Dark Victory : Former Naval Photographer’s Haunting Images of World War II Led to an Academy Award

Like a lot of aging veterans of America’s wars, Dwight Long occasionally likes to look at the pictures he took when he was a young man fighting in a far-off place. What sets Long’s war album apart from others is that it is contained on film, not in a photo album or scrapbook.

What sets it even further apart is that Long’s war album won an Academy Award as the best documentary film of 1944. Now, a half century after Long shot the film that was turned into the World War II documentary “The Fighting Lady,” the 80-year-old former Navy combat photographer still thinks of his wartime experiences as miraculous.

It was a miracle they got the film footage; it was a miracle it was made into an award-winning film; and it was even a miracle that, unlike so many of his aviator friends, he survived while filming with U.S. Navy dive bombers as they flew missions against heavily defended Pacific islands.

“It still moves me, emotionally, to see it,” Long, a Long Beach resident, says of “The Fighting Lady.” “There were good things, and there were rough things. It was like nothing else I’d ever done in my life.”

Today, Long will once again relive those good times and rough times when he introduces the film at a fund-raising benefit for the Palos Verdes Peninsula Council of the Navy League of the United States. The fund-raiser will be held at the Maritime Museum in San Pedro.

The story of “The Fighting Lady” began in 1943, with the commissioning of the new Essex-class aircraft carrier “Yorktown” at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. (The carrier was the second Yorktown, the first having been sunk at the Battle of Midway.) Ordered to report aboard her was a young Navy lieutenant (j.g.) named Dwight Long.

A native of Seattle, Long had experienced more than his share of adventure before the war. In 1934, he had set out on an around-the-world voyage on a 32-foot sailing ketch named the “Idle Hour.” Seven years later he completed the voyage; he also completed a film of the circumnavigation, which he showed at lectures around the country.

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Joining the Navy shortly after Pearl Harbor, Long’s filmmaking experience earned him an assignment with a photography unit headed by famed photographer Edward Steichen, then a Navy captain. Long made some Navy promotional and training films in Florida.

Then came the Yorktown assignment. His orders were simple: take film footage of carrier warfare, and not just the machines, but the men as well.

Long traveled with the Yorktown through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific. With two assistants he began collecting film of the Yorktown and its planes and men in action--at Marcus Island, Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Truk in the Caroline Islands, and finally the Battle of the Philippine Sea. Most of the combat footage was shot with gun-mounted cameras on carrier planes; much of it was in 16-millimeter color. Sometimes Long flew with the Navy aviators as they made their attacks on Japanese ships and installations.

Long has no idea how many thousands of feet of film his cameras shot. But he remembers that “if we got one short scene out of a whole roll of film we were lucky.”

Periodically, Long would take the film back to Hawaii for processing; he kept one print and one was sent back to the States for the newsreel market. Theater audiences across the nation watched the progress of the Pacific naval war through the “eyes” of Long’s cameras. Some of the scenes that later wound up in “The Fighting Lady” will be familiar to devotees of old World War II-era feature films, which often used actual combat stock footage.

In 1944, after the Battle of the Philippine Sea, Long realized that the 60,000 feet of usable film he had amassed--three quarters of it shot on the Yorktown, the rest on other carriers--would make a great documentary. The Navy brass agreed, and sent him to Hollywood with the mass of film in hand to get it done.

“I tried to get the studios interested in producing it, but it wasn’t easy,” Long remembers. “I was only a lieutenant, and I couldn’t get anybody interested. Then Steichen came out, and finally 20th Century said they’d produce it.”

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At that point Long’s film passed into other hands. Louis de Rochemont, director of the famous “March of Time” series, was the producer and director. Robert Taylor, the actor turned Navy lieutenant, served as narrator. But Long and his team had provided the raw material, and Long received credit as photography supervisor.

What emerged was a 60-minute color documentary that followed the lives--and deaths--of the crew of an aircraft carrier. (Although the film was shot primarily on the Yorktown, the name “Yorktown” was never mentioned because of wartime secrecy. The carrier was identified only by the fictional name, the Fighting Lady.)

As is to be expected in a war documentary, the combat footage, while not especially gory by today’s film standards, is undeniably violent: Japanese planes are torn apart by American fire, bombs destroy Japanese airfields, damaged American planes crash-land on the deck and burned or bloody pilots are pulled from them, alive and dead.

“There wasn’t any Betty Grable or Clark Gable in it,” Long says of the film. “It was just men fighting a battle.”

Also to be expected from a World War II documentary, the only heroes are American.

But the film also portrays intimate, timeless human scenes of 3,000 young men at war, from cooks to deckhands to pilots, as they wait on board the carrier for the next action that could end their young lives. For 184 Yorktown men who died, that action came too soon; one of them was Long’s roommate, a pilot named Smokey Stover.

When the documentary premiered, Time magazine wrote: “For violent air action and for pure visual magnificence, ‘The Fighting Lady’ is not likely ever to be beaten.” Later, when the Academy Awards were announced, Long wasn’t able to attend the award ceremony. He was back in the Pacific, shooting more film, this time on submarines.

Long left the Navy after the war, took some more long sailing trips and worked in various lines of business, including a stint running a jewelry shop at Disneyland. The Yorktown, meanwhile, served in the Korean War and was finally decommissioned in 1970. Later, it was purchased by the state of South Carolina and made into a floating memorial and museum. Two months ago, Long attended the 50th anniversary of its commissioning.

People interested in meeting Long and seeing the film “The Fighting Lady” today from 6:30 to 9 p.m. can contact the Navy League, Palos Verdes Peninsula Council, at 310-645-6549. Cost is $25 per person.