On Front Lines to Capture the History of War

Behind every silver-haired guy sitting at the table with a scrapbook on his lap and a plate of pretzels and dip at his elbows is one heck of a story.

Hal shot movie footage of the A-bomb test on Bikini Atoll and can tell you what it’s like to fly above a mushroom cloud. Joe snapped pictures of the Allies liberating German concentration camps.

Donnie almost died, camera in hand. He got trapped on a hilltop in South Vietnam and watched the enemy cut down his platoon from 70 men to six.

At a recent meeting of the International Combat Camera Assn., held poolside behind a Valley Village home, veteran cameramen gathered to dust off each other’s forgotten glory and lend an ear for pained memories.

The group is for veterans who served as photographers and filmmakers in the armed forces, many of whom landed in Hollywood after their tours. They meet regularly in the San Fernando Valley, though members are sprinkled worldwide from Australia to Germany. One 91-year-old member was, in a past life, an official photographer for Adolf Hitler.

Their pride is evident--but so is a sliver of bitterness. Their work is the backbone of thousands of documentaries and history books, but they rarely receive credit beyond the standard “Army Pictorial Services” in fine print.

Part of the group’s mission is to lobby film companies for individual attribution and to arrange museum exhibits to raise its profile. The association will display photographs and gear at the Great Western Gun Show in Pomona from April 31 to May 2.

But more than anything, the organization is about fellowship. It’s a bunch of guys in the twilight of their lives who get a lift from piling a table high with scrapbooks and snacks and soaking up the mess hall camaraderie of their brightest days.

“I guess you could say a lot of what we do is sit around and tell each other how brave we were,” said 82-year-old Hal Geer at a recent meeting.

The organization started about 15 years ago and incorporated as a nonprofit in 1989. Joe Longo, an Army photographer during World War II and later a TV cameraman, formed the association because he wanted to make sure “that people never forget that there was a guy sticking his head and a-- out from behind a camera when all hell was breaking loose.”

Los Angeles, where Longo then lived (he has since moved to Oregon), was the perfect spot for the organization’s headquarters, thanks to a long-standing connection between Hollywood and military photography.

When America jumped into the war in 1941, the Army turned to the movie studios for experienced cameramen. (They were all men back then.) Director John Ford trained a top-secret team of filmmakers who parachuted behind enemy lines to film military targets. Actors such as Ronald Reagan and William Holden starred in training movies. Many of the cameramen who worked at the studios also saw combat.

One of them was Joe von Stroheim, son of the famous silent movie director Erich von Stroheim. Before he enlisted in 1942, the younger Von Stroheim lived a storybook life, riding to work each morning with Clark Gable and making a living photographing the stars. Then, at 23, he was sent to war, first to take pictures in Europe and later in the South Pacific.

Many of Von Stroheim’s stories are a tangled web of places and dates, shell sizes and camera models, military jargon and cameraman jargon, sometimes obscure but gripping because of his vividness.

Some of his best stories are light. There’s the one about getting crammed in a pup tent with a recruit who smelled like a goat. One night after lights out, the recruit asked Von Stroheim for some deodorant. Von Stroheim handed him black shoe polish, which, in the dark, the recruit proceeded to wipe under his arms.

“You should have seen his face in the morning,” Von Stroheim laughed. “We really had an esprit de corps back then.”

That same esprit continues between Von Stroheim, now a portly 76, and other core members of the combat photographer association. Though the group has 270 members worldwide and continues to grow by word of mouth, the nucleus remains a handful of older veterans from the Los Angeles area who meet every few months.

Jerry Cole is the wise guy. All skin and bone, his pants held up with a huge brass belt buckle that says “JERRY,” he let no page in his scrapbook go unnoticed.

“Hey, guys, look at this baby,” said Cole, 74, pointing to a photograph of B-17 bombers in a cloud of anti-aircraft fire over Europe. “That flak’s so thick you could walk on it.”

Donnie Shearer, the president of the association, smiled at Cole’s machismo. At 56, Shearer is one of the younger members of the core group and maybe the most uncomfortable about his war experience.

Shearer was the Marine whose platoon was decimated on a muddy hilltop in Vietnam in August 1969. Like many military photographers, he was part cameraman, part soldier, with an Arriflex movie camera slung around his neck and a .30-caliber carbine over his shoulder. That night on the hilltop, he used both.

Hal Geer is the artist of the bunch. From bomber planes, he filmed attacks in the Pacific and the A-bomb test after World War II on Bikini Atoll. His best pictures though were snapped on the ground during the Japanese invasion of China. They are images of human misery that are somehow beautiful to look at, instinctively arranged to please the eye. Like the one of Chinese refugees dragging carts through the mud, faces gripped with fear, ribbons of farmland in the background, a slice of sky at the top of the frame.

“I was telling the story of human hell,” he said.

For a moment, the other guys at the meeting paused to let Geer finish his spiel. “We were there to tell stories,” he said.

“To make sure people didn’t forget what happened.”