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MARK HEISTAD: Where were you on that day in December 1941? Most Americans don't have an answer for that. Most of us are too young. But if you're much older than 45, you probably remember, distinctly, where you were, what you were doing, when the news came.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: It's going to sound real funny, but I was rebuilding an engine on a 1934 Ford V8 Roadster.

MARK HEISTAD: Jack Aufderheide was a young man of 25.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: I had the engine apart, and I had four new pistons in one side, I was just installing. And then my dad came down and said, they bombed Pearl Harbor, so the other four never got fixed. [LAUGHS]

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: Everybody was excited. The radios, and-- it was just pandemonium. Everywhere people calling each other, your in-laws, and relatives, and things like that, "Did you hear what happened?" It was just incomprehensible.

SPEAKER: I was listening to the radio, music or something, and my wife was in the kitchen, and all at once, "We interrupt this music to say that Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japs." I went out to the kitchen, and I said to my wife-- I says, well, that son of a bitch has finally got his way. That's what he wanted. You could tell he was-- Roosevelt was trying to get us in.

RICHARD ARBUS: Coming out of church, somebody came by and said, Pearl Harbor. What? Pearl Harbor? Well, the Japs attacked it, Pearl Harbor. That's how we found out about it. At the time, I don't think that it even registered.

MARK HEISTAD: But if a fairly young Richard Arbus didn't immediately grasp the meaning of that day's news, the implications were crystal clear to those like Lloyd Marti, who were already in uniform.

LLOYD MARTI: I was inducted on the 3rd of December. I was home on my first furlough on the day the war started. And of course, they called us all back immediately, by radio. I tell you, I got kind of a sinking feeling, and that lasted for four years, until I was out. [LAUGHS]

MARK HEISTAD: And for Lester Domeier, the news of Pearl Harbor had particular meaning. Just 10 days before the attack, the navy cruiser, USS Boise, on which he was serving, had left Pearl Harbor for the Philippines. Domeier says it's hard for him not to think about what it might have been like if he'd been in the harbor when the planes appeared.

LESTER DOMEIER: We all knew what we do on a Sunday morning. And there, in Pearl Harbor, everybody-- not everybody is sleeping, but they come back from Liberty. I think Liberty expired at 12 o'clock at night or 1:00 in the morning. And then you have your Sunday procedure.

And all of a sudden comes the attack, it's confusion. And you have no ammunition on the top deck, for your anti-aircraft. You've got none. And that's all locked up in the magazine. And the captain of the ship, or the gunnery officer is-- the captain is the custodian of the keys.

And by the time they get organized, the attack was over. Humph! They were sitting ducks, that's what happened. Nothing prepared. Yeah, when 300 or 400 planes come at you-- so they had no chance.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: Yesterday, December 7, 1941-- a date which will live in infamy-- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces.

I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

[END PLAYBACK]

MARK HEISTAD: For many Americans, it wasn't until the attack on Pearl Harbor, and President Roosevelt's address to the nation the following day, that this war became a reality. Actually, of course, the fighting had been going on for some time.

In Asia, Japan had unleashed its army in China in 1937. In Europe, war had begun in the fall of 1939. But up until the attack on Pearl, it had been someone else's war. The fighting was going on somewhere over there.

That was probably less true in New Ulm, though. People there had deep roots in Europe. In Germany, many had been born there. Others were just a generation removed. Contacts with family and friends in the old country were frequent. And the people of New Ulm took their German heritage seriously. Joyce Aufderheide.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: In those days, downtown, people in the stores and everywhere spoke German. It was their native language. English was secondary. In fact, they thought in German.

MARK HEISTAD: During the First World War, the German heritage of New Ulm had caused serious problems for the people of this community. Back then, there was something called the Minnesota Commission on Public Safety. It was a special wartime executive council designed to make sure that the state ran smoothly during wartime.

The council took upon itself to root out any disloyal elements in the state. They unleashed the full fury of the state against New Ulm, going so far as to replace the mayor, whom they considered to be of questionable loyalty.

The event that precipitated that move was a massive anti-conscription rally, to which, perhaps, 10,000 had attended. Many interpreted the rally as anti-American, pro-German. And though there was probably some of that, it was basically an anti-draft rally. Don Steinbach.

DON STEINBACH: A lot of these Germans here came over to America to get away from the draft over there. Before the First World War, the German nation over there was really militaristic. They all had to go in the army when they were young, and that, see. And that's why a lot of people came over here, to get away from that.

MARK HEISTAD: New Ulm, many people will tell you, got a black eye from its World War I experience. And as the Second World War broke out, there were still some lingering questions about just how people there felt about their country.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: I know that the very fact that Jack was German, a full-blooded German, and had the background he had, that when he did enlist, the FBI came, and they investigated him all over town.

They went to, one, the courthouse, the police station, every place, to make sure that he was not-- that he was on the up-and-up, that he really wanted to serve his country, and that he was more American than he was German. Because there was a lot of questions about things like that.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: I'll tell you how bad it was. We were manufacturing tile, and one cement company refused to ship us cement because this is a German community. Personally-- I don't know-- I think they used it for an excuse because there was a shortage of cement. But they refused to ship cement to us because we were from a German community.

