Episode Three: "A Deadly Calling" - November 1943-June 1944, The War, A Ken Burns Film (Experiencing War, Veterans History Project, Library of Congress)

Experiencing War (Companion to the PBS Series -- The War: A Ken Burns Film) Stories from the Veterans History Project

Episode Three: “A Deadly Calling”
November 1943 - June 1944

In the war’s Pacific Theater, the battle in November 1943 to take the island of Tarawa from the Japanese illustrated just how difficult a fight the U.S. would have for the next 20 months. Treacherous landing conditions, inhospitable terrain, and an enemy determined not to surrender combined to make each island invasion seem more daunting than the last. In Italy, the fight went on at the heavily fortified Monte Cassino monastery and on the beach at Anzio as the drive to liberate Rome continued. Civilian ambulance drivers from the American Field Service worked the battlefields to transport the wounded to safety.

Soldiers of the Shamrock Battalion want to push ahead--Gilbert Islands, Makin Atoll / photo by Sgt. John Bushemi. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Tarawa
	"I went in the second day ... the morning of the second day..." John Herbert Armstrong's story	"I had feedback from Saipan afterwards… You know, nightmares and stuff... " Norman Lee Brown's story
	"As a kid, it’s just excitement, not a feeling of foreboding or anything like that..." Sherwin H. Goodman's story
Anzio
	"I doubt if anyone ever gets used to combat." Joseph L. Bieber's story	"I always wondered what kind of a feeling it would be to think you are a goner ..." Ruth Deloris Buckley's story
	"...some new recruit would come in and we would tell him, don’t be so particular; wait until dark..." Harold Conan Hammil's story	"One day we lost six of our thirty patients and I was pretty depressed ..." Elsie Perch's story
	"We were just down in that [foxhole], and we stayed for almost four months." Robert H. Rudolph's story	"...just a few hundred yards more in a different direction it could very well have been me that would have been hit ..." Walter B. Stevens' story
American Field Service
	"And then they gave me orders to report back to headquarters for desk duty for a year, and I tore those up..." Ward B. Chamberlin, Jr.'s story

The War: Episode Three

The Library of Congress
September 19, 2007

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