No documentary can capture experience of World War II, veterans say

Ken Burns' documentary "The War" will try to tell the story of World War II to another generation of Americans, starting tonight. No matter how well done, veterans of the war say, no film, no book can ever explain the reality.

"A lot of people were in the war," said Bill Duncan, who was in the Army in the Battle of the Bulge and in Germany. "But they don't know war."

The only ones who really knew were in combat, he said. "I can always tell who was in combat and who wasn't. All of us who were in combat know the difference."

Duncan, who is in his 80s, lives in Alameda. He is one of thousands of World War II veterans in the Bay Area. The region has a reputation for being anti-military, but veterans who fought the war are here, out of the spotlight.

Johnny Johnson fought in the first battle, at Pearl Harbor; Bill Mason was in the last, at Okinawa, aboard a Navy ship that was so small it didn't even have a name. Eddie Fung, born and raised in San Francisco's Chinatown, was captured by the Japanese and worked as a slave laborer on the infamous Burma-Thailand "death railway." The experience taught him what it was to be a man and what it was to be proud to be Chinese.

Don Jardine was a Marine fighting veteran Japanese troops in the jungle at Guadalcanal. "The war was won by a bunch of kids," he said. "A bunch of 18- and 19-year-old kids beat the best they had."

Now these kids are old men; sometimes they talk about the war, mostly they do not, but it is seared in their memories. The experience of a lifetime.

Johnny Johnson remembers Dec. 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor. The San Francisco was his ship, a handsome heavy cruiser that had been commissioned at Mare Island seven years earlier. The ship was at the Hawaii port for repairs, tied up at a pier, and missed the hell that rained down on the battleships of the Pacific fleet. "The San Francisco was one of the luckiest ships in the whole world," he said.

The San Francisco served through the war and earned 17 battle stars. The ship and its crew had a close brush with death in November 1942.

The Navy was supporting the invasion of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The battle was bitter and very tough. "You can't believe how close we came to losing the war," Johnson said.

The Japanese were bringing in reinforcements; two battleships and some cruisers were the escorts. Aboard the San Francisco, Rear Adm. Daniel Callaghan steered the San Francisco and his other ships to meet them.

Johnson was an ordinary sailor; the admiral was his hero. "He took on those two battleships. It looked like suicide, but he had to do it. He was a great man."

The battle lasted only 24 minutes, but the Japanese were turned back. Callaghan and 84 other men were killed. The bridge of the ship, with the shell holes still in it, is a memorial in San Francisco. Johnson, who later ran the ship's supply operation, is an advocate for that memorial, even now, at age 84. "I cherish the memories of my life on board that ship," he said.

On the island, Pfc. Don Jardine and his buddies in the First Marine Division took on the Japanese. He still marvels at how they did it.

"I had been in the Marine Corps for seven months when we landed. I was 18, and the average age was 19. The oldest company officers were 25 or 26. To us, they were old men.

"It was the Marine training, the discipline that did it," he said. "In boot camp, they tore us down and built us back up as Marines.

"We beat the best they had. It was the first defeat in a land battle the Japanese ever had in their history."

Meanwhile, in Thailand, Eddie Fung was seeing another side of the Japanese war machine. He was born and raised in San Francisco, but moved to Texas to be a cowboy.

In San Francisco, the Chinese were second-class citizens, but to be a Chinese cowboy, he thought, that's the thing. When it looked like the United States was going to get into the war, he joined the Texas National Guard and was soon called to active duty.

His unit was at sea, heading for the Philippines, when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

They couldn't wait to get into action. "We thought the war would only last a couple of weeks," he said. "You know how Americans are. We thought we were invincible."

Instead Fung's unit, an artillery battery, was sent to Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies. An Allied fleet trying to defend the island was defeated, and the Dutch capitulated in March 1942.

