'Victory at Sea': 1950s documentary series is dated but still worth watching

Victory at Sea (1952-1953)

Directed by M. Clay Adams

Written by Henry Salomon and Richard Hanser

Narrated by Leonard Graves

2003 Introductions: Peter Graves

Victory at Sea is a 26-part television documentary that focuses mainly (but not exclusively) on naval warfare in World War II from the Allied point of view. Produced with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, Victory at Sea originally aired on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) television network from October 1952 to May 1953.  The series won an Emmy for best public affairs program in 1954 and became the template for such historically themed documentaries as CBS’s World War One (1964-1965)  and Thames Television’s The World at War (1974)

Produced and co-written (with Richard Hanser) by Henry Salomon and directed by M.Clay Adams, Victory at Sea consists of 26 half-hour  episodes that cover major naval battles and land campaigns in the European and Pacific theaters of war. The series follows the chronology of World War II from the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939 to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in September 1945.

Victory at Sea is a compilation-style documentary, edited by Isaac Kleinerman from over 13,000 hours of footage shot by Allied and Axis government cameramen during the war. Its presentation is, in comparison to modern World War II documentaries, rather spare. Each episode (or “volume”) focuses on a specific campaign (Hitler’s 1940  blitzkrieg in the West)  or naval battle (Midway) and features “voice of God” narration by Leonard Graves over black-and-white footage of combat in the air, on land, and on the sea.

Another hallmark of the series is the musical score. Although Richard Rodgers is credited as the composer of Victory at Sea’s  popular symphonic score, he only wrote 12 basic themes (none more than two minutes long) for the piano. Rodgers handed these themes to composer/arranger/conductor Robert Russell Bennett. Bennett took these basic two-minute themes and composed the longer, more complete musical tracks performed by the NBC Symphony Orchestra.

The Rodgers/Bennett score was so successful that RCA (which then owned NBC) released a soundtrack album LP in 1953. RCA has released several versions of the Victory at Sea album on various audio formats, including vinyl, audio cassette, and compact disc.

Episode List:

Victory at Sea - Volume 1: Design for War

Victory at Sea - Volume 2: The Pacific Boils Over

Victory at Sea - Volume 3: Sealing the Breach

Victory at Sea - Volume 4: Midway is East

Victory at Sea - Volume 5: Mediterranean Mosaic

Victory at Sea - Volume 6: Guadalcanal

Victory at Sea - Volume 7. Rings Around Rabaul

Victory at Sea - Volume 8. Mare Nostrum

Victory at Sea - Volume 9: Sea and Sand

Victory at Sea - Volume 10: Beneath the Southern Cross

Victory at Sea - Volume 11: The Magnetic North

Victory at Sea - Volume 12: Conquest of Micronesia

Victory at Sea - Volume 13: Melanesian Nightmare

Victory at Sea - Volume 14: Roman Renaissance

Victory at Sea - Vol. 15: D-Day

Victory at Sea - Vol. 16: Killers and the Kill

Victory at Sea – Vol. 17: The Turkey Shoot

Victory at Sea – Vol. 18: Two If By Sea

Victory at Sea – Vol. 19: The Battle For Leyte Gulf

Victory at Sea – Vol. 20: Return of the Allies

Victory at Sea - Vol. 21: Full Fathom Five

Victory at Sea - Vol. 22: The Fate of Europe

Victory at Sea - Vol. 23: Target Suribachi

Victory at Sea - Vol. 24: The Road to Mandalay

Victory at Sea - Vol. 25: Suicide for Glory

Victory at Sea - Vol. 26: Design for Peace

My Take

I’m too young to have watched this series when it ran on NBC during the 1952-1953 season. I also did not see the 1954 two-hour theatrical spin-off, also titled Victory at Sea when it premiered.

However, I do remember watching syndicated reruns of Victory at Sea on a Miami indie TV station back in the mid-1970s.

At the time, I was impressed by the blend of edited World War II-era footage, Leonard Graves’ narration, and the musical score (which is still popularly attributed to Richard Rodgers). I was already a World War II buff as a tween, so Victory at Sea reruns were “must-see” (or is “must-sea”?) TV for me.

65 years after its original network run, Victory at Sea still gets props for being among the first major documentary series made for television, its depiction of the human story of World War II from the point of view of the sailors, soldiers, Marines, and airmen, and its depth of coverage.

Unlike Britain’s The World at War, however, Victory at Sea has not aged well.

First, though the series covers a wide range of World War II topics, it does so without giving viewers in-depth analyses on strategy, tactics, or the complexities of multi-national alliances. Perhaps this superficiality stems partially from the episodes’ 30-minute running time. It’s not always easy to discuss serious issues, such as war on a global scale, in such a brief period of time.

However, I strongly suspect that Victory at Sea’s editorial slant reflects two realities:

1. It was a Cold War-era production that first aired during the last few months of the Korean War
2. It had to toe the official line of the Department of Defense, and particularly the viewpoint of the U.S. Navy

Though Victory at Sea is historically accurate and does not veer off into conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor, producer Henry Salomon and his creative team sometimes resort to Hollywood trickery to tell their story. In some sequences, viewers can tell when M. Clay Adams used footage shot on a low-budget sound stage to depict a conference room or a warship’s flag bridge. The different looks of WWII-era footage and shot-in-the-studio are glaring and hard to miss.

The series is also guilty of using footage from different periods of the war and causing weird anachronisms. For instance, planes such as the F6F Hellcat ( which entered service in 1943) will appear in episodes set in 1941 or even earlier. The casual viewer may not catch these goofs, but WWII buffs or veterans can, and often do.

Still, Victory at Sea is an enduring television classic. Even with its flubs and uncritical editorial approach to its narrative, producer Henry Salomon’s 13-hour-long series is a powerful visual record of the greatest cataclysm in human history.

The 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition

Because NBC never bothered to renew the series’ copyright. Victory at Sea is in the public domain. This corporate oversight has allowed several home video companies to release Victory at Sea on different formats with varying degrees of video and audio quality.

The 2003 Victory at Sea; 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition, produced and released by NBC News and the History Channel, is the best DVD set yet produced. The series’ 26 episodes are distributed among four discs. Each episode is presented with none of the blurry or glitchy image issues present in DVD sets produced by Mill Creek Entertainment and other companies.        

Though the audio levels are variable due to their analog era origins, the video portion of Victory at Sea is as good as one can expect from a series made in 1952. The NBC News-History Channel set’s  video transfer is clean and looks more professional than Mill Creek’s glitch-filled edition.