The True Story of the Big Red One History Channel Documentary
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00:00:00Where you see the passing of time.
00:00:02The clouds in St. Peter's Square are praying like mad for the Pope's ride.
00:00:06Where moments refuse to die.
00:00:09This is a momentous hour in world history.
00:00:11This is the invasion of Hitler's Europe.
00:00:14And where victory lives on.
00:00:17Plenty of girls are being kissed by plenty of boys they don't know, and they do not care.
00:00:22You can love it, hate it, embrace it, or turn away.
00:00:28Lenin was shot to death late last night outside his apartment building.
00:00:31But it is a past we all share.
00:00:34Come on out here and give me a salute.
00:00:36Big baby salute.
00:00:37This is where yesterday has a home.
00:00:40Where we wonder what it was like back then.
00:00:43Go forward, knights, in safety.
00:00:45And not too long ago.
00:00:47His spirit must live on.
00:00:50It's where history has its place, and where the past comes alive.
00:00:56The History Channel.
00:00:59They are the heroes of No Man's Land, the bloody beaches of D-Day, and the jungles of Vietnam.
00:01:07They are the warriors of the U.S. Army's oldest and most famous infantry division.
00:01:14From the riflemen on the front line to the commanding general.
00:01:18Meet the real power of America's premier fighting force.
00:01:22Next, on the true story of the Big Red One.
00:01:39This morning, on Gunnery Range 18 at Fort Riley, Kansas, there is no room for mistakes.
00:01:53These U.S. Army tank crews are being tested on how well they have learned their war fighting skills.
00:02:01Under the close scrutiny of their commander, it's time to see if their training has paid off.
00:02:08Today, the 14 tanks of Company B, 1st Battalion, 34th Armored Brigade, are having their turn on the firing line.
00:02:19They're a part of the Army's 1st Infantry Division, the famed Big Red One.
00:02:27To their battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel John C. Cooper,
00:02:32nothing is more important than making sure his crews can hit their targets.
00:02:37It's all over.
00:02:39Our mission is to close with and destroy the enemy. That's our mission.
00:02:43And for the tank crews, this is their culminating event,
00:02:46to prove that they are qualified as a tank crew, certified to go out and perform their mission.
00:02:53Their training is hard. Their leadership is tough.
00:02:57These soldiers know that more than likely, it'll be their division, the Big Red One,
00:03:02that'll get called up and sent to deal with some crisis somewhere in the world.
00:03:11Well, it's the 1st Division.
00:03:14They'll always be the spearhead.
00:03:17The 1st Division will always be the one to carry the flag forward.
00:03:21The 1st Division will always be the division that the country looks to when we get in trouble.
00:03:27It's just as simple as that.
00:03:30Today's soldiers of the Big Red One are the descendants of a long line of warriors.
00:03:36The 1st Infantry Division is more than 80 years old.
00:03:40It is the oldest division in the U.S. Army.
00:03:44The 1st Infantry Division is more than 80 years old.
00:03:47It is the oldest division in the U.S. Army.
00:03:51Its record in battle is unmatched.
00:03:55The 1st Division was the first American force to fight in World War I.
00:04:01In World War II, it led the amphibious assaults on North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy,
00:04:07and pushed Hitler's army back across Europe.
00:04:15In Vietnam, the Big Red One dominated battlefields called the Iron Triangle,
00:04:20Catcher's Mill, and Thunder Road.
00:04:25During the 1991 Gulf War, the warriors of the 1st Division spearheaded the armored juggernaut into Iraq.
00:04:35To be sure, they've made their share of mistakes.
00:04:38Ask a World War II vet and he'll tell you how the Germans rolled over them in North Africa.
00:04:45But the tally of victories far outnumbers the losses.
00:04:51The Big Red One, the 1st Infantry Division,
00:04:54has participated in virtually every major event of this century.
00:04:59Military, political, diplomatic.
00:05:02In some way, those soldiers have been there.
00:05:10We were the front line, and that's what we wanted to be.
00:05:13That's what the Big Red One's all about.
00:05:15You take care of the bad guys so the people at home can live decent lives.
00:05:24I guess what I'd say on an epitaph of the Big Red One is what General Terry Allen said.
00:05:32Nothing in hell must ever stop the 1st Division, and nothing did.
00:05:37Beyond a doubt, it's the most prestigious division in the United States Army.
00:05:41So I couldn't be more proud to wear that patch.
00:05:44And I'm authorized to wear three different combat patches, and that's the one I wear.
00:05:52The best years of my life were serving in the 1st Infantry Division.
00:05:56And I will never forget it.
00:06:00I wish I could do it over again.
00:06:07The real story of the 1st Division is revealed in the recollections of the soldiers who wore the Big Red One.
00:06:18It's their story, because it's their courage and sacrifice
00:06:22that earned the 1st Division its reputation as the Army's finest.
00:06:26Their story is the true story of the Big Red One.
00:06:37The Big Red One
00:06:47On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.
00:06:53President Woodrow Wilson appointed General John Blackjack Pershing
00:06:57as the Commander-in-Chief of the newly formed American Expeditionary Forces, the AEF.
00:07:07Pershing was a good choice for the job.
00:07:11He had just returned from Mexico, where he had been in pursuit of Pancho Villa.
00:07:16Although he never found the elusive bandit,
00:07:19the 11-month expedition gave Pershing valuable experience leading a large force in the field.
00:07:26In Europe, the Germans were inflicting enormous casualties on the British and French.
00:07:32The Allies needed American reinforcements as soon as possible.
00:07:36But Pershing's Expeditionary Force wasn't quite ready for combat.
00:07:41The U.S. Army barely had 100,000 men in uniform.
00:07:47New York was in a state of panic.
00:07:50The U.S. Army barely had 100,000 men in uniform.
00:07:55New recruits needed to be trained and equipped.
00:07:59At the time, the largest organizational unit in the Army was the regiment,
00:08:04about 3,000 men and officers.
00:08:07But a big war in Europe demanded a larger force,
00:08:10a unit big enough to have a decisive impact on the battlefield.
00:08:16On June 8, 1917, the Army combined four regiments of infantry soldiers
00:08:23with three artillery regiments and for the first time created an independent division.
00:08:29They called it the 1st Expeditionary Division.
00:08:35The division was made up of many smaller building blocks
00:08:38that started with a dozen men in a section or squad.
00:08:43Four sections formed a platoon, four platoons a company,
00:08:47four companies to a battalion,
00:08:50two battalions per regiment,
00:08:53two regiments in a brigade,
00:08:55and two brigades in the division.
00:08:57Add the support troops and that brings the total to 27,000 men.
00:09:03They came from all over the country and all walks of life.
00:09:08They were laborers and college students,
00:09:11the sons of sharecroppers and businessmen.
00:09:14And two of them, Teddy Roosevelt Jr. and his younger brother Archibald,
00:09:18were the sons of a president,
00:09:20a cross-section of America eager to join the fight over there.
00:09:28In June 1917, the soldiers of the 1st Division boarded a transport ship
00:09:33and set sail for France.
00:09:36As they came off the boat in their broad-brimmed campaign hats,
00:09:40they didn't inspire much confidence.
00:09:43But General Pershing recognized their potential.
00:09:46He called them sturdy rookies and promised,
00:09:49we shall make great soldiers of them.
00:09:53From the shipyards, the men went directly to the port
00:09:57where they would be stationed.
00:10:01From experienced French instructors,
00:10:03the 1st Division doughboys spent many months
00:10:05learning the deadly business of trench warfare.
00:10:12Major General Robert Bullard, the division commander at this time,
00:10:16heeded Pershing's order to train the men well.
00:10:20The American soldiers didn't know it,
00:10:22but they were under his command.
00:10:26The American soldiers didn't know it,
00:10:28but they were under a microscope.
00:10:31The British and the French were putting pressure on Pershing
00:10:34to use the Americans as replacements
00:10:36for British and French units already in the field.
00:10:39They asked Pershing to split up the 1st Division
00:10:42and parcel out the doughboys.
00:10:46General Pershing said,
00:10:48no, Americans will fight under American commanders.
00:10:52So a deal was struck between the senior commanders
00:10:56of the British and the French armies and with General Pershing
00:10:59in that in the first battle, if Americans did real well,
00:11:03they would stay under American commanders.
00:11:05If not, they would become replacements
00:11:07for the British and the French army.
00:11:11In April 1918, after months of training,
00:11:15the 1st Division got orders to join the war on the front line.
00:11:21I think anyone that has seen any pictures
00:11:25of the World War I battlefields,
00:11:27particularly by late 1917 and early 1918,
00:11:31the terrain is very different.
00:11:34It's a lot more dense,
00:11:36By late 1917 and early 1918, the terrain is wrecked.
00:11:40It looks like the face of the moon.
00:11:43These huge pits full of water,
00:11:45rats and debris and pieces of bodies everywhere.