MARK HEISTAD: For the younger German-Americans, like the Aufderheides, there was no doubt where their loyalties lie. They and their parents were born here. They were definitely Americans first. But for some of the older ones, America's entry into the Second World War was not nearly so easy to reconcile. Leona Hesse's mother-in-law was a first-generation immigrant.

LEONA HESSE: Well, it makes a big difference whether-- you know, you had your ties over in Germany. Because the older folks who left relatives over there would feel entirely different than we who were born in this country. And our own parents were born here.

But his mother left 13 brothers and sisters over in the old country, so naturally, her feelings would be entirely different than ours. And she worried about her nieces and nephews over there, and that her sons were over there, probably shooting down their own cousins. And that's understandable.

MARK HEISTAD: By the time of Pearl Harbor, Hesse's husband, Richard, was already in an army uniform. He'd been drafted earlier that year, despite a bad leg. Hesse had put up quite a stink about that.

And though she wasn't able to change the local draft board's mind about taking him, she so impressed the board that they offered her a job. It wasn't a pleasant way to make a living during those years, but she did need the work.

LEONA HESSE: I saw my own-- you know, my brothers were drafted while I was there, my brother-in-law. It's tough, but there was nothing you can do about it. It was just their numbers came up, and they had to go. But there were-- I think there were 40 of them that left that time too. There were 40 when he left.

MARK HEISTAD: How was that? When you'd have 40 young men going off, and I suspect 40 families there--

LEONA HESSE: All around the bus, seeing them off, and trying to-- well, I can remember when he went. You're all standing there, and holding your hand out, trying to get the last handshake, and the tears, and-- it's rough.

And like I say, working with drafting people all the time and not being able to really do anything to help people, you just-- if they were certified 1-A, that was it. The next group that went-- it went by numbers. So you just felt you had to do your duty.

MARK HEISTAD: Though nowhere near as controversial as during the Vietnam War, the World War II draft did raise a few eyebrows. After all, the local draft boards were deciding who would and would not be putting their lives on the line. And to this day in New Ulm, there is talk about who should and shouldn't have gone. Joyce Aufderheide.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: There were young men-- they weren't like the draft dodgers of the Vietnam War, where they all ran to Canada. In World War II, it was different. They'd get their doctor to say they had a bad back, especially if their old man was a good friend of the doctor's.

Or they'd get a letter of need that they were needed for something, or some of them developed bad legs, and all these little things. And do you know that those young men were never really well-thought-of, because they had pulled strings to get out of it.

And in a town as small as this, you know-- I suppose they could get away with it in the Twin Cities but not here, not in a small town like this. You knew who had a bad back, and didn't have one, and all of a sudden got one.

MARK HEISTAD: Again, Leona Hesse.

LEONA HESSE: You know, sometimes, it didn't seem quite fair. But they were a bunch of fair men. They tried to do the right thing, but-- you know, people didn't always understand the reasons behind why people were rejected, and so they took a lot of heat. And they really could become nasty about it.

MARK HEISTAD: Of course, many young men in the New Ulm area were deferred from the draft. They were engaged in vital industries, farming, or working at the nearby canning plant. Jack Aufderheide was deferred because his family brickyard made drainage tile that was important to agriculture. Figuring he'd probably get drafted later on anyway, he decided to enlist in the Air Force.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: I can't say I had a guilty feeling I was sitting home, but I just had a feeling that I should do my part. I don't know. There were a lot of draft dodgers, but I didn't want to be one, I can tell you. I had to argue with the draft board for a couple of months before they let me go.

MARK HEISTAD: Was that a tough decision at all, coming from this very German town to join the service and go into the war against Germany?

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: Oh, in World War II, there was no feeling here for Germans, none. Those SOBs started the war. I had the feeling if they do wipe, like, France, and England, and them, we'll be the next step. That was my feeling. That's one reason I thought, well, better to go over there.

MARK HEISTAD: Throughout those winter months, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, young men were leaving New Ulm by the busload. Nearly every week, another group was off, first to Fort Snelling, then on to training somewhere in the south. And in that fall, one of New Ulm's young men returned.

Lester Domeier came home that November on a short furlough, the first from New Ulm to come back after seeing battle. The month before, his ship, the USS Boise, had participated in the biggest naval battle of the war, an engagement with a Japanese fleet near Savo Island. Accounts of his story were front page news in New Ulm for several days running.

LESTER DOMEIER: In the afternoon, we were told they'd spotted a bunch of Japanese ships again, a task force, in fact, heading towards Guadalcanal. And we knew then, in the afternoon late, that we're going to engage them tonight. And everybody was very, very tense.

And I think we did meet them with the-- we had four cruisers. I think the Salt Lake City, Chicago-- they were heavy cruisers, Salt Lake, Chicago-- Boise, and I think our sister ship, the Helena was with us. And about midnight, we spotted them, and the action started.

And then we shot for around 27 minutes, and constant firing. And then they hit us viciously. And our ship was set afire. And then we had to get out of formation. And the rest of the ships took care of them.

MARK HEISTAD: In that battle, the Boise was credited with sinking six of the Japanese ships.

LESTER DOMEIER: See, we had the initial blow. It's just like you get in a fight with a guy, if you get 15 punches in before he fights back, he's bleeding. [LAUGHS] Our gun was knocked out. I was a first loader.

