World War II with Tom Hanks (2026) s01e17 Episode Script
No Surrender
[ominous music]
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
is a transformative figure
in American history.
He steers the country
out of the Depression
and away from isolationism.
In the summer of 1944,
Allied forces are
battling across France,
and heavy bombers are striking
the Japanese home islands,
but forcing the Axis powers
to submit to FDR's demand
unconditional surrender
still requires enormous effort
from America and its Allies.
All wars change the world,
but none of them changed the world
like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march;
Germany's on the march.
No one can imagine the nightmare
they're about to unleash.
The most destructive
war in human history.
Suddenly, the world
is turned upside down,
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned by
the speed of the advance.
You get the Allies
led by the Big Three:
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.
Men who are dealing with
immensely complicated questions.
It's the biggest military
operation of human history.
The Allies have to come together,
not just militarily,
but industrial scale.
It's a global perspective.
They have to fight in every climate,
from the Arctic to the
jungles of the Pacific,
to the deserts of Africa,
and the depths of the ocean.
[triumphant music]
But there was no certainty of victory.
It was going to be a
horrific bloodbath.
We see humans at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings,
and we see them at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives
that others might live.
World War II was a struggle
in which there could be one victor
and one vanquished.
[triumphant music continues]
[weapons thundering]
[group cheering]
[tense music]
[Tom] Summer, 1944.
While American forces
combat Germany in Europe
and Japan in the Asia Pacific,
in the United States,
it's an election year.
Even though his nation is at war,
the Commander In Chief, the
most powerful man in the world,
must seek the approval of voters.
Franklin Roosevelt is
trying to do something
no American has ever done,
which is be elected to a
fourth term as President,
and the country is not ready
to turn Franklin Roosevelt out,
but they're not thrilled
about rehiring him either.
Roosevelt wasn't in robust health
when he first ran for
President in 1932.
He was a polio victim as a young man;
he's in a wheelchair.
Those who've known him before the war
always come away a bit shocked
at how dramatically he seemed to age.
The stress of the war
has ground him down,
so he's got to demonstrate
to the American people
that he is still firmly
in command in this war
and can bring it to a successful close.
[intriguing music]
Roosevelt decides to
sail over to Hawaii
to hold a wartime conference
with his top leaders.
By being on a warship at the
site where the war started,
for the Americans,
he has the ability to project an image
of continued vitality and strength.
[Tom] The primary purpose
of the Pearl Harbor Conference
is to determine American
strategy against Japan
in the Pacific.
[Robert] Roosevelt looks at Japan
and sees a country infected
with a kind of militarism,
[crowd chanting]
a desire to conquer its neighbors,
a notion of racial superiority
over all the other peoples in Asia.
[soldier shouting in foreign language]
[Robert] To prevent another
Pearl Harbor,
he's going to have to
stick to the policy
he declared in 1943:
unconditional surrender.
[Tom] The United States
controls most of the Pacific,
including New Guinea and the
recently captured Mariana Islands.
The Navy wants to push
on and take Formosa,
modern-day Taiwan,
as a prelude to invading Japan.
General Douglas MacArthur
has other ideas.
[dramatic music]
Douglas MacArthur is
one of the most famous
American generals in history,
also one of the most controversial.
He's got an ego that is unbelievable.
In Hawaii, he shows up late.
He keeps the President
waiting on purpose,
[Jonathan] And then rolls in,
in this leather jacket,
decidedly casual,
in complete contrast to the Navy,
which is all turned out
in their dress whites.
[Robert] MacArthur believes
he's more important
to the country than the President.
In fact, he believes he is the country,
that his will and his
desires in some way
embody the will and desire
of the American people.
[Tom] MacArthur insists
American forces must return
to the Philippines
for reasons both
strategic and personal.
[solemn music]
[Jonathan] Douglas MacArthur
had a long-standing affiliation
with the Philippines.
He had a real affinity
for the Filipino people.
He had lived there before the war,
and then in 1941 and 1942,
he was the commander in
chief of that garrison
when it was attacked by the Japanese
at the very beginning of the war.
[tense music]
[Tom] When Japanese forces
overran the Philippines
in 1942,
Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur
to evacuate to Australia.
He understood MacArthur's
personal value
to the morale of the American public.
After months of bitter fighting,
American and Filipino troops
surrendered to the Japanese.
In the cruelest conditions,
they were marched off
the Bataan Peninsula
and into captivity:
the Bataan Death March.
During the Japanese occupation,
hundreds of thousands
of Filipinos are killed.
Women are forced into sex slavery;
entire villages are
destroyed in mass executions.
As he is about to leave,
MacArthur makes this
famous pronouncement:
I shall return.
It's not "we shall return";
it's "I shall return."
This is a vow that becomes
really a rallying cry for Americans,
not only in the Philippines
who are captured,
but also for Americans back home.
[Tom] At Pearl Harbor,
MacArthur presses the
President to strike Japan
through the Philippines
instead of Formosa.
[dramatic music]
The problem with the Philippines
is it's not just an island;
it's an archipelago.
And there's a very large
Japanese army on these islands,
hundreds of thousands of troops
that could lead to protracted
fighting with the Japanese.
[Robert] But MacArthur has some
arguments on his side as well.
The Philippines are an
American possession.
They're a commonwealth.
To simply bypass the
Philippines and go to Taiwan
will make America look like
a very inconstant partner,
not to mention abandoning the survivors
of the Bataan Death March.
[Tom] Roosevelt leaves the conference
without making a decision.
A week later, though,
he sends a letter to General
MacArthur agreeing to his plan.
[weapons firing]
On October 20th,
over a hundred thousand U.S. troops
backed by the Seventh and Third
U.S. Fleets land on Leyte,
a central island in the Philippines
with a protected gulf.
MacArthur's campaign to
retake the country has begun.
[triumphant music]
[A.J.] He had the Army Signal
Corps of Engineers
go ahead on the beach ahead of him,
so by the time he got there,
he gives his radio address.
[MacArthur] People of the
Philippines, I have returned.
[Jon] The fact that MacArthur
is able to return
to fulfill that promise
is a morale boost.
But the theater of MacArthur saying,
"I have returned,"
does not translate into
straightforward Allied victory.
[suspenseful music]
The Japanese know
that General MacArthur
has promised to return,
and so they anticipated
the next decisive battle
may be over the Philippines.
[Tom] The Philippines sit between Japan
and the Dutch East Indies,
Japan's primary source of oil.
[Jonathan] So if the
Philippines get captured,
it will cut off the supply lines,
and the military runs out of oil.
[Tom] The Japanese already have a plan
to defend the Philippines:
Operation Sho-Go, or victory.
They will send all their warships
to destroy the U.S.
fleets in Leyte Gulf,
then trap General MacArthur's
troops on the island.
[Jonathan] The Japanese position is
it's absolutely imperative to
carry out this operation now.
We've got oil, we've got warships.
We better use them or lose them.
This is almost like one
last banzai charge at sea
that can have a material effect
on the outcome of the war.
That's the kind of spirit
in which the Japanese are
heading into this battle.
[Robert] The Allies have
promised the Japanese
that the war's gonna go on
until unconditional surrender
of the Japanese empire.
But deep down inside,
I'm not sure the Japanese believe that.
They still think they can
inflict enough casualties
on the United States that eventually,
despite all the talk of
unconditional surrender,
the Americans will be willing to talk.
[Tom] As MacArthur and
his troops land on Leyte,
the Japanese fleets move
towards the Philippines.