00:11:48It's just a horror show.
00:11:50And into this, of course, come these young men
00:11:53trying their best to do what's been asked of them,
00:11:56trying to survive, trying to get on with it.
00:11:59Americans are very adaptable,
00:12:01and they learn quickly, and they perform well.
00:12:06On the 1st Division's left and right were two French divisions.
00:12:10In front of them, on the other side of No Man's Land,
00:12:13was the small village of Cantigny.
00:12:16The Germans occupied the town
00:12:18and had fought off three successive French attacks.
00:12:22It wasn't a big town,
00:12:24and militarily, it wasn't that important.
00:12:27But Pershing saw this as the place
00:12:29to prove that his soldiers could fight.
00:12:31He ordered General Bullard to send in the 1st Division
00:12:34and take the town.
00:12:39The Germans knew something was up
00:12:41and gave the Americans a rough welcome.
00:12:44They shelled and machine-gunned the Americans.
00:12:47A 1st Division officer called it
00:12:49the hottest place on the Western Front.
00:12:55On the morning of May 28th,
00:12:57the Americans began their attack with a rolling barrage.
00:13:04Then, with bayonets fixed,
00:13:06the doughboys crossed No Man's Land in 10 minutes.
00:13:10In 88 minutes, they had captured Cantigny.
00:13:13The Americans made it look easy.
00:13:19But then the real fighting begins to settle in.
00:13:22The Germans always counterattack.
00:13:24It's part of their tactical doctrine.
00:13:26They use machine guns, mortars, artillery,
00:13:28and all available troops to immediately counterattack
00:13:31before the Americans have an opportunity
00:13:34to consolidate their position.
00:13:36The Americans shuddered
00:13:38under the weight of German artillery and mortar attacks.
00:13:41General Bullard received a frightening message.
00:13:44Front line pounded to hell.
00:13:46Must be relieved.
00:13:51The doughboys faced a crisis.
00:13:53French officers asked Bullard,
00:13:55Will your Americans panic and run?
00:13:59More artillery fire poured in
00:14:01and stopped the German counterattacks.
00:14:04In three days, the village was firmly in American hands.
00:14:08The 1st Division had won their first battle.
00:14:14For the doughboys, the victory was bittersweet.
00:14:18Private Max Ottenfeld was just 17 years old
00:14:22when he discovered the horror of war.
00:14:25They brought one man over
00:14:28who had been hit in the neck.
00:14:32And I rushed out there, and I said,
00:14:34Doctor, I got a man here very serious.
00:14:37I said, He's bleeding very bad.
00:14:39So he says, There's nothing, nothing that we could do for him.
00:14:43He says, It'll only be a moment or so.
00:14:46All his blood will be gone, and that'll be it.
00:14:50Well, I stayed there with him.
00:14:53Well, I stayed there with that man,
00:14:57and he finally took his last breath.
00:15:04And I've never forgotten that.
00:15:07That has been a thing that has lost a lot of sleep for me.
00:15:12Still does after all these years.
00:15:17The 1st Division lost 45 officers and 1,022 enlisted men.
00:15:22The Germans, however, lost nearly twice that number.
00:15:27So the battle in the overall scale of World War I was a small battle.
00:15:31But the most important thing about it for the American Army's concern
00:15:34is that the Division did so well that everybody agreed
00:15:38that Americans could fight on American commanders.
00:15:41Perhaps the most important psychological effect
00:15:44was for the men themselves.
00:15:47They saw that they could plan and execute an attack successfully
00:15:52and get the job done.
00:15:54So even though it was small in dimension, it had, I think, large implications.
00:15:59Throughout the summer and fall of 1918,
00:16:02the 1st Division met and defeated the Germans time and again
00:16:08at the Battle of the Marne, at Soissons, and at Saint-Michel.
00:16:14In October, they marched into their final offensive
00:16:18into the heavily defended woods of the Argonne Forest.
00:16:23When passersby warned them what lay ahead,
00:16:26someone from the ranks shouted back,
00:16:28We are the boys who can do it!
00:16:31The Americans prevailed, and when the guns fell silent on November 11, 1918,
00:16:37the 1st Division could finally catch its breath.
00:16:42They couldn't imagine it back in 1918,
00:16:45but in a generation, the 1st Division would be fighting again,
00:16:50and they'd be fighting the same enemy on the same ground.
00:17:02In 1919, after a year of occupation duty in Germany,
00:17:06the 1st Division returned to the United States.
00:17:10They led the World War I Victory Parade up New York's Fifth Avenue.
00:17:15The doughboys had left home as rookies.
00:17:18They returned with an unmatched battle record.
00:17:21They also came back with an identity.
00:17:27As legend has it, a doughboy had taken a piece of red felt
00:17:32from a German uniform and stitched it to his own sleeve.
00:17:36The bold insignia caught on and quickly came to symbolize military excellence.
00:17:41The Big Red One.
00:17:56When America entered the Second World War
00:17:59after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941,
00:18:03the 1st Division had just finished up a month of full-scale maneuvers in North Carolina.
00:18:11It was the first time since World War I
00:18:13that the various regiments of the division had come together in one place
00:18:17to practice making war.
00:18:20With new weapons and vehicles,
00:18:22the division learned the techniques of modern warfare.
00:18:26The 1st Division was officially redesignated the 1st Infantry Division
00:18:31and trimmed from four regiments to three.
00:18:36That put the division's strength at about 14,000 men.
00:18:41On August 2, 1942, all 14,000 soldiers boarded the ocean liner Queen Mary
00:18:47and departed for England.
00:18:53We were terribly crowded and we slept in shifts.
00:18:57And another thing I particularly remember was
00:19:00since we had very little to do on board,
00:19:03gambling was a very big sport.
00:19:07They made the tragic mistake of paying us before we went on board ship
00:19:14and that converted it to a gigantic poker game or dice game.
00:19:23The division commander was Major General Terry Allen.
00:19:26Although he had flunked out of West Point,
00:19:28his ability to lead men was beyond compare.
00:19:31He was cocky and flamboyant.
00:19:33He was good and he knew it.
00:19:42Allen's assistant commander was Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, Jr.
00:19:47Roosevelt had been with the division since World War I
00:19:50and worked his way up the ranks.
00:19:53Roosevelt, like Allen, had a reputation as a charismatic leader
00:19:57and a hard-drinking maverick.
00:20:03In England, Allen and Roosevelt prepared their men for the first taste of combat.
00:20:14In November 1942, the 1st Division got its first job.
00:20:18It was to join 70,000 other GIs for the invasion of North Africa.
00:20:27The plan called for British and American troops to sail from England
00:20:31and land along the Mediterranean coast of Africa,
00:20:34from Casablanca to Algiers.
00:20:38The 1st Infantry Division would land near the port city of Oran.
00:20:43The enemy, however, was not the Germans or the Italians,
00:20:47but Frenchmen loyal to the Vichy French government.
00:20:50The Vichy government had collaborated with the Nazis since 1940
00:20:54and French soldiers were expected to stop the invasion.
00:21:00On November 8, 1942, as the Americans moved towards the beaches,
00:21:05no one was certain whether the French would fight or surrender.
00:21:10Before the war, Tom Lancer was an FBI agent.
00:21:14During the invasion, he commanded a company of military police.
00:21:20We were told to say in French, and everybody practiced it in French,
00:21:24do not shoot, we are your American comrades.
00:21:28We repeated that in French and over loudspeakers.
00:21:32At some of the beaches, French units surrendered almost immediately.
00:21:36But where Lieutenant Bill Gara came ashore,
00:21:39the French defenders put up a tough fight.
00:21:46As we arrived, the French Foreign Legion were the ones
00:21:49that were waiting for us on the beach.
00:21:52And it was a scary time.
00:21:54It was a terrible time.
00:21:56The French Foreign Legion were the ones that were waiting for us on the beach.
00:22:00And it was a scary time to arrive on the beaches and get yourself shot at.
00:22:05This was off baptism of fire.
00:22:09For Private Bill Lee, the harsh reality of war became very clear very quickly.
00:22:18You, for the first time, would hear a rifle fired an anger at you,
00:22:23or shells fired at you.
00:22:25There was somebody trying to kill you is what it was.
00:22:28At first you think it's bees humming around you.
00:22:32You're not even acclimated to the point that you're in warfare.
00:22:35And it didn't take you long because you saw men being wounded.
00:22:39Then that was real life.
00:22:41There were people shedding blood down there, and some were killed.
00:22:45We had to fight for three days, hard fighting,
00:22:48against the French Foreign Legion to take the city of Oran.
00:22:51We suffered some casualties.
00:22:53We suffered a little bit of humiliation as well
00:22:56because soon after they surrendered,
00:22:59the French Foreign Legion suggested that we attend a briefing.
00:23:05And they showed us the mistakes we made.
00:23:07Can you imagine how we felt?
