Tim Barton
You found your way into the WallBuilders Show the intersection of faith and culture. This is the place where we look at different events happening around us from a biblical, historic and constitutional perspective. My name is Tim Barton. I am the president of Wall Builders and I am joined by my father, David Barton, who is the founder of WallBuilders. He's also known as America's Historian Generally. We will have our third amigo, rick Green, with us. He was not able to join us. He's had some travel issues, but we are in the middle of a series. If you didn't get yesterday, didn't hear that episode, I would encourage you to go back. You can go to the WallBuilders website, wall, but there's live or wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it. We started with a TV special covering some of the history of Memorial Day and, dad, we got to interview one of our very good friends, Brian Birdwell, and hear just a little bit about his story.
David Barton
Yeah, Brian's story is amazing. He is still very active today and by even what you heard yesterday, his testimony is he should not be alive and he should not have been alive. The percentage of burns he had over his body, compounded with the degree of those burns, made him what should have been 100% death. But he did survive, by God's grace, and he has gone on to have a very productive life. But he has a very sober view of Memorial Day and how important it is, and there are so many stories like that, and so what you're going to hear us talk about today when we start is an incident in World War II that really should have resulted in Medal of Honor for four individuals.
It did not, because these were four individuals that were on the USS Dorchester. It was hit by a torpedo from a German sub and Congress wanted to award these four individuals who were so heroic, the Medal of Honor. But you can only do that if you're under fire. You have to demonstrate this under fire, and they weren't under fire at the time the torpedo hit. They were sinking. They saved countless hundreds of lives with what they did.
So Congress came up with a special medal just for the four chaplains, as the four chaplains medals, the only time it's ever been given, and this is a medal that Congress said would never be given again. So this is a one-time medal for these four guys and it is the equivalent of the Medal of Honor. So we're going to start with that story today. It is quite a heroic story and even though Memorial Day was yesterday, we're going to keep this going today and tomorrow, part of the TV special that we did a while back. It's just. These are stories worth knowing, worth hearing, great stories of heroism and sacrifice, and today we're going to start with the four chaplains.
Tim Barton
So we're going to pick up with episode two of this series and helping you guys learn some more of this history, some of the details of why it's important. So join us now for the second part of this series.
Narrator
A lot of the soldiers I lost were 19. They never knew the joys of marriage. They never knew love and raising their children. They never lived to a ripe old age working in some capacity that they enjoyed, enjoying the freedoms that their sacrifice paid for, never got to see their grandchildren. So we should do that. We should pause from the barbecue and the lake trips and go down and reflect on names on a wall and maybe look one or two of them up and find out who were they, who were their lives, what was their impact and what was the life they never got to live, like Frank compared to Jack.
Tim Barton
So, even though the history of Memorial Day goes all the way back to just after the Civil War, looking at Arlington National Cemetery, most Americans today still don't know much about Memorial Day, don't really know why we have a day to commemorate or remember, or even really when it began
David Barton
You have to go back even to the Civil War because in the South and in the North you particularly had ladies that were decorating the graves of fallen soldiers.
And so in 1868, after the Civil War is over, general John Logan, who's commander of now the Reunited American Forces, issues General Order Number 11. And on General Order 11, he says on this particular day we want to decorate the graves of all of those who fell in the Civil War. And so what happened at Arlington Cemetery, they had a special commemoration that day. The address was given by General James A Garfield, and then ladies and children from all over the city decorated the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers, and so it was known as Decoration Day. But after World War I, after the deaths in World War I at that point is when they changed it to Memorial Day they said let's take this day, this day in May, and celebrate not just those who died in the Civil War but those who died in all wars. That's how it came to be, and it is a time to remember those who died for their country, those who gave their lives, gave the ultimate sacrifice,
Tim Barton
And for us, I mean, world War II is pretty much as far back as you can go and there are still veterans who lived and experienced that. Actually, later in the show we get to interview one of those guys. When you look at so many of the stories that have come from World War II, there are some amazing stories, not just of heroic acts where there was victory. There's some pretty amazing heroic acts of sacrifice.
David Barton
Well, if you move out of the Pacific and go over to the Atlantic side, at the Atlantic side we were shipping troops out all the time, trying to keep reinforced in Europe, and would go up through Greenland and then over to Europe or sometimes straight across. As they sailed, in the Greenland there was a place they called Torpedo Alley where the German U-boats would sit out there and just sink these ships, all these ships filled with soldiers going to Europe. And so, as they set out in the last part of January of 1943, about January 29th, they set out. The Germans knew they had set out, they had spies here. Fifth column is working. And so, as they're going through that torpedo alley, it's about midnight and particularly U-boat 233 is sitting there waiting for them. And so, as the USAT, us Army Transport Dorchester, went by, they launched torpedoes at it and the torpedo hit below the waterline and so of the 900 people on board, about a third of them died below waterline from the impact and what happened?
