1. As in my recent work on related topics, I choose a gerund intentionally, wishing to define remembering as an ongoing process, something that mediates between what we might call (very approximately) history — what happened — and memory — how it is retrospectively constructed in a certain cultural moment. I do so, among other reasons, to avoid unwieldy distinctions, in addressing issues of American democratic culture, between what Michael Kammen has called “collective memory” on one hand — “(usually a code phrase for what is remembered by a dominant civic culture)” — and “popular memory” — “(usually referring to ordinary folks)” (10) — with the latter also recently made to embrace, as Kammen also notes, currently fashionable notions of “oral cultures” or “working-class” and “community” history” (9). I use remembering here to address these and other ways of negotiating between history and various forms of cultural memory. See Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar.

2. Comparable texts, as I have written elsewhere, would include Sands of Iwo Jima or South Pacific, Mr. Roberts or Battle Cry, The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, The Young Lions, The Caine Mutiny, or even Catch-22. And likewise here, as in my related work on many of these titles, the idea of commodity continues to denote my particular interest in the World War II classic — with Victory at Sea the case at hand — achieving its status through multiple forms of production. In this sense of the text as “production classic,” I obviously imply the idea of mass-cultural production used by Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others, as spanning the orbits of artistic and politicoeconomic enterprise. At the same time, I want to use it in the less ideologically restrictive sense of relationship between literary production in America, from the earliest days of the Republic onward, and the production of cultural myth. In sum, I mean here to address within post—World War II political and economic contexts popular-culture representations of the war in various forms — literary, dramatic, and cinematic — of commercial genre or medium.

3. The role of the fledgling network, NBC, will receive considerable attention in the production account that follows. As to the participatory enthusiasm of the service in question, the U.S. Navy, see Boettcher, Thomas D.'s First Call: The Making of the Modern U.S. Military, 1945–1953 (New York: Little, Brown, 1992)Google Scholar, in which he details the desperation of Navy officials at seeing their 151-year role as the nation's preeminent military arm usurped in the late 1940s by an eighteenmonth-old Air Force. Even Reader's Digest, according to Boettcher, had suddenly become an enemy, running a series of pro-Air Force articles by William Bradford Huie seemingly timed to influence FY 1950 defense budget negotiations (168).

4. Weaver, Pat, with Coffey, Thomas H., The Best Seat in the House (New York: Knopf, 1994), 241Google Scholar.

5. As a model of early television's frequent promotional emphasis on “live” presentation as a distinguishing feature, this also became the program on which, with great ceremony, a first, totally simultaneous, coast-to-coast hookup was achieved.

6. For this important insight, the salience of which has been obscured by time, see the sections on early television, for instance, in Goulden, Joseph C., The Best Years: 1945–50 (New York: Atheneum, 1976)Google Scholar.

7. On the other hand, at some point here, one must also confront the issue of this same artifact's essentially sui generis status as far as ensuing large-scale attempts to depict World War II on TV would be concerned: the issue, as one might put it, that aside from movie reruns and other documentary re-creations devised essentially on the Victory at Sea model, the Big War seems to have proved unusually resistant to transfer to the small screen. Only a handful of dramatic efforts, for instance, including series such as Combat and Twelve O'Clock High or the occasional miniepic call themselves to memory as having attracted substantial viewing interest, with the only long-running successes, ironically, being in the situation-comedy format: namely, Hogan's Heroes and McHale's Navy. To be sure, one might ascribe this more to audience enthusiasm for genre than subject matter: these are not shows about World War II but basic situation comedies, with a humor-in-the-service orientation, with the first set in a World War II POW camp with some strutting costume-drama Germans in charge and the second on a World War II Pacific Island with some diminutive Japanese foes stumbling in and out occasionally. At the same time, however, such caricatures certainly continued to sell vividly in more serious renderings on the big screen. For a slightly more detailed inventory of offerings, see Barnouw, Erik T., Tube of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 374–75Google Scholar.