00:23:09These guys were shooting us up, now they're our allies,
00:23:11and they're telling us the mistakes we made in coming in.
00:23:15By November 10th, Oran was in the hands of the 1st Infantry Division.
00:23:20The French had given up and sworn allegiance to the Allies.
00:23:24The Big Red One was on a roll.
00:23:28General Terry Allen and his men couldn't wait to turn their guns on the Germans,
00:23:32on Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his vaunted Afrika Korps.
00:23:38We thought we were hot shots because we had bested the French and beat them.
00:23:43And we really thought we could whip anything, bring them on.
00:23:48We were ready for the Germans.
00:23:51The Big Red One went looking for a fight and spearheaded the hunt for Rommel.
00:23:57By November of 1942, the Allies had reached Tunisia.
00:24:03During their rapid sweep, the Big Red One split up into smaller combat teams.
00:24:08The combat teams came up against Italian troops
00:24:11and had little problem eliminating any resistance.
00:24:14But that was about to change.
00:24:19On February 19th, Erwin Rommel and his army rolled into the Kasserine Pass.
00:24:26The pass was of strategic importance.
00:24:28From the rugged hills overlooking the pass,
00:24:31a regiment of the Big Red One dug in and prepared to stop the German force.
00:24:36Now we're beginning to find out we're not nearly as hot shots as we thought we were
00:24:41because Rommel decides he's going to attack in force.
00:24:45He's going to test the mettle of the American army down in there.
00:24:49Well, he comes out of that pass with his panzers
00:24:52and he had gotten in behind us and had flanked us.
00:24:56It's just like Fourth of July.
00:24:58Anyplace you might be, there's somebody shooting at you.
00:25:01And at 2 a.m. in the morning, I'll remember the first sergeant saying to me,
00:25:04we're going to leave these positions.
00:25:06Tell the man next to you we're pulling out.
00:25:10The Americans were overwhelmed.
00:25:13They retreated in a panic.
00:25:16The battle at Kasserine was a humiliating defeat.
00:25:20The American army had been soundly beaten in its first fight against the Germans.
00:25:29The big thing about Kasserine Pass was lessons learned.
00:25:32And this was the American introduction to combat in World War II.
00:25:37And the Americans thought they had done a good job of training their troops
00:25:40and preparing them for combat and found out that they hadn't.
00:25:44They started realizing that we've got to train more.
00:25:47Eisenhower said about the 1st Division that whenever they're not in the line,
00:25:51they've got to be training.
00:25:53Now, of course, the men weren't terribly happy about that,
00:25:55but after Kasserine, they realized, God, he's right.
00:25:58He's right. We've got to train harder. We've got to train more.
00:26:02General Terry Allen didn't think the problem was in training.
00:26:05He blamed the defeat on the fact that his division had been fragmented into smaller teams.
00:26:10After Kasserine, Allen convinced Eisenhower to reunite his division
00:26:14and let the regiments fight together under his command.
00:26:18With strength in numbers, Allen's men counterattacked
00:26:21and drove the Germans out of Kasserine.
00:26:23They had regained their momentum.
00:26:26At the Battle of El Ghatar, the Big Red One defeated two panzer divisions
00:26:31with the efficiency and valor of a veteran force.
00:26:37By the spring of 1943, things looked bad for the Germans.
00:26:41In March, Erwin Rommel fled North Africa.
00:26:46By May, 200,000 Germans had walked into Allied POW pens.
00:26:56These guys were real pros.
00:26:58And we learned a great deal from fighting them.
00:27:01We made mistakes. We learned from our mistakes.
00:27:04And by the time North Africa was over, we were veterans, too.
00:27:11The 1st Infantry Division celebrated the victory over Rommel in a manner all its own.
00:27:16In towns across North Africa, the division left a trail of looted wine shops.
00:27:22General Terry Allen did nothing to halt their outrageous conduct.
00:27:34But General Omar Bradley, Allen's superior officer, forced Allen to rein in his men.
00:27:40Bradley made it clear,
00:27:42we'll all play by the same ground rules whatever patch we wear on our sleeve.
00:27:47Despite its behavior behind the lines,
00:27:50the Big Red One proved it could do the job in combat
00:27:53and would soon find itself back on the front lines.
00:28:05The defeat of the Afrika Korps boosted the reputation of the Big Red One
00:28:09as outstanding military power.
00:28:12The Afrika Korps boosted the reputation of the Big Red One as outstanding warriors.
00:28:17Whether they liked it or not,
00:28:19they became the team to call when the Army had a tough assignment.
00:28:25And tough assignments were never in short supply.
00:28:30General Eisenhower picked General George Patton
00:28:33to command the American forces in the next Allied operation,
00:28:37the invasion of the Mediterranean island of Sicily.
00:28:42A British army of five division under Field Marshal Montgomery
00:28:46would land on the southern shores
00:28:48while Patton's force of four divisions would land further west.
00:28:52But this invasion wasn't expected to be as easy as the landings in Africa.
00:28:59Sicily was defended by 300,000 German and Italian troops,
00:29:04of which 20,000 belonged to the elite Hermann-Goring Panzer Division.
00:29:11The Allied forces were forced to retreat,
00:29:14and the Allied forces were forced to retreat,
00:29:17and the Allied forces were forced to retreat,
00:29:20resulting in the disbandment of the Panzer Division.
00:29:26Only one American division had the experience
00:29:28to take on such a powerful enemy force, the Big Red One.
00:29:36They weren't originally on the troop list.
00:29:39Patton says, I want those sons of bitches.
00:29:41I want them. I want them in the lineup.
00:29:44He knew that he needed the 1st Division.
00:29:50On July 10th, 1943, the invasion of Sicily began.
00:29:56The 1st Division had a surprisingly easy time coming ashore.
00:30:03The town of Gela, the division's main objective, was securely in American hands by nightfall.
00:30:09Resistance was minimal.
00:30:11They hadn't found any Germans.
00:30:15The invasion seemed deceptively easy.
00:30:19Bryce Denno was the executive officer of an infantry battalion.
00:30:25The second day ashore in the morning, we're overwhelmed by German tanks.
00:30:36This is by far the fiercest action I ever saw.
00:30:41These tanks came right through us.
00:30:43They fired their cannon right in our faces, and they had these machine guns going.
00:30:48And I moved around as best I could to encourage our soldiers.
00:30:54I remember seeing one soldier in a prone position with a bazooka.
00:31:00So I slumped down alongside of him, put a round in his bazooka.
00:31:05And at that time, a tank came right by us just a few feet away.
00:31:10And we looked right down the barrel of that gun.
00:31:13And I said to myself, for God's sake, don't shoot now.
00:31:18Now they were up against Krak-Wehrmacht troops, the best that the Germans had.
00:31:23And rather like at Kasserine, they learned a lesson from this.
00:31:28This isn't a game.
00:31:30We're not here to have fun.
00:31:32We're here to kill or be killed.
00:31:35In a desperate pitched battle,
00:31:37the 1st Division fought off the German panzers and held their ground.
00:31:43The Big Red One moved inland and slogged across Sicily
00:31:47in an effort to cut the enemy forces in half.
00:32:06The Germans had packed the rugged terrain of Sicily
00:32:09with all sorts of obstacles, mines, and booby traps.
00:32:13It became the unenviable task of the combat engineers to clear the way.
00:32:23Their job is specifically to do everything possible
00:32:26to advance the infantry units during an attack.
00:32:32Do whatever it takes to get the job done.
00:32:35At the same time, stand by and be ready to perform combat duty.
00:32:41The combat engineers, without them, nothing.
00:32:44You're not going to go forward without them.
00:32:46They've got to get in there and they've got to clear out these paths of advance for you.
00:32:50It was a campaign that depended almost exclusively on how quickly
00:32:55the engineer elements of each of these divisions could advance.
00:33:00So it was really an engineer's war.
00:33:02And in a matter of less than seven weeks, the island of Sicily was taken.
00:33:10In 37 days of constant fighting, the Allied armies had crossed the island
00:33:15and broken the back of German resistance.
00:33:18Generals Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, and Omar Bradley
00:33:22had shown Hitler that even his best soldiers were no match for the battle-hardened Americans.
00:33:31The First Division
00:33:43Even though the First Division had met its objectives and destroyed the enemy,
00:33:47General Terry Allen continued to resist orders from his superior officers.
00:33:52Allen wanted to fight the war on his own terms
00:33:55and bristled at the thought of taking orders from anyone.
00:34:00Allen is contentious, he's rough around the edges,
00:34:05he's a hell of a combat commander, and his men love him.
00:34:09And they fight like tigers.
00:34:11But to people outside the First Division,
00:34:13there is the view that the First Division isn't a very good team player.
00:34:17And as America's teams get larger and larger and comprised of more and more divisions,
00:34:23they see this as a bit of a problem.
00:34:25Unfortunately, Allen drank too much.
00:34:28His second in command, Teddy Roosevelt Jr., was a pretty heavy drinker.
