[MUSIC]
>> The Japanese have attacked Pearl Harbor by air.
>> Ask not what your country can do for you.
>> President Kennedy has been shot.
>> One small step for man.
>> Hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
[MUSIC]
[SOUND]
[MUSIC]
>> In the summer of 1936,
the city of Berlin had put on its best face as host of the Olympic Games.
[MUSIC]
>> Berlin was a lovely city.
It was a joyous, it was a happy city at that time.
It was more attractive as a city, for me, than were London or Paris.
>> In a world still plagued by the Depression,
the capital of Nazi Germany was thriving.
>> The Nazis used the Olympic Games of 1936
to try to project a positive image of the new Germany,
to translate the athletes' success into the success of National Socialism.
>> During the Olympics,
the uglier side of Hitler's National Socialism was kept under wraps.
>> There was no outward sign of anti-semitism.
There were no signs that were reported later on,
of course, Jews and dogs forbidden.
I never saw that sign during the games.
[MUSIC]
>> But the glittering surface of the international Olympic spirit could not
completely obscure the darker reality.
[MUSIC]
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Marty Glickman and
Sam Stoller were members of the American relay team.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> The morning of the day we were supposed
to run, we were told, Sam and I, that we were not going to run.
No fit American track and field athlete has ever not competed in
the Olympic Games, except Sam Stoller and me, the only two Jews on the track team.
>> Marty Glickman is convinced it was politics that kept him out of competition.
He believes the American Olympic committee did not want to embarrass Hitler by having
Jews stand on the winner's podium.
[MUSIC]
Almost everything at the Olympics seemed to be going Hitler's way.
In event after event,
German victories appear to support his notion of Aryan racial superiority.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> But then came the 100 meters.
The hopes of the American team rested
on the son of an Alabama sharecropper, Jesse Owens.
[MUSIC]
[SOUND] >> [APPLAUSE]
>> [FOREIGN]
[MUSIC]
>> I was standing ten yards behind Hitler.
Hiter, hearing the name Jesse Owens, angrily pushed back his chair,
and with a deep growl on his face, walked right past me and walked out.
[MUSIC]
>> In that tense summer of 1936, Owens went on to win four gold medals.
>> The competition was grand.
We're very glad to come out on top.
Thank you very kindly.
[MUSIC]
>> There were other American victories, but
Germany won far more medals than any other nation.
And with the 11th Olympiad, Hitler had pulled off an international success.
For the rest of the decade,
it was not his athletes but his soldiers who challenged the world.
As Hitler, with ever greater boldness, threatened his neighbors,
the rest of Europe and Britain stood by, incredulous.
America, safe on the other side of the ocean,
was still worried about the Depression.
>> I see one-third of a nation ill-housed,
ill-clad, ill-nourished.
>> January 1937, the clouds of the Great Depression still hovered over
Franklin Roosevelt at his second inauguration.
>> I see millions whose daily lives, in city and on farm,
continue under conditions labeled indecent half a century ago.
>> The president thought that, in order to lift the nation's spirits,
he had to make the country face the economic crisis head on, together.
And he used the battery of newly available mass media to do that.
The government hired photographers to capture the faces of the Great Depression.
[MUSIC]
>> No other government has ever done this.
>> Carl Mydans, just 28 at the time,
was among those who set out with their cameras.
>> The 35-millimeter camera became the heart of the new age of photography.
That is, the new age of photojournalism.
What moved me greatly was their spirit.
They simply were proud of the fact that they could live in the circumstances and
still be solid citizens.
We photographers were pretty skillful.
One could not look at those pictures about what
was happening in the country and not be affected by them.
>> These photographs were all over the new magazines, Life chief among them.
>> I can remember, as a kid, running home from school on the day that Life came,
to get that copy before my brothers got home and
take it to my room so I could look at it first.
[MUSIC]
It was as if the whole world was opening up in those pictures.
And that magazine changed the way we saw the world.
[MUSIC]
>> The United States Supreme Court today handed down its long-awaited-
>> At a time when people were desperate
for news, radio, more immediate and more trusted than newspapers,
became America's favorite way to keep up with events.
>> Maritime labor leaders declared today that-
>> The man who really
discovered radio to use it on a massive scale which made history was FDR.
>> The money- >> He found,
in order to be able to reach the citizenry, he could use radio.
