The RAF vs. the Luftwaffe. Capra’s own synopsis: “Showing the gallant and victorious defense of Britain by the Royal Air Force, at a time when shattered, but unbeaten, British were the only people fighting Nazis."

Director Ford and his regular camera man Joseph August, who had worked on many Hollywood features with Ford, were assigned to Midway Island in 1942 to document, for the Navy, the work of guerrillas and resistance fighters in the Pacific. Two days before the battle of Midway, he learned that the J...

Report from the Aleutians (1943) is a 46 minute documentary directed
by John Huston, an iconic (and frequently iconoclastic) director of
some 40 feature films, many regarded as classics, over a 45 year
career. During World War II he served in the Army Signal Corps with the rank
of Captain, making...

The Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star marked a turning point in American aviation—the U.S. Army Air Forces’ first operational jet fighter, designed and flown within a staggering 143 days in 1943. But how did it truly compare to its contemporaries, like Germany’s Me 262 and Britain’s Gloster Meteor? And...

December 7th (made in 1943) is a striking manifestation of its time, a feature-length docudrama about the bombing of Pearl Harbor that is often at cross purposes with itself in the message it means to convey.
Gregg Toland, the brilliant cinematographer fresh off of Citizen Kane, The Little Foxes ...

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...

The film was directed by Edward Steichen with William Wyler as an uncredited co-director. The battle footage is absolutely first-rate, much of it captured by automated cameras directly mounted on the aircraft guns.
The carrier is never named in the film because of wartime restrictions, but was la...