War Stories

Aired May 6, 2005 - 22:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again.

War changes us. It pulls us together. It tears us apart. It rearranges the world. This is why we fight wars and why we seek to avoid them. It is also why we tell war stories.

So, tonight, with the country at war and 60 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, war stories and why they still have a hold on us.

President Bush landed today in Latvia in the Balkans -- in the Baltics, rather -- to mark the anniversary where history resonates deeply. The stories there are of occupation and oppression and deal- making and what it's like to be a small player on a large and dangerous stage.

But we begin tonight with the stories told by men and women who had reason, if only for a moment, to celebrate a job well done, defeating the Nazis, even as they braced for the hard work of defeating Japan. That was 60 years ago this Sunday, V.E. Day. The storytellers now are fading. Their stories, though, are not. We begin with CNN's Candy Crowley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SR. POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This was a story about a young man from Hawaii and another from Kansas who both dreamt of becoming doctors and then went to war.

BOB DOLE (R), FORMER U.S. SENATOR: He was wounded a hill apart and a week apart, a week later, on a hill that I could see it from where I was.

CROWLEY: It was the spring of 1945 in Italy's Powell Valley, weeks before V.E. Day, when something exploded Bob Dole's shoulder, shattering his spinal cord. He lay on the battlefield paralyzed near death.

SANDERS: All I knew was that something hurt up here in my right area, shoulder. And just I could see my little dog, my little white dog. I remembered the girl I first had a date with. All these things just sort of -- you remember your mother and your father and freezing ice cream, hand-cranking ice cream.

CROWLEY: Daniel Inouye had enlisted in the 442nd, the Go For Broke regiment. Assaulting a heavily defended hill, he was shot in the leg, the stomach and a third shot blew off his arm. Inouye won the nation's highest military award for valor for what came next.

SEN. DANIEL INOUYE (D), HAWAII: I don't remember charging up to a machine gun, this, with blood splattering all over and tossing grenades just like from here to you, and then picking up my gun and, like Rambo himself, you know, with -- it looked ridiculous. I can't picture myself doing that. But they all swear that's the way it happened.

CROWLEY: Inouye's arm could not be saved. He spent three months in and out of surgery and headed for rehab. INOUYE: We were given a choice. They would say, there are four orthopedic hospitals, one in Utah, one in California, one in Michigan and one in the South somewhere. I said, let me go to Michigan. And that's where I met Bob Dole.

CROWLEY: The next battle had begun.

DOLE: If you're pretty badly hurt, then you've got a long, long period of hospitalization and rehabilitation. And, you know, it's like anything else. The cameras are gone, the lights are off and there you are.

CROWLEY: War is about enemies, death and destruction. War's aftermath is about friends, healing and choices.

DOLE: I used to watch him play bridge. He was the best bridge player in the hospital. You know, we sat around and talked about, what are we going to do the rest of our life?

CROWLEY: Their injuries meant neither could ever be a doctor.

INOUYE: I said, Bob, what are you going to be doing? And one thing about Bob Dole, he had his life mapped out, really mapped out. He says, well, when I get back, I'll be a county attorney. Then I'll be in the legislature. The first opening in the Congress, that's where I'll go. I said, gee, that's a good idea.

CROWLEY: It was not the path either had originally chosen, but sometimes you pick the journey and sometimes life does.

DOLE: Three more weeks, the war was over. We could have been there for the victory party. Instead, we were both flat on our bed, our backs in a hospital somewhere. And -- but, as it turned out, I guess we did all right for a couple of guys. So...

CROWLEY: Two men, two worlds and quite a journey.

INOUYE: I went to law school. I became an assistant prosecutor,got into territorial legislature. Hawaii became a state. I'm here. When I got here, I sent a note to Bob. "Bob, I'm here. Where are you?"

