rs ago,mothers with sons and husbands at war in Europe could celebrate the end of the war there, even as they worried about the possibility their loved ones might be heading to the invasion of Japan.

Today's guest has made his life's work about telling the stories of those heroes, their sacrifices and their legacy.

He's Tim Gray this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright upbeat music) (bright upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Tim Gray, a remarkably talented documentary filmmaker whose body of work focuses on the Second World War and the heroes who fought it.

He's joining us today in the studio.

Tim, thank you for being back.

- It's always a pleasure.

I think this is the third time with you guys.

- Third time.

- Hopefully I'll get it right.

(group laughs) - Well you always get it right and we're so grateful to you for the work you do and the stories that you share with the public.

We wanna talk to you, obviously, the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II is approaching in May for the war in Europe, later this summer for the war in the Pacific.

May 7th, Dwight Eisenhower sends a telegram to the combined chiefs of staff in London and Washington.

It reads simply, "The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945."

The war goes on for a few more months in the Pacific.

But that moment in Europe, what have they achieved and what is the cost?

- The cost is a lot.

I mean, when you look at the Soviet side of all this, the Soviets lost 28 million people in the war themselves.

United States lost 413,000.

It was, a lot of people felt like that was the official end of the war, when the war in Europe ended, because they didn't really know a lot about what was going on in the Pacific.

They would get headlines about Iwo Jima or Okinawa or Peleliu or Guadalcanal.

But the Pacific War was so foreign to what was happening in the United States that there was a sense of relief that, you know, once it ended in Europe, it would be a short amount of time until it ended in the Pacific.

Now it went till August with the dropping of the bombs and didn't end officially until September 2nd with the signing on the USS Missouri.

So when you look at Europe, there was a sense, this is one part of the closure and let's just finish up the rest.

And they didn't realize how difficult the rest would be.

- 80 years, we'll get to the war in the Pacific in a minute, but 80 years later, what do you think the legacy of the war in Europe is?

- It defined borders.

We thought it did anyway, until Russia went into Ukraine.

NATO came out of that.

There has been relative, obviously, peace in Europe since then.

So I think coming out, it achieved what it was going to do, to prevent another person, like Hitler or Mussolini, from rising to power and starting a world war.

So I think in some regards, it has worked, up until what happened with Russia and the Ukraine.

But I think, you know, it's achieved its goals.

Peace in Europe.

- So you spend a lot of time speaking about the war.

- Yeah.

- Obviously.

- How well understood is it by different populations, old, young, and I'm talking about populations today, most of whom were not alive during that period of time.

- Most young people know World War II through video games now.

So if you play "Call of Duty."

- Really?

- They'll come in and they'll talk to us and I'll say, "Who knows about Normandy?"

And a kid will raise his hand and say, "Oh, I play 'Call of Duty.'

I know about Omaha Beach."

And to me, you know, a teacher might roll their eyes, but to me, that's a starting point for a conversation.

So I will say, "Okay, this 13 or 14 or 15-year-old knows the two words, 'Omaha Beach.'

I can then talk to them on a level where I can explain what it was really like."

You know, you didn't get points for killing Germans back then, and you didn't capture their weapon and continue on.

Sometimes you did as a real soldier.

But the reality is, this is not being taught in schools anymore.

So there really is not a reference point for this generation for World War II.

And that's unfortunate because I think a lot of what resonates today in society and in the world is a direct consequence of what happened during those years, 1939 to 1945.

- I just wanna follow up on that because I think you're absolutely right.

And I can remember, my wife says all the time that she missed World War II in her social studies class, 'cause she was at Girls State.

- Yeah.

- And so every time I'm either reading a book or talking about one of your films or something else, she said, "How did I miss this in school?"

- Yeah.

- For me, it's the linchpin for understanding the 20th century.

- Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

- And, is there any hope of remedying that?

Do you see any trends towards- - No.

- Getting this back into schools?

- No.

No, I don't, unfortunately.

And I think, when schools are making cuts and teachers are pressured with time, the first thing that usually go will be history and then the arts, and then sports.

So to me, history is not important to educators here in the United States as it is in Europe.

So in Europe, because the war was fought there, two World Wars were fought there, they're very in tune with everything that happened during especially World War II.

And it's talked about at the dinner table, it's taught in the schools.

Over here, I read something where only 41% of Americans could name a concentration camp.

