Transcription
♪♪ is brought to you by (Aircraft noise) She's one of America's longest serving and most distinguished fighting ships, sailing through war and peace for some 47 years. Now she's in retirement as a floating museum here on San Diego's waterfront. Welcome aboard the U.S.S. Midway. I'm Richard Yniguez. You may recognize me from roles I've played in movies and on TV. But the role I'm most proud of is my service on-board a U-S Navy aircraft carrier "Yorktown" during the Vietnam War. I'm also the proud son of Navy veteran Rudy Yniguez and Army veteran Santiaga Carrillo.
My parents, along with thousands of other Mexican-Americans, answered this country's call during World War II. These were men often neglected in pre-war America, men who helped save this country and, in many ways, found a better life in post-war America. This is their story, a story of dedication, sacrifice, patriotism and valor. Valentia: Mexican Americans in World War Two. ♪ (Church Bells)
I was coming out of church, this church here, when I heard about it. And it didn't actually sink in! Being farm boys, we just.... where the heck is Pearl Harbor? (Battle Sounds) My mother thought I was too young. My father said, "He's 18, he's a citizen, it's his duty." And I never thought otherwise that I wouldn't go or I shouldn't go.
They were relegated to Mexican only neighborhoods, schools, theatres, and churches. Yet hundreds of thousands of Mexican-Americans signed up to serve in World War II. If you look at the statistics, you would have to conclude that 375 to half a million estimate out of 2.569 million population is extraordinary, and remember that you also have Mexican-American women serving in the armed forces as well as Mexican nationals. I had friends from Connecticut, Arkansas, California, Arizona, just all over the states. That really felt like I belonged. I belonged to this family.
Families with names like Correa and Ramirez sent all their sons and even their daughters to join the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, the Air Corps or do their part here on the home front, giving so much, even their lives, for this country. For many, the armed forces turned out to be a great equalizer. And as you will see, gave returning veterans the courage off the battlefield to fight for equal opportunity. ♪
I was the only officer. I was the only pilot in the whole group who was Mexican-American. The whole group consisted of four squadrons, 64 airplanes, (and) 64 crews. After more than sixty years, Gilbert Duran Orrantia still fits into his flight jacket. When World War II broke out, he was an Arizona college student training to be a teacher. But he dropped out to join the Army Air Corps, now called the Air Force. I just went in, because I thought that was the best thing for me and for the Army. They needed people who had two years of college, and I needed to be in some place that could challenge me rather than carry a rifle, say, across Germany or wherever.
The young cadet flew a twin-engine bomber. It was noisy, but the very first mission I went on, they blew off a wingtip, and I thought, is this thing going to get back? Well, it did great! (Airplane Noise) While discrimination in the armed forces was uncommon, it reared its ugly head on occasion, like the time Lieutenant Orrantia was asked to work with a young man named Ramirez. So he reported to me and he became my radio gunner, because the other pilots didn't want him. They didn't want him because he was Hispanic, and Hispanics were not supposed to be that intelligent. Well, and the same thing happened with my crew chief. No one would take him because his name was Torres, and he was the best crew chief we had.
Another Air Corps volunteer, Joe Hernandez from San Antonio, landed in a job, not for the faint of heart, as a turret-gunner, flying bombing missions over Germany. Another really bad experience happened to me on Friday the 13th. One of our airplanes came up right in front of us, and the prop wash, you know, the propeller flipped us over. We fell down about 5,000 feet. We were at about 20,000 at that time, and (we) went down to about 14-15,000 when finally the plane ....the pilot and the co-pilot, pulled it out.
As part of the famed 82nd Airborne Division, Daniel Ramirez worked on board C-47s, planes that towed gliders across the English Channel during the harrowing D-Day invasion. They had 35 paratroopers in one of those gliders, and some of those guys never got out. They went in and shot them even before they hit the ground. D-Day, June 6, 1944 marked the Allied invasion of Europe, and John D. Luna from Ceres, California was there. Well, when I first went in, that was bad. That was very bad. I saw my buddies fall to the side of me. I tried to help them. They had blood all over. I just couldn't help that. The seas were real heavy, and some of our tanks just went to the bottom and didn't come up. But we managed to make it to shore, and it was real crowded. We couldn't get out. We were closed in for several weeks, and we were bombarded day and night. And people were dying all around me. And all I did was pray and fall to the ground. That's all, and it wasn't my turn.