(LAUGHTER)

CROWLEY: Bob arrived in Washington two years later. Republican Senator Robert Dole and Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye served together in the United States Congress for 36 years. They have been friends for almost 60. Candy Crowley, CNN, Washington.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: The war that ended 60 years ago had many victims, the soldiers who died, those concentration camps who were murdered. This is a story of another group of victims, victims you may not have heard about. They were born to be the future of the regime that saw in them something they didn't even see in themselves precisely, purity. Reporting their story for us tonight, CNN's Nic Robertson.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): You learned how to ride a bicycle down here?

SISS OUSTAD, BORN DURING HITLER'S REGIME: Yes.

ROBERTSON: Yes?(voice-over): Siss Oustad is living the legacy of Adolf Hitler's plan to create a master race. She takes me down her painful memory lane.

OUSTAD: This was also a guy, an elderly guy. And he stopped to ask for direction.

ROBERTSON: It's 1954 and she's 12 years old.

OUSTAD: And then he grabbed me and took me into a courtyard.

ROBERTSON: He's not the first man who has tried to rape her.

OUSTAD: The first guy, he did it because he knew my background.

ROBERTSON (on camera): He knew you were a German child?

OUSTAD: Yes.

ROBERTSON (voice-over): Knew nobody would care if such an outcast were raped, because she was a Lebensborn, which translates into fountain of life, a wartime product of Hitler's ambitions to expand the Aryan race.

In April 1940, the Nazis invaded Norway. By June, the king was in exile, the government gone. Norway was occupied by more than 400,000 German troops, its three million citizens forced to live under Nazi rule. It was then that Hitler, driven by his desire to create a pure Aryan race, saw opportunity among the blond and blue-eyed Scandinavian women.

German soldiers were told to treat Norwegian women well. And the women were encouraged to return the favor. Any child born out of these liaisons was to be cared for in a special Nazi-run Lebensborn home. By 1945 and the end of Nazi occupation, 10,000 to 12,000 babies had been born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers.

OUSTAD: There was a rumor that every one of us were going to be shipped to Germany. And my grandfather had never seen me.

ROBERTSON (on camera): He hadn't come to see you because he didn't want anything to do with you?

OUSTAD: He was persuaded to come then. And he looked at me and I charmed him. And he said, oh, no, she's not going to Germany.

ROBERTSON (voice-over): Siss was 3. She was lucky. Some were dumped in insane asylums. (on camera): To your knowledge, were you the only German child at this school?

OUSTAD: No. ROBERTSON: There were others?

OUSTAD: Yes. ROBERTSON: But you obviously didn't know it at the time.

OUSTAD: I had a suspicion.

ROBERTSON: Really?

OUSTAD: Yes.

ROBERTSON: You had a suspicion about others, but you didn't know about yourself?

OUSTAD: No. ROBERTSON: As I'm finding out, though, growing up with her grandparents, Siss was told very little. OUSTAD: I saw this one first. And I thought, hmm. But the letters were so difficult to read because I was young. But I saw my name and I saw, well, my sister's name.

ROBERTSON: And you knew it was a birth certificate.

OUSTAD: Yes. (INAUDIBLE) ROBERTSON: Well, it has your mother's name here and your father.

OUSTAD: Yes, my father's.

ROBERTSON: It says...

OUSTAD: Yes.

ROBERTSON: It says -- what, does it say German soldier?

OUSTAD: Yes. So, I took those and went to my grandmother, or my mother, as I said, and said, what is this? And she goes furious.

ROBERTSON: She got really angry?

OUSTAD: Yes.

ROBERTSON: You must have known something was going to -- was important then.

OUSTAD: Yes, I knew that, uh-oh, this, I shouldn't have seen.

ROBERTSON (voice-over): Siss was just 8, too young to understand the grown woman she called sister was actually her mother, that her loving grandparents had adopted her. As she got older, she craved answers. Then, when she was 16, sitting with her real mother:

OUSTAD: I called her by her name. And I said, actually, you are almost 20 years older than me and you are my sister, I said, but actually you could be my mother. Are you or aren't you? I am, she said. And who told you?

