Shooting War: World War II Combat Cameramen

Tom Hanks host and narrates this two-hour documentary on WWII Combat Photographers in Europe and the Pacific theater of war. Rare achieve footage of never release for public viewing films, some scenes breath taking - seeing our war machines in action, others horrific (should not have been shown on network television) showing mangle smash, burn and shot up human bodies Allies and Axis (see Benito Mussolini body and you know what I mean). There's a great behind the scene segment on director John Ford staging his 1942 production of the attack on Pearl Harbor, model ships and planes enter cut with the real footage of that day. Hank walks and narrates through a photo gallery (wearing a long beard-film during the production of `Cast Away') points out the significance of each photo and how all but one reel of the D-Day invasion was lost at sea. Stephen Ambrose narrates the second half of the show at the Normandy grave site. The conclusion have our camera men in Japan showing you in living color the full effects of the Atomic bombs.

One of the best documentaries about World War Two. A fresh way of looking at the war.

You will never again see a documentary or docudrama on D-Day without noticing the complete absence of photographic support concerning Omaha and Utah beaches. Or the sad re-use of the few seconds of footage that did survive from the second or third waves.

The famous and atrocious footage taken on Okinawa of the mother throwing her baby and then herself off a cliff, while painful to watch, is remarkable.

Now that embedding journalists with US servicemen has become standard operational procedure,now that every soldier walks around with a cell phone capable of recording and re-transmitting battle footage instantaneously, it is well worth going back to a time when it was not so.

This documentary records a time when images of the war were special, be it recording the horrific images of the holocaust so that it's lessons will never be forgotten, or the sad and stricken faces of Japanese civilians suffering through the aftermath of the first Atomic bombs.

This is really the beginning of man's realization of the cost of war. It soon became impossible for those responsible for sending young men to war to suppress for their loved ones the photographic truth of the horrors of war.

Unfortunate that total exposure 24-7-365 has made so jaded that we barely even look at the images coming back from the many wars in the world, much less allow those images to move us to act in any meaningful way to stop further needless conflict.