♪ ♪ (male #1) World War II is the most important event of the 20th Century.

It changed everything.

(male #2) Anybody who is a student of history understands that the term "Greatest Generation" is not a misnomer.

It was an unbelievable feat that we accomplished.

And we are in the process of losing that generation.

(male #3) I'm not a coward, but I'm not the hero.

That guy in the Marine Corps and those guys on Okinawa... now, those are heroes.

(male #4) I'll never forget hearing it over the radio, yellin', "Oh, God, wait on me!

I've been hit; my copilot's hit too."

That's what they did.

They turned us into tigers.

Every one of us.

Every one of us!

And we haven't changed.

(male #5) The only heroes are the ones under the white crosses.

The fact that I'm here, or any of us survived is-- again, I'm lucky.

That's all, that's all.

No, I'm no hero.

[clearing throat] [voice breaking] But I am a survivor.

(male #1) It is a vanishing generation, but it's a generation that we need to, we need to preserve as much of, in terms of recollections, as possible.

♪ ♪ World War II is the most important event of the 20th Century.

It changed everything.

50 million people died in World War II, including 405,000 Americans.

The United States became a world power, the leading world power, because of World War II.

To us, of course, it's really the second moment in which we attempt to stretch liberty and democracy to other parts of the world, the first moment being, obviously, the First World War, when faced with something of the same.

But the Second World War was a war that is almost unparalleled in its cruelty in the history of the world.

(male narrator) Over 60 years ago, hundreds of thousands of men and women from South Carolina joined the nation in the Second World War.

It changed their lives and the world as well.

Facts such as the dates of battles and important historical figures can be found in textbooks.

But the personal memories of veterans can give invaluable insight into why and how the war was fought and the impact it had on those who experienced it.

Over a thousand World War II veterans are dying every day.

Soon such important personal stories will be lost forever... unless we record them now.

♪ We went out into the quadrangle of the barracks.

Two Japanese planes flew over.

I said, "Lord, the torpedoes are as long as the airplane!"

He said, "That's the Japanese insignia on the wings."

I said, "They can't get here from Japan with airplanes."

He said, "I don't care; they're here."

Well, we went out the other side of the barracks to look toward Hickam Field where all the airplanes were.

The Japanese were having a field day shootin' airplanes.

They wouldn't have to look for 'em.

They just strafed 'em right and left, and the buildings.

Hickam Field was burning real, real bad.

The smoke was billowing up in the clouds, and it was a beautiful, sunny day.

When all those 300 Japanese planes started strafin' and bombing and everything, the ships started blowin' up and sinkin'; they sure were.

We could see sailors in the water and the water was gettin' to flamin'.

It really was kind of sickenin' to look and see those guys.

I have a close, close friend that's now... one of our leaders of the Pearl Harbor Survivors.

He was on a Navy ship, a ammunition ship, supply ship.

That ship blew up, but it... he came out alive.

And when they got into other boats, smaller boats, and went out, trying to save these people-- they had fire extinguishers, tryin' to put the flames out on the water.

He said they were reachin' down, tryin' to pull guys from the water.

He'd reach down to get an arm and come away with the meat off their arms.

They'd been burned, and most of 'em didn't last because they'd inhaled it too.

But I know he had night-- I had nightmares, too, when I came back.

But I can imagine what kind of nightmares those sailors had, tryin' to save those poor fellows out there in the water with the flames.

♪ At the tender age of 15, I lied my way into the U.S.

Army, and I ended up in the Philippines by choice.

And...I was in the army for 27 days when I arrived in the Philippines.

So it was... late 1940, '41.

I was with the infantry on Bataan.

And when Bataan surrendered, why, I escaped to Corregidor and joined up with the Marines there, with the Fourth Marines.

And that's where I was-- where we were captured.

Captured the sixth of May, 1942.

Well, we were living in nipa shacks, and, uh... they were... weren't weatherproof.