ROBERTSON: Since then, Siss Oustad has married, divorced, raised her own family, watched her grandchildren grow, learned that her father is dead and figured out she wasn't alone. Wanting to move on, she joined a campaign to help Lebensborn like herself, who were denied basic rights, denied the opportunity to seek child support from fathers in Germany, many even denied Norwegian citizenship.

OUSTAD: We had an incident when we went to court, one guy who rose from this chair, furious and said, you German kids, keep your mouth shut and be quiet.

ROBERTSON (on camera): This -- we're talking about a few years ago here?

OUSTAD: Yes, just a few years ago.

ROBERTSON (voice-over): Siss has convinced me, though, she was born out of love, for her, bittersweet.

OUSTAD: I hope, in the name of whatever, that no one ever, ever will suffer like this again, ever.

ROBERTSON: Nic Robertson, CNN, Oslo, Norway.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: If Norway was intended to be the nursery for the Third Reich, the beaches of Normandy became the boneyard, a turning point not only in the war, but also in the career of a young photographer named Robert Capa. Capa would go on to establish the photo agency Magnum. And he used to say, if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough. That day, D-Day, Robert Capa got close enough, his story told by his biographer, Richard Whelan.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) RICHARD WHELAN, AUTHOR, "ROBERT CAPA": If one had to choose a day that was the climax of Capa's career, D-Day was it.

Capa set the standard of bravery, certainly. He took his camera closer to the front-line action than anyone had ever dared to do before. He chose to go in with the first wave of American troops. And the soldiers thought this was the most extraordinary folly they'd ever heard of, that someone would go in without being ordered to do so. Capa photographed them studying this model, planning their strategic moves.

He photographed men putting their equipment together and getting on to the ships, as they were putting the final preparations on the sail, and while they were actually sailing to the French coast. When he got out of the landing craft into waist-deep water and waded with the men into the beach, he began shooting and he had two cameras loaded with film.

He wanted to photograph the faces of the soldiers.

He wasn't content to walk behind and photograph the soldiers' backs. He wanted the faces, as he always did. And when he went to change the film, hi hands were shaking so badly he could not change his film again. There were so much pressure in the London office of "LIFE" that a darkroom assistant turned the heat in the drying cabinet up too high. And the films that Capa had exposed at such extraordinary risk to his life, going in with his back to the Germans, armed only with a camera, no gun, the films he had made began to melt. Of all the photographs he had made on the beach, only 11 were at all savable, usable.

When Capa left Omaha Beach, the only landing craft to which he could manage to swim was a medical craft that was evacuating some of the first of the wounded. He often focused on doctors, medics, treating not only Americans, but Germans as well. What interested him was how the living cope with the horrors of war. He really understood what a horrendous social crisis, a catastrophe war is. The German army had sustained extremely heavy losses. And these very, very young men, these boys really, were thrown into combat with almost no training, very little equipment.

He photographed them as bewildered, terrified, victims of war in their own way. Capa was very aware of the political complexities of the situation. And he brought that to his work. He covered wars that in some ways really touched his life very directly and wars in which he was willing to risk his life, just as the combatants were risking theirs for the outcome. Capa's work is a benchmark to measure work against, as most photojournalists do still regard Capa in that sense. They depend upon his work. They go back to his work to get their bearings, to get a sense of what it really is about.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: In a few moments, the sinking of a ship that helped change the course of history. This story is not about the titanic. But now, at a quarter past the hour, Erica -- Erica Hill has the headlines.

ERICA HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hi, Aaron. Good to see you. U.S. intelligence is closely monitoring North Korea, which could be preparing to test a nuclear weapon. Officials tell CNN analysts have picked up signs of activity on the ground. But they stress it's unclear if North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is truly getting ready to test a device or if he's conducting an elaborate plan to deceive American spy satellites.