I wanted to pay tribute to the different divisions that had fought throughout America's Wars. Ernesto Pedregon Martinez is an artist who honors the armed forces on canvas. During World War II, his unit liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen. We were struggling to tear down the gate, and from far away in the barracks, we started seeing, like, a little black cloud moving. And we almost opened up on them, you know, because we thought they were soldiers. And as they came close, it start getting clear that they were people. And we thought it was an insane asylum, because a lot of them were almost completely nude. Eventually, I think we liberated about five thousand prisoners alive.
How did these young Mexican-American soldiers, many of whom had never been but a few miles from home, deal with the carnage, the danger, the loneliness? Every night that we were in our camp or in our foxhole, I always said my rosary. Faith and friendship: two pillars of strength among G-I's like Joe Arambula from San Antonio. I said my rosary simply because I asked God to watch over me, and secondly, it kept me awake. Awake in the foxholes, he shared with Amos, his buddy from Missouri. He's a fine man, just like a brother to me. Joe had already lost two of his brothers in battle. Then Amos died when the truck he and Joe were riding in rolled over. His widow wrote to me after he got killed, and I took it pretty hard because he was ....we looked after each other. Even as the truck rolled over, he grabbed me. He grabbed me. Then after the first roll, I got knocked out. I don't even remember, but that's where he got killed. (War sounds)
It was rough. Well, the LST I was on. It was number 13. And to this day I'll always believe that thirteen is a bad number, because it seemed like we never missed a storm out in the Pacific. What was so scary when we first went aboard the U.S.S. Saranac, our Captain's name was John J. Cross, and the first thing he told us, "If you boys are afraid to die, you don't belong on this ship." As North Manila is cleaned up, artillery opens on South Manila across the river.
In the Pacific, G-Is encountered World War II's fiercest and deadliest battles. An elite fighting force called the Bushmasters rose to the occasion. We came up with the name Bushmaster in Panama. They killed great big snakes that were called the Bushmaster snake, and that's how we got our name. The Bushmasters were made up largely of Mexican-American men recruited from the Arizona National Guard. They trained in the jungles of Panama and New Guinea in preparation for action in the South Pacific. General Douglas MacArthur called them the greatest fighting combat team ever deployed for battle.
Memories of wartime emerge still fresh and raw after so many years. My father was an 18-year-old from Sacramento when he went into the Navy ....to Iwo Jima and Guam. Total, I made about five invasions. Getting sailors back in from the island into the ships, you're lost out there. You haven't eaten. Dark, wet, you can't find your ship, because there's thousands out there. Small ones, big ones, just bombarding that place day and night. Thousands of people just floating in the water. That's hard to take. I was thirty-five days in the front. As a front-line doctor with the little that I had, to try and save some lives as best I could.
Antonio Moreno from Austin, Texas served as a medic, tending to injured Marines at Iwo Jima. I think it was the fifth day that we landed. We saw the flag, first flag on Mount Suribachi. It was a crude flag that was planted there with a pipe that they found there with a small flag hanging up. Well, we were really happy. We thought it was going to be over soon! that's what they told us, that it was going to be no problem to take that island, but low and behold it got rougher and rougher.
Toward the end of the war on the island of Mindanao, American soldiers were targets for snipers. But Julian Gonzalez from San Antonio was lucky. He found help from Filipino police, because he could speak Spanish. The commanding officer spoke Spanish, and I spoke Spanish. And we got pretty....we became friends, and then I told him about our situation. And first thing he did was he said, "Well, you don't have to worry about it." He posted a guard, a twenty-four hour guard, there to protect us.
