World History

- 46 mins., May 2024.
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- Jack Lieb, A Newsreel Cameraman’s View of D-Day. June 5, 2014, The National Archives.

Jack Lieb went to Europe in 1943 with two movie cameras: He brought his 35mm black and white camera to film war coverage for Hearst’s News of the Day newsreels and his 16mm home movie camera to shoot color film to show to his family back home. After the war, Lieb edited the color footage into a film that he would narrate in lectures around the country, in venues as varied as the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. and his daughter’s fourth grade class in Chicago.

In the film below (Local Identifier: LIEB-JL-1), donated by the Lieb family to the National Archives in 1984, you’ll see D-Day from a perspective different than the official military film or commercial newsreel. With his personal footage, Lieb takes the viewer through the preparations in England, where he spent time with war correspondents Ernie Pyle, Jack Thompson, and Larry LaSueur, to the liberation of Paris and finally into Germany.

Along the way, Lieb captured his experience on 16mm Kodachrome, filming everyday people in France and the occasional celebrity, such as Edward G. Robinson or Ernest Hemingway..

Jack Lieb’s film story does not begin and end with his D-Day footage, though. By the time he arrived on Utah Beach with a seaborne element of the 82nd Airborne Division, he had already spent nearly two decades shooting newsreel footage. In 1926, Jack Lieb was a pre-med student at City College of New York. He took a summer job at Hearst and ended up with a 35mm movie camera in his hand, shooting film for newsreels. Lieb never made it back to school–he had fallen in love. Before long, he was on a boat bound for Africa, where he would spend several years filming for a Fox travelogue series called “The Magic Carpet.”...
https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2014/06/05/a-newsreel-cameramans-view-of-d-day/