The Tales of Our Fathers: World War II on the Screen

The strings swell and fall, in pace with black and white ocean waves on the screen.  Then the fanfare, and the brass take up the triumphant theme—ending abruptly on, literally, an ominous note.  Sunday afternoons, and I’m a four-year-old taking part in the cataclysm of World War II.

Victory At Sea: The Theme of the High Seas

For me, war is symphonic. In the same way, perhaps, that, for a later generation, Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” provided the score for Vietnam, my soundtrack is “Victory At Sea.” But Wagner was used ironically in Apocalypse Now to suggest racism and imperialism.  Victory At Sea was a Roman Triumph, a celebration of the defeat of the greatest evil the world had ever known.

At the same time I was being born, Samuel Eliot Morison was writing his epic History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, and one of his research assistants, Henry Saloman, started collecting newsreel footage, much of it from our recent enemies.  Saloman produced 26 episodes, focusing mainly on the naval war, and they aired from 1952 to 1953.

I soaked (pardon the pun) them up, and watched them again later in the 1950s when they re-aired.  

Just a sidenote:  This was the swansong for the newsreel—the moment that television news programs were making theatrical newsreels obsolete.  But Victory At Sea gave them one final moment of glory.

In 1895, Stephen Crane published what is arguably the greatest book about the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage.  Like me, he was born after the war ended.  Like me, he grew up with stories about the war, tales told by veterans for decades afterward and books like Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs.  And young men like Crane and his contemporary, Theodore Roosevelt, grew up imbued with a hunger for adventure and glory.  So, I confess, did I.

But unlike me, they didn’t have television.  To read the books, they had to first learn to read and then to understand.  By the time Crane wrote his book, thirty years after the end of the war, he still loved adventure (he nearly died running guns to Cuban revolutionaries), but he had perspective on the subject.  The Red Badge of Courage is an ironic examination of the “fog of war” and the fickle nature of bravery and the horrible reality of war—hardly a celebration.

My postwar experience was rather different.  We had our novels of the war, too:  From Here to Eternity, The Naked and the Dead, Catch 22… But they came out later, when I was already an adolescent.  They shared an impulse to tell the truth about war, about the brutality and barbarism of even a “just” war.  Had they been my main source of information, I might have been far more skeptical as I came of age and faced the prospect of going to Vietnam.

But I had television, virtually from the first moments of awareness, and I had an heroic score by Richard Rogers and Robert Russell Bennett.  And it wasn’t just Victory At Sea, but a host of other TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s that turned the war into legend.  One of my favorites was The Silent Service, about the exploits of American submariners in the Pacific.  This series had a special resonance for me; I was named after an uncle who died about the U.S.S. Triton (which was featured in an episode of the show.)  I was fascinated by submarines; I would have enlisted in the Navy to serve on one if I’d been old enough.  There was Twelve O’Clock High; if I couldn’t make it into submarines, maybe I could become a bomber pilot.  Vic Morrow starred in Combat.  War even became comedy:  McHale’s Navy’s merry PT Boat crew gave me fantasies of South Sea islands and fast boats; Sergeant Bilko introduced me to a platoon of lovable scoundrels, and Hogan’s Heroes even made life in a German prisoner of war camp sound sort of fun.

It was all preparing me, and the young men of my generation, for our own war, our chance to live out the experiences of our fathers.  But instead of the epic battle against monstrous evil … we got Vietnam.