Borg el Arab: Filming in the Desert

Kay Gladstone, Acquisitions and Documentation Curator, IWM

Desert Victory is probably the most famous British campaign film from WWII; it was awarded the 1943 Oscar for best documentary of 1943 and by the end of the war had been shown in 81 countries and in 15 language versions. Stalin was even sent a copy by Churchill after the film's premiere in March 1943 (possibly in lieu of opening the Second Front in that year).

Some of its sequences have come to symbolize Britain's victorious power in WWII, and have been repeatedly plundered by television producers wanting easily recognizable archival period wallpaper for their programmes. Yet despite its fame, little is known about who shot the film, or the problems they faced, "they" being the cameramen of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) and the Royal Air Force Film Production Unit (RAFFPU). But first a little background about the history of British combat filming in WWII.

Development of British combat filming in WWII

At the outbreak of war, Britain had not a single cameraman in uniform, unlike the well-prepared French and Germans. A ban was placed almost immediately on civilian newsreel cameramen filming any military subject, including the departure of the British Expeditionary Force for France, the most visible sign of the country's preparedness for war. As at the start of WWI the War Office was so frightened of the risk to military security of film and photography that they were slow to appreciate their possible benefits for both military analysis and publicity purposes.

In all three services film and photography were the responsibility of Directorates of Public Relations (DPR). These organisations were staffed by retired officers ill-versed in the requirements of the new art of PR, as the Australian Official War Correspondent Kenneth Slessor found when he visited Whitehall to obtain a pass in June 1940. He met a Major "a pompous, pontificial type of staff officer, very lofty and aloof ….. who pointed out rather contemptuously, there being no war in Britain, there could be no war correspondents". The exasperated Australian concluded in his diary, "If this fellow is a fair specimen of the type of officer in the War Office, Heaven help Great Britain!"

Presumably because of pressure from an almost equally inept Ministry of Information, the Army did appoint its own Official War Office Cinematographer (Lt Harry Rignold) and an assistant (Sgt Gerry Massy Collier) just in time to film (rather inadequately) the BEF. Rignold and Massy Collier can fairly be described as typical of the first generation of combat cameramen during the period 1939-41, men with a professional background in either the British documentary or feature film industry, who were granted honorary military rank, placed in uniform and posted to Public Relations Units at home or overseas. None had previous military experience, although British evacuations from Dunkirk, Greece and Singapore soon made Rignold, Massy Collier and Lieutenant Bryan Langley familiar with the most conspicuous common feature of British operations during this first stage of the war.

Acting as lone camera operators, these pioneer cameramen made a significant contribution to the history of British combat film during the Second World War. Harry Rignold was posthumously awarded the Military Cross after dying of wounds received while coming ashore at Salerno, Massy Collier's film of the first Italian prisoners of war in the Western Desert boosted British morale late in 1940, while the vigorous nonagenarian Langley set up and trained the Indian Army's Public Relations Film Unit in Tollygunge (Calcutta) after surviving the Fall of Singapore. (It is frustrating to note that Langley made a comprehensive record of British defences on Cyprus in July 1941 in the expectation of attack, but that shortage of time and cameramen meant that the operations in Crete three months before were not recorded by the Army Film Unit.)

Creation of the Army Film and Photographic Unit

Meanwhile reports from the USA and British embassies in other neutral states constantly lamented the lack of any British military material in their local newsreels, amply supplied with impressive items from Berlin. It was only after a campaign mounted by the British Ministry of Information, ably assisted by a civilian public relations professional inside the Army's DPR, that the War Office and Air Ministry were obliged to form an expanded version of the AFU, the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU), and the Royal Air Force Film Production Unit (RAFFPU), formed in October and September 1941 respectively.

The major argument of the campaign was summarised in a film compiled from captured and pirated German newsreels showing the extensive facilities the German services gave their numerous cameramen operating on the land, at sea and in the air. The film was provocatively titled Film as a Weapon, at a time (March 1941) when Britain had precious few other weapons.

The Army immediately recruited a section of thirty cameramen and photographers from serving soldiers who had been invited to volunteer if they had any peacetime experience of film or photography, however slight. This second generation of combat cameramen were all given the rank of sergeant; as one of them (Ken Rodwell) later recalled in an interview:

"this gave us a certain amount of authority over the ordinary troops but also you could talk to anybody. I used to talk to old General Montgomery, Alexander, I filmed them, General Horrocks, lovely men".

In Rodwell's view the previous system of making cameramen into lieutenants was not effective,

"because you found the ordinary sort of soldier didn't like talking to officers and found it awkward".

The thirty cameramen and photographers arrived in Cairo in early 1942 to form No 1 Army Film and Photo Section (AFPS), a recognizable military unit of soldiers armed with cameras. Their CO was Major David Macdonald, whose glamorous feature film background and personable manner helped the new unit establish itself in the eyes of the Army and later the public. A fortnight before their arrival Slessor had attended a screening in a Cairo cinema of captured German and Japanese film, where the assembled top brass were urged to give every possible assistance to the new arrivals, who were expected to make such an important contribution to Britain's war effort. Every member of the new unit, shortly to have its own badge (a camera on a tripod), carried a pass authorizing him to record anything without regard to security or sensitivity since all film and photographic records were subject to military censorship (as moreover had always been the case).