I was the guy that took the shells out of a ready-- not out of the ready box, from the-- and it was big. We had to lift them, 75 pounds. And I think I fired around-- oh, about 80 shells. That's a lot. And that's constant firing.

And when we were hit underneath-- the shell from the Japanese had exploded, and knocked off all our wiring, and blew up the deck, practically. And then we hand-rammed the shells into the chamber and shot mechanically, until they gave the word, cease fire. And then we-- that was it.

MARK HEISTAD: When you were taking such heavy fire yourself, did you feel that this was going to be it, and you were going to go down?

LESTER DOMEIER: You don't see anything. You see all fire from the blast of the guns. 15, 19 guns firing, that's all you hear is noise, noise, noise. And it knocks the cotton out of your ears. One blasted after another.

MARK HEISTAD: Later, other young men from New Ulm came home with a different story. They were members of a unit of combat engineers who had fought on an island called Attu, in the Aleutian chain, just off Alaska. Victor Braun was among them.

VICTOR BRAUN: It was the most dreary, godforsaken place that you could imagine. The Bering Sea is on the north side and the Pacific Ocean on the south. And those two warm and cold air masses constantly fought each other. And you had violent storms and fog continuously. You very seldom ever saw the sun.

MARK HEISTAD: The Japanese had dug in on Attu shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Braun's unit, backed by naval and air support, were ordered to retake the island. It was the only land battle of the war fought on US soil.

VICTOR BRAUN: It was mass confusion right away. You didn't know where the enemy was. It was mortar, mortar fire and sniper, which was really the-- what I thought was the worst, not knowing where it come from.

MARK HEISTAD: The Japanese held the high ground at Attu. They weren't about to relinquish it without a fight. After more than a week of on-again, off-again skirmishes, the Japanese launched a massive attack from their positions in the highlands.

VICTOR BRAUN: That was the scariest thing you ever could imagine. I forgot how many people there were in this last suicide breakthrough. It was several hundred. They knew that they couldn't do anything anymore.

And they went out about 3 o'clock in the morning, and broke through our lines, and tried to kill as many of us as they possibly could, and then committed suicide. There was just windrows of them. They just killed themselves. It was just, like, insane.

That night, some sniper had hit me on the side of the helmet. And it went right on through, and just creased my scalp a little, and right out again. And I couldn't hear anything for a long time after that.

So-- I don't know-- how lucky can you get. It was just a miracle. I never thought I might see Minnesota again. But it's a funny thing, how-- if luck is with you, what you can go through.

MARK HEISTAD: Victor Braun, survivor of the battle for Attu. But for the occasional soldier back on leave, or the semi-regular, but rarely newsy letters from overseas, news of the fighting was of a more generic variety, from the newspapers and, increasingly, from the radio.

It is telling that most people seem to have gotten the news of Pearl Harbor from their radio. Because from the beginning, it was radio that brought this war home, radio that helped America understand what was going on over there and why. There was William Shirer in Berlin, Eric Sevareid, Charles Collingwood, and George Hicks, and of course, Edward R. Murrow in London.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

EDWARD R. MURROW: I'm standing on a rooftop, looking out over London. At the moment, everything is quiet. For reasons of national as well as personal security, I am unable to tell you the exact location from which I'm speaking.

Off to my left, far away in the distance, I can see just that faint, red, angry snap of anti-aircraft bursts against the steel blue sky. But the guns are so far away that it's impossible to hear them from this location.

About five minutes ago, the guns in the immediate vicinity were working. I can look across, just at a building not far away, and see something that looks like a splash of white paint down the side. And I know from daylight observation that about a quarter of that building has disappeared, hit by a bomb the other night.

[END PLAYBACK]

MARK HEISTAD: Joyce Aufderheide.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: There was a radio announcer by the name of H. V. Kaltenborn, that my father wouldn't have missed his program for anything. And he was a very historical person. And he was very good at keeping you abreast of what was going on. And it was horrifying.

I could tell you Kaltenborn's voice if I-- and Edward R. Murrow, I'm sure, because we always had it on. It's just that you didn't want to miss anything. You wanted to know where they were, how were we doing, were we going to lick that guy or weren't we. And you lived for the radio.

MARK HEISTAD: War is an uncertain time. Who knows where one's husband, father, son, or brother will be stationed? What kind of action he'll see? Whether or not he'll come back? And for many Air Force wives like Joyce Aufderheide, that uncertainty began long before her husband went overseas.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: You just didn't know whether you were going to come back one day or the next. Well, it was that way even in training. There were many, many young fellows killed right here in learning how to fly, learning how to do this or that.

And the wives would never know-- when they see the captain walk up to the house you were staying in, you wondered which wife was going to get it. And sure enough, it'd be one of us. I was very fortunate.

It was a gradual process of programming you into this. By the time your husband did get ready to go overseas, you had been really programmed, from leaving home, living in one room, fear of the flying, learning about the discipline in the Air Force. He's not coming in on Saturday night. You can't expect to see him when you want to see him. It was a discipline, really.

MARK HEISTAD: All during those years of training, Aufderheide had tagged along from air base to air base as her husband's flight instruction continued. Then in 1944, new orders came. They didn't list the next base. Both knew what that meant, Jack was headed overseas.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: It was a suicide mission. They were going to go through that Brenner Pass in Austria. And they told them that most of them would not get back alive, and so they knew that.