And, uh... the conditions were, were terrible.

They-- the disease and-- you, you got to understand what our situation was.

We were almost starved to death before we were captured.

And once-- that was by the Americans.

And once we were captured, why, it wasn't any better, you know.

The Japanese, when they, when they... when they captured Bataan... they had no idea in this world what was gonna happen.

They believed in Bushido, which means, you know, "fight to the end."

Jump over a cliff, if necessary, to-- but you know that we're not a-- we don't live that way.

So they had all these prisoners and didn't know what to do with 'em.

So that was the result of the Bataan Death March.

And, uh... I think that's, you know, that started the... the...downfall of a lot of people, that they were just in such poor shape that they didn't stand a chance.

Those of us that didn't give up are the ones who came back.

But...it was a lot of bad days.

You know, some people are... they're bitter.

They're... they just don't have anything good to say about anybody.

But, yeah, I don't... I don't have anything against the Japanese people as a whole.

But... I will never forget-- never forgive-- the treatment by their military.

But they treat their own people that way.

♪ In '43, I got drafted in the army.

Well, when I went in the army, that's when... we really saw the division of the races.

I was in New York, in Camp Upton, New York.

All the troops, all the fellows there, all the draftees were from the New York area.

But when we got there, we were separated.

Company C was all black.

Company A was all white.

We were put on a train heading south to Keesler Field, Mississippi... Biloxi, Mississippi.

Well, we rode overnight, all night long.

About 8:00 the next morning, the train was stopped.

I think it was in Birmingham, Alabama.

We raised the shade, just to see where we were, and whatever.

And I remember seeing this, this white man with a little boy about six or seven who turned around and saw these black faces, and pointed his finger at us saying, "Daddy, look at the niggers!

Pthu!"

And he spat in our direction.

I said, "Boy, here we are in the Deep South, something we heard about but never lived it."

That was all segregated.

And we couldn't go to the movie.

The white movie and the black movie.

You'd go to the service club, they had a area for the blacks, a area for the whites.

Well...more or less, you'd do the best you can.

Whatever the situation was, you'd do the best you can.

We went to Europe.

In fact, we wound up in England.

We were stationed in a little town called Bristol... Bristol, England.

Very nice place.

Now, the British people were nice... but the American troops, they weren't nice at all, the white ones, that is.

They told these people not to associate with us because of this, because of that.

Some of these Red Cross workers, they'd bring the canteen out in the field, and...they had these white American females serving the coffee and stuff.

And what happened to me, I was in line, and there was a white soldier in front of me who was of lesser rank, and she called him by rank.

She says, "Corporal, what'll you have?"

He told her.

Got to me, she says, "What can I do for you, boy?"

I said, "Nothin'," and I left.

They took all that from America all the way over there, I guess.

Once it's in you, you just can't get it out.

The 1940s was-- had its problems, as well.

And I don't think there are very many Americans who would like to return to that time.

I mean, this was a-- the Second World War was, for one example, fought with a segregated army.

Racism was rampant, and there was a great paradox here, as well.

One of the reasons the United States was fighting was because of Hitler's views on the Aryan race and white supremacy.

And yet, most white Americans shared that belief.

So I think the modesty of that World War II generation is, in some respect, deserved.

I mean, they realized that they were not living in kind of an idealized world of film, but an actual world in which there was good and evil, evil in the world, but also here at home.

♪ I had a reputation for being pretty darn good on the wheel.

I'd be back in the charthouse.

They'd holler for me and put me back on the wheel at times.

And this particular day... the Jap planes got in on us.

They broke through and was comin' out towards us, and I was steering the ship.

The captain was out on the wing of the bridge, the starboard side.

Bridge isn't big.

They had about 50 planes on the hangar deck--flight deck with their engines runnin', roarin'.

Then the main batteries start firing.

That's 4- or 5-inch shells, guns in front.

And that's the loudest damn noise you ever heard in your life.