[Christopher] At this point in the war,
the Japanese have suffered
terrible losses in the Pacific
from Midway to Guadalcanal,
but they still have a
tremendously powerful fleet.
They have these super battleships,
the Musashi and the Yamato.
These are the biggest
battleships ever built,
and this has always been
the U.S. Navy's fear.
If these massive Yamato-class
battleships get loose
in amongst MacArthur's troop ships,
the invasion support vessels,
the devastation could be immense.
[Tom] Two Japanese fleets,
a central fleet and a southern fleet,
will converge on Leyte Gulf,
where U.S. naval forces are
protecting MacArthur's landing.
Success depends on a third fleet
moving towards the gulf from the north:
a decoy fleet.
[Bradley] There's another aspect.
There's essentially
a carrier task force
that sails towards Leyte
Gulf from the north.
It has four aircraft carriers in it.
It's designed to try to
lure American ships away
from protecting MacArthur.
And this is the brilliance
of the Japanese move.
They decide to use
the carriers as bait.
The entire Japanese strategy
is to trap MacArthur,
trap this famous general
himself, potentially.
They're gonna bring
these two heavily armed
and armored pincers against
the American landing force
while it is still unloading cargo
and supplies and troops at Leyte
and annihilate it.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] General MacArthur has
landed 130,000 troops on Leyte,
the first step in the
American liberation
of the Philippines.
But as U.S. troops establish
a secure beachhead,
the Japanese Navy
enacts Operation Sho-Go.
[Jonathan] The Japanese
have to figure out
how to sneak their forces
close to the landing beaches
without being discovered,
because if they come
under heavy air attack,
they're in real trouble.
So they plan to lure most
of the American forces
out of the fight.
[Tom] There are two American fleets
supporting MacArthur's forces:
the U.S. Third Fleet led
by Admiral Bull Halsey
and the Seventh led by
Admiral Thomas Kinkaid.
As the Japanese cross the Sibuyan Sea,
they're spotted by one
of Halsey's scout planes.
[tense music]
[Anand] The Americans
attacked from the air,
and they better focus on
the largest ships they see,
which was the super
battleships Yamato and Musashi.
[Jonathan] Musashi is an
absolute giant.
She has 18.1-inch naval guns,
the largest naval guns ever mounted.
The Japanese have even developed
a special anti-aircraft
shell for them as well,
which explodes in this enormous cloud,
and it's supposed to
destroy any American planes
that are flying through it.
[weapons firing]
But the attacks that are
launched by these American planes
gradually start whittling away
at her defensive capabilities.
[Dr. Grant] Torpedo after torpedo
streaks towards the Musashi,
hitting and exploding
below the waterline.
[Jonathan] Seventeen to 19 torpedoes,
more than a dozen bombs,
[bombs thundering]
finally get her to go down.
[Tom] The Musashi sinks along
with a thousand of her crew.
The Japanese central fleet retreats.
That night, Kinkaid's fleet,
including battleships
that had been damaged at Pearl Harbor,
decimate the Japanese southern fleet.
But Halsey again spots
Japanese warships
north of Leyte Gulf,
including four aircraft carriers:
the Japanese decoy fleet.
[Jonathan] In Halsey's mind,
as a carrier commander himself,
any enemy carrier fleet
represents the most dire threat
to his mission, which is
protecting the invasion forces.
So Halsey takes his entire fleet
and goes charging off after it.
[Bradley] And so Halsey's
played into the Japanese hands
exactly as they had hoped.
[Dr. Grant] Halsey's taken all the
major firepower north with him,
and that puts MacArthur's
invasion at risk.
[tense music]
[Tom] Halsey moves north,
but the Japanese central fleet
under Admiral Takeo Kurita
returns to Leyte Gulf.
From the battleship Yamato,
Kurita sees that only a
portion of the Seventh Fleet
is left to protect
MacArthur's invasion.
[Jonathan] For Kurita, this is
a heaven-sent opportunity.
The dawn breaks,
and now there is an American fleet
sitting directly under his guns.
All he has to do is sink them.
[Dr. Grant] The American vessels
that are still around Leyte
primarily provide support
for the landing forces going ashore.
So there's only a token force
of light escort
carriers and destroyers.
[Jonathan] Escort carriers are
small, extremely vulnerable.
They can carry 25 to 30 aircraft max.
They're designed for ground support
for the troops ashore.
That's their role.
It is not to get themselves
into standup fights
against large enemy warships.
[Tom] The escort carriers
launch their planes
against Kurita's much larger fleet.
And then these escort carriers,
mostly what they do is
turn around and run,
because they are not designed
to fight a threat like this.
[Tom] The only force that
can match the Japanese,
Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet,
remains a hundred miles to the north.
His commander in chief,
Admiral Chester Nimitz,
requests his location.
[Jonathan] Halsey receives a
message from Nimitz:
"Where, repeat, where, is Task Force 34
The world wonders."
Traditionally, naval
messages begin and end
with sort of a nonsense phrase
to confuse code breakers.
The nonsense phrase they
used in this message, though,
is "the world wonders,"
[Jonathan] And the "world wonders" line
should have been removed by his
cipher officer, but wasn't.
[Robert] I've always
wondered if Admiral Nimitz
was also sticking a little
barb in Halsey as to,
"What are you doing up there?"
[Jonathan] And the result is
that Halsey
just goes into conniptions,
throws his cap on the floor,
swearing up and down.
His chief of staff has to tell him
to get a grip on this situation.
[Tom] Halsey realizes the danger.
He sends his fastest
battleships back to Leyte Gulf,
then continues after
the Japanese carriers.
[Bradley] Now, what the
Americans don't know
is that the Japanese carriers
lying to Halsey's north
don't have many planes on them.
In fact, most of the planes have
been offloaded already
and flown to the island of Luzon
for what is about to come,
because a new and terrifying weapon
emerges from this battle:
[plane buzzing]
the kamikaze.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] At an airfield on Luzon,
Japanese pilots are assembled
for a unique mission.
[Dr. Grant] Japanese pilots at
the beginning of the war
were the cream of the crop,
elite, hand-selected,
and carefully trained.
But by this point in the war,
Japan just doesn't have the time
or the resources to train its pilots.
[Noriko] The Japanese military
leadership
has to make a tough decision
to make a cost-efficient way
of destroying American enemy ships.
And one way to do it is to
undertake one-way flight
that will end with crashing a plane.
[Tom] This new unit of 24 pilots,
led by 23-year-old
Lieutenant Yukio Seki,
is Japan's first organized
special attack unit.
They will soon become
known as kamikaze:
the divine wind.
[Bradley] So the kamikaze in
some ways represents
a perversion of traditional
Japanese bushido doctrine,
the samurai code,
this idea of sacrificing
one's life for Japan
and for the emperor.
[Christopher] It's hard to generalize
about their motivations.
You find some of them saying,
"I'm doing this for the emperor."
Other pilots talk about their village,
they talk about families,
and they say, "I'm doing this for you."
For the Japanese, what they're doing
was not regarded as suicide.
It's a death in combat.
So it's this sense that
these young men are becoming
something really special,
that almost to give this
level of self-sacrifice
makes you a samurai.
[solemn music]
[Tom] In Leyte Gulf,
the American escort carriers
of the U.S. Seventh Fleet
confront a new and lethal
threat from the air.
[plane buzzing]
[plane buzzing]
[Dr. Grant] Stopping a kamikaze
plane is almost impossible.
The American carriers
can only do two things.
One is maneuver away,
and the second is put up
a huge curtain of flak.
