All language subtitles for World.War.II.with.Tom.Hanks.S01E17.No.Surrender.1080p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DD_5.1.H.264-playWEB

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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.

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.

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.

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.

The primary purpose
of the Pearl Harbor Conference

is to determine American
strategy against Japan

in the Pacific.

Roosevelt looks at
Japan

and sees a country infected

with a kind of militarism,

a desire to conquer
its neighbors,

a notion of racial superiority

over all the other
peoples in Asia.

To prevent another
Pearl Harbor,

he's going to have to
stick to the policy

he declared in 1943:
unconditional surrender.

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.

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,

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.

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.

MacArthur insists
American forces must return

to the Philippines

for reasons both
strategic and personal.

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.

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.

At Pearl Harbor,

MacArthur presses the
President to strike Japan

through the Philippines
instead of Formosa.

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.

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.

Roosevelt leaves the conference

without making a decision.

A week later, though,

he sends a letter to General
MacArthur agreeing to his plan.

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.

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.

People of the
Philippines, I have returned.

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.

The Japanese know

that General MacArthur
has promised to return,

and so they anticipated
the next decisive battle

may be over the Philippines.

The Philippines
sit between Japan

and the Dutch East Indies,

Japan's primary source of oil.

So if the
Philippines get captured,

it will cut off
the supply lines,

and the military
runs out of oil.

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.

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.

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.

As MacArthur and
his troops land on Leyte,

the Japanese fleets move
towards the Philippines.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Americans
attacked from the air,

and they better focus on
the largest ships they see,

which was the super
battleships Yamato and Musashi.

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.

But the attacks that are

launched by
these American planes

gradually start whittling away

at her defensive capabilities.

Torpedo after
torpedo

streaks towards the Musashi,

hitting and exploding
below the waterline.

Seventeen to 19
torpedoes,

more than a dozen bombs,

finally get her to go down.

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.

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.

And so Halsey's
played into the Japanese hands

exactly as they had hoped.

Halsey's taken all
the major firepower

north with him, and that puts
MacArthur's invasion at risk.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,"

And the "world
wonders" line

should have been removed by his
cipher officer, but wasn't.

I've always
wondered if Admiral Nimitz

was also sticking a little
barb in Halsey as to,

"What are you doing up there?"

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.

Halsey realizes the danger.

He sends his fastest
battleships back to Leyte Gulf,

then continues after
the Japanese carriers.

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:

the kamikaze.

At an airfield on Luzon,

Japanese pilots are assembled
for a unique mission.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Leyte Gulf,

the American escort carriers
of the U.S. Seventh Fleet

confront a new and lethal
threat from the air.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

So after these
moments of tension

where Kurita could have
potentially wreaked havoc

on the American
fleet in Leyte Gulf,

he actually withdraws.

Kurita retreats ahead

of Admiral Halsey's
returning warships,

but the Japanese have lost
a third of their navy.

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.

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.

Over two months of
fighting in dense jungle terrain

against fierce
Japanese resistance,

General MacArthur's
troops retake Leyte.

Luzon is next.

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.

Twelve days after
the victory at Leyte Gulf,

it's election night
in the United States.

At Hyde Park,

a victorious President
greets townspeople

on election night.

Franklin D. Roosevelt wins

an unprecedented fourth term.

The unconditional surrender
of Japan and Germany

remains his highest priority.

On January 9th, 1945,

MacArthur's troops land on
Luzon in the Philippines.

Quickly, special operation
forces trek inland

to liberate Japanese POW camps.

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.

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.

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.

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.

MacArthur's
men are supported

by Filipino resistance
fighters who provide intel,

disrupt Japanese supply lines,

and help secure key
routes into the city.

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.

The Japanese response,
like the Nazis in Europe,

was to use guerrilla activity

as an excuse to
murder civilians.

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.

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.

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.

Roosevelt meets
with British Prime Minister

Winston Churchill in Malta

to discuss the strategy for
ending the war in Europe

and in the Pacific.

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.

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.

At first, the Marines
are ordered to take Iwo Jima.

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.

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.

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.

Japanese troops on
Iwo Jima have been preparing

for an American attack
for over three months.

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.

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.

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.

Looming over the
Marines' landing beaches,

Mount Suribachi
provides the Japanese

with a perfect
defensive position.

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.

On Iwo Jima, Japanese
soldiers are issued orders

to kill 10 Americans
before they die.

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.

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.

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.

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,

every Japanese soldier
with a mortar, machine gun,

or a piece of artillery

will now start to shell
the landing beach.

In the face
of withering fire,

the Marines struggle up
dunes of 15 feet or more.

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.

Bulldozers are called
in to clear a path

through the dunes,

allowing the Marines to
continue their advance.

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.

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.

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.

By the end
of the first day,

the Marines have
secured an airfield

and prepared to attack
Mount Suribachi.

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.

After securing the beaches,

U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima
attack Mount Suribachi.

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.

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.

Six Marines plant
the second American flag.

Joe Rosenthal, an Associated
Press photographer,

captures the moment.

All the ships offshore
begin blowing their horns.

Everyone on the
island can see it.

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.

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.

FDR was always a
frustrated journalist.

He had been the editor
of the Harvard newspaper.

He understood visual imagery.

It's American
determination

embodied in a single photograph.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

After victory on Iwo Jima,

the Marine Corps sends
three surviving flag raisers

back to Washington,

but they will not
meet their President.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.