Presents interviews, photographs, letters, oral histories, stories, eyewitness accounts, and excerpts from historical writings from different perspectives on a wide variety of topics related to the Second World War.

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. Part 4. The Pacific war -- "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 Peery 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 -- Part 5. Postwar -- "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.