But oftentimes the kamikazes
can break through that flak curtain.
[Robert] You could fire every
anti-aircraft gun in the world,
but unless you get
something like a direct hit
that kills the pilot,
that plane's gonna hit your ship.
[tense music]
[Bradley] There's a
psychological effect as well.
Japanese kamikaze are
giving up their lives
in the most violent ways possible
simply to kill Americans.
This is something that is difficult
for Americans to understand,
that this is a human being
who has chosen to do this to you.
How do you fight against
an enemy like this?
[Tom] Lieutenant Seki crashes his plane
into the flight deck of an
American escort carrier,
the USS St. Lo.
It's the first ship to be
sunk by kamikaze attack.
Six other vessels are struck
and barely stay afloat.
But Admiral Kurita's central fleet
also faces an aerial attack.
[Jonathan] Despite the pounding
the Americans have taken,
it is actually Kurita
who is under a major disadvantage here.
He's up against 350 American planes,
and because Kurita is
being constantly attacked
by American aircraft,
he becomes increasingly paranoid
that he is now surrounded
by American carriers.
[Bradley] So after these
moments of tension
where Kurita could have
potentially wreaked havoc
on the American fleet in Leyte Gulf,
he actually withdraws.
[Tom] Kurita retreats ahead
of Admiral Halsey's returning warships,
but the Japanese have lost
a third of their navy.
[Bradley] It's the largest
naval battle in human history.
More than 200,000 combatants involved,
and the American victory really knocks
the Japanese Imperial Navy
out of the war in the Pacific.
[Col. Douds] But without a doubt,
the Japanese are not gonna surrender.
This perversion of the bushido code,
it has manifested itself on
islands throughout this war,
and now it's manifesting itself
in the sea and in the air.
So it's starting to get
in the mind of the Allies
about how costly it will be to
achieve that unconditional
surrender of Japan.
[weapons firing]
[Tom] Over two months of
fighting in dense jungle terrain
against fierce Japanese resistance,
General MacArthur's
troops retake Leyte.
Luzon is next.
[Jonathan] Luzon in particular
is gonna be a very tough nut to crack,
because not only is it a large
island with mountain chains
the Japanese can fortify,
but there's also this
enormous capital of Manila
with about a million people
sitting in the middle of the island.
And if the American forces get involved
in urban combat there,
the casualties are likely
to be very, very heavy.
[group cheering]
[Tom] Twelve days after
the victory at Leyte Gulf,
it's election night
in the United States.
[Reporter] At Hyde Park,
a victorious President
greets townspeople
on election night.
[Tom] Franklin D. Roosevelt wins
an unprecedented fourth term.
The unconditional surrender
of Japan and Germany
remains his highest priority.
[dramatic music]
On January 9th, 1945,
MacArthur's troops land on
Luzon in the Philippines.
Quickly, special operation forces
trek inland to liberate
Japanese POW camps.
[weapons firing]
[Jonathan] At the end of two years of
captivity in Japanese hands,
these men are in terrible condition.
A third of them have already died.
There are also a number of
American civilian detainees
that are in camps that are near Manila,
so there's a ticking clock here
as far as MacArthur is concerned.
He needs to liberate these
camps as rapidly as possible.
[weapons firing]
[Tom] In early February,
American forces surround
the capital of Manila.
Most Japanese troops
have retreated north
to create an extensive defensive line,
but one group stays with orders
to fight to the last man.
[tense music]
[Robert] The real problem of
urban warfare in the modern era
is that the city is a gigantic sponge.
You can have a million-man army,
and suddenly it's split
up all over the place.
[Christopher] So the Americans
find themselves having to fight
street by street, building by building,
and it really turns Manila into
the Stalingrad of the Pacific.
[weapons firing]
[Tom] MacArthur's men are supported
by Filipino resistance fighters
who provide intel,
disrupt Japanese supply lines,
and help secure key
routes into the city.
[Jonathan] There have been
active groups of
Filipino guerrillas in existence
since 1942,
and those guerrillas
have been carrying on
a very successful
campaign of resistance
against the Japanese occupiers.
[weapons firing]
[Robert] The Japanese response,
like the Nazis in Europe,
was to use guerrilla activity
as an excuse to murder civilians.
[tense music]
[Christopher] So whether it's a
school, a hospital, homes,
Filipino people are being bayoneted,
they're being shot, beheaded,
sometimes burned alive,
corpses left to rot.
There's a sense of scorched earth,
a sense that we will leave
nothing for the Americans.
[Bradley] The Japanese will
ultimately take the lives
of a hundred thousand
Filipino civilians.
The Battle of Manila, in a lot of ways,
is a harbinger of what's to come.
[Christopher] Roosevelt and his
top military advisors are aware
of the increasingly dire implications
of a longer war with Japan,
but the American
people are very focused
on what's going on in Europe,
and they think the war
is now winding down.
President Roosevelt's
just been reelected.
He's looking at the horrors,
the brutality of the
fighting in the Philippines,
and he's been peppered with letters
from the moms of America saying,
"Where is my boy? What is he doing?
What God-forsaken island is
he fighting on this time?"
He needs to find a way
to strengthen the will
and resolve of the American people,
because he knows things are
going to get a lot worse
before they get better.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] Roosevelt meets
with British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill in Malta
to discuss the strategy for
ending the war in Europe
and in the Pacific.
[Bradley] The question is,
if we have an enemy willing
to sacrifice young men
in kamikaze attacks,
an enemy that seems willing
to fight on beyond reason,
how are we going to
bring this to an end?
Roosevelt's advisors are arguing
that the Japanese will not give up.
This war will not end
until there is actually an invasion
of the home islands.
[A.J.] Churchill and
Roosevelt are in Malta
on the way to Yalta early in 1945,
and this is where Operation
Downfall first crystallizes:
the invasion of Japan.
The sense is that after the
war in Europe would be over,
and all of the resources, all the men,
all the equipment
that they could muster
would be transferred
into the Far East theater
for a massive, massive operation,
the kind of which history
has never seen before.
This would occur
after a protracted
strategic bombing campaign,
which as of early 1945
is beginning to take
more and more effect.
[Tom] At first, the Marines
are ordered to take Iwo Jima.
[Dr. Grant] Japan has an
airfield on Iwo Jima,
and as the B-29s start operating
out of Saipan and the Marianas,
they're using it to
spot the B-29 formations
on their radar scopes.
[Col. Douds] Iwo Jima becomes a
logical place to, first of all,
remove something from
the Japanese control.
Second, don't allow them to
have any Japanese fighter
on there or early warning systems.
And third, for all those B -29s
that are making those long
flights over 1,200 miles,
it creates a place to land
if they have engine trouble,
if they run into any difficulties.
So Iwo Jima has gotta go.
That needs to become
an American airfield.
[Robert] Now, American
intelligence tells the Marines
that there are about
13,000 Japanese defenders,
but there are actually 23,000,
nearly double what the
intelligence estimates listed.
As a result, you have an
American invasion force
that's going to be meeting
a much tougher defense
than it expected.
[tense music]
[ominous music]
[Tom] Japanese troops on Iwo Jima
have been preparing
for an American attack
for over three months.
[Martin] The Japanese strategy
is to make the battle last
as long as possible.
Each day that that battle lasts
is a day where the people
at the home islands
are spared of an American invasion.
[Christopher] So the commander
of the Japanese on Iwo Jima,
Kuribayashi, says,
we're going to prepare these
defensive fortifications
and wait, draw the Americans
in, and then attack them.
