The D-Day heroes who went to war armed only with cameras

D-DAY: SECRETS OF THE FRONTLINE ✸✸✸✸

SEVEN years ago, the three-part Netflix documentary series Five Came Back, based on Mark Harris’s superb 2014 book of the same name, chronicled the frontline documentary work of top Hollywood directors John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, Frank Capra and William Wyler during World War II.

Both series and book focus not just on the experiences of the five, who were embedded with regular troops and filmed in the heat of battle, but also on the profound psychological and moral effects those experiences had on them and on their postwar work.

All of them returned from the war changed men, and changed filmmakers. They mostly avoided war as a subject for the rest of their careers. It’s telling that Wyler’s masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives, made in 1946, concerns the difficulties facing three veterans – close friends despite being different ages and from different social strata – from the same midwestern city as they return to civilian life in a changed post-war America that doesn’t always appreciate their sacrifices.

OVERLAP

There’s some overlap between Five Came Back and D-Day: Secrets of the Frontline Heroes

(Channel 4, Saturday, May 25; streaming on channel4com), in that Ford and Stevens again feature.

Though somewhat narrower in scope, this hourlong documentary is no less powerful and captivating. The focus here is on the men who took thousands of photographs and shot hundreds of hours of footage of the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944.

Countless documentaries and feature films, especially the astonishing 24-minute opening segment of Saving Private Ryan, has made us familiar with the iconography of D-Day: the barges packed with soldiers; the beaches engulfed in smoke from the German clifftop machine guns; the spiked barriers, shaped like Jacks from the old children’s game and nicknamed “hedgehogs”; the dead bodies floating in the lapping water.

Less attention has been paid to the identities of those who went to war with cameras rather than guns and faced exactly the same risk of swift death as the soldiers.

As well as Ford, who was in charge of a team of cameraman working for the filmmaking department of America’s wartime intelligence service the OSS (forerunner of the CIA), and Stevens, who worked directly for General Dwight D Eisenhower’s Special Coverage Unit, the documentary honours cameraman Richard Taylor, who was attached to the US Army’s signal corps, and News of the Day newsreel cameraman/reporter Jack Lieb.

Possibly because the work of Ford and Stevens has already been comprehensively documented in Five Came Back, most of the emphasis is on Taylor and Lieb.

When we think of the war, we tend to think in black and white only. But there was plenty of colour photography, both still and moving. It ranges from the prosaic to the horrific.

On the way to Plymouth, Lieb filmed English villagers going about their daily business. War seems far away. In sharp contrast is his film of soldiers tending to a wounded comrade, His blood spatters their helmets.

There’s deeply poignant film, black-and-white this time, of a smiling Eisenhower meeting soldiers the evening before the invasion. The supreme commander of the Allied Forces isn’t giving them a pep talk; he’s just chatting to them as equals. The film is silent, but experts who analysed footage of Ike talking with 22-year-old Lieutenant Wallace Stobel ascertained the men were discussing fly fishing. Behind Ike’s smile was the knowledge that many of these young men would not come home.

Incredible footage from fixed cameras on three landing craft show soldiers plunging into the water to make their way up the beach. For some, it was the final seconds of their lives.

Perhaps the most powerful footage here is the 12 seconds of film shot by Richard Taylor, who was among the first wave. Taylor took a bullet in his left arm, but continued to head for the cover of a cliff.

Once there, he turned his camera around to film a group of soldiers racing up the beach. Some fall down dead. Then Taylor panned across the beach to show the scale of the operation – and the carnage. Without the bravery of men like him, the world might have forgotten the bravery of so many others.

‘When we think of World War II, we tend to think in black and white only’