A powerful explosion in Lebanon today in a Christian stronghold just north of Beirut. Reports say at least one person was killed, two dozen injured. Lebanon's president said the violence may be linked to the return from exile tomorrow of a Christian politician who is a fierce opponent of Syrian influence in Lebanon.

And more violence in Iraq today. Two suicide bombings north and south of Baghdad kill at least 23 and wound dozens others. One bomber hit a crowded market. The other hit a bus carrying Iraqi police officers. And militants in Iraq say they will murder an Australian man they're holding hostage if Australia does not withdraw its troops from Iraq in 72 hours.

Video of 63-year-old Douglas Wood was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. Australia says it will not negotiate with terrorists. And, for the first time ever, the Pentagon has released a list of sexual abuse cases in which military personnel were either victims or alleged assailants. In 2004, there were 1,700 such cases.

Last year, there were 880 cases of alleged assault by at least one military person against another, 425 alleged assaults by military members against nonmembers; 296 cases involved an unidentified assailant against a member of the military. And that's the latest from Headline News at this hour -- Aaron, back to you.

BROWN: Erica, thank you. We'll see you in a half-an-hour. Coming up on the program tonight, a day 90 years ago that changed the world forever, a disaster that seemed impossible at the time.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Nobody believed that she could actually be caught by a submarine.

BROWN (voice-over): She was the pride of the British commercial fleet, with nearly 2,000 people aboard. Few would survive after the torpedo struck.

DIANA PRESTON, AUTHOR, "LUSITANIA: AN EPIC TRAGEDY": It really signaled the beginning of a no-holds-barred warfare.

BROWN: She was just 9 years old when her father died in Vietnam.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Your dad is gone. He's gone for the rest of your life. He's not there when you drive your first car. He's not there when you take your first date. He's not there when you get married. BROWN: Now she helps others who share a similar pain.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When the boys ask, why? Why did God take him? Why is he gone? Why can't he be here? It's hard to hear. But it's the only answer I have, which is, he's needed more up there right now. BROWN: He went to war 60 years ago and lived to write about it.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I wrote a long letter on V.E. Day, and I took a lot of pictures on V.E. Day, because I knew it was historic.

BROWN: An American soldier recalls what victory in Europe felt like. And his recollections might surprise you. From New York and around the world, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: For as often as politicians boast and news anchors report, very little happens day to day or even decade to decade that truly changes the larger course of human events, the birth of Christ, the shot fired at Lexington, Hiroshima. Some day, we may see 9/11 that way.

Ninety years ago, an oceanliner set sail, not the Titanic, the Lusitania. Ninety years ago tomorrow, she was sunk, and the world has never been the same.

Here is NEWSNIGHT's Beth Nissen.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The morning of May 1, 1915. New York's Pier 54 was a melee of porters, steamer trunks, boarding passengers.

PRESTON: She was carrying over 1,200 passengers in a crew of 700. That was her biggest eastbound complement since the first World War had started.

NISSEN: Many boarding the Lusitania that day were nervous. A stark notice from the German Embassy had appeared in morning newspapers. "Travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk." Everyone knew what that meant. The Germans had recently stepped up their use of submarines, U-boats. Passengers were hastily reassured. The Lusitania was too large, too fast for a submarine to track, sink. Besides, it was unthinkable that a civilian passenger liner would be attacked, even one like the Lusitania with war material in her cargo.

PRESTON: She had in her hold Remington rifle cartridges. She had shrapnel shells and fuses. This was legal. What was in the Lusitania's hold was on her manifest.

NISSEN: And there were 200 American passengers on board.

PRESTON: This was hugely significant fact, because American citizens at the time were citizens of a neutral country.

NISSEN: The Lusitania set off and sailed across the Atlantic to within sight of the Irish coast. Her captain, William Turner, knew German submarines were in those waters, but he took no evasive action. He did not know that, in the six days since the Lusitania left New York, 23 merchant vessels had been torpedoed by U-boats in area, boats that included the U-20, which surfaced on the morning of May 7 to find the Lusitania dead ahead.

