Press Release: "The Pacific"

It was the largest battlefield in history.  A savage battle fought on an epic scale.  Yet it’s a story as intimate as one soldier’s story.  KUED continues its heralded series on the men and women of Utah’s “Greatest Generation” as they recount their very personal stories from the war in the Pacific.  Utah World War II Stories:  The Pacific, the third installment of KUED’s four-part series, airs Sunday, August 13 at 7:00 p.m.

America and her allies had done the impossible in Europe. In three and a half long years of severe casualties and bloody fighting, they had defeated Europe’s first modern superpower, Nazi Germany.  But the nightmare of World War II was still not over.

On the other side of the globe, America was locked in a fight to the death on a battlefield of such immense proportions it defies human comprehension.

The Pacific, 64 million square miles of ocean, was an area so large that all the earth’s land mass could fit within its boundaries.  Combat raged in the skies above, the depths below, on worthless volcanic outcroppings and in steaming island jungles.

Along with thousands of other Americans, Utahns fought with bravery and courage in the Pacific theater as the fate of human freedom hung in the balance.

George Wahlen of Ogden won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service as navy medical corpsman.  His job was to take care of Marines in his company and platoon who were wounded on Iwo Jima as the battle raged. “I thought, ‘Am I really going to be able to do this?  …I’d never been very religious up to that time, but I think during that time that I started praying to the Lord.”

It is the triumphant raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima that is one of Keith Renstrom’s most vivid memories of the war. “It was just a satisfying, great feeling to see those stars and stripes flying over the highest piece of ground on the island.”

Roy Tew of Mapleton, Utah recalls the March 9 firebombing of Tokyo in which more than 200,000 people were killed. “That incendiary raid on Tokyo killed more people than either of the atomic bombs,” recalls Tew who was a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps and served as a B-29 navigator.  “After a while I just kind of felt a hate for this airplane when I realized what we were doing --  bombing civilians up there in Japan, innocent people.  I’m sorry.  I just couldn’t take it hardly.  I just didn’t like what we were doing.  The hate for the plane, I guess, was trying to transfer some of the guilt I was feeling for doing this.  But, of course, it was war and it was our job.” 

Other Utah veterans recall darker days of the war in the Pacific.  Salt Laker Woody James, who served as a U.S. Navy Coxswain, describes the grueling ordeal of surviving nine days in the ocean after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis.  “The first day, about noon, somebody started yelling, ‘Shark, shark, shark.’  And they came -- a whole school of them. Pretty soon somebody let out a scream and all of the guys were just quiet.  Just the lapping of the water, that’s all you could hear….  We’d pull the lifejackets off  bodies that were cut in half by sharks.”

The United States of America would finally conquer the Japanese empire. St. George resident Gene Jacobsen, who spent three and half years as a POW in Japanese coal mines recalls the day he watched the camp commander stand on a platform to tearfully announce that the war was over and  the Allies had been victorious.

“All of a sudden all of the hatred I had for the Japanese just evaporated,” he says in the film. “I no longer hated them.  That hatred I had was replaced with joy….and I’m telling you it was the most beautiful thing that could happen to me.  I never could believe I could be so happy.  I know I cried. I know I laughed. I’m sure I sang a little bit. I was just so overcome with joy.”

Utah World War II Stories:  The Pacific was produced by KUED’s Elizabeth Searles with assistance from writer/consultants Rick Randle and Geoffrey Panos.  Look for Utah World War II Stories:  The Home Front coming December 2006.