A quad of 40 millimeters in front firing, a quad on top, and 20 millimeters on the starboard side.

You can't hear one word or command from the captain.

Can't hear nothin'.

And the first floor is smoke, orange smoke.

Now... the captain-- I was watchin' him-- he wanted me to turn right.

I could tell that, but the commander can't hear it.

He ran in the pilot house.

We had not rehearsed this.

We hadn't rehearsed it, hadn't practiced it.

He ran in there, looked at me, and started beating me on the arm.

"You wanna go that way?

We'll go that way."

That went on for several hours.

He'd beat me on this arm or pat me on the back and point straight ahead.

That's what we did, dodgin' planes and bombs and stuff.

But we never rehearsed that one.

He beat the hell outta me.

[laughing] But you understand, a aircraft carrier like this ship is a heavyweight boxer with a glass jaw.

It'll beat the hell outta you.

But if you hit it, you hurt it.

Everything on this ship blows up, burns, or both.

We're just kids.

We're just kids.

But some of our airplanes would fail, or a pilot would go down, and the Japanese would capture them.

And you know what they did?

They cut their heads off.

What do you think that did to us?

Made us tigers.

During the war, we destroyed 119 Japanese warships, and about 15 of 'em were big battleships and cruisers and carriers.

With our 90 pilots, we destroyed over 2,000 planes in the air and on the ground.

And with our own guns, we shot down 15 planes around us.

But that's... the bad news; you wanna hear the good news?

We didn't take one damn prisoner!

That's what they did to us!

Overnight, they just turned us into tigers, every one of us.

Every one of us!

And we haven't changed.

♪ We got up to, in the Battle of the Bulge, we got into a place called Moircy, and that's where I got my first... [voice breaking] combat injury.

And, uh... couple days later-- by then, it was early January-- we got into a town called Bonnerue.

And, uh... that was my last day of freedom.

And we got assigned to this house which became our headquarters where we set up our machine guns.

And this German panzer tank came up right in front of the house, and my gun was set up in the second window.

That was our last stand.

So with German tanks in front of the house, which was the front street, and German burp guns in the back, my ammunition bearer... [voice breaking] Wilcox, from Delaware, he said, "They're not getting me."

And he took off.

He started running out the hole in the wall where they had already throwed a shell through, and you could walk through that hole.

And they just mowed that dear boy down.

And Williams from California said, "They're not getting me, either."

And he ran out the same hole.

And he didn't get too far.

Just a couple steps, and they.... Ralph Carver, who was with me, he reached out and brought him back in.

And things were getting bad.

And then we knew we either were gonna be captured or killed.

I chose not to be killed.

I wasn't gonna run out there and just get murdered.

Next thing I knew, they broke in the front door and came in and started talking German to us, and we had to put our hands up.

And we were, of course, captured and had to march out front, down the street.

We met some other guys who were already captured.

I watched them being captured, knowing our time was... drawing nigh.

We walked out that door, and I can still remember, it was yesterday.

I wish I could forget it!

I said, "Oh, my God, I'm a prisoner of war."

♪ But Pearl Harbor, of course, was one... [clapping] about four-hour period.

And I didn't get shot-- I got shot at when I got strafed in the street-- but it was something you could get away from because there was no continuity.

That was the end of it.

The beginning and end was right there.

There was 35 missions.

It took me a year of training.

It took us from when I got back to the states in February of '43 until end of July, '44 before we were finished with the crew.

It was a long, drawn-out period, and you had so much more to think about.

And you were with the same nine guys-- there was eight besides me-- just all the time.

So we had a real good... group of people that worked well together.

We were all kinds, you know... Kansas, Michigan, Ohio, New York, and Arizona.

But they were all different.

But they all worked together very well, just great.

We flew most of our missions with an airplane we inherited from another crew who had finished.

We'd had six, seven missions, flying any plane available, and we got this plane.

The name on the plane was "Hellcat Agnes."