Why could World War II not accommodate itself to TV or vice versa? One simply wonders finally if the unique capacity to mediate between viewing scales was not really just the feature capitalized upon by Victory at Sea for its multiple successes. For war-era and immediate postwar audiences conditioned to large-screen information and entertainment, that is, Victory at Sea may have made a move to the small screen, but it also kept the documentary format and the standard package of wartime and immediate postwar atmospherics — film technique, narration, music. Hence, although in a new “medium,” the war continued to seem remarkably wedded to the media that had rendered it familiar — the news photograph, the movie, the picture magazine, and the popular book. As noted previously, the initial “event” itself reinforced then all these impressions by its capitalization on the early sense of TV as a “live” medium. But at the same time, once beyond the special showings, the series could also turn around and capitalize on the virtues of segmentation, specifically of the thirteen-hour twenty-six-installment plan's lending itself to the half-hour format already proving the standard for soap operas, sitcoms, and entertainment and information programming.

8. This is confirmed by a number of accounts. For one giving an inside view from NBC, see Weaver, , Best Seat (241)Google Scholar.

9. Salomon also repaid the trouble. Listed as Naval Advisor was Cpt. Walter Karig, primary writer on the six-volume Battle Report series and a bitter rival of Morison, whose own history project was seen as amateur-academic competition, and who, in the Morison opus, running ultimately to fourteen volumes of text and a fifteenth for index, had rated a footnote in volume 3. Further, he surely must have enjoyed creative benefit from active participation on the project by Karig, an imaginative writer by temperament and achievement, remembered far less today for Battle Report than for more than twenty children's books and works of popular fiction in which he clearly recognized a popular audience and successfully grasped what kind of story line would appeal to them. See Pfitzer, Gregory M., Samuel Eliot Morison's Historical World (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 238–39Google Scholar.

10. In Rodgers, ' version, recorded in his autobiography, Musical Stages (New York: Random House, 1975)Google Scholar, Weaver, identified as a “contact,” described Victory at Sea to him initially in somewhat cloak-and-dagger terms as a “Navy” project, with the atmospherics of it all suggesting recruitment to some desperate paramilitary enterprise. The cryptic initial “message,” he remembered running as follows: “If you were approached to do some work for the United States Navy,” said Weaver, “we'd like your assurance that you wouldn't refuse to consider it.” “Well, of course,” replied the somewhat puzzled composer, imagining himself perhaps Emile Debecque-like in a crisis of civilian honor, “I wouldn't refuse to consider any offer from the United States Navy.” Rodgers went on:

His curiously negative question, it turned out, was simply a matter of protocol. The Navy had approached NBC with the idea of presenting a television documentary series about its exploits during World War II, but before a definite offer could be made I had to give my assurance in advance that I would at least consider composing the score. One simply does not say no to the United States Navy — not out of hand, anyway. (248)

Thus, through what appears to have been Weaver's expert sandbagging, was revealed the mission. And thus was the mission also accepted, with the further patriotic stipulation by Rodgers that his work at least on the original project be nonprofit. For Weaver's version, see also his memoir (Best Seat, 241).

11. To judge of this impact, a viewer of the era might have noted the appearance in short order of a new documentary series entitled Air Power, featuring Walter Cronkite, that seemed to promote a competing view of victory from the standpoint of the newly formed U.S. Air Force. (The Army, as usual, had to settle for a poor third with The Big Picture, a syndicated public- information newsreel.)

12. It is hard to know where to begin to catalogue the disappointments. On the world stage, any cheer of victory was quickly replaced by the Cold War, with face-offs in Greece and Eastern Europe, the Berlin Blockade, the fall of China to the Communists, and actual war in Korea — and with all of this, of course, also presided over by the growing specter of final nuclear armageddon.

At home, problems of conversion to peacetime governance and economic policy, if not sufficiently complicated by such geopolitical atmospherics, were further exacerbated by interservice rivalries and McCarthyite witch hunting. The Arsenal of Democracy, plunged into intense military debate over defense appropriations and management policy, worried out its new strategic image amidst a never-ending train of conspiracy theories, global exportation and subversion theories, containment theories, domino theories, deterrence theories, and massive reaction theories. In a post—Cold War world, such a psychology of reception, one should hope, will prove increasingly easy for Americans to forget. On the other hand, it surely played a crucial role at the time in creating viewer response to Victory at Sea as a welcome reaffirmation of the grand American and Allied effort that seemed so recently crowned with worthy success.

