- 2 months ago
Americans filmed their own battlefield failures, and the result changed how the U.S. Army learned to fight. This military history story follows Marine cameraman Norman Hatch at Tarawa, where he waded onto the reef with a hand-cranked camera and no rifle, capturing American troops dying in the water in daylight. Those images were developed, edited, shown in theaters, and later used for combat intelligence, training aids, and lessons for the next assault wave.
The narration also compares American war footage with German propaganda newsreels, showing why the two systems produced such different results. From Cassino and Tunisia to the War Department’s Combat Lessons pamphlets and the creation of underwater demolition teams, this is a documentary-style analysis of World War II combat photography, battlefield learning, and the power of film in war.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history, documentary narration, combat footage analysis, and historical war stories. It also fits search intent for World War II history, Tarawa, Marine Corps history, battlefield lessons, and forgotten war stories with strong educational and archival context.
The narration also compares American war footage with German propaganda newsreels, showing why the two systems produced such different results. From Cassino and Tunisia to the War Department’s Combat Lessons pamphlets and the creation of underwater demolition teams, this is a documentary-style analysis of World War II combat photography, battlefield learning, and the power of film in war.
Created for listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, military history, documentary narration, combat footage analysis, and historical war stories. It also fits search intent for World War II history, Tarawa, Marine Corps history, battlefield lessons, and forgotten war stories with strong educational and archival context.
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LearningTranscript
00:00On the morning of November 20, 1943, a 22-year-old staff sergeant named Norman Hatch
00:06stepped off a landing craft onto an exposed coral reef 700 yards from the beach at Baichio
00:12in the Tarawa Atoll and began filming the worst 76 hours in the history of the United States
00:19Marine Corps. The tide had betrayed them. The reef that aerial photographs promised would be
00:26under deep water was sitting there in the open and the boats behind the first wave were grinding
00:32to a stop on it 700 yards out. The men had to climb over the gunwales and walk, chest-deep
00:39water,
00:40Japanese machine guns firing straight down the lanes between the piers. Hatch went in with them
00:46carrying a .45 caliber pistol he barely used and a hand-wound Bell and Howell Aimo, a camera the
00:53size of a lunchbox, that ran for 67 seconds before it had to be wound again. He carried no rifle.
01:01That was the part the other Marines could not accept. They kept turning in the water to shout at him,
01:07asking why he was out here without a weapon. Years later he remembered his answer, and it was not
01:14shouted back. It was said quietly, one man to another. He told them he had to be here.
01:21So he stayed in the water, and he cranked the camera. And what went through the lens was not
01:28a landing. It was Marines going down in the shallows and not getting up. It was bodies in
01:35the surf, turning with the water, going nowhere. It was the American attack failing, in daylight,
01:43in focus, at 40 feet. Hold on to that image, because everything in this story turns on it.
01:52A United States serviceman, under fire, deliberately photographing his own side losing.
02:00If you find this kind of history worth preserving, a like helps it reach the people who should see it,
02:05and subscribing means you will not miss what these men did next. Now.
02:12That film did not disappear into a vault. It was developed at Pearl Harbor, cut in San Francisco,
02:20picked up by all five American newsreel companies, and edited at Warner Brothers into an 18-minute
02:25picture. In March of 1944, four months after the battle, American families walked into their
02:32neighborhood theaters, sat down, and watched their own dead sons float in the water at Basio.
02:39Not implied. Not suggested. On screen. The following year, that picture won an Academy Award.
02:48Now I want you to do something with that. Go looking for the German equivalent. Six years of war,
02:5515,000 men in the German propaganda companies at their peak, 12 to 18 hours of fresh combat footage
03:02flown to Berlin every single week. Somewhere in that mountain of film, there is Stalingrad.
03:09There is Fales. There is the Ruhr. And you will not find a German newsreel that shows a German attack
03:16collapsing, or German bodies lying where they fell, screened for German civilians while the war was
03:23still going on. Not one. Not in 1942, and not in 1945, with Soviet artillery inside Berlin.
03:34And here is where most people reach for the easy answer, so let us get rid of it now.
03:39The easy answer is that Americans had a free press, and the Germans had censorship.
03:45That answer is wrong, and it hides something far more interesting.
03:50American war footage was censored. Heavily. Every foot of it went through a review board.