[Bradley] The Japanese
aren't on Iwo Jima;
they're actually in Iwo Jima.
They have miles and miles of tunnels
that they have dug out of
this soft volcanic terrain
on the island.
And they've also fortified
the most prominent
landmark on Iwo Jima,
which is Mount Suribachi.
[Tom] Looming over the
Marines' landing beaches,
Mount Suribachi provides the Japanese
with a perfect defensive position.
[Jonathan] It's gonna be
this defensive hive
that the Americans will
have to reduce cave by cave,
bunker by bunker, one thing at a time.
[Tom] On Iwo Jima, Japanese
soldiers are issued orders
to kill 10 Americans before they die.
[Bradley] We see very few Japanese
who attempt to surrender.
There's a view that this is a
great dishonor,
not only to oneself and one's family,
but to the emperor as well.
[Christopher] If you look at
the letters
that Kuribayashi writes
home to his family,
he's clear right from the beginning
that no one on the Japanese
side is coming home
from the Iwo Jima campaign.
And he starts to issue these orders
very clearly to his men
saying, "Fight to the death,"
but he doesn't want a banzai charge.
He doesn't want
pointless suicidal acts.
He wants to show the
Americans the cost to them
of going as far as the
Japanese home islands.
[gentle music]
[Tom] The Navy bombarded
Japanese positions
for three days.
Now the Marines plan to land 60,000 men
across Iwo Jima's southern beaches,
push north, and take the island.
[Col. Douds] So at 8:59 on the
19th of February,
the first 10,000 men land,
and it's quiet.
But then at 10 o'clock in the morning,
[explosions thundering]
every Japanese soldier
with a mortar, machine gun,
or a piece of artillery
will now start to shell
the landing beach.
[tense music]
[explosions thundering]
[Tom] In the face of withering fire,
the Marines struggle up
dunes of 15 feet or more.
[Col. Douds] Iwo Jima is not
sand; it's volcanic ash.
Your feet just sink up to your knees.
It's like walking in coffee grounds.
It's incredibly deadly
to try and move forward.
[Tom] Bulldozers are called in
to clear a path through the dunes,
allowing the Marines to
continue their advance.
[Bradley] As the Marines
finally make their way
off the beaches, they're getting
attacked from everywhere,
people coming out of tunnels,
of mortars coming off
of Mount Suribachi,
of hidden artillery
emplacements all over the place
with snipers firing positions
they can't even see.
[Jonathan] Individual
soldier has to somehow
get up close with a grenade
that he can put through the firing slit
and kill the crew that's in there.
[Col. Douds] Ultimately, one of the
greatest weapons that the Marines have is
what they'd call Zippo tanks,
which are tank-sized flamethrowers
that can shoot long distances,
and that becomes the weapon of choice
for Marines on Iwo Jima.
[tense music]
[Tom] By the end of the first day,
the Marines have secured an airfield
and prepared to attack Mount Suribachi.
[Robert] On Iwo Jima, two
strategies come into conflict.
One says, no surrender,
that's the Japanese,
and then unconditional surrender,
and that's the American position.
And on Suribachi,
the Americans make a
determined statement
that it's going to be
unconditional surrender.
There is no position on planet Earth
held by the Japanese army
that American troops cannot take.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] After securing the beaches,
U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima
attack Mount Suribachi.
[Martin] The force that
goes up the hill
fights off Japanese resistance,
and upon reaching the summit,
they find a water pipe
that had been associated
with a Japanese cistern.
They attach a small American
flag to that water pipe,
and then they raise that flag.
[epic music]
[Col. Douds] But they realize
the flag's too small.
We need a bigger flag.
So what they're gonna do
is they're gonna take a ship's flag
and they're gonna send it up there.
And about noon, it gets up there.
[Tom] Six Marines plant
the second American flag.
Joe Rosenthal,
an Associated Press
photographer, captures the moment.
- Captures the moment.
- [camera clicks]
[Martin] All the ships offshore
begin blowing their horns.
[horns blowing]
Everyone on the island can see it.
[Col. Douds] It's a snapshot in time.
The composition's nearly perfect,
although he basically
shoots it off his hip
without even using his
rangefinder as he did it.
You can't see anybody's face.
And so really it becomes
everybody's picture.
[Tom] Two days later,
Rosenthal's photograph is on the
front page of newspapers across America.
President Roosevelt
immediately understands
how inspirational this single image is.
[Jon] FDR was always a
frustrated journalist.
He had been the editor
of the Harvard newspaper.
He understood visual imagery.
[Robert] It's American determination
embodied in a single photograph.
[Col. Douds] They're all
working together,
and so it tells a national story.
It's not just those
guys on top of the hill
that raised the flag.
It's a nation that put that
flag on top of the hill.
[Jon] But it's striking that
the flag isn't fully planted.
It's as if the struggle
is still unfolding,
and that fit FDR's mood at that point.
This isn't over.
We're getting closer,
but we haven't gotten there yet.
[Tom] To FDR, these six Marines
are the perfect symbol of
America's wartime effort.
He calls the Marines and
says, "Find me these guys.
I want to bring them
to the Oval Office.
I want to send them
on a war bond drive."
[Martin] So the Marine Corps
sends somebody to the island,
but they find that three
men who were in the photo
were dead already.
They died within days of
the photograph being taken.
[Tom] U.S. Marines
suffered 26,000 dead,
wounded, and missing.
Almost every Japanese soldier
on Iwo Jima is killed.
Kuribayashi himself,
who never believed he was
getting off Iwo Jima alive,
he retreats, and he takes his own life.
[Bradley] It's the only
battle in the Pacific
where the Americans actually
take more casualties
than the Japanese take.
So for American military planners,
the lesson of Iwo Jima
seems pretty clear,
that if you're going to
launch Operation Downfall,
if you're actually going to invade
the Japanese home islands,
the cost is going to be immense,
because at this point in the war,
most Americans have concluded
that Japan is never going to surrender.
[Tom] After victory on Iwo Jima,
the Marine Corps sends
three surviving flag raisers
back to Washington,
but they will not meet their President.
[ominous music]
[Reporter] Ladies and gentlemen,
the tragic news of
the President's death
came to Washington today
as a complete shock,
except to a very few people
who knew of his condition.
[Sarada] Franklin Roosevelt had
loomed so large for so long.
An entire generation of Americans
really only knew him
as their President.
Supposedly during the
funeral procession,
a man is so overcome by his emotions
and another man says, "Did
you know the President?"
And he says, "No
but he knew me,"
and that's how people felt
about Franklin Roosevelt.
[Robert] Roosevelt had been a
very, very active President,
a very, very powerful personality,
the kind of caretaker to the people,
and he knew you can't
fight an endless war
if you want to maintain
your democratic ideals.
He also knew how difficult
unconditional surrender can be
to put into actual practice.
[Tom] During years of
fear and uncertainty,
Roosevelt was uniquely able
to lead America's colossal
fight against fascism.
Now, this job will fall
to his vice President,
Harry Truman.
[Jon] Mrs. Roosevelt summons
Truman to the White House.
He says, "Is there anything
we can do for you?"
And Mrs. Roosevelt says,
"No, Harry, is there
anything we can do for you?
For you are the one in trouble now."
On assuming the presidency,
Truman told reporters,
"I felt like the moon, the stars,
and all the planets had fallen on me."
Harry Truman of Missouri
is now responsible for
the successful conclusion
of the largest conflict
in human history,
including
the final destruction of
Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
is a transformative figure
in American history.