There was a picture of this gal holding Hitler's head by the hair.

That's the one we finished most of our missions in.

My radio operator kept a diary while we were flying, and he wrote a book-- really, it's a manuscript-- about our missions.

I said, "We oughta do something about-- have a name of its own to put on the book."

One of 'em said, "How about, 'One Mo' Time'?"

We had a gunner that quit 34 times.

Every time we'd get back, he said, "'I am not goin' with ya anymore.

You guys are gonna get killed."

But the next time we'd go, he'd be out there, so... that's why we called it, "One Mo' Time."

♪ To me, everything was sorta surreal.

I mean, you just, Can this really be... is this real?

I don't know.

I just felt like I was in a sort of a dream.

Surreal is the nearest I can think.

And their fifth mission was over Iwo, and that was, of course, that was my real introduction to what war is really like, my fifth mission over Iwo.

As we neared the island, we were met by Japanese fighters.

Zeros came out to meet us about 50 mile out from the island.

This was the first enemy fighters we had encountered.

We had encountered anti-aircraft fire before, you know, shells shooting a few planes.

We hadn't encountered any Japanese fighters.

I'll never forget this mission because a good friend got shot down on this mission.

A boy, Fred Snyder, he and his crew, their tent was right adjacent to our tent, back on Saipan.

We had visited with 'em the night before, hung out with 'em, played cards, talked about home, all that stuff.

Anyway, on this mission, I remember ol' Fred, he was flyin' off my right wing.

And as these fighters came out to meet us, Snyder, he'd kind of dropped back.

He hadn't got tightened up.

When they came to meet us, they circled around, and every one zoomed in on him.

And they shot him down.

I'll never forget hearing it over the radio, yellin' out, "Oh, God, slow up; wait on me!

I been hit; my copilot's hit too."

And out of my peripheral vision, I could see him slowly goin' down and smokin'.

In a few minutes, he hit.

Boom!

Ten men gone like that.

Guys we'd been in trainin' with; guys we had visited with the night before; knew 'em, talked about home, that kind of stuff.

And that really, you know... Boy, I said, this is for real, now.

You're really into it.

♪ They organized--reorganized-- the Red Ball Express.

We would go from Cherbourg back at the harbor at the-- in France.

We would load up all of those 250 trucks with-- at first we loaded 'em up with ammunition.

And we'd take 'em to the front, to where Patton had run.

He was gettin' outta Luxembourg and goin' into-- ready to go into Germany.

We would haul all those supplies, truck full of ammunition and gasoline.

[laughing] He was runnin' out of gasoline too.

And then, when it started snowin' and the Battle of the Bulge started, Red Ball Express was given the task of goin' to the battlefield and collecting all the dead GI soldiers who were frozen.

Most of 'em were frozen.

We would put 25 men of the frozen ones in the truck, and the truck, back of that one, we'd put 25 German-- we'd started capturin' Germans like mad.

We'd put 25 live German-- live or wounded German soldiers on each truck, and we would convoy those all the way back to Cherbourg.

That was almost worse than Pearl Harbor.

That brought ya right down to the earth, in touch with...prisoners, and in touch with the dead and frozen.

And some of those frozen-- it's sad to say, but some of those soldiers, they were frozen with their guns in their hand, and legs here and their arm there, stickin' out.

So the medics would have to thaw those out and break 'em, or break 'em to put 'em in there and get 'em in the trucks.

♪ Then the tank battles down there... it was a reality!

It wasn't on the TV.

There are the Japanese tanks and the American tanks, and you'd see one explode, or you'd see a person tryin' to come out, and as they did, you know, they would be hangin' over the side of the thing, both American and Japanese, and was a fight to the finish.

[flame thrower roaring] But that was the real heart-rendering thing, when I was on Okinawa.

But then, after-- the other thing that really left a mark on me-- and for years... you wake up... and... you know... [voice-over] it gets to ya.

