John Ford's D-Day footage

Some of Ford's footage was included in a documentary film that was shown to Allied leaders of World War II, namely British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the USSR's Marshall Josef Stalin. The film sent to the Allied leaders was never released but in 2014, the U.S. National Archives surfaced 33 minutes of film on four reels that are believed to be this compilation. Upon investigation the Imperial War Museum found it had similar footage. NARA digitized these four reels and uploaded the footage to the Internet. Per the Kodak online film calculator, if the film was 35 mm and 24 fps, it would have been about 44 minutes long. ==Screenings==

Hollywood director Anatole Litvak, born in Ukraine and fluent in Russian, German, English, etc., traveled to Moscow to show a film to Allied diplomats, Soviet officers and Joseph Stalin. Stalin reportedly thought it ought to be released to the public. Also, contra Ford's retelling in 1964, film-history researchers believe that Ford probably personally didn't land on a beach until D plus 2 or 3. Yet a contemporaneous OSS report stated, "Knowing full well he would be subjected to unusual exposure to enemy fire with- out means to take cover, he personally took charge of the entire operation and was the first of his unit to land...After landing he visited all of his men at their various assignments, and served as a great inspiration by his total disregard of danger in order to get the job done." Ford himself said of his camera operators, who carried no weapons, "Facing the enemy defenseless takes a special kind of bravery." == Product ==

Exigencies of wartime being what they are, film preservation was not a top priority amidst the push to defeat Adolf Hitler. Some of the footage seems to have been ruined and some promptly lost. According to one report, "A large amount of film was placed into a duffel bag to be sent back to England, however, the junior officer carrying it, Major W. A. Ullman accidentally dropped it into the English Channel." However the documentary record only says that Army Signal Corps officer William A. Ulman failed to make contact with any cameramen in the area. Per an analysis by military historian Charles Herrick, "Ulman could not have been the mysterious courier who [supposedly] dropped the Utah Beach film in the ocean. Indeed, the only evidence we have of him on D-Day places him in the Transport Area, 13 miles off Omaha Beach." Per Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris, "The cameras jammed, were damaged or captured little of interest." According the Sydney Morning Herald in 2014, "When he was working on the documentary John Ford/John Wayne: The Film-maker and the Legend, Ken Bowser asked the US National Archives if they had any unreleased D-Day footage. They told him some footage was still under lock and key, but he doubts the 100-minute assembly still exists. 'I think it is probably mythological...I think by 1966, Ford had no idea of what the truth was. Those guys were all liars; we know that. They were just tall-tale tellers, and the tales got bigger every year.'" Many reels of D-Day footage shot by the Coast Guard with OSS slates can be found in the National Archives, including some color footage. ==Additional images==

{{gallery | title =D-Day film production| mode = packed == References ==