Fung, who was 19, was a prisoner of war. He and 190 other soldiers were sent to Thailand to work on the Thai-Burma railway. More than 60,000 POWs and 200,000 Asians were put to work. The film "The Bridge on the River Kwai" is about that ordeal.

"We did what was asked of us," Fung said simply.

It was slave labor, disease and death. An atrocity.

Of his group of 191 U.S. soldiers, only 13 died. "It was the breaks of the game," Fung said. "It was who you were with and a lot of luck." It made the difference between life and death.

"Once, when I had both dysentery and malaria, I thought I would just let go. But I had a great desire to get back and tell my mother that I understood what my father and mother had tried to teach me all my life: to be myself. To be Chinese. To be myself. To be a man.

"The guards could treat us like dogs, but we were not dogs," he said. Those who understood that and were lucky survived. When the war ended, Fung weighed 60 pounds.

On the other side of the world, in Europe, the tide of war had changed. Bill Duncan, born in Pennsylvania, joined the Army in 1943 as a private. He was later assigned to the 69th Infantry Division, and by November 1944 he was in Europe, in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, the German Wehrmacht's last major offensive.

He was in a reconnaissance company, at the edge of the American forces. "We ran patrols," he said, "night patrols when we were in the Ardennes, day patrols later in open country once we got into Germany."

Their job was to probe ahead - to see what was out there, to find out where the enemy was. It was very dangerous. "You had to be careful, or you might run into an ambush," he said.

Duncan is a blunt man. He does not use extra words. "You know what combat is?" he said. "Combat is the most dirty, degrading, traumatic period in anybody's life.

"A lot of people were in the war. Only a small percentage saw combat."

Once, he said, "I got a citation and some leave. They sent me to Paris. Paris was full of soldiers - rear-echelon people. I felt nothing in common with them."

He only felt at home, he said, back with his unit, with men who had seen what he had seen. Had been through it, as they say.

"You do a lot of things," he said. "Combat isn't pretty."

Duncan got a battlefield promotion from technical sergeant to lieutenant. He liberated death camps, and camps where the Germans had held slave laborers. He earned two Bronze Stars, the Purple Heart and other decorations. He stayed in the Reserve and retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1976 after 33 years of service.

"I still get flashbacks about combat and the war," he said. "It's so long ago it's almost unreal. But when I talk about it, like now, it's almost like yesterday. I can see it all again."

"It never goes away," said Bill Mason. In 1945, Mason was a 19-year-old gunner aboard a gunnery support ship so unimportant it didn't have a name.

In the seas off Okinawa, his ship was on the outer ring of defense and warning for the U.S. fleet. The Japanese suicide planes - the kamikaze - were trying to break through to the invasion fleet. It was their last desperate chance.

"You know, they put us out there to get killed," Mason said. "We took a hell of a beating."

Once, Mason's little ship pulled close to a destroyer, hit by a kamikaze and afire.

Mason still sees the dead sailors, "lying there, burned, dead. You never forget that," he said.

Nor did he ever forget the men he served with on the ship. "You know, we worked together, lived together. You are never closer than I was to those men."

Okinawa was the last battle of World War II. After it fell, the Americans dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered.

For Eddie Fung, the end of the war came on Aug. 19, 1945, when his POW camp got the word. They told the prisoners Japan had lost and they were now free.

"You can just walk anywhere you want," Fung said. "We didn't take revenge on the guards. Nobody said anything, but we all decided hate has to stop somewhere.

"I have never had a bad day since that day."

After the war, Johnny Johnson had a successful business career. He lives in Lafayette and still works.

Bill Duncan also went into business. He is retired but is an engineering officer aboard the memorial ship Jeremiah O'Brien. Eddie Fung is retired and lives in Santa Cruz. His autobiography will be published in November. Don Jardine had a long career in international banking. He lives in San Francisco.

Bill Mason is a professor emeritus at San Francisco State University. He lives in San Francisco.

E-mail Carl Nolte at cnolte@sfchronicle.com.