Japanese surrender in Southeast Asia during World War II. Airplanes in formation flight. Two Japanese Mitsubishi G4M-1 'Betty' twin-engine bombers painted white with green crosses on their wings, fuselage and tail land at Ie Shima Ryukyu Islands near Okinawa carrying Japanese delegates. The planes land at Nichols Field at 1813 hours. The planes are dubbed 'Bataan number 1' and 'Bataan number 2.' Lt. Gen. Torasirou Kawabe, the vice chief of the Japanese Army's General Staff and his surrender party disembark from the airplanes. Members of the surrender party include Rear Admiral Ichiro Yokoyama Representative, Imperial Japanese Navy Staff., Colonel Yashima Terai General Staff, Colonel Orato Yamoto General Staff, Mr. Morio Yakawa Secretary, Japanese foreign office. Kawabe leads the surrender party. Army C-54 transport airplanes parked. Japanese surrender delegates board the airplanes which take off for Manila, Philippines. United States Army General Douglas MacArthur speaks to his troops from a balcony at the war damaged Manila City Hall (Padre Burgos Ave, Ermita, Manila, 1000 Metro Manila) on 20 August 1945. He notes that he is hopeful that they will all be able to return home soon.
Film from 1965 shows scenes that span from early 1940s through mid 1960s. Film opens showing armed conflict in Laos and South America. Soldiers firing rifles in jungle areas. Armed men running across a field and in a town in Cyprus. Heavy armor engaged in conflict and buildings burning in undisclosed location. Riots in Congo with a crowd of men beating another man. Armed Republic of South Vietnam soldiers (ARVN) moving through jungle in Vietnam War. A Viet Cong fighter shot as ARVN troops attack a hut. People fleeing in streets of Cuba as government soldiers engage armed revolutionaries under Castro. A civilian woman suffering a seizure as Red Cross workers attempt to carry her. Burned body of dead tank crew soldier atop a tank. Medical corps persons moving wounded on a stretcher. Various views of ARVN with captured Viet Cong in Vietnam. Narrator discussion about Geneva Conventions and Counterinsurgency. View of the Palace of Nations building in Geneva Switzerland. Scene shifts to inside, in 1949, where delegates of 59 nations are gathered to develop new rules expanding the original 1929 Geneva Conventions, in order to better protect prisoners of war, wounded prisoners, noncombatants and others caught up such internal conflicts. View from ground of German paratroopers during World War 2, jumping from Junkers Ju-52 trimotor transport planes. Closeup of German soldiers leaping from a plane and descending in parachutes. Japanese soldiers surrendering to Americans on a Pacific Island in World War 2. Several scenes of massacre victims lying on the ground, victims of Nazi German brutality in Europe during World War II. Survivors of a Nazi concentration camp near the time of its liberation in 1945. A U.S. Army medical corpsmen help one to a stretcher. Executed prisoners of war. Courtroom of the Nuremberg trials. Seen in the front row of Nazi leaders are: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, and Julius Streicher. Seated behind them are: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, and Konstantin von Neurath. Scene shifts to the postwar trial of Japanese Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, in the Philippines. Prisoners with hands bound, in an unidentified Asian conflict, being herded into an open truck. Views of the document constituting the 3rd Geneva Convention of 1949, addressing treatment of prisoners and of parts directed to "conflicts not of an international character." Views of a traumatized civilian driver wounded and a female passenger killed in in his car (appears to be in Cuba or Latin America). Armed gunmen have the man leave the car. A man lays the body of the woman beside the car. Scene shifts to a group of surrendered Vietcong fighters with their weapons stacked. Wounded combatants being carried on stretchers. American survivors of a Japanese prison camp receiving a good meal after being rescued - this is possibly in the Philippines in 1945. Many of the American prisoners are gaunt and emaciated and malnourished. Narrator recites list of activities prohibited by Geneva conventions, as images show these activities: A ditch filled with victims of massacre. Hostages being taken in an internal conflict in an African country. Prisoners being beaten by non-uniformed civilians in and humiliated in public. A recently liberated prison with a former prisoner in striped uniform beating a man as a group is marched away (likely a World War 2 concentration camp with a liberated prisoner beating a former Nazi guard). Death sentences being rendered without due process. A court in Cuba. A boy pointing at a lineup of prisoners. A prisoner shot.
