Making a Production Out of It:Victory at Seaand American Remembering

Abstract

“Of course. It's my father's absolute favorite. He was there, you know.” Thus a friend replied when I told her I was writing aboutVictory at Sea, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) classic television documentary of U.S. and Allied Naval Operations in World War II. The father in question, moreover, was no ordinary judge of the material, but an old Navy Chief whohadactually been there for much of it, before, during, and after. Nor was the friend – a career journalist of long acquaintance with sea stories – an uncritical interpreter of the information. Still, as regards the forms and processes of cultural mythmaking, the exchange could be said to contain a familiar parable of World War II and American remembering, about some of the particular and identifiable ways in which Americans from the generation of 1941–1945 and their successors have come to conflate the experience of the war with certain popular-culture texts achieving classic status among its postwar representations. To put it more directly, one could not help thinking that for both father and daughter, as for myself and other Americans who “remember” World War II, “there” – or at least a significant portion of it – hasbecome Victory at Sea.