So only 41% of Americans- - Wow.

- Could name Auschwitz or Dachau or Buchenwald or something along those lines.

So I just feel as though people say history repeats itself.

I don't believe that, but I feel as though history rhymes.

And if young people do not have a reference point to what a genocide is, then how are they gonna recognize the signs now?

Ancient history to these young students is 9/11.

- Yeah.

- So when 9/11 happened, I started talking a lot about Pearl Harbor being a reference point, because it hadn't happened in the United States since Pearl Harbor.

So now, even young people don't know anything about what happened on 9/11.

And again, history seems to take a backseat in our schools and we keep repeating these things and they keep rhyming and unless we get in touch with what has happened in the past, we will continue to look at these things happening with amazement.

- Yeah.

- Not with education or historical reference.

It's like, "I can't believe that happened."

- Right.

- And I'll tell somebody, "It happened 80 years ago.

Here's, let me tell you what it was like."

- Well, that's lamentable.

I think is- - It is, it really is.

- Clearly the right word here.

You know some veterans and you have brought them into your films who are still alive.

Talk about that population, how many there might be, I'm talking about United States American veterans of World War II.

- Yeah, there were about 16 million who served, and there are probably about 60,000 left today.

- Oh, 60,000.

Okay.

- Yeah.

Just 60,000.

- Wow.

- And a lot of them are observing their last major anniversary, being the anniversary of D-Day last year, the anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.

This year is the anniversary we just had of Iwo Jima, we'll be having Okinawa, we'll be having the anniversary of the end of the war, the dropping of the bombs.

Most of the interviews that we've done over the last 20 years, most of those men and women are gone.

I'd say 95% of them are gone.

There are still, who are 99, 100, 104, the outliers, who are still here.

- That's their age.

Yeah.

- That's their age to have that perspective.

And a lot of them are really still, you know, willing to talk about their experiences during the war.

But they're much fewer than when we started in 2006.

- So at last count you have done 38 documentaries.

- [Tim] We've done 40 right now.

Yeah.

We just finished number 40.

- 40 right now.

And you've got a bunch of others in development now.

Question, are you ever gonna run out of stories about the war?

- No.

And I'll tell you why because- - That was a very emphatic answer.

- Yeah, it is.

People have asked me that before.

And back in 2006, our videographer, the videographer that I work with, Jim Karpeichik and I sat down and said, "We have a limited window here to do this.

Let's interview as many as we possibly can."

So back in 2010, we sat 50 veterans and survivors down at one time just do their interviews.

- Wow.

- And then, so we probably have only scratched about 50% of the interviews that we have.

And I would say again, about 98% of those veterans that we have on our hard drives in our archive- - Oh these are ones you've already interviewed.

- These are ones we've already done.

- Wow.

- But we knew the window was closing.

So in 2006, we're like, "Let's interview as many as we can."

So we have a lot of interviews that haven't seen the light of day that we plug into our films based on the story that we're telling.

- I hope you back all this up.

(group laughs) - Triple, triple back up.

I've gotten it, and I've got a hard drive buried in my backyard.

(group laughs) - Do, you know, those veterans who you've come to know and you've honored so well in these films, do they, legendarily, this is a generation that did not come home from the war and talk about it.

- No.

- How were you able to encourage these men, they were mostly men.

- Men, yeah.

Women, a lot of women too.

- But how were you able to encourage these veterans to be able to tell their stories when they were quiet for so much of their lives?

- I think you have to have an understanding of what they went through.

I will never know the smell of gunpowder.

I will never know what it was like to be at Pearl Harbor.

But I know the stories.

So I'm able to relate these stories.

So I'm not going up to a veteran and saying, "Tell me what it was like to serve in World War II?"

I can bring them down to almost the barracks where they were stationed when the attack at Pearl Harbor happened.

So they know that I've invested time in learning their stories.

And a lot of times, at the end of their lives, they're dealing with their own mortality, they're a little bit more willing to open up.

And for most of the families, I'd say 90% of the families, when we do these interviews with the veterans in front of family members, it's the first time the family is hearing the story.

So they had no idea that dad or grandpa was awarded a Silver Star on the Easy Red Sector of Omaha Beach on D-Day, or was at Pearl Harbor, or fought on Iwo Jima, because they've tried to spare their families of the things that they had to do and the things that they saw.