I don't know how men can take that. I don't-- to this day I don't know how they can calmly then go get in that plane and go, knowing that they're going to be up against such terrible odds.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: You just did things automatically. We'd get up at 3 o'clock in the morning, go in a briefing, eat some breakfast, get the airplanes ready to go, and we'd take off. A lot of the times, we didn't get home until 8, 9 o'clock at night.

Then we'd have a debriefing. You know, what did you see? What did you shoot? Where was this or that? Then we'd get some supper, take a shower, go to bed at 3 o'clock. Sir, sir, you're flying. You finally got to be a zombie.

I know in briefing, a lot of the times, in the morning, I'd stand in the corner and sleep, until my co-pilot, my navigator, or somebody, oh, you guys, it's your turn. And I'd sleep. [LAUGHS]

MARK HEISTAD: Aufderheide was flying B-24s over Italy. He was a command pilot. He had a crew of 10.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: All the missions we flew were into either the Brenner Pass or into their oil refineries or storage-- oil storage. And of course, we just-- boy, we had a lot of planes lost. It was pretty rough. I think I had-- I had one what they would call a milk run. We had to hit Marseille, France.

And that was like flying a practice mission. We went out there, and we got over there, and there was nobody there to-- no guns, no airplanes, and we dropped our bombs and came home. But all the rest of them-- the worst, of course, was flak. There wasn't anything you could do about it.

We'd hit Vienna, which had one of the only oil refineries left at that time. And when we came in there, they just put up a wall. They didn't shoot at you. They put up a solid black wall of flak. And to hit the bombing-- on a bombing run, to hit the target, you had to fly through that.

We always had fighter protection along. And we'd get up to this, and all the ones, they'd say, bye-bye, boys, we'll pick you up on the other side. And of course, we had to go through it. And then what was left, they'd pick up and take back.

When we went in on a bomb run, you'd see, maybe, a white one go off a couple of miles ahead of you, and then a red one would go off, maybe, over you. And by that, they'd figure out how high you were.

Then by the time we'd get there, they'd be ready for us. Of course, after a while, we got smart. We'd come in and just about the time we'd hit where the flak was, we'd either drop or raise a little bit.

And then we'd drop what they called chaff. See, their guns were fired by radar, by altitude, so we'd dropped chaff, which was the same thing as tinsel you hang on a Christmas tree. They said, Vienna, the streets in Vienna were two, three feet deep in that stuff. And that flickered up the radar. Sometimes they would shoot miles away from where we were.

MARK HEISTAD: But flak wasn't the only danger to a B-24 and its crew. Germany's aggressive research and development effort in military aviation had reaped considerable dividends for the Luftwaffe.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: They were building a rocket plane in the Munich-Riem area, in Munich. And Riem is right next to it. And they had a big airport there. They were building a rocket plane. And that darn thing-- we'd come over, and they'd take off, and they'd go right through our formation. And they'd take maybe five, six planes.

And they'd go so fast, our guns couldn't touch them. Then they'd turn over, and come back down again, and take four or five more. But it was so fast, it just went through us without-- there's no way you could get close to it.

Our airplanes couldn't even get close to catching up to it. Like the first time I ever saw a jet plane was theirs, the twin-engine jet plane. They ran away from us, [LAUGHS] and we couldn't-- it was just a puff, and they were gone.

MARK HEISTAD: I suppose you were involved in pretty much a cat and mouse game, with each side developing something. And then you had to react to it.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: That's just the way it was.

MARK HEISTAD: And then there'd be something else. And you'd say, holy cow, what's that?

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: But, see, the first time we saw a jet plane-- when we got back and we reported it, and it hadn't been seen before. Then what we did-- usually we flew-- when I was in the 51s, usually we flew a leader and-- ours was two together, see.

And when we see a jet plane-- they couldn't stay in the air at first, maybe 20 minutes, 30 minutes, maybe, that's all-- so we'd follow them until they'd land. Then one guy would go down and destroy the airplane, and the other guy would go after the pilot.

And then pretty soon, they had strips in the woods. And they'd land on these strips. And then we'd come down, and both sides of the woods would be nothing, but guns. And then they'd shoot us down.

So then we'd start carrying maybe 100-pounders and stuff on the 51. And instead of going through and destroying with the machine guns, we'd start dropping bombs on them. And then they'd get bigger guns. It was always, like you say, act, and counter, react. That's the way the whole thing went.

MARK HEISTAD: While Aufderheide was playing his deadly cat and mouse game in the skies over Italy and Austria, his wife was back home in New Ulm-- she and her infant child-- waiting, listening to the radio, marking time.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: We were all war wives, and we all played bridge, and-- it just kept you from thinking. You know, it was better than thinking. And we all had children, or were going to have children. We were all the same age. And we laughed a lot.

I mean, I drank enough Coca-Cola in those years. [LAUGHS] That was-- the only pop you had was Coca-Cola. Oh, and we might have had Orange Crush, I can't remember. But everybody drank Coke. And so we drank Coke and played bridge. And that dulled your senses. You didn't have to stop and think about it.

