Earl Hamner Jr. credited as playing...
The Narrator
- Narrator: [narration as John 'John Boy' Walton, Jr. reading from his journal] In the late spring of 1940 our world on Waltons Mountain was very quiet and uneasy. For the first time ever people stopped work in the daytime to turn on the radio. The war in Europe had seemed to be hibernating until, suddenly, on the 10th of May the Germans invaded Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg. By the 10th of June, they had enslaved all three and driven the British and French forces into the sea, and were marching into Paris. To all purposes, the free world in Europe now consisted only of the British Isles. And just as suddenly, at least it seemed so here at home, there were no more pacifists, no isolationists. The little ocean between us and the Nazi terror was not very wide any more. People were beginning to feel that the time had come to help whatever allies we had and to be ready when the attack turned on ourselves.