00:34:32And neither one of them cared very much about the discipline among their troops.
00:34:38General Omar Bradley, Allen's boss, noted that
00:34:42the First Division has become increasingly temperamental,
00:34:45disdainful of both regulations and senior commands.
00:34:49In private, Terry Allen referred to Omar Bradley as a sanctimonious old bastard.
00:34:57Allen and Roosevelt came in to see Bradley during the Sicilian campaign.
00:35:02And they came in just swearing and cursing and tearing the place up
00:35:09and making an awful scene because an MP had stopped them
00:35:12and had given them a fine for not wearing their helmets.
00:35:15And to Bradley, that just typified what was wrong with Allen and Teddy Roosevelt.
00:35:21Bradley and Allen just couldn't get along.
00:35:29Left with no choice, Bradley fired both General Allen and General Roosevelt.
00:35:36Eisenhower supported Bradley's decision.
00:35:38But the men of the division resented the loss of their command.
00:35:42Bradley moved quickly and appointed Major General Clarence Ralph Huebner
00:35:46as the division's new commander.
00:35:49For Huebner, the assignment was a homecoming.
00:35:52He had worn the division patch in every rank from private to colonel.
00:35:56He had served heroically with the First Division in World War I,
00:36:00a single-man army.
00:36:02He had served with the First Division in World War II.
00:36:05He had served with the First Division in World War II.
00:36:08He had served heroically with the First Division in World War I,
00:36:11a stickler for military detail.
00:36:13Huebner expected his men to adhere to his high standards of discipline.
00:36:22Huebner felt it was his job to remind the Big Red One
00:36:25that while they may be the best division in the Army,
00:36:28they were just a part of a much larger enterprise
00:36:31and to start acting like team players.
00:36:39Under Huebner's command, the First Division would achieve things in combat
00:36:43that many would consider nothing less than miraculous.
00:36:54By November 1943, after the victory in Sicily,
00:36:58the Big Red One was back in England.
00:37:00Rather than allowing his men to rest on their laurels,
00:37:03General Huebner had them back on the training fields.
00:37:09By now, the Big Red One had fought in more campaigns
00:37:13and destroyed more of the enemy than any other unit in the U.S. Army.
00:37:18Yet at their camps in England, their training continued
00:37:21with an unprecedented urgency well into the spring of 1944.
00:37:28They were getting ready for their biggest fight, the invasion of Normandy.
00:37:39The plan to invade Normandy called for five divisions of British,
00:37:43Canadian and American infantry to cross the English Channel
00:37:47and attack a 50-mile stretch of the French coastline.
00:37:55The Canadians were to land at a beach codenamed Juneau.
00:38:00The British would hit two beaches, Sword and Gold.
00:38:03The American 4th Infantry Division would come ashore at Utah Beach.
00:38:09And elements of the 29th Infantry Division would join the Big Red One
00:38:13in an assault on the most heavily defended sector, Omaha Beach.
00:38:20For years, the Nazis had been fortifying the coastline.
00:38:24It was no secret that an invasion would be very costly.
00:38:28The question in the minds of the British was,
00:38:32The question in the minds of the men of the 1st Division
00:38:35was how they were expected to get off the beach alive.
00:38:42Joe Dawson commanded a company of riflemen.
00:38:45He offered his men one answer.
00:38:49I desperately tried to impress upon the men that I was to lead
00:38:55the gravity and the importance of trying to work as a team
00:39:01and not as an individual,
00:39:04and to recognize that on either side of a man there was a supporter,
00:39:10and that only through our unified efforts would we have any chance of success.
00:39:26The morning of the 6th, the H-hour on D-Day,
00:39:31the small boats are put into the sea 11 miles from shore.
00:39:37They travel at 5 knots. It's going to take 2 1⁄2 hours to get to shore.
00:39:41Heavy seas, 20-mile-per-hour winds from the northwest.
00:39:46Men are getting seasick. They're bouncing in.
00:39:55We thought that perhaps by now the firing from our battleships
00:40:00and the cruisers and the rocket ships and the Air Force had done the job.
00:40:05We just covered them. It wasn't so.
00:40:08The heavy fire from the battleships all went beyond the shore area.
00:40:15Overcast. They couldn't get a good reading of where they were firing.
00:40:19The air bombardment went inland. Again, overcast.
00:40:24There was not a single trench or shell hole created for the troops to run into when they arrived.
00:40:32It was almost unscarred.
00:40:36As a consequence, when the 1st Division, and over to their right the 29th Division,
00:40:42hit the beach at Omaha, all hell broke loose.
00:40:46The German defenders poured down on them a veritable wall of steel.
00:40:50There were guys who were in landing craft that when the ramp dropped,
00:40:54the machine guns came in on them. Nobody got out alive.
00:40:58I mean, all 30 men in the landing craft dead without even getting out into the water.
00:41:13We landed on the sandbar before we got to the beach itself.
00:41:19We hit the sandbar, and so the ramp goes down, and we go out of the boat.
00:41:24And, of course, we start in the water, and the first thing you know,
00:41:26we're having the water clear up to our necks.
00:41:28And then you'd see people hovered around the rocks there as we came closer inland to the beach.
00:41:35Some of them didn't have their guns because they lost them in the water.
00:41:39There were people hiding around those and people laying on the beach, not moving.
00:41:44It was kind of a gruesome sight.
00:41:47When we got up to the beach, I looked around,
00:41:51and I didn't see any other big red ones on the shoulders of other men around me.
00:41:56And I was trying to visualize where these fortifications were that I had studied on the map and the placements,
00:42:05and they weren't there.
00:42:06Well, then I realized, well, I was in the wrong area.
00:42:09By mistake, the Navy had put us about 3,000 yards to the right.
00:42:17So for the first four hours, it was a fiasco.
00:42:22Scrambling tooth and nail to get ashore and work your way up.
00:42:29It's a debacle.
00:42:31It's man-made hell.
00:42:33It's confusion.
00:42:35You don't know where the people are.
00:42:37There's nobody in or around that you know.
00:42:40There's artillery shells coming down on you like rain.
00:42:44There's machine gun bullets.
00:42:46Anything you can think of is being fired at you.
00:42:56Carl Wolf had been in the division for only a month.
00:42:59D-Day was his first experience in combat.
00:43:03I gathered up the men that I could find from our landing craft,
00:43:07and I led the men down to the left to get back to the 1st Division area.
00:43:12And you ran across everything along the beach,
00:43:15half bodies and people wounded that you couldn't do anything about
00:43:20other than pull them out of the water so that they might possibly make it.
00:43:27Just four hours into the invasion,
00:43:293,000 dead and wounded men covered the Allied beaches,
00:43:33a corpse just about every six feet.
00:43:36The beach was so congested with bodies,
00:43:38there was no room to land reinforcements.
00:43:43It's just literally ingrained in you to keep going.
00:43:47And as long as another guy's ahead of you, you're not going to stop either.
00:43:52You're going to follow him.
00:43:55That's the guy that got you where you are,
00:43:58and he's the guy you're going to have to help.
00:44:01Walt Ehlers was a squad leader on D-Day,
00:44:04responsible for the lives of 12 men.
00:44:07He was 25 years old.
00:44:10You had to fight as a unit.
00:44:12You've got to keep going if you've got a mission to get done.
00:44:15And that's the principal reason for leading the men,
00:44:18is that they'll follow you, you know,
00:44:20and they'll know that they have to keep going.
00:44:23And I realized as soon as I landed
00:44:27that there was only one way to survive,
00:44:30and that was to move and engage the enemy.
00:44:33And while we would take casualties,
00:44:36we would give casualties as well.
00:44:39We couldn't just sit there and let it just destroy us.
00:44:43And this was one of the great moments in American history,
00:44:47because people like Dawson came to a conclusion
00:44:50that if I stay here, I'm going to get killed, I can't retreat.
00:44:53God damn it.
00:44:55If I'm going to get killed, I'm going to take some Germans with me.
00:44:58Now they're up there, and I've got to get from behind this seawall,
00:45:01and I've got to start up that bluff if I'm going to take any Germans with me.
00:45:04And these guys, a captain over here, a sergeant over there,
00:45:07a corporal over there that came to that conclusion,
00:45:10would say to the guys to their left or right,
00:45:13we're going to go, come on, follow me.
00:45:15And they started.
00:45:18Men inched their way across the sand
00:45:20and reached the relative safety of the bluff overlooking the beach.
00:45:26Joe Dawson of the 1st Division was the first American officer
00:45:30to get to the top of that bluff on the morning of June 6, 1944.
00:45:34Many others followed.
00:45:36Many casualties taken in the process,
00:45:39but they got to the top of that bluff and they started moving inland.
00:45:42And that was the great victory of D-Day.
00:45:46By the end of the day,
00:45:48the British and the Canadians had taken their objectives.
00:45:52The U.S. 4th Infantry Division secured Utah Beach.
