Activities of the Seabees during Allied invasion of Sicily, in World War II. Seabees lash sections of floating causeway to LST. Allied troops landing on the beach of Sicily shores between Licata and Gela. Seabees install floating causeway from LST to the beach. A bulldozer goes from the LST to the beach over the causeway. "Enemy" Italian troops volunteer to help with the unloading. German stuka dive bombers attack the allied beachhead and destroy an LST. Sherman tanks reach the beachhead from other LSTs using the floating causeways. Vehicles, artillery, and troops move ashore over the causeways.
Film begins showing a U.S. Army Air Forces C-47 transport plane in flight over the city of Cairo and Pyramids, in Egypt during World War 2. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's voice is heard speaking in his 1943 Christmas report to the Armed Forces. He states that following the Cairo Conference, he and Prime Minister Winston Churchill flew to Teheran, Iran. View of city of Teheran from an airplane overhead. View of front of the Soviet Embassy building there. Wider view showing conference principals on the porch with reporters and photographers below the steps. Next, a closer look with Soviet Marshal Stalin, President Roosevelt, and Prime Minister Churchill, seated on chairs, conversing. Closeup of the Big Three with their military commanders standing behind them. Views of ongoing Soviet operations on the Eastern Front. Russian troops firing field artillery from a snowy field. (A transport airplane is in the far background.) Shells bursting on snowy hillside. Soviet soldiers training in white arctic clothing rush through toward tanks and lie down in the snow. Three Soviet aircraft buzz a snow covered field. A huge explosion is seen and then Soviet cavalry charge across snow. View shifts to U.S. Army troops operating in Italy. A jeep filled with soldiers tows an artillery field piece across a shallow river. U.S. soldiers ride across a stream in a truck. Rear view of artillery piece being towed toward an italian town. Glimpses of aerial combat between Allied and German aircraft. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General Mark Clark are seen riding in a jeep across a bridge in Italy. Glimpse of Italian people trying to clean up destroyed section of a town. Portrait of Benito Mussolini in the debris. General Eisenhower walking with a local British commanding officer and General Mark Clark, in Italy. Eisenhower and Clark at an outdoor briefing by British officers. Eisenhower pinning the Legion of Merit medal on U.S. Army Air Forces Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz, deputy commander of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces who President Roosevelt says has been selected to be commander of Strategic Air Forces in Europe. Glimpse of B-24 Liberator bombers dropping bombs in Europe. Film shifts back to Teheran and the Big Three Leaders sitting in chairs. Closeups of them. Then their foreign secretaries step being them (Molotov, Hull, and Eden.) Nazi swastika flag. German armed forces marching on parade. German boys playing on artillery pieces under watchful eyes of German soldiers. Children at a playground. European farmers harvesting grain by hand. German troops in black parading. Glimpse of Adolf Hitler giving impassioned speech. Several views of Teheran conferees. President Roosevelt holding a ceremonial sword. Scenes of good will with hand shakes among conferees. Glimpses of British, Soviet, and Chinese troops attacking. Massed flags of the Allies.
Undersecretary of War, Robert Porter Patterson, Sr. speaks about a report from the General staff outlining the needs for combating Germany and Japan in World War 2. He cites Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, as an example of what will be needed. He continues to narrate in the background as an animated map appears showing the buildup of supplies and Allied forces in North Africa; Allied air forces flying 60 thousand sorties over Sicily and, the direct amphibious assault using 3,200 vessels. Map also depicts opposing forces of 12 (“unwilling”) Italian Divisions and 3-1/2 German Divisions. View of Allied troops carrying some of their 31 thousand casualties on stretchers from field ambulances. Allied medics attending to the wounded. Some are seen lying on stretchers in a row on the ground near a wall. Interior of a field hospital where surgeons and other medical personnel treat the wounded. Animated map shifts to Europe with Germany at its center, showing , in contrast to Sicily that was only an “outpost,”, the heavily fortified perimeter of Axis controlled areas; the axis industrial might; and the disposition of 300 German Divisions (mostly on the Eastern front) defending the region. Next, the map illustrates Japan’s defended regions in the Pacific Image returns to Undersecretary Patterson i n his office, speaking of the Allied offensives planned for next year (1944), and emphasizing their challenge and difficulty. Scene shifts to General Jonathan Wainwright and his garrison at Corregidor, in the Philippines, surrendering to Japanese forces in 1941. Japanese military camera pans over the Americans being taken prisoner. Other Americans and Filipinos are seen being marched together under guard. Scene shifts to classic views of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. View of Japanese soldiers executing two Chinese civilians in 1937. Dangling bodies of persons hung by Nazis during Operation Barbarossa in Russia, in 1941 A Russian soldier comforts a little girl as he escorts her across a snowy landscape. Time bomb left by German forces retreating from Naples, Italy, in 1943, blows up a Post office building . Views of damage to building and bodies of victims. American Military Police assisting a victim. American soldiers carrying an injured civilian on a litter. Scene shifts to British Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, and U.S. Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, entering a hall in the Spiridonovka Palace, during the 1943 Moscow Conference in Russia. Close-up of the American, Soviet, and British flags on a table. View of many delegates seated around the table. Close-up of Molotov, Eden, and Hull signing conference document.
