Today may have been Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, but the US and Japan nearly went to war four years prior to Pearl.
In December of 1937, Japan and China were at war in the Second Sino-Japanese War in the Asian prelude to World War Two. The Japanese were marching to Nanjing and the US State Department ordered all American citizens out of the city and head for the safety of US naval vessels in the area. There were three newsreel cameramen in Nanjing at the time: Eric Mayell of Fox Movietone, Arthur Menkin of Paramount News and Norman Alley of Universal News. Mayell and Alley left for the gunboat USS Panay on December 11th while Menkin stayed behind to eventually witness the fall of Nanjing as well as the massacre a few days later.
On December 12, 1937, the USS Panay was bombed and sunk by the Japanese while she laid at anchor in the Yangtze River upstream from Nanjing. When the bombs started to fall, the two cameramen aboard the Panay heeded their instincts, grabbed their cameras and started to film the attack and aftermath.
Mayell stayed behind to continue to cover the war, while Alley was taken out of China by the Navy along with the negatives and sent to Washington under heavy military and police protection in order to screen the prints with selected government officials. President Roosevelt demanded that 800 feet of it to be censored in order to keep the US and Japan out of a war at that time and the rest was allowed to be publicly shown in the theaters. Universal turned it into a special feature as well as dragged Alley in person from theater to theater so the audiences could meet the actual cameraman who shot that film.
As a result of the newspaper coverage of the bombing and Universal’s heavy promotion of him to the public, Norman Alley became a minor celebrity…enough of one that years later he even would upstaged Ed Murrow when the two were working together on stories for CBS (well at least until Murrow took on McCarthy).
And of course, Alley himself with his "thousand-pound pencil" 35mm Wall sound news camera.
Moving on from how Alley became famous in his day.
Norman Alley was quite an interesting photog. The best way to describe Alley would be that he wrote like Lenslinger does but had a heck of a lot more chutzpah. He wrote an autobiography about his career from 1912 to 1940 titled I Witness. Alley had the benefit of a copy editor for his book, but I have copies of some of his unedited writings and they read like Lenslinger’s blog, right down to the grammar.
The chutzpah? Alley believed quite firmly in the rights of news photographers to shoot whatever they considered newsworthy and not have to pay for those rights…and was willing to back that beliefs up. The "Long Count Fight" between Dempsey and Tunney – he snuck in himself and a half dozen other photogs into Soldier Field to shoot the match in retaliation to the exclusive rights being sold to a local firm. At the 1936 Rose Bowl, he and the other newsreel firms in Los Angeles were told they could only use 100 feet of film of the game since the media rights to the game were sold to a local firm as well. Alley orchestrated a newsreel media boycott of the game as well as the Rose Parade because they couldn’t have as Alley put it, "camera carte blanche" at the game.
The "twenty minute war" on the Yangtze River that turned Alley into a household name also had some repercussions for his fellow photogs in the late 1930s. The public became overly facinated with them and their careers. One Paramount News crew had to resort to making bystanders go away so they could work by handing out cards with the answers to the most commonly asked questions.
Another fallout from Alley’s public fame and the heightened interest in news photographers was MGM bought a screenplay written by Fox Movietone News cameraman Len Hammon (same photog who was claiming that citizen journalists were going to replace him) and turned it into a movie called "Too Hot to Handle." Hammon wrote the screenplay based upon real stories he and his fellow photogs shot with a big dose of artistic license of course. If you can track down a copy, its actually the sort of film you can watch with your wives/girlfriends – Clark Gable and Myrna Loy are the main stars. There’s two big mistakes in it (Eyemos can’t record sound and crews didn’t bring projection gear with them into the field), but its the best glimpse into what the news-gathering world that Alley worked in was like.