A Latino veteran finally shares his battlefield tales

Like many men of his time, ex-Marine Bill Lansford kept his World War II stories to himself.

But now because of the widely publicized and still ongoing skirmish between filmmaker Ken Burns and a coalition of Latino groups, millions of television viewers are going to hear them on Sunday when Burns’ documentary series “The War” premieres on PBS.

The 85-year-old veteran, who was born and raised in East Los Angeles, the son of a Mexican actress and a Los Angeles cop, is one of two Latinos feverishly filmed and edited into the seven-part World War II documentary. The Playa del Rey resident’s last-minute inclusion into the highly touted 14-hour-plus project was part of a compromise reached earlier this year between Burns and Latino groups who were angered that their wartime experience was overlooked in the documentary’s original version.

“I’m just not part of that generation that’s out there saying, ‘Hey, look at me over here! Look what I did!’ ” said Lansford, who survived years of intense combat in the Pacific theater. “But if it’s for a cause, as in this case, to obviate an earlier omission, yeah, I’ll talk about things that I have not talked to anyone else about, ever.”

Ultimately, Lansford agreed to do the on-camera interview with Burns’ co-filmmaker, Lynn Novick, for two reasons: one, to highlight the contributions of Latinos during the war, and two, to draw attention to his long-standing goal of erecting a monument in Los Angeles to the nation’s 40 Latino Congressional Medal of Honor recipients.

“What people don’t understand is that before World War II, Latinos were invisible in Los Angeles; they were almost like foreigners in their own country,” added Lansford, whose plans for the Eugene A. Obregon/Congressional Medal of Honor Memorial were approved earlier this year by the Los Angeles City Council. “But World War II was a turning point. Why? Because guys remember the guys they served with. You’re not going to disrespect a man that helped save your life.”

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An unintended slight

His story, and those of fellow Marine Peter Arias, who now lives in Santa Maria, are tacked on to the end of “The War’s” first and sixth episodes. Also, a vignette about a Native American soldier who fought at Iwo Jima was attached to the end of the fifth episode.

Of the 16 million Americans who served In the U.S. military during World War II, the National World War II Museum in New Orleans estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 were Latinos -- although the museum point outs a firm number will never be known since Latinos were categorized as whites.

“I don’t believe Ken Burns or Lynn Novick meant to ignore Latinos,” said Lansford, a high school dropout who later became a successful television writer and author. “I think as Easterners they were simply unaware of Latino participation. Easterners think about the pilgrims, and we in the West think about the conquistadors -- and never the twain shall meet, you see?”

Throughout the controversy, Burns has maintained that his latest project was never intended as a textbook but rather as a “bottom up” history built primarily upon the personal accounts of a handful of men and women from four American towns. Burns, whose landmark 1990 documentary, “The Civil War,” is still the most-watched program ever on PBS, asked that judgment be withheld about “The War” and its half-hour of new Latino material until the program has aired.

“I think we’ve found the right balance, had the right compromise,” Burns said in an earlier interview. “That permitted us not to alter our original vision and version of the film and at the same time honor what was legitimate about the concerns of a group of people who, for 500 years, have had their story untold in American history.”

Some Latino groups, such as Defend the Honor, a nationwide grass-roots organization that sprang up after early previews of the Burns documentary were shown, remain angry over their community’s absence from the original project and are very skeptical about its latest incarnation. While they applaud the half-hour of additional Latino and Native American material, they argue it’s hardly enough to counterbalance a distorted impression created by the other 14 1/2 hours of the documentary.

“This has to stop. Burns has done this twice before with his documentaries on jazz and baseball, where he virtually puts us out of history,” said Armando Rendon, head of Defend the Honor’s campaign in Northern California, who is the nephew of four men who served in World War II. “That’s one of the reasons we’re still protesting, so it won’t happen again.”

But Lansford, who has seen the final cut, is generally satisfied given the time constraints the filmmakers were under. “You’re never going to win over everybody,” he said.