03:56The decision to release the Tarawa film sat so far outside policy that no general,
04:01no admiral, and no secretary of war could make it. It went to the desk of the President of the
04:07United
04:07States, and Franklin Roosevelt sat on it, because he was not at all sure the country could take it.
04:13The second easy answer is that Hatch was simply braver than his German counterpart.
04:19Also wrong. German cameramen were drafted combat soldiers who died at the front in large numbers,
04:25and they filmed from positions just as exposed as his.
04:29So the question is not courage, and it is not freedom of the press. The question is why a 22
04:36-year-old
04:36sergeant was standing in that water at all, with a camera instead of a rifle, in the middle of a
04:42battle
04:42that was going badly. Somebody sent him. Somebody wrote an order in an office in Washington that put
04:50an unarmed man into the first wave of an amphibious assault and told him what to photograph when he got
04:56there. That order exists. It survives in the official history of the Signal Corps, written up in 1945 and
05:04marked as one of five copies. It contains a list of what American cameramen in combat zones were
05:11required to bring back. And most of it is what you would expect from any army. Enemy armor, enemy
05:17camouflage, captured weapons, our own troops in action. And then comes one line that no other army
05:24on earth put in writing. It is the reason Norman Hatch was in that water. And once you have read
05:31it,
05:32the entire war looks different. Here is the line. Buried in a list of subjects that American combat
05:38cameramen were required to photograph, after the enemy armor and the captured weapons, the Signal Corps
05:44historians wrote that emphasis was placed on showing the disaster that follows from the use of
05:49incorrect battle technique. Read that again. That is not a sentiment. It is an instruction.
05:56The United States Army was ordering its cameramen to go out and bring back pictures of Americans doing
06:02it wrong, and of what happened to them as a result. Not to punish anybody. Because somebody in Washington
06:10had decided that a photograph of a squad getting it wrong and dying for it was worth more to the
06:16next
06:17squad than any lecture ever given. And that changes what Norman Hatch was doing in the water at Batio.
06:24He was not a journalist who happened to be brave. He was a weapon system. You know one thing that
06:31happened to his footage. It went to Warner Brothers. And into theaters. But that was the third stop,
06:38and by the army's own rulebook, the least important one. The field manual governing photographic
06:45companies said the primary mission of the company was combat intelligence, and that intelligence work
06:50took priority over everything else. Ahead of morale. Ahead of the newsreels. Ahead of the historical
06:57record. So the film went out of Batio in more than one direction. One print for the theater commander,
07:04for tactical study and analysis, meaning the men who would plan the next landing.
07:10One shipment straight to the war department. And the wording there is what I want you to hold on to,
07:15because it comes back later. For staff study, and for use in training aids.
07:23Training aids. Somebody had already decided, before the film was even shot, that pictures of dead
07:31marines in the surf were going to end up in a classroom. On the 20th of March, 1943, the army
07:38wrote
07:39down what this was for. And the phrasing is almost blunt. The purpose was to bring the war to the
07:45chief
07:45of staff. That was George Marshall. And the memo says plainly what he wanted to see. Not just American
07:52troops. Enemy footage, too. And in particular, the effectiveness of enemy weapons. Picture that room.
07:59A general who cannot be on 20 battlefields at once. Sitting in the dark, in Washington. Watching
08:05German gunners work. Watching what German shells do to American vehicles. And asking his staff,
08:12what has to change. Not reading a summary written by an officer who wants a promotion. Watching it
08:19happen. That is what the army thought film was for. The impersonality of it was the point. And the
08:26signal corps said so. A written report shows you what the writer chose to notice. A photograph shows
08:33you everything in the frame. Including what nobody wanted noticed. Now hold that image of Marshall in
08:40the dark. And put a second man beside him. Because there is a mirror version of this in Berlin. And
08:45it
08:46is not the one you would guess. The Germans were not lazy about this. Every week, 12 to 18 hours
08:53of
08:53fresh combat film came out of the front by courier. Trained professional cameramen, many from the film
08:59industry, all drafted, uniformed, armed, and subject to military law. 15,000 men in the propaganda
09:06troops at the peak in 1942. And here is a detail that surprises people. German civilian correspondents
09:14were not permitted into a combat zone at all. The propaganda companies were the only source of
09:20images from the German front. So where did that river of film go? It went to a processing center
09:27inside Germany, where censors went through it. And from there it was forwarded to the Ministry of
09:32Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, where Josef Goebbels personally worked on the newsreel, editing and
09:38rewriting the scripts, cutting 18 hours down to 20 or 40 minutes for the theaters. Look at those two
09:46pipelines side by side, because the whole war is in them. American film went to the man who had to
09:53fight tomorrow. German film went to the man who had to explain today. Neither system was free. Both were
10:03censored. But they were pointed in opposite directions. And film only teaches you something
10:09if it is pointed at the people who still have to go out and do the thing. And that is
10:15why the German
10:16army could learn brilliantly and still be blind. Remember that. Because I am not going to let you
10:23believe the Germans were stupid. They were not. But there is a problem with everything I have just
10:30told you. Orders are cheap. Any army can write a memo about learning from failure. Very few can
10:39stand what happens when the pictures come back. So look at the date on that memo again. 20th of March,
10:481943. Four weeks earlier, in a mountain pass in Tunisia, the United States Army had just taken the
10:55worst beating it would receive in the entire war in Europe. And one of its cameramen had thrown his
11:01camera into a river. On the 19th of February, 1943, in the Atlas Mountains of western Tunisia,
11:08the German attack came through the passes and the American line came apart. Somewhere in that retreat
11:15was a sergeant named Larry Mueller. And he was carrying something the army had almost none of.
