WWII on Film

When the United States entered the war in December 1941 Hollywood went with it. Frank Capra, then Hollywood's most successful director (It Happened One Night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington), was commissioned as a major and told by General George Marshall to explain to draftees why they were fighting. The result was Why We Fight, seven feature-length films made between 1942 and 1945 with editor William Hornbeck, composer Dimitri Tiomkin and Disney's animation department drawing the maps. Prelude to War won the Academy Award for Best Documentary; the whole series was added to the National Film Registry in 2000. All seven are here, from The Nazis Strike and Divide and Conquer to War Comes to America.

John Ford shot The Battle of Midway (1942) himself on 16 mm Kodachrome and was wounded doing it; it is followed by December 7th (1943), the long version of Ford and Gregg Toland's controversial Pearl Harbor film that the Navy kept out of circulation for decades. William Wyler flew combat missions over Europe to make The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944). John Huston's Report from the Aleutians (1943) and The Battle of San Pietro (1945) were so unsparing that the Army initially refused to release San Pietro; his post-war Let There Be Light (1946), about psychiatric casualties, was withheld until 1981.

The Marine Corps and Navy cameramen are represented by With the Marines at Tarawa (1944), To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945) and The Fighting Lady (1944), the colour portrait of the carrier USS Yorktown that won an Oscar. Know Your Enemy: Japan (1945), also supervised by Capra, is included as an example of how propaganda framed the enemy, and should be watched as such. The Negro Soldier (1944), directed by Stuart Heisler and written by Carlton Moss, was the Army's attempt to address segregation in its own ranks and became a staple of civil-rights screenings after the war.

The Reel ends with The True Glory (1945), the Anglo-American account of D-Day to V-E Day that won the Academy Award for Best Documentary for 1945, with a Universal newsreel on the arsenal behind D-Day, and with Tuesday in November (1945), the Office of War Information's explanation of a presidential election to the liberated world.

Every film here was produced by the U.S. Government or its armed forces, which places it in the public domain worldwide under U.S. law; several were made by directors whose commercial films are still protected, so check the rights statement before reusing music or added narration from later re-issues.