WWII, in Full Frame

Narration is not what Tom Hanks does well. So his thin voice and stiffly read words are a constant distraction in “Shooting War,” as is the Abe Lincoln beard (required, apparently, for his latest movie, “Cast Away”) he wears when on camera as host.

It’s the newsreel footage--much of it quite extraordinary--that drives this valuable 90-minute ABC documentary celebrating the work of military combat cameramen who served at great peril during World War II, delivering frame after frame of pictures defining the absurdity and harrowing reality of war.

All in all, “Shooting War” is not visually the equal of a recent British documentary series, “World War II in Color,” but its pictures, shot with hand-held cameras mostly in black-and-white, are more intimate and to the bone, in part because so many are supported by interviews and voice-overs from the now elderly veterans who shot them.

There were some 1,500 of these enlisted men, most of whom have spent nearly six decades in undeserved anonymity.

Some of their work captures anomalies of warfare: A U.S. Marine rescues a cat from beneath a wrecked tank. A family of jaywalking geese nonchalantly crosses a road thick with Allied ordnance on the move.

Yet mainly, of course, epic tragedy is the theme of these transcendent images culled from 600 hours of archival footage shot many years before Vietnam gave the U.S. its seminal first television war:

* A small Japanese child floats lifeless in the waters off Saipan after being thrown from a cliff by his terrified mother, who then jumped to her own death, fearful that a camera aimed at them by a U.S. photographer was a gun.

* On Tarawa, Allied soldiers and Japanese defenders are near enough to each other to appear in the same frame.

* In Borneo, a flailing Japanese soldier staggers from hiding when torched by an Aussie with a flamethrower.

* At Dachau, Allied troops slide open the doors of boxcars, inside of which are stacked the corpses of Holocaust victims.

* In Milan, Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, hang from their heels in a public square after being shot dead unceremoniously by Italian partisans.

* In atom-bombed Nagasaki, orphans display their scorched bodies and a man reels from the radiation sickness that will soon kill him.

It’s fitting that “Shooting War” airs tonight on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 that yanked the U.S. into a conflict that already had engulfed Europe. Hanks is here, presumably, because of his pivotal role as an Army captain in “Saving Private Ryan,” the D-day movie that earned Steven Spielberg a directing Oscar. Spielberg conceived “Shooting War,” collaborating with Time magazine film critic and documentarian Richard Schickel as writer, producer and director, and the results are mostly impressive.

“Shooting War” notes almost offhandedly that some of the documentary combat footage shot for public consumption during the war by movie directors John Ford and John Houston was staged. Ford “was out to stir the nation,” says Hanks, as if that end justified the deceptive means.

Yet here, too, are actual pictures of the June 6, 1944, invasion of France against withering defensive fire from entrenched Germans that cut down waves of Allied troops hitting the beaches of Normandy as part of Operation Overlord. Ironically, this documentary footage does not convey the combat ferocity that Spielberg did in his indelibly savage Omaha Beach opening of “Saving Private Ryan,” in this case reality having less of an impact than art.

* “Shooting War” airs at 9 tonight on ABC.