11:22A 16mm Kodak Special. A beautiful scenic camera brought out to his unit by Colonel Daryl Zanuck,
11:30the Hollywood studio chief, then wearing an American uniform. Mueller got to the Kasserine River with
11:36Germans behind him. He could swim it, or he could carry the camera. He threw the camera in the water
11:43and swam.
11:44It is still down there, and you need to understand what that single camera was worth,
11:50because the numbers are almost comic. When American troops came ashore in Algeria three
11:57months earlier, the entire photographic effort of the invasion consisted of one sergeant and one
12:02private. Between them, two still cameras and three movie cameras. In Tunisia, 12 photographers
12:12were expected to cover a front of 143 miles. Twelve men. One cameraman for every 12 miles of war.
12:20And one of them had just thrown his equipment into a river. That is the state of the thing I
12:26have been
12:26calling a weapon system. In February of 1943, it barely existed.
12:32Now the battle itself. In 10 days, the United States Army lost 183 tanks and roughly 7,000 men,
12:413,000 of them simply gone, listed as missing. Units broke and ran. And the reason sat 70 miles behind
12:49the fighting, where the Corps commander, Major General Lloyd Friedendahl, was running a battle
12:54he had never gone forward to look at. He commanded from maps. He scattered his units in small packets
13:01across the passes, so that no piece of his Corps could support any other piece. His men were dying
13:07because of decisions made by a man who would not come and see. Eisenhower sent Major General Ernest
13:13Harmon down to find out what was happening. Harmon reached the headquarters at three in the morning
13:19and found a Corps commander groggy, beaten, finished. Friedendahl handed him a note putting him in charge,
13:27told him the party was his, and went to bed. Harmon took the front, steadied it,
13:33and went back to Eisenhower with a verdict of four words. Friedendahl was no damn good.
13:41Hold that scene, because here is the hinge of this entire story. Watch what the American Army did next,
13:49and watch how fast. On the 6th of March, Eisenhower relieved Friedendahl, a two-star general commanding
13:56an American Corps, and put George Patton in his place. Eleven days after that, Patton attacked.
14:05The American press was allowed to run Kasserine as what it was, a disastrous defeat.
14:11And at Army Ground Forces, back in the United States, General Leslie McNair started a deliberate
14:17program to work out exactly what had gone wrong in Tunisia, and rewrite the training of every soldier
14:23still in a camp in Georgia and Texas and California. Notice what nobody did. Nobody classified the
14:31defeat. Nobody quietly moved Friedendahl sideways. He went home to spend the war training men,
14:38and the Army let the whole institution watch him go. Now put the German side of the same battle next
14:45to
14:45that, because they were looking at the same ten days and drawing a conclusion, and the conclusion
14:50is the reason all of this matters. To Rommel and the officers around him, Kasserine settled the
14:57question of the American soldier. Inexperienced. Badly led. Tactically clumsy. An army that had never
15:06been hit hard, and had folded the moment it was. That judgment was not stupid, and it was not arrogant.
15:14It was a reasonable reading of the evidence, and every image their own system produced confirmed it.
15:20Because those images were made to prove a point that had already been decided. And the difference
15:25is not honesty. It is what a picture is for. The German photographs of Kasserine were an answer.