Other soldiers were not so lucky. They perished in battle from disease or were taken prisoner, like a young soldier named Luz Cisneros. He, of course, went into a POW camp, and ultimately he perished in a Japanese POW camp from pneumonia in 1943, but surrounded by his comrades and supported by them. His legacy lives on at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. Building 1013, which is a barracks for the Third Battalion 6th Defense Artillery, is a training barracks for advanced individual trainees. It's named Cisneros Barracks in recognition of Private Cisneros's contribution to World War II. ♪
Dawn to dusk and back to dawn again - three eight-hour shifts in one day. So much can be done in a day if Americans keep their sleeves rolled up. ♪ Not only men were called to roll up their sleeves in war time, but women, mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters, their work largely confined to the home front, in defense factories, and civil defense. Henrietta Lopez Rivas lived near a strategic air base: Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. She spoke both English and Spanish (and) was snapped up by the Civil Defense corps. They asked, "How many languages do you speak? Do you speak fluently, and do you read and write, and so on." And I said, "Of course I do." So the next thing I knew I was called to be an interpreter.
Like many young Mexican-American women, Henrietta didn't stop there. She displayed a certain mechanical acumen that earned her a good-paying job at the local air base. They sent me to school. I think it was over three months, and I qualified for instrument repair, which is very delicate, you know. You have to work with microscopes and tiny, tiny screws. ♪
I remember the victory gardens we used to have, and I remember the rationing of the food, sugar, meat and gasoline. In World War II, everyone pulled together with a sense of pride and shared sacrifice. People who had never picked up a shovel began growing some of their own food in victory gardens. They sold war bonds to raise money for military operations. Even children did their part. Little Rosa Ramirez Guerrero, who says she was born dancing, entertained soldiers in El Paso, Texas. We were like the Mexican American Bob Hope show. We would bring up the morale of our troops. El Paso and Fort Bliss had the largest military base in the world here in the Second World War. People don't remember that, but I do. And I remember all the soldiers coming downtown, and all you could see is khaki-khaki. And on Saturday nights, this big bus, an army-colored bus, would pick us up, and it was a thrill for us to go dance for them. Here she is, selling poppies....
Mothers and wives of servicemen did the lion's share of boosting troop morale. In Tucson and Phoenix, Arizona, La Asociacion Hispano-Americana de Madres y Esposas published a newsletter called Chisme or Chatter that kept GI's up to date on news from home. And they sold bonds - lots of them. They raised over a million dollars in war bonds. This was in Tucson. And this is $1 million dollars in the 1940's. That's a lot of money for the war effort. Local churches stepped up to the plate - the collection plate - raising money for the troops and holding prayer vigils for their safe return.
In Sacramento, California, a mother from Mexico named Enriqueta Andazola, with several sons and a son-in-law in uniform, recruited women to support servicemen from the central valley. She started an organization called The Mexican War Mothers. They tended to wounded soldiers in local hospitals, sent care packages overseas, and gave visiting GI's a welcome taste of home. I remember going with my mother and my grandmother to the USO here in Sacramento. And they would actually cook Mexican meals there at the USO so the men could have good Mexican food. But the greatest legacy of the Mexican War Mothers is this: a silent sentinel modeled after a soldier, Diana's Uncle Joe, standing guard near the capitol in downtown Sacramento. The statue really does honor the boys that died, the Mexican soldiers that died. That's really the significance of the statue. To honor the Mexican young men that died in the Second World War. ♪
"Welcome home! Well done." More than sixty decades have passed since World War Two ended and soldiers returned home. But the bonds forged by these bands of brothers have been impossible to break. In dwindling numbers, they gather at reunions, dusting off their memories and mementoes: ♪TAPS♪ They faithfully attend events at American Legion Post 41 in Phoenix, established by Mexican-Americans after the war. , "Aim, fire! Aim, fire!" The combat, the hardships, the ultimate sacrifice made by these men and women were not in vain. Veterans took advantage of the GI Bill to advance their educations. They eliminated the so-called "poll tax" collected at the voting booth. "If you didn't pay the poll tax, you didn't vote. And we had a big campaign on the poll tax and it helped elect the first Hispanic mayor of El Paso, Raymond Tellez."
