Shooting War Page #5

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Hatch credits a movie actor

with getting things organised.

Eddie Albert was there.

He was a navy JG at the time.

He was a boat director,

and he discovered early on

that there wasn't much coordination

on getting wounded out.

He stayed on the beach

during the worst part of the fighting

and directed boats bringing supplies in

to carry wounded back to the ships.

As the battle moved inland, the futility

of the naval bombardment was obvious.

Their pounding didn't do much good.

They used armour-piercing shells

and there was no armour.

They were hitting sand

and skittering all over the island.

You'd see these 16-inch shells.

Nothing had ever happened with them.

What grabbed me and took hold of me

was the bodies, the dead bodies,

God knows how many marines,

face down, floating in shallow water.

That was the first time

that I had really seen dead bodies.

When you see these bodies floating

in the water, it grabs you.

And they all seemed to look like

a buddy of mine, Norman Hatch.

This was a piece of ground that wasn't

as big as Central Park in New York,

and in the course of that 72 hours,

6,000 people died.

5,000 of those were Japanese,

1,000 were marines,

and another 2,000 were wounded.

Passing a disabled tank,

Hatch heard this kitten's cry.

He thought it might be a wounded

enemy. It was just another war victim.

He thought he might make a pet of it,

but the kitten scampered away,

never to be seen again.

The quality of his film

earned Hatch a trip home,

where this footage of him was made

for an army-navy short subject.

We drove down Market Street

and every major theatre had my name

on it as taking the Tarawa film.

They were running it.

That's the best combat film

I've ever seen.

- And from an army man to a marine!

- It was just luck.

A movie cameraman,

a stills man... and a driver.

That's how the Signal Corps organised

its combat photographers in Europe.

The cameras we were using

were Eyemo,

called a bomb-spotter camera.

It had a crank on the side you wound up.

They only had one two-inch lens.

If you can believe

the running you have to do

to get your long shot, medium shot

and close-up with a two-inch lens.

It was really criminal

that they sent us there with that stuff.

Yet remarkable things

could be done with that equipment.

John Huston, one of several directors

who followed Ford to war,

used it to make what James Agee

thought the best war documentary.

Huston would write and speak

this strikingly ironic narration.

Patron saint:
Peter.

Point of interest: St Peters, 1438.

Note interesting treatment of chancel.

Huston found real war more difficult

to direct than the Hollywood kind.

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