Shooting War Page #4

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he crash-lands at the end of the strip.

When the leader landed,

Quaid thought a retreat was in order.

He was, after all,

responsible for wrecking the plane.

He comes up to me and he says,

"Quaid, get out of here!"

He said, "Four more

and you're a Japanese ace!"

I think it was one of the funniest lines

of World War II.

He said, "Dave, don't take it to heart.

"We really wanna get P-51 s."

June, 1944.

The marines land in the Marianas,

within bomber range

of the Japanese home islands.

The late Richard Brooks

collected the exposed footage.

When the landing boats came in,

the cameramen came in first,

so they could photograph the marines

coming in to make the invasion.

Like Huston, Brooks would edit,

write and narrate this footage

into a great war documentary.

He would become an Oscar-winning

Hollywood writer-director after the war.

The Japs bring down

another one of our planes.

A sniper is burned out.

A Jap makes a run for it.

Lieutenant General Holland Smith,

commanding the assault forces.

He was known to his men

as Howlin' Mad Smith.

Brooks was working up the nerve

to ask him a question.

I made sure to get some shots

of General Smith

up against the skyline

and against the sea.

Walking back to his jeep, I said,

"May I ask you a question?"

He said, "Go ahead." I was a corporal.

I said, "Is there any way, General,

that our combat cameramen

can carry side arms?"

He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "We just got the camera.

"If somebody's shooting at you,

it's easier if you can shoot back."

He said, "I don't care

if you got film in it.

"I want those cameras there

and I want 'em there all the time.

"Those cameras, whether

they've got film in them or not,

"are the eyes of the world.

"And there are no cowards

in front of a camera."

John Ercole was

one of the photographers.

The sniper, wherever he was,

I'm in his sights.

I gotta move back and forth.

He's trying to hit me in the foot.

He keeps hitting the ground.

I'm photographing this tank.

Our marines are carrying some badly

wounded marines on their shoulders

and using the tank as protection.

The tanks were a key element

in the victory.

This was shot in colour, but,

like these pictures from inside a tank,

it was released in black and white.

The last Japanese strongholds

were the hills,

honeycombed with caves, from which

they had to be painfully routed out.

The big thing on Saipan

was knocking these guys out.

We had people speaking Japanese

trying to get 'em to give up.

We took an oath that you were willing

to die to save your buddy

and to get shot to save your buddies.

The Japanese took it a little further.

Their oath was to die

rather than give up.

They were told we had to kill our own

children to get in the Marine Corps,

all kinds of stories

that these people had been told.

As always, only a handful

of Japanese soldiers surrendered.

Mostly it was civilians who gave up.

But even some of them

were too terrified to do so.

There's a shot on Saipan

where I come across a woman.

There's a cut in the cliff.

She's 50 yards away from me.

She's got a child standing here,

baby in her hand, and she spots me.

She sees the camera,

which is on a gunstock.

She doesn't know it's a camera.

As I raise it up, she kicks this kid

off the cliff, throws the baby off the cliff,

and she takes the dive.

That's all on film.

Only maybe... four seconds.

That's the fear that these people

were embedded with.

This shot of the dead child, one of

the most pathetic images of the war,

was not released at the time.

These paratroopers were the first

to breach Hitler's Atlantic wall.

They would land in Normandy in the

pre-dawn darkness of June 6th 1944,

forerunners of history's

greatest amphibious landing.

The bombers were next.

Every D-Day plane carried

broad identifying stripes.

This defence against friendly fire

used up all the white paint in England.

Carl Voelker remembers that morning.

We flew twice.

Went out early in the morning.

It was too dark to do much.

I was photographing the bombs

going down on the beach.

They brought sandwiches out.

We stayed with the plane.

It was re-bombed, refuelled

and we went out.

We went across the Channel

and we saw the boats and the ships

from Torquay, southern England,

all the way across.

It was quite a sight

to see so much equipment

being moved across the Channel.

They were bumper to bumper.

The troops passed the hours

in the usual pastimes of anxious waiting.

But, inescapably,

they were alone with their thoughts.

And with the equipment on which,

luck aside,

and who dared think about that,

their lives would depend.

In that whole armada, only one

creature didn't know what awaited him.

But even he was prepared for the worst.

Still, the choppy Channel

and the fear took their toll.

As it brightened, gliders appeared,

carrying more troops to assault

the Germans from behind their lines.

Then the bombers, flying low, returned.

But the second time we went over low,

maybe 5,000 feet.

It was exceptional for us.

We never bombed down that low.

Voelker's bomb spotting

was also exceptional,

steady and unerring.

In most documentaries of World War II,

you'll see a chicken-foot impression

on the screen.

That day I got static electricity

in the camera.

The sparks appear in the gate

and it's on every foot of film.

That was my D-Day.

"It was like a thousand Fourth of Julys

rolled into one," an eyewitness said.

But the bombardment came too soon.

It was too dark for accuracy,

or for Walter Rosenblum's camera.

I couldn't go in on the first wave

'cause it was dark.

No way I could photograph.

The landing craft came back

and loaded up with another crew,

and I went into that crew.

Like you see in the movies,

you climb down a rope ladder.

I went in on one of these landing craft.

The men in these waves would

confront D-Day's grimmest reality:

The sight of their fallen comrades.

We landed on the beach

and the thing that struck me first

is I'd never seen

a dead person in my life,

but I was surrounded by death.

There were Gls in the water,

rolling up and back.

Blood in the water.

It was a very frightening sight.

The Signal Corps cameramen

live with a bitter irony:

Almost the entire surviving

photographic record of D-Day

was shot by coastguard cameramen.

The film exposed by Rosenblum

and the other men on the beaches

would be lost.

By late morning,

the beachhead was established.

At the end of the day, the cameramen

surrendered their hard-won footage.

We turned our footage in

to the beach masters.

A colonel went to each beach master

and picked up the film,

put it all in a duffel bag, put it

on his shoulder and went out to a ship.

Going up the side, he dropped it

over the side and all the film was lost.

There was one exception:

A cameraman named Dick Taylor.

He made this great shot.

By default, these few seconds constitute

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