Fall of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini seen speaking to a crowd and shaking his fist. Sicily surrenders to Allied troops during World War II. German soldiers holding white surrender flags march forward. Civilians in Italy cheer the arrival of smiling American soldiers. Scene changes to American B-25 bomber aircraft dropping bombs over Japanese positions in Pacific Theater. Close view of bombardier calibrating position and bombs away from bomb bay doors toward Japanese-held targets. Gun camera footage of Allied aircraft attacking Nazi German Wolfpack submarines in the Atlantic Ocean. Allied aircraft, including B-25 bombers, bombing German industry and cities during a night raid. In England, United Kingdom, church service is held open to the sky in the ruins of bombed out Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed by German Luftwaffe blitz bombing of Britain. Clergy, robed choir members, and British parishioners seen at the enthronement service of Bishop of Coventry Neville Gorton in 1943, enclosed only by the exterior walls of St. Michaels, Coventry Cathedral.
Allied Military Government efforts to rebuild Sicily after capturing it from Axis forces during World War 2. Italian men needing employnent board an open truck for transport to a job site. Workers standing with American soldiers preparing to work. A huge crowd of men pushing and shoving outside an Allied Military Government (AMG) labor hiring headquarters where they were offered decent wages to begin rebuilding after the war's destruction. Italian men, as well as American soldiers, rebuilding roads in the Alpine region of Italy, where German forces had destroyed them as they withdrew. U.S. Army engineers using a bulldozer, to clear and smooth a road. A large dump truck spreading new gravel for a highway bed. A team of workers manning a cable to pull down a damaged portion of a building. A British Army officer and a Colonial soldier in a turban, set explosive charges to destroy a bomb-damaged building. They detonate the charges and bring down the entire large building. Bulldozers at work on huge piles of rubble. A steam shovel being employed to clear large piles of debris. Men at work in Palermo, to clear entire streets buried in rubble. Men clearing rubble near piles of twisted steel building girders. Rubble being moved by horse-drawn carts and dumped into the sea. Italian masons at work building new homes and refurbishing old ones. In views three months after the original Allied landing in Sicily during July,1943, Palermo is seen well on the way to restoration. School children, including girls with brooms, walking to a place needing cleanup. Views of them cleaning steps and windows. Citizens picking up debris from streets and sidewalks. A man using a hose to clean a street and sidewalk in the city.
American troops of the 45th Infantry Division, are seen in mountains after breaking through the first segment of the German Winter Line, near San Pietro Infine, Italy, in World War 2. It is Christmas Day, 1943 and they occupy Mount Lungo. They receive Christmas dinner in their individual mass kits and sit down on the ground to eat it. On December 28th, they employ pack mules and also use stretchers to retrieve remains of fallen 3rd Division defenders down the steep mountain trails of Mount Lungo. They place the carefully wrapped remains at the base of a bullet pock-marked stone structure. Scene shifts to Mount Sammucro where American troops take advantage of a brief lull in fighting. On 1 January, 1944, Second Corp reinforcements have arrived and Americans commence a new assault on the German Winter Line defenses, with an artillery barrage on German positions guarding San Vittore del Lazio. View of smoke rising from that town. Shelling of Mountaintop flanking Highway 6held by Germans. Groups of American troops firing mortars from valley below. Shells exploding on German positions. Closeup of American gun crew loading and firing a 155mm long tom field gun. Soldiers holding their ears when gun fires. Bombs dropped from American warplane aircraft explode near roads in the valley. Glimpse from U.S. warplane flying overhead, of smoke rising from German positions in the Winter Line. Soldiers of the 168th Infantry Regiment firing a recoiless rifle from wooded area. Shells striking at base of mountain. Troops of the U.S. 137 Infantry Regiment advancing on San Vittore. view in the Italian town on 7 January, 1944, when street fighting has ended. American soldiers are seen mingling with the civilian inhabitants. German military equipment destroyed and burning during the American Winter Line offensive. Captured German soldiers being taken into custody, searched, and processed as prisoners of war.