And that's why they're more willing to tell a perfect stranger their story than even open up to their own families.

- I'm guessing that would also be true of veterans of Vietnam too.

- Any veteran, pretty much, I think of any veteran of Vietnam- - Korea.

- Of Korea, of Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever we are, it's unique to a veteran that they do not want to burden family members with the things they had to do and the things, again, that they witnessed.

And I think that spans all veterans.

- So you've captured the heroism and the valor and the service of so many who have served.

Your films have also captured some of the atrocities of axis forces.

There was a village, Oradour-sur-Glane in France that General Charles de Gaulle, after the war, ordered be preserved in perpetuity as a reminder of the atrocity that took place there.

- [Tim] Yeah.

- You had a very powerful documentary come out last year that has won a ton of awards that documents what happened there.

- [Tim] Yeah.

- What happened in that village?

- The German second SS division was on its way to Normandy after D-Day, and they were dealing with a lot of attacks by the French resistance.

So they wanted to make an example of a village in France to send the message.

So what they went in and did was massacre 643 people in the village.

There were only six survivors.

And then they burned the village down to the ground.

The village, when you go and visit it today, a new village, Oradour-sur-Glane, was built next to the old village that was burned down by the SS division.

They preserved everything so people can go and see what it was like on the last day that that village was alive.

So the cars are still parked in front of the homes.

- Oh wow.

- There are still pots on the stove.

The Singer sewing machines are there, the bed frames are there.

So it was the massacre, mostly of women and children who were burned alive in the church at Oradour-sur-Glane.

It was one of the worst atrocities of World War II and as soon as Charles de Gaulle came upon the village, he had the foresight to recognize that this needed to be preserved as a symbol of what happened in France during World War II.

So we did this film and it brings home what happens when a force comes into a village, whether it be anywhere in the world, and innocent civilians pay the price.

- So you've mentioned the war in Ukraine a couple of times.

- Yeah.

- There's a well-documented case of atrocity in the Ukrainian village of Bucha.

When you're making a documentary like this about World War II, are those current examples present in your mind?

Or are you just focused on telling the story that happened in 1944?

- I'm focused on telling a story that happened in 1944, but I'm also aware of that history rhymes.

And that's just the way it is.

And until you learn how to stop these things from happening, we'll never learn as a society.

Everything you can think of imaginable happened during 1939 to 1945.

Even if you want to go back to when Hitler came to power in 1933 to 1945.

Everything you can imagine happened.

Atrocities, heroics, you know, horrible events, bravery, cowardry, I mean, you know, cowardness, I guess that's the word.

- That's the word.

- Oh, good.

- Yeah.

- I'm always 50/50.

(group laughs) I write for a living, but I'm always 50/50 on my words.

- I write for a living too and I hear you, totally.

- Yeah.

I never quite know.

But it just continues to happen.

- Yeah.

- And people are always surprised when it happens.

And with my historical background, I can always point to that, Oradour, comparing it to what's happening in the 21st century in the Ukraine, so.

- So it's a truism that freedom isn't free.

Do you think people today understand the price that was paid during this war to keep freedom?

- Not if they're not taught about it.

- Yeah.

We get back to that, don't we?

- Yeah, if you're not, a lot of young people, I'm encouraged by a lot of young people who, we have a museum in Rhode Island.

We have a lot of young people who come there.

And once they're shown the stories and told the stories and they're able to touch the artifacts, of the 4,000 kids we've had through our museum, there hasn't been one kid who's been in the corner playing on their phone.

- Wow.

- It's been presented to them.

And you present it to them based on their age group.

If we have a bunch of 17 and 18-year-olds at our museum, well guess who was fighting World War II for the United States and other countries?

17, 18, 19-year-olds.

If you can personalize it, if you can personalize the stories and get these kids to say, "Wow, at 18, I'm just cruising the Providence Place Mall.

This person was parachuting into Sicily at 15 and fighting.

I can't believe somebody my age did that."

They're amazed, but there's no teaching, telling of these stories.

And that's the unfortunate part.

- So some of these kids had grandfathers or great-grandfathers.

- They're all related in some way.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- Somebody in their family served in World War II.

A dad, a grandfather, an uncle, a great uncle.

Mom was on the home front.

Grandma was on the home front.

- [G] And do they bring that up when they're in your museum?

- Most of them don't know.