And that was the beginning of the Fireside Chats.
>> Our capacity is limited only by our ability to work together.
>> He made the difference.
People would be glued to their radios, all over the country,
to find out from this man What's happening?
What's going on?
When can we get word?
When will things change?
>> And just as he understood the power of the still photograph and
radio, Roosevelt also saw the newsreel as a way to pull the nation together.
Boulder Dam put into operation, giant spurts of water runways.
>> There was something in there a dam was being built or
the a river was being built.
>> The Colossal Triborough bridge has is formally opened by president Roosevelt.
>> Where a was being real- >> More than $50 million.
>> Or some invention was being announced, there was something good going on.
Roosevelt made the White House an amplifier
of all that the government was trying to do.
>> And gentlemen, the President of the United States.
>> Five years of information through the radio and the moving picture,
have taken the whole nation to school in the nation's business.
We have learned to think as a nation, we have learned to feel ourselves, a nation.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> [FOREIGN]
>> In Germany too,
the new mass media were part of the national myth making machine.
Joseph Goebbels as Hitler's Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda,
control the printed press and exploited the power of pictures and sound.
[MUSIC]
>> [FOREIGN] >> At Goebles' direction,
the government put loud speakers in the streets and
made cheap radios available to every shop, school and home.
Every German was now within the sound of Hitler's voice.
>> [FOREIGN] >> To
have a real radio now that was fantastic.
Every day there were political programs or sound, I learned lot from the radio.
I thought it was great but father, father thought it was one of the main
weapons now to brainwash.
[MUSIC]
>> Propaganda films promoted a glorious Germanic world of tomorrow.
[MUSIC]
We were told that we were the top nation on Earth.
We were the chosen the people, he was the head and we called it, the Master Race and
that we will more intelligent and better looking and stronger.
Than all the others and that it was our God given
duty to force our life onto all the others.
>> To glorify the Master Race on film,
Hitler's choice was Germany's preeminent filmmaker Fritz Lang.
Lang sensing the time, when one could say no to the Fuhrer had passed left for Paris.
The powerful film propaganda post would go to Hitler's
second choice, director Leni Riefenstahl.
Her film Triumph of the Will used the 1934 Nazi Party Congress
as a vast backdrop designed to make Hitler look like a god.
[MUSIC]
>> Military music was played and he marched down the center aisle,
flanked by heaven knows how many gorgeously uniformed creatures.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> And he would be behind the lectern
standing there, silent,
waiting, until the tension rose.
>> [APPLAUSE]
And then he would start.
>> [FOREIGN].
>> Slowly revving up.
>> [FOREIGN] >> Until
he finally reached a tremendous pitch.
>> [FOREIGN]
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> [FOREIGN]
>> If you sat in an audience like that
you'd be swept along.
>> [FOREIGN]
>> [APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC]
>> Never before had mass communication been more effective.
>> Never before had it been used with more sinister intentions.
>> [FOREIGN]
[MUSIC]
>> [FOREIGN]
>> Only four months after Hitler came to
power, bonfires burned in the streets of German cities.
>> [FOREIGN] >> The flames were fed with books by
Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Hellen Keller, Sigmund Freud and
other authors who were deemed subversive to the German people.
[MUSIC]
>> [FOREIGN] >> Democracy in Germany was dead.
>> [FOREIGN] >> Hitlers own book"Mein Kampf",
"My Struggle" was now the blue print for Germany's future.
[MUSIC]
In the new Germany, Nazi Party thugs, the paramilitary Brown Shirts would
patrol the streets to root out and arrest anyone who stood in Hitler's way.
Thousands of political opponents were sent to hundreds of concentration camps.
The first was near the German village of Dachau.
>> Everyone knew that you could be sent to such a camp without due process of law.
We had a verse that was
widely recited [FOREIGN] >> Dear God,
strike me dumb, so that I won't be sent to Dachau.
>> In the new Germany everyone was classified by race,
in the new Germany, only those who Hitler considered perfect.
The purest members of the Aryan race were welcomed.
>> [FOREIGN] [SOUND] The name undesirable
was the Jewish people, the Jews.
We were being told that the Jews, they are behind everything which is bad in Germany.
[MUSIC]
>> There was a lot of propaganda against the Jews.
