Warships: Pearl Harbor to Midway Review

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(More customer reviews)This DVD production is a compilation of mostly WWII-era motion picture film clips from official USN sources as well as studio archives and newsreel footage. Some of it is familiar, but there is quite a lot that this reviewer hasn't seen before in more than 50 years of watching this sort of thing. That was a welcome surprise.
Some of those scenes are worth special mention. One of them was a brief movie clip of a twin-engine Japanese Betty bomber flying past a U.S. cruiser, maybe a hundred feet above the water and very close. You'd think the pilot was doing a fly-by in an air show! I found it truly amazing.
Other memorable movie scenes: battleship messman Dorie Miller on the USS Enterprise, getting his Navy Cross for heroism at Pearl Harbor; fighter ace Jimmy Thach personally explaining the "Thach Weave;" dive bomber pilot Wade McClusky's interview from the 1970s; and an interview with Torpedo Squadron 8 survivor George Gay from about the same time.
The program is arranged into 8 discreet segments: (1) the Pearl Harbor attack, (2) the Marshall Islands raids, (3) the Doolittle raid, (4) "Carrier X" (USS Yorktown and Coral Sea), (5) Coral Sea and Midway, (6) the John Ford "Battle of Midway" film, (7) "Hook Down, Wheels Down" Part 1, and (8) "Hook Down Wheels Down" Part 2. Watching it reminded me of one of my favorite World War II films, "A Wing and a Prayer" (Don Ameche, 1944). The value of that movie is not its historical accuracy, for it has nearly everything wrong in that regard. Rather, it's the contemporary scenes and dialogue played by actors who looked and talked exactly like the men they were portraying. You don't get that in later movies, like "Midway" (1976) and "Pearl Harbor" (2001).
One gets that same effect from this production. Don't watch it for an accurate historical treatise on the various segments, for you'll see numerous out-of-place clips and a whole lot of misstatements of fact. Instead, remember that the film and its accompanying dialogue were created *back then* when the true facts of a given battle were often unknown or classified. Thus when the announcer makes a statement that we now know to be historically wrong, remember the vintage of what you are watching and appreciate it for its classic quality.
Speaking of quality, the video imagery is as good as modern digital remastering can make it, and the surround-sound background music that the producer has inserted here and there sounds great. All in all, it's a great production that any WWII naval aviation fan should find quite entertaining.

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