MARK HEISTAD: But then one day in the spring of 1944, the daily mail brought what Aufderheide had long feared might come, a telegram.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: My sister-in-law was at my house, and here comes the Western Union. And of course, I had been programmed for that one for a couple-- three years. And I couldn't open the telegram, my sister-in-law had to do that. And it said that he was missing in action.

Well, a couple of days later, then, here comes a letter from General Nathan Twining, his commanding general. And it said that they had interrogated the ones that did get back to the base, and they said that no one could have gotten out of Jack's plane alive.

And I can't remember the exact amount of time that elapsed through this thing, but then all of a sudden, I got a telegram from Switzerland. And then I got that one from Jack.

MARK HEISTAD: Jack's plane, it seems, had been shot down over the Brenner Pass. Fortunately though, he was able to get his crew out alive before losing control of the fatally wounded bomber. Most fortunate of all, they parachuted into neutral Switzerland, rather than into an area held by German troops.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: I heard always that if you got caught and were a German, then, of course, they took it out on you, because you were fighting your own brothers, and sisters, and cousins, and stuff. A lot of guys were beat. Oh, they had bayonet marks and stuff.

And they said that if you had a German name or from German descent, they gave it to them every day. Till it started getting towards the end of the war more, and they knew they were going to get the works, you know, they were going to be defeated-- they knew that-- then I guess, they started to act a little better.

MARK HEISTAD: Tell me about this camp in Switzerland.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: Well, the camp in Switzerland-- the place that we stayed was a little town called Adelboden. We stayed in an old abandoned hotel. It was nice, but no heat, and we didn't get much food. They didn't have much themselves, so.

We had-- well, Swiss soldiers were there guarding us. But we had our own commanding officer, and all this stuff. We had a regular camp. And we could walk out into the mountains all we wanted to.

MARK HEISTAD: Aufderheide's life in that internment camp, while certainly not pleasant, was in marked contrast to the experiences of other soldiers captured by the Germans. Herb Lobs was with an armored division that had followed the initial wave at Normandy a few days after D-Day.

In the summer of 1944, they were overrun by German units and taken to Stalag III-C, just east of Berlin. He is still reluctant to talk openly about what happened to him there.

HERB LOBS: Well, the camp was-- we had two tiers in there. One of them slept on the bottom, aside, and the next bunch slept on the top bunk. And they had straw, we slept on straw. It was all lice, and infected, and everything. And we didn't have much food.

MARK HEISTAD: How did you spend your days? That's a lot of time to fill.

HERB LOBS: We sat around, and walked around, and that's about all you could do.

MARK HEISTAD: Lobs was held in Stalag III-C for six months, until a Russian unit liberated the camp early in 1945. To get back home, though, the Americans were forced to walk to Warsaw, Poland, where they were able to find passage back to the States. Lobs still finds himself returning to that camp, though, remembering what happened there.

HERB LOBS: When I get busy, it's all right. But if I have to sit around and everything, I get uptight. With the retirement now, that makes it a little worse again.

MARK HEISTAD: You find yourself thinking back.

HERB LOBS: Yeah. When it happens, then I'll jump in the pickup, and drive around, and-- it gets my mind off everything again.

MARK HEISTAD: Lobs says it's gotten a bit better lately. He's just started getting together with other World War II POWs and a psychologist from the VA to work through it all, 40 years after his release.

There were others from New Ulm held prisoner during the war, many others who returned home with gruesome tales to tell, particularly those held in the Pacific by the Japanese. There was one though who didn't make it back.

He was Willibald Bianchi, a decorated hero who had been captured at Bataan. His unmarked POW ship had been sunk off the Philippines. Willibald Bianchi became New Ulm's most highly decorated soldier. The awards came posthumously.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

DOUGLAS MACARTHUR: Representing the President of the United States and the Congress, I am to have the honor this afternoon, as commanding officer of Fort Snelling, to present to Mrs. Carrie-- Ulm, mother of Captain Willibald C. Bianchi, the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity, above and beyond the call of duty, in action with the enemy on February 3, 1942, near Bagac, Province of Bataan, Philippine Islands.

SPEAKER: Speak into the microphone.

CARRIE BIANCHI: On behalf of my son, the state of Minnesota, and the city of New Ulm, I gratefully accept this Medal of Honor. A boy, a son is so close, so precious to a mother's heart, and to bring such rich returns is truly wonderful. I am proud.

SPEAKER: Wonderful. Beautiful.

[APPLAUSE]

[END PLAYBACK]

MARK HEISTAD: The fighting in the Philippines had gone badly for US forces in 1942. And in the end, US troops there were ordered to surrender. But Gordon Lang decided that surrender was not for him, so he headed into the jungles on the island of Leyte.

GORDON LANG: I had a little shack built up in the hills, a few miles inland from the seacoast. And I thought I'd live up there for the next two or three months until the war was over, but-- and I was going to live a life of peace, a relaxing-- enjoy everything until the war was over. It was, why should we fight a war, if you can have a nice, peaceful life?

MARK HEISTAD: But that life of peace was not to come for Lang. An informer told the Japanese that he was living on Leyte. A Japanese patrol attacked and destroyed his home. And so Lang, the only American on the island, decided to join the war after all, organizing some Filipino neighbors into a sizable guerrilla force.