Cameramen and photographers worked in teams of two, with a driver and their own jeep, which gave them the independence and mobility vital for their job. Generally six teams came under a section officer, a lieutenant whose main task was to find out from Intelligence at divisional headquarters where action was expected, so that he could attach his men to designated brigades. Respect for these combat cameramen soon grew; whereas previously a newsreel cameraman might, fairly or unfairly, have been greeted with the taunting enquiry "Come to fake something?" now soldiers began to realize that the arrival of these sergeants wearing a badge easily mistaken for Mickey Mouse probably indicated that action was imminent.

Equipment of the AFPU in the Western Desert

All film shot by WWII British (and indeed German) cameramen was 35mm black and white mute stock, although shot at sound speed (24 frames per second) so that it could be edited and have library sound effects and commentary added if included in a documentary or newsreel. The rolls were either 100 or 200 feet long, approximately 1 or 2 minutes in duration, and could be changed in daylight shade or darkroom changing bags. The cine camera most widely used by the AFPU in North Africa and Italy was the American DeVry, a rectangular metal object aptly but not affectionately known to its users as the "sardine can". The hand-held sardine can had a noisy clockwork motor, which needed rewinding after running about 40 feet of film, so judgment, and luck, were needed to capture some of the unexpected events of battle before the film ran out or the spring wound down. Cameramen seldom exposed more than fifteen minutes of film per day, and from their oral history testimony seem never to have been short of film. It was their lieutenant's job to keep them supplied and to collect their exposed reels together with the vital dopesheets which precisely identify and authenticate virtually every foot of Army and RAF film now preserved by the IWM. for processing in Cairo, as well as to ensure would have 15 rolls of film, which would seldom be exposed in a single day.

The cameraman had a choice of three lenses, the 6-inch being the nearest equivalent to a telephoto and obviously requiring a tripod, otherwise seldom used. The DeVry had a bayonet lens mount, requiring one lens to be removed and the other inserted, an awkward procedure, which risked the penetration of sand By contrast the first generation of British officer cameramen, many RAFFPU cameramen and virtually all US Army Signal Corps cameramen, used the precision built and ergonomically designed Bell and Howell Eyemo camera, which normally had an easily adjustable turret lens mechanism. Even more fortunate were the German PK cameramen, equipped with the professional standard Arriflex, with its triple lens turret, reflex viewfinder and powered by a separate battery pack.

Filming in the Western Desert

Although on some occasions equipment may have limited a cameraman's ability to record scenes of battle, a greater limitation was the nature of modern warfare itself, noisy, distant and spread over a wide area, and often conducted under cover of darkness.

Several Western Desert cameramen have described the difficulties they faced at the time of the battle of El Alamein.

Sergeant Bill Jordan, who was awarded the Military Medal and who was wounded three times within two years (sniper fire in Tunis, S-Mine in Sicily, mortar at Monte Cassino), recalled the frustration of not being able to film all the night time activity before El Alamein. He did manage however to film the night barrage by slowing the speed of his camera to 4 frames per second, which had the effect on screen of speeding up the rate of artillery fire, making it even more impressive than the reality.

His main frustration was trying to film armoured warfare in the desert:

"Tank battles are two way duels, there's nothing in between and one of your tanks firing looks as if it could be anywhere. It's frustrating when you don't see the opposition and you have to try and get some action intro the photography." On one occasion he was so close to the action when waiting inside a slit trench for a push by Australian tanks in the early hours that when they unexpectedly rolled straight over his position, he was too close, and petrified, to film.

Sergeant Ken Rodwell, who recalled how he and Alan Moorhead were so close to the front line later in Sicily that they were reported to have captured Taormina, was one of the eight cameramen covering El Alamein, and attached to the Highland Light Infantry. (His colleague Frank Martin was later killed when their jeep hit a Teller mine.) Rodwell described the frustration, and dangers, of trying to film battle with such short focal length lenses that "An explosion of a shell on a 3-inch lens if it goes off 200 yards away doesn't look all that much, yet it's frightening because you have got red hot metal flying around".

When asked the obvious follow-up "Did you used to reconstruct events?" Rodwell answered with a number of examples showing that staging events was sometimes the inevitable price paid to film "real war":

"If you get a few old car tyres, put them in a tank and set fire to them with a bit of petrol it looks like the tank is still burning. Then all you need is one bren carrier with troops on moving through the smoke, and it's all happening but it's not real war".

Rodwell immediately qualified his implication that combat cameramen regularly "reconstructed" or "staged" events for the camera by recalling Bill Jordan's experience of front-line filming. Cameramen who did need to stage events were always required to note the fact in their dope sheets, but the practice was in any case severely discouraged as likely to demoralise the unit.

