climes, a subject on which I was not then fully informed. The order that someone had to lay an Awful Warning on the Unit before it went to war had come amid masses of bumf from Headquarters and been passed down the line to be side-stepped with a hearty laugh by every available officer … before stopping at the least significant.
A callow youth, but aging fast, I faced that parade of world-weary 35-year-old family men who seemed like knowing and experienced uncles. There were a few grizzled Regulars who at various postings around the world had obviously looked into the whole subject quite closely. It was not an easy moment. However, I gave them the benefit of my inexperience and they were most tolerant, listening as though I was telling them something new. Well, it was new to me.
The Great Central was plush and comfortable, after field kitchens and empty billets in Cumbria. I passed some mornings drilling our assorted band of cameramen in Dorset Square, NW1. Fresh from the ministrations and ferocity of a Guards RSM at OCTU, I was quite shocked by their casual and unmilitary bearing – and they didn’t much care for mine, either. However I shouted a lot, and they fell into some sort of shape.
I was told to take them on a route march. I always found this a boring and pointless exercise so led them, not round and round Regents Park, but through such wartime bright lights as remained in the West End. Down Edgware Road to Marble Arch, where traffic waited while we crossed haughtily into Park Lane, then left for Piccadilly, up the hill, past the Ritz and left again into Bond Street. Such a route brightened the tedium of the march for us all; at least we could look into the shop windows as we strode past.
It would have been ideal for Christmas shopping, had the shops anything to sell and my Army pay been better than a few shillings a week. We were doubtless contravening a stack of regulations but even wartime Oxford Street was more visually entertaining than the country lanes around Dolgellau.
We were commanded by Major Hugh St Clair Stewart, a large gawky and humorous man who after the war, returned, quite suitably, to Pinewood to direct Morecambe and Wise and Norman Wisdom film comedies. Some of our sergeants were professional cameramen, others bus drivers and insurance clerks, salesmen and theatrical agents. All had been through Army basic training. ‘I’d rather have soldiers being cameramen,’ said Major Stewart, ‘than cameramen trying to be soldiers, because one day they may have to put down their cameras and pick up rifles.’ So they did.
At the start of World War II in the autumn of 1939, the War Office had sent one solitary accredited cameraman to cover the activities of the British Expeditionary Force in France. The powerful propaganda lessons of Dr Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl had not been learned, so few pictures and no films emerged from that first unhappy battlefront. Neither the Guards’ stand at Calais nor the desperate rescue from Dunkirk was covered pictorially – just a few haphazard shots, to be shown again and again. The Government had not awoken to the power of a picture to tell a truth or disguise a defeat, and the Treasury refused to find money to equip a film unit. Public relations still meant bald communiqués handed down from HQ, and parades when inspecting Royalty asked something unintelligible.
Two years later the power of Nazi propaganda upon morale at home and among neutral nations had begun to permeate Whitehall. After questions in Parliament, the War Office was finally permitted to provide some pictorial coverage for newspapers and newsreels and, equally important, for the Imperial War Museum and History. This belated reply to the Nazis’ triumphant publicity was a grudging concession: the formation of a small active and responsible film unit. Its budget did not run to colour film which the Americans used, of course. Ours was to be a black-and-white war.
The Treasury also refused to pay for recording equipment, so we shall never hear the true sound of Montgomery leading the Eighth Army into battle, nor the fearful might of Anzio Annie, nor Churchill addressing the victorious First Army at Carthage.
The original Army Film Unit, 146 strong, had been sent to Cairo to cover the Middle East – then regarded as extending from Malta to Persia. It had 60 cameramen, half always to be on duty in the Western Desert. Their pictures of the Eighth Army in action began to filter home. They remain classic, as does their first feature film for the cinema, Desert Victory, edited at Pinewood from their collected footage. Churchill was proud to present a copy to President Roosevelt. Later there was Tunisian Victory. In this respect at least, the Treasury was edging slowly and reluctantly into the 20th century and becoming aware of the power of propaganda to influence the thoughts, decisions and spirit of nations.
War, we now know, is the most difficult event in the world to photograph – even with today’s brilliant technology and miniaturisation. Audiences have grown accustomed to John Mills ice cold in Alex and John Wayne capturing a plaster Guadalcanal in close up and artificial sweat while smoke bursts go off over his shoulder and are dubbed afterwards in death-defying stereo. Just watch Tom Hanks storming Normandy. Terrifying. So viewers are not impressed by a tank in middle distance and a couple of soldiers hugging the dirt in foreground – even though at that moment real men may be shedding real blood.
Reality can be dull, unreality cannot afford to be; yet should a cameraman get close enough to war to make his pictures look real he is soon, more often than not, a dead cameraman.
The second film unit, which I was joining, was formed to cover the new southern warfront in North Africa and the threatened battlefields of Europe. To provide Britain and the world with an idea of the life and death of our armies at war, the No 2 Army Film and Photo Unit eventually took 200,000 black-and-white stills and shot well over half-a-million feet of film. We were busy enough.
To get those pictures, eight of the little band of 40 officers and sergeant-cameramen were killed and 13 badly wounded. They earned two Military Crosses, an MBE, three Military Medals, 11 Mentions in Despatches – and, eventually, a CBE. Today, any picture you see of the Eighth, Fifth or First Armies in action was certainly taken by these men.
The sergeant-cameramen worked under a Director – a Captain or Lieutenant – and travelled the war zones in pairs, with jeep and driver. Their cine footage and still pictures were collected as shot and returned to base for development, and transmission back to London. By today’s standards their equipment was pathetic – any weekend enthusiast would be scornful. Each stills photographer was issued with a Super Ikonta – a Zeiss Ikon with 2.8 lens, yellow filter and lens hood. Each cine man covering for newsreels, films and television-to-be had an American De Vry camera in its box – a sort of king-size sardine tin – with 35mm, 2” and 6” lens. No zoom, no powerful telephoto lens, no sound equipment; effects would be dubbed in afterwards – usually to stirring or irritating music, with commentary written in London.
To get a picture of a shell exploding the cameraman needed to will one to land nearby as he waited, Ikonta cocked. If it had not been fatally close, he would shoot when smoke and dust allowed, otherwise the explosion which could have killed him would be invisible on film. A German tank had to be close and centre-frame before he could take a reasonable shot – by which time the tank might well take one too, more forcibly. A long life was not in the script. So, ill-equipped but confident, we went to war.
HIS MAJESTY GOT A WRONG NUMBER…
It certainly began badly for Britain. In 1940 France surrendered and we were driven out of Europe. Hitler ruled the Continent, Italy and Japan declared war upon us. Only in Africa did we eventually taste victory, at El Alamein and Tunis. But now in ’43 we were starting our return journey to Europe in gathering strength alongside our new American ally.
The Army Film Unit approached the recapture of Europe by a rather circuitous route, it seemed. Small enough to start with, it had been split into even tinier segments as we went to war alone, or in pairs, and approached Hitler’s European fortress surreptitiously. We knew that convoy sailings were top secret, and at our Marylebone hotel faces now familiar would suddenly disappear without a word. There were no Going-Away parties.
When it came to my turn, I sailed from the Clyde one bleak January night in the 10,000-ton Chattanooga