John Ford's D-Day footage refers to the motion-picture film shot by 56 U.S. Coast Guard combat photographers and automated cameras mounted on landing craft under the direction of legendary Hollywood film director John Ford on Omaha Beach and environs during the Normandy landings and Battle of Normandy in summer 1944. Director George Stevens landed with the and shot on Juno Beach. A Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) timeline reported that of film was processed by the Allied communications departments in June 1944.
The films produced with this footage from the Field Photographic Unit of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services combined with other moving pictures of Operation Overlord produced by the collective Allied militaries of World War II may also be known as the OSS/SHAEF D-Day films.
Ford was the head of the U.S. government's Field Photographic Unit. He was in the employ of the Office of Strategic Services, an intelligence section of the U.S. military that was a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. In a 1964 interview with American Legion magazine (on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Operation Overlord), Ford reported that after landing with the his team shot "millions of feet" in both color and black-and-white, but "mostly Kodachrome" (color), including near Colleville-sur-Mer. The film was shipped back to the UK and edited in London by a team working 24-hours-a-day in shifts, four hours on, four hours off. Producer Alan Brown supervised the editing, at Denham Studios.
Top-secret film for Allied leaders
