Shooting War
- Year:
- 2000
- 88 min
- 21 Views
Other wars had been photographed.
World War II was covered
from start to finish
in every service, in every theatre.
For the first time,
civilians knew something
of how their sons, husbands
in this vast crucible.
The images of this war
burned our eyes and spirits
and welded us together.
I loved it because it was dangerous.
I'm a fraidy-cat,
but if there was a job to do, I did it.
No matter how horrible the action was
that you were covering,
when you looked through,
that glass was your filter.
I got carried away one time
and got out in front of the gun,
shooting the gun firing.
That was a big mistake.
The muzzle blast knocked me 40 feet,
ass over teakettle.
We hit an intersection
where we were shot at.
into the cab of the truck.
When you're baling out of that aeroplane,
on the way down, you say, "Oh, no."
But shells, you can't say anything.
"Stop. I'm here."
Those are men who took the pictures
by which we remember World War II.
Some of their images are immortal.
Many have been hidden
in the archives for decades.
Whether their pictures
are famous or not,
what you are about to see is unique:
War stories backed by the irrefutable
evidence of the films they made.
In their hands, the camera became
a weapon more potent than the rifle,
a weapon whose impact resonates
even more powerfully now,
as memory is transformed into history.
In 1941, we were as unprepared
to photograph war as to wage it.
When John Ford made his film
on Pearl Harbor,
the Japanese attack was recreated,
intercut with old newsreel footage
and a few feet of the real thing.
Men, man your battle stations.
God bless you.
Hollywood cameraman Gregg Toland
re-staged these scenes
The actors are obviously amateurs,
but they are real sailors.
The planes were the contribution
of 20th Century Fox special effects.
In this out-take, you can see the wires
supporting the model Zero.
Ford organised his photographic branch
before the war, as part of the OSS.
Toland's crew set fire to crashed planes,
adding drama to his footage,
but his feature-length parable
about American unpreparedness
was judged unreleasable.
Ford now took a more active hand,
cutting December 7th to 34 minutes.
He retained much of the miniature
footage, also made at Fox.
This material, never before seen,
was shot in colour,
though the film was released
in black and white.
This is Hollywood's version
of Pearl Harbor's battleship row
and the Ford-Toland version
of the attack on it.
There was authentic footage
of the Nevada trying to escape,
but Ford preferred this reconstruction.
It matched the rest
of his fake footage better.
His goal was not strict authenticity.
He was out to stir the nation.
There was enough reality to win an
Academy Award for best short subject.
As Toland and Ford worked
America mounted its first
aggressive response to Pearl Harbor:
A navy task force
under Admiral "Bull" Halsey.
It carried James Doolittle's flyers
and 16 B-25s aboard the Hornet.
Hal Kempe was
a photographer's mate on the ship.
I've heard many stories. Some say
we slipped out under cover of darkness.
We went under
the Golden Gate Bridge at noon.
We had the planes
lined up on the flight deck.
It looked like it was a ferry trip.
After we were at sea
they re-spotted the flight deck.
They took each B-25,
and placed them with their tails
extending out over the edge.
They put one on each
port and starboard side
until the lead plane had
sufficient run for his take-off.
That was one third
the normal take-off distance.
The raiders were spotted
They were sunk but might
have radioed a warning.
There was no choice
but to launch the attack.
So they said, "Man your planes.
We're gonna launch."
So we were launching
eight hours too soon.
Doolittle was first.
He went and the rest
of the crews were wondering,
"Can it be done?"
The raiders, volunteers, had practised
short-run take-offs on land,
a few from a carrier deck,
but never in bad weather.
Yet all were safely launched
for their 30 seconds over Tokyo.
Halsey's concern: The early launch
made it impossible
to make safe landings in China.
Yet all but three flyers survived the raid.
It did little damage,
except to enemy morale.
They carried four 500lb bombs each.
That's not very much,
when you really look at it,
but enough to put the fear
of God into them for a while.
The Doolittle raid provoked
a Japanese counter-attack
aimed at destroying the US Pacific fleet.
But we had broken their code and
knew they would attack Midway Island.
This evened the odds for the carriers
as they approached
the war's first great naval battle.
Midway was a pair of tiny coral atolls
vital to the defence of Hawaii.
This time, John Ford
was present with a film crew.
Ford himself operated a camera and
was wounded getting these pictures.
for the film he fashioned.
The crucial battle was at sea between
ships that never saw one another.
They didn't know exactly
but the torpedo-squadron skipper had
an idea it was in a certain direction.
He went off there.
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"Shooting War" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 24 Apr. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/shooting_war_18036>.
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