Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1930-1949)

supervision or coordination. This was simply one of the growing pains connected with the establishment of the Air Force as a separate Department along with the Army and the Navy. It was not strange, therefore, that the outbreak of hostilities in Korea found the Air Force unprepared to meet its photographic requirements in an efficient and organized manner. The Army and the Navy, on the other hand, were well prepared to document their combat activities with photography, so essential for operational purposes. When the Chief of Staff of the Air Force became aware of the situation, he directed the immediate establishment of a photographic service to satisfy the most urgent requirements of the Air Force. After almost a year of careful study and planning, the scattered but related activities of the Air Force were reorganized under a single command, which was designated the Air Photographic and Charting Service. The principal elements of the Photographic Service are: The Photographic Documentation Group ; The USAF Photographic Center; The Mapping and Charting Group ; and The Aeronautical Chart and Information Center. The units of these activities are of necessity scattered from Korea through Europe, to North Africa and the Middle East. Wherever the global mission of the Air Force requires its operation, there also you will find units of the Air Photographic and Charting Service. I should like to emphasize that during the year in which the Photographic Service was being organized and firmly established, photography did not stand still. During that first year our Combat Camera Unit in Korea piled up over 300 combat missions and exposed more than 225,000 feet of motion picture film in combat. The Unit ran up an outstanding record of awards and decorations and took their combat losses along with the fighting units. Today we are happy to fall in step with the pace set by you television engineers. We have brought the field of electronics into a firm position in our organization. Indicative of how we are accomplishing this in the Photographic Service is the fact that the production division has a split title. It is called the Motion Picture and Video Production Division. In this Division we have affected a marriage of these two fields without any of the initial rivalry that ran through industry when the motion picture and the television people first eyed each other warily from opposite sides of the fence. It was a matter of firm pride to think that I was connected with the creation of a video production unit in the Air Photographic and Charting Service. The mission of this unit is built around the high-speed concept, completely mobile with the latest electronic equipment. This unit is now undergoing the equipping phase prior to an operational shakedown. It was established on an experimental basis to ascertain as early as practicable the applicability of television to the operational and training mission of the Air Force. Part of their portable equipment is a 16mm rapid processor which was first presented, I believe to the Society at your convention in Chicago in April 1950. As you know, this machine presents a ready-to-project print beginning ninety seconds after initial photography. As the author of any new work takes great pride in crediting his source material, we do so with a bow of great appreciation to industry and to our elder services — the Army and Navy. Throughout all of our efforts, we have maintained liaison with industry, with the experiments conducted by the universities and colleges throughout the country and the work done by the Navy in its Special Devices Center at Sands Point and, of course, with the Army's "Operation Caravan." No great degree of imagination is required to see unlimited possibilities in the application of TV to technical, flight and combat crew training, and through kinescope recordings the preparation of training films with celerity and informality hitherto impossible. What we lose in artistry, we gain in speed and volume. I have given you a rough sketch — yesterday, today and tomorrow — of photography and television in the Air Force. Your meeting here in Washington seems to key note high-speed. In the Air Force we are trying to keep our thinking and our planning in that same key — to keep the pace that you are setting. 438