years of self-sacrifice and heroism with those who understand it fully but you have to live a. real life stories from world war two. victory nineteen forty five dollars r.t. dot com. you're watching r t the headlines for you now forty four people are killed as a passenger plane crash lands in northwest russia eight survivors are hospitalized in critical condition bad weather and airport systems for a long first ference for the cause of the tragedy. claims of more civilian victims in libya after a fresh nato bombing but at least fifteen reported dead including children women and strike the west of tripoli becomes just a day off they are not some weeks into killing civilians while blaming

a weapons not functional. plan the prime minister of greece is facing a crucial confidence vote has recently been shuffled government the outcome could determine whether he will be able to push through a new austerity package to secure another much needed injection of cash from the move. on next to the emotion crusade of an eighty nine year old u.s. or world war two veteran outraged by what he believes is the indifference of his country towards the memory of fallen soldiers. the large concentration of litter on the beach poses an additional health hazard when the refuse is swept out to sea during the storm despite this danger we are in so i know and the aluminum cans are plastic bottles he found bay shows major recycling plant near by where aluminum cans are crushed and both can walk.

leon paid a visit to the owner and manager of the plant derek and her warmth i wrote repeatedly to the washington usual suspects the president in the white house the secretary of defense and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff members of congress so i'm here to began and hopefully in action program with funding from my government what we've done. is to restart the cupboard under the current. master of the. car battery way here it says in a nutshell what i'm thinking that we should expand your operation clean up the beach on red beach one would be my primary objective is to give my salty language but you can understand my anger sure and having seen businesses' creation know how ground work on red beach leon had developed an action plan for be sure that

included two phases the first would be to set up refuse containers and collection centers throughout the beaches and employ local citizens the second phase would be to establish state of the art incineration systems that would recycle trash as well as provide electricity for the island the ons action plan could be used for any island based diminishing land sources. the local fiji television station taped an interview of the story in its current mission to taro. years and say. ok. we. never took me on outings boat to revisit the scene of the battle. i used to have a nightmare. i granted for years afterwards. i had somehow or. fallen into the water and i had sunk down and there was

a kid sitting on i sure my 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 him wondering what the fuck are you doing here he was sitting on top of the sherman tank and the koran was all around this bright yellow red glow car all was all around us and it was this kid very happily sitting on top of the chevron tank and that's a dream that i had for years. i had told my wife. if i start threatening iran but just leave the bread because i get. back to crazy i'm not aware of it but anyway. she she knew when i made those morning sounds i couldn't talk because of i began to speak i would drown i would swallow water later that day visited the presidents of john and molly brown. she showed

a movie about the battle for tara prior to a tour of the sights. over the years the browns have collected munitions in their back yard a number of shells of still life. that's right. they were just for research. from writing certainly from american history. is still

a long long long yet you know kicking please not whenever there's a dangerous shells and weapons of all shapes and sizes a majority of americans constantly turn up on a shill although these have caused deaths and injuries to the local population over the years there is no exact figure provided by the care about government by quarter the local australian naval commander on the island still has the difficult task of dealing with world more toward that's. the issue here is that the us keeps turning out but everyone it's pretty well i kind of it's all right just stuff just keep setting up whatever they're summarizing but something you know that's a far better one were discovered was one sort of taking care of it so i had it standing upright. on the end of the bomb and nothing is guaranteed when i was using it as i just wanted to invent. the wheel you know leon was introduced to

australian ex-pats involved in exploring the history of the battle of tora. 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 times off base here and is employed by history flights on their two year program to survey the island from lost graves now there's a there's a plane just picking up the brandy let's put the others in the waste that's of a twenty people who brought it. back what's in the water a b. twenty four is a picture of it that's the vision this is the focus he. believes in c sections there in the core of. the debris from the battle still covers the island and every storm on earth new ordinance stanch only on a fifty caliber machine gun sitting in the water a few yards from their beach front. castle it has a that's a fifty fifty caliber machine still but again we're talking played on

a stand keeps a storage container full of the weapons and munitions he's collected this is going for. sixty million more the true nature is here with. us more and more there is a lot more there were good. throughout the fuse and the flawed system the motor of the law i don't know if it's old this is like this. stuff by it's about the radio or portable radio that was run out of a boy named frank already takes thirty this is the part of the tool but from a supposed officer from silicon what i dug up and also tells that is if you have make it and see the nickel couple of. reports of a nation for the japanese talk want to take the main gun it's a thirty seven no room. to use the explosion room for

a lot of rooms. up on your head like this very carefully frightening thought. by the end of day to the ground coming colonel she who had been wounded by shrapnel during his landing the day before rallied his troops to capture the airport runway 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 of it 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 eat fighters based from nearby more flights the japanese were on a mission to bomb and strafe the tower landing force. by ten o five that morning the americans had shut down seventeen of the twenty bombers and

force the remaining three back to the base the marines on base are safe from potentially devastating casualties. meanwhile supported by reinforcements and artillery fire from nearby islands the marines used all means necessary to systematically take out the japanese defenders they slowly advance through the narrow eastern tip of the art. 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 at a just hours after they took over the island and now that you have an i am playing i have warning that japan was going to occupy the zine all the sudden they simply showed up as i write through those at three o'clock i want to look up the descendants of those up till now to where they land and place here as his

outreach to local officials continued leon and ted met with the minister of interior. more than three years i've been trying to get our government to do something about the desecration bettas happened to the beaches where so many americans died in defense of our country so i've. been a buzz a. cyclist a lot of. the little the little bustle. the show the leon the tape for fiji television was broadcast all the islanders. but if i was. one of the different sort i think a number of the stuff i saw selling it was like everyone with a filling in for stuff. and never did it. all the time coming and thinking surely. but because i. still thought.

