[editor’s note: another cross-post from b-roll.net]
Yesterday may have been Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, but the US and Japan nearly went to war four years prior to Pearl.
In December of 1937, Japan and China were at war in the Second Sino-Japanese War in the Asian prelude to World War Two. The Japanese were marching to Nanjing and the US State Department ordered all American citizens out of the city and head for the safety of US naval vessels in the area. There were three newsreel cameramen in Nanjing at the time: Eric Mayell of Fox Movietone, Arthur Menkin of Paramount News and Norman Alley of Universal News. Mayell and Alley left for the gunboat USS Panay on December 11th while Menkin stayed behind to eventually witness the fall of Nanjing as well as the massacre a few days later.
On December 12, 1937, the USS Panay was bombed and sunk by the Japanese while she laid at anchor in the Yangtze River upstream from Nanjing. When the bombs started to fall, the two cameramen aboard the Panay heeded their instincts, grabbed their cameras and started to film the attack and aftermath.
Mayell stayed behind to continue to cover the war, while Alley was taken out of China by the Navy along with the negatives and sent to Washington under heavy military and police protection in order to screen the prints with selected government officials. President Roosevelt demanded that 800 feet of it to be censored in order to keep the US and Japan out of a war at that time and the rest was allowed to be publicly shown in the theaters. Universal turned it into a special feature as well as dragged Alley in person from theater to theater so the audiences could meet the actual cameraman who shot that film.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WujTPNkjSeM
As a result of the news coverage of the bombing and Universal’s heavy promotion of him to the public, Norman Alley became the minor celebrity that Al Brick never did with his scoop on celluloid a few years later.
He was enough of one that years later Alley would even upstage Ed Murrow in print when the two were working together on stories for CBS…
(well at least until Murrow took on Senator McCarthy.)
