I was up late last night watching combat footage and documentaries from both the Pacific and the European theaters and maybe I am the only one that has this opinion. I wonder why the footage seems so tame and not graphic compared to reality. For instance, I feel like the troops in the footage are always a little too calm, I never see the enemy in the same frame and never see who the troops are shooting at, and I never see casualties occur such as soldiers being shot or shelled. Obviously, there is plenty of footage of the aftermath such as the dead and wounded, but nothing actually during the heat of battle. The only video that I felt came close to depicting the realities of combat was a scene from Norman Hatch’s documentary “With the Marines at Tarawa.” There is a brief clip of a dead corpse getting riddled with machine gun fire which is graphic to watch. After having seen films like Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, and the Pacific, I would expect there to be more footage similar to those combat scenes rather than what is broadcast to us today.
Did the wartime photographers or the US Military edit out the frames that were too graphic for the public to see? Did the photographers not roll the camera when things got too hot? Maybe I’m not watching the right videos… Can anybody explain?
The first thing I'd point out is that "compared to reality" is something of a strange baseline to make. I doubt that you are a World War II veteran, and neither am I, as you might suspect, but nevertheless, I would note that technically speaking, actual combat footage is reality, while "Saving Private Ryan" isn't. Now, that isn't to say that old newsreel footage is a closer approximation, by any stretch, but it is to say that using Hollywood films is problematic in several ways. They are striving to capture authenticity, and in some ways what feels authentic doesn't need to be what is actually accurate. We're getting more into film theory then history, but something like the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan" is trying to transport us there, and this can mean it needs to be more real than reality. There is a quote attributed to Winston Churchill along the lines of "There is no feeling more exhilarating than being shot at without result", which I think is fitting here. If you are actually there, all you need is a bullet or two whipping by your ear to know you're being shot at, while a film like 'SPR' needs to do a lot more than that to actually transport the viewer and make them feel like they are on the beach themselves. Again though, none of this is to say what 'reality' is, just more like some opening 'meta' commentary to remind you that you need to consider what 'reality' even means, and that one needs to consider the exigencies and aims of filmmakers in this context. Films can be more real than reality in some ways, and in other ways less.
So, that having all been pointed out, there are several factors which come into play here. The first is the censorship during the war. Images of dead Americans, or even those whose wounds were 'disturbing' were tightly controlled both by the government, as well as the press' own self-censorship. In fact, for almost the first two years of the war, the publication of images of dead American soldiers was simply prohibited. There was decided caution in the administration about what impact grim images would have on public morale. This view slowly was chipped away at, however. Careful, controlled release of images which included the badly wounded was allowed in 1942, and by the beginning of 1943, the negative side of the policy began to be much more closely evaluated. Images of the real war were quite bloodless, and even images of the fake war mostly lacked it too! The Office of War Information evaluated 62 war films released in 1942 and found that a mere five of them actually showed American soldiers being killed!
While it might have been implemented out of concern that the images could tank public morale, by this point, committed to the war for over a year, the new concern winning out was that the public was now lacked cognizance of the cost of the conflict. The allied countries, mainly the UK and the USSR, had shown considerably more willingness to release some images acknowledging the dead, and in turn it was decided that the US needed to follow suit and show the public images that "vividly portray the dangers, horrors, and grimness of War". Hundreds of photos were sifted over to find a set which could be released, including the American dead, and also the truly gut-wrenching injuries.
Finally, it was in September, 1943, that the first batch of pictures were put out. Incredibly, very few papers were willing to start running them immediately, outright declining, or at least refusing the most gruesome. The most famous, and one given credit generally as "first", was one in Life Magazine, who published George Strock's photo of American dead at Buna Beach that most members of the public would be directly exposed to the mortal cost of the conflict on their own soldiery, and even then, it is hard not to see the photo and consider how tame it is: a fairly artistic composition if you distance yourself from the object of the camera's gaze, with the three bodies at the edge of the shore, one partially buried int he sand, no obvious wounds, let alone mutilation, nor even pooled blood, which no doubt long washed away. It is a picture of serene death, a carefully chosen one intended to show the people back home the cost of war, but hardly any of the brutality. To underline how big a deal the photo was, a full-page editorial on these "three units of freedom" accompanied the image, and Life, which would prove to be one of the most open publications in terms of these images for the remainder of the war, still declined to publish more shocking images such as one showing the mangled remains of a foot blown off.
