The Green Box: At the Heart of War

MARTIN SHEEN: World War II: a boy witnesses an air battle over the Alps and can never forget.

A world away, another boy longs for the father he can never remember.

JIM KURTZ: There's an unwritten rule in our home that no one goes up into the attic where the green box is.

MARTIN: He dares to open a forbidden box that may hold answers, but only finds more questions.

A mystery that lasts over 50 years, until a strange invitation arrives revealing the epic courage of his father.

Heroism in a doomed plane.

DEBBIE BESON: I thank him for my life.

If Jim's father never would have helped my father, maybe I never would have been here.

MARTIN: Imprisonment in the notorious POW camp that launched The Great Escape; an infamous death march across a frozen Europe.

LT.

COL.

ALEXANDER JEFFERSON: It was cold as hell, and you marched along with the rest of the men, always hungry, simply surviving.

MARTIN: Finally, hearts cracked by the sacrifices that saved the world.

This is the astonishing true story unleashed by the secrets of The Green Box.

JIM: I don't remember much about my early childhood, but I always felt deeply loved, by my mom and my three brothers.

We were bonded forever by the loss of our father.

MARTIN: In his 60s Jim Kurtz wrote a book about the father he never knew: Robert Kurtz who died when Jim was only two years old.

The story he learned took a lifetime to uncover.

At its center lay an event which took place high in the Austrian Alps in the depths of World War II.

August 3rd, 1944, a perfect Summer morning.

In the village of Ehrwald people picnicked, enjoying the weather.

Suddenly they heard the familiar drone and looked up to see Allied bombers returning from a mission, being chased by German fighter planes.

(bell tolls) (plane engines rumble) For 8-year-old Gerd Leitner, the air battle he witnessed was terrifying.

(Speaking English) MARTIN: During those few short minutes, 31 American airmen and 5 German pilots were killed.

The parachutes saved the lives of 49 Americans.

But within a few short hours most of them were captured and taken prisoner by Nazi troops stationed in the area.

For all the combatants, the air battle would change their lives...forever.

For Gerd that moment would also be pivotal, setting him on a course of peace and reconciliation.

It also gave him the key to a mysterious green box in an attic on the other side of the world.

Jim grew up knowing that his father Bob had fought in WWII, but that was it.

His mother Peggy had been so traumatized by his father's death that she could not even speak of him.

And she had to raise 4 young boys alone.

JIM: The interesting thing is no one ever talked about my father.

My mother's grief was so huge that if we would bring up my dad's name, she would cry, her eyes would well up.

And I think- I remember from that first time I have any memories of all that, asking about him, to be told me not to either by my brothers... my mother would never say don't ask me... you just could look at her face and you knew that was gonna be a bad idea.

I will never ever forget that day.

I was eight and I ran up those stairs and remember coming around the corner and seeing the olive drab shine.

it was screamingly hot, so hot.

I waited for my three brothers to go out and play and my mom was vacuuming downstairs, so I knew I had like about a minute or two window.

I opened that up and it opened up the rest of my life.

MARTIN: In the green box, Jim found a treasure trove of objects, that at first, he didn't understand: papers, ID cards, a medal.

And seemingly, oddly out of place, a pair of faded pink baby slippers.

He also found a typed account of a war pilot's day... and reading his father's words, Jim encountered his father's voice for the first time... YOUNG VOICE READING LETTER: A combat mission actually involves a full twenty-four hours... MALE VOICE CONTINUES: It's hard to know where it begins and ends.

With full gas and bomb load plus the ever-present prop wash from the ships just ahead, the take-off is packed with potential danger.

But you make it alright, find your proper place in the formation and continue in the assembly of the group... MARTIN: A story, letters, medals, baby shoes?

JIM: The worst part was I could not ask my mother about them, because I was not supposed to be up there in the first place, and I knew I was gonna get punished.

MARTIN: In the next few years, Jim would sneak up to the green box hoping to solve the mystery of his father's war... to no avail.

When he was young, Jim didn't understand his mother's grief... a love story rooted in a time of war.

It was Spring 1941.

The war in Europe had been raging for 18 months.

Germany had annexed, occupied, and invaded most of Europe.

France had fallen, and the brutal bombing of England had begun.

Popular opinion in the United States was against becoming involved in the war, but the writing was on the wall.

That April, Peggy Luther met Bob Kurtz at a church concert in White Plains, New York.

Peggy was nineteen, Bob was twenty-one.

Decades later, she told her son that she saw a man approaching and looked up into the warmest hazel green eyes she had ever seen.

Bob had been admiring Peggy in the previous months as they rode the same train into Manhattan, but it was only when they met in the church that he had the courage to sit down beside her, and as Peggy put it: "And so, it all began."