13. The prophecy would be realized in any number of ways, some immediate and some long term. At NBC itself, Salomon and many members of his production group moved on to the Project XX series that would set the standard for television special-project documentary and put in motion patterns of similar development at the other major networks. Eventually public television, of course, would make a specialty of the documentary information–entertainment–education model, with the latter also given further new commercial life in the age of cable with a host of special-interest channels including Arts and Entertainment, Discovery, Nature, and History.

14. Time, November 10 1952, 105; Newsweek, November 10 1952, 68; New Yorker, April 4 1953, 77–78; and Harper's (June 1954): 8–13. Moreover, it has continued to be so treated in historical studies. Bluem, for instance, in his standard history of American TV documentary pronounces on the groundbreaking aesthetics of an essentially new form. Without sacrificing overall effect, within each of the twenty-six segments, he observes, a “major subject was given a specific point of view around which a thematic episode could be constructed” and sustained through film, words, and music. As to sustained dramatic interest, this was likewise provided internally by a maintaining of “the distinction between the journalistic point of view and the artist's expression of theme” (Bluem, A. William, Documentary in American Television [New York: Hastings House, 1965], 147Google Scholar).

15. With prime later venues including, of all places, Japan, where it enjoyed a tremendous run in the late 1960s.

16. The most visible of these, of course, was the Life's Picture History of World War II, which had been followed, also in 1959, as it turns out, by a two-volume follow-up set incorporating new photoessays and text by Winston Churchill. By this time, similar efforts had also been made by the staffs of such quasi-official wartime organs as Yank and Stars and Stripes. We may now look back at these and contemporary analogues, perhaps, as the dying gasp of photojournalism as immortalized by the great popular magazines of midcentury. On the other hand, we should also continue to see their popularity as a function of the degree to which, aside from words, classic photojournalism and newsreel production remained entrenched in people's minds as their primary means of having seen the war's events represented to them at the time.

17. The first, perhaps still the most familiar for those who recall the albums, printed the blowup of a famous photograph of the carrier Bunker Hill in the moment of being struck by Kamikaze. The movie footage had appeared in the documentary. The still had been featured in the print volume (Salomon, Henry, with Hanser, Richard, Victory at Sea [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959], 245Google Scholar). The second and third opted for vivid, impressionistic combat scenes, reminiscent of the war art of such familiar figures as Tom Lea, Jon Whitcomb, and others. Eventually the first, in new editions, recast the original photograph in an illustration style consonant with the other two jackets.

18. The jacket copy of the first volume, a standard single, for instance, began with an essay on the genesis of the project by Henry Salomon. Along the way, it also managed to get in admiring commentary from Variety and the New Yorker, a specific outline of Rodgers's and Bennett's achievements, and a quote from the Peabody Award citation for series at large. On the record itself appeared new, dramatic titles with which major musical motifs and melodies came to be identified: “The Song of the High Seas,” “The Pacific Boils Over,” “Guadalcanal March,” “D-Day,” “Hard Work and Horseplay,” “Theme of the Fast Carriers,” “Beneath the Southern Cross,” “Mare Nostrum,” “Victory at Sea.”

Accordingly, the second record package, enlarging on the documentary function, presents itself literally as an album, in this case a folio volume. Again, jacket text rehearsed the overall history of the project, with emphasis on Salomon's alleged recruitment of Rodgers's and Rodgers's ensuing happy decision to forge a collaboration with Bennett. It then turned to matters of production continuity as well. “The present selection of themes and melodies,” it claimed as “a natural sequel to the first, which it supplements without repeating. And these, duly, are then named and discussed in a sidebar — “Fire on the Waters,” “Danger Down Deep” (noted as a variation of “The Song of the High Seas”), “Mediterranean Music,” “The Magnetic North,” “Allies on the March,” “Voyage into Fate,” “Peleliu,” and “The Sound of Victory” — with notes credited to Richard Hanser, billed as “Co-Author of the script of ‘Victory at Sea,’” Further, on the inside, the musical programming so described was also complemented with the thrill of new technologies, of sound-effect segments, strategically interspersed, creating for a given passage the appropriate documentary atmospherics. From the teeming jungle to the stormy North Atlantic, one could now hear also monkeys, screeching birds, telegraph keys, thunderous naval bombardments, signals vanishing into the winds, and the silences of the cold magnetic north.