Break
David Barton
The captain of the ship had ordered everybody to sleep in their life jackets because they were going through the torpedo island.
Tim Barton
Many of those soldiers who decided they didn't want to sleep with their life jackets sleep with their bulky stuff on. So when those torpedoes hit, as they are scrambling to survive, they're scrambling without the things that would help give them extra minutes in that ice-freezing water they're about to get into.
David Barton
And as they get up on top, there's panic everywhere. There were people in a catatonic state. They just didn't know what to do. They were just, and these four chaplains they're the ones who are keeping really a calm on it and as guys are panicked and not knowing what to do, they're helping them find gloves or helping them find life jackets. And finally, as they run out of life jackets, these four guys take their own life jacket off and give to the last four guys going in and as the ship went down, was going under the waters.
On the deck they watched the witnesses watches. These four guys linked arms and were praying together and singing hymns as the ship went under. And so a lot of those young guys said had it not been for them, I would not have made it. And so what happened as a result was Congress came up with this. These guys were not given the Medal of Honor because they were not killed in battle against hostile action. They were killed as a result of sinking ship. So Congress made this. It's sometimes called the Chaplain's Medal of Honor, but they created this just for those four guys. But that's another story of the sacrifice that they were willing to make.
Tim Barton
These are stories that, especially on Memorial Day, these are the kind of things we ought to be looking to, so grateful for the people that laid down their lives for our freedom, but again, one of the stories that today doesn't get nearly the attention it probably deserves. Just, we've kind of moved past knowing some of these things, but worth remembering.
David Barton
And as we move toward the end of the Pacific Theater, because after we're able to go in on D-Day and, by the way, this is a flag from D-Day, that was the third flag that went in on D-Day and so if you get on the backside of that flag, you'll see all the shrapnel holes through that flag. It's just unbelievable. So, whether it be after we finish in Germany and then we come back and now we have to finish in the Pacific area, we know Iwo Jima and we know the iconic image that we have at Iwo Jima, but the guy on the left side who has just raised the flag, just gone up with it, is a guy named Ira Hayes. Ira Hayes was a Pima Indian. He was 22 at this point. We have a letter from Ira Hayes that is just pretty unbelievable. This is Ira writing to his parents. I want to read you what he says to his parents here. He says Dear parents and brothers, good evening, dear folks. I ain't got nothing to do just now, so I'm writing to you. I hope you're all okay, but please do not worry about me. I'm all right and can take care of myself in any situation.
I don't know if I ever mentioned this to you, but when I joined the Corps I started to pray maybe four or three times a week.. But when I went over the first time I prayed every night and the second time over here before we went to Iwa and done likewise. But on Iwa I was always praying. So many others was praying for their first time. My prayers were with me and comforted me. They gave me courage to face the next day. I never asked God to spare my life. I'd say if it is by his will that I see another morning, I would be thankful for it. But if it is the other way and God's will, well, I'll be ready and I have been ready a long time ago. I never felt his nearness to me as I did on that island. Prayers are always heard and I'll keep on praying as I never did before.
Well, folks, I don't have much more to write. Thanks for sending that letter to me, and it's signed Ira Hayes. Now Ira died 10 years later he came back with what we might call PTS. We don't call it PTSD. It's not a disorder but post-traumatic stress. In the next, after he got out of the military he was arrested 52 times for public drunkenness and it was just, he couldn't handle it. He kept saying so many guys better than me died and I didn't. And it was just this thing that was hard for him to reconcile and so he died at the age of 32. And you know, he's just representative sometimes of what civilians don't understand.
Tim Barton
I think it's probably worth pointing out, as something that I'm grateful for, how American culture has recognized a little better that we need to help guys that are coming back from down range. There's a lot of organizations, actually some faith-based organizations, which have the highest success rate. One of the things that has been discovered is, without God right, it's hard to find that reconciliation, it's hard to find that forgiveness, sometimes even self-forgiveness, but there's a lot of amazing faith-based organizations that are helping veterans as they come back and certainly we're so grateful that there are groups that do this. But when you back up to World War II, when you're coming back after the war, there wasn't a lot offered to help people kind of reintegrate and overcome some of those struggles and
David Barton
what these guys saw, particularly in a culture where that killing is what the enemy loved doing.
