tv [untitled] June 20, 2011 1:31pm-2:01pm EDT
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leon's action plan could be used for any island for some diminishing land sources but the local fiji television station taped an interview of your own story in his current mission to taro. so. there are two cleone out in his boat to revisit the scene of the battle. i used to have a nightmare. i granted for years afterwards. i had somehow. fallen into the water and i had sunk down and there was a kid sitting on i am on a tank. he was saying he he waved at me he and i are about twenty maybe thirty feet under water and i was looking at i'm wondering what the fuck are you doing here and he was sitting on top of the sherman tank and the koran was all around a bright yellow red blue car all was all around us and it was
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a kid very happily sitting on top of the sherman tank and that's a dream that i had for years. i had told my wife. if i start threatening ron but just leave the bread because i get. back kind of crazy i'm not aware of it but anyway. she she knew when i made those moaning sounds i couldn't talk because of i began to speak i would drown i would swallow water. later that day visited the residence of john and molly brown. so she showed a movie about the battle for tara prior to a tour of the sites. just tired of her three cows. but that's three.
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player. plays. over the years the browns have collected munitions in their backyard a number of shells are still alive. that's right good for an american just for these are. some of the driving thirty weeks of american history are often the still a long way around. yet you said you don't kick it and play for an hour when emre those are dangerous shells and weapons of all shapes and sizes a majority of them american constantly turn up on base she'll although these of cause deaths and injuries to the local population over the years there is no exact
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figure provided by the kid about government. mike corder the local australian naval commander on the island still has the difficult task of dealing with world war two war yes. the issue here is that no one escapes turning out how they got rid of a way on it's it can be like kind of but there's a hole right to stop it just keeps turning up or whatever and it's amazing what some people you know that sort of foreign affairs bomber discovered was that one sort of a chicken curry you know that's i had a standing upright. bible on the end of a bomb and having to detonate a bomb and are using it as just one quarter of the way to invent. the wheel you know leon was introduced to two australian ex-pats involved in exploring the history of the battle of tara stan ghosh to his professional diver initials expert and peter scarlett has lived on the island for over fifteen years stan has done hundreds of dives off base yo and is employed by history flights on their two year program to survey the island for lost graves there's there's
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a plane just looking at randy that's for the other to the waste that's a big twenty fold right. as that what's in the water and the twenty four is a picture of it that's the station this is the the hole see. the waves into sections there before. the debris from the battle still covers the island and every storm on earth new ordinance stand showed leon a fifty caliber machine gun sitting in the water a few yards from the beach front home. that's it that's a fifty fifty caliber machine. still the cup again we're talking flight on a stand keeps a storage container full of the weapons and munitions he's collected. this is going for sixty no more ditches and eight zero waste. us more a mortar is a more mortar and edible
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a good. still what the fears and the flawed system the motor. a lot of us still own that this is all over the place this. stuff by is about the radio portable radio that was run out of a boy named track already baked goods this is the fault of the job but on the supposed office of from him a can that i dug up and also. had enough of it make you can see the nickel couple. of books of emanation for the japanese still going to close a little mind gun it's a thirty seven no room still the whole explosion room the laws are. up on your head like this right carefully. by the end of day to the ground commander colonel shoot who had been wounded by shrapnel during his landing the day before rallied his troops to capture the airport runway
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this effectively cut the enemy defenses into. day three began with an easier landing of additional marines at the western shore as the american forces began to outflank the japanese defenders that morning a chance event was taking place in the skies nearby. a flight of hellcat fighter planes on routine patrol from the aircraft carrier lexington accidentally intercepted a formation of twenty japanese equine hers based from nearby marshall lyons the japanese were on a mission to bomb and strafe the tower landing force. by ten o five that morning the americans had shot down seventeen of the twenty bombers and force the remaining three back to their base the marines on base you see for potentially devastating casualties. meanwhile supported by reinforcements and artillery fire from nearby islands the marines used all means
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necessary to systematically take out the japanese defenders they slowly advance toward the narrow eastern tip of the arctic. leon paid a visit to mother superior margaret sullivan of our lady of the sacred heart mission she showed in the declaration the japanese government is that it just hours after they took over the island now did you have any and playing on any warning that japan was going to occupy the xining all of a sudden they simply showed up as a right to die is that really what i want to pin up every tenth of december to those that will not and where they land and face. as his outreach to local officials continued leon and ted met with the minister of interior. her more than three years i've been trying to get our government to do something about the desecration that has happened to the beach as well as so many americans died in defense of our country so out of. them it was a. fight with just
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a little or a. little bit with us. the show that leon had taped for fiji television was broadcast to all the islanders. who. was one of the. school i made a number of trips in the big stuff i saw killings i never saw my life and everyone but it really never stopped. and never did it. all the time i was coming to think surely to tell it. but because i. still. i was damn angry i think the best thing for me to kill as many of the end of. the world i did some helpless person which i simply because i chatted