For the rest of the war, toleration for these images of sacrifice increased with the media, and also became more encouraged by the government. Public opinion showed to be generally positive, and found that they were some of the most effective propaganda images in making an appeal to the population. Concerns about 'good taste', as well as the impact that seeing such images could have on the families of the fallen, remained a concern through the end of the war, and what was and wasn't released was always controlled. Many images of the fallen which were released echoed the 'Buna Beach' photo in obscuring the face, generalizing the fallen instead of singling out one man. By the tail end of the conflict, when more graphic material such as actual mutilations were being in limited material such as the propaganda film "Two and One-Half Minutes", which showed among other things, a body with a severed arm, the body was at the least not identifiable, being face down and in shadow. One of the first films which would include any actual combat footage would come out in early 1944, "With the Marines at Tarawa", and included images of the dead and wounded, and the men in action too, but nevertheless it, and other similar combat footage, never showed the true extremes that the American dead and wounded at times lived.
Disclaimer: I'm not a trained Historian, and there may be some obscure research I'm not aware of that demolishes this entire post. That said, I stand by my answer, certainly as being better than speculation, and hope it meets the high effort guidelines. It's definitely a high effort post for me.
And of course /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov snipes me by 40 minutes haha. I'd still recommend reading both my post and his, since we did both answer in somewhat different ways.
That's a really good question, with a whole bunch of ways to answer! I'll start out with the part that most relates to my formal training, there are a number of statistical biases that influence what footage we have, the biggest one being survivorship bias. In short, anytime you have a situation where there's a difference in probability in observing an event (which is unconnected to the probability of the event itself occurring), you'll observe more of whatever event is more likely to be observed than you'd expect just from the distribution of the event itself. And so, survivorship bias causes the under-representation of footage that is more likely to run into some kind of hurdle making it from the camera to your computer screen. Propaganda footage is going to have a much, much better chance of making it back to the archive than footage from the rear, which is more likely to make it back than footage from the front. There is so much more that can go wrong that could stop a piece of film from making it from an intense combat area to safety.
The next thing that I want to briefly touch on are the cameras in question. Until the Vietnam era, still cameras weren't terribly easy to lug around, video cameras only more so. While there absolutely were people crazy enough to do it, as you look farther back in history the fewer and fewer people who both able and willing to take video on the front. Furthermore, the camera operator can only record so much footage and must make snap prioritizations as to when they actually record a given combat engagement. Also, it's difficult to see humans that are far away in video just in general, even in modern footage.^[3] For a contemporary example, here's a picture of US troops crossing a street in Germany after being shot at by a sniper. This is, without a doubt, a close quarters fight. But you'll note that the window in the right is pretty much completely black, if there was someone standing just inside, would you be able to tell? How about the farthest house away from the camera, maybe 25 meters away. It's tricky to make out some of detail, even at that distance. Could you spot someone 100 meters away trying not to be seen? Probably not.
So, there are only so many cameras taking video, of those only so many are actually at the front and see intense combat that can be filmed, of those they must also choose to try and record the engagement, then that footage has to make it back to safety. That's already pretty rough.
But don't worry, it gets worse.
Most infantry combat takes place at 300 meters and in.^[1][2] Even still, it's hard to see people at that extreme end of that distance, especially if they don't want be seen. Shooting and hitting a human sized target at 300 meters is difficult for your average soldier to do in calm conditions on the training range, with a known distance target, and a rifle that's far less punishing than WWII era rifles.^[2] In battlefield conditions, where your enemies are taking cover and shooting back at you, your heart is racing, and your officer is shouting, and your really aren't quite sure exactly your enemy is, you aren't going to be incredibly accurate. So to answer that part of your question, most of the time when soldiers are shooting, they're trying to suppress the enemy, not pick off a single person they've identified and drawn a bead on. And of course as I mentioned before, at typical engagement ranges it's unlikely that the camera will be able to easily get both the shooter and enemy in the same frame, even in close combat. And of course, unless someone is doing something really, really wrong, any casualties caught on film will be pretty much purely be luck.
