Preface

Summary

The National Broadcasting Company launched its long-awaited World War II documentary program Victory at Sea on 26 October 1952, when America was mired in a “police action” conflict of ideologies in Korea. Victory wasn't US television's first such WWII series, but it quickly captivated both critics and viewers. Television, not yet in color then, was rapidly expanding across the United States; by 1953, half of the country's homes would have receivers.

Each week, Victory's audience viewed a skillfully edited array of wartime footage, much of it shot in combat by US armed forces cameramen or taken from military training films. The perspective, however, wasn't solely American. Newsreel and battle footage was sourced from fourteen different nations, including the Axis powers Germany, Japan, and Italy who had fought the Allies around the globe.

The twenty-six Victory episodes weren't war college studies or history lessons for the uninitiated. All but the youngest of Victory's 1952–53 viewers had experienced WWII either in military service or on the home front, and they remembered Pearl Harbor, Midway, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Normandy, Yalta, and Hiroshima from the war years’ headlines. Each installment aimed not to be a blow-by-blow documentary, but rather to take a compelling and emotional approach to its subject.

Victory's producer Henry Salomon sought to let the filmed sequences speak for themselves as much as possible, with terse and often poetic scripts. Sound effects were few, with some episodes using none whatsoever. What audiences mostly heard was the music: a non-stop score credited to Richard Rodgers, as arranged for orchestra by Robert Russell Bennett. Bennett, too, conducted the hallowed NBC Symphony Orchestra's musicians at the soundtrack recording sessions.

NBC had funded Victory with expectations of modest post-1953 returns in syndicated re-runs, but the series’ durability shattered expectations, eventually being aired in dozens of countries on six continents. The music proved to have notable staying power independently; three LP records of orchestral excerpts generated strong sales for RCA, the first becoming a $1million-selling “Gold Record.” Richard Rodgers was known worldwide in the early 1950s for his stage musicals, especially Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I, and Victory at Sea added a new dimension to his celebrity.

Victory is now celebrating its seventieth birthday. Its several decades as NBC's valuable syndication property were followed by home video and then online access, making it available to seemingly anyone, anytime.