There were no longer any normal newspapers.
Most of them were Nazi.
You saw headlines, the Jews are criminals, the Jews are vermin.
They must be killed.
There must be arrested.
>> Hitler had declared in "Mein Kampf" that Jews weaken the German Master Race.
>> Well of course we talked about race in school, and
the superior races, the non-superior, the degenerate races.
And the teacher had some calipers to measure the width of your eyes and
your nose and so on, the head.
[MUSIC]
>> In our classroom, we had a poster, the head shapes from the sides,
the Aryans of course, they looked good from the sides,
they looked good from the front, they were blond and they were blue-eyed.
And when I was about 14 years old, my hair began to darken and
I sometimes was worried that I didn't look like a proper Aryan anymore
because my hair was not really blonde anymore.
And also my nose is a little bit hooked as you might probably see and
sometimes I looked in the mirror, held another mirror here and
I was frightened that somebody should think that I had some Jewish connections.
>> Two years after they came to power, they came out with the Nuremberg racial
laws, which separated the Jews from the German people.
We were not allowed to go swimming with the other children.
We are not allowed to play with the other children.
We were not allowed to go excursions with the other children, and so on.
[MUSIC] >> Jews were stripped of their
citizenship, their businesses boycotted.
They were forbidden to marry or have sexual relations with Aryans.
[MUSIC] Any trace of Jewish ancestry meant
immediate banishment from all civil service jobs.
[MUSIC]
>> I was classified as a quarter Jew, a mongrel of the second degree.
I was dismissed from the public service.
All I had achieved through examinations, through study and
other efforts to establish myself in life,
all that was, by a stroke of the pen, cut off.
>> Hitler had made his vision for his people a reality.
And he planned to force that vision far beyond Germany's borders.
[MUSIC]
>> And I remember when I was a guest with my mother in Berchtesgaden,
you could see on a clear day, you could see Salzburg.
And he pointed out to me, he said, you see that there, boy, that's Salzburg.
That is in my homeland of Austria.
And one of these days I'm going to see to it that that will join with Germany.
THE ANSCHLUSS
>> On March the 12th, 1938, Hitler made good on his plan.
Americans heard it first from NBC's Max Jordan.
>> Ladies and gentlemen, at the Austrian frontier town
an endless stream of German soldiers is pouring into Austria.
>> It was astonishing.
The takeover of a country broadcast live on radio.
>> The cheers are for Chancellor Adolf Hitler, returning to his homeland for
the first time in almost 25 years.
>> Karla Stept lived in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
She was 20 years old, and a Jew.
>> It was my home, so when suddenly the Germans marched Into Austria,
where they were welcomed with open arms.
[MUSIC]
The world ended for me.
[MUSIC]
>> It was a Friday evening, crowds began to march down, shouting slogans.
I remember one specifically which was [FOREIGN],
which translated means Jews perish in your own filth.
And it was clear that something was imminent, something was happening.
[MUSIC]
>> Saturday morning, the Brown Shirts, and
Blackshirts already started to go against the Jewish population.
They got Jewish men and women out to scrub the sidewalks on their knees,
being kicked by the population standing around them.
Hitler wasn't even in Vienna yet.
But what took Germany five years took Austria 24 hours.
[MUSIC]
>> In the spring of 1938, few Americans could avoid the news of Hitler in Germany.
>> Parade in Berlin's Tiergarten shows that once again, Germany has a real army.
>> That would mean war, when will Nazi aggression end?
The democratic nations draw together against-.
>> The rest of Europe Hitler orders all Germany to mobilize at it's full
war strength.
A million and a half-.
>> Growing anxieties over the increasing power of the Third Reich,
turned a heavyweight boxing match in June 1938 into an international showdown.
In one corner of the ring would be Hitler's pride and joy, Max Schmeling.
In the other, the American champion, Joe Louis.
>> Joe symbolized not only the fight against discrimination but
the struggle against fascism.
At a time when the entire world was talking about Hitler and
Mussolini, anti-Semitism.
>> Under the wing Max swings around Joe Lewis with two swift lefts to the chin.
>> There was tremendous tension.
>> A left to the jaw, a right to the head, and Donovan is watching carefully.
>> I was glued to the radio.
>> Lewis measures him, a right to the body, a left up to the jaw, and
Schmeling is down.