In the weeks and months that followed they dated and fell in love.

But the clock towards war was ticking... Not long after he and Peggy met, Bob was drafted.

He was inducted into the Army on July 23rd and shipped out to Camp Davis in North Carolina.

The lives of so many young men and women in the latter part of 1941 must have followed a similar pattern: uncertainty, romance, expectation, separation and hasty reunions... dreams, hopes, and fears.

JIM: As I grew older, I realized that these letters and telegrams told a piece of my parents' passionate love story.

MALE VOICE READING LETTER: I can't wait to take you in my arms again.

Bye for now, my baby.

I'll be seeing you real soon.

I love you with all my heart, soul and body.

FEMALE VOICE READING LETTER: Will arrive Cleveland main Terminal, 7:20 Saturday morning - meet you for breakfast - never had a better birthday present.

MALE VOICE READING LETTER: I hope you're very happy tonight dearest.

Wish I could be there with you.

(plane engines rumble) MARTIN: On December 7, 1941, the fears of war became reality.

The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor killed more than 2400 Americans and crippled or destroyed nearly 20 ships and 300 aircraft.

MALE VOICE READING TELEGRAM: Keep your chin up honey, I love you always.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Yesterday, December 7, 1941: a date which will live in infamy.

MARTIN: The next day the U.S.

declared war on Japan.

Catapulted into war, the U.S.

needed pilots in the first conflict to be fought as much in the air as at sea or on battlefields.

Horrified by the events, nonetheless the war allowed Bob Kurtz to fulfill a lifelong dream... he had always wanted to fly planes.

Within weeks of Pearl Harbor Bob was accepted into the Army Air Corps.

Most young fliers were single, but on March 28, 1942, Bob and Peggy were married.

JIM: When he finally found out that he had been accepted into the aviation school, they took a three-day honeymoon in Boston, which was supposed to be a two week one - but they called him back to service.

He was just an incurable romantic; I mean he did things that I discovered in that box.

While he was training out in California, he found out that my mother was pregnant.

He was given a fifteen-day furlough, and he hitched 3000 miles to White Plains, New York and made it back in fifteen days.

MARTIN: Before the war, Bob dreamed of being a writer and this story was published in the National magazine.

MALE VOICE READING STORY: I reached home in four days - 100 hours to be exact - but it's not the speed of my trip that was important, rather it was the spirit, the friendliness of all those people... JIM: My dad couldn't be there when my oldest brother was born but a telegram revealed his joy.

MALE VOICE READING STORY: You have made me the happiest fellow in all the world today.

MARTIN: The green box provided Jim with tantalizing clues about his father, but until he was in his 50s that was all he had.

It took the unexpected intervention of an eyewitness to open the door to his father's story.

Gerd Leitner, the eight-year-old boy who had witnessed a horrific air battle over his home in the Alps located Jim.

In the years after the war, Gerd had become an expert mountain climber and guide.

He'd found metal skeletons of the many planes that went down on that fateful day.

He resolved to bring together as many of the surviving men and their families as he could, building a bridge of reconciliation and peace.

In August of 2001, Gerd organized the first memorial of the air battle he had witnessed.

JIM: It wasn't until I was 52 years old that I really finally got a chance to find something out about my father.

(Speaking English) MARTIN: Fifty-seven years after the battle, Jim Kurtz found himself hiking 6,500 feet up The Alps with other descendants of American airmen, to a place called the Brendlkar.

There they saw the mangled remains of an American B-24 Bomber.

JIM: I remember my knees wobbling a little, just to know that my father had been - you know, luckily they bailed out, but he had been there, that high up in the Alps, and luckily he was able to get out of the plane.

I was struck pretty hard with emotion.

I remember holding that piece of his co-pilots chair up to the sky and I thanked God for letting him get through it.

MARTIN: Gerd Introduced Jim to survivors of the battle, children of servicemen who knew his father and witnesses to the events.

(Speaking English) JIM: I finally got the opportunity to talk to people that he had served with.

His navigator was still alive, his bombardier was still alive.

So now I was getting a perspective from a friend, a guy he might have had a few beers with.

They revealed unknown stories and brought my father to life for me.

(indistinct chatter) MARTIN: For Bob Kurtz the air battle that ended his career as a B-24 bomber pilot began early in the morning of August 3, 1944.

Their mission: to bomb an ammunition factory in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Bomber crewmen had to complete 35 missions before they could go home; by the end of a tour their chance of survival was a slim 25 percent.

The Friedrichshafen mission was considered so dangerous that it counted double.

By August 3, Bob had completed over 20 missions.

Jim had read his father's feelings about these missions decades before.

