Transcript: Chapter 05

Narrator: When America went to war in 1917, young men from small towns all across the nation responded with patriotic fervor. Harry Truman was one of them. That spring Harry left the farm in the hands of his mother and sister and joined the army. And at long last, Bess agreed to marry him. But now Harry refused

"I don't think it would be right for me," he told her, "to ask you to tie yourself to a prospective cripple."

The Great War had already taken the lives of an entire generation of Europe's young men. One million men died at the Somme. Nearly another million more at Verdun. But for Harry, like other raw recruits, war still shimmered with romance. He later said that he was "stirred by the flame."

"I felt that I was Galahad after the Grail."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: There was no need for Truman to have ever gone to war. He was technically blind in one eye. His eyesight was so bad that he could never have gotten in at all but for the fact that he memorized the eye chart in advance of the examination. But he wanted to go. He was determined to go.

NARRATOR: Harry had never been to college, never been in a fight in his life, but he earned the rank of captain, was sent to France and given command of four rapid-fire guns and 194 men.

On the morning of July 11, 1918, Captain Harry Truman introduced himself to the notorious Battery D, a rowdy bunch, mostly Irish from Kansas City, some of the most insubordinate soldiers in the United States Army.

"Never," Harry said later, "have I felt so nervous."

MCKINLEY WOODEN, Battery D: We had been pretty tough bunch. We had got rid of three captains. But the first night he addressed the battery, he says, I didn't come over here to get along with you fellas. You're going to get along with me. I said to an Irishman, "What do you think of the new captain." He says "Ninety days, ninety days."

NARRATOR: "You could see," one of the men remembered, "that he was scared to death."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: World War I was the crucible for Truman. It was the formative experience of his life. It changed everything for him -- changed him changed his understanding of himself.

NARRATOR: At the end of August Captain Truman led his men into battle for the first time. Battery D opened fire on a company of German soldiers encamped four miles away. Before the Germans could return the fire, Truman ordered his men to take a new position, but they couldn't move without the horses to pull the cannons.

MCKINLEY WOODEN: Harry had given the first sergeant orders to have the horses up at a certain hour. But the first sergeant was thirty minutes late in getting up there. We'd have been away from there if he had'a. That's where the trouble started.

NARRATOR: It was dark and raining when the Germans opened fire. Battery D was trapped, its big guns mired in the mud. The men panicked -- many ran.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: And Truman is caught in the middle and he sees everybody taking off. And he stands there and he calls them every name he can think of and he knew a lot of names.

NARRATOR: You "no good Irish sons of bitches" he hollered and ordered his soldiers to re-group. The men, stunned by his rage, inspired by his courage, did as they were told. Through the dark and rain, Truman marched them out of danger.

"Dear Bess, The men think I am not much afraid of shells. But they don't know I was too scared to run ..."

Battery D had escaped without a single casualty.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: And they thereafter saw him differently. Because he had stood his ground. And after a while they began to realize that this fellow with the eyeglasses and the bank clerk look about him was in fact a man of real determination.

NARRATOR: "Captain Harry," the men decided, was good luck. "We have a captain," one soldier wrote his father, "who cannot be beat."

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: He was about as unheroic in his eyeglasses as one could be. But there is a photograph of him that is on his I.D. card. And he has his glasses off and you look at that photograph and you see the strength. You see what a rugged character he is. Harry Vaughan once said that, "if you want to understand Harry Truman you have to understand that he is one tough son of a bitch of a man." And if you look at that picture, you can see the iron. You can see what his men must have recognized and understood.

NARRATOR: At night, Harry would sit and stare at a photograph he brought with him to Europe.

"Dear Bess, I have two breast pockets in my blouse. Naturally you can guess whose picture stays in the left hand one... It has never left me ... nor will it ever. I have looked at it many, many times and imagined that you were there in spirit, as I knew you were, and it helped a lot ... I hope you have a most happy birthday and that you will never see another one without me to help celebrate and then may they go on without end ..."

By November, the war to end all wars was over. Captain Truman and the boys from Battery D had seen some of the bloodiest fighting in American history.

"Dear Bess, You know I have succeeded at doing what was my greatest ambition to do at the beginning of the war. That is to take a Battery through and not lose a man. We fired some ten thousand rounds at Heinie and were shelled ourselves time and again but never did the Hun score a hit on me."

ALONZO HAMBY: Truman's wartime service was awfully important to him because it was the greatest success he had had in his life up 'till that point. He comes out of it having established himself as a leader of men.

That's something he never could have said about himself at any point earlier in his life.

NARRATOR: In January 1919 Harry watched as President Woodrow Wilson arrived in Paris to a tumultuous reception. World leaders were gathering to ensure a lasting peace, empires had fallen, the map of Europe was about to be re-drawn, but Harry Truman simply wanted to go back to Missouri.

"For my part," he wrote, "I don't give a whoop whether there's a League of Nations or whether Russia has a Red government or a Purple one and if the president of the Czechoslovaks wants to pry the throne from under the king of Bohemia, let him pry, but send us home. But it would be months before the army would let Harry go back to Missouri.

He toured France, saw the Riviera and Paris -- the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Folies Bergere. Forty years later Harry would remember it as "disgusting." At the time he wrote that it was what you'd expect to see in Kansas City -- "only more so."

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