Finally, I'd like to mention that Hollywood style intense combat was and is rare. Most battles were certainly intense, but never as fast paced as one may think. As an example, the following are a few excerpts of a Soviet countercounterattack during a Finnish counterattack on 21 December 1939, from the war journal of the 2nd Sissi Ranger Battalion (the Finnish unit present). ^[4]
16:45 following message sent to Group Tavlvela: At 10:00 am a strong and accurate artillery barrage from the enemy began.... After this, the enemy started a strong attack... A flanking attack to the right by our vanguard company (aside, somewhere around 100 men) forced the enemy to halt for half an hour.
At 13:30 we received an alarm... that a large enemy formation was advancing [on the depot from which this message came from]... The depot only held light sentries at the time...
The journal goes on to describe the Finnish response, engaging the Soviet force and pushing them back. The excerpt ends with
19:50 ...Enemy suffered around 50 dead, our own losses for the day are 2 dead and 14 wounded.
And this is on a relatively mobile front, over the course of an entire day. While it certainly does get far more intense than this, such a battle isn't unusual.
When you consider all these factors (and I'm sure there are more I'm not aware of, such as the possibility of censorship), it's not all that surprising that there isn't much high quality, intense footage from the Second World War. Hope that answers your question!
[1]: This^pdf ^warning! translation of a Soviet small arms intelligence report. Specifically, look at the "Small Arms of the Soviet Army" (pdf page 5), where the 400-600m combat range is cited as being the "most critical ranges of fire". The Soviets have a slightly different way of looking at firearm roles than us Westerners, which could a post in and of itself, but suffice to say that this is the maximum distance they expect their troops to just spot an enemy in the fields of Ukraine.
[2] This^pdf ^warning! extremely interesting US Army analysis of the M16A2. Page 9-11, justifying the Army's interest in ranges inside of 300 meters pretty much exclusively.
[3] /r/CombatFootage, see for yourself...
[4] Finland at War: The Winter War 1939-40 pg. 124
I'm not a historian - and you've gotten an excellent answer on that front - but I'd like to answer from a filmmaking perspective, as well, as I am a filmmaker.
When you're making a movie, you can put the camera anywhere. There's a beat in SPR where a soldier gets dinged in the helmet by a bullet, takes off his helmet to gape at the close call, and then gets shot in the forehead. Now, this is probably a bit of dramatic license, but even if this really happened, the camera would never be in that location. To get that shot you'd have to be in front of the front line, looking back at your own troops, completely exposed to enemy fire. Attempting to get it would be suicidal.
The first guy out of the boat was never the one with the camera. And the guy with the camera was never choosing to be between the enemy and their own soldiers.
Also, good filmmaking gets power out of careful choreography. There's another shot in SPR, where Tom Hanks (IIRC) talks to a radio guy, moves to one side and the camera pans with him, and then moves back to the radio guy, whose face has been blown off. Not only does this have the same "no real cameraman would be in that location" problem, but the visceral effect of the shot is created through intentional choreography which requires foreknowledge of the fact that the radio guy is going to get it, so you can choreograph Hank's move away from him and then back towards him. Documentary filmmakers occasionally get happy accidents like that, but it's rare. Narrative directors like Spielberg fill their films with those moments.
Much of our emotional connection in filmmaking comes from the cut: see the character, see what they're looking at, see their reaction. Look at how the tension is created in this sequence:
https://youtu.be/QZv550Ofye0?t=139
Look at the number of different camera locations used to create that moment, and notice how some of them (e.g. the closeups of both snipers) could never been in the same war footage. Notice how many shots are in locations where you could never be, even if you had a GoPro (nobody's going to stand in front of a sniper and shove a camera in his face!) Notice how the camera is right where it needs to be to capture a perfectly elegant blood splatter, and how the timing of the cut helps add to the percussive impact of the hit. Notice how many different camera angles there are of the dying soldier.
Watch a war sequence with the remote control in your hand and pause it after every cut. Notice where the camera is and how it moves in anticipation of what's going to happen. Even if the exact same events were happening in real life and depicted on film, you'd never be able to capture it with that kind of nuance, detail, and immediacy live.