00:45:57The 29th Division and the Big Red One
00:46:00had penetrated the enemy defenses on Omaha Beach.
00:46:05German resistance held the Allied advance to a strip of ground
00:46:09hardly more than a mile deep.
00:46:12But the Americans, the British and the Canadians
00:46:15had established a firm foothold,
00:46:17and with reinforcements on the way,
00:46:19they could press the attack inland.
00:46:22Their next move was to push the enemy back out of the farmland,
00:46:26out of the dreaded hedgerows.
00:46:30The battle-hardened Big Red One had met the challenge
00:46:33and taken the first step in liberating Europe.
00:46:46The 1st Infantry Division paid a big price for its victory on D-Day.
00:46:50The Big Red One had suffered at least 1,200 men
00:46:53either killed, wounded or missing.
00:46:56And the fight to liberate Europe was just one day old.
00:47:05The men that made it off the beaches
00:47:07pursued the Germans into the French farmland,
00:47:10a patchwork of fields surrounded by trees and dense undergrowth
00:47:13known as hedgerows.
00:47:16It was a tricky and dangerous place to fight.
00:47:29Sergeant Walt Ehlers had gotten all 12 of his squad members
00:47:33safely ashore on D-Day.
00:47:35He wasn't about to start losing men in the hedgerows.
00:47:40He worried about them as they moved through the treacherous green maze,
00:47:44but most of all, he worried about his brother.
00:47:49He and his older brother Roland had enlisted on the same day back in 1940.
00:47:54They both ended up in the 1st Division in the same company
00:47:57and they had fought side by side
00:47:59through the bloody campaigns in North Africa and Sicily.
00:48:06In England, just before D-Day,
00:48:08their company commanders split them up
00:48:10and reassigned them to different companies.
00:48:14On D-Day, the two brothers would hit the beach
00:48:16only a few hundred yards from each other.
00:48:21As Walt Ehlers led his men inland, he watched for the Germans,
00:48:25but he kept an eye out for any sign of his older brother.
00:48:30We had an understanding between us
00:48:33and we knew that if one of us fell,
00:48:37that the other one had to keep on going.
00:48:39We had that understanding.
00:48:42On a patrol in the hedgerows on the 9th of June,
00:48:45he found the Germans he had been pursuing.
00:48:49I started going up the hedgerow and I heard some noise on the other side
00:48:53and I looked over the hedgerow and here comes the German patrol
00:48:56and so I just opened up on them and I killed four of the German patrol.
00:49:01As we started going back, I saw the Germans putting down a machine gun
00:49:06down below us about a hundred yards there
00:49:09and so I fired upon those guys there
00:49:11and knocked about three of them guys off of their machine gun.
00:49:16Ehlers turned a corner and came upon a German mortar crew.
00:49:20He shot them and another machine gun crew concealed in the hedgerow.
00:49:24One of his men was wounded.
00:49:26Without regard to his own safety, Ehlers carried the wounded man
00:49:30back to an aid station.
00:49:32Ehlers realized that he himself had been shot.
00:49:35The medics patched him up,
00:49:37but Ehlers refused to be evacuated from the battlefield.
00:49:40His men called him a one-man platoon.
00:49:46That's when I first asked about my brother.
00:49:49I saw his platoon sergeant and I asked him if he knew where my brother was
00:49:53and he said, well, he said he didn't know he was missing in action.
00:49:57So I knew that I couldn't go back and look for him
00:50:01because he just didn't do those things.
00:50:04So I just had to wait, wait it out.
00:50:08In July, Walt Ehlers finally got news of his brother.
00:50:12Roland had been killed a month ago in the very first minutes of D-Day.
00:50:20I just broke down and cried like a baby for a while.
00:50:24You know, it's one of those things.
00:50:27We were very close and he was a great guy.
00:50:32He was a great guy. He was my hero as far as I'm concerned
00:50:35because he was the one that kept me straight.
00:50:38And from then on I was on my own.
00:50:41I knew I had to keep myself straight from then on.
00:50:45As the Big Red One pushed across France, Ehlers received even more news.
00:50:50The Army had recognized his gallant actions above and beyond the call of duty
00:50:55and awarded him the Medal of Honor.
00:50:59At the presentation ceremony,
00:51:01reporters had a few questions for the soft-spoken hero.
00:51:06I was asked, did I hate the Germans?
00:51:09And I said, no, I don't hate anybody.
00:51:11They couldn't believe that.
00:51:13They said, well, why do you kill them?
00:51:15I said, well, it's either killed or be killed.
00:51:17That's the way it is, you know, in combat.
00:51:19So that was my answer to that.
00:51:23With men like Sergeant Ehlers leading the way,
00:51:26the 1st Division continued its push inland.
00:51:29After six weeks of hard fighting,
00:51:31the Allied armies destroyed the Germans in Normandy
00:51:34and broke free of the beachhead.
00:51:41The men advanced across France like a steamroller.
00:51:45In one week, they fought and drove over 300 miles.
00:51:50At one point, they moved so fast and so far ahead of their supply lines
00:51:54that they lived off captured German rations
00:51:57and moved their vehicles with captured German gasoline.
00:52:04By early September, just three months after landing in Normandy,
00:52:08the 1st Infantry Division had crossed into Belgium.
00:52:13It seemed to many that the Germans were finished
00:52:16and the war would be over within the year.
00:52:18But they were wrong.
00:52:20The enemy still had a lot of fight left in them.
00:52:25GENO MERLEE
00:52:36Geno Merlee was a 20-year-old private from Pennsylvania.
00:52:40He was a machine gunner armed with a .30-caliber heavy machine gun.
00:52:48He had an assistant gunner named Tom Hendricks.
00:52:52On the night of September 4, 1944,
00:52:55Merlee, Hendricks, and a second gun crew
00:52:58were ordered to protect an important crossroads.
00:53:04They dug in and aimed their guns down the road.
00:53:09That night, a band of German soldiers came face to face
00:53:13with Merlee and his machine gun.
00:53:17About 10 o'clock at night, here comes the enemy soldiers
00:53:20down the road.
00:53:22You could hear commands being given by the enemy.
00:53:25He gave the command, commence firing.
00:53:28And we must have got pasted with about
00:53:33three to five hundred rounds of ammunition.
00:53:37The Germans outnumbered the two American machine gun crews
00:53:40more than 50 to one.
00:53:42In the attack, Hendricks and the other gunners were killed.
00:53:46Miraculously, Merlee wasn't even wounded.
00:53:51The Germans sent out a patrol
00:53:54to investigate Merlee's gun emplacement.
00:53:57Merlee laid next to Hendricks' corpse and played dead.
00:54:01The Germans prodded their bodies with bayonets
00:54:04and left convinced that all the G.I.s had been killed.
00:54:09As they turned around and went back to report,
00:54:12they opened fire.
00:54:14When they opened fire, they returned fire.
00:54:17Throughout the night, Merlee single-handedly fended off
00:54:20three more counterattacks from scores of Germans.
00:54:25I just stayed and waited for anything to happen.
00:54:28Threw a grenade every now and then
00:54:30to misdirect the enemy in one way or another.
00:54:33But all by myself, I was getting more scared each time,
00:54:36praying and hoping daylight would come.
00:54:38When dawn came, there must have been at least
00:54:41over a hundred bodies laying out in front of that area there.
00:54:44Nineteen in front of the gun.
00:54:48The private's bravery and accurate shooting
00:54:51stopped the Germans in their tracks.
00:54:55Merlee's commander told him that he would recommend him
00:54:58for the Medal of Honor.
00:55:01I said to him,
00:55:03Captain, put the medal in for Hendricks.
00:55:08He's the one that truly deserves it.
00:55:11Because you and I are still alive.
00:55:15He sacrificed his life...
00:55:20for all of us.
00:55:34He's the brave guy.
00:55:36He's the brave guy.
00:55:40Merlee received the nation's highest award
00:55:43for sticking with his gun in the face of almost impossible odds.
00:55:53The Big Red One kept up its rapid advance across Europe.
00:55:57It seemed invincible until it found itself
00:56:00fighting Germans on German soil.
00:56:07On September 12, 1944,
00:56:10the Big Red One came up against the Siegfried Line,
00:56:13a long network of fortified defenses along the German border.
00:56:22Adolf Hitler believed that the gun emplacements, minefields
00:56:25and rows of concrete obstacles called Dragon's Teeth
00:56:29would stop the Allied advance.
00:56:31They did, but only for three days.
00:56:36Explosives and bulldozers cleared the way.
00:56:45On the other side of the Siegfried Line
00:56:48rested the ancient imperial city of Aachen.
00:56:52It was the first large city on German soil
00:56:55to come under attack by Allied ground forces.
00:56:58Hitler ordered that Aachen be defended to the last man.
00:57:07The Battle of Aachen
00:57:18By early October, elements of the 1st Infantry Division
00:57:21and the 3rd Armored Division had nearly encircled Aachen.