Production of Desert Victory

How Desert Victory was edited is best told in the actual words of Dickie Best, who as Sergeant Best of the AFU was based at the headquarters of the AFU and RAFFPU at Pinewood Studios:

"The film started coming back prior to Alamein, quite a time prior to Alamein. David Macdonald was out there with his cameramen, and masses of film came back daily, perhaps 2 or 3,000 feet [approximately twenty to thirty minutes]. We viewed everything in the cutting room theatre. ... It kept coming in every day. What Roy [Roy Boulting - the director and supervising film editor] would do - he would select what he wanted me to use. He would probably throw out an entire roll, 600 or 700 feet - 'nothing in there we want for this'. .... We had the dope sheets that the cameramen sent back, so we knew where we were and what particular location we were at and we knew what it was meant to be.

Obviously one did not have a script as such - one had a sort of treatment of the progression, maybe a rough commentary, so one knew what to cut to, one knew the order of events. Roy would say 'we shall open the film on that wonderful long shot of the desert.' He didn't actually tell me where to cut. You would put it together sequence by sequence. .... He never actually handled film, he did not come into the cutting room and himself physically cut or mark anything up. I put it together according to what we had discussed in the theatre. And he would again see it in the theatre as a rough-cut. Don't forget it was all silent, no sound at all - until we got the shape, and then we would have the commentary and adjust it to the commentary. That was really the basic way of working. A lot of the material was quite obvious as to what it was meant to be. It was either preparing, or the troops resting, all the build-up before Alamein. And when it was after Alamein, it was pretty obvious, tanks tearing along, or guns going off, it was all pretty clear, the positioning.

He didn't actually handle any film himself. The only thing Roy did, we had shot all the music, which was the wonderful composer Willian Alwyn, at Pinewood in Theatre One, and it was broken down, ready to be laid the next day. I came in the next day, ready to lay this music. And there it was, all end-out, laid, it was a cutting-copy! Roy had stayed up all night, he had gone in when I had left, and laid this music. And I said ' Aren't you tired?' and he said 'No, sleep is a fetish' he said - Very Roy is that! It took a long time, we did do ten weeks, working till about nine or so, every day, seven days a week for the final editing of this film.

And Frank Clarke did the last reel of that film which is really the victory. .... It was purely celebration stuff, no fighting in it, he could do that as a piece. It was the speed, because we had a premiere date in the West End."

Inevitably suggestions for improvements came from various quarters, generally from people unfamiliar with the technicalities of film production. Thus when Churchill asked for the marchpast of the 52nd Division to be inserted and for the commentary to refer to the New Zealanders marching by, no alterations could be made since the music and commentary had already been cut.

A more significant amendment was suggested by the person who had forced the War Office to expand the Army Film Unit into the Army Film and Photographic Unit, Churchill's journalist friend and newly appointed Minister of Information, Brendan Bracken. Bracken wanted the names of the cameramen killed during the making of Desert Victory to be mentioned. When word came back that although two officers and four sergeants had been killed in the whole of operations, ie a 25% fatality rate, in the Battle of Egypt itself "they were fairly lucky" as only one photographer had been killed, so no alteration was made. But a suggestion from India that it would be politic to include Indian troops in action was made just in time to be accepted.

Beyond these minor details, the major force shaping Desert Victory was the imagination of Roy Boulting, already known for his direction of the daringly anti-Nazi film Pastor Hall (1940). Realising that the hour long campaign film needed to be more than a pedestrian account of military operations based only on footage supplied by the AFPU and RAFFPU (as had originally been intended), Boulting decided to shoot special sequences at Pinewood in order to give artistic shape to the hour-long documentary. In the words of Dickie Best:

"Roy was such a dominant person, he was so accurate, he was the creative genius of these films, really. Deciding to shoot stuff at Pinewood for instance at the beginning of the attack, the night stuff, which you could not have got in the desert. It came about because there was no lead-up to the drama. We had a few tanks settling down ready to go and we had the barrage, plenty of gun shots for the barrage, and then all hell let loose and off they ran. But we had not got the suspense, to build a suspense sequence, and that is what he wanted. That is why he shot the bagpipes and the troops advancing to their positions, at Pinewood on stage at night. And I think it was worth it because it gave a tremendous tension to the battle.

And then of course the wadi which he had dug for Desert Victory - because that was something again which could not be shot at the time. He wanted to give the feeling that they had to go down this wadi and get up again in order to get across. It was a great big ditch, it was more than a ditch, you could put a house in it, done by a bulldozer. ...So he was quite clever, the things that he did to make these films [Desert Victory and Burma Victory] what they are today."

Reactions to Desert Victory

The film was widely praised by the press on its release, and was extremely popular with the public, being listed in Mass Observation opinion surveys as one of the best British wartime films shown in this country. It was also shown successfully in the United States of America, traditionally unwilling to watch "foreign movies". As the Allied advance across Europe progressed, Desert Victory was widely screened to audiences who until recently had only seen the triumph of German weaponry on their screens. Few can have realized that it was only thanks to the earlier impact of German film propaganda on British official thinking that the War Office had created a film unit just in time to record the most spectacular victory of British and Commonwealth forces in the Second World War.