MALE VOICE READING LETTER: You experience a 50-50 feeling.

Fifty percent happiness because it's going to count double, fifty percent uneasy stomach because the chances are very good that it will be rougher than usual.

MARTIN: While the 10-man crew knew that any mission was dangerous, little did they know as they climbed into their plane just how fateful this mission would be.

Their B-24 - nicknamed "Sugar Baby" - took off with the rest of the squadron from an airbase in Italy.

(plane engines rumble) Flying northeast towards their target, they were joined by the fighter wing that would protect them.

Jim was stunned to learn that his father's B-24 was escorted by none other than Tuskegee airmen, the Red Tails - recognized by the characteristic paint on the rear of their planes.

This elite group of Black fighter pilots would later become famous for their skill and courage.

In 2016, Jim was able to meet one of the pilots who flew fighter support on his father's fateful mission.

General Charles McGee was one of the most distinguished U.S.

pilots in history.

GEN.

CHARLES MCGEE: Our tasking was to help keep the airs clear so that the bombers could do their job, but at the same time it meant saving lives because on each bomber lost, that's ten American lives that in many cases that were lost.

It was an important mission and fortunately, we performed it successfully.

JIM: In the story he wrote, he depended on you, and the Tuskegee Airmen and the other fighter support, he called them I believe "pups frolicking on a lawn" is the way he put it, because he was so happy to see you out there - he'd look out the side of the cockpit and see... GEN.

MCGEE: Well, you know we all had our markings for identification because back then the men in the groups didn't know that the then Redtails were Black pilots because our activity was still segregated overseas.

We had separate facilities, separate bases and in the air, you've got on your helmet, oxygen mask and goggles and all, you can't tell who's behind all of that.

So, for a long time, many of the pilots didn't know that there were Black pilots flying because we didn't live together; we didn't share the same club facilities or rest camps.

I don't have specific memories of that mission, that day.

Yet we know we shared it, because our log-books show us that we were both in the air at the same time.

JIM: Meeting Gen.

McGee was an incredible honor.

His memories let me see my dad's fateful flight almost as if I'd been there.

MARTIN: Another surviving Tuskegee airman remembers what those missions were like.

LT.

COL.

JEFFERSON: It was exciting, the P-51 flew above the bombers and protected the B-17s and B-24s from being shot down by the German fighters.

The Germans had anti-tank guns and aircraft guns, they were trying to shoot you down and you were trying to shoot them down.

It was a dangerous flight.

You were subject to being shot down and ended up as a POW like me.

(explosions) MARTIN: Lt.

Colonel Alexander Jefferson was not part of Bob Kurtz's mission, but the Germans also shot down the young pilot in August of 1944; he and Bob Kurtz would soon find themselves in the same place.

On August 3rd, protected by their fighter escorts, Sugar Baby's squadron dropped their bombs and headed back to base.

Over the Austrian Alps, not far from the German border, the successful mission turned into a disaster.

GHOST VOICE: Five o'clock high.

Two German fighters, coming in hot!

MARTIN: A group of German fighter planes flew up from a nearby base and attacked.

GHOST VOICE: Can't get him.

MARTIN: One of Sugar Baby's eight-plane formation was hit.

(gunfire) GHOST VOICE: I can't hold him.

MARTIN: Pilot Larry Crane dropped back to assist; and Sugar Baby and seven other planes were shot down.

GHOST VOICE: Other formations hit.

Bail Out.

MARTIN: It was just before noon.

The men had only moments to bail out - moments during which Bob Kurtz made a decision.

JIM: I found out that my dad was a hero in a strange place - on the top of a mountain.

MARTIN: At the crash site in 2001, Jim learned the story from Debbie Beson, another of the children from the Sugar Baby crew.

DEBBIE BESON: I said "Jim, I'm glad to meet you, "because if it wasn't for your father, "I don't know if my dad would have made it out alive."

JIM: She said, "As you know, "my dad was a substitute gunner on August 3, 1944, "and he's still living now, "and the only reason he is still alive, is because of your father."

And that's what she said to me, and I just, you know, my mouth hung open - I said, "What are you talking about?"

DEBBIE: When his plane was shot down and burning, he was in the top turret.

When he dropped down into the main area he looked up and he saw the copilot, brushing the fire off his leg, because some shrapnel had hit him and was burning on his pant leg.

JIM: She said everyone had gotten off the plane, the plane was plummeting to the Earth on fire.

Your dad was going to be the last man off the plane he thought, until he heard screaming from up above.

DEBBIE: And Dad was struggling to get his parachute, and the wires from the radio and stuff like that so that he can get his parachute properly on before he bailed out.