And it's somethin' that you don't ever want to have happen again, but we do.

We... well, I'm anti-war.

On May 11, 1945, the Japanese-- it was our last big blast of kamikazes.

They were around off and on all the time from the first of April until-- that's really five weeks-- the eleventh of May.

And on that day, they threw everything they had left at all the positions, including us.

And I was on duty early that morning, I think about 7:00 or 8:00.

And I saw this plane in the distance which was completely out of place.

My first thought was Amelia Earhart'd come to life again.

A big plane-- couldn't have been doing more than 90 miles per hour-- was in the distance.

And the group of ships was... two destroyers, and then our ship, and then two smaller ships, LCIs, in the unit, and we were about 50 miles off, northwest of Okinawa.

Apparently, this, this flying boat obviously radioed our position, and within half an hour or so, the air was full of planes.

According to that citation, we were attacked by 156 planes.

One of the destroyers set a record for the war.

It shot down 23 planes in 23 minutes.

The other one did almost as well but was put out of action.

We went alongside.

They abandoned ship, which they shouldn't have done.

We went alongside and took the wounded and eventually towed the ship into the harbor, into Naha in Okinawa.

That's the most action we saw.

And in the midst of this uproar, [laughing] a signalman, a friend of mine-- he was from the Boston area.

I was in the conning tower, and--his name was Bill Mills.

Mills stuck his head in the door.

Why I was responsible, I don't know, but he said, "Moore, you SOB, "if I get back to New England, I'm never gonna leave it again!"

I seemed to be responsible for what was going on.

♪ (Grove) When we were in this second prison camp, which was deep in Germany, Bad Orb, Germany, Stalag 9B, we could hear... bombing going on way off in distance.

In fact, one time, an American plane flew over, and one dropped a bomb, and then, all of a sudden, they knew this was a POW camp.

So they'd go over and wave their wings.

And that was such a great thing.

We'd all get out there and shout and wave our hands and everything else.

But the noise of artillery... began to get louder and louder and closer.

And then we could hear small arms fire.

I'll never forget.

It was Easter Sunday, 1945, that we just knew this was the end, that we were finally going to be delivered.

And Easter Monday morning, the day after Easter... [voice breaking] it was the greatest day.

The American tanks came in, knocked over the fences, the towers, and we were delivered.

When the war ended on... the 13th of August, they sent word into all the camps to stay put, and they'd come get us.

Now, some people left and, you know, made their way back to the States by piece, by meal, but the majority of us stayed in the camps.

Of course, we had no guards.

We would do whatever we wanted to.

But we stayed in the camps until they had made arrangements to-- see, I wasn't liberated till the 10th of September.

We were mad at the United States, you know?

They'd promised us... help, and it never got there.

And... a good friend of mine in West Columbia was a German prisoner of war, and we talked one time, and he said, oh, the jubilation that they had.

We didn't have that, because we weren't, we weren't that happy with the United States, you know?

We had an ax to grind, so to speak, and... so there was no, no, no real jubilation on our part.

♪ My unit was in, wound up in Luxembourg, and I was back with my chemical unit.

And some general says, "Find me somebody that started this war.

"I want somebody that knows something about the war and started, started the war in 1941."

My boss says, "I'm gonna send you up for a nomination.

"There must be a lot of guys here.

"I'm gonna send you up for a nomination.

"You're a Pearl Harbor survivor.

You were there on December 7."

And I says, "Okay by me."

So...the general sent back and says, "First lieutenant?"

"Yep."

"Well, tell him he is now "the Grand Marshall of the parade, the Victory in Europe Parade in Luxembourg."

And I had to maneuver-- it was something else.

I had to maneuver those 5,600 troops around the square somehow.

And then all of us officers were taken upstairs.

When I got everybody inside, I went upstairs with the general that happened to be there.

There was a general there, but I was commander of the parade, commander of the troops.

So we got up there, and they put him over to the side, and then they put me up there.

