U.S. Navy

John Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland made this film about the attack on Pearl Harbor for the U.S. Navy. The original cut ran 82 minutes and asked uncomfortable questions about American readiness and the treatment of Japanese Americans; the Navy shelved it and Ford cut it to 32 minutes, concentrating on the battle and the recovery. The shorter version won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1944. Toland's staged recreation of the attack was so convincing that feature films borrowed footage from it for decades. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

John Ford, serving as a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, was on Midway Island when the Japanese attacked in June 1942 and was wounded while filming. The result is one of the first American combat documentaries of the war, shot in color and built around the pivotal naval battle that broke the back of the Japanese carrier fleet. The film shifts between the calm of island life, the chaos of the attack, and the recovery of American airmen from the sea. Hollywood voices including Henry Fonda, Donald Crisp, and Jane Darwell narrate, giving the footage a human, almost home-front tone. It won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

Directed by the renowned photographer Edward Steichen while he served in the U.S. Navy, this documentary follows life aboard an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, identified only as "the Fighting Lady" for wartime security (she was the USS Yorktown). The film moves from the routines of life at sea through the Panama Canal to combat in the Marcus Islands and the climactic "Marianas Turkey Shoot," where American pilots downed nearly four hundred Japanese aircraft. Cameras mounted in cockpit canopies show what it is like to dive through anti-aircraft fire. The film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. As a work of the U.S. federal government, the film is in the public domain.

War · Documentary

The first of four Mr. Hook cartoons made for the US Navy to sell war bonds. Set in 1953, sailor Hook tells his young son how buying bonds a decade earlier helped him defeat a Japanese fighter pilot attacking his aircraft carrier. The only Hook short produced at Walter Lantz Productions — in Technicolor — before the series moved to Warner Bros., and the only one directed by James "Shamus" Culhane, with Dick Nelson voicing Hook. A US government film in the public domain; like much wartime propaganda it trades in the racial caricatures of the era.

Animation · Comedy · War