JIM: The parachute cords were tangled in the wreckage and he couldn't get out.

DEBBIE: The copilot came back and helped Dad get the wire so that Dad could get the parachute on properly.

And that was Jim Kurtz's father.

JIM: And my dad had to make that last split minute decision whether to jump or to go help.

His name is Tony Jezowski, he went back up.

He freed Tony's cords.

They jumped out of the plane, and five seconds later the plane blew up.

(plane engine rumbles) (gunfire) So she's a very important person to me, and we just sit there and look at each other realizing that, you know, we both kind of owe each other's existence to these men that got through that day.

MARTIN: With a shrapnel injury, and having risked his own life to make sure that the young gunner made it out of the plane, Bob Kurtz parachuted out, landing somewhere on the side of the mountain.

While it was a peaceful summer day in the village of Ehrwald, nonetheless it was a country in Nazi territory.

Enemy soldiers occupied the area, and having seen the air battle, they were soon hunting the survivors.

Two of Sugar Baby's crew died in the crash - Lawrence Hamilton and Charlie Sellers, who was on his last flight before going home.

The rest were now trying to evade capture in enemy territory.

Amazingly, Bob Kurtz's rapid capture was witnessed by a little girl who was picnicking with her family.

Her story revealed the most perplexing relic in the green box.

JIM: In 2001 in Ehrwald, I met a woman named Hilda Richter and she said, "I saw your father get captured."

And I said, "How did you know it was my father?"

And she said, "Well my brother and my mom, "we were out in the meadow "at 11:30 on a gorgeous day "playing underneath the pines.

"And here comes this air battle, "and 30 seconds later she's looking up at planes, "and people, and parachutes falling from the sky."

And then she says, "I see your father coming over the top of the hill "with three German soldiers running after him.

"They caught up to him, "they knocked him to the ground, "they were beating him, they probably would have killed him."

(Speaking English) JIM: And he reached inside his bomber jacket and pulled out a little fluffy baby slipper, showed it to the men that were beating him (Speaking English) JIM: They stopped beating him and took him prisoner.

And then the little bell went off and I thought back to the green box and I had forgotten that there were two little baby slippers in that green box and now it all made sense, one of those was the one my dad used to save his life.

MARTIN: Before Bob left for overseas, he and Peggy each took one of a pair of their young son's baby slippers to keep with them always: a talisman of hope that the slippers, and the young family, would eventually be reunited.

The slipper had saved Bob's life, eliciting compassion from his captors.

But it could not save him from what lay ahead.

He was now a prisoner of the Third Reich.

On the home front, Peggy learned much about the war from newsreels shown at movies theaters.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Pilots of the U.S.

8th Air Force Fighter Command, they carry the sky war to the enemy by daylight.

MARTIN: The newsreels were a blend of facts and propaganda.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Paratroops, tank corps, all the sleek and polished machinery of 20th century warfare, reminding the nation, telling the world that America is on the march.

MARTIN: Communication methods were slow.

Bob was shot down on August 3.

Peggy didn't learn he was missing in action until over two weeks later.

It was not until September 6, 1944 that she received a telegram informing her that he was alive but a POW.

For over a month she hadn't known if her husband was alive or dead.

The telegram was a relief, but it began a long period of anguish for both, Peggy on the home front and Bob in what was to become the most famous POW camp of World War II... Stalag Luft III.

To this day, the camp - part of Nazi Germany during the war, now located in the Polish town of Zagan - remains infamous.

A museum there is dedicated to the prisoners.

Five months before Bob's arrival, 76 allied prisoners made a mass escape through a tunnel dug under the camp's heavily guarded fence.

Stalag Luft III was the site of the so-called Great Escape.

Jim Kurtz and his son Mike came to the museum in the summer of 2019 to learn about Bob's life in the POW camp.

They were welcomed by Marek Lazarz the museum director.

He leads the on-going research and is dedicated to understanding and honoring the lives of those who were held captive.

MAREK LAZARZ: The remains of the huts, of the buildings, there are still many of them in the camp: hut 104 - The Great Escape hut, the walls of the theater... just, woods, just the camps roads.

I can feel the camp.

I went through the hundreds of pictures of the camp and for normal tourists, the camp is today a beautiful wood, but for me, it's a camp.

I see people, I can hear the voices.

I can hear the conversations.

It's a kind of magic and it's still here.

MARTIN: Remembering the events and the heroes of the escape is key to understanding the new world that Bob Kurtz entered in August of 1944.

MAREK: Fifty black names are those who were executed by the Gestapo.

Blue names, are 23 who survived The Great Escape.

They were captured.

And they were taken back to the camp.

JIM: And then three?