>> We just shouted exploded, shouting, wow.
>> The count is five, six, the men are in the ring.
The fight is over, Max Schmeling is beaten in one round.
>> People shouted out of their windows, Joe won, Joe won.
All up and down.
>> [INAUDIBLE] and still champion Joe Louis..
>> We won, it was a victory.
And we needed victories very badly at the time.
>> When 21 year old Milt Wolff heard the news about Joe Louis,
Wolf was already fighting against Hitler in the Spanish Civil War.
In that war, Nazi Germany was supporting Francisco Franco's fascist rebels who
were about to overthrow Spain's freely elected government.
>> I was a kid in Brooklyn, okay,
and I was caught up in this whole bit of the war in Spain.
For myself, it was a commitment to a struggle against fascism.
>> Milt Wolff joined 2800 American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
in defiance of American neutrality.
They went to defend democracy in what was widely seen as a dress rehearsal for
the greater battle with Hitler.
>> So these were guys who were essentially coming off the street.
Most of them had no military training at all, and up to the front they went.
[MUSIC]
They were hitting us with artillery, and
they were strafing us with the German planes.
And guys were getting killed and wounded.
For myself, the war in Spain gave meaning to the word anti-fascism.
>> By 1938, democracy was doomed in Spain,
as it had been in Italy, and Austria, and Germany.
Hitler's ideology and Hitler's armies were a danger to freedom everywhere.
>> It has now reached the stage
where the very foundations of civilization are seriously threatened.
Let no one imagine that America will escape,
that America may expect mercy,
that this Western hemisphere will not be attacked.
>> September the 12th, 1938.
The entire civilized world, as a CBS broadcast put it,
was anxiously waiting to hear Hitler's next threat.
It came in an unprecedented live broadcast from the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg.
>> [FOREIGN] >> Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland,
a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by German speaking people,
become a part of Germany.
>> [FOREIGN]
[MUSIC]
>> The Columbia Broadcasting System has brought its listeners to be addressed by
Adolf Hitler.
At this time, we present HV Kaltenborn.
>> Good afternoon, everybody.
Adolf Hitler has spoken, and the world has listened.
The world has listened, because it fears that this speech might mean war.
>> The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain,
who'd never been on an airplane before,
flew to Germany twice within ten days to seek a peaceful settlement.
[MUSIC]
>> Just to see on the newsreels screen Chamberlain coming there
with his umbrella is unthinkable to a German mind.
Hitler with an umbrella, you laugh when you think about that about.
We thought they were weak.
[MUSIC]
>> Chamberlain failed.
Hitler refused to withdraw his demands.
The Sudetenland would be his, one way or the other.
War now seemed inevitable.
In Britain, nervous citizens began to build bomb shelters.
[MUSIC]
In France, army reserves were called up.
[MUSIC]
And then only 24 hours before Hitler's promised invasion of Czechoslovakia,
Prime Minister Chamberlain once again flew to Germany.
At a meeting in Munich with Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini,
Chamberlain abandoned the Sudetenland to Germany, in return for
what he called "Peace In Our Time."
Hitler gave his word that there would be no more territorial claims.
THE MUNICH PACT
Chamberlain flew home to a hero's welcome from a Britain anxious to avoid another
conflict, after the devistating slaughter of World War I, only 20 years earlier.
>> And here is the paper which bears his name upon it, as well as mine.
>> [NOISE] >> As symbolic of the desire
of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
>> Chamberlain got what he thought was peace.
Hitler got the Sudetenland.
>> To us Germans, it was a great thing.
Their land is bordering on Germany.
And as a Sudeten, people were Germans, so we thought, yeah,
sure, why should say live in Czechoslovakia?
>> On October the 1st, 1938 Hitler welcomed 3.5 million
Czechoslovakians of German blood into the Reich.
>> [NOISE] >> Hitler's reception was a replay of
Austria.
[MUSIC]
>> [NOISE] >> As Hitler was being cheered
in the Sudetenland, the Nazis campaign against German Jews was intensified,
very much aided by an incident in Paris.
On November the 7th, a young Jew, Herschel Grynszpan,
distraught over the deportation of his parents,
walked into the German Embassy in Paris and shot a minor official, Ernst vom Rath.
