Author Archive: Retro

Documents a bombing in Germany… how itis planned, executed. Features members of the royal airforce

Actual war footage of German attacks on London during WWII.

Douglas MacArthur (26 January 1880 – 5 April 1964) was an American five-star general and Field Marshal of the Philippine Army. He received the Medal of Honor for his service in the Philippines Campaign (1944-45). He was one of only five men ever to rise to the rank of General of the Army in the US Army, and the only man ever to become a field marshal in the Philippine Army.

Produced and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders.

Victory at Sea began life as a 26-episode television documentary, originally presented on NBC in 1952-1953 as part of their Project 20 series. The program used rare film clips — including captured German and Japanese combat and newsreel footage — to chart the history of WWII, from the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 to VJ (Victory in Japan) Day in 1945. Richard Rodgers composed a special score for the series, which quickly matriculated into a hit LP; one of Rodgers’ leitmotifs was later adapted into “No Other Love” in the Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical Me and Juliet. Victory at Sea won several awards and ran forever in rerun syndication — and, in 1954, was spun off into a theatrical feature. It was up to editor Isaac Kleinerman to distill the 13 hours of the orginal series (culled from 60 million feet of film!) into 97 minutes. The feature version of Victory at Sea was [...]

Detailed documentation of the Nazi trials. Includes Russia before the German invasion and after the atrocities.

Very graphic captured Nazi footage of the horror of the concentration camps.

Filmed in color, The Memphis Belle has long been held up as a “model” wartime documentary. In a terse, exciting 41 minutes, the film assembles footage from several allied bombing missions into one single representative flight of the famed Flying Fortress known as The Memphis Belle. Though both the crewmen and the filmmakers take considerable pride in the fact that the Belle has completed 25 successful missions, there’s no phony heroism, no grandstanding, no flagwaving. As calm-voiced narrator Ed Kern explains, the Belle has a job to do, and it does it, and that’s all. The danger facing these Flying Fortresses is underlined, but never overemphasized, by brief glimpses of those doomed ships that didn’t make it back. Memphis Belle was directed by William Wyler, who also flew several missions with the crew, manning the camera himself at considerable risk. The overall excellence of The Memphis Belle is even more obvious when compared to the [...]

Dir. Garson Kanin. The bravery of the men who were a part of the Allied armies in Europe. Battle footage w/ voice-overs.Compiled from the footage shot by nearly 1400 cameramen. It opens as the assembled allied forces plan and train for the D-Day invasion at bases in Great Britain and covers all the major events of the war in Europe from the Normandy landings to the fall of Berlin.