I mean they wanted to take you out, and if they could take themselves out, that is great too, especially in the Pacific theater,
Tim Barton
especially in the Pacific theater.
David Barton
The Japanese empire I mean you take this picture down here with the beheading that's going on. This is one of those beheading swords. We have all sorts of accounts of Japanese officers who would have beheading contests with each other to see who could behead a hundred soldiers, a hundred POWs, the fastest. They had to have runoffs between it because they were so fast.
Break.
David Barton
I was reading last night the account of one Japanese officer who said if he went more than two weeks without beheading someone, he really didn't feel good about himself. He needed to behead someone.
Tim Barton
Well, so actually he would remedy that right. As we were reading the account, he said that he would just go get a POW and just bring him out, have him dig a grave, chop his head off, throw him in the grave and then go back. He said I just felt better after I beheaded somebody, and that's a culture that, as we talk about, even history that's forgotten. Probably the European theater is studied a lot more right in history than the Pacific theater. Most Americans know that Hitler targeted Jews. Most Americans aren't aware that the Japanese executed far more Chinese than Hitler even got close to with what he did, and actually probably the most common way of execution for Japanese was beheadings.
David Barton
Yeah, we see that Hitler took out nearly six million Jews, but the Japanese took out nearly 10 million Chinese and, like ISIS, they had their sex slaves. They went to the Korean Peninsula, took Korean women back. They became sex slaves for the officers. The culture of death. They taught their young people how to do suicide bombs. One of the things that they used in World War II were suicide torpedoes. You'd put two Japanese inside a torpedo, you'd launch it. They would guide the torpedo to hit the ship. It's like a kamikaze bomber, but you have it in torpedoes.
I mean, killing was just, and so if we have to invade Japan like we invaded Germany and Europe, it's a whole different thing, because they're going to fight to the death and not surrender. And so as we finally get we did not lose a battle, island hopping going, we did not lose an island, we won every single island till we finally get up against Japan. And now we've got to take Japan and they're not surrendering and they know they've lost. They've lost all their allies, but they're not surrendering. And it's interesting what we do at that point the American side came through in a way that is not covered in textbooks. I've never seen this covered in any single textbook at all, and it is that we took the island of Saipan and we started broadcasting from the island of Saipan every 15 minutes into Japan that we're coming to destroy all the military stuff there. We do not want to take out a single civilian. So here's where we're coming, here's where we're going to bomb. We want all civilians to leave those areas because we don't know civilian deaths.
This is a leaflet that we dropped in Japanese. It gives the 35 cities that the American bombers are going to bomb and it warns the Japanese to get out of those cities. We will destroy all military installations. We want no innocent lives. We finally got to a point. The B-29s bombed Tokyo. 100,000 Japanese lost their lives in Tokyo. B-29s bombed. So the Japanese are very aware of what a B-29 can do and they came out with this one here. This shows five B-29s In Japanese. These five B-29s. It says all right, you've seen what a B-29 can do. We have one bomb that's capable of doing what 2,000 B-29s do. We will use that bomb. We don't want to get out of the city. Get away from this, get your guys to surrender. We don't want to do this. We're dropping 70 million leaflets across Japan. Here's some of the others.
Tim Barton
Yeah, we have a lot, just a lot of leaflets.
David Barton
Every conceivable message. You can imagine the.
Tim Barton
American warnings were completely neglected. Again, the Japanese thought that if you are dying in battle, that's not a bad thing. Right, you can be rewarded in eternity. There's going to be great things waiting for you. So they're not afraid of this notion and so they're embracing the idea of death. But Truman knows this is going to cost a lot of American lives. The estimates were that it would cost one million American lives if we had to invade Japan because they were going to fight. It would take two to four million allied lives and somewhere between five to 10 million Japanese would lose their lives. So you're looking at estimates of anywhere from three to 10 million Japanese would lose their lives. So you're looking at estimates of anywhere from three to 15 million people losing their lives on this. And they won't surrender. And that's where President Truman said no, we've got a bomb and we're, you know, we told you that we've got a bomb that would do what 2000 of these did. We're not going to do this. And so we dropped the first bomb on the 6th of August 1945. You had about 70,000 killed, about 80,000 with radiation deaths after that, three days later, they're still not surrendering Saipan. We're still broadcasting. We're going to drop a second bomb. Truman, after we dropped the first bomb, went on air and said we've got another one. Surrender or we'll use it. They won't surrender. We drop the second one. We've got another one. Surrender or we'll use it. They won't surrender. We drop the second one. We've got another one, we'll use it. They won't surrender. It was five days later before they finally surrendered, so that's what eventually ended the war.