PRESTON: The U-20 fired a single torpedo that went singing through the water with a hiss.

NISSEN: Seconds later, the torpedo hit. Passenger Oliver Bernard, an artist, later sketched the shattering explosion.

PRESTON: The side of the ship was breached. You had cold water pouring in, setting up these additional explosions.

NISSEN: Some survivors thought those explosions were the munitions in the cargo hold. But researchers say they were caused when cold sea water hit the Lusitania's red hot boilers. Within minutes, the great ship was tilting sharply.

PRESTON: People couldn't even stand upright. You had people careering around the deck. And the ship was progressively tipped and tipped and tipped.

NISSEN: For the nearly 2,000 souls on board, time was cruelly short.

PRESTON: That 30,000-ton ship, as a result of that one torpedo striking it, sank in just 18 minutes.

NISSEN: The water was a'churn with what artist Oliver Bernard described as hundreds of frantic, screaming, shouting humans, struggling to stay afloat in the frigid water.

PRESTON: The suffering that those people must have undergone, the suffering and the uncertainty in that cold, cold water, waiting two to three hours before any rescue came.

NISSEN: No nearby ships responded to the Lusitania's SOS. Fishing boats had to row the 10 miles from shore. Steamboats at port had to fire their boilers before they could travel out.

PRESTON: They didn't arrive until twilight. And all they found, nobody left alive, but just the sea covered with dead bodies.

NISSEN: Small clusters of survivors who had managed to get into the few swamped lifeboats or float on debris began arriving in the village of Queenstown on the Irish coast. So did a flotilla of bodies, hundreds of them, brought in by the tide for days. It was weeks before lists of the dead or missing were complete. Of the 1,960 people on board the Lusitania, 1,200, almost two-thirds, had perished, including 94 of the 129 children on board. Of the 200 Americans on board, 128 died.

PRESTON: This caused a huge uproar in the United States. And it was a reason why, in 1917, the United States of America did eventually go to war with Germany.

NISSEN: The sinking of the Lusitania not only changed the course of World War I. It changed war itself.

PRESTON: The sinking of the Lusitania belongs to a step change in the nature of warfare, where you could use any technology that was available to you and anybody could be your victim, whether they were a civilian, whether they were a child, whether they were a baby. It really signaled the beginning of a no-holds-barred warfare.

NISSEN: In the bombing of cities in World War II, from London to Dresden to Hiroshima, the napalming of villages in Vietnam, suicide bombings of neighborhoods in Baghdad, the line between soldier and civilian blurred.

PRESTON: The world on the 8th of May 1915, the day after the Lusitania was attacked, was a much less innocent place than it had been the day before. The world had changed forever.

NISSEN: Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up on NEWSNIGHT, she lost her father to war decades ago, how her mother became her hero.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: The simple truth is that you can't know what war is like until you've been there. In the same way, you can't really know what it's like to lose a loved one to war without feeling that sorrow firsthand. Every war claims many victims who never set foot on the battlefield, many of them too young to understand why their father and now their mother isn't coming home.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): This is the story of two very different women from two very different times.

JACKIE LIVAUDAIS, HUSBAND KILLED IN IRAQ: Who's this?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Daddy?

BROWN: Jackie Livaudais, a mother of three, was one of the first widows of the war in Iraq.

LIVAUDAIS: Destre, he misses everything about him. He loved daddy in every day. He misses working with him. He misses cuddling with him. I know he really misses daddy telling him that he's proud of him. But we all try to do that for him. When the boys ask why did God take him, it's hard, hard to hear. But it's the only answer I have, which is he's needed more up there right now. And, of course, it's hard for kids to understand why.

BROWN: Karen Spears Zacharias, was the child of another war, searching for a father who left for Vietnam when she was 9 and never came back.