MAREK: So only three of them made it home.

JIM: Wow.

MARTIN: Prior to the escape, the lives of POWs were protected by The Geneva Convention.

Under international rules, prisoners were required to be treated humanely.

The soldiers at Stalag Luft III enjoyed the use of an extensive library, had an active theater, engaged in sports, and were even allowed to be escorted out of the camp for walks.

After March of 1944 much of that changed.

MAREK: Stalag Luft III was run, was built and administrated by the Luftwaffe, by the German Air Force, which means that the pilots, watched the pilots and it was kind of mutual respect between the guards and the prisoners of war.

After the execution of the 50, both the prisoners of war and the guards were terrified.

And they were shocked because it was a war crime, and nobody expected that.

So, that's why also the relations became colder.

MARTIN: Bob Kurtz arrived into this harsher camp environment.

It was the small details of his father's life there that moved Jim the most.

JIM: I think you and I have to go and stand where your grandfather took a shower.

This is what I need to do, stand in my father's footsteps.

MIKE: Yeah.

MAREK: We are here.

So, what you can see?

We're standing right in front of the door and you see the corridor here, rooms on the right and on the left, so this was - you see the wall was right here; that's the main shower room... JIM: Mm-hmm.

And there's your drain.

MAREK: In the middle.

JIM: Basically, this is where my father took a shower.

MAREK: Absolutely.

JIM: Walking in here, I got goosebumps.

I'd sensed my father throughout my entire journey, but I really, really felt him here more than any place.

Standing inside these pines... God, it took me over.

I can almost hear his voice.

(indistinct voice) LT.

COL.

JEFFERSON: Life as a prisoner was never easy - outdoor toilets, just the building.

Food was at a premium, always.

Weather was always rough.

Life was rough.

MARTIN: Tuskegee Airman, Alexander Jefferson arrived in the camp just a few days before Bob Kurtz.

They may never have met but their experiences were similar.

Fellow prisoner Second Lieutenant Bob Doolan had arrived at the camp a year earlier.

His artistic skills caught details of daily life.

2ND LT.

BOB DOOLAN: The center compound where I was, was primitive; we had no water.

We had a washhouse, but no toilets.

The only toilet facilities was a trough at the end, and a bucket.

We had a old-fashioned circular stove for heat.

MARTIN: The stove cooked what little food the prisoners had.

Some came in Red Cross parcels provided by the international organization.

Regular before the escape, afterwards they were reduced at the camp.

2ND LT.

DOOLAN: The Red Cross package was supposed to be enough food for one man for seven days.

That's fine except you had to share it because there was a 12 ounce can of SPAM, a 12 ounce can of corned beef.

Then we formed essentially families; we called them combines.

Four or five, ten men in a combine so we could share the stuff that was difficult for one man to eat.

The Germans gave us mostly soup, we called them the black death and the green death.

They were barely edible.

MARTIN: Beset by constant hunger, uncertainty, and boredom, an essential lifeline for the prisoners was word from home.

MAREK: Prisoners of war were allowed to write letters from home, they could receive letters from home.

After The Great Escape, some of the letters were stopped, or just because of the damages of the railway, outcoming and incoming mail was just stopped.

MARTIN: A few of Bob Kurtz's letters home to his parents survive: MALE VOICE READING LETTER: Dearest Folks, all is going fine.

This past week I read three biographies.

They have a very good library here and of course I have plenty of time to read.

MARTIN: Bob's early letters minimized the hardships of camp life.

But he wasn't getting any letters... he only received one of the letters that Peggy wrote daily.

He spent nine months behind the barbed wire, with no idea of what was happening at home... no word of his growing young son, no words of comfort from Peggy.

This was a situation that Lt.

Col.

Alexander Jefferson understood.

LT.

COL.

JEFFERSON: The silent longing for loved ones whom were never quite sure we would see again.

It was equally difficult.

It was life as a POW.

MARTIN: The lack of mail was particularly hard on Bob.

His crewmate, Joe Spontak, also held at Stalag Luft III, remembers him being depressed.

JANE DONOVAN: My father talked about Robert Kurtz, and that he was in a different building than my father.

He would see him and he would be so despondent.

He attributes a lot of that to the fact that he did have a wife and child stateside.

LT.

COL.

JEFFERSON: One or two out of the ten men in the room had nightmares.

There were a lot of men who just couldn't take it psychologically.

Anytime the Germans are firing at your plane, and explosions in that belly of that plane and your comrades are hit - their insides are all over the plane.

You see horrible death, all hell breaking loose.

And you age.

This is where boys became men overnight.

MAREK: There were many wounds they carried after the war.

The camp life had a great impact on them.

Sometimes it changed in brutal ways.

