Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER JULY 1940 15 '» REAR-GUARD FILMING By DOUGLAS SLOCOMBE larpa -.uiiiji HE CHIEF CONCERN of an English camera■-"■Aii Jan who is filming — or attempting to film ■^jcsi _a German invasion of a small country is, •itcjij uite apart from taking care of his valuable life, 3i otdffl j, see that he retreats with the defending army i-'i iffli bd that he is not captured by the invaders. He ' '^ ' [lerefore has to film with one eye on the door ; TtcUil file does not want to spend the rest of his days in '--^1 Jnominous internment. After two experiences in this t>pe of filming, or^-rai jhave now come to regard it as a sort of rear uard action. The first time this happened to me , /as in Poland where I spent a month filming the reparations of the army and then a fortnight , . ' Iming what was virtually the scene of my own On that occasion, I had just left — or rather een thrown out of — Danzig, where I had been iming the last stages in the Nazification of that "s lis ity for Herbert Kline, the U.S. film director. "" ' nine joined me in Warsaw on July 1st, and with ur two young wives to complete the crew, we japrcd !t to work. As the first waves of German bom Uieea ers flew over Warsaw, exactly one month later, Hanai I'e were already making our way North — sitting wffy n boxes of explosives in an ammunition train — .ijjl J film the fighting on the frontiers of the Corri or. But by the time we reached Torun after a ivo-day journey which in normal times would ave taken only three hours and during which /e were nearly bombed out of existence a dozen mes, we found that the Polish "lines" had com 1 1^--' letely collapsed, that there was no "front" any Miiiifl ^here, and that the Polish army was in full, il M lewildered retreat. From that day onwards, our !■ ^P^ Iming was done while we retreated also. A car ■liniCffl fhich had been sent to us from London was due ptpia ) arrive at Gdynia on September 4th, but as ■eriaiii Poland's only port was cut off from the rest of he country within the first two days and fell .,,j5ail ompletely into German hands soon after, we ji^tlj rere severely handicapped in the matter of swift i[j^|ijij ind independent travel. j,j^ P[(j Moreover, trains were formed in a very hap .^ azard fashion and as there were no definite ^jjsjl ime-tables one had to spend sometimes 24 ^0 lours dozing on a station floor before a train of ^njj orts (invariably with every window broken) jijjjipj rould steam in. Our retreats were therefore ^ ilsi) lostly timed more by luck than good sense. And j^;i ilenty of luck we had for in every case we vacated lj£|i spot only a few hours before the Germans ^ 1^ J jame in. We filmed quite a lot of machine-gun Kpjjjj [ctivity and a plane crash in Torun and then (^ (lade a second nightmare journey back to War ' jj[j jaw, taking this time 48 hours and losing four of i^5j he carriages on our train in bombing attacks. [heBfl ' Warsaw was reached in the midst of an air ■^jj laid, as indeed was Torun and every other town , 0 ^e were to visit during the war. We found that -;;5ilphe Government and military authorities had lown and we were left stranded without filming passes or any form of official identification. We decided to try and follow the Government and once again we took a train bound for an unknown destination. This last point didn't matter much for we never reached it anyway. On the second day out the train was so severely bombed that a quarter of its refugee passengers were killed and the few coaches which were left, together with the locomotive, were put completely out of action. Meanwhile, of course, the camera was running all the time. Abandoning the train, we were able to hire a couple of primitive farmcarts in which we slowly continued our journey. It was during these long days of snail-paced travel under the blazing midsummer sun that we shot some of the best sequences of our film. A tiny village, dozens of miles away from the nearest town or place of any military significance, which we found blazing from one end to the other, provided us with an unforgettable scene as old peasant women ran about barefoot on the scorched soil, feebiy throwing pails of water on the roaring furnaces which had once been their homes, their cattle and their haystacks. Daily discarding more and more of our belongings which we left in a long trail along the roadside, we finally reached the Latvian frontier and got out safely with our film two days before the Russian tanks rumbled in. In many ways, at any rate as far as I was concerned, history repeated itself in Holland. Once again I arrived in the country a month before Hitler's troops, and spent much profitable time photographing the Prime and Foreign Ministers and the General Staff". I was shown roimd the famous "water line" of Holland of which so much was expected and so little materialised. And I was arrested more times than I can remember. The last occasion was the forerunner of a new decree which was passed forbidding the carrying of cameras by anyone in Holland. This situation did not help me much in my work. And then one night I returned to my hotel at about 2.30 in the morning and was just weighing up the respective merits of bromo-seltzer or aspirin to demolish a headache, when I heard a familiar but almost forgotten noise. It was that same protracted drone which I had not heard since I had left Poland. Looking out of the window, I counted over 200 planes silhouetted against the breaking dawn. Dutch anti-aircraft fire burst furiously into action, but it seemed to me that the bursts were miles wide of their targets. Despite the intense activity in the air, none of the Amsterdam syrens went off. It was only the next morning, after several planes had been allowed to fly about unhindered and after one of them had dropped a salvo of bombs which blew up three houses, killed 40 and blasted three people and their bicycles into a canal, that the syrens at last wailed their acknowledgment of the deadliness of these German air weapons. Meanwhile, things were not looking too well for me. I was still in Amsterdam. The Military Command was still in the Hague. And I had not yet been given my promised filming permit and war passes. Since all photography had been forbidden even in peacetime, these passes were all the more necessary now that hostilities had started. Every attempt I made to reach the Hague or even phone the military authorities failed. The Germans had played the same trick they used in Poland to such good effect. They had in a few hours completely cut off every form of communication between the Administrative and Business capitals. Moreover, the situation in the streets did not help me to sneak shots. Every street in Amsterdam and outside was patrolled at twenty-yard intervals by armed guards, and shooting would break out every now and again when a short battle raged with fifth columnists hiding in different houses. In many cases, people were shot at sight. As I rigged up my camera on the hotel roof and lay down behind the parapet to film some planes flying low on the horizon I was astonished to hear a series of short whistles over my head, followed by sharp reports. One look into the street below showed me I was being fired upon by some over-zealous youth in a green uniform. Not wishing to be arrested at this stage, since it would have been impossible for me to contact the military chiefs to explain my integrity, I flew down the service stairs of the hotel and hid my kit. I spent one more agonising day, going between the chief of police and the local army authorities in an attempt to get some kind of permit, without any result. And then, after still getting nowhere, it became evident that the Germans, who had been overrunning the country pretty freely, were about to take Amsterdam too. So, together with the rest of the British journalists, I decided it was time to worry about my retreat. It took us only two days to get back, thanks to the help of some Dutch soldiers who escorted us through the firing line. German bombers who mistook our cars for troop carriers constantly flew overhead and dropped bombs at random in the night without doing us any harm. On one occasion also, machine-gun fire broke out all around us, as some parachutists landed and replied to the fire of our accompanying soldiers. s.o.s. The Director of the NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY would be grateful for a copy of DNL JANUARY (First Issue), to complete his File. Will anyone with a spare copy please send it to DNL, 34 Soho Square, London, W.I.