KAREN SPEARS ZACHARIAS: Why in the world did life continue? Didn't the world understand my father was dead? And how could they go on and just act like nothing had happened? Because everything had happened different for me from that point in time. And I was angry at my mother over that. I was angry at my dad. I was angry at God.

BROWN: Zacharias, that anger haunted her for years. The book that grew from that anger "Hero Mama," is her story and the story of her mother.

ZACHARIAS: I almost can't stand the way that this is being replayed in people's lives every day because of the war in Iraq. I look at Jackie Livaudais. She was 22 when he died. She was 5 months pregnant. She had two little boys. I look at Jackie Livaudais and I see my mother. I hear my mom's story.

LIVAUDAIS: We've become good friends, because we have that loss in common. But there's so much more than just the loss. When somebody can understand it and actually articulate and relate to the boys, they love it. Karen's been a great friend, but she's also been the view from the child's eyes that I need.

ZACHARIAS: When you're in that child, it just doesn't matter. Your dad's gone. He's gone for the rest of your life. He's not there when you drive your first car. He's not there when you take your first date. He's not there when you get married.

BROWN: What you have, all you have, are memories.

ZACHARIAS: You tell me a story about daddy.

DESTRE LIVAUDAIS, SON OF JACKIE: He was a great man. And he had strong muscles. I remember he was a good guy. He took care of us good. I keep those pictures in my room because, I love him. But it doesn't help any.

LIVAUDAIS: Every kid has a picture of their dad in their room. They'll sleep with the picture when they're having a rough night because they know that bad thing are scared of dad because dad's pretty tough and strong. All the widows, all the kids, they all have -- the kids all have their tear-stained pillows, I believe. I think they all do. They're always going to have that pain. It's their shadow now.

BROWN: Karen Zacharias, the adult, is never far from Karen, the child. Someone who knows too much about loss and a lot about possibility.

ZACHARIAS: I'm just there because I would have given anything as a young girl to have that person there for me or to have someone come along and befriend my mom. What I hope it brings to them is a sense of hope that when Jackie Livaudais looks at me, what Jackie Livaudais sees is that her kids are going to be OK. That she's going to mess up, but as long as she loves those boys with all of her heart, mind and soul, the way my mom loved me, they will know that she was a terrific mother. She is a terrific mother.

BROWN: Another hero mama in a long line.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: With more women serving in the military, it's not just fathers, of course, who are missed when parents go off to war.

In Georgia this week a high school student got a call from his mom who was serving in Iraq. She called him on his cell phone during his lunch period. His teacher told him to hang up, you can't take cell phone calls in school even from moms in Iraq it seems. He refused and was suspended.

The principal of the school says the teen used profanity when he was taken to the office and could have been arrested. Instead, because his mom was in Iraq, he was just suspended for 10 days.

Still to come on the program tonight, he went to war and watched history unfold around him. How one World War II veteran remembers V-E Day 60 years later.

Around the world this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In putting the program together, it struck us that wars even world wars, are still fought one soldier at a time. Their experienced one air raid at a time, one refugee, one meal to the next. And even in retrospect, when there's time to appreciate the stakes and ask what might have been, wars are remembered one moment at a time, or one letter home. Herman Obermayer is a veteran of the second World War and the author of "Soldiers for Freedom: A G.I.'s Account of World War II." We -- we spoke with Mr. Obermayer earlier this evening.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Do you remember the day itself, V-E day?

HERMAN OBERMAYER, AUTHOR, "SOLDIERING FOR FREEDOM": As you know, I wrote a book based on letters. I wrote long letter on V-E day. Which -- and I took a lot of pictures on V-E day, because I knew it was historic. So yes, I was able to refresh my own memory, because I wrote a long letter that describes events. And with that as a jog, I can remember quite clearly.

BROWN: I want to talk a little bit about -- you wrote a lot of letters about a lot of things. We'll talk about letter writing in a moment. But one of the things about is we read through your thoughts on V-E Day is that it meant different things to the Americans than it did to the Europeans or the French, which is where you were.