Some of the prisoners became drinkers after the war.

And it changed their life, forever I think.

MARTIN: At the end of November 1944, Bob had been a POW for four months.

A letter to his parents gives us another glimpse of his life and of his sadness.

MALE VOICE READING LETTER: I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving.

We're still holding faint hopes for Christmas, but I'm afraid it isn't going to be this year... Still looking forward to my first letter - it will be a wonderful day.

Love, Bob.

MARTIN: Peggy did write him before Christmas, and it is the only letter Bob received, but not until months later.

FEMALE VOICE READING LETTER: Tonight was the white gift service at church... I came very near to tears.

Somehow, Christmas can't be much without you, sweet.

I miss you more than ever if that's possible, Bobby I imagine will save the day, and I only wish you had him to help yours.

(car engines rumble) MARTIN: By the close of 1944, it was becoming clear that unless something totally unexpected happened, the Allies would win the war.

In Europe the Nazis were being squeezed between two massive armies, the British and Americans approaching from the west and the Russians from the east.

2ND LT.

DOOLAN: December 1944, there were three rumors.

One rumor is the Germans are going to kill us all, because the Russians are now only 100 miles away.

They're at Auschwitz, in east Poland.

The second rumor was the Germans are just going to pull stakes and run away and leave us for the Russians, and that was equally bad.

The third rumor was, they're going to walk us out of there.

By this time, there were 10,000 of us.

So, we're sitting there, there's no way they can walk 10,000 prisoners out of here.

January 29th, we found different.

MARTIN: That night, in one of the worst blizzards on record, Bob Kurtz, Alexander Jefferson, Robert Doolan, Joe Spontak and approximately 11,000 other allied prisoners and their guards marched out of the prison camp westwards into the heart of Germany.

Hitler's mass evacuation of all the POW camps in the path of the Russian advance, took place in one of the coldest winters of the 20th century.

Between January and April of 1945, as many as 80,000 POWs, plus tens of thousands of civilians marched hundreds of miles.

They had what little food they could carry and the clothes on their backs.

2ND LT.

DOOLAN: We started walking at two o'clock in the morning.

It was about ten degrees temperature and about eight inches of snow on the ground.

For the first five hours, I don't remember seeing anything except the rear ends of the three men ahead of me.

We walked twelve miles that night.

No water.

You can eat all the snow you want, and it doesn't quench your thirst, you're still just as thirsty.

JANE: It was very significant in his life, and in some ways that, it seemed to me that that march was more significant than the time he spent in the prison camp.

2ND LT.

DOOLAN: Some of the men had somehow gotten small sleds.

Several men have bad frostbite and blisters and were limping.

So my best friend from navigation school had such bad feet he had to be carried in one of the carts.

DEBBIE: It was one of the hardest winters, he said they got four in a group and they would lay their blankets down in the snow - one down, and then they'd use the other three blankets on top, and they would just get comfortable and the bugs would start climbing all around them and you'd hear the English Air Force flying by bombing, and he says it was a horrible experience.

JIM: My dad was walking in that, 10 miles, 20 miles a day in snow, no food.

Most of them were sick, already, and no place to get warm.

JANE: He talked a lot about how cold it was.

the people who were just starved and so sick and would drop out of line.

JIM: Men laying down on the road and giving up.

They just could not go any further, whether due to illness or the cold.

Other men just picking them up and throwing them on their backs or pushing them or holding them up and making them continue.

DEBBIE: And when they were on that death march, he always called it the death march because a lot of people did die on that.

But what they got to eat was sawdust, potato peelings with a lot of dirt on 'em.

It's amazing that the guys survived what they had to go through that winter.

MARTIN: A starvation diet, relentless cold, no medical support, and having no idea where they were headed... many men carried physical and emotional scars that lasted a lifetime.

DEBBIE: I said, "Dad, you never tell us anything - much about that march."

And he got really mad at me.

And he turned to me and he says, "What do you want me to tell you?"

He says, "Do you want me to tell you how my friend had dysentery "and was blood all the way down his pants.

"And then the next thing you know, "they take him out of the marching line "into the woods.

You hear a gun shot and you never see him again?"

And he turned around and walked away and never said any more.

LT.

COL.

JEFFERSON: It was cold as hell.

And you marched along with the rest of the men.

Always hungry.

Simply surviving, simply surviving.

MARTIN: Somehow, Bob Kurtz survived the long march.

By April of 1945 he was in his final POW camp in Moosburg, Germany, waiting for the war to end.

In a compound designed to hold 20,000 men, 130,000 cramped, hungry desperate prisoners waited... for freedom.

On April 29th, General George Patton's tank division liberated the camp.