[MUSIC]
>> While he was fighting death,
the newspapers carried headlines, headlines against the Jewish people.
"The Jews have taken off their mask from their face.
They have shown now what they want to do to us."
It was dreadful.
We said if only this man does not die.
But of course, he died.
[MUSIC]
>> Vom Rath's death became Hitler's opportunity.
Only a junior diplomat,
Vom Rath was nonetheless accorded the honors of a fallen hero.
[MUSIC]
The ceremony was intended to inspire revenge.
For once, said Joseph Goebbels, the Jews should get the feel of popular anger.
[MUSIC]
That anger exploded on the night of November the 10th, 1938, Kristallnacht.
>> I saw the synagogue in flames.
People came from all over, the fire department.
They did not make one effort to put out a flames.
Kids were laughing.
Kids were having fun.
I heard "kill the Jews, kill the Jews".
>> For 24 hours, Nazi stormtroopers rampaged through Germany and
Austria, destroying synagogues and shops.
The Night of Broken Glass in German, Kristallnacht.
[MUSIC]
Scores of people were killed, more than 20,000 arrested.
It was now clear there was no future for Jews in Germany.
>> For the first time in America, it broke through a certain part of the awareness
that something horrible was happening in Hitler's Germany.
>> [FOREIGN] >> [FOREIGN]
>> Roosevelt himself said it just was
incomprehensible to imagine that such a thing could happen in the 20th century.
And still,
people felt we've seen what happened when we get involved in Europe's wars.
This is Europe's problem.
>> [FOREIGN]
[MUSIC]
>> On Easter Sunday, 1939, an enormous crowd came together around the reflecting
pool in the nation's capital to hear one of the great voices of modern time.
Marian Anderson
[MUSIC]
>> Because she was a Negro, Anderson had been barred from performing at
Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
When president Roosevelt heard this,
he enabled her to sing at the Lincoln Memorial.
[MUSIC]
>> And I was among the 75,000 people
gathered to hear her sing that day.
This was a moment maybe even more important to us than what Joe Lewis
had done when he demolished Max Schmeling.
[MUSIC]
And we stood there and we listened, and tears ran down our faces.
[MUSIC]
It was a part of America's statement in Hitler's face,
about what we truly thought about Black people.
[MUSIC]
>> Marian affirmed for all of us, what the true meaning of America was.
[MUSIC]
>> That powerful symbol of racial justice gave hope to European Jews.
Hope that despite strict quotas, limiting immigration,
America would provide a haven from the terror of Adolf Hitler.
>> My mother desperately tried to get out of Austria.
And because of the quota system, there were obvious difficulties, and
could not gain entrance to United States.
And one possibility was to get entrance to Cuba.
>> Fred Reif's family joined more than 900 Jewish refugees
on board the steam ship, St. Louis, bound for Cuba.
But at Havana, Cuban officials refused to let them land.
[MUSIC]
>> Some suicide start to happen.
I remember one person slit his wrists and jumped overboard in harbour.
[MUSIC]
>> The fear is, of course, if you can't land in Cuba,
then you have to go back to Germany to a concentration camp.
We all lived there.
[MUSIC]
>> And so, the St. Louis turn north towards the United States.
For five days,
the ship sat off the Florida coast while the captain appealed for refuge.
[MUSIC]
>> Everybody's hopes were up.
Franklin Roosevelt was everybody's idol.
And nothing will happen to us.
America wouldn't let us down.
[MUSIC]
>> But the United States government did not permit them to land.
[MUSIC]
The passenger sent one last urgent plea directly to President Roosevelt.
There was no reply.
[MUSIC]
The St. Louis had no choice but to sail back across the Atlantic.
At the last minute, England, France, Holland, and
Belgium agreed to take the stranded refugees.
But because the war was spreading over the next six years,
660 of the more than 900 passengers would perish at the hand of the Nazis.
[MUSIC]
>> President Roosevelt was sympathetic to the plight of the refugees.
But with the United States Congress in an isolationist frame of mind,
he felt he could not spend "political capital" saving a small number of Jews,
when all of Europe needed help against Hitler.
Roosevelt believed that the only way to stop Nazi aggression and
keep America insulated from Europe's troubles, was to arm Britain and France.
It was not a popular idea in a country that was officially neutral.
