War stories: Ordinary men and women remember World War II. (American History).

In 1941, Eleanor Kadis lived across the street from the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Each evening, she could see the lighted dome from her window. Then, on December 7, 1941, terrible news came over the radio: The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, an important U.S. naval base in Hawaii.

The attack stunned the nation: 2,403 people were killed, 188 planes destroyed, and the mighty Pacific fleet crippled.

"That night, the dome was dark," Kadis recalls. "The entire city was pitch-black."

On December 8, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war. Across the U.S., men and women rushed to enlist, while others helped out at home. Kadis and her roommate became air-raid wardens.

"During drills, a loud siren would wail," Kadis told JS. "We [wardens] would patrol the streets to make sure that everyone was indoors, and that no lights were visible. The police knew us by our distinctive helmets."

The Capitol dome remained unlit for the duration of the war, making Washington "a city of darkness," says Kadis.

A Fight Against Tyranny

From 1941 to 1945, more than 16 million Americans fought alongside soldiers from Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the other Allied countries.

But trouble had been brewing in Europe since the 1930s. In 1939, German dictator Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, attacked Poland. Britain and France then declared war on Germany.

War also raged in Asia, as Japan sought to extend its control. After Japan attacked Manchuria, a region of China, in 1931, fighting between the two nations continued throughout the decade.

In 1940, Germany, Italy, and Japan formed a wartime partnership called the Axis powers and continued their conquest of nearby countries. Soon, much of Europe and Asia were battlefields.

The world mobilized against the rise of fascism--a form of government that controls all aspects of political, economic, cultural, religious, and social life. Fascism also fosters a dangerous form of patriotism that can lead to the persecution of minorities. Under Hitler's fascist regime, nearly 6 million Jews were killed.

Allied forces struggled to contain the tyranny (absolute power) of Hitler, Italy's Benito Mussolini, and Japan's Hideki Tojo. By the time the Allies claimed victory, in August 1945, about 17 million soldiers on both sides had been killed. Civilian deaths were even larger, though the exact number will never be known. Across Europe and Japan, heavily-bombed cities were in ruins. Despite the staggering toll, most Americans believed, and still believe, that the war was necessary. Many call it "the Good War."

Here are the stories of five ordinary Americans who helped the U.S. and its allies in the fight for freedom.

Combat

In June 1944, troops from Britain, Canada, France, and the U.S. launched an attack on the coast of France, which Germany had conquered in 1940. Using artillery fire, battleships, and landing craft tanks, the Allied forces captured the beaches in Normandy. This invasion, called D-Day, allowed the Allies to begin a direct attack on the Axis forces in Europe. Elliott Johnson, an artilleryman in the U.S. Army's Fourth Infantry Division, landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944.

"The fifth night we were there, we were in dug-in foxholes.... There were Germans ahead of us and Germans in the back of us.... A sniper...was shooting at us. Every time I'd stick my head out of the foxhole, I'd get shot at. I called two very dear friends on a [field] telephone. We fanned out, each of us with a grenade. At a given point, we pitched our grenades and accomplished what we had to do....

"We were called on by our government, [and] our country was in jeopardy [danger]. Therefore, we had to fight for it. Personally, I had no malice [hatred] at any time towards the Germans."

Women in the Army

More than 150,000 American women served their country in the U.S. armed forces. Women performed essential military jobs as administrators, nurses, and mechanics. Evelyn Fraser was a public-information officer for the Women's Army Corps. She describes some of the difficulties women experienced in a largely male fighting force, as well as the benefits she gained from serving her country.

"It was awkward for the men. I'd been brought in for administrative work. This lieutenant wouldn't tell me a thing about the job. He was afraid I was going to replace him.... [I said,] 'Look, you can put everything on the desk now. I'm going overseas, and you can stay here.'

"If it weren't for the war ... I wouldn't have traveled as extensively as I did. It really changed my life. A young woman my age never had an apartment away from her parents. ... This way I could gloriously go off on my own."

Prisoners of War 

In Europe and Asia, the Axis armies captured many American soldiers. These men became Prisoners of War (POWs) and lived and worked in camps or factories run by the enemy. Richard M. Prendergast, a soldier in the U.S. Army's 106th Infantry, surrendered to the German Army in 1944. He lived in POW camps and worked in a German factory until the end of the war.

"Twenty-three of us were ... sent to a chemical factory, Bykguldenwerk, about 10 miles outside of Dresden. ... Our principal job there was shoveling coal, which we did 10, 12 hours a day. ... We did all that on one bowl of turnip soup and a seventh of a loaf of bread a day ... I've never been able to look a turnip in the eye since....

"We could always escape, that was no problem. But where are you gonna go ...? Two guys escaped. They were captured by a troop of German boy scouts, who beat [them badly]. ... Brought 'em back on stretchers. That also discouraged us from further thoughts of escape."

The Home Front

At home, the war changed most people's lives. Americans used ration stamps to buy meat, sugar, and fuel, scrambled for shelter during air-raid warnings, and collected mountains of scrap for the making of bombs and equipment. Mike Royko, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist, grew up in Chicago in the 1940s. He remembers some of the changes war brought to his neighborhood and to the U.S. in general.

"Suddenly you had a flagpole. And a marker. Names went on the marker, guys from the neighborhood who were killed. Our neighborhood was decimated [destroyed]. There were only kids, older guys, and women....

"There was the constant idea that you had to be doing something to help. ... We were all supposed to save fat--bacon grease and chicken fat. We believed that it would be used to make nitroglycerin [for bombs].

"We'd listen to the radio every night. My father would turn it on to find out what was happening. ... The world was very simple. I saw Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo: Those were the villains. We were the good guys."

Rosie the Riveter 

During the war, more than 6 million women across the U.S. toiled in factories. They built bombs and jeeps and stitched boots and uniforms. They even welded fighter planes. Many worked outside their homes for the first time.

Everyone called these female pioneers "Rosie the Riveter," after a famous recruiting poster. Eighteen-year-old Peggy Terry worked in a munitions (bomb) factory.

"The first work I had ... was at a shell-loading plant in Viola, Kentucky.

... I pulled a lot of gadgets on a machine. The shell slid under, and powder went into it. Another lever you pulled tamped [packed] it down. Then it moved on a conveyor belt to another building where the detonator [trigger] was dropped in. You did this over and over....

My mother, my sister, and [I] worked there. Each of us worked a different shift because we had little ones at home. We made the fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week. To us it was an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing."

"The Good War"

In May 1945, Allied forces captured Berlin. The German Army surrendered, and the Allies won the war in Europe. Three months later, in August 1945, U.S. planes dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon thereafter, Japan surrendered. The war was over.

World War II, which involved more than 50 nations, cost more than a trillion dollars. It killed more people and caused more changes around the globe than any other war in history. The conflict led to the decline in power of Western Europe and the rise of the Soviet Union--and it ushered in the nuclear age.

Yet for most people, the war was a righteous cause and necessary for our survival.

"It was an act of such faith," says Paul Edwards, a Red Cross worker during the war. "It's a war I still would go to."

Source: "The Good War": An Oral History of World War Two, by Studs Terkel (Pantheon Books, 1984).

Web For eyewitness accounts of Pearl Harbor and other ww II attacks: www.ibiscom.com/pearl.htm