by Mark Harris
Stevens arrived first, with his own 16-millimeter camera and magazines loaded with Kodachrome Safety Color Film for Daylight; the men with him included Irwin Shaw, William Saroyan, Bill Mellor, and Ivan Moffat. The work that SPECOU did was a team effort, and there are no labels on the surviving footage that indicate who was behind the camera for any given shot. But the film Stevens was able to preserve shows that the healthy men he photographed smoking and chatting at the train station as they prepared to leave London for the coast of England were grim and worn-looking by the time they were aboard HMS Belfast, a six-hundred-foot Royal Navy cruiser that was among the largest of the thousands of ships bound for one of the five designated Allied landing points. The seas were so rough that General Eisenhower had considered postponing the landing for another day; the soldiers all wore life jackets, and many of the men, full of tinned army rations and adrenaline and buffeted by the surf, were throwing up over the sides of the lurching boats. From the deck, Stevens’s men tried their best to capture the immensity of the fleet with long shots of the serried rows of ships and the barrage balloons that protected them from bombers overhead. Before they landed, the Belfast’s captain called for attention and read the men the Saint Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V:
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
Within hours of the first landing, Stevens was making his way out of the ocean at Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer, the sector the Allies had named Juno Beach.
Ford was aboard USS Plunkett, a 350-foot destroyer bound for Omaha Beach that had already seen action in the North African and Italian campaigns and had survived a strike from a 500-pound bomb that had killed dozens of its crewmen. The ship had set out, along with the rest of the American fleet, on June 3, only to have to turn back because of reports of violent storms on the French coast. The next day, the skies and the water were even more punishing, tossing the jittery soldiers and sailors from side to side for hours. “What I’ll never forget is how rough that sea was,” Ford said in 1964. “The destroyers rolled terribly. Practically everybody was stinking, rotten sick. How anyone on the smaller landing craft had enough guts to get out and fight I’ll never understand, but somehow, they did.”
The Plunkett was to be used to provide protection for the transport vessels that were running supplies from the ships to the beachfront. Shortly before 6 a.m., it dropped anchor just off Omaha Beach, where the resistance from Axis forces positioned in the hills and low cliffs overlooking the shoreline was most heavily concentrated. Within a few days, the British navy would construct a giant artificial harbor known as a “Mulberry” to protect the Allied fleet from the sea, but at the moment, they were exposed on all sides. “Things began to happen fast,” said Ford. “It was extreme low tide and all the underwater obstacles put there by the Germans stuck out crazily like giant kids’ jackstraws with mines and shells wired all over them. There were demolition teams on the first landing craft that were supposed to blow such things out of the way for the landings to follow. As the first landing craft started past the Plunkett, I could see the troops bailing with their helmets, stopping to heave their guts out every few throws. I could even hear them puking over the noise of motors and waves slapping flat bows all the way to the beach.”
Although Ford later recalled the Plunkett as having abruptly moved during the Channel crossing from the rear of its huge convoy of vessels to the front, so that he ended up “leading the invasion with my cameras,” it was not a landing ship, and in all probability Ford himself did not set foot on the beach until a few days later. Soon after the fleet had arrived, the $1 million of camera equipment the ship was carrying was unloaded and the Field Photo men were packed into DUKWs (amphibious landing craft that were known as “ducks”) that took them up to hip-deep water at the edge of the shore. Ford, their commanding officer, told them their objective was “simple—just take movies of everything” that was happening on the beach. He recalled watching a black GI who worked for the Services of Supply division (even at Normandy, whites and blacks were segregated by duties) unloading materiel from a DUKW while Germans shot at him. “He . . . just kept going back and forth, back and forth, completely calm. I thought, by God, if anybody deserves a medal that man does. I wanted to photograph him, but I was in a relatively safe place at the time, so I figured, the hell with it. I was willing to admit he was braver than I was.”*
Shortly thereafter, Ford was ferried over to USS Augusta, a 570-foot heavy cruiser from which Omar Bradley was running First Army operations. For the first couple of days, Ford would attempt to coordinate Field Photo operations from aboard ship, and hope for the best. “In all honesty,” he said, “I was more or less a logistic officer. It was my job to see that everyone who should have a camera had one.” Operation Overlord was now under way. “Not . . . I [nor] any other man who was there can give a panoramic wide-angle view of the first wave of Americans who hit the beach that morning,” Ford said. “There was a tremendous sort of spiral of events. . . . and it seemed to narrow down to each man in his vortex on Omaha Beach.”
With more than half a million American and British soldiers and naval personnel coming from five thousand ships along fifty miles of beach in the ten days following D-Day, creating a filmed overview of those first hours and of the week that followed would have been impossible, and neither Ford nor Stevens intended to try. Instead, they told their men not to put themselves in unnecessary danger and to focus on what was within their own field of vision as well as on their own safety. Ford’s contention that he was on the beach that first day, which he repeated with less hesitation and more emphasis the older he got, was probably untrue, but initially, at least, he certainly didn’t tell the story in order to suggest an amplified sense of his own courage. “Once I was on the beach I ran forward and started placing some of my men behind things so they’d have a chance to expose their film,” he said. “I know it doesn’t sound blazingly dramatic. . . . To tell the truth I was too busy doing what I had to do for a cohesive picture of what I did to register in my mind. We stayed on the job and worked that day and for several other days and nights too.”
