Part 1. Beginnings : Pearl Harbor
Photo essay : "Pearl Harbor photographs"
"December 7, 1941" : Studs Terkel interviews American witnesses to the Japanese attacks
"December 8, 1941" : interviews with Japanese civilians and soldiers
"Austin, Texas, December 9, 1941" : man-on-the-street interview following the attack on Pearl Harbor
Part 2. The war in Europe
"War" : historian Eric Hobsbawm reflects on the coming of war
"Flight" : Elisabeth Freund, a German Jewish emigre, recounts her flight from Nazi Germany
"A turning point" : Studs Terkel interviews Mikhail Nikolaevich Alexeyev, Russian author and editor, about his experiences as a Soviet soldier on the eastern front
"The bombers and the bombed" : Studs Terkel interviews Eddie Costello and Ursula Bender about the Allied bombing of Frankfurt, Germany
"Return to Auschwitz" : author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi is interviewed as he returns to Auschwitz after forty years
Part 3. The U.S. home front
"Trouble coming" : Nelson Peery describes the profound racial tensions that erupted in southern states as African American soldiers mobilized in large numbers
"A Sunday evening" : Studs Terkel interviews Peter Ota, an American-born Japanese man who served in the American military
Photo essay : "Manzanar" : Ansel Adams photographs an internment camp for Japanese Americans
"Statement on entering prison" : David Dellinger issues a political statement on his status as a conscientious objector in 1943
"Rosie" : Studs Terkel interviews a woman who went to work in a factory during the war
Photo essay : "Rosie the riveter" : from the office of war information archive
"Confronting the Holocaust" : historian David Wyman interviews Hillel Kook, who led the effort in the U.S. to push American leaders to rescue European Jews
Image essay : "Dr. Suess goes to war" : propaganda cartoons from Theodore Geisel on the Nazi menace.
"The slaughter of an army" : Osawa Masatsugu relates his experiences as a Japanese soldier in New Guinea in 1943
"Tales of the Pacific" : Studs Terkel interviews E.B. (Sledgehammer) Sledge about the American experience of war in the Pacific
"An American revolutionary" : Nelson Perry relates his experiences as an African American soldier in the fight against Japan
"One world or none" : an excerpt from public statements by leading atomic scientists, warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons
"The atomic bomb" : Studs Terkel talks with a nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project
"A terrible new weapon" : firsthand witnesses of Ground Zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
"The war (rough draft)" : an account of Paris after the German occupation, by Marguerite Duras
"Refugees" : poet Charles Simic remembers a life in transit in the aftermath of the German surrender.