00:57:24It looked like the city might surrender without much of a fight.
00:57:29When we went up on this ridge
00:57:32overlooking the town of Aachen,
00:57:35we didn't realize what we were in store for.
00:57:38All we knew is that it was at that time undefended,
00:57:42and we took it undefended.
00:57:45But the next day, all hell broke loose.
00:57:48And from that day on, for 39 days and nights,
00:57:52we were constantly under attack.
00:57:55Dawson and his riflemen fought off countless infantry attacks
00:57:59and artillery bombardments to hold the high ground.
00:58:03While down below, other 1st Division rifle companies
00:58:06began the miserable job of rooting out the Germans
00:58:09one building at a time.
00:58:14The United States Army didn't have a doctrine for street fighting.
00:58:17And nobody had thought that we were going to be fighting in these big cities.
00:58:21And then all of a sudden, we were.
00:58:23And how do you do it? Well, it had to be learned on the spot.
00:58:27Well, the difficulty is, you don't know where they are,
00:58:30where the enemy is, and you push open a door,
00:58:34and you don't know when you appear in there
00:58:37whether somebody's going to try and blast off your head or not.
00:58:41They learned that overwhelmingly,
00:58:43the first thing about street fighting is stay out of the streets.
00:58:47If you're in the streets, you're going to get killed.
00:58:50So how do you advance if you don't get into the streets?
00:58:53Well, blast those walls down.
00:58:55I mean, one thing the U.S. Army had abundance of was high explosives.
00:58:59So just blast through those walls
00:59:01and move your way from building to building
00:59:04by knocking down the walls themselves.
00:59:06Stay out of the second floor of buildings.
00:59:09Get down into the cellars of the buildings.
00:59:12Don't try to make an attack that is a string of men
00:59:15stretched out over 3 or 4 blocks trying to move forward.
00:59:18It ain't going to work that way.
00:59:20You've got to take it building by building,
00:59:22and you've got to take your time about it.
00:59:24There isn't any room for heroes in street fighting.
00:59:26This is very much a team operation.
00:59:29In town and on the ridge overlooking the city,
00:59:32the fighting was ferocious.
00:59:35At times, it was at such close range
00:59:38that combat was reduced to bayonets and hand grenades.
00:59:42It was deadly simply because we had no choice.
00:59:47We had no choice except to stay there and defend.
00:59:51On October 21, after 3 weeks of vicious fighting,
00:59:55the German defenders laid down their arms.
01:00:00With the exception of the cathedral,
01:00:02not one building remained intact.
01:00:05The Germans had surrendered not a city, but a pile of rubble.
01:00:12I think all these cities should have been bypassed
01:00:15and let the Germans sit in there and suck their thumbs.
01:00:18They were eventually going to have to give up.
01:00:20They weren't going to be getting any new ammunition.
01:00:22They weren't going to be getting rations.
01:00:24They weren't going to be in communication
01:00:27with their superiors outside of the encirclement.
01:00:30And they're going to eventually have to give up.
01:00:33And the Battle of Aachen never should have been fought.
01:00:36But it was, and because it was,
01:00:38the 1st Division had to learn how to do it, and they did.
01:00:46The Battle of Aachen
01:00:54After the bloody Battle of Aachen,
01:00:56the 1st Infantry Division came up against the Hürtgen Forest.
01:01:03The Hürtgen was a man-made forest,
01:01:05planted decades ago for one reason,
01:01:08to stop the invading army.
01:01:10The woods were thick, the mud was like glue,
01:01:13and the roads were practically nonexistent.
01:01:16Rather than move around it, the soldiers of the Big Red One
01:01:19were ordered to attack right through the center.
01:01:27You negated all of America's strengths,
01:01:30the air superiority, the artillery, the tanks, the mobility,
01:01:34and you gave it all up to fight a battle
01:01:37which was just riflemen against riflemen.
01:01:40Only our riflemen, the 1st Division guys,
01:01:43and many other divisions that were involved in the Hürtgen Forest battle,
01:01:47were the poor sons of bitches that were on the offensive.
01:01:51If you're going to fight in the forest,
01:01:53pray God that you're on the defensive.
01:01:56The Germans really were dug in
01:01:59and determined to hold that area at all costs.
01:02:02They had tanks and infantry all around.
01:02:08November 16, 1944, the first clear day after a week of rain,
01:02:13the 1st Division attacked.
01:02:19The Germans were everywhere.
01:02:21It was said that a G.I. who so much as blew his nose drew mortar fire.
01:02:27Each hill, each house, each hole in the ground had to be fought for.
01:02:32The progress that used to be measured in miles was now reckoned in yards.
01:02:39The Germans could never understand why we were fighting for the Hürtgen,
01:02:42but they felt as long as Americans were putting troops in it,
01:02:45there must have been some value they didn't quite understand,
01:02:48but as long as Americans were pouring troops in it,
01:02:50they continued to pour troops in it.
01:02:52The Hürtgen Forest was just a meat grinder.
01:02:57The thick woods made it hard to coordinate large attacks.
01:03:00The smaller units, platoons and companies,
01:03:03had to depend on their own resources to survive.
01:03:06As a result, they took a lot of casualties.
01:03:12They ended up where you'd have normally 150 to 175 men in a rifle company.
01:03:19They ended up with something like 30 men in one and 35 in another.
01:03:25Men had to endure enemy snipers, the artillery fire, and even combat fatigue.
01:03:33Combat fatigue is something that can happen to anybody,
01:03:36and I'm convinced, as are most combat soldiers,
01:03:39that anybody, if you stay in combat long enough, you'll get it.
01:03:43It just wears you down eventually, no matter how tough you are,
01:03:47how disciplined, all the rest of it.
01:03:49You just can't stay in the air day in and day out.
01:03:53And, you know, you're human.
01:03:56Replacements with little or no combat experience
01:03:58were brought forward to fill gaps left by casualties.
01:04:02Veteran soldiers shied away from these new guys.
01:04:09You didn't want to know them.
01:04:10You didn't want to even know their name,
01:04:12because tomorrow they'd be dead.
01:04:16You knew he was just a rookie coming into the lines.
01:04:19He was just a rookie coming into the lines.
01:04:21You were hoping if he'd watch that old soldier, he might live through the war.
01:04:27By early December, the Big Red One finally emerged
01:04:30on the other side of the Hurtgen Forest.
01:04:34To this day, I can't understand what the purpose was,
01:04:38because we accomplished nothing except to get a lot of people killed.
01:04:43It was an expenditure of men and ammunition and supplies
01:04:48and all the rest of it that brought no return.
01:04:51The worst sin of all in war is to expend lives for no gain.
01:04:55And that's what happened in the Hurtgen Forest.
01:05:00After the miserable fighting,
01:05:02the division was pulled out of the front line
01:05:10and given a much-needed break.
01:05:14They handed over their positions to a fresh division
01:05:17and moved to the rear for a little R&R.
01:05:24Their respite, however, was cut short.
01:05:32In a last-ditch effort to destroy the American army,
01:05:35the Germans counterattacked on December 16,
01:05:38punched through the Allied lines and triggered the Battle of the Bulge.
01:05:43In sub-freezing temperatures,
01:05:45the Big Red One returned to the front,
01:05:47helped hold the lines,
01:05:51and then pushed deeper into enemy territory.
01:05:59In March 1945, the Big Red One crossed the Rhine River.
01:06:04They battled their way through Germany's industrial heartland.
01:06:07By the end of April, the division was fighting
01:06:10the Germans in Czechoslovakia.
01:06:19On May 8, 1945, the Big Red One got the order to cease fire.
01:06:24Germany had surrendered.
01:06:33The 1st Infantry Division was in combat
01:06:35a grueling 443 days during World War II.
01:06:4043,000 men served in the ranks of the Big Red One.
01:06:46Of those, 4,300 were killed and 15,000 had been wounded.
01:06:54From North Africa in 1942 to Czechoslovakia in 1945,
01:06:59the division's fighting qualities were best summed up
01:07:02in a statement made by a German officer.
01:07:05He observed, where the 1st Division was,
01:07:08there we would have trouble.
01:07:16A generation later, the Big Red One would be giving
01:07:20trouble to another enemy on another distant foreign shore.
01:07:25After the Second World War, the 1st Infantry Division
01:07:28stayed in Germany on occupation duty,
01:07:31then as partners with the new Germany in NATO.
01:07:39In 1950, the North Koreans invaded South Korea.
01:07:43The North Koreans were forced to surrender
01:07:45to the Soviet Union.
01:07:48In 1950, the North Koreans invaded South Korea.
01:07:52For two years, United Nations forces
01:07:54fought the communist invaders,
01:07:56but the Big Red One was not called to fight.
01:08:02During the Korean War and throughout the 1950s,
01:08:05the 1st Division's mission was to stay in Germany
01:08:08and stand as a shield against a possible
01:08:10Soviet attack in Western Europe.