Wartime news film entitled: "Manila Cleanup." View of the Pasig River, dividing North and South Manila. American tanks and tank destroyers on North bank, firing at Japanese positions on the South side of the river. Exploding shells on South side. U.S. troops fire 155mm howitzers at low elevation, blasting the walls of Intramuros and adjacent buildings. The 540th Field Artillery fire 240mm guns point blank against the ancient walls. Troops firing machine guns at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran and Manila Post Office buildings. Troops of the 3rd Battalion, 129th Infantry, 337th Division, crossing the river in small assault boats, under covering fire. Landing on the South Bank, troops fan out around and about the walled city. Japanese forces resist from fortified pill boxes and machine gun nests near the public buildings. U.S. troops breach a section of the wall and elements of the 37th Division enter Intramuros on February 23, 1945. U.S. soldiers sheltered behind wall as others employ flame throwers. U.S. Soldiers prepares a TNT charge to blow up walls and seal underground passageways. A destroyed Japanese pill box at base of wall with many dead Japanese soldiers are seen. U.S. artillerymen firing 155mm howitzers directly at Japanese troops holed up in the Legislative, agricultural and finance buildings. Troops of B Company, 148th Infantry Regiment, advance from the Manila City Hall, towards the Legislative building. They direct flame throwers at Japanese fortifications under the wall. Soldier with flame thrower passes through group of riflemen and fires into hole in wall. U.S. soldiers fighting room to room in the walled city. On February 24th U.S. troops defeat the last Japanese resistors of Manila in World War II.
Film opens with slate reading: "Cabanatuan Prisoners' Hospitalization at Time of Repatriation." Brief view of a tent-like field hospital where former POWs were being treated, behind American lines, with rescued American POWs in beds and several Army nurses attending them. After that is an extended view of several ambulatory patients engaged in conversations at a hospital behind American lines. At TC:01:35, the scene reverts to earlier time, and a patient is seen lying in the ruins of the prison camp on the day of the rescue raid (Jan 30, 1945). He is being tended to by another soldier, with whom he converses. Two former prisoners are seen in a straw-lined cart prepared for transport back to the American lines, by water buffalo. The remainder of the film shows the former POWs and their rescuers leaving the Cabanatuan prison, on their way back to the American lines. Some non-ambulatory former prisoners are seen lying on straw- covered ground.
Film opens with slate reading: "Evacuation to Hospitals." Next, on January 30, 1945, the day of the "Cabanatuan Raid" (Mission to rescue prisoners of war from the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan) rescuers are seen carrying a former POW from a building, on a litter. Local Filipinos and others are standing on the porch of the prison building. An ambulatory former prisoner comes down the steps unaided. Several rescued prisoners are seated on chairs, conversing. Closeups of some of them. Two weakened and bandaged former prisoners help each other up some steps. Slate states: "Man with Cane afflicted with Beri-Beri." A severely disabled former prisoner, with a cane, makes his way unaided across the grass. Rescuers and Filipinos are in the background, along with some carts used to evacuate disabled former prisoners back behind American lines.
On January 31, 1945, during World War 2, elements of the 11th Airborne Division attached to the U.S. Eighth Army, are seen in landing craft approaching the shore of Nasugbu, Batangas. They hit the beach in an unopposed landing, but one of their vehicles stalls near the shoreline. A DUKW Military Amphibious Vehicle moves along the shore as soldiers board the stalled vehicle and head toward the beach pulled by a bulldozer using a towline. Another vehicle is also seen, being pulled by a bulldozer.