World War II Documentary Double Feature: The Battle of Midway (1942)/Tunisian Victory (1944)

THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY(1942): When iconic filmmaker John Ford was sent by the U.S. Navy to Midway Island in the North Pacific, he thought he was going to be making a documentary about life at the small military base there. After several days of filming sailors and marines during their downtime, Ford heard rumors that the Japanese were planning an attack on the base. Roused from his sleep on the night of June 4, 1942 by the sound of explosions, he spontaneously started filming the battle with his 16mm camera. As Flying Fortresses took off and headed into a 300-mile battle area filled with one-on-one dogfights, Ford captured some incredible color footage, finding himself injured by friendly fire in the process. The wounded Ford returned home fearing the military censors would not his allow his footage to be shown to the public, but after a rough assembly was screened for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the White House, FDR declared, "I want every mother in America to see this film." The finished version incorporated voiceovers from such Ford regulars as Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell, in addition to an overall narration by Donald Crisp. The Battle of Midway was released as a short subject by 20th Century Fox on September 14, 1942. It was one of four films to win the inaugural best documentary Oscar at the Academy Awards that year.

TUNISIAN VICTORY (1944):Tunisian Victory was meant as a sequel to Desert Victory (1943), the celebrated British documentary about the Battle of El Alamein. That battle had been one of the biggest Allied successes of the North African campaign, but the filmed document drew criticism for downplaying the Americans' part. (When asked about it, the British war department simply claimed that the Yanks "didn't have any good footage.") To prevent this from happening again, the film about the next step in the North African campaign, the liberation of Tunis from Nazi occupation, would be a full-blown British/American co-production. Both British and American camera crews were present as the largest armada ever assembled defeated the German Panzer Army holding the capital of Tunisia. In an unforeseeable turn of events, the ship carrying all the American footage back to the United States was then sunk by a German U-boat. Once again the Americans were in danger of being left out of the official record of one of the most important battles of World War II. So legendary directors Frank Capra and John Huston were assigned the task of filming staged "battle" sequences in the Mojave Desert and in Orlando, Florida. When presented with this footage, the British were skeptical of its authenticity, but could not dispute its high technical quality and incorporated it into the film anyway. Acknowledging the disparity between the two, the British sequences were narrated by Bernard Miles while Burgess Meredith narrated the American re-enactments. Tunisian Victory opened in theaters March 16, 1944 to audiences hungry for news of the war raging overseas.

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