01:08:12But its next call to arms wasn't to stop
01:08:14Russian tanks in West Germany,
01:08:16but to fight communist guerrillas
01:08:18in the jungles of Vietnam.
01:08:21In 1965, the United States began to send
01:08:24combat troops to Vietnam.
01:08:26They went to help the South Vietnamese
01:08:28and the U.S. military in Vietnam.
01:08:31The U.S. military was united by the U.S.
01:08:34and the U.S. military was united by its allies.
01:08:37The U.S. military was united by its allies.
01:08:40The fight against the Soviet Union
01:08:42was a direct result of the U.S.
01:08:44and its allies' commitment to the U.S.
01:08:47and their commitment to the U.S.
01:08:49Vietnamese fend off communist soldiers invading from the north and Viet Cong guerrillas operating
01:08:55in the south.
01:09:02On June 23, the men of the 1st Infantry Division continued their tradition of being the first
01:09:08in combat as they stepped from Navy landing craft on to the beaches of Vietnam.
01:09:16Johnny Lives was a 23-year-old platoon leader when he stepped ashore.
01:09:20He came to Vietnam charged with the spirit of the Big Red One.
01:09:27There wasn't any doubt in anybody's mind that we could lick them.
01:09:32There just isn't that in the Big Red One, never has been.
01:09:34The whole mood was young men, I suppose, and soldiers especially, that have been trained
01:09:39to do something.
01:09:40They wanted to put that training to use in real combat.
01:09:44Even at that age, you say, hey, bring it on, let's go, let's tangle.
01:09:51The men built their home in the jungles around Saigon, the capital city of South Vietnam.
01:09:59The division's area of responsibility stretched 100 miles to the border of Cambodia, an area
01:10:05called War Zone C.
01:10:10Each camp was like a frontier outpost reminiscent of the American Old West, a safe haven surrounded
01:10:16on all sides by unfriendly natives.
01:10:19From their base camps, the men began the job of going after the enemy, a procedure they
01:10:27called search and destroy.
01:10:32Robert Haldane commanded an infantry battalion.
01:10:36We bust the jungle, we go through the jungle days at a time, and if we came upon Viet Cong,
01:10:43we was engaged.
01:10:51Search and destroy meant you go out and you find the enemy and you kill him.
01:10:59Once you get out in the tree line, they couldn't see you anymore.
01:11:04You're on your own.
01:11:05So you develop the battle the way you want to.
01:11:07The whole idea was to develop battle and then bring in our technology.
01:11:14We never let people go out from under the artillery, fan of the artillery, because if
01:11:20they did, they had mortars, some grenade launchers and their own weapons and not much else.
01:11:28So the whole idea was to keep them under artillery support, which is vital.
01:11:36It wasn't like World War II or Korea, it wasn't big unit fighting, a platoon's even too big
01:11:44to go through a jungle with, it's more squad size that work in the jungle.
01:11:53The war in Vietnam was different from anything the 1st Division had ever experienced.
01:11:59The enemy could be anywhere and everywhere.
01:12:03It was hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.
01:12:07Vietnam War had no front lines.
01:12:09Without front lines, it was impossible to measure success in the traditional terms of
01:12:14real estate gained.
01:12:18Success came to be measured in body count.
01:12:22Korea had several firefights and a firefight was nothing like you think.
01:12:26Most of it's walk and look and all of a sudden, when it hits, it's fast, furious and horrible.
01:12:34All you hear is noises and guns going off and grenades going off.
01:12:44That's the way it was.
01:12:52One thing was clear.
01:13:02The Big Red One faced an elusive enemy who made expert use of the dense jungle.
01:13:08The Viet Cong moved very quickly through the terrain.
01:13:14The Americans needed a way to keep up.
01:13:17The best weapon to counter the jungle and make up for the lack of roads was the helicopter.
01:13:26The man who turned the Big Red One into an effective helicopter-borne fighting team was
01:13:31General William DePue.
01:13:33DePue commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967.
01:13:47Paul Gorman was a colonel commanding a battalion.
01:13:50He helped in the transformation.
01:13:55General DePue was absolutely determined to make the division the most mobile unit in
01:14:05Vietnam and to that end, he continually urged us commanders to lighten our units, to pare
01:14:15them down to the essentials so that we could more readily be moved.
01:14:20Continually, I would hear officers saying that they never taught us anything about this
01:14:26in school.
01:14:28Don't worry.
01:14:32We're the first people that have ever done this sort of thing.
01:14:34We're going to make it up as we go along.
01:14:39General DePue had an agenda.
01:14:41He wanted to go after the enemy with as many men as possible.
01:14:44A technique that he called pile-on.
01:14:46It's not a stealth operation.
01:14:51It's a noisy, terrifying kind of experience.
01:14:55In all of that chaos and confusion, however, there is a certain amount of order that can
01:15:00be imposed.
01:15:01First of all, you've got to do what you can to suppress the enemy weapons that are bearing
01:15:07on the landing zone.
01:15:10Basically the problem was machine guns down on the LZ.
01:15:14The name of the game was find the machine guns and use gunships to attack gun positions
01:15:19with rockets and machine guns.
01:15:27The division developed new tactics, like immediately sending out patrols in all directions as soon
01:15:32as the helicopters landed.
01:15:37If there were enemy in the immediate vicinity, we would find them instead of the opposite.
01:15:46It's one of those kinds of circumstances that you cannot predict what's going to happen.
01:15:53When people talk about hot LZs, General DePue was right.
01:15:58It got hot in a hurry.
01:16:05Helicopters played a big role in large-scale operations like Rolling Stone, Junction City,
01:16:10and Shenandoah.
01:16:12In battles known as Thunder Road, the Trapezoid, and Catcher's Mitt, the Big Red One on every
01:16:17occasion dominated the battlefield and destroyed their enemy.
01:16:41During the Vietnam War, soldiers were assigned to combat units for one year.
01:16:48This policy had one serious drawback.
01:16:51Just as a soldier got good at fighting the enemy, he was sent home.
01:16:55Then a new guy was brought in and training started all over again.
01:17:02Even so, the men spent enough time in combat to figure out they weren't really fighting
01:17:06for abstract notions like national sovereignty or democracy.
01:17:10They were fighting for their friends, for the other guy in the foxhole.
01:17:20This may sound funny to other platoon leaders from World War II or World War I, Desert Storm,
01:17:28because you expect to take casualties.
01:17:30But I honestly believed that I could save my men if I was smart and kept on top of the
01:17:36job.
01:17:38At least that was what I was going to try to do.
01:17:41That was my goal.
01:17:42That was my mission.
01:17:44That's when everything becomes work, because then you're going to stay alive and survive.
01:17:51Then you don't even think politics.
01:17:52You don't think anything but survival.
01:17:56You know, there's a love in the foxhole that becomes so prevalent in a combat unit that
01:18:02by God you'll do anything to save it, the guys around you, anything.
01:18:07That means giving your home life.
01:18:09And the walls are full of people that got Medal of Honors because of jumping on grenades
01:18:15and everything else to save their men.
01:18:22In the spring of 1970, the 1st Infantry Division furled its collars and left Vietnam.
01:18:28In five years of combat, 3,079 soldiers of the Big Red One were killed in action.
01:18:34Eleven soldiers received Medals of Honor.
01:18:41To veterans of Vietnam, battlefields like Ap Gu and Bong Trang have as much significance
01:18:47as Normandy and the Hurtgen Forest have for veterans of World War II.
01:18:55The Vietnamese names aren't as familiar to us, but they are places that witnessed the
01:18:59same courage and sacrifice that soldiers of the Big Red One have always demonstrated.
01:19:11The 1st Infantry Division would have to fight their next battle a whole new way.
01:19:27For most of its history, the Big Red One was strictly an infantry division, and typically,
01:19:33infantry soldiers moved on foot.
01:19:36When necessary, armored units lent a hand.
01:19:42But when the division came back from Vietnam in 1970, the Army was ready to modernize.
01:19:53At its home base at Fort Riley, Kansas, the Big Red One reinvented itself as a mechanized
01:19:59infantry division.
01:20:02Armored personnel carriers and main battle tanks were added to the division's fighting
01:20:07power.
01:20:09Mobility would play an important part in warfare of the future.
01:20:20For the next two decades, the 1st Division, along with the rest of the Army, learned how
01:20:25to fight a war based on speed.
01:20:28In 1991, that theory was put to the test.
01:20:51In August 1990, Saddam Hussein ordered his army to invade Kuwait.
01:21:02The United States joined a coalition of nations determined to free Kuwait of the Iraqi invaders.
01:21:12U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps units deployed to the Gulf and prepared for
01:21:18combat.
01:21:26The Big Red One was part of the international team.