Then they started filling the champagne glasses.

And we helped pour it out.

[laughing] Turn around and smash those glasses and there'd be another'n right there, ready.

Well, that was some celebration there.

Oh, man, I'm tellin' you, I was walking on cloud nine!

To pick me, a poor, little first lieutenant, and let me be a Grand Marshall, that was some honor, I can tell you.

I brought back braggin' rights when we came back to the States.

(narrator) When the war ended, over 4,000 South Carolinians never returned home from the battlefields around the world.

Those who did return have spent over 60 years with the memories of what they experienced.

For the rest of society, World War II has become just another chapter in a history book.

How do we honor those who served, those who sacrificed, and those who are still with us today?

♪ It's, what, 60 years now since the end of the war, and that generation is... very rapidly leaving us.

And again, when we lose a generation, it's always-- we lose an important tie with our past.

But this one, this is particularly significant, because you're talking about the single most important event in world history in the 20th Century.

And we've had nothing like it since.

The war on terror, the Iraq War... in some ways, those are, you might even say, final chapters to the Second World War.

We're still, in many ways, living out the legacies of the Second World War.

So it is a vanishing generation.

But it's a generation that we need to, we need to preserve as much of, in terms of recollections, as possible.

♪ Patriots Point is a state agency, actually, that was born right before the bicentennial.

And the General Assembly gave us a mission of public education, public recreation.

Naval & Maritime Museum began in 1975, when the USS Yorktown was brought here to great fanfare and tied up at this pier.

And over the next few years, more ships joined.

This particular Yorktown was commissioned in 1943.

The original Yorktown in World War II actually sank at the Battle of Midway, the most important battle of the Pacific Theater, and the location where-- the turning point of World War II in the Pacific.

In honor of that Yorktown -- CV-5 was her hull number-- a ship under construction in Newport News at that time, to be named the Bon Homme Richard , for John Paul Jones' ship, was renamed while under construction, USS Yorktown (CV-10).

She entered the war in 1943 and was involved in pushing the Japanese back to the Japanese mainland after the Battle of Midway in 1942.

Don Ziglar is an employee here.

He is our only staff tour guide.

Don was what we call in the Navy a plank owner.

Don was in the precommissioning crew when the ship was being built.

He entered the Navy as a 17-year-old.

Was a quartermaster.

Quartermasters do things like navigate.

They are the master helmsmen.

He was on the bridge during general quarters.

He watched the attacks take place.

He was the captain's phone talker during general quarters, during major battles.

He saw it all first-hand.

Well, they got a program on, and they asked me to help, the limited time I have with them, on teaching them-- it was not teaching, but exposing them to the opportunity to feel what the wheel was like to a helmsman.

But to teach them... there's more to it than that.

But the children wanna feel the ship so much.

You see it even-- if you watch closely, the teachers want to too.

They want to get ahold of that wheel; everybody does.

And we want to help 'em get ahold of the wheel.

Anybody who is a student of history understands that the term "Greatest Generation" is not a misnomer.

It was an unbelievable feat that we accomplished fighting on both sides of the United States to help our allies win that war.

And as we all know, we are in the process of losing that generation.

If there's anything in our nation's history that we need to remind ourselves about so that we maybe don't make the same mistakes again, it's what happened in World War II.

So it's a big issue with us.

For instance, the Yorktown existed as a commissioned vessel until 1970.

What did we choose to feature throughout the Yorktown were World War II history, because that, to us, is the most important story to tell to remind future generations of what has to be done to preserve freedom.

♪ The Eighth Air Force and their missions in the war against Germany, against the Nazis, lost 28,000 men killed.

56,000 were shot out of the air.

The rest of them were prisoners of war.

The museum is now the permanent home of the Mighty Eighth, the Mighty Eighth Air Force.

And it is based on honoring the men who sacrificed.

(Meyne) It's not a display of aircraft.

There's four... three or four airplanes there.