By the end of the first day of fighting, more than four thousand Allied soldiers were dead. Fourteen of the sixteen tanks that had tried to roll onto Omaha Beach that dawn had been destroyed. Some men, laden with equipment that included eighty-pound flamethrowers, sank and drowned when their landing craft foundered in shallow waters. Others were torn apart by machine-gun fire as they walked down the ramps into the water, or died because they became entangled in underwater obstructions placed just off the shore and panicked; others were killed by snipers or mortars as they took their first steps out of the surf and onto the beach; others were first injured, then killed along with the soldiers who tried to carry them on stretchers to the front lines where the medics were. Soldiers died because their map or their navigation was faulty and their boats landed at the wrong coordinates; they died because, weighed down by their water-saturated boots and uniforms, they couldn’t move to shelter fast enough; they died because they took off their helmets so they could see through the smoke, rain, and mist, determine where the gunfire was coming from, and try to find any spot along the coast that looked safe; or they died because they were unlucky enough to be part of the first, expendable wave of sacrifice that cleared the way for the massive invasion force and material resources that were right behind them. Some soldiers who survived that first day later recalled that the constant, agonized screams of fear, pain, and confusion were the worst part of it. By nightfall, long stretches of the beaches were stained red-brown with blood and corpses lay in all directions, exposed and unretrievable.
“I saw very few dead and wounded men,” Ford said. “I remember thinking, that’s strange. Although l
ater, I could see the dead floating in the sea.” Miraculously, nobody in Field Photo was killed that day and only one member of the unit was injured. But most of the film for which Ford had planned so carefully was unusable: The stationary cameras that were mounted on ships were blown apart, or failed to function, or functioned only to have the film exposed and destroyed, or captured nothing but chaos. And all but three of the cameras in the first wave of landing craft were ruined.
In the days that followed, Ford’s men moved inland with the troops, and miles away, so did Stevens and the British and American forces to which his SPECOU unit was attached. Eventually, the two men seem to have connected, if only briefly. Stevens was fond of telling a story about crouching behind a hedge in Normandy for shelter during a firefight only to look up and see Ford standing there above him, placidly surveying the action. The anecdote has more than a hint of mythmaking, but it speaks volumes about his admiration for the stoicism and unflappability that Ford projected under pressure. Stevens had suffered an especially rough few days as he tried to lead his team. “George had no right to be in the Army,” recalled Irwin Shaw, “because he suffered from asthma, and he just hid [it] from the doctors. And in Normandy . . . the weather [was] awful. There was one period when he couldn’t get [up]. . . . We had pup tents . . . under some trees in the side of a field, and he just lay there for three days. As a commanding officer, he was a little . . . softhearted. He couldn’t stand the idea of the guys getting hurt, and he tried to keep a rein on all of us, to keep the casualties down.”
Ford, according to an OSS report, would go ashore by day to check on the Field Photo men, but it seems likely that he mostly stayed on the Augusta, despite his claim decades later that “yes, I was one of the first men ashore . . . at the first hour.” On June 8, he wrote a letter to Mary saying, “Dear Ma—My darling, I miss you terribly and our home and our family, but I guess that’s what we’re fighting for. Carry on, my sweet. I hope to be with you all again before many weeks. This thing here is going great. Jerry is bound to crack up any day. I love you. Daddy.”
Less than seventy-two hours after D-Day, most of the retrievable film that Field Photo, the SPECOU team, the Coast Guard, the Canadian army, and the British had shot was sent to London. Some of it was in color; all of it was converted to black-and-white for use in newsreels. Working around the clock in four-hour shifts that alternated with four-hour respites, Americans and members of the British Army Film Unit sifted through every image and created a rough assemblage of footage, marking the scenes they thought were worth using. There were not many. Much of the footage was blurry, obscure, or jerky and frantic, and many of the clearest images were so explicit that they were immediately deemed inappropriate for any kind of general exhibition. There were shots of terrified wounded men, of open-eyed corpses floating face up in the shallows, of severed limbs, of waves clouded with blood lapping against the shore; the cameramen had followed Ford’s dictum “If you see it, shoot it,” but what they captured would not be shown in any major public venue for more than fifty years. “Very little was released to the public then,” said Ford. “Apparently the government was afraid to show so many casualties on screen.”