15:32The American photographs were a question. Ask yourself which of those two things is more
15:39useful to a man who has to fight the same enemy again in three weeks. Because that is exactly what
15:46happened. At El Gattar, ten days after Patton took over, the Americans hit German armor and stopped it.
15:54And the officers who had written them off had to start writing something else. Remember Rommel's verdict.
16:01We come back to the moment German officers had to revise it. And it is not a comfortable document.
16:07But the retraining of an entire army does not happen because a general is sacked.
16:12It happens because information gets from a dead man in Tunisia into the hands of a 19-year-old in
16:19a camp
16:20who has never heard a shot. And in 1944, the War Department began printing something,
16:27and shipping it down to every corporal and private in the United States Army.
16:33What was in it had never been put on paper by any army in history. And if the Germans had
16:39ever seen a
16:40copy, they would not have believed the Americans were allowed to print it. It was called Combat Lessons.
16:46Rank and file in combat. What they're doing. How they do it. A plain pamphlet, printed by the
16:52government printing office from combat reports, published by direction of the Chief of Staff.
16:58There were nine of them. Here is what made it unlike anything else on Earth.
17:03It was not staff officers summarizing what ought to happen. It was assembled from what men in the field
17:09actually wrote down, in their own words, and much of it was what they had got wrong.
17:15Take one page from the Pacific. Colonel Harry Liversedge on New Georgia, reporting on his own patrols.
17:22His patrol leaders came back and told him what they had seen. Japanese positions, machine guns, movement.
17:28Good men, doing a dangerous job well. And their reports were worthless. Because they could not say where.
17:37Sit with that. Because it is the whole war in one sentence. A patrol leader crawls out at night,
17:43finds a Japanese gun that will kill Americans in the morning, crawls back, and cannot put it on a map.
17:49Nobody can plot it. Nobody can shoot at it. The artillery that could destroy that gun in 90 seconds
17:55sits silent because the location does not exist as a number. And in the morning,
18:01the gun is still there. And men walk into it. An army protecting its reputation prints a heading
18:07that says, Improved Reconnaissance Procedures. The United States Army printed a heading that said,
18:13in effect, don't forget the where, and told its corporals plainly that this had been happening
18:19and had to stop. That is what was in those pamphlets. A battalion commander explaining,
18:25without excuse, that one enemy outpost held him up for four to six hours because the Germans had
18:32better observation and he could not maneuver. Street fighting, mortars, forward observers,
18:39tank and infantry teamwork. And running through all nine issues, one conclusion repeated until it must
18:46have felt like a drumbeat. The decisive factor in every single operation was leadership,
18:52in every grade, from corporal to colonel. And underneath every entry, a small comment,
18:59reminding the reader that this was one man's experience in one theater. Not doctrine. Not gospel.
19:07Evidence. Ask yourself when a German private last read a document in which a named German colonel
19:15described his own unit's failure, distributed downward, on purpose, as instruction.
19:22Now the film side of the same machine, because the paper was only half of it. There was a series
19:28called Combat Bulletin, cut from Signal Corps footage. There was the Army-Navy Screen Magazine,
19:3450 issues, bi-weekly, running in every military theater in the world under Frank Capra.
19:41There were staff film reports for commanders. Film went out from Washington the way ammunition went
19:47out. And here is the detail almost nobody knows. In the Pentagon, there was a motion picture review
19:54board, and the board sat at a device called the multiple film selector, which produced a punched tape.
20:00It was a machine built for one purpose. To make nine million feet of combat film findable. Because
20:10that is the number. Across the war, the American system delivered something on the order of 500,000
20:16still photographs and nine million feet of motion picture film to the agencies that used it. Nine
20:23million feet. If you ran that through a projector without stopping,
20:27you would be sitting there for more than two months. And remember what that grew from.
20:32On the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, the entire overseas photographic strength of the Signal Corps
20:38was 14 officers and 196 enlisted men. By the day Japan surrendered, it was 377 officers and more
20:48than 2,000 men. And in the seven weeks after the Normandy landings, one theater alone shipped home
20:558,748 photographs and over 56,000 feet of film. That is what the 12 men on the 143-mile
21:05front in Tunisia
21:06turned into. So the loop is closed. A man does something wrong in Sicily, or does something right,
21:14and a camera or a report catches it. It goes back, gets sorted, printed, cut, and shipped. And a 19
21:23-year-old in a
21:23camp in Texas learns it before he ever meets a German. But everything I have just described works on
21:30failures of a certain size. A patrol that forgot to give a grid reference. A battalion held up for six
21:37hours. Small, correctable, teachable. In November of 1943, the machine met something else. Not a mistake.