He steers the country
out of the Depression
and away from isolationism.
In the summer of 1944,
Allied forces are
battling across France,
and heavy bombers are striking
the Japanese home islands,
but forcing the Axis powers
to submit to FDR's demand
unconditional surrender
still requires enormous effort
from America and its Allies.
All wars change the world,
but none of them changed the world
like the Second World War did.
Japan's on the march;
Germany's on the march.
No one can imagine the nightmare
they're about to unleash.
The most destructive
war in human history.
Suddenly, the world
is turned upside down,
and all hell is let loose.
The West is stunned by
the speed of the advance.
You get the Allies
led by the Big Three:
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin.
Men who are dealing with
immensely complicated questions.
It's the biggest military
operation of human history.
The Allies have to come together,
not just militarily,
but industrial scale.
It's a global perspective.
They have to fight in every climate,
from the Arctic to the
jungles of the Pacific,
to the deserts of Africa,
and the depths of the ocean.
[triumphant music]
But there was no certainty of victory.
It was going to be a
horrific bloodbath.
We see humans at their absolute worst,
how they treat other human beings,
and we see them at their absolute best,
willing to give their lives
that others might live.
World War II was a struggle
in which there could be one victor
and one vanquished.
[triumphant music continues]
[weapons thundering]
[group cheering]
[tense music]
[Tom] Summer, 1944.
While American forces
combat Germany in Europe
and Japan in the Asia Pacific,
in the United States,
it's an election year.
Even though his nation is at war,
the Commander In Chief, the
most powerful man in the world,
must seek the approval of voters.
Franklin Roosevelt is
trying to do something
no American has ever done,
which is be elected to a
fourth term as President,
and the country is not ready
to turn Franklin Roosevelt out,
but they're not thrilled
about rehiring him either.
Roosevelt wasn't in robust health
when he first ran for
President in 1932.
He was a polio victim as a young man;
he's in a wheelchair.
Those who've known him before the war
always come away a bit shocked
at how dramatically he seemed to age.
The stress of the war
has ground him down,
so he's got to demonstrate
to the American people
that he is still firmly
in command in this war
and can bring it to a successful close.
[intriguing music]
Roosevelt decides to
sail over to Hawaii
to hold a wartime conference
with his top leaders.
By being on a warship at the
site where the war started,
for the Americans,
he has the ability to project an image
of continued vitality and strength.
[Tom] The primary purpose
of the Pearl Harbor Conference
is to determine American
strategy against Japan
in the Pacific.
[Robert] Roosevelt looks at Japan
and sees a country infected
with a kind of militarism,
[crowd chanting]
a desire to conquer its neighbors,
a notion of racial superiority
over all the other peoples in Asia.
[soldier shouting in foreign language]
[Robert] To prevent another
Pearl Harbor,
he's going to have to
stick to the policy
he declared in 1943:
unconditional surrender.
[Tom] The United States
controls most of the Pacific,
including New Guinea and the
recently captured Mariana Islands.
The Navy wants to push
on and take Formosa,
modern-day Taiwan,
as a prelude to invading Japan.
General Douglas MacArthur
has other ideas.
[dramatic music]
Douglas MacArthur is
one of the most famous
American generals in history,
also one of the most controversial.
He's got an ego that is unbelievable.
In Hawaii, he shows up late.
He keeps the President
waiting on purpose,
[Jonathan] And then rolls in,
in this leather jacket,
decidedly casual,
in complete contrast to the Navy,
which is all turned out
in their dress whites.
[Robert] MacArthur believes
he's more important
to the country than the President.
In fact, he believes he is the country,
that his will and his
desires in some way
embody the will and desire
of the American people.
[Tom] MacArthur insists
American forces must return
to the Philippines
for reasons both
strategic and personal.
[solemn music]
[Jonathan] Douglas MacArthur
had a long-standing affiliation
with the Philippines.
He had a real affinity
for the Filipino people.
He had lived there before the war,
and then in 1941 and 1942,
he was the commander in
chief of that garrison
when it was attacked by the Japanese
at the very beginning of the war.
[tense music]
[Tom] When Japanese forces
overran the Philippines
in 1942,
Roosevelt ordered General MacArthur
to evacuate to Australia.
He understood MacArthur's
personal value
to the morale of the American public.
After months of bitter fighting,
American and Filipino troops
surrendered to the Japanese.
In the cruelest conditions,
they were marched off
the Bataan Peninsula
and into captivity:
the Bataan Death March.
During the Japanese occupation,
hundreds of thousands
of Filipinos are killed.
Women are forced into sex slavery;
entire villages are
destroyed in mass executions.
As he is about to leave,
MacArthur makes this
famous pronouncement:
I shall return.
It's not "we shall return";
it's "I shall return."
This is a vow that becomes
really a rallying cry for Americans,
not only in the Philippines
who are captured,
but also for Americans back home.
[Tom] At Pearl Harbor,
MacArthur presses the
President to strike Japan
through the Philippines
instead of Formosa.
[dramatic music]
The problem with the Philippines
is it's not just an island;
it's an archipelago.
And there's a very large
Japanese army on these islands,
hundreds of thousands of troops
that could lead to protracted
fighting with the Japanese.
[Robert] But MacArthur has some
arguments on his side as well.
The Philippines are an
American possession.
They're a commonwealth.
To simply bypass the
Philippines and go to Taiwan
will make America look like
a very inconstant partner,
not to mention abandoning the survivors
of the Bataan Death March.
[Tom] Roosevelt leaves the conference
without making a decision.
A week later, though,
he sends a letter to General
MacArthur agreeing to his plan.
[weapons firing]
On October 20th,
over a hundred thousand U.S. troops
backed by the Seventh and Third
U.S. Fleets land on Leyte,
a central island in the Philippines
with a protected gulf.
MacArthur's campaign to
retake the country has begun.
[triumphant music]
[A.J.] He had the Army Signal
Corps of Engineers
go ahead on the beach ahead of him,
so by the time he got there,
he gives his radio address.
[MacArthur] People of the
Philippines, I have returned.
[Jon] The fact that MacArthur
is able to return
to fulfill that promise
is a morale boost.
But the theater of MacArthur saying,
"I have returned,"
does not translate into
straightforward Allied victory.
[suspenseful music]
The Japanese know
that General MacArthur
has promised to return,
and so they anticipated
the next decisive battle
may be over the Philippines.
[Tom] The Philippines sit between Japan
and the Dutch East Indies,
Japan's primary source of oil.
[Jonathan] So if the
Philippines get captured,
it will cut off the supply lines,
and the military runs out of oil.
[Tom] The Japanese already have a plan
to defend the Philippines:
Operation Sho-Go, or victory.
They will send all their warships
to destroy the U.S.
fleets in Leyte Gulf,
then trap General MacArthur's
troops on the island.
[Jonathan] The Japanese position is
it's absolutely imperative to
carry out this operation now.
We've got oil, we've got warships.
We better use them or lose them.
This is almost like one
last banzai charge at sea
that can have a material effect
on the outcome of the war.
That's the kind of spirit
in which the Japanese are
heading into this battle.
[Robert] The Allies have
promised the Japanese
that the war's gonna go on
until unconditional surrender
of the Japanese empire.
But deep down inside,
I'm not sure the Japanese believe that.
They still think they can
inflict enough casualties
on the United States that eventually,
despite all the talk of
unconditional surrender,
the Americans will be willing to talk.
[Tom] As MacArthur and
his troops land on Leyte,
the Japanese fleets move
towards the Philippines.