Most of 'em haven't talked to their family about, what was our role in World War II?

- I wonder if they go home and do that.

- I hope they do.

And that's what, we wanna be a conduit, so they will go home with those questions.

- Yeah.

- So one of your more recent films is about Bob Hope and his role in the war.

- Yeah.

- We were chatting yesterday about his autobiography, about his service.

- Yeah.

- It's remarkable.

For me, what always resonated was his idea that, "Well, we're gonna make people laugh while the world is literally burning around them because that's important too."

What did your research and your understanding of, the history inform you, about Bob Hope's role in the war itself?

- It was not only Bob Hope, it was Hollywood and how Hollywood came together to support the war effort.

Five of the top Hollywood directors went off and made World War II films, training films, and documentaries.

John Huston, William Wyler, Frank Capra, a lot of them, George Stevens, went off and left their Hollywood careers.

It was such a patriotic time.

- And they were giants of cinema before.

- They were giants, yeah.

And John Ford was another one making these.

- John Ford.

Wow.

- Yeah.

Making these documentaries.

And everybody felt they had to play a role in World War II.

And there hasn't been a war like that since.

Everybody who felt left out, you know, there were 4-F guys who failed their physicals who committed suicide because they couldn't be involved in World War II, 'cause their friends were going off, everybody after Pearl Harbor was united as a country and wanted to make, you know, win this war.

- And it wasn't just Hollywood, of course, it was people here back home, it was people along the coast.

It was Rosie the Riveter, you know, everyone.

- Yeah.

- The country was united.

- It was united and it showed that we had the potential to be united.

That's the biggest thing I take out of World War II, is why is it gonna take another attack on American soil to bring Republicans and Democrats together to do what's best for Americans?

Why will it take another Pearl Harbor, 9/11, for all of us to get together?

It shouldn't be that way, we should be together now to solve pediatric cancer and homelessness and all these problems that are raging in our country because we have shown we can come together as a country.

We have proven between 1941 and 1945 that we can do what's best for our country as Americans, not as political parties.

And so the potential is there and it's maddening that it doesn't exist.

- It really is maddening.

- You know, so the weeks before we taped this, there was news out of the Pentagon about the .

.

.

Forgetting, intentionally so, of people like Ira Hayes, one of the Iwo Jima flag raises, the Tuskegee Airmen.

- [Tim] Yeah.

- Even the B-29 that carried the first bomb dropped in war- - Enola Gay, correct.

- Enola Gay, because of these efforts to roll back diversity, equity, inclusion programs in the US government.

Leaving aside some of the politics in the moment.

- Sure.

- Why is it important that we remember the Tuskegee Airmen?

Why is it important that we remember Ira Hayes?

Why is it important that we remember the Enola Gay?

- They saved the world.

I don't know any other longer explanation I can give you than, you know, Ira Hayes was on Iwo Jima.

He's a hero.

- Yeah.

- The men, you know, Tibbets, Paul Tibbets, who flew the Enola Gay is a hero.

His crew heroically did what the government asked them to do.

The Tuskegee Airmen were some of the best pilots of World War II.

They were heroes to so many B-17, white, Caucasian B-17 pilots, who thought they were the best pilots of the war.

The 442nd Regiment, the Nisei soldiers, second generation born Japanese Americans fighting in Europe, the highest decorated regiment of World War II, while their families were back home in internment camps.

The Tuskegee Airmen fought while their families were back home and being, you know, burned and hung and couldn't go into restaurants and segregated and racism, but yet, they still fought for their country.

These are all heroes.

I don't care what color they are.

I don't care where they serve.

We are here and able to do the things we can today because of the Tuskegee Airmen, because of the Nisei soldiers, the Japanese Nisei, the 442nd, Daniel Inouye was senator for Hawaii.

- Former senator from Hawaii.

- One of the great senators in the history of this country and his arm was blown off in northern Italy, and he was part of the 442nd.

Some of the finest men I've ever met were Tuskegee Airmen.

So we're erasing our heroes.

And I think for any veteran to watch that being done, that's not a good thing, whether you're a veteran of World War II or Korea or Vietnam, they're erasing the memories of people who saved the world.

- How do you decide what stories to tell?

I mean, we've sort of touched on that a little bit earlier, but you have literally thousands of possibilities.

Maybe even more.

How do you decide which story you need to do next?