OBERMAYER: Yes.

BROWN: How so?

OBERMAYER: Well, chiefly, I guess for us we had won the first half of the game. I quote in the letter that when the Americans built their first pontoon bridge across the Rhine, the soldiers built a sign on the eastern end of the bridge the shortest route to CBI, meaning China, Burma, India theater. We had a war to fight. And in May 1945, we were in Okinawa, and I have since done the research. And that was effectively a 90-day battle in which we lost 40,000 men were injured and 13,000 men were killed in a 90-day engagement. And that was going on. We weren't winning that war, at least it wasn't apparent that we were winning it. And all of us knew that we were -- I worked on a pipeline. And while I was -- by the end of June, they had closed the pipeline, pumped all the gasoline out of it and were moving it to Marseilles to go to the Pacific.


BROWN: You mentioned -- the book is rich, literally rich with letters that you wrote. First of all, just really quickly, did you know the letters still existed or at what point did you know the letters existed?

OBERMAYER: I probably always knew that some of them existed.

BROWN: These were letters to your folks.

OBERMAYER: Letters only to my parents. And I knew that many of them existed. I was -- my mother, when she broke up housekeeping in a large house sent them over to me in 1962. And until the mid-'90s, I didn't examine them. And then I started to organize them. And all of the overseas ones were numbered. So I knew I had everything there, but two numbers which were probably thrown away by the censor.

BROWN: Do you think that today those of us of a certain age and younger appreciate not what the greatest generation did -- I mean, I think people get that -- but the importance of it? Why it mattered so much at the time?

OBERMAYER: It's hard -- you know, I don't know whether I have any more understanding than you do. I think I understood, or understand now maybe more that if America hadn't entered the war, Hitler would have crossed the Atlantic. Hitler's -- from 1940 on Hitler stood on the edge of the Atlantic, and we -- our -- without the strength and determination of America, Hitler would have crossed the Atlantic.

BROWN: You weren't at the front. This is -- there's no great heroics portrayed here by you. When you look back on it, do you ever wish that your role in the war had been different?

OBERMAYER: Probably not. I'm here.

BROWN: Yes.

OBERMAYER: I survived. And, as I say in the next to the last paragraph when I go to the cemetery at Omaha Beach, the decision to go from the infantry to the airborne to the engineers to the medics, I didn't make any of these decisions. I didn't understand how anybody else made them. Some guy blew a whistle in the morning and said fall out and he read a list. And I went where I was sent to. And I could have gone to someplace that I died and I didn't. And I guess I look back and just say I was blessed. I was there and I lost my freedom to make any other decision.

BROWN: And the rest of us, in fact, are blessed to be able to read it. You've had a really interesting career. And if this -- this is a fascinating chapter of it. The letters -- in some respects just because letter writing strikes me as such a lost art in and of themselves are worth taking a look at. It's nice to meet you. Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Herman Obermayer. As our special coverage of V-E Day -- the anniversary, thereof -- continues. We'll check some of the other news of the day. And then morning papers from 60 years ago. A break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: In a moment, our anniversary series looks at the man who helped bring freedom to South Africa. But first, at about a quarter to the hour, Erica Hill with headlines in Atlanta -- Erica.

ERICA HILL, HEADLINE NEWS: Thanks, Aaron.

And CNN's "Security Watch" tonight, President Bush today nominated Edmund Hawley to run the troubled Transportation Security Administration. Hawley helped create the agency, and will be the fourth person to run it in as many years. TSA has been criticized for its spending and hiring practices.

And a change in leadership at the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. Peter Nanos will step down as director next week. His two years at the lab in New Mexico were marked by turmoil. He instituted strict policies to stop the mental abuses and security lapses and was met with a lot of resistance.

