Happy 2026 to all!
Today’s film is a forgotten piece of fluff found in the “Combat Subjects” series of the US Army Air Forces in WWII. Basically, a few GI’s find a derelict Kubelwagen (aka “German Jeep”) and decide to get it running again! Volkswagen resurrected the design in the late 60’s as “The Thing”.
The story was a welcome diversion from the grim tales of war. The fact that it has sound makes it stand out. Only a handful of films with composite sound are found in this series. There were a few ways to record sound optically but field recording was a different thing from commercial film. In this case the recording was likely made on transcription discs, later converted to an optical sound track in a lab.
Films like this are under-described in the National Archives on-line catalog, and are usually unavailable digitally. This particular film was recorded off the flatbed film viewers in NARA’s research room, no other digital copy exists. A professional media researcher can navigate the resources available in the research room and add value to your next production!
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62 years ago, in an article appearing in The American Legion magazine, film director John Ford recalled D-Day on the 20th anniversary of Operation Neptune, the naval assault on Normandy. Ford was in charge of Navy and Coast Guard photographic assets for the invasion. Confessing that his recollections were fuzzy and disconnected, Ford recalled the…
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Today’s film highlights activities at an Airborne Glider Base in England in 1944 just before the D-Day invasion. The roll opens with airmen painting the invasion stripes on a glider and then a C-47. The base band rates a whole minute of film. The meat of the roll is four minutes (four camera rolls) of…
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As part of an extended look back at D-Day for the 82nd anniversary of the assault on Hitler’s Europe, today’s film examines PT boat operations in Plymouth harbor and the English Channel. Regular readers of this blog know that written descriptions found at NARA are sometimes misleading, incomplete, incorrect, or missing all together. In this…
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