Six days later the Nazis surrendered, and less than a month later Bob Kurtz came home.

For Peggy there had been stress of a different kind than Bob's: months of not knowing if he would survive combat missions; weeks of not knowing if he was alive or dead, followed by the uncertainties of what his life in a prison camp was like.

She spent her time caring for their baby son, and writing letters of encouragement to the families of other Sugar Baby crew members, terrified for their loved ones.

FEMALE VOICE READING LETTER: I've had several friends who've been forced down over enemy territory and are now prisoners.

However more times than not it has taken nearly six months before they've been heard from.

In this way, I feel that you will no doubt hear something soon.

Perhaps your son landed several miles from some of the others and was able to escape being taken prisoner and is with the underground, as happened so many times.

JIM: My mother's courage to me was almost equally as important as my father's.

She had to stay back home - wonder how he was doing.

In our age of electronics now, if something happens to someone overseas, you'll Skype 'em or you'll get a email and know something's happened.

MARTIN: When the ship of returning soldiers came into New York Harbor, it seemed like the trauma for both lovers was over.

The pink baby shoes were reunited, as was the young family.

But in common with so many other war-time survivors, there were emotional and physical consequences still to be paid.

DEBRA MICHALS: I think the biggest adjustment is when people came home injured, and that changes everything.

So, you've got about 650,000 wounded, returning to the U.S.

after the war, and you can't return to any kind of normalcy when that happens.

MARTIN: When Bob came home, Peggy thanked God that his battle wound had healed; she had no way of knowing that Bob had hidden injuries.

He and Peggy had a second honeymoon, and with Bobby, settled into a home near their parents in White Plains, New York.

Second Lt.

Robert Kurtz was relieved of duty on September 22, 1945, twenty days after the official end of World War II.

To all outward appearances, his future was filled with promise.

It was not the same for all returning veterans.

For Black soldiers, some of whom had experienced a degree of equality - even in a segregated military, the future was less rosy.

LT.

COL.

JEFFERSON: Life in the United States as a Black man, in 1940 was hell.

POW life was mild considering segregation and discrimination in the United States, as a Black man in 1940, '41, '42.

Even when you got home, racism, segregation.

At least in Stalag Luft III, I was treated as an equal.

MARTIN: For all veterans, regardless of color, there were physical and emotional wounds.

These wounds affected not only the veterans themselves, but their families and communities.

JIM: These men and women were expected to come back from war, pick their lives right back up, get the GI Bill and buy a house, and have kids and act like nothing ever happened.

DR.

MATTHEW FRIEDMAN: There was a cultural issue in the '40s about that males didn't express emotions.

So, stiff upper lip, you kept it under control.

DEBRA: And really, we don't even have a language of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, until after Vietnam.

But that doesn't mean men weren't coming home traumatized.

I mean think of the things they must have seen.

MARTIN: Sugar Baby crew member Joe Spontak, who tried to cheer Bob up in prison camp, had PTSD: Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It affected the rest of his life.

JANE: My father's PTSD certainly had an impact on me.

My bedroom was across the hall from my parents' bedroom and my father always would be shouting throughout the night, and he would be making noises, and I can remember it clearly.

He would say - he would go, "Ah, ah, ah" and my mother would - I would hear her say, "Joe, Joe, Joe" and he would come to.

I'd ask him about it in the morning and he would say, "Oh, I have these dreams about "falling out of the air and out of the sky.

I'm always falling."

Really almost every night he would go through that.

DR.

FRIEDMAN: The trauma itself has a life of its own.

You wanna go to sleep at night or you don't want to go to sleep because there's a nightmare waiting for you.

The most pathological symptom is the PTSD flashback.

For seconds or longer, think that you're back in the traumatic situation trying to protect yourself.

Your heart rate will go up, your blood pressure will go up, you'll start to shake, you're feeling tense.

JANE: My father was out of control.

We went to the fireworks and you know it makes all those little chit chit chit noises, and they're all kind of going off.

That sounds like the flak that was hitting in the air and the plane.

And my father started running to the car.

And it really took me back.

I saw a panic in him that was very abnormal.

MARTIN: Bob Kurtz returned seemingly healthy from his war experiences.

He got a job, and he and Peggy had three more boys, the youngest - Jim - was born in 1949.

But beneath the surface, internal injuries from disease, starvation and the horrendous conditions of the forced march were literally breaking his heart.

JIM: I've seen pictures of the last couple of years of his life, he did not look good.

I often wonder how much of the effects of war caused that early heart attack.

I do know that his physical abuse, in the POW camps, his starvation, his sickness, and everything contributed; he lost 60 pounds.

