Attack! Battle of New Britain

A typical war-time documentary about the battle for part of a South Pacific Island. It's in black and white, an hour long, narrated mostly by the reassuringly everyday voice of Lloyd Nolan, and made for a popular audience.

New Britain, like Guadalcanal and New Guinea, is in a tropical rain forest climate. It's thick jungle and it rains often, so there are no grand vistas, nothing darting across open fields. Everything moves slowly. Even combat is close and the enemy is masked by broad-leafed vegetation. To make sure we get the point, we can hear the cry of the kookaburra. New Britain may be a bit outside its range but not as far as Tarzan's African jungle.

There is some combat footage but most of what we see is behind the front lines -- the surgical tents, the stringing of telephone wires, the unloading of supplies. The action scenes are exciting and interesting in their own right, and they include the Air Force and the Navy.

The strategic situation is made clear by a few simple graphics, maps with moving arrows, so we're never lost.

Nolan's commentary is never dry or elevated. It's often sentimental and sometimes brief. If we see the soldiers or Marines drop and begin firing, Nolan may comment, "Enemy strong point." British actor Leo Genn adds some remarks.

The score is drawn from varied sources: the Marine Corps hymn, Gershwin, Rachmaninoff, the Air Force hymn, Adeste Fidelis (on Christmas day), Debussy, passages from the score of "The House On 92nd Street," Onward Christian Soldiers, and Anton Dvorak.

The film didn't win any awards. There were dozens of documentaries like this that were ground out. But, my God, what a terrible war they illustrate.

In charge of shooting this film under Capra, and contributing much of the narration was Jesse L. Lasky, Jr. (here uncredited). He went on to write many Cecil B DeMille films (8 in all). While his father, Jesse L. Lasky was producing the films 'Mark Twain' and 'Rhapsody in Blue', Jesse served three and a half years in the South Pacific and his job in Combat Photographic was to make films for the American public to better understand what was happening to their boys fighting overseas. If the writing seems florid for today's taste, it was evocative then. Jesse came home heavily decorated, and after the war went back to work writing films in Hollywood. Pat Silver-Lasky

This is really an impressive war documentary made up of completely live action footage. These are real soldiers and this is a real invasion. Once you've seen this you can understand what all those war films have been trying to achieve. However, there are the unpleasant shots of dead Japanese soldiers and injured Americans and some blatant racism in the form of the 'nips' to the 'fuzzy-wuzzy' natives of New Britain. But it is extremely educational and does what a narrative simulated war film can not do. In my opinion anyway. You do have to put up with the blatant propaganda too but this actually helps put the documentary in it's war era context, providing an insight into social and political opinion of the time.

"Not ghosts from Pearl harbor but American boys - Tom, Dick and Johnny. The boys who used to play baseball in the vacant lot on Saturday afternoons, the youngsters who drove jalopies and sang the popular songs. You may have wondered sometimes if they'd amount to anything. Well, here they are giving all they've got." This piece of narration is typical of the documentary and can be annoying at times. The footage is amazing though and definitely worth a look.

US war documentary, "authentic in every details", about the 1944 campaign to liberate the New Guinean island of New Britain from Japanese occupation, photographed by the US Army Signal Corps and released by the US Office of War Information. Produced by Frank Capra (Why We Fight), written by Robert Presnell (The Real Glory) and composed by Dimitri Tiomkin (Flying Blind) with an arranging of military and classic music, especially Rachmaninoff's 2nd piano concerto.

The film begins with the rehearsal of US troops to land on New Britain following the New Guinea mainland campaign, preparing themselves to "such a difficult battlefield as the jungle, crawling with bugs, snakes, lizards and spiders through wet stench and blazing equatorial heat, tropical sunsets only bringing malarial mosquitoes". We dive in the daily life of soldiers, these "boys who used to play baseball on Saturday afternoons", based in training camps which "tame a corner of wilderness into a temporary home".

Then a little speech of general MacArthur with his cigar introduces the battle itself on the eve of Christmas, to "hit fast and hard", with crude scenes of fights where "you can only go forward and never go back". If we sure watch Japanese bodies and Zero planes crushed, we also see Marines shot by snipers, American boats sunk, a hospital tent shelled, a burial, wounded carried and operated, and even a Japanese soldier injured and "decently treated".

The different war techniques are well shown during this tough progression through the jungle, with Alligator and Buffalo amphibious tanks, bombing barrage, machine guns, mortars, bazookas, hand grenades, trenches and flame throwers, and jungle constructions by talented Papuan natives called "fuzzy-wuzzy" as a tribute to Kipling. Rabaul, the main town on New Britain, remains far away, but the Arawe Peninsula and Cape Gloucester landings allow Allied armies to go on further this Pacific War "on the road to Tokyo". And Thomas Paine is to conclude that "tyranny is not easily conquered but the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph".