The War is the story of the Second World War through the personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four American towns. The war touched the lives of every family on every street in every town in America and demonstrated that in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives.
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Video description:
Despite the bravery of African Americans in all of America’s previous wars, despite the argument made by the NAACP and others that “a Jim Crow army cannot fight for a free world,” the armed forces of the United States remained strictly segregated.
America needed to take Iwo Jima to secure a base for US Bombers. The Marines landed on Feb 15, 1945 and the fighting would last for nearly a month and cost the United States 6,821 lives.
In the September 20, 1943 issue, LIFE magazine published the first image of dead American servicemen that American civilians had been allowed to see in the twenty-one months since Pearl Harbor.