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each one. by one twelve pm on november twenty third the island was declared secured over five thousand five hundred men lay dead on the sands one thousand one hundred thirteen were american marines and two thousand two hundred ninety were wounded only one japanese officer and two enlisted men survived along with fourteen korean labor. the entire island was a vast twisted wasteland of death and destruction. american and japanese bodies covering the island were a mute testimony to the ferocity of the battle. one marine commented that it was the closest thing to dantes inferno you never seen. it was a hellish wasteland of destruction. literally covered with thousands of bodies and ordinance. now came the grim task of collecting and bury
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a body. general holland smith and the marine commander was reputed to have said later that tara was a tragic mistake. after the battle the marines would bury their dead take detailed plot maps of the grave sites and within a matter of days return to their ships. meanwhile the burial were continued gun issue. identification was made more difficult by the condition and decomposition of several bodies and a number were lost at sea. i fortunately had the unpleasant duty of attending a number of burials at sea i can't remember how many at least a half a dozen but one of the stands out in my memory in particular the chaplain who was
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in charge of the burial details i was standing next to him after he said his usual words before we dumped the guy into the date and i said the chap on the horizon who is a sky and he said we don't know and i said well his dog tags are in the sailcloth he said. and i can't imagine anything more that needs to be said other than they absolutely absurd ridiculous treatment in yes absolutely and different treatment was given to all these guys who had died in defense of our country. lieutenant bonny been a posthumous medal of honor winner for his valor in the battle would be buried in the eighth marines grave site number two. the navy seabee units which were the logistic backbone of every operation would then clean up the battlefield quickly build the infrastructure to support in the near future.
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this is a picture of the island after the c.b.c. cleaned it up and turned it into a modern air base you can see from the temporary cemetery there's thirty three twenty six twenty five this is part of the old pier right here the island basically had forty three cemeteries and in building into a modern air base the basically a race some of the senators. that we've taken has been working for the australian government as a contractor. he has made some unusual discoveries while rebuilding beach use infrastructure and you know there was one instance we dug a lot of the water title this is the one that stain very interested in and we found it really in complete stuff i'm still had partial uniform boots wash and it was because a lot of the i was how much did the metal yes or rather the rather what was a it was the one in the front of the it was. part of the last one i was with gives
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the side of. this and nothing else now. so you told somebody in a government us government about this. project then to me the project a project manager for the right off to. the bone numerous organization down but what happened was the law in the raid in the buttons in that up in law office in a rush by. a military brain of drops and i have to try and drop the drawing card and this bag was the title. and he was it will box and i'll call on such a letter to them as much as they are going to say what we should do with the file. and then was our reply yes which well as. with jennifer award it i feel almost like he's one of the like can you at all leon had spent months
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seeking assistance from every level of government to address the garbage situation at base you now he discovered something even more disturbing that hundreds of marines remains still lie in the sands of the island. just as we've been told by. the guys we met with the. woman down on the ground and almost anywhere you walk you see the mortal remains of somebody japanese american he was introduced to the minister of health dr boyd to present its maximum place i don't lie the things that i want to do to help you ultimately he was granted the meeting with the president of cuba i know to talk a little on the employment of citizens of who will who will assist in the in the monitoring of the refuse collection of your country and ultimately. a state of the art incineration system. which will
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have a number of benefits for. the brutality of the tower or campaign would soon hit home when the american public began to see the pictures of the casualties and devastation in late december one thousand nine hundred eighty three the gruesome carnage was so disturbing that some mothers demanded nimitz's resignation what was more striking was not just the heavy casualties but the confusion regarding the burial of hundreds of marines who gave their lives ataru the actual number of total missing people from this from this battle was five hundred eleven basically it's a very nebulous number there is a huge distance here there was eleven hundred six people lost at the end of the war when the army came back to dig these people up and take them back to the states
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only three hundred ninety two were dug up and brought back to the states there's over. well over two hundred fifty probably almost three hundred people on the island today the quartermaster corps of the of the army made a reasonably diligent effort starting in february of one thousand nine hundred eighty six and winding up in. may of nineteen forty six they had done to find the remains of approximately three hundred maybe four hundred guys but. the report that i read issued by the guy in charge says that they could not account for almost fifty percent of the people who were brought back to the states those are real graves those are real people who were brought back but there was over three hundred that were never brought back and those people's names are still listed as missing in action today although many of them we have pictures of their graves we have pictures of the maps of where they were buried those people those families were