01:21:30Its 12,000 soldiers and 7,000 vehicles moved from their home base in Fort Riley, Kansas,
01:21:35to the desert of Saudi Arabia.
01:21:41They took up positions along the border with Iraq and made ready for war.
01:21:54On January 17, 1991, Desert Storm began as the coalition air forces bombed the Iraqis.
01:22:09And as the air war raged overhead, coalition ground forces rehearsed their plan of attack.
01:22:23Major General Thomas Rain commanded the Big Red One during Desert Storm.
01:22:29The area that was chosen for the division to breach, we knew was occupied by the 2060
01:22:36division.
01:22:37We knew how he was laid out, where he was laid out, when he went to bed, and everything
01:22:43there was to know about that guy.
01:22:45We knew these guys were no good.
01:22:49We knew we were clearly superior.
01:22:51I knew some people were going to get hurt, and I knew a lot of them were going to get
01:22:55hurt if they gave us resistance.
01:22:58But I was totally confident that we were just going to rip him apart.
01:23:05On Sunday, February 24, 1991, the ground attack started with a massive artillery barrage.
01:23:19Then the Big Red One spearheaded the armored thrust into Iraq and opened a hole for the
01:23:24coalition armies to follow.
01:23:33The American vehicles stretched to the horizon.
01:23:37Brigadier General William Carter served as the assistant division commander.
01:23:43It was more vehicles than any of us had ever seen in that concentrated space, at least
01:23:47in my 30-year career, and the size of the formation itself and the amount of terrain
01:23:51that it actually covered, I think, shocked almost everyone how big the division was and
01:23:56how much power we had.
01:23:57There were 360 tanks in that division when we executed the breach.
01:24:03The Big Red One broke through the fixed defenses and attacked the 26th Iraqi Division.
01:24:11Many Iraqis surrendered.
01:24:13Whoever didn't surrender was annihilated.
01:24:17The 26th Iraqi Division no longer exists as an organization.
01:24:23Literally 100 percent complete, in-detail destruction.
01:24:27It doesn't exist anymore.
01:24:29It's gone.
01:24:30Brigade commanders, division commanders, everybody, they're gone.
01:24:34They're all gone.
01:24:36More surprising than the rapid destruction of the Iraqi 26th Division was the fact that
01:24:41no American died in the process.
01:24:46Not bad for a bunch of guys out of Fort Riley, Kansas, huh?
01:24:51Not bad.
01:24:52Everybody got killed.
01:24:54Some guys got hurt, you know, wounded, but none life-threatened.
01:24:58It's amazing.
01:24:59Amazing.
01:25:00We haven't had any main gun engagements against any enemy armor.
01:25:01Basically, as we pull up to the positions, they see the armor and the heavy tanks rolling
01:25:02up.
01:25:03They just surrender so far.
01:25:04We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:05We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:06We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:07We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:08We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:09We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:10We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:11We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:12We expect to get some resistance once we meet their tanks, though.
01:25:39The most exhilarating feeling that I've ever had in my life was to stand outside my tank
01:25:45on the ground watching all that gunfire, and all these Republican Guard tanks, they're
01:25:52all burning up.
01:25:54And if you're in them, too bad, because you're not going to walk away, you're a dead man.
01:26:00The armored clash came to be known as the Battle of Norfolk.
01:26:04In a point-blank duel, the 1st Division destroyed more than 40 enemy tanks.
01:26:12By daylight the next morning, it's a desert full of burning equipment, a desert full of
01:26:19destroyed enemy equipment.
01:26:22These are the best guys that SUDNOM has got, okay, they ain't worth a damn against a professional
01:26:28well-trained army.
01:26:31The Division swung wide to the west to cut off the Iraqi escape route from Kuwait City.
01:26:38They fought the Iraqis under the black smoke of hundreds of burning oil wells.
01:26:44Looked like hell.
01:26:45The flames shot probably 200 feet in the air, and then you had the just tremendous belching
01:26:51black smoke coming off each of those, so you had a whole area that just had a black pall
01:26:56over it, you had this tremendous roaring noise, and flames everywhere.
01:27:01It was like Dante's Inferno.
01:27:10Thousands of Iraqis surrendered as the 1st Infantry Division bore down on their positions.
01:27:16I saw soldiers repeatedly risk their life to not shoot people.
01:27:20When they came across an enemy tank to fire around alongside the tank, telling the crew
01:27:24you got about two seconds to get out of the tank because I'm going to destroy it.
01:27:28It was very civilized from our perspective, which I think is a real tribute to the American
01:27:31soldier.
01:27:32You didn't see folks get down into the sub-civilized category of any kind of wanton destruction
01:27:37or killing at all.
01:27:41Colonel Mike Ryan was in charge of the military police.
01:27:45It was his job to figure out how to deal with thousands of prisoners.
01:27:50I set some very strenuous guidelines as the provo-marshal for the military police in regards
01:27:57to handling of the prisoners of war, that they would treat them with the same dignity
01:28:01that they'd want to be treated.
01:28:03There were no incidents or complaints on the part of the prisoners of war that they were
01:28:08maltreated in any way, and I was very proud of that.
01:28:14I remember being surprised at the number of American-educated, fluent, English-speaking
01:28:23prisoners of war.
01:28:24We had an Iraqi doctor at one point that was a prisoner who had done undergraduate
01:28:32work at Kansas State, and I remember kind of having my suspicions about his veracity,
01:28:38but I knew he was telling me the truth when he asked me if K-State's football team was
01:28:43still as bad as it was when he was there.
01:28:47And it's kind of strange.
01:28:48Here you are in the middle of the desert in Iraq, and you're talking about football at
01:28:53Kansas State University with an Iraqi army officer.
01:29:00We were loading prisoners to haul back into Saudi Arabia, and the truck was full, and
01:29:07they were about to put another prisoner on, and one of the MPs said, no, it's full, take
01:29:10him off.
01:29:11And the prisoner just started to throw a fit.
01:29:15And my driver spoke pretty good Arabic and was able to communicate that the person that
01:29:19went on before he got on was his brother, and that he was afraid if he didn't get on
01:29:25the same truck with his brother that he'd never see him again.
01:29:29And what I did at that point was I ordered another prisoner off and put this, and I remember
01:29:33the two brothers just holding each other and crying and just saying this is kind of a human
01:29:38and really sad part of war.
01:29:48At 8 a.m., February 28, 1991, the war was over.
01:29:54In 100 hours, the Big Red One moved 160 miles through enemy-held territory.
01:30:01It had destroyed all or part of 11 enemy divisions and captured 11,000 Iraqis.
01:30:11I can't think of a single thing that I could say which would discredit anybody in the division.
01:30:18They simply, from the time it began its attack until the time the president called the ceasefire,
01:30:26the men and women of that division totally were dedicated with one purpose in mind, and
01:30:32that was to destroy the Iraqi army to the best of their God-given ability.
01:30:38I was very, very proud of the division.
01:30:46The coalition ground forces won by an incredible margin of victory.
01:30:50The Big Red One helped crush an Iraqi army of half a million men at a cost of 18 lives
01:30:56from the 1st Division.
01:31:004,000 Iraqi tanks were destroyed for the price of only 10 coalition vehicles.
01:31:11On May 10, 1991, the Big Red One left Saudi Arabia and returned home to Fort Riley, Kansas,
01:31:25once again upholding its heritage of excellence in combat.
01:31:48First Infantry Division has a longstanding motto, no mission too difficult, no sacrifice
01:31:54too great, duty first.
01:31:56It's more than words.
01:32:02It's a guide by which the soldiers of the division are willing to live, fight, and if necessary, die.
01:32:11At their first battle in World War I, the inexperienced doughboys of the 1st Division
01:32:16proved they had what it took to win on the Western Front.
01:32:21In World War II, the Big Red One led the charge across North Africa, into Sicily, and across
01:32:28Europe and destroyed the Nazi war machine.
01:32:35From their jungle outposts in Vietnam, the 1st Division endured miserable conditions
01:32:39and pursued an elusive enemy.
01:32:46During Desert Storm, the division showed what well-trained, well-equipped soldiers can accomplish.
01:32:56Since the Gulf War, the bulk of the division has relocated from Fort Riley, Kansas, to
01:33:00a new home in Germany.
01:33:03In 1996, the Big Red One was ordered into Bosnia, not as warriors, but as peacemakers
01:33:10enforcing the Dayton Peace Agreement.
01:33:15As part of the Multinational Implementation Force, or I-4, the men and women of the 1st
01:33:21Division worked for a year to provide a climate of stability and fairness in war-torn land.
01:33:30And that's what this division has always been about, executing the will of the American
01:33:34people.
01:33:36No mission too difficult, no sacrifice too great, duty first.
01:33:41And that's all you can ask of any American man or woman who serves in the American Army,
01:33:47and specifically in the Big Red One, to do their best to live that motto and everything
01:33:53that it has meant over the 80-odd years that this division has been around.
01:34:11♪♪♪
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