GORDON LANG: See, the Japanese were spreading themselves very thin. They would not have one large garrison in the capital of any particular island. But they would put maybe a squad, or a platoon, whatever that would be, in their numbers, in all the little different towns, so they could control the whole island.

MARK HEISTAD: Lang began his guerrilla campaign by attacking Japanese patrols.

GORDON LANG: We picked a spot that had sort of a hill on the side of the road. And as the truck came by-- I don't know, there might have been about 20 in the truck. And there might have been maybe 40 or-- I'm not sure of the number of us, 30, 40, something like that.

So we were all on one side of the road, and just everybody let go at the same time when the truck came by. And we didn't kill them instantly, they shot back. And then after we ambushed this patrol, we-- we had a pretty good setup. We knew when they were coming, because they made patrols daily, and we wiped them out.

MARK HEISTAD: Lang spent the rest of the war hiding out from the Japanese, going from island to island under the protection of Filipino friends. He took a Filipino wife and they had a son. Most of those years, he was the only American in his area.

For Gordon Lang, this was a very different war. For him, this was personal. After all, it was after the Japanese attacked his home that he'd decided to join the war. And unlike most soldiers, Lang had some control over his destiny.

GORDON LANG: Well, I tell you what was enjoyable about it, I could make my own decisions. I could take my chances with my life and decide whether I wanted to engage the enemy or live another day.

And you didn't depend upon somebody else's foolish decisions with someone else's life. So I could decide for myself if I wanted to-- I took a lot of risks, I'll admit that. I did a lot of foolish things. But it was my decision.

MARK HEISTAD: Through it all, Lang's family back home in New Ulm knew nothing of this. The military authorities had presumed Lang was dead, and that's what his parents had been told. It wasn't until the summer of 1945, a full three years after he'd headed into the jungle, that Lang's parents learned that their son, their only child, had been alive all along.

For a brief time during 1942, some local news replaced the war news at the top of New Ulm's local newspaper. On June 1, the paper said, several dozen Nazi prisoners of war would arrive just outside New Ulm, to establish a prisoner of war camp. In all, perhaps as many as 250 would be interned in an old state park campsite.

New Ulm had been chosen for this camp because there was a severe manpower shortage there. Farmers in the surrounding area, and the Del Monte canning factory in nearby Sleepy Eye were both in serious need of help. The German prisoners would go a long way to solving the labor shortage. Richard Arbus supervised prisoners working at the Del Monte plant.

RICHARD ARBUS: I was in charge of about 22 of them, or 28 of them, in the cook room and canning room. We had people from-- ages from 16 to 55.

MARK HEISTAD: 16, that's an awfully young soldier.

RICHARD ARBUS: Those were the last ones that came in. And they told us that they were picked up off the streets at the last part of the war, had no training. They were put in uniforms, given guns, and put out to the front.

MARK HEISTAD: Arbus actually got to know his prisoner workers quite well during their stay in New Ulm. Break times were often filled with talk about the old country and about the war. It was a rather congenial atmosphere all in all. And though the prisoners were kept in a fenced camp, with armed guards keeping watch, no one seemed to think the Germans menacing in the least.

RICHARD ARBUS: The guards and the POWs got along real well. The guards would bring them in, and then you never knew what happened to them. The first couple of days, they'd be on the roof and all over the yard, and after a while, they disappeared.

But by the time the bus came, they'd be there. Or if they weren't, the POWs would go look for them, because they always told me, we can't go home without the guards. He says, we've got to have them. [LAUGHS]

MARK HEISTAD: Herbert Richter has vivid memories of that camp near New Ulm. He was held prisoner there.

HERBERT RICHTER: Six to eight of us, we worked in the camp. And about 75, they went out to the canning factory in Sleepy Eye. I worked in the kitchen first, in the German kitchen, washing dishes. And then they needed a cook over in the-- for the American guards, and I went over there.

MARK HEISTAD: Cooking for his captors, Richter had a chance to get to know many of New Ulm's residents. There was the man from the bakery, who came each day with fresh bread, and the ice man, who stopped by from time to time.

And of course, the butcher, whose shop in New Ulm, Richter visited several times a week to pick out fresh meat. Richter says he has fond memories of his years in that camp, particularly the Sunday afternoon band concerts.

HERBERT RICHTER: The band was from the German Air Force. They played in the camp, in front of the-- in the compound, where we was living in, we had a clubhouse. And then in front of the clubhouse, we had a big recreation area there. And that's where they was playing all the time. And then people from town, from New Ulm, they came to listen to us. They was singing in German, they was playing.

MARK HEISTAD: Richter isn't alone in his fond memories of the New Ulm prison camp. Many of the area's residents also speak highly of that experience. Carl Romberg and Orville Ramos were among the area's farmers who used the prisoners as harvest help.

CARL ROMBERG: It worked out real good.

ORVILLE RAMOS: See, we worked together on the farm. We were attached together--

CARL ROMBERG: We were neighbors on the farm.

ORVILLE RAMOS: --neighbors. So he went down with the truck, and picked them up. And then they'd come out, and they shocked for me, and then they shocked for you. There were 10 of them the first time. And after we started slashing, we got three of them for about a week.