That's all.

But what's there is what made the airplanes fly.

I mean the crews, the equipment, whatever.

It's... it's.... Our 379 Bomb Group has a big window like, oh, it's almost the size of that wall, and artifacts in it.

It'd be tragic if this is all forgotten.

This museum will keep people from forgetting.

And I always say, when people come in here to this museum, that let's remember this: this is not an airplane museum.

We have a couple of airplanes, but this is not an airplane museum.

This is a story museum.

This is a story telling about people.

And so... I... I have a very strong feeling for this museum.

I started with the museum about 15 years ago.

(Brown) We have a memorial garden with over 4,000 names on plaques.

The families and the gentlemen, the Eighth Air Force guys have bought the plaques.

They have their crew names up there.

They have their crew plaques.

It's unique in the world.

It's out behind, near the chapel.

The chapel itself is unique in that the Eighth Air Force veterans sponsored it.

We built it.

It's in the form of an old English chapel.

It has stained glass windows that the bomb groups not only sponsored, but have helped design.

Most of them have to do with their wartime history.

They're unique, and they're absolutely beautiful.

People come from everywhere just to see the chapel, get married and have christenings in the chapel, and memorial services for those who've gone ahead.

♪ And by World War II, there had been approximately 12,000 men who had come to Clemson.

Not all of them had graduated because Clemson had a variety of types of programs.

But of those 12,000, about 9,000 were alive at the time, and over 6,000 served as officers in the United States Army in World War II.

Only West Point and Texas A&M, which is about three times Clemson's size, equal or surpass that offering that Clemson made, so that consequently, Clemson is very much tied to the history of this nation, and particularly to the great effort of World War II, where we did our most.

Bowman is the place that that soldier looks over as he's getting ready to make his step out onto the field.

And when you get to the Heritage Plaza, notice that not only is there that arresting statue of a young soldier, a young man, but on either side, there is an impression of half a soldier, so that, in fact, what it is saying to you is, "This is the mold from which this young man has come."

And so it's powerful in that regard.

There's a tendency, I think, to romanticize wars once the people who actually fought in them and lived during the war have passed from the scene.

I don't think that's a healthy thing.

I think we are better knowing more about our past and knowing about the horrors of war as well.

It's not that... it's not that history, and especially the history of war, teaches lessons necessarily.

But we are wiser when we know what happened and the complexities of it.

Already, there has been a tendency to romanticize the Second World War.

It's frequently referred to as the "good war," in comparison with Korea and Vietnam and Iraq.

But--some wars might be necessary, but I'll bet you'll never find anybody who fought in a war who would say the war was good.

And World War II is no exception.

So I think those are some of the reasons it's critical to record the memories of veterans before they pass from the scene.

There's nothing more compelling than hearing the first story, the first-person account of a World War II veteran, of what it was like, of the fear that they went through, of the sacrifices they made.

Kids today... we're involved in a war.

It's the first time in many years that we've seen these sacrifices made.

They can relate more to World War II, when 17- and 18-year-old kids went to war and weren't seen by their families for two or three years.

That is the sacrifice, the courage we see displayed in times of war to preserve our freedom.

That's the story we're trying to tell.

To hear it from people who experienced it, there's nothing more valuable and no better way to make that imprint on today's generations.

These are the words from the horse's mouth.

These are the original guys who fought the war, flew the war.

We have depictions using some of them.

So we use those, and the TelePrompTers, the television displays, the prisoner of war exhibit, the escape and evasion, the French Underground helpers.

We have all of that explained by the original Eighth Air Force guys who escaped from enemy territory with the help of the Underground.

We have a mission experience that visitors can go into.

They get an original World War II briefing from an original World War II guy, airman.

They fly a mission, a 15-minute mission, and they come out of that very emotionally involved.

That's the story, the exhibitry that develops from the oral history program.

And what we want to do is not only preserve the story for future generations, but use it in our exhibitry, and use it for researchers to be able to have primary source material.