[Christopher] At this point in the war,
the Japanese have suffered
terrible losses in the Pacific
from Midway to Guadalcanal,
but they still have a
tremendously powerful fleet.
They have these super battleships,
the Musashi and the Yamato.
These are the biggest
battleships ever built,
and this has always been
the U.S. Navy's fear.
If these massive Yamato-class
battleships get loose
in amongst MacArthur's troop ships,
the invasion support vessels,
the devastation could be immense.
[Tom] Two Japanese fleets,
a central fleet and a southern fleet,
will converge on Leyte Gulf,
where U.S. naval forces are
protecting MacArthur's landing.
Success depends on a third fleet
moving towards the gulf from the north:
a decoy fleet.
[Bradley] There's another aspect.
There's essentially
a carrier task force
that sails towards Leyte
Gulf from the north.
It has four aircraft carriers in it.
It's designed to try to
lure American ships away
from protecting MacArthur.
And this is the brilliance
of the Japanese move.
They decide to use
the carriers as bait.
The entire Japanese strategy
is to trap MacArthur,
trap this famous general
himself, potentially.
They're gonna bring
these two heavily armed
and armored pincers against
the American landing force
while it is still unloading cargo
and supplies and troops at Leyte
and annihilate it.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] General MacArthur has
landed 130,000 troops on Leyte,
the first step in the
American liberation
of the Philippines.
But as U.S. troops establish
a secure beachhead,
the Japanese Navy
enacts Operation Sho-Go.
[Jonathan] The Japanese
have to figure out
how to sneak their forces
close to the landing beaches
without being discovered,
because if they come
under heavy air attack,
they're in real trouble.
So they plan to lure most
of the American forces
out of the fight.
[Tom] There are two American fleets
supporting MacArthur's forces:
the U.S. Third Fleet led
by Admiral Bull Halsey
and the Seventh led by
Admiral Thomas Kinkaid.
As the Japanese cross the Sibuyan Sea,
they're spotted by one
of Halsey's scout planes.
[tense music]
[Anand] The Americans
attacked from the air,
and they better focus on
the largest ships they see,
which was the super
battleships Yamato and Musashi.
[Jonathan] Musashi is an
absolute giant.
She has 18.1-inch naval guns,
the largest naval guns ever mounted.
The Japanese have even developed
a special anti-aircraft
shell for them as well,
which explodes in this enormous cloud,
and it's supposed to
destroy any American planes
that are flying through it.
[weapons firing]
But the attacks that are
launched by these American planes
gradually start whittling away
at her defensive capabilities.
[Dr. Grant] Torpedo after torpedo
streaks towards the Musashi,
hitting and exploding
below the waterline.
[Jonathan] Seventeen to 19 torpedoes,
more than a dozen bombs,
[bombs thundering]
finally get her to go down.
[Tom] The Musashi sinks along
with a thousand of her crew.
The Japanese central fleet retreats.
That night, Kinkaid's fleet,
including battleships
that had been damaged at Pearl Harbor,
decimate the Japanese southern fleet.
But Halsey again spots
Japanese warships
north of Leyte Gulf,
including four aircraft carriers:
the Japanese decoy fleet.
[Jonathan] In Halsey's mind,
as a carrier commander himself,
any enemy carrier fleet
represents the most dire threat
to his mission, which is
protecting the invasion forces.
So Halsey takes his entire fleet
and goes charging off after it.
[Bradley] And so Halsey's
played into the Japanese hands
exactly as they had hoped.
[Dr. Grant] Halsey's taken all the
major firepower north with him,
and that puts MacArthur's
invasion at risk.
[tense music]
[Tom] Halsey moves north,
but the Japanese central fleet
under Admiral Takeo Kurita
returns to Leyte Gulf.
From the battleship Yamato,
Kurita sees that only a
portion of the Seventh Fleet
is left to protect
MacArthur's invasion.
[Jonathan] For Kurita, this is
a heaven-sent opportunity.
The dawn breaks,
and now there is an American fleet
sitting directly under his guns.
All he has to do is sink them.
[Dr. Grant] The American vessels
that are still around Leyte
primarily provide support
for the landing forces going ashore.
So there's only a token force
of light escort
carriers and destroyers.
[Jonathan] Escort carriers are
small, extremely vulnerable.
They can carry 25 to 30 aircraft max.
They're designed for ground support
for the troops ashore.
That's their role.
It is not to get themselves
into standup fights
against large enemy warships.
[Tom] The escort carriers
launch their planes
against Kurita's much larger fleet.
And then these escort carriers,
mostly what they do is
turn around and run,
because they are not designed
to fight a threat like this.
[Tom] The only force that
can match the Japanese,
Admiral Halsey's Third Fleet,
remains a hundred miles to the north.
His commander in chief,
Admiral Chester Nimitz,
requests his location.
[Jonathan] Halsey receives a
message from Nimitz:
"Where, repeat, where, is Task Force 34
The world wonders."
Traditionally, naval
messages begin and end
with sort of a nonsense phrase
to confuse code breakers.
The nonsense phrase they
used in this message, though,
is "the world wonders,"
[Jonathan] And the "world wonders" line
should have been removed by his
cipher officer, but wasn't.
[Robert] I've always
wondered if Admiral Nimitz
was also sticking a little
barb in Halsey as to,
"What are you doing up there?"
[Jonathan] And the result is
that Halsey
just goes into conniptions,
throws his cap on the floor,
swearing up and down.
His chief of staff has to tell him
to get a grip on this situation.
[Tom] Halsey realizes the danger.
He sends his fastest
battleships back to Leyte Gulf,
then continues after
the Japanese carriers.
[Bradley] Now, what the
Americans don't know
is that the Japanese carriers
lying to Halsey's north
don't have many planes on them.
In fact, most of the planes have
been offloaded already
and flown to the island of Luzon
for what is about to come,
because a new and terrifying weapon
emerges from this battle:
[plane buzzing]
the kamikaze.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] At an airfield on Luzon,
Japanese pilots are assembled
for a unique mission.
[Dr. Grant] Japanese pilots at
the beginning of the war
were the cream of the crop,
elite, hand-selected,
and carefully trained.
But by this point in the war,
Japan just doesn't have the time
or the resources to train its pilots.
[Noriko] The Japanese military
leadership
has to make a tough decision
to make a cost-efficient way
of destroying American enemy ships.
And one way to do it is to
undertake one-way flight
that will end with crashing a plane.
[Tom] This new unit of 24 pilots,
led by 23-year-old
Lieutenant Yukio Seki,
is Japan's first organized
special attack unit.
They will soon become
known as kamikaze:
the divine wind.
[Bradley] So the kamikaze in
some ways represents
a perversion of traditional
Japanese bushido doctrine,
the samurai code,
this idea of sacrificing
one's life for Japan
and for the emperor.
[Christopher] It's hard to generalize
about their motivations.
You find some of them saying,
"I'm doing this for the emperor."
Other pilots talk about their village,
they talk about families,
and they say, "I'm doing this for you."
For the Japanese, what they're doing
was not regarded as suicide.
It's a death in combat.
So it's this sense that
these young men are becoming
something really special,
that almost to give this
level of self-sacrifice
makes you a samurai.
[solemn music]
[Tom] In Leyte Gulf,
the American escort carriers
of the U.S. Seventh Fleet
confront a new and lethal
threat from the air.
[plane buzzing]
[plane buzzing]
[Dr. Grant] Stopping a kamikaze
plane is almost impossible.
The American carriers
can only do two things.
One is maneuver away,
and the second is put up
a huge curtain of flak.