MARK HEISTAD: These farmers didn't really seem to consider the prisoners much different from ordinary farm laborers. They paid them $0.60 an hour, which was to be held for them until their release. And they fed them, just as they always had their farm hands.

ORVILLE RAMOS: We gave them lunch. And we invited them in, and they sat down at the table, and ate with us.

SPEAKER: You had a regular dinner. You know how you do when you have thrashers, you have a good dinner, meat, and potatoes, and vegetables, and all that.

SPEAKER: And they thought they had had so much already, and then I brought out dessert.

SPEAKER: And they said, oh yay, oh yay, oh yay.

CARL ROMBERG: We wasn't really supposed to feed them, but they was awfully tickled to get it.

SPEAKER: Well, they were working all the time, we felt they needed it. If we wanted the work out of them, why, we had to feed them. They couldn't work on an empty stomach.

SPEAKER: Actually, you weren't even supposed to visit with them, but that seemed rather cruel.

MARK HEISTAD: Don Steinbach was in high school when the prisoners first arrived in New Ulm.

DON STEINBACH: To us, they should have looked different because they were Nazis or Germans, you know. But they were just people too, you see. They were just like home around here. They had it pretty well made. Even some of the girls used to visit them out there, from town.

MARK HEISTAD: But not everyone in New Ulm felt so friendly towards the German prisoners. Joyce Aufderheide wanted no part of them.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: They used to tell me about how the women from town would take pies out, and cakes, and slip them over the fence. And I really don't know if that's true or not. I certainly didn't.

I mean, because they made me angry. My husband was over there because their lord and master created this problem. And so I probably was, inside, very, very bitter about the whole thing.

MARK HEISTAD: Nevertheless, Aufderheide's father-in-law had contracted to have prisoners help out at his family brickyard. He simply needed the help. So Aufderheide saw quite a bit of the Germans, and she paints a very different picture of the prisoners.

JOYCE AUFDERHEIDE: And they were the most arrogant bunch of soldiers that I have ever seen. There was one that was called Joe, and he had to be the meanest looking thing I have ever seen. I'd hate to meet him in the dark at night.

Then there was a tall blonde. He'd have made a good one for the movies, blonde, steely, cold blue eyes, and just a grim set mouth. I was really quite afraid of him. And if he was around, I didn't linger.

MARK HEISTAD: But perhaps the strongest response to the presence of German prisoners in New Ulm came from Jack Aufderheide. He was more than a bit chagrined to return from an internment camp in Europe to find his former enemies working in the family business and enjoying, what seemed to him, a pretty high living.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: They were being treated like kings over here, and we just did nothing over there. In fact, I think it was only, maybe, two or three weeks after I got back-- I went to back to work right away. And in just a couple or three weeks, and I got rid of them.

I didn't want anything to do with them. I couldn't-- I just couldn't stomach that these guys-- you know, working. And they even took trucks right up town. And people take food out to them and stuff. That wasn't for me. Well, I actually resented the fact that they were there.

MARK HEISTAD: But New Ulm, generally, didn't seem to have much of a problem with having the POWs.

JACK AUFDERHEIDE: Well, there were some of them, like the older people, that-- I could name some names. I won't, but I mean, the older ones, of course, they thought they were being mistreated, and they felt sorry for them, and this kind of thing. I guess, there were even some women who'd go out there. But they had it pretty nice, living pretty high off the hog.

MARK HEISTAD: For his part, Herbert Richter has mostly good memories of his imprisonment in the New Ulm area. He says he can't help but feel a bit nostalgic every time he catches a rerun of Hogan's Heroes on the TV. He says he would have signed a contract to stay on there, if only the authorities had allowed it.

HERBERT RICHTER: In the first place, if I had a choice, I would have never left. I wanted to stay here. But only doctors and lawyers, they could stay.

MARK HEISTAD: Herbert Richter was able to get back to this country after the war, though. And he's lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin, for most of the past 35 years. If there were some mixed emotions in New Ulm about the prisoners of war held there, reports soon began filtering back to the city that were even more troubling.

As Allied forces converged on Berlin, they uncovered the death camps, Dachau, Buchenwald, and the others. Clarence Pitko was a member of one of the two units that liberated Dachau.

CLARENCE PITKO: I think the first thing we'd seen, when we got to the gates, was prisoners-- there was something like 30,000 prisoners that were still alive there. But in the compound itself, there was 45 boxcars of dead prisoners that were brought down from-- I believe it was the concentration camp at Buchenwald.

Because Buchenwald was overrun before Dachau, and they loaded up all the live prisoners at Buchenwald, and put them in this train, and shoved it into Dachau. And they just starved to death.

MARK HEISTAD: Did you-- you speak German, I'm assuming.

CLARENCE PITKO: Yes.

MARK HEISTAD: Did you get a chance to talk with any of the German civilians from around there at all?

CLARENCE PITKO: Well, those that I talked to, all of them claimed they didn't know what was going on there. Of course, none of us could buy that. I don't know how you can kill thousands of-- tens of thousands of people and not know what's going on right around you.

Along that point, I have relatives over there, that live very close to there. And they too swore that they didn't know what was going on at Dachau. But like I say, I just can't buy that.

MARK HEISTAD: Pitko wasn't the only soldier from New Ulm to come home with stories of the horror of the Nazi camps. Lloyd Marti saw a camp just outside Ohrdruf in France.

