John Ford was 47 years old when he reported for duty to the Chief of Naval Operations in the fall of 1941, four months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. His eyesight was poor and without a waiver he would never have been allowed to serve on active duty, but after the country entered World War II, he was eager to get into the thick of it. After working on field reports, training films, and a documentary on the attack on Pearl Harbor (which eventually became December 7th, directed by Gregg Toland), he was sent to document a top secret mission (the Doolittle Raid of April 1942, the first American attack on Japan of the war) and then volunteered to document "a dangerous mission" at Midway, a strategically essential atoll in the middle of the Pacific. He was officially assigned temporary duty as a "Photographic and Intelligence Officer" and assumed he was there to document the isolated outpost, and he brought U.S. Navy Photographer's Mate First Class Jack MacKenzie, Jr., a young enlisted man who had worked as a camera assistant at RKO and shot some of December 7th, with him. He had no idea that they were to be witness to the biggest sea battle of World War II.
The Japanese attack was in fact anticipated--Japanese communications codes had been cracked and orders for the impending offensive intercepted--and Ford was eventually informed of the true mission. He was to observe the attack from the roof of the island's power station, which gave him a 360 degree view of the attack but also put him directly in harm's way on top of a major enemy target, and report the progress of the attack via telephone. "Forget the pictures as much as you can," ordered Captain Cyril T. Simard, the commander of the Naval Air station, "but I want a good accurate account of the bombing. We expect to be attacked tomorrow." So on the morning of June 4, 1942, Ford and MacKenzie took their stations, each armed with a 16mm camera and hundreds of feet of Kodachrome color film, and started shooting when the first formation of Japanese Zeroes, the long-range bombers that attacked Pearl Harbor, appeared on the horizon. Meanwhile, on the deck of the Hornet, an aircraft carrier off the coast of Midway, Ford had another unit shooting the battle from the sea.
In later years, Ford conveniently forgot the contributions of his cameramen ("I did all of it--we had only one camera," he told Peter Bogdanovich) but his own courage under fire is beyond question. One bomb landed so close that it knocked both Ford and MacKenzie off their feet, momentarily knocking Ford unconscious and leaving him with a deep gash in his arm (he earned a Purple Heart for his service that day). Both got back up and resumed filming, first from the roof and later on the ground, and Ford continued reporting the battle over telephone. "The image jumps a lot because the grenades were exploding right next to me," Ford told Axel Madsen in 1966. "Since then, they do that on purpose, shaking the cameras when filming war scenes. For me it was authentic because the shells were exploding at my feet." That raw footage, complete with the camera getting bounced around and the film knocked out of the gate, was included in the finished film, which adds to the power of the presentation.
Ford took the footage--four hours of silent film in all, everything from soldiers at rest before the attack to wounded soldiers being carried off in the aftermath of battle to the prized combat footage--to Los Angeles. Afraid that the military would take it from him, he handed it to Robert Parrish, an assistant on How Green Was My Valley (1941), to begin assembling under his supervision. He coaxed longtime collaborators Dudley Nichols (Stagecoach, 1939) and James Kevin McGuinness (Men Without Women, 1930) to write narration and actors Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell (stars of The Grapes of Wrath, 1940) and Donald Crisp and Irving Pichel (How Green Was My Valley) to record the chorus-like commentary, which was filled with folksy, sentimental lines. Alfred Newman, the musical director of 20th Century Fox, scored the film, using songs such as "My Country 'Tis of Thee," "Yankee Doodle Dandy," and "Red River Valley" (which was prominently featured in The Grapes of Wrath), and Ford composed a dense soundtrack of sound effects from the studio sound library. His rough cut, complete with a mixed soundtrack, was ready in six days, and as he fine-tuned the film, he made sure that each branch of the service had equal time in the film to prevent the film being held up in squabbles and perceived slights. Just before screening at the White House, Ford handed Parrish a short clip of Major James Roosevelt, the President's son, to cut into the memorial sequence. "When the lights came up, Mrs. Roosevelt was crying," recalled Parrish, describing the White House screening. "The president turned to Admiral Leahy and said, 'I want every mother in America to see this picture'." With President Roosevelt's blessing, the film was released to civilian theaters, where it had a powerful impact on audiences, reducing many to tears. According to reports, some viewers were so shaken up that they had to be helped out of theaters.
The Battle of Midway won the Oscar for Best Documentary in 1943--the director's fourth, and his third in three years--and gave audiences the first color footage of the war. Echoes of the film can be seen in They Were Expendable (1945), Ford's dramatized portrait of the war in the Pacific starring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery (who served in the Navy himself and reached the rank of Lt. Commander). Historian Mark Harris called the film "perhaps the most personal, idiosyncratic, and directorially shaped movie made by any Hollywood filmmaker under the auspices of the federal government during World War II" in his book Five Came Back. It showed the potential power of the military documentary in the hands of an artist.
Sources:
Print The Legend, Scott Eyman. Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Five Came Back, Mark Harris. The Penguin Press, 2014.
Searching For John Ford, Joseph McBride. St. Martin's Press, 2001.
John Ford, Peter Bogdanovich. University of California Press, 1967.
IMBd
By Sean Axmaker