21:46A slaughter. Over 1,000 Marines dead in 76 hours on one square mile of coral. Most of them killed
21:56in the
21:56water before they reached the beach. And Norman Hatch had it all on film. Nobody argued about whether to
22:04study it. The argument was whether the American people could be shown it. And while that argument
22:10was going on in Washington, the Marine Corps was already doing something with the Tarawa photographs
22:15that I still find astonishing. On an island in Hawaii, they were building a copy of the thing
22:21that had just killed a thousand of their own men. On the 23rd of November, 1943, at half past one
22:27in
22:27the afternoon, organized resistance on Baishio ended. The island was one square mile. It had cost more than
22:36a thousand American lives, and the men who took it were still pulling their own dead out of the lagoon.
22:43Before we go to Hawaii, you need one fact about that reef, because it makes the rest of this hurt.
22:50Somebody had warned them. Lt. Col. David Shoup, who planned the assault, had looked at that barrier
22:56reef and understood exactly what it would do to a landing boat. He knew the answer, too. Tracked amphibious
23:04vehicles, Amtraks, machines that could crawl over coral instead of grounding on it. He got 125 of them.
23:1350 of those arrived on the morning of the landing. It was not enough. The boats behind the first wave
23:19stopped on the reef. The men walked 700 yards through the water, and that is where most of them died.
23:26So the failure at Tarawa was not that nobody understood. It was that understanding did not
23:32arrive in enough quantity, in time, in the right hands. Now watch what the system did with that.
23:39The Navy and the Marine Corps went through the battle line by line. The bombardment had been too
23:44short. Worse, there was a gap between the guns stopping and the Marines landing, and the Japanese used
23:51it to come up out of their shelters and manned their weapons while Americans were still crossing open
23:55water. The radios had failed when they got wet. Nobody had accurate information about the tide over
24:02that reef. Every one of those went into the next operation. Longer bombardment. Landing craft converted
24:10into gunboats and rocket ships to run in with the assault waves so the fire never lifted. Waterproofed
24:16radios. More Amtraks and better ones with heavier armor and heavier guns. And two things that were
24:23entirely new. The first. Admiral Kelly Turner ordered 30 officers and 150 enlisted men to the amphibious
24:32training base at Waimanalo on Oahu to build a unit that would swim in ahead of a landing, survey the
24:39water, map the obstacles, and blow them up before a single Marine came near. Underwater demolition teams.
24:47Frogmen. The direct ancestors of the Navy SEALs. Remember that, because a thousand Marines died in
24:54the water at Baishio, and that is where the SEALs come from. The second is the one I find hardest
25:01to
25:01think about. On the Hawaiian island of Kahulave, using the reconnaissance and the photographs,
25:07the Marine Corps built replicas of the defenses of Baishio. Full size. The log seawall. The blockhouses.
25:16The emplacements. So that men who had never been there could rehearse against the exact thing that had
25:22killed the previous division. Picture standing in front of that. A young Marine, months from his own
25:29landing, walking up to a copy of a wall that men died in front of by the hundred, with an
25:35instructor who
25:36knows exactly what happened at the real one. That is the American machine at full power. And it is not
25:43comfortable. And it was never meant to be. And now the price. Because there was a price. And it was
25:50paid by people who had nothing to do with any of this. When Roosevelt released Hatch's film and the
25:57photographs went into the magazines, the country did not thank anybody. On the 4th of December, 1943,
26:04the New York Times ran it on the front page. The defense of Tarawa had come as a shock. And
26:10Marines
26:10who went in expecting an easy job found swift death instead. Congressmen started talking about
26:17investigations. Editors were accused of morbid sensationalism. And a mother whose son had been
26:23killed on Baccio wrote a letter to Admiral Chester Nimitz, the commander of the Pacific Fleet,
26:28and told him that he had murdered her boy. Read that again. That is what an open system costs.
26:35Not an abstraction. A woman at a kitchen table with a pen. Writing to the most senior sailor in the
26:42Pacific. Because her government had shown her what happened to her son, instead of telling her he fell
26:48bravely somewhere far away. The German system never sent that letter. Because the German
26:54system never gave that woman the picture. And a government that will not give her the picture
26:59will not give its own sergeants the picture either. That is the thing. You cannot switch it on for the
27:05training camps and off for the mothers. It is one decision, and the Americans made it once.