LLOYD MARTI: When we came in, there were about 20 Germans in the courtyard that were machine-gunned. And according to the people that were still-- there were still a few left alive, that managed to hide, but they were in such a bad shape that they could hardly walk.

And they said that these people couldn't walk. Because this was-- they were from the hospital part of it. And they just machine-gunned them right there. And you could see they were full of holes, and the blood was running all over the place. It was really gory.

Well, then we went out-- they took us out about-- oh, maybe, three or four city blocks, and there were ditches dug 10 feet deep. And there was a bunch of railroad rails there. And there were still corpses, half burned on the rails. They were burning them. They were digging them up and burning them.

I guess the order had come through to get rid of the evidence. Well, of course, it was only half done. But some of these ditches were two blocks long, and you'd still see a leg or an arm sticking out of the bottom of it.

Really-- oh, it was-- I was there quite a while because I took pictures. And the soldiers that would come in, that were used to seeing people dead, would just cry like babies when they'd see this.

MARK HEISTAD: You'd been ordered to this camp?

LLOYD MARTI: Yeah.

MARK HEISTAD: To see this camp?

LLOYD MARTI: Yeah. Everybody was supposed to go. In fact, for a week, they brought people in before they started to clean the place up. Well, we were all anxious to see it anyway, of course.

I think most of us had heard about these places, but we never quite believed it. And you just had to see it to believe it. You just can't imagine how anybody could do that, without actually seeing it yourself.

MARK HEISTAD: But if most Americans didn't actually see the camps, they were given a sense of the horror, a glimpse of the gruesome reality, when Edward R. Murrow, by far the most respected of the war correspondents, described what he'd seen at a place called Buchenwald.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

EDWARD R. MURROW: When I entered, men crowded around. They tried to lift me to their shoulders. They were too weak. Many of them could not get out of bed. I was told that this building had once stabled 80 horses. There were 1,200 men in it, five to a bunk. The stink was beyond all description.

I asked how many men had died in that building during the last month. They called the doctor. We inspected his records. There were only names in the little black book. Behind the names of those who had died, there was a cross. I counted them. They totaled 242, 242 out of 1,200 in one month.

As I walked down to the end of the barracks, there was applause from the men too weak to get out of bed. It sounded like the hand-clapping of babies, they were so weak. I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.

Dead men are plentiful in war, but the living dead, more than 20,000 of them in one camp. And the country roundabout was pleasing to the eyes. And the Germans were well-fed and well-dressed.

American trucks were rolling towards the rear, filled with prisoners. Soon they would be eating American rations, as much for a meal as the men at Buchenwald received in four days. If I have offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I am not in the least sorry.

[END PLAYBACK]

MARK HEISTAD: By the time of that broadcast, the fighting was over in Europe, the tide had turned in the Pacific, though, there were several months of fierce fighting and two atomic bombs still to come. It would be several more years before all the men would be back home safe.

In the end, reflecting on their experiences during those war years, the people we spoke with in New Ulm voiced a variety of feelings and memories. But there were two responses that kept recurring, we're glad it ended, we're lucky to have made it through.

SPEAKER: I know, I lost my hearing. I lost a lot of hair. I lost all this flying. You wore that darn helmet all the time, and stuff. I don't know, I just-- it happened, and I came back, and it's gone.

SPEAKER: I was 20 years old when I went in and 24 when I got out. So that was some of the best years, yes.

MARK HEISTAD: Were they good years?

SPEAKER: Well, I wouldn't want to go through it again, but, I guess, I wouldn't want to give up my experience either.

MARK HEISTAD: What did you get out of that experience?

SPEAKER: What did I get out of it? [LAUGHS] I think it made a man out of a boy, yes.

SPEAKER: Well, it set me back about 10 years. You know, two years before, you knew it was coming, and you didn't decide what you were going to do then. And then another four years-- another four years afterwards, you just fooled around. But you could figure, it's a bite of 6 to 10 years out of your life.

MARK HEISTAD: The other part of that, though, is you saw a lot of the world that people of my generation--

SPEAKER: I'd just as soon stayed home. [LAUGHS] No, I shouldn't say that. I enjoyed that part of it, really. I got to see an awfully lot of Europe. In fact, I've got an ambivalent attitude toward the whole thing.

I sometimes feel that it had to be-- having been in Europe, I just feel that it was something that wouldn't go away. Although I've read the Wedemeyer Reports, and he claims that the Germans never had any intention of going any farther than England.

MARK HEISTAD: It's quite a ways in itself.

SPEAKER: Oh, yeah, that's quite a ways in itself. I would hate to live in this world today with Hitler running France and England.

MARK HEISTAD: Yeah.

SPEAKER: I really would. Whether he'd have ever been able to hold it, that's questionable. Yeah. [CHUCKLES] I don't know. Anyway, that part of it always says, well, it's a good thing we went over there.

SPEAKER: We were so glad to get back. I don't know, we just-- it was just like a bad dream, or a nightmare, or something. It's hard to describe it. I think hardly a day has passed away that I didn't think about this experience.

It's something that you cannot block out of your mind. It just stays with you. You just can't wipe it out. I feel fortunate that I kept my sanity, and could come back here, and live a normal life again.