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Bloody memories

As with many veterans, Lansford found exhuming memories that included fierce guerrilla-style fighting at Guadalcanal and a blood-soaked month at Iwo Jima painful. He also discovered that overcoming a common generational hesitancy to discuss battlefield experiences was a challenge. During a subsequent interview for this story at his beachfront duplex, Lansford interrupted himself repeatedly with phrases like “I feel silly” or “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

In fact, the Purple Heart recipient was lucky to survive the war at all. Among other wounds, Lansford took shrapnel to his hand and back on Iwo Jima and also suffered severe hearing loss due to prolonged exposure to machine gun and artillery fire. Still, today the stocky, married father of two grown children is in remarkably sturdy condition and is as energetic and alert as someone decades younger.

Viewers of “The War” will first see Lansford talk about his time with an elite Marine commando unit known as Carlson’s Raiders, named for the battalion’s cunning commander, Evans Carlson. In winter 1942, when America was still reeling in the battle for the Pacific, the unit’s assignment was to land behind enemy lines at Guadalcanal and harass and otherwise occupy about 3,000 Japanese troops.

To get a coveted spot, Lansford interviewed with Carlson and the unit’s second in command, James Roosevelt, the oldest son of then President Franklin D. Roosevelt. One question posed to all candidates: Would you cut the throat of your best friend if you knew he was going to give away the patrol and there was no other way to silence him?

“I told them what I thought they wanted to hear, so I said, ‘Sure,’ ” remembered Lansford, who was then barely 20 years old and weighed little more than 130 pounds. “I compared notes with the other Marines later and they said the same thing. We didn’t realize until later that [Carlson] wasn’t kidding.”

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The Long Patrol

The ferocity of battle soon proved to be more than a game as the unit embarked on its dangerous 30-day mission, which later became known as the Long Patrol, revered even today in military circles for its daring. While living off the land in hostile territory, the Marines employed hit-and-run tactics, confusing the Japanese and killing nearly 500. (Though many suffered dysentery and other debilitating jungle illnesses, the Marines had fewer than 50 total battlefield casualties.)

“In the jungle, you fight sometimes maybe up to 10 feet apart,” he said. “It’s quick-draw time. The guy that levels his weapon, and fires first, wins.”

But some Marines didn’t perish fighting. Instead, they were captured and tortured to death, said Lansford. Some prisoners from his unit were staked out on the ground and systematically impaled by the cold steel of a Japanese bayonet, he said.

“We could hear them when they were being bayoneted,” recalled Lansford. “Our response was to reciprocate, except we didn’t torture them, we just shot them.”

As gruesome as jungle fighting was, it still wasn’t as horrible as the landing at Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945. By then, Lansford was a Marine sergeant aboard a landing craft heading for the shore of the strategically valuable island that would soon claim more than 6,800 American lives.

He remembers it as the single worst day of his life. While the first couple of troop waves made it ashore without being fired upon, by the time Lansford’s boat reached a quarter-mile from the beach, enemy artillery opened up. It lasted for three hours.

He survived the landing, but on the Ides of March he wasn’t as fortunate. He was hit by mortar fire in the hand and back and, because of the noise, he could barely hear. He sought medical treatment but continued to serve on the line until the battle was over, about 10 days later.

After the war, the young kid who once hated school maneuvered his way into a newspaper job and started taking college classes on the GI Bill. Years later, he was writing short stories for national magazines, one of which caught the eye of a producer for “Bonanza,” then one of the most popular series on television. From there, he went on to pile up a mountain of credits on such shows as “Fantasy Island,” “Starsky & Hutch” and “Ironside.”

But Lansford’s extensive television work had nothing to do with appearing on the Burns documentary. Instead, it was his activism for establishing a city monument to Latino soldiers that ultimately brought the filmmakers to him.

“We’re not Mexicans, we’re not Puerto Ricans, we don’t belong to the Old Country,” said Lansford. “This whole thing hasn’t been about pride or conceit. The simple reason is that we wanted people to know that if our country was in danger we were prepared to defend her. And that we’re Americans and nothing else.”

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martin.miller@latimes.com