At the courthouse in Santa Maria, California today, the mothers of two boys who repeatedly slept with Jackson in the same bed testified he never acted inappropriately toward the boys. And they said that Jackson was like one of the family.

The Elian Gonzalez case is back in the news. A federal judge in Miami has ruled against awarding millions of dollars in damages to 13 people who claim they were injured when federal agents seized the boy five years ago. The plaintiffs claimed that the lingering effects of tear gas were responsible for their injuries. And that is a look at the headlines at this hour.

Aaron, back to you. Have a great weekend.

BROWN: Thank you. You too.

Tonight, as we continue our anniversary series "Then & Now" we profile a man who dedicated his life to defeating apartheid in South Africa and eventually became the beloved leader of that country.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Both the symbol and a source of power for the fight against apartheid in South Africa, Nelson Mandela never gave up. He was imprisoned in 1962 for his leadership of the outlawed African National Congress in the battle to win equal rights for blacks. Mandela was released more than 27 years later. He received a Nobel Peace Prize and became the first black president of South Africa.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mandela viva. Viva.

CROWD: Viva.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Married for the third time on his 80th birthday in 1998, he retired from the presidency one year later. Mandela is now 86-years-old. After a battle with prostate cancer and other health problems, he retired from public life last year.

MANDELA: Don't call me, I'll call you.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Only to re-emerge to spearhead a new cause. Mandela leads a fund-raising group for AIDS victims called 46664, after his prison number. The fight once again is personal for Mandela, his son died of AIDS in January.

MANDELA: Let us give publicity to HIV/AIDS and not to hide it.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: All year long as CNN celebrates 25 years of reporting the news. We'll look back at the newsmakers and the stories that have shaped the extraordinary era in which we live. Morning papers, then and now, when we return.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: OK. Time to check morning papers from around the country, around the world, and we'll begin 60 years ago. I don't think we've ever done A German headline, but we shall tonight "The War Is Out."

"The war is over," says the headline. Pictures of Stalin, Truman and Churchill, Hitler and Mussolini. It's over."Daily News." this one, "500,000 in Times Square." To me, the picture -- I assume this is the "New York Daily News" -- doesn't quite match the headline. I wish I could see the cut line, but hey, these are 60-year-old papers. You can't always get it.

"The Daily Mirror," "This is V-E." The sub had "Japs To Fight On War Leaders Say." A sign of the times. "

The Los Angeles Examiner," then it became "The Herald Examiner." I ain't know if it's still in business. "V-E Day Official Today." "Truman, Churchill, Stalin, de Gaulle will broadcast victory manifestos. Nazi's to sign final pact."

This morning "The Los Angeles times" a little more succinct. "Full Victory in Europe. Allies to make formal announcement today." But lots of war stories on the front page.

This is the "Daily News" again. "Philadelphia Daily News," "New York Daily News", can't tell, costs two cents, though. "It's Over in Europe." But that looks like the half a million people in Times Square, doesn't it?

OK, how are we doing in time there, Barkley?

OH, plenty.

OK, I'll slow down.

This is of wars today.

The "Marine Corps Times." I'd like to see this headline, by the way. "Body Armor Recall. The Corps is pulling back 5277 vests, but ballistics experts say -- rejected 14,000 more." And then one of those news you can use stories "Is your vest safe?"

"The Dallas Morning News" also of wars present. Middle of the -- middle of the page "It Does Their Hearts Good. Soldiers rave about Dallas, Fort Worth rousing welcome crew at the airport. The volunteers of greeters say they get more than they give." That's a nice story on that.

And that's wars present.

Maybe this is, unfortunately, wars future. "North Korea Plays Coy With Nuke Test Setup."
That's a headline in the "Chicago Sun-Times." Also "Paula Abdul Goes on the Offensive." For all of you who have been following that particular caper. The weather by the way, in Chicago tomorrow, mixed message.

We'll wrap up the week in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Have a terrific weekend. We'll see you on Monday. Until then, good night for all of us.

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