 How are you doing, Tim? Money hot, huh? Yes. Three-year-old Sarge nursing his baby. Hiya, Sarge. Hiya, fellas. In a few minutes I'll have an anniversary. Four years with a division. A lot has happened in four years. For one thing, new faces have come into the outfit. Only a few of us now remember the faces that haven't been around for a while. Faces that go back two, three, or even four years. In World War I, our outfit tramped all over France. Got the name Sightseeing Six. And we got along a little in World War II. Sarge, how about some singing? Okay. What do you want? Got something about Hawaii? Hey, that's for me. A hula dance is a pretty sight to see, soldier. And a hula girl is nice beside the sea. Yes, the Six had a good look at Hawaii. But when we shipped out, it wasn't only hula girls we were leaving. A wahoo was amphibious training. Plenty of it. And we didn't mind leaving. We had talked about the war. We were trained for it. Now we had to get moving. Going over, we thought it was going to be Australia. But it turned out to be New Guinea. In only Bay. It's about to work at the bars together. Beautiful New Guinea. Rich golden sunsets. Tall palm trees with coconuts. All you can eat. And fine California weather. Day after day. So this was home. Started to set up housekeeping and meet the neighbors. It was a pretty comfortable routine. If this was life in the Southwest Pacific, it wasn't as bad as they said it was going to be. But after a while, the usual thing happened. Somebody remembered our name, the Scythe and Six. And we had to move again. We had just gotten nicely set up in our jungle home when we were involved in a trip up the coast to Maffin Bay. It was a routine move. We wouldn't go in fighting. But when they put K-rations in our hands and said we'd occupy defense positions, we started thinking. Didn't take long to find out. Two days later, that first battle. First, we were walking. Then, creeping. The first time we were hugging Mother Earth. Lone Tree Hill. The silliest name for a hill you ever heard of. The Six hit the bloodiest ten days of the New Guinea camp. It was the first time we smelled jabs. First time we saw our own buddies killed. We kept pushing. We grunted up that hill. The closer to the top, the hotter it got. We took Lone Tree Hill. The men who fought there wanted to become heroes. They just wanted to do their job. Wanted to get it over with. There's something else to remember about Maffin Bay. Our base area was built on a solid foundation of mud. Whatever the new job was, we'd been baptized. Some of us had a chance for a last dip before leaving. We'd done some fighting. We were off on another job. We didn't help feeling like seasoned troops. Next up, way out on the western tip of New Guinea. Sandsapar. While the Amtrak took two small islands off the beach, the rest of us drove toward the mainland. It was a cool gray dawn. A little quiet. And very wet. There was no opposition. What were we here for? Then the picture got clearer. We weren't looking for a fight. Our mission in Sandsapar was to gain an air strip. We did it business-like. First a beach head. Then up the coast to secure our right flank. We walked down the coast on our left flank. Some japs in the area. Retreating. We cut them off. Right and left flanks accounted for. We controlled Sandsapar. All this time the engineers were busy. They started working on that strip the day we got ashore. There was an air strip on Sandsapar in record time. Soon the fly boys were getting the lowdown on their first mission. Colonel Smetcher told you that this is our first mission out of Sandsapar. The 6th and 9th will lead the 7th Attacks. The takeoff will be at 0940. We'll be able to target at 12 o'clock. We'll go from Sandsapar to Dampere Strait and then direct to the target. You have two squads and they'll go down and strafe up to the target. Sandsapar was paying off. The air force was striking at Borneo and up toward the Philippines. And there was something else in the air. An atmosphere of something big about to happen. We got little talks about things to come. Stuff to think about. Then came the loading. Every day the job was loading. More and more LSTs pulled up to the beach. Day after day we moved in the stuff for our next battle. Finally the ships were jam packed. We were getting ready for the biggest thing in the Pacific. The Philippines. Sandsapar wound up the New Guinea campaign. The victory was duly recorded. And the sightseer set sail from beautiful New Guinea. Paradise of the Southwest Pacific. Hoping never to return again. There was one thing we had behind us. The sightseeing sixth had been together for a long time. In one briefing after another they gave us the details. The lady had been invaded. We were going to bite off a bigger chunk of the Philippines. Luzon and Manila. But no Jap kamikazes or anything else were going to stop us from landing at Lingayan Gulf. Before the attack. An evening like any other evening in the tropics. Beautiful sky coming up. A long battle for Luzon. Funny looking back on the first few days. Not much trouble. The Japs just seemed to have left town. But the Japs were pretty close. Just off our left flank. They were out to blast our beach head. To silence those guns. One of our combat teams went into the hills. They called it the Purple Heart Valley campaign. Got those Jap guns and the stuff kept rolling ashore. The Luzon campaign was off to a start. The rest of the division was moving down the Central Plains area. Easy going until the Japs started playing games. Hide-and-seek. With us out in the open and them having all the hiding places. The Cameroon Hills. On the way south there was one little town being softened up for us by airstrikes. A town called Munoz. When we got to the town it seemed to be asleep. Or dead. No activity. Then Jap tanks and infantry. The first blow made us die. But we hit back. So we slipped around to the back door and opened without knocking. The nips were trapped. One night they tried to pull out. We had tanks and heavy guns lined up along the highway waiting. Just waiting for this. We ran out to take a look. We had knocked out the biggest collection of Jap armor ever encountered. You can say this about the Siceers. Give them a job. Anything. Any place. They'll do it. Drive across Luzon. Split the Japs in half. Check. Drive to Batan. Check. Crack the Schimble Line. Well that one can't be checked off so quick. With Manila taken by the first cavalry in the 37th Division the danger came now from the mountains east of the city. The Japs were high up again and behind the Schimble Line. It was down into the valley and up the hill. Again, one damn hill after the other. Around those mountains it felt like a walking target. The Japs always had perfect observation. The perfect approach was knocking us out. We decided to set out on a new tack. Those hills. Banzai Hill, for example. They had to be taken all the way to the top and then all the way down the other side. And after every hill a counter attack. You could depend on it. After 112 days of this stuff we cracked the Schimble Line. We were pulled out for a rest. But some Japs came up. MP work in Manila. Check. Guarding highways. Check. Mop up the central Luzon area. Check. A nice rest. We came back from the rest to watch the Air Force burning out of trail forms into the north. We went after General Yamashita and his Imperial Japs headquarters. Just follow Highway 4. Highway 4, especially those days, was not a good highway. There weren't any speed laws, but you just couldn't make any time. Highway 4 was a lousy highway. It took us right into the jungle. We had been here before. This was New Guinea country. This was New Guinea, right down to the rain. The 6th Division had an answer to the jungle supply problem. Hard work. The country changed. We got closer to the Imperial Japs headquarters. In this position the sightseers didn't see much country. The fighting was getting tougher. We kept moving forward, K by K. General Yamashita had his back to the wall in northern Luzon. Sixth was poised for the final push when the Japanese Empire surrendered. But the word was slow getting around to the Japs. So at the end of the war the sightseers were the most heavily engaged troops in the United States Army. We didn't get to take part in any formal surrenders. Our outfit had another mission. We pulled out of the lines and sent to Korea. So here we are. I wouldn't be in another outfit. Take it easy, gentlemen.