Arriving in the Movie’s Wake: 3 Pearl Harbor Documentaries

At the opening of the National Geographic documentary “Pearl Harbor: Legacy of Attack,” NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw tries to explain why the attack still has an emotional hold on much of the American public nearly 60 years later.

“Pearl Harbor,” Brokaw says while standing on the deck of the battleship Missouri, “was so unexpected, so brutal, so chaotic that we’re struggling to understand what happened that day.”

Three top-notch documentaries airing this weekend go a long way toward explaining exactly what happened on Dec. 7, 1941, and why Americans refuse to forget. All are hoping to catch the tail wind created by Disney’s blockbuster-manque “Pearl Harbor,” which opened Friday.

Of the three, “Legacy” is the most ambitious and, ultimately, the most compelling. In it, Pearl Harbor veterans explain in agonized detail how they are haunted by the images of death and destruction.

“I ran into a friend of mine and he was crying and asking me for help,” says Carl Carson, who was a 20-year-old sailor aboard the battleship Arizona. “I looked at him in horror. There was just nothing in the world I could do. . . . That has bothered me all my life.”

Computer graphics detail how the Japanese planes struck Battleship Row. Woven into the interviews and the historical tale is the story of a recent underwater search for a sunken Japanese mini-submarine--one of five that were part of the attack force. The effect is to give “Legacy” a sense of suspense and freshness.

A second National Geographic effort, “Beyond the Movie: Pearl Harbor” marks the beginning of what National Geographic officials promise will be a series of documentaries exploring Hollywood’s use, and misuse, of history.

Despite a somewhat promotional tone--the “Pearl Harbor” filmmakers were eager collaborators--”Beyond the Movie” is a good analysis of how the movie departs from history on key points while trying to be faithful to its central message of sacrifice and heroism.

One example is the Navy cryptographer played by Dan Aykroyd who warns that the Japanese are planning to attack Pearl Harbor. His warning is ignored by superiors. Problem: The character and the warning are fiction.

“Historians out there will say we got this or that wrong,” says “Pearl Harbor” director Michael Bay, “but that’s not what it’s about, it’s about: Did we get the essence?”

It is an important debate--how much license should filmmakers be given to portray historic figures saying and doing things they never said or did? Presumably it is a point the “Beyond the Movie” series will continue to explore.

ABC’s “Pearl Harbor: Two Hours That Changed the World,” is an updated version of a 1991 documentary done jointly by ABC and NHK Japanese Television Network showing the attack from both sides.

Hosted by David Brinkley, “Two Hours” portrays both sides as ignorant, even contemptuous of each other, making war inevitable.

Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent the Japanese a note demanding withdrawal of their forces from China. The note was seen as an ultimatum.

The Japanese, Brinkley says, considered the Americans “rich but weak and undisciplined.”

The issue of racial misunderstanding hovers over the Pearl Harbor tragedy. Brokaw notes that Americans thought of the Japanese as a “quaint little people ruled by an emperor.”

“Two Hours” interviews one of the Japanese pilots: “We knew Americans were made up of many races and therefore assumed they had no united loyalty to their country and no desire to fight for it.”

Brinkley’s stock-in-trade is irony and it abounds in the events that led to Pearl Harbor. In the months before the attack, as world tensions increased, the Navy reduced its effort to crack the Japanese naval codes in order to concentrate on cracking the diplomatic code, which provided no clue that Pearl Harbor was targeted.

“Sure enough,” says Brinkley, “years later, code-breakers would find a treasure trove of warning clues in piles of undeciphered [naval code] messages.”

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All three documentaries are drawn to the gleaming white memorial over the sunken Arizona, where more than 900 sailors are entombed. Oil bubbles up daily from the wreckage.

The oil slick, Brinkley says, “is sad and spooky like a message floating up from an underwater grave.”

In “Legacy,” Kathy Billings, U.S. Park Service superintendent of the Arizona Memorial, which is visited by 1.5 million people annually, notes that the ship holds 500,000 gallons of oil that could spill into Pearl Harbor, fouling the ecosystem and hurting military operations.

For any other sunken ship, removing the oil would be a routine operation. But so many Americans are so emotionally attached to the Arizona that the prospect of disturbing the wreckage, even in the name of environmental protection, is horrifying to them.

“Many visitors and survivors consider the oil to be the tears of the ship or [that] the ship is bleeding,” Billings said. “We will be dealing with that emotional feeling people have about the oil. . . . It will be a balance between protecting the ecosystem and protecting the tomb, the shrine that this place symbolizes.”

If a benediction is needed for Pearl Harbor, it is provided by historian Stephen Ambrose, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence:

“I don’t think we’ll ever be done with Pearl Harbor. I think Pearl Harbor is like Gettysburg, Appomattox, Lincoln’s assassination, like Yorktown and the surrender to Gen. Washington. God help our country if it’s ever forgotten.”

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“Pearl Harbor: Two Hours That Changed the World,” narrated by David Brinkley, airs tonight at 10 on ABC.

* “Pearl Harbor: Legacy of Attack” can be seen Sunday at 5 and 8 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel and at 9 p.m. on NBC.

* “Beyond the Movie” will be shown Sunday at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. on the National Geographic Channel.