Break
David Barton
Any way you look at it, the use of atomic weapons saved millions of lives.
Tim Barton
But we also have a couple of images that it's specifically signed by Dutch von Kirk, who was a navigator of the Enola Gay, and in these it's interesting what he says, and let me just let me read a portion. He says most people do not recall why we dropped the atomic bombs. It was forgotten after 64 years. So it tells you when he wrote it right 64 years Only, remembering the large casualties they caused. We dropped the bombs to end the war and stop the killing by destroying military and military support facilities, defending against an invasion.
Earlier, we dropped millions of leaflets which were largely ignored. Now the reason it's significant is he's reminding people. We warned them millions of leaflets that were dropped. This wasn't some arbitrary attack of how can we be destructive and do something that might be bad, although that is part of how it's portrayed in some of modern academia. Now, certainly not all academics would promote that, but it's even something we saw if you back up to the 2014 AP US History Standards. So for AP History, if you're in high school, if you are a bright student, you might take your AP courses If you take the AP History course, the section that covers World War II this is the entire section that covers World War two.
David Barton
That that's it. Now, guess what? Hitler's not mentioned once. The Holocaust is not mentioned once D Day is not mentioned once Iwo Jima is not mentioned once Patton and that's Patton's flag that was on his casket, that's four star flight Pattstar flag. Patton is not mentioned. Eisenhower is not mentioned. Truman is not mentioned. Nimitz is not mentioned. What happened to all those?
Tim Barton
to all those. But what is mentioned is, they says, there was the internment of Japanese Americans, challenges to civil liberties, debates over race and segregation, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb raised questions about American values. Now here's what's crazy you could go through an AP history class today and leave thinking America was the bad guy from World War II. Why? Because we didn't know anybody else. Now, this was the 2014 standards. This was so bad. Americans cried out, said you've got to change it. So here's the 2015 standards for World War II. In the 2015 standards, they do mention the Holocaust and they do mention Hitler, but they still keep all the negative things about America.
When we tell history in such a way that you could leave thinking America was the bad guy of World War II, we're doing a disservice to every young person. But this is part of what we have forgotten in history, and this is one of the reasons that days like Memorial Day are so important, because it allows the opportunity to retell some of these forgotten stories, to help remind especially the next generation of the price that was paid for the freedoms, the benefits, the luxuries you get to enjoy, and this is certainly something that we, just when you look at the next generation, we just don't know much apart from technology. Right, really tech savvy. Not real good when it comes to history, especially when it comes to military history, or even what our nation largely is about, what our nation largely is about.
David Barton
And while we today can identify the Patton kind of guys, which is good, very few people can identify the John Bassalones and Chaplain Good and Chaplain. And it's so many of these smaller guys that really make the heart of what America is and what America did and what allows us to be free Americans. I mean it is good we've got these leaders and Eisenhower and Nimitz and the others, but it's these guys down here that are so significant that we don't get the story about in history today.
So, speaking of unsung heroes, one of those unsung heroes is Ed Harrell. Ed Harrell is a veteran from World War II. He is the survivor of the single largest loss of life in any single ship in American history. His ship, the USS Indianapolis, was sunk in World War II. It's a very significant event that ship was part of and a very significant story that Ed has to tell us.
We were recently with Ed in Tennessee. Here's his story.
We're in Clarksville, Tennessee. We're at the home of veteran Edgar Harrell from World War II. Thank you for inviting us into your home.
Edgar Harrell
Thank you,
David Barton
you were part of World War II. You were on the USS Indianapolis, which is the single greatest loss of life for any single ship in naval history. How old were you at the time?
Edgar Harrell
Well, I volunteered for the Marine Corps when I was 17 years old. I'm already in the Marines for a period of time before the sinking of the Indianapolis, which happened July 30, 1945.
Tim Barton
All right, welcome back, as we have talked about a little bit. If you heard us, at the beginning of the program, we mentioned that we are in the middle of a series. This is part two. Tomorrow will be the third and final installment. We're going through a TV special that we did where we cover the history of Memorial Day.
Tomorrow we have an interview that is just staggering, still in my mind to think about what the event was, what happened. But today we even got to go through some stories. We heard a couple of people that we were able to talk to as this was going on. Yesterday we got to hear from Brian Birdwell In that interview. He has a book called Refined by Fire. He's got a video on I Am Second, so there's so much information. If you guys want to know more about this, as always, a great place to go to find out more history is wallbuilders.com. If you want to go back and get any of the episodes that you have missed this point, you can go to wallbuilders.show. And, as always, to learn more, we encourage you, tune in tomorrow and we will finish this series tomorrow. We'll see y'all then.