His autopsy proved that his heart was decalcified, he had occlusions all over the place, his liver was - it was all from starvation and diet basically is what they said.

If you want to add mental anguish to that - I'm sure that was part of it.

Physically, I think that's 90% of why he died... but there's got to be that other factor... the mental factor.

DR.

FRIEDMAN: He probably minimized it; I mean think about what this man went through: he spent years minimizing everything, minimizing the cold, minimizing the pain, minimizing the constant threat of death.

Feeling that he was now in the United States and safe, and yeah I have a little shortness of breath.

That isn't anything compared to what I've been through.

So certainly he might have neglected his own health.

MARTIN: When he was just 33 years old, and on his 10th wedding anniversary, Bob died of a massive heart attack in his bed next to his beloved wife Peggy.

Though his death occurred seven years after he returned home, Bob Kurtz was yet another casualty of war, leaving a bereft widow and a young family behind.

JIM: I've tried to talk to my brother Bob.

I've seen pictures, so I know he's got memories... He won't talk about it.

I think it just, it took too much, took probably just as much out of him as it did my mom.

He had to become the man of the family at nine years old.

DEBRA: Young boys always did that, right?

Especially in that time period.

And sometimes mothers even said, "Well, you're the man of the house now."

JIM: It was very, very hard on him.

I can't imagine being in that position myself.

It changed his life forever.

He doesn't open up about it and I don't blame him.

The whole process of growing up... you were the Kurtz kids that didn't have a father.

MARTIN: Peggy Kurtz raised the couple's four young sons as a single parent but she could never talk to them about their father.

JIM: When we would ask her about my dad's death or anything about him, she would basically curl up and say nothing... made me think that she mentally had some major issues - very possibly PTSD.

She couldn't deal or talk about it.

DR.

FRIEDMAN: It's possible that what Mrs.

Kurtz went through could be called trauma.

It's possible that she had PTSD.

It's a question.

MARTIN: In the 1950s and '60s, people didn't consider the possibility that widows and other family members might have been wounded by the war in any medical way.

Heroes were celebrated in thousands of homes, but in the Kurtz household, the green box, with its trove of medals and clues, lay hidden in the attic.

When young Jim Kurtz found them, he had no idea about the courageous story they told.

He was unaware of the tragic consequences that courage often had on thousands of families... including his own.

DEBRA: The cost of war is really all of the hopes and dreams that a family had before the war, before the soldier went away, before the soldier came back, either injured or didn't come back at all, or, had some ailment that took their life after the war.

JANE: I saw the very deep impactful meaning of that particular war, my father's situation and how that impacted him as a human being.

But his words of saying "I should have died that day," made the hair stand up on my back.

MARTIN: For Peggy Kurtz, who hid away all the reminders of Bob's war experiences, no heroic story or medal could ease her grief.

JIM: That was a woman who spent sixty years as a widow, basically in grief.

Although she loved her family and we did a lot of things together and we had a lot of loving experiences.

To me, she was always a sad woman.

MARTIN: In the rear-view mirror of history there can be a tendency to take the sting out of the past, to let the courage and the sacrifice blur the costs of war.

But they are written in the lives of whole communities and families - often multi-generational injuries inflicted not only on bodies, but on minds and hearts.

The wounds of war last long after the guns stop firing, and the bombs stop falling.

And they can take decades, often generations to heal.

Jim Kurtz's healing began when Gerd Leitner invited the surviving pilots and their families of the air battle he had witnessed as a child to Ehrwald.

JIM: It changed my entire life, he led me into journeys, he introduced me to people that would forever be a part of my life.

MARTIN: On August 3, 1944, in the latter part of one of the most tragic and impactful wars in human history, hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives were altered... lives were lost and lives were saved.

Future bridge builders were inspired; medals for courage in the face of incomparable suffering were awarded.

And many who endured suffering received no recognition for their invisible wounds.

JIM: My story is not just a World War II story.

I would like to have people understand what these people went through.

I also want them to know about my parents' love story.

MARTIN: After decades of research and pilgrimage in the footsteps of his father, Jim answered questions that arose when he first climbed into the attic as an eight-year-old boy.

He called his book: The Green Box.

JIM: While I was writing this book, many times I had to just stop, whether in tears or just shaking.

I'd find myself at times when I was writing about the long march, actually shivering.

So, I feel his feelings, I feel his cold, his starvation, his - his love.

These precious little items in this box, which at the time meant nothing to me.

Now, they mean everything to me, they are a fingerprint of history.

I've come to know my father better than anyone except of course my mom.

Our family isn't unique.

The effects of long-term grief and trauma are shared by many other families of veterans.

If we continue going through wars for the rest of our lives there will be fractured people forever.