I think everybody, including you two guys, should sit down and record your life.

Now, you may think that your life is not interesting.

That's a bunch of crap.

Everybody's life is interesting.

I've recorded my experiences, combat experiences, here for the museum.

They have my recording.

That's when I spoke for two hours.

[laughing] I have four children.

Three of them know very, very little about my experiences or, frankly, about World War II.

I have a philosophy on history that to be able to better enjoy the present and to be in position to handle the future, you need to know what has gone on in the past.

I think there are history lessons.

I think there are cultural and social lessons.

I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from recording histories of World War II.

And some of the personalities, some of the characters that you are going to run across, what...how they felt about it, you know... I think it is important, yes.

A lot of people don't even know that they had a World War II.

And history is something that...that should be saved so it can be passed on from one generation to the next.

No matter how old you get to be, a hundred years old, they'll still say in 2041, "Did you show there where Pearl Harbor got bombed?"

It happened a hundred years ago, but don't we still talk about George Washington?

So... same thing.

History is a very important, very important thing.

We're losing about 1200 a day.

But there are still four million of us.

[laughing] Now, as our World War II vets die off, it is, in many ways, one of the last great wars.

Now think about this.

We don't understand or even appreciate the deprivations that that generation went through, and we must remember it, because it was a sacrifice like almost no other, except maybe the sacrifice that white Southern families, many times, made during the American Civil War, when they had high portions of their young away at war.

♪ That's the first thing they say: "Here's our hero!"

We weren't, we aren't heroes.

We happened to be over there.

The only way we could be heroes is we volunteered to go to Hawaii.

We didn't know the war was gonna come or we wouldn't have volunteered.

They'll tell you in the army, "Don't volunteer for anything!"

Didn't do anything heroic.

I did what I was told to do.

No, I'm not too sympathetic with the idea of the Greatest Generation.

It's something that came along, and you had to do it, and you did it.

So why take plaudits?

(Perkins) We earned this.

It just wasn't a gift.

We went out there, put our lives on the line, and some of us didn't come back.

Those of us who did come back, we should be appreciated.

It's a small token, but it's big to the individual.

(Porter) Let me start by this.

Many people say to me-- I talk to people in this museum all the time.

Many of them come to me and say, "Thank you for your service," and, "My gosh, you were great."

I'm convinced, and I know I'm right, there's no heroes.

There are no heroes.

The only heroes I can think of are the ones under the white crosses.

The fact that I'm here, or any of us survived, is again, I'm lucky; that's all, that's all.

World War II, in classrooms today, very little is ever said about World War II, which, as far as I'm concerned, just happened yesterday.

So the younger generations are not getting the picture.

There is no way... there is no way to explain combat .

I don't care whether you're on the ground, on the sea, or in the air.

There's just no way to explain that.

I'm not a coward, but I'm not the hero.

That guy in the Marine Corps and those guys on Okinawa... now those are heroes.

I could have gotten killed many times.

But they got killed.

The heroes are dead.

And they carried out orders, and those were the finest.... Some of our finest people are being killed today in Iraq.

(Price) We were heroes, you know.

Everybody would welcome us like heroes.

And I just couldn't feel like a hero.

My buddies that got shot down; hell, that was a hero.

No, I'm no hero.

[clearing throat] [voice breaking] But I am a survivor.

I survived combat.

I de--I robbed death so many times in combat.

I was delivered from starvation.

I was only skin and bones... when I got out of the second prison camp.

And I got out of all that stuff alive.

And I look back on it today.

Even though I went through it, it's hard for me to believe that I actually went through that stuff.

It seems like I watched a television program or read a book.

But it doesn't seem possible at all.

For me to be a hero?

No.

I'm just one of the trophies of grace that I'm here alive today.

And I use the word, I survived it.

So I'm not a hero.

I'm a survivor.

♪ ♪ Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc.

803.988.8438 ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