27:11The film, by the way, won the Academy Award. Now hold all of that. Because Tarawa is not the furthest
27:21this
27:22went. Not close. At almost the same time, in a valley in Italy, a Hollywood director in an American
27:29uniform was filming something that went beyond anything in Hatch's footage. And when he brought it back,
27:36senior American officers did not merely worry about the public seeing it. They tried to stop their own
27:43soldiers from seeing it. In December of 1943, at the mouth of the Leary Valley, about 60 miles north
27:51of Naples, an American infantry regiment was trying to take a 700-year-old village called San Pietro Infine
27:58off a mountainside. And the Germans above them had every yard of the approach registered. Attached to that
28:06regiment, the 143rd of the 36th division was an army captain named John Huston with a cameraman called
28:13Jules Buck and a crew that included the novelist Eric Ambler. Huston's original order had been to make a
28:21picture about American troops entering Rome. Then the War Department changed it. The new assignment was to
28:29explain why the advance on Rome was taking so long. Think about what that order actually asks for.
28:37It asks a director to go and document his own army's failure to advance.
28:43So Houston's men went up the hills with the infantry. And what came back was not a battle film. It
28:50was
28:50mattress covers. Dead American soldiers, sewn into mattress covers, carried down and laid in rows.
29:00It was dog tags nailed to rough wooden crosses. It was Houston's own voice over shots of tired men
29:07grinning at the camera, telling the audience that many of them were already dead. Nobody had ever handed the
29:14United States Army anything like it. And the Army's reaction is where this story stops being about
29:20cameras and becomes something else entirely. Senior officers wanted it stopped. The complaint was
29:27blunt. This picture is pacifist. It is against the war. Houston's answer outlived every officer in the
29:35room. If he ever made a picture that was for war, he said, they should take him out and shoot
29:40him.
29:41But watch the specific fear, because it is the important one. It was not mainly the public.
29:48Officers tried to keep the film away from troops in training. Their reasoning was obvious and,
29:53on its face, sound. You do not show a 19-year-old in a camp what happens to 19-year
30:00-olds four weeks
30:01before shipping him to Italy. It will break him. That argument went up the chain until it reached George
30:08Marshall. And Marshall came down on the side of the film. Not reluctantly. Not as a compromise.
30:14His reasoning is the answer this whole story has been building towards. So listen to it carefully.
30:20Marshall said that because the film was so brutally real, it would make an excellent training film.
30:26The sight of the dead would make the men take their training seriously. Read that once more.
30:32The chief of staff of the United States Army looked at footage of American corpses in mattress covers
30:39and concluded that his soldiers needed to see it. Not to be inspired. To be frightened into learning
30:47properly. To understand in their bodies that the difference between doing it right and doing it
30:53wrong was that. And so it was used exactly that way. It went into the training program. It was screened
31:02to American troops in North Africa in 1944 where one soldier who saw it wrote that it was almost more
31:08than any heart can stand. Now here is the turn and it changes the meaning of everything I have told
31:15you
31:15so far. Even this system had a limit. Houston had filmed something else at San Pietro. He had interviewed
31:2325 or 30 young soldiers about what the war meant to them and what they thought they were doing there.
31:29Some of the answers, he said, were profound. And then several of those men were killed.
31:34So Houston took the words they had spoken while alive and laid them over the images of their bodies.
31:41That sequence was cut. And years later, Houston agreed it should have been. He said it was unbearable.
31:48And he asked you to think about their families seeing it. Look at where that line was drawn.
31:54Not to protect the Army's reputation. Not to protect a general.
32:00The one thing the American system would not do was use a dead boy's own voice against his mother.
32:07That is the boundary. And the fact that the boundary sits there and nowhere else tells you what the
32:14whole machine was actually for. The institution did push back. When the film was finally released
32:21to the public in May of 1945, it carried a two-minute introduction by General Mark Clark,
32:28the commander in Italy, explaining that San Pietro had been key to the region and the cost had not been
32:34excessive. He does not look comfortable saying it. Houston, incidentally, was not punished.
32:42He was decorated and promoted to major. So we now have the answer. Or most of it.
32:49It was never courage. And it was never freedom of the press. It was ownership. American film
32:57belonged to the men who still had to fight. That is why it could show anything.