Emboldened by their brothers-in-arms, Mexican Americans continued to fight for equality in jobs, housing, and education. Near Houston, Mexican-American educators developed a program to teach English to non-English speaking children; it became the model for "Head Start". The American GI Forum, the "Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund" and the "League of United Latin-American Citizens" - all successfully promoted civil rights and equal opportunity. "No more Mexican theatres, no more separate YMCAs, no more separate sections in the church. No Mexican section, Anglo section in the church." "World War II and after their service, they really did belong and they had that self-confidence."
Dr. Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez is one of seven children of defense worker Henrietta Lopez Rivas and Ramon Martin Rivas, who was stationed on Alaska's Aleutian Islands. "The biggest legacy of that was that my parents taught us to stand up for ourselves and to say that something's not right. To not be afraid to say that this isn't right. And, uh, I think that's the biggest part. I think that comes out of World War II because that's the effect that WWII had on this generation of Latinos." Dr. Rivas-Rodriguez spearheads the effort to ensure that the contributions of Mexican-Americans will not be forgotten. She and her staff at the University of Texas at Austin have interviewed hundreds of World War II veterans-with key parts of their oral histories published in this book. We have this fantastic photo of these five brothers around their little mother on the couch and all of them in their uniform. And I think that's been the amazing thing...is just to realize that...um...you know, these families gave so much and did so much and put up with so much! And came out all the better for it."
"It's the adventure of your life, good or bad..." Pete Dimas is named for his father, a World War Two veteran who spent time in a German POW camp. His dad's stories inspired Pete to produce his own documentary about Post 41. "I fell and finally I was looking for my gun, because." "When I stepped on the mine, it blew both my legs..." Silvestre Herrera is one of a (dozen) Latino soldiers awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II. Their heroism recognized in the larger community thanks to Richard Martinez with the GI Forum. He travels the country with photos and documents celebrating all Latino Medal of Honor recipients. "I have done that for quite awhile now and I sit back and I watch and I see people take out their handkerchiefs and, and...especially veterans...they read the citation and they say, 'How could this guy do that? Risk his life for his friends?'" "And it's something that we do a lot of, out of love for not only our friends, fellow veterans, but for our country."
"World War II is a good example of this contribution-the sacrifices that have been made, the struggle that families encountered and dealt with, and the struggles that they overcame in spite of the difficulties of racism and segregation. Beyond that is the larger story of 'Americanism'. Americans are all of us, and Mexican-Americans are also Americans, and I think sometimes that is something that is forgotten." "Let me get this straight. I'm an American. I'm proud of it and by the grace of God a Texan from San Elizario, so I don't listen to that garbage. It doesn't affect me; it doesn't bother me because I am an American. We earned it!" "America the Beautiful" in the background.
Now, at last, veterans and their fallen comrades are being honored for all they've given and continue to give to all of us. "Because of them our lives are free. Because of them our nation lives..." A nation's gratitude expressed in both public and private ways... across the generations: "This is a little essay that my little grandson, Michael Thomas Murphy wrote." "My grandpa is a proud American who served his country bravely." "He is an American hero because he was in World War II as an Air Force pilot. He was one of the only Mexican American pilots in the war."
"this love of this nation that didn't love them for so long is just amazing to me. It's just amazing... So, I know. I'm getting all upset. But you know, it's true." ♪ "The fathers are proud of what their kids did. My dad was... he was a man. He thanked me. He thanked me for what I had done. Imagine him thanking me?" My parents were typical of that generation. They returned from the war, quietly got on with their lives working and raising families, asking only for equal treatment in return. For me, as a Mexican-American, I know that without my parents's service and the sacrifices of all the other Mexican-Americans during World War II, my life and, yes, your life, would not be what it is today. Thanks for watching. I'm Richard Yniguez. To find out more about Mexican-Americans and World War II, visit our Web site. ♪