Bombing of Pearl Harbor and Burning of S.S. Normandie (1942)
Naval History
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10m
Eugene Castle was a newsreel photographer starting around 1925. In 1937 he started marketing 8mm and 16mm movies for home use, one of the first to do so, and his company was immensely successful until home video made it obsolete by 1984.
He started out selling newsreel compilations, many of which he had helped shoot. This film was part of his “News Parade” series, came out in 1942, and was reissued in 1947. Castle later branched out into releasing super-condensed versions of feature films. The 8mm movies were silent; the 16mm reels had sound tracks.
The events of Pearl Harbor were of course well known, and still very fresh in the minds of this movies’ first audiences. The destruction of the Normandie, once the most luxurious ocean liner in the world and the pride of the French Line, was initially widely attributed to sabotage but thorough investigations subsequently showed that it was accidental, due to a chain of mistakes.
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