33:05But there is one more layer. And it is the layer nobody talks about. Because it is not about policy
33:11or politics at all. It is sitting in a dry American intelligence report on captured German photographic
33:19equipment. Two lines about lenses. And those two lines explain why no German unit could have filmed
33:26its own mistakes even if Berlin had ordered it to. In 1943, American intelligence in the North African
33:33theater wrote up an inventory of what German photographic units in that theater were actually
33:38carrying. It is one of the least dramatic documents of the war. And I think one of the most revealing.
33:45Two types of camera. That was all. For motion pictures, an Airyflex with one medium telephoto lens.
33:53No high power telephoto lenses at all. And for stills, a Leica. Used exclusively. With a single
34:0150mm lens. No telephoto lenses with these. One film stock. Superpan. For everything. Packed in 30
34:09meter rolls for the cine cameras. And 36 exposure lengths for the Leicas.
34:15Unless you have used a camera, you may not feel what that means. So let me put it plainly.
34:20A 50mm lens sees roughly what your eye sees. It is a beautiful lens for a soldier's face.
34:27A tank commander in a hatch. A column moving past you on a road.
34:32It is very nearly useless for a battle. Because a battle happens a mile away. And at a mile,
34:38a 50mm lens gives you a landscape with some smoke in it. So a German propaganda cameraman could
34:44photograph men. He could not photograph evidence. To get a picture, he had to be close enough to see
34:50faces. Which is exactly where you stand if your job is to produce an emotion. And exactly the wrong
34:57place if your job is to record where the enemy's guns are. And before anyone objects, this is not
35:03German industry being backward. It was the opposite. German optics were the best in the world. And
35:10American photographers said so. They loved captured Leicas and Roliflexes. Bought them where they could.
35:16And used them in preference to their own issue equipment. So the finest cameras on earth were
35:22pointed at faces. Because the system that issued them wanted faces. Now look at what the Americans
35:28did with the same problem. This is where it snaps into focus. In April of 1943, straight out of the
35:36Tunisian fighting, an American general wrote back to Washington with a demand. 35mm cameras had to be as
35:45rugged as a Leica or a Contax. And telephoto lenses were absolutely necessary to get anything worthwhile
35:52from a battlefield. Because modern war meant armored formations maneuvering at distance.
35:59That is not a photographer talking. That is a soldier saying, I cannot see the enemy.
36:05Send me something that lets me see the enemy. And they did not wait for Washington.
36:11In the 12th Army Group, a technical sergeant working as a shop foreman built, by hand, an adapter that
36:18let a 21-inch lens be fitted to either an IMO or a Leica. 21 inches. 10 times the reach
36:27of what the Germans
36:28had in Africa. He took it out to the Lorient and Saint-Nazaire sector. And the pictures that came back
36:34showed
36:34roadblocks and gun emplacements that American intelligence officers did not know existed.
36:41Stop on that. A sergeant in a repair shop improvises a lens mount, and enemy positions appear on a map
36:48for
36:49the first time. That is the entire thesis of this story, compressed into one man with a file and a
36:56piece
36:56of aluminum tubing. A camera built for propaganda cannot do reconnaissance. A camera built for
37:03reconnaissance can do propaganda whenever you want it to. That same sergeant also built a rain and mud
37:10shield for the front of the speed graphics, and ground down a plate inside the movie cameras because
37:15his photographers complained the film was picking up scratches. Look at the culture in that. Issue tripods
37:22weighed 8 to 18 pounds, so a cameraman built one out of aluminum tubing that weighed 2.
37:29Another made a camera handle from the casing of a parachute flare. Men waterproofed Leicas in ration bags.
37:36Nobody asked permission because their job was not to deliver an approved image. Their job was to bring
37:42back what was there. Now put the numbers on it. By the 1st of April 1945, there were around 200
37:50American
37:51cameramen working the European front alone, and they had produced 55,000 stills and two and a half
37:57million feet of motion picture film. 200 men with telephoto lenses, feeding a machine that turned what
38:04they saw into what the next division was taught. And now go back to February of 1943 and Rommel's verdict
38:13on
38:13the American soldier. Inexperienced. Badly led. Clumsy.
38:19Ten days after Patton took over, at El Gattar, American troops stopped a German armored attack cold,
38:26and German assessments of the Americans began to shift. And they kept shifting, because the army they
38:33had measured at Kasserine kept ceasing to exist and being replaced by a better one every few months.