But oftentimes the kamikazes
can break through that flak curtain.
[Robert] You could fire every
anti-aircraft gun in the world,
but unless you get
something like a direct hit
that kills the pilot,
that plane's gonna hit your ship.
[tense music]
[Bradley] There's a
psychological effect as well.
Japanese kamikaze are
giving up their lives
in the most violent ways possible
simply to kill Americans.
This is something that is difficult
for Americans to understand,
that this is a human being
who has chosen to do this to you.
How do you fight against
an enemy like this?
[Tom] Lieutenant Seki crashes his plane
into the flight deck of an
American escort carrier,
the USS St. Lo.
It's the first ship to be
sunk by kamikaze attack.
Six other vessels are struck
and barely stay afloat.
But Admiral Kurita's central fleet
also faces an aerial attack.
[Jonathan] Despite the pounding
the Americans have taken,
it is actually Kurita
who is under a major disadvantage here.
He's up against 350 American planes,
and because Kurita is
being constantly attacked
by American aircraft,
he becomes increasingly paranoid
that he is now surrounded
by American carriers.
[Bradley] So after these
moments of tension
where Kurita could have
potentially wreaked havoc
on the American fleet in Leyte Gulf,
he actually withdraws.
[Tom] Kurita retreats ahead
of Admiral Halsey's returning warships,
but the Japanese have lost
a third of their navy.
[Bradley] It's the largest
naval battle in human history.
More than 200,000 combatants involved,
and the American victory really knocks
the Japanese Imperial Navy
out of the war in the Pacific.
[Col. Douds] But without a doubt,
the Japanese are not gonna surrender.
This perversion of the bushido code,
it has manifested itself on
islands throughout this war,
and now it's manifesting itself
in the sea and in the air.
So it's starting to get
in the mind of the Allies
about how costly it will be to
achieve that unconditional
surrender of Japan.
[weapons firing]
[Tom] Over two months of
fighting in dense jungle terrain
against fierce Japanese resistance,
General MacArthur's
troops retake Leyte.
Luzon is next.
[Jonathan] Luzon in particular
is gonna be a very tough nut to crack,
because not only is it a large
island with mountain chains
the Japanese can fortify,
but there's also this
enormous capital of Manila
with about a million people
sitting in the middle of the island.
And if the American forces get involved
in urban combat there,
the casualties are likely
to be very, very heavy.
[group cheering]
[Tom] Twelve days after
the victory at Leyte Gulf,
it's election night
in the United States.
[Reporter] At Hyde Park,
a victorious President
greets townspeople
on election night.
[Tom] Franklin D. Roosevelt wins
an unprecedented fourth term.
The unconditional surrender
of Japan and Germany
remains his highest priority.
[dramatic music]
On January 9th, 1945,
MacArthur's troops land on
Luzon in the Philippines.
Quickly, special operation forces
trek inland to liberate
Japanese POW camps.
[weapons firing]
[Jonathan] At the end of two years of
captivity in Japanese hands,
these men are in terrible condition.
A third of them have already died.
There are also a number of
American civilian detainees
that are in camps that are near Manila,
so there's a ticking clock here
as far as MacArthur is concerned.
He needs to liberate these
camps as rapidly as possible.
[weapons firing]
[Tom] In early February,
American forces surround
the capital of Manila.
Most Japanese troops
have retreated north
to create an extensive defensive line,
but one group stays with orders
to fight to the last man.
[tense music]
[Robert] The real problem of
urban warfare in the modern era
is that the city is a gigantic sponge.
You can have a million-man army,
and suddenly it's split
up all over the place.
[Christopher] So the Americans
find themselves having to fight
street by street, building by building,
and it really turns Manila into
the Stalingrad of the Pacific.
[weapons firing]
[Tom] MacArthur's men are supported
by Filipino resistance fighters
who provide intel,
disrupt Japanese supply lines,
and help secure key
routes into the city.
[Jonathan] There have been
active groups of
Filipino guerrillas in existence
since 1942,
and those guerrillas
have been carrying on
a very successful
campaign of resistance
against the Japanese occupiers.
[weapons firing]
[Robert] The Japanese response,
like the Nazis in Europe,
was to use guerrilla activity
as an excuse to murder civilians.
[tense music]
[Christopher] So whether it's a
school, a hospital, homes,
Filipino people are being bayoneted,
they're being shot, beheaded,
sometimes burned alive,
corpses left to rot.
There's a sense of scorched earth,
a sense that we will leave
nothing for the Americans.
[Bradley] The Japanese will
ultimately take the lives
of a hundred thousand
Filipino civilians.
The Battle of Manila, in a lot of ways,
is a harbinger of what's to come.
[Christopher] Roosevelt and his
top military advisors are aware
of the increasingly dire implications
of a longer war with Japan,
but the American
people are very focused
on what's going on in Europe,
and they think the war
is now winding down.
President Roosevelt's
just been reelected.
He's looking at the horrors,
the brutality of the
fighting in the Philippines,
and he's been peppered with letters
from the moms of America saying,
"Where is my boy? What is he doing?
What God-forsaken island is
he fighting on this time?"
He needs to find a way
to strengthen the will
and resolve of the American people,
because he knows things are
going to get a lot worse
before they get better.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] Roosevelt meets
with British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill in Malta
to discuss the strategy for
ending the war in Europe
and in the Pacific.
[Bradley] The question is,
if we have an enemy willing
to sacrifice young men
in kamikaze attacks,
an enemy that seems willing
to fight on beyond reason,
how are we going to
bring this to an end?
Roosevelt's advisors are arguing
that the Japanese will not give up.
This war will not end
until there is actually an invasion
of the home islands.
[A.J.] Churchill and
Roosevelt are in Malta
on the way to Yalta early in 1945,
and this is where Operation
Downfall first crystallizes:
the invasion of Japan.
The sense is that after the
war in Europe would be over,
and all of the resources, all the men,
all the equipment
that they could muster
would be transferred
into the Far East theater
for a massive, massive operation,
the kind of which history
has never seen before.
This would occur
after a protracted
strategic bombing campaign,
which as of early 1945
is beginning to take
more and more effect.
[Tom] At first, the Marines
are ordered to take Iwo Jima.
[Dr. Grant] Japan has an
airfield on Iwo Jima,
and as the B-29s start operating
out of Saipan and the Marianas,
they're using it to
spot the B-29 formations
on their radar scopes.
[Col. Douds] Iwo Jima becomes a
logical place to, first of all,
remove something from
the Japanese control.
Second, don't allow them to
have any Japanese fighter
on there or early warning systems.
And third, for all those B -29s
that are making those long
flights over 1,200 miles,
it creates a place to land
if they have engine trouble,
if they run into any difficulties.
So Iwo Jima has gotta go.
That needs to become
an American airfield.
[Robert] Now, American
intelligence tells the Marines
that there are about
13,000 Japanese defenders,
but there are actually 23,000,
nearly double what the
intelligence estimates listed.
As a result, you have an
American invasion force
that's going to be meeting
a much tougher defense
than it expected.
[tense music]
[ominous music]
[Tom] Japanese troops on Iwo Jima
have been preparing
for an American attack
for over three months.
[Martin] The Japanese strategy
is to make the battle last
as long as possible.
Each day that that battle lasts
is a day where the people
at the home islands
are spared of an American invasion.
[Christopher] So the commander
of the Japanese on Iwo Jima,
Kuribayashi, says,
we're going to prepare these
defensive fortifications
and wait, draw the Americans
in, and then attack them.