it was a damned thing. missing for me kills many of the end of. the world i did something helpless or something they just. simply because i chose. 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 group and only one japanese officer and two enlisted men survived along with fourteen korean laborers 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 bomb. one marine commented that it was the closest thing to dantes inferno it ever seen. may show was a hellish wasteland of destruction. literally covered with thousands of bodies and ordnance. now came the grim task of collecting and burying bodies. general holland smith in the marine commanders was recruited to it said later that tarot was a tragic mistake. after the battle and the marines would bury their dead. detail cloth maps of the grave site and within a matter of days return to their ships. meanwhile the burial were continued on that ship. identification was made more difficult by the

condition in the composition of several bodies and a number were lost at sea. i fortunately had the unpleasant duty of a travelling a number burials at sea i can't remember how many at least a half a dozen but one stands out in my memory in particular the chaplain who was in charge of the burial details i was standing next to him after he said his usual words before we got the guy ends of a d. and i said with a chaplain hasan who is a sky and he said we don't know and i said well his dog tags there in the sailcloth he said. and i can't imagine anything more that needs to be said other than i absolutely absurd ridiculous treatment and yes absolutely indifferent treatment was given to all these guys who had died in defense of our country. lieutenant bonnie but

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 within clean up the battlefield and quickly built the infrastructure to support an airfield. this is a picture of the island after the c.d.c. cleaned it up and turned it into a modern air base you can see some of the temporary scimitar is there's thirty three twenty six twenty five this is part of the old pier right here the island basically had forty three cemeteries on it and and building it into a modern air base they basically erased some of the senators that we've taken out he's been working for the australian government as a contractor. he has made some unusual discoveries rockne building b. shields infrastructure he knew that there was one instance we dug below the wall the title this is the one that stain to be interested in and we found really

important stuff and still had partial uniform boots to watch and a good part of us want to be believe that was how might be a good. part of yes the ride of the rather the way with a with the lion in the front of me was. the thought of the last one i was three years the son yes and nothing else now. though you told somebody in a government us government about this. project engineer the project a project manager and he believed right off to. be admiral nimitz organization but what happened was he did warner a nice buns in that up in my office in a rush but. i don't like to bring a draft and i had to drop the draft growing type and this bag was underneath the

pipe. and he was it will box and now sample on such a letter to them it's going to so so i think what we should do with the frying pan then was our reply here which well as. we can the forever war did i feel almost like he's one of my can you know leon had spent months seeking assistance from every level of government to address the garbage situation that patient now he discovered something even more disturbing that hundreds of marines remains still lying in the sands of the island. just as we've been told by the guys we've met with. you want down on the ground and almost anywhere you walk you see the mortal remains of somebody japanese or american he was introduced to the minister of health. because that is not simply i don't lie the things that i want to do to help you ultimately he was granted

a meeting with the president of kirkuk and how to top it it will involve the employment of citizens of karate who will. assist in the in the monitoring of the refuse collection of your country and ultimately and won't be a state of the art incineration system. which will have a number of benefits so. 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 night in forty three the gruesome carnage was so disturbing that some mothers demanded nimitz's resignation. 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 natural number of total missing people from this from this battle was five

hundred eleven basically it's a very nebulous number and there's a huge distance or there's eleven hundred six people asked at the end of the war when the army came back to dig these people up and take them back to the states only three hundred ninety two are dead 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 gillet effort starting in february of one nine hundred forty six and winding up in. may of nineteen forty six 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 never told that here's you're a family member and return to the states those people are still lost in space this is a photograph. bernard she least grave on the west side of the island there 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 nomar 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. 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 map of great number thirty three were four hundred people were were listed as being buried but in reality only hundred twenty nine were recovered. one of those people by the way is an alexander boney man who was who won the congressional medal of honor in the ballots are won and in doing so he lost his life and he was buried in one of these temporary cemeteries and never found lieutenant alexander bunnymen was one of four congressional medal of honor winners which also included first lieutenant colonel william boyd alone and the only survivor of the battle colonel david chu. bunnymen and many of the great men were on the islands mind when he paid his respects to 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 pays his respects to a special marine so most lies here he came to the coast watchers memorial a beautiful woman so those guys who gave their lives. in defense of their country and ours too by the way and the bretts the australians of rosie with theirs are a lot more allies here but soames is not he lies here or somewhere we're i'm standing and then i'm 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 equals 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 a reticence generation of people because after world war two many people have said all this 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 and the crew finally. were for whom the work is just thank god he's determined to fight it's going to action is taken by our government. i'm going to present a documentary into senator feinstein and hopefully have her take the necessary action have appropriations provided to tara so that they garbage control program and the public education program could get underway before carola sex under the

ocean a couple of gallons in the twelve that are changed the island archipelago are now the most the needs the ocean anatoly a matter of time maybe a dozen years or twenty or thirty years before the entire island group will be called the new it live as because there won't be any general. definitely sixty five years of past many unanswered questions remaining hundreds of americans are still lost in the sands of peace. and there's a dangerous as well as disastrous environmental legacy that means on this tiny atop and many other islands throughout the pacific campaign. for leon cooper the battle is just beginning.

the move. to. sniff. a fish. i am. sure than a month. in one of the most extreme environments on the planet this is and large

adults and people have to be aware that they are far away from civilization sean thomas discovers what makes sense arctic is so special and instructive for many a wildlife in antarctica is opposing and friends an. expedition to the bottom of the earth an artsy.

today children play war in the old curiously. but in june nine hundred forty one these walls were the first barrier for the nasty troops on their way to moscow and. restless were dying one by one under ceaselessly. water. in the last shelter an unnamed soldier left a few simple words farewell mother i'm dying but i'm not so.