OD TO HELL
people were killed, was footage the world had Lawrence Kasdan said: might be prison camps xtermination camps. I e five directors Stevens’ r was the most intense, g and in some ways the istory.” ear-old married dad of wered US Supreme l Eisenhower’s call and med with his camera. d: “I’d gone so far with and so I just retired. I Army to go to Africa . I had no certainty uld pick up [ my film career] again.” From there, he was selected with Ford to shoot the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944. He knew there was a significant chance he would die. Kasdan said: “They knew some of those men would be sacrificed. There was no protected place to film the invasion.”
Mark Harris, author of the book the series is based on, said: “Without the efforts they oversaw, 75 years later, we wouldn’t know what D-Day looks like. Our understanding of it comes from those initial images.”
Atrocity
Stevens continued the brutal slog to Germany and on April 30, 1945, the day after liberation, Stevens entered Dachau in Bavaria where he found unimaginable horror. Harris said: “By the time Stevens got to Dachau he had more brutal boots on the ground experience than anyone else.
“Stevens got through those gates and intuited that this was without precedent and an atrocity of a scale he had not imagined. He instantly understood d that now he was there for somethinghing very different – he was not using his camera for propaganda or r to shoot newsreels. He’s there to document history in the deepest sense.” nse.”
It shook Stevens to the e core. He worked tirelessly for weeksks shooting footage but would be hauntedunted for the rest of his life if he had filmed enough. He shot the evidence dence to prove the showers s were gas chambers. In a caption sheet, he wrote: “Note airtight door … Note absence of means of opening door from within … Note absence of rust or oxidation on nozzle and absence of normal exterior plumbing…”. In another note, he added: “It is not surprising to see the [survivors] cooking beside the typhus-ridden bodies of their roommates. They were obliged to sleep in the same room, and even in the same beds as those who died while they were asleep.” Back in Hollywood, Stevens, a lieutenant colonel, said: “I couldn’t continue to make films like before.” He made Shane and won Oscars for Giant, starring James Dean, and A Place in the Sun. In 1959 he made The Diary of Anne Frank. Stevens died of a heart attack, aged 71, in 1975. Kasdan said: “AllA five were willing to turn from a very comfortable life and serve t their country in the best way they t thought they could.” Francis Ford Coppola said: “I do think all five of them paid a very personalperso price.” SpielbergSpielber added: “These filmmakers th that came back with footage aboutabou the truth of that war were chan changed forever.” MARRIED Hollywood rebel and lothario Huston joined the Army partly to escape his stormy love life.
But as a captain in the Army Signal Corps the charismatic director of The Maltese Falcon made two of the Second World War’s finest documentaries, Report from the Aleutians and San Pietro in 1945.
Troubled by the death of 1,100 US soldiers at the Italian village of San Pietro, Huston made a DIRECTOR William Wyler won an Oscar for his war drama Mrs Miniver but could not collect it.
It was March 1943 and he was preparing to go on the 25th bombing mission with a US crew in a B-17 to film Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. It was a dangerous business, on one run his oxygen bottle tube froze and he passed out.
In a B-52, filming his documentary Thunderbolt about the liberation of Rome, he lost 80 per cent of his third film, Let There Be Light, shot in a military hospital showing holloweyed GIs arriving from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific with posttraumatic stress. It was banned for 35 years. He later protested against Hollywood witch-hunts by the House of Un-American Activities. Huston went on to make Moby Dick in 1956 and The Misfits five years later. hearing. Five Come Back writer Mark Harris said: “In some sense, Wyler thinks his career is over and that his life is over.” But the Jewish filmmaker from France, who poured his funds into trying to save friends stuck in Europe at the outbreak of war, would go on to win best director Oscars for The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946 and Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston, in 1959. Wyler’s daughter Catherine produced the 1990 film Memphis Belle.