- We say our demographic is 15 to 40.

That's our demographic.

I'm not worried about the 40-year-olds and the 50-year-olds and 60-year-olds.

They're all watching "Saving Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers" and "The Pacific" and "Masters of the Air" and "Fury" and everything else.

I try to do films that resonate with a younger audience to keep their attention, to be that, again, conduit where they might want to go out and Google Bob Hope after they see our film.

So it's gotta keep their attention, first of all, they have to be stories that resonate with our demographic, which again, is 15 to 40.

So we're trying to keep their attention for 54 minutes.

And one of the greatest compliments I ever got was from a young person.

He was 16, he was a skateboarder, had his hat on backwards, and he watched one of our films in a movie cinema on the Holocaust in Boston.

And he turned to his mom at the end and said, "You know, Mom, that didn't suck."

(Jim and G laugh) So I thought to myself, I had a kid's attention, you know, who's with a skateboard and he's got his hat, I've got his attention for 54 minutes.

And he said, "That didn't suck."

And maybe he's gonna go home and Google Dachau or Auschwitz to find out more about what happened there.

- I mean, that was a compliment.

It was a high compliment.

- That was a huge compliment.

- Absolutely.

- Of all the stories that you have researched and told, is there one in particular that lingers with you?

- I've got 40 kids.

(Jim and G laugh) So if I were to ask you who your favorite kid is, that is a tough one.

- Yeah.

- We took an Auschwitz survivor back to Auschwitz, and when you do that, you put a microphone like I have here, you put that on him and you let him go.

You don't get in the way, you let him remember what it was like to be at Auschwitz in 1944.

That, to me, was very impactful.

I think every film we do has its own impact in some different way and we try to do a variety.

Every time Jim and I, or my crew down in Fort Myers, Florida sit down, we always say, "How do we do this differently?

How has it already been done and how do we do it differently?"

And that's always our first, you know, that's our starting point.

So all of the films, in their own way.

But I think when you start to getting into films about the Holocaust, you start to really, it really gets heavy.

- So we've got just a couple of minutes left here and we have unfortunately given short shrift to the war in the Pacific.

- It's okay.

- But it is a huge effort there.

There's controversy with how the war ended and Truman's decision to use atomic weapons, both at Hiroshima and at Nagasaki.

When you look back at that decision, how do you assess it?

How do you judge it with the benefit of 80 years of perspective?

- It was not a hard decision for Truman to make.

Those bombs, and it's horrible to say when you're talking about atomic weapons, but in the end, those bombs saved lives.

The United States was poised to go into Japan.

10 million people in Japan would've been wiped off the face of the earth.

A million American casualties more in 1945.

As horrific as the bombs were, they ended up saving lives.

After the second bomb was dropped at Nagasaki, the Japanese military did still not want to surrender.

They didn't wanna surrender.

It was only the emperor who came through and said, "Enough is enough."

Then they tried a coup against the emperor.

So we're talking about a fanatic people that were going to defend Japan, every man, woman, and child, and Truman looked at the casualty, potential casualties for the allies, especially the Americans, and said, "I can't."

The guys who had finished the war in Europe were now dreading going to the Pacific.

The guys who fought in the Pacific had fought the Japanese and knew the tenacity of the Japanese and were dreading going into Japan.

So that's why the decision was, I don't think, hard for Truman.

- Just a very quick note on concentration camps.

I visited Dachau many years ago and it was the most sobering experience probably of my life.

And so to see it on film, I think, probably has a similar effect, even if you have not been there.

- Yeah.

- It just tells you the horror that took place at concentration camps.

- It's hard to imagine it.

And quickly, Eisenhower was smart.

He brought the media in when all the camps were being discovered because he knew people would deny the fact that this ever happened.

- And they still deny it.

- So, and they still deny it.

But he brought in the videographers and the photographers and the writers and the AP correspondents and everybody else, and just said, "Just look at this and witness this and talk about this, 'cause someday people will deny it."

- That was really smart.

- How can people see your films?

- They can see 'em on our website, which is wwiifoundation.org.

And we also have a global app on both iTunes and Android under World War II Streaming Channel.

- It is tremendously important work.

Thank you for sharing some of it with us.

- Always good to be with you guys.

- Always great to have you, always.

- Thank you.

- And you're welcome back anytime.

(G and Tim laugh) - That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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