cutlass even if. they faced it this is not a prohibition but a warning of. a form to it and you should see several but you sure disapprove futurist because they have no idea about the hardships to face. they wanted to says it all to tunis and for any army the life of the usaf is the most precious thing in the world. is 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 nine hundred forty five dot dot com.

coming to live from moscow the week's top stories russia mourns the forty five victims of tuesday's plane crash in the northwest of the country aircraft one fire after cress landing on a major road just a kilometer from its destination pilot error and poor weather conditions are believed to be the main causes of the tragedy. levy has seen a surge in the number of civilian casualties from nato airstrikes in the country with the latest bombing reportedly telling fifteen leave us socials say over eight hundred civilians have died since the operation began in march. and a new demands for greece to impose tougher budget cuts to secure a fresh bailout sparked mass protests at home and alex rage at yet another rescue plan within the block that summit predictions doubts the euro is on the brink of collapse. next the emotional crusade of an eighty nine year old us 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 leone saw no empty aluminum cans or plastic bottles he found major recycling plant nearby were aluminum cans are crushed both came from. leon paid a visit to the owner and manager of the plane derek and you are there i wrote repeatedly to the washington usual suspects the president and the white house the secretary of defense the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff members of congress so all i'm here are to began and hopefully an action program with funding from my

government what we've done. is restarting the couple or many. faceted or. call their. way here is said in a nutshell what i'm thinking is we should expand your operation clean up the beach on red beach one would be my primary objective because my salty language but you can understand my anger and having saying this desecration of how ground war 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. 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 and his current mission to taro. years. 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 sure my tank. he was a 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 corals all around this bright yellow red

blue car all was all around us and it was a kid very happily sitting on top of the trevor 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 got. back kind of 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 leon visited the residence of john and molly brown she showed a movie about the battle for tara prior to a tour of the sites. just . three cows. but that's for three.

hours of. play. over the years the browns have collected munitions in their back yard a number of shells are still alive. that's right it never just are these are. from five and thirty weeks of american history are often the still a long way around. yet you say they don't kick at anything please for an hour when i'm right those are dangerous shells and weapons of all shapes and sizes a majority of them american constantly turn up on base feel although these of cause deaths and injuries to the local population over the years there is no exact 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 all we wanted to be like kind of but there's a whole range of stuff that 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 standing upright. on the end of a bomb and having to detonate a bomb and are using it as just one corner here but you can bet that 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

a plane just looking at randi that's further to the west that's a basically for the brotherhood as that what's in the water and the twenty four is a picture of it that's the station this is the the whole 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. i said that's a fifty fifty caliber machine. still the cup again we're talking light on a stand keeps a storage container full of the weapons and munitions he's collected. this is going for sixty million more to church and it's here with. us more and more this is a lot more and there were good. still with the fuse and

the flaws you need to know more than. a lot imo still on that this is full of the play this. still guides of a about radio portable radio that was run out of a boy an amtrak already baked goods this is the fault of the jewel but from the supposed office of from him a can that i dug up and also now tells had been making you can see the nickel couple. of books of emanation put the japanese talking on the porch with a mine gun it's a thirty seven mil room still use the whole explosion room to a lot of rooms. up on your head like this right carefully but i'm not. by the end of day to the ground commander colonel chute 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 event was taking place in the skies near by. a flight of hellcat fighter planes on routine patrol from the aircraft carrier lexington accidentally intercepted a formation of twenty japanese he cried is based from nearby marshall islands 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 forced the remaining three back to their base the marines on base year were 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

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 that you'll have money and playing on a 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 look up at the descendants of those that will now where they land and face. 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 dozen creation that has happened to the beach as well as so many americans died in defense of our country so i've. made was a. fight with

a simple a lot of. little little muscle. the show that leon had taped for fiji television was broadcast all the islanders. different schools i think the number of troops and. stuff i saw. it was like everyone wanted to like the first stuff. and never did it. all the time coming to think surely to tell. but because i. still. listen to. this thing. killed many of the end of the world i did some helpless person which i simply because i chatted with my.

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 laborers . the entire island was a fast twisted wasteland of death and destruction. american and japanese bodies covering the island were a mute testimony to the ferocity of the bout. one marine commented that it was the closest thing to dantes inferno universe and. it was a hellish wasteland of destruction. literally covered with thousands of bodies and ordnance. now came the grim task of collecting and bury

a body. general holland smith the marine commander was reputed to have said later that tarot was a tragic mistake. after the battle in 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 on base your. identification was made more difficult by the condition than decomposition of several bodies in a number were lost at sea. i fortunately had the unpleasant duty of attending a number of burials and say 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

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 to the chaplain hasan who is a sky and he said we don't know and i said well his dog tags are in the sailcloth he said. 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 an airfield.

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. who we've taken has been working for the australian government as a contractor. he has made some unusual discoveries while rebuilding base use infrastructure and you know there was one instance we dug a lot of the water table is the one that stain was very interested in and we found it really complete skeleton he still had a partial uniform whose watch and it was because a lot of the the i was how much did the metal part yes or rather the rather the what was a little bit about him in the front of the was. a lot of less water was what he

gives to the side of it and nothing else now. so you told somebody in a government the us government about this. to the project engineer the project a project manager and he wrote it off to. the bone numerous organization down but what happened was the law in the rain in the buns in the up in law office in a rush but. then on the brink of drought and had to try and drop the growing tide and this bag was on the title. he was it will last and now on sunday letter to them it's not much so so i think what we should do with the five. and then was our reply yes which well as it. was with him for a awarded i feel almost like he want to lie can you at all leon had spent months

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 the japanese american he was introduced to the minister of health dr boyd to present its maximum play 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

have a number of benefits for. the brutality of the tower were campaign would soon hit home when the american public began to see the pictures of the casualties and devastation in late december nine hundred forty 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's eleven hundred six people lost at the end of the war when the army came back to doing these people up and take them back to the states 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 nine hundred forty six and winding up in. may of nine hundred 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

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 hundred twenty nine were recovered. one of 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 minh and many other brave men were on the islands 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 and to those guys who gave their lives. in defense of their country

and ours too by the way and the brits the australians are to resume of there's. no more allies here but soames is not he lives here or somewhere we're i'm standing and then unmarked grave and like our government unrecognized 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 a reticence generation of people because after world war two many people does that

all the time they get on with their 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 headed 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 souter feinstein and a whole play 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 cero off sinks under the ocean a couple of gallons in the twelve the thirteenth 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 in the what lattice because there won't be any tomorrow. after nearly sixty

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.

today children play war in the old case me.

but in june nine hundred forty one these walls really a first barrier for the nazi troops on their way to moscow. sunders and restless were dying one by one under siege the salt. water. in the last shelter an unnamed soldier left a few simple words very well motherland i'm dying but i'm not surrendering. i was just thinking about my future before the foreign companies came i dreamed of owning a can cut in factory. but we have less garbage now. some

visitors who come here make fun of me. pick up garbage boy i'm not bad like people saying. i'm a good person. it's just the people don't. samey. but i feel it was time people like me. that i feel people will start to appreciate us.

and.