Reels of the footage—about one hour and forty minutes in all—were shown to Churchill, then flown to Washington and screened for Roosevelt. It was a week in which Americans flocked to theaters hungry for any news of the war, which was now coming at a dizzying pace. Monday had brought word of the Allied liberation of Rome, news that was broadcast by radio in thousands of theaters. D-Day was the next day, and for the second night in a row, movie houses across the country had turned off their projectors in the middle of their features so that their audiences could listen to Roosevelt’s six-minute address to the nation, in which he asked Americans to join him in prayer. Theaters changed their newsreels weekly, usually as soon as they could thread the newest shipments into the projectors after they were delivered on Thursday or Friday afternoons. Capra, knowing that footage from Normandy could not possibly be prepared, processed, and shipped in time to be shown on the coming weekend, had had his unit prepare a twenty-minute documentary called Eve of Battle, about the run-up to the invasion, that would replace regular newsreels in many theaters on June 8 and also serve as a kind of preview of coming attractions for the D-Day footage that would finally become public on June 15.
By that evening, moviegoers were in a frenzy to see film from Omaha Beach, which had been touted all week with slogans trumpeting “First Invasion Pictures!” They were shown ten riveting army-approved minutes, all in black and white, that included the shooting of an American soldier but otherwise omitted the most brutal and explicit images that had been caught on film. The War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations praised the collective work of the D-Day cinematographers as “the greatest pictorial team play” of the war.
Ford treated the completion of Field Photo’s work documenting the first few days at Normandy as the wrap-up of the greatest film shoot of his career, and celebrated by going on an annihilating bender. Bill Clothier, who had shot much of the footage for Wyler’s Memphis Belle, had become a friend of Ford’s and would go on to film several movies for him; he was now overseeing his own small unit of Army Air Force photographers, and they were bunking at a house off the French coast in an area that had just come under Allied control. Sometime around June 12, Ford made his way to the house—he told Clothier he was looking for Stevens—and started drinking. For the next three days, he stayed in a sleeping bag, crawling out only when he needed more alcohol, even when he had to steal another officer’s supply to obtain it. Occasionally he’d stagger outside and pick a fight with one of the French soldiers who were guarding the door. When Clothier looked in on him and saw that he was passed out in a sleeping bag that he had now soaked with urine and vomit, he lost his temper, called Mark Armistead, a buddy in Field Photo, and asked him to come collect the director immediately. By the time Field Photo showed up, Ford had wandered off to a tavern and was found out of uniform and barely coherent. “We just had to take care of him,” Armistead said. “He [was] the type of person that one drink is too many and a thousand is not enough. . . . When he [drank], you would just have to stay with him day and night, let him get it out of his system.”
Back on the Augusta, sober and worn out, Ford began to turn his thoughts toward his next movie. John Bulkeley was in the English Channel, leading a fleet of several dozen PT boats that were patrolling the area in order to fend off any attacks from Schnellboote (the fast, wood-hulled vessels that the Allies called E-boats, essentially the German counterparts of PTs). Ford radioed Bulkeley’s boat and asked for permission to be lowered into it. He wanted to talk to Bulkeley about They Were Expendable, and he told him that he was now committed to directing it. Bulkeley, who had been hearing about the project for the last year, admitted that he wouldn’t mind being played by Spencer Tracy; Ford scoffed at the idea. “He had not many nice words to say about Spencer Tracy, for whatever reason,” Bulkeley recalled.
After their embarrassing encounter in Washington, Bulkeley was wary of Ford; he thought the director was a blowhard and a showboater and didn’t particularly trust him. Over the next few days, Ford accompanied him on patrols, and Bulkeley got the impression that he had not witnessed much action on D-Day and wanted to get closer to where the war was really happening. When their PT boat came under fire from a distant German machine gun, Ford didn’t flinch; “he loved the excitement of it,” said Bulkeley. By the end of their time together, his distaste for Ford had mellowed into grudging appreciation, but he made it clear to the director that he wanted no part of Hollywood, declined his offer to serve as a technical adviser on the picture, and added that he wished the movie weren’t being made at all. Ford told him that he had no intention of turning his life story into “some goddamned two-bit propaganda flick,” and, to ensure that the movie wouldn’t be misused, told Bulkeley that it wouldn’t go into production until after the war.
A day or two later,
Ford was in the Mulberry harbor off Omaha Beach when a gale tore across the English Channel and ripped apart the breakwaters and caissons that the U.S. and British navies had constructed; the artificial port had been the conduit for 1.6 million pounds of supplies for the Allies every day. Ford had some of his Field Photo men station themselves on the caissons and photograph the destruction, not realizing that it would be the last time he would supervise any filming as a naval officer. It is not clear why Ford’s time in France ended so abruptly, but his drinking binge, which had tested the patience of an air force captain and required the intervention of more than one navy officer, had been so embarrassingly public that it could have resulted in a dishonorable discharge. No official report of the incident seems to have been made, but Ford may have been urged by his own men or Bill Donovan to take himself out of harm’s way and keep a lower profile. On June 19, he sailed back to London and checked into Claridge’s. “Sorta winding this thing up,” he wrote to Mary, providing no details. He would remain in England—except for a brief mission to Yugoslavia with Bulkeley—for another six weeks. But there was nothing more for Ford to do in the battlefield. His war was over. He was going home.