In March 1939, six months after the Munich Agreement,
which Neville Chamberlain thought Hitler would honor, Hitler broke his
promise not to make any territorial claims, and took all of Czechoslovakia.
And still,
most Americans wanted to leave the Europeans to deal with their own crisis.
America was interested in a very different future.
[MUSIC]
>> In the summer of 1939, New York was home to the world's fair,
that it was called the World of Tomorrow.
[MUSIC]
Visitors got their first look at television.
>> How it worked, we did not know.
I didn't ask [LAUGH] I was just in awe of the whole thing.
>> General Motors confidently offered visitors a future without traffic jams.
General Electric dreams of easy living with a dishwasher.
>> It was as if all of the dreams of the future was suddenly going
to be materialized.
Machines were going to make us better people.
>> And here he comes, ladies and gentlemen.
Walking up to greet you, under his own power.
>> It was like science fiction for me, 12 years old,
waiting to see the World of Tomorrow.
[MUSIC]
>> The flags of 60 nations flew over the fair.
Only one major power was absent.
[MUSIC]
Germany had been invited, but Hitler had declined.
[MUSIC]
He had his own plan for the World of Tomorrow.
[MUSIC]
On the last day of August,
visitors were enjoying another festive evening at the fair.
[NOISE] >> As we were approaching
the Polish pavilion, the lights went out.
And we didn't know whether it was an electrical problem.
or what?
Because the rest of the fair was still lit.
All of a sudden a loudspeaker went on.
And they had announced that Germany had just marched into Poland.
[MUSIC]
>> Suddenly, the World of Tomorrow had lost its bright promise.
>> And here is the United first flash from Warsaw which says officially that
German planes have bombed railway station in 3 Polish towns.
10 Downing Street =Prime Minister of UK
I am speaking to you in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street.
This country is at war with Germany.
[SOUND] >> I remember
the broadcaster in London saying, and I'll never forget that sentence he used.
Tonight, the lights are going out all over Europe, and
no one knows when they'll ever come back on.
[MUSIC]
The war in Europe made Americans realize just how blessed they were.
In a display of patriotism, flag sales soared.
And the song by famous Jewish immigrant
Irving Berlin went to the top of the hit parade.
[MUSIC]
Most Americans still wanted Europe to fight its own battle,
but President Roosevelt and a growing number of people knew that they had to
prepare for the worst, as events in Europe raged out of control.
[SOUND]
>> In the spring of 1940,
Hitler turned his Blitzkrieg,
his lightning war, against the countries of western Europe.
[SOUND]
>> I think at that time, probably,
he was at the top point of his power.
Six weeks to beat Poland and 18 days to occupy Norway and Denmark.
To beat Holland in five days and Belgium in 17 days.
I think those who doubted him,
they then thought that man is just superb, he wins everything.
[MUSIC]
>> And then France fell in just six weeks.
On June the 14th, German troops entered Paris.
[MUSIC]
Even as France collapsed, the German planes started to attack Britain,
the last democratic stronghold in Europe.
Still, the United States held back.
President Roosevelt was able to help America's battered English ally with
a program to "Lend and Lease" them arms.
>> We shall send you in ever-increasing numbers,
ships, planes, tanks, guns.
That is our purpose and our pledge.
[SOUND] >> But
as a beleaguered Britain became freedom's last holdout in Europe,
full American involvement became increasingly inevitable.
In December of 1940, the first peacetime draft in American history began.
America's armed forces were in woeful shape.
The US Army had under 200,000 men, fewer than Holland or Portugal.
[MUSIC]
I remember even running around with sticks for rifles and
we used old tomato cans from the mess hall.
They got Campbell's soup cans and they'd put gravel in them, and they'd rattle.
And then we'd throw them as far as we could throw them, and
that's learning how to throw a grenade.
[SOUND] >> I was in ROTC,
I was studying to be an officer in the American Army.
And I would look at that German war machine, and it put cold chills up and
down my back.
[MUSIC]
And I used to say to myself, you mean to tell me we gotta go up against those guys?
[MUSIC]
It wasn't a very pretty picture.
[MUSIC]
>> By 1941, history's deadliest conflict was underway.
And the very survival of freedom in the world depended on the outcome.
That's on the next episode of The Century: America's Time.
I'm Peter
Jennings,
thank
you for
joining
us.
[MUSIC]