.

They offer us a glimpse of the sacrifices made on behalf of all Americans and.