[Bradley] The Japanese
aren't on Iwo Jima;
they're actually in Iwo Jima.
They have miles and miles of tunnels
that they have dug out of
this soft volcanic terrain
on the island.
And they've also fortified
the most prominent
landmark on Iwo Jima,
which is Mount Suribachi.
[Tom] Looming over the
Marines' landing beaches,
Mount Suribachi provides the Japanese
with a perfect defensive position.
[Jonathan] It's gonna be
this defensive hive
that the Americans will
have to reduce cave by cave,
bunker by bunker, one thing at a time.
[Tom] On Iwo Jima, Japanese
soldiers are issued orders
to kill 10 Americans before they die.
[Bradley] We see very few Japanese
who attempt to surrender.
There's a view that this is a
great dishonor,
not only to oneself and one's family,
but to the emperor as well.
[Christopher] If you look at
the letters
that Kuribayashi writes
home to his family,
he's clear right from the beginning
that no one on the Japanese
side is coming home
from the Iwo Jima campaign.
And he starts to issue these orders
very clearly to his men
saying, "Fight to the death,"
but he doesn't want a banzai charge.
He doesn't want
pointless suicidal acts.
He wants to show the
Americans the cost to them
of going as far as the
Japanese home islands.
[gentle music]
[Tom] The Navy bombarded
Japanese positions
for three days.
Now the Marines plan to land 60,000 men
across Iwo Jima's southern beaches,
push north, and take the island.
[Col. Douds] So at 8:59 on the
19th of February,
the first 10,000 men land,
and it's quiet.
But then at 10 o'clock in the morning,
[explosions thundering]
every Japanese soldier
with a mortar, machine gun,
or a piece of artillery
will now start to shell
the landing beach.
[tense music]
[explosions thundering]
[Tom] In the face of withering fire,
the Marines struggle up
dunes of 15 feet or more.
[Col. Douds] Iwo Jima is not
sand; it's volcanic ash.
Your feet just sink up to your knees.
It's like walking in coffee grounds.
It's incredibly deadly
to try and move forward.
[Tom] Bulldozers are called in
to clear a path through the dunes,
allowing the Marines to
continue their advance.
[Bradley] As the Marines
finally make their way
off the beaches, they're getting
attacked from everywhere,
people coming out of tunnels,
of mortars coming off
of Mount Suribachi,
of hidden artillery
emplacements all over the place
with snipers firing positions
they can't even see.
[Jonathan] Individual
soldier has to somehow
get up close with a grenade
that he can put through the firing slit
and kill the crew that's in there.
[Col. Douds] Ultimately, one of the
greatest weapons that the Marines have is
what they'd call Zippo tanks,
which are tank-sized flamethrowers
that can shoot long distances,
and that becomes the weapon of choice
for Marines on Iwo Jima.
[tense music]
[Tom] By the end of the first day,
the Marines have secured an airfield
and prepared to attack Mount Suribachi.
[Robert] On Iwo Jima, two
strategies come into conflict.
One says, no surrender,
that's the Japanese,
and then unconditional surrender,
and that's the American position.
And on Suribachi,
the Americans make a
determined statement
that it's going to be
unconditional surrender.
There is no position on planet Earth
held by the Japanese army
that American troops cannot take.
[dramatic music]
[Tom] After securing the beaches,
U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima
attack Mount Suribachi.
[Martin] The force that
goes up the hill
fights off Japanese resistance,
and upon reaching the summit,
they find a water pipe
that had been associated
with a Japanese cistern.
They attach a small American
flag to that water pipe,
and then they raise that flag.
[epic music]
[Col. Douds] But they realize
the flag's too small.
We need a bigger flag.
So what they're gonna do
is they're gonna take a ship's flag
and they're gonna send it up there.
And about noon, it gets up there.
[Tom] Six Marines plant
the second American flag.
Joe Rosenthal,
an Associated Press
photographer, captures the moment.
- Captures the moment.
- [camera clicks]
[Martin] All the ships offshore
begin blowing their horns.
[horns blowing]
Everyone on the island can see it.
[Col. Douds] It's a snapshot in time.
The composition's nearly perfect,
although he basically
shoots it off his hip
without even using his
rangefinder as he did it.
You can't see anybody's face.
And so really it becomes
everybody's picture.
[Tom] Two days later,
Rosenthal's photograph is on the
front page of newspapers across America.
President Roosevelt
immediately understands
how inspirational this single image is.
[Jon] FDR was always a
frustrated journalist.
He had been the editor
of the Harvard newspaper.
He understood visual imagery.
[Robert] It's American determination
embodied in a single photograph.
[Col. Douds] They're all
working together,
and so it tells a national story.
It's not just those
guys on top of the hill
that raised the flag.
It's a nation that put that
flag on top of the hill.
[Jon] But it's striking that
the flag isn't fully planted.
It's as if the struggle
is still unfolding,
and that fit FDR's mood at that point.
This isn't over.
We're getting closer,
but we haven't gotten there yet.
[Tom] To FDR, these six Marines
are the perfect symbol of
America's wartime effort.
He calls the Marines and
says, "Find me these guys.
I want to bring them
to the Oval Office.
I want to send them
on a war bond drive."
[Martin] So the Marine Corps
sends somebody to the island,
but they find that three
men who were in the photo
were dead already.
They died within days of
the photograph being taken.
[Tom] U.S. Marines
suffered 26,000 dead,
wounded, and missing.
Almost every Japanese soldier
on Iwo Jima is killed.
Kuribayashi himself,
who never believed he was
getting off Iwo Jima alive,
he retreats, and he takes his own life.
[Bradley] It's the only
battle in the Pacific
where the Americans actually
take more casualties
than the Japanese take.
So for American military planners,
the lesson of Iwo Jima
seems pretty clear,
that if you're going to
launch Operation Downfall,
if you're actually going to invade
the Japanese home islands,
the cost is going to be immense,
because at this point in the war,
most Americans have concluded
that Japan is never going to surrender.
[Tom] After victory on Iwo Jima,
the Marine Corps sends
three surviving flag raisers
back to Washington,
but they will not meet their President.
[ominous music]
[Reporter] Ladies and gentlemen,
the tragic news of
the President's death
came to Washington today
as a complete shock,
except to a very few people
who knew of his condition.
[Sarada] Franklin Roosevelt had
loomed so large for so long.
An entire generation of Americans
really only knew him
as their President.
Supposedly during the
funeral procession,
a man is so overcome by his emotions
and another man says, "Did
you know the President?"
And he says, "No
but he knew me,"
and that's how people felt
about Franklin Roosevelt.
[Robert] Roosevelt had been a
very, very active President,
a very, very powerful personality,
the kind of caretaker to the people,
and he knew you can't
fight an endless war
if you want to maintain
your democratic ideals.
He also knew how difficult
unconditional surrender can be
to put into actual practice.
[Tom] During years of
fear and uncertainty,
Roosevelt was uniquely able
to lead America's colossal
fight against fascism.
Now, this job will fall
to his vice President,
Harry Truman.
[Jon] Mrs. Roosevelt summons
Truman to the White House.
He says, "Is there anything
we can do for you?"
And Mrs. Roosevelt says,
"No, Harry, is there
anything we can do for you?
For you are the one in trouble now."
On assuming the presidency,
Truman told reporters,
"I felt like the moon, the stars,
and all the planets had fallen on me."
Harry Truman of Missouri
is now responsible for
the successful conclusion
of the largest conflict
in human history,
including
the final destruction of
Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.