The third album, in turn, basically cycled the rest of the way through the logic of the evolutionary spinoff. Billed as a pictorial edition, in production format, it became an album cum narrative photodocumentary, with hard covers and actual bound pages, capturing again in text and classic photographs the feel of all the earlier artifacts. Tribute to Salomon was rendered, for instance, by reprinting of a condensed version of the essay written for the first recording. Yet another essay then followed by Hanser on the project's historical and aesthetic genealogy, and a new one by Bennett, identified here as conductor of the “Victory at Sea” orchestra, on musical evolutions. Accordingly, the text itself became a total package, with narrative copy, photoessays, and record tracks all integrated into a new set of motifs created by the latest efforts at dramatic retitling: “Rings Around Rabaul,” “Full Fathom Five,” “The Turkey Shoot,” “Ships That Pass,” “Two if by Sea,” “The Turning Point” — and finally, in grand summation — “Symphonic Scenario (The Melodic Story),” But again, one had only to look at the cover to see that now there was even more. For blazoned beneath the title, with illustration, new notes also proclaimed this latest production model to feature “Sounds of firing of 16-inch and 8-inch guns from U.S. battleships and heavy cruisers — anti-aircraft guns and naval combat planes of World War II — submarine crash dives/and underwater torpedo launchings — produced with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy.”

In sum, amidst a musical fad among high-fidelity and stereo devotees for doing things like the 1812 overture with actual cannons, muskets, and chimes, etc., or recording drag racers and jet airplanes, volume 3 truly did it all. One at last could not easily tell if one was buying a coffee-table book or a glorified sound-effects record.

19. Here, especially, one may find a fitting last technological chapter in the genealogy of the artifact as defined by both its unfolding modes of production and its evolving contexts of consumption and reception. For televisions, of course, after all these years, can finally be bought with speaker systems characteristic of state-of-the-art high-fidelity and stereo equipment. To put this simply, in the particular case of Victory at Sea, the sound reproduction technology has caught up with the quality of the music. One hopes Morison would have been horrified. Salomon, Rodgers, Bennett, Sarnoff, and company, on the other hand, would surely have been pleased at the most recent commodification of the forms of American remembering they had wrought.

20. One might date a 1985 American Heritage survey by Ward, Geoffrey C. of video editions of Victory at Sea, The March of Time, and The World at War as having caught the beginning of the buildup (36, no. 6 [10—11 1985]: 14–16)Google Scholar. Nothing might have prepared one, though, for the array of fiftieth-anniversary articles in magazines and newspapers, wherein the title Victory at Sea has surely been invoked by at least one local journalist in every city in America as a particular lead-in on the sources of recollection.

21. In concluding retrospect, one might further note that the titles do represent scrupulous and comprehensive historical collage. The Battle of the Atlantic, the Pacific, Submarines, the Mediterranean, North Africa, South America, the North Atlantic, the Italian Campaign, D-Day, Southeast Asia, the Army, and the Marines in Pacific all get fairly equal time — although there seems pointedly nothing of the Air Force or the Russians. Numerically, the Pacific predominates with fifteen segments. The rest are distributed regionally, including the Atlantic, Mediterranean, South America, North Africa, Italy, and Europe. The dramatic arrangement is roughly chronological, although division according to theater of war causes some going back or jumping ahead. The third from last section, “Road to Mandalay,” for instance, placed after European surrender and Iwo Jima, must return to much earlier Japanese conquests in China and Southeast Asia before moving to concluding installments on Okinawa and the kamikazes, and then the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the aftermath of war.