38:40That is what they were actually fighting. Not braver men. A faster loop.
38:46There is one image left. Norman Hatch, in the water at Batio, made a single frame that no other
38:53cameraman in the entire Pacific War managed to make. What is in it is the last thing I have to
39:00show you.
39:00Here is the frame. Batio, the 20th of November, 1943. In the foreground, marines firing. In the
39:09background, in the same shot, Japanese soldiers running for cover. Both sides, alive, in one image.
39:17It is believed to be the only time in the entire Pacific War that American servicemen and enemy
39:23troops appear together in the same piece of combat film. Hatch estimated he was about 30 or 40 feet
39:30from the enemy when he made it. He said afterwards that he did not know why he was not hit.
39:36And I want
39:37you to understand what that frame required. To stand where he stood, a man had to be close enough to
39:43be
39:43killed, and he had to accept that when the moment came, he would be winding a camera instead of raising
39:49a
39:49rifle. Those marines, shouting at him in the water, were not being unkind. They were being sane. In their
39:57world, a man who could not shoot back was a man who was going to die for nothing. He was
40:03not going to die
40:04for nothing. That frame, and the 76 hours around it, went back to Hawaii and into full-size replicas of
40:11Japanese seawalls, into the founding of the underwater demolition teams, into waterproofed radios and longer
40:18bombardments, and a thousand small corrections to the way the next landing was made. Men who never
40:25knew his name, on beaches he never saw, walked ashore easier because he stood in that water with a camera.
40:33That is the answer to the question we started with, and it is simple enough to say in one sentence.
40:39The Americans filmed their own mistakes because their film belonged to the men who still had to fight.
40:46The Germans could not, because theirs belonged to the men who had to be believed.
40:53One army was studying itself. The other was performing. And over four years, that difference
41:00compounded, the way small differences do. Until it stopped being a difference in film policy,
41:06and became a difference in armies. And the reason no German unit ever dared is not that German soldiers
41:14lacked nerve. It is that in their system, there was nobody to show it to. A film of a German
41:20attack
41:20breaking down had no destination. There was no combat lessons pamphlet waiting to print it. No training
41:27camp waiting to screen it. No chief of staff sitting in the dark, asking what has to change. It could
41:33only ever
41:34be an embarrassment, so it was never made. Now, what happened to them? Lloyd Freddendall went home
41:41and spent the war training soldiers, retired in 1946, and died in 1962. David Shoup, who warned about
41:49that reef and did not get enough Amtrak's, received the Medal of Honor for Tarawa and rose to become
41:55Commandant of the Marine Corps. John Huston was decorated, promoted to major, and went back to Hollywood.
42:01San Pietro was entered into the National Film Registry in 1991. His last wartime film, about soldiers
42:10with shell shock, was suppressed for 35 years, which tells you the loop was still imperfect, and that it was
42:17people, not machinery, who kept forcing it open. Larry Mueller's camera is still at the bottom of the
42:25Loserene River. And Norman Hatch went on to Iwo Jima, became Chief Photographic Officer of the 5th Marine
42:32Division, and filmed what was left of Nagasaki. He left the Marine Corps in 1946 as a major.
42:39And then he did something that I think closes this story better than anything else could.
42:45He went to work for the Department of Defense as a civilian, and stayed for 34 years, ending as Chief
42:52of
42:52the Audiovisual Division for the Assistant Secretary of Defense. And for 15 of those years, he was the
42:59Senior Audiovisual Advisor to the Secretary of Defense himself. Think about that. The kid who waded onto the
43:08reef at Batio with a hand-wound camera and no rifle spent the rest of his working life making sure
43:14the
43:14United States kept looking at itself. He died on the 22nd of April, 2017, at 96 years old, and he
43:23is buried at Arlington.
43:26The Marines in that water asked him why he was there without a weapon. He told them, quietly, that he
43:34had to be.
43:35He was right. And it took the rest of the century to see how right he was.
43:43Thank you for staying with me to the end of this one.
43:46If it gave you something you did not have before, a like helps, because it tells the platform this
43:52kind of history is worth putting in front of people, and stories like hatches are easy to lose.
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44:03watching from. If your father, your grandfather, or your uncle wore an American or Allied uniform in
44:09the Second World War, tell me his name and what he did. I read them, and so do a lot
44:16of other people here.