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never told that here's your family member and return to the states those people are still lost in space this is a photograph from. bernard she leaves grave on the west side of the island near what was known as green beach and that's a photograph of his grave and he's still missing today this is someone named steve momar who no one even knows who he is and no you can't even find. a mention of him in any of the original rosters here's a picture of grave number eighteen with robert brand baseball norman jr frank as the sea and henry lot so they're all still missing today this is a photograph of grave number eleven where there are one hundred forty five graves and only thirty two were disinterred this is a plot math grave number thirty three were four hundred people were were listed as being buried but in reality only one hundred twenty nine are recovered. one of
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those people by the way is alexander bonny man who was who won the congressional medal of honor in the battle of sorrow and in doing so he lost his life and he was buried in one of these temporary cemeteries and never found lieutenant alexander bonnie min was one of four congressional medal of honor winners which also included first lieutenant hawkins william bordelon and the only survivor of the battle colonel david chu. bonnie many and many other brave men were on leon's mind when he paid his respects at the marine monument which has been placed in a parking lot away from the litter on the beaches. as a fitting tribute to the many missing in action and still lost on this tiny stretch of coral leon pieces respects to a special marine soames lies here he came to the coast watchers memorial a beautiful war also those guys who gave their lives. in defense of their country
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and ours too by the way and the brits the australians of those who were there is. no more allies here but soames is not he lies here or somewhere we're i'm standing and then on margrave and like our government recognized forgotten. and of no value. god rest him. and i feel very sad about him and his relatives in the intense difficulty of world war two many people seventy nine thousand of them basically were lost in space this is an example of different branches of the service not being able to communicate effectively with each other and show where they left all these people and this is not on usual island i mean this is an enormous mistake that happened during an enormously difficult time in american history and this was
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a reticence generation of people because after world war two many people have said all it's time to get on with our lives and this issue is a done issue but in reality a lot of people's families don't feel that way. leon in the crew finally heading home but for him the work is just begun. he is determined to fight until action is taken by our government i'm going to present a documentary into salad or feinstein and hopefully have her take the necessary action have appropriations provided to tear off so that they garbage control program and the public education program could get underway before taro sinks under the ocean a couple of gallons in the twelve the thirteen island archipelago are now the most the needs the ocean and it's only a matter of time maybe a dozen years or twenty or thirty years before the entire island group will be called the new atlantas because there won't be any tomorrow. after nearly sixty
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five years have passed many unanswered questions remain hundreds of americans are still lost in the sands of the show and there's a dangerous as well as disastrous environmental legacy that remains on this tiny atoll and many other islands throughout the pacific campaign. for leon cooper the battle is just beginning.
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nine hundred forty one these walls were the first barrier for the nazi troops on their way to moscow and. the funders of breasts were dying one by one under siege of. water. in the last shelter an unnamed soldier left a few simple words very well. i'm dying but i'm not surrendering. download the official antti have location until i phone all i pod touch from the i choose our. life on the go. video on demand ati's my broadcasts and already says feeds now in the palm of your
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if. politics or night made to admit it launched the air strike that killed nine civilians in a tripoli suburb while british taxpayers wary of reckless spending how did the bill for three months of bloody stalemate. japan gets a grilling in vienna members of the international nuclear watchdog gathered to look at ways to avoid another fukushima crisis while people there say they don't feel safe even kilometers away from the exclusion zone a report coming up for you tonight. and every have the state wants a second term but it's the people who have the final word so says president medvedev he still isn't announce whether he'll stand again but did rule out a faceoff with prime minister putin.
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ten pm monday evening here in moscow welcome if you just joined this you watching r.t. international money kevin zero in on our top story tonight nato has admitted its forces killed up to nine civilians in a bungled airstrike on a poor neighborhood in tripoli anger over the incident among libyans was heightened when the country's health ministry announced that the intervention had left more than eight hundred civilians dead so far his riff national reports now from the capital of tripoli you may find some of the images coming up in a report disturbing. mohamed that hurt his extended family used to be one of the biggest in the neighborhood and they table mean killed five of them his father one of his brothers his sister and her own family mohammed shows us the picture of little jumana his niece taken on his mobile phone his days before he pulled her dead body from on the day. i woke up when i heard an explosion some stones a piece of the roof fell on me and i ran immediately to see how my family is and
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many were dead my mother survived another brother is in a coma and we don't know where know if he will recover but how does that not three days be livin in this agreement this strict entry fully it's home to many hours income people most from one family this is just a regular city quarter why does the populated built up area this is what used to be there had his house but three story buildings are reduced in ruins in just moments after being hit in a missile strike home on mohammed's brother who survived says they will never forgive or forget what nato has done to them destroying their lives and homes. they should take responsibility for their wrongdoing and nato has responded with an apology. intended target during last night air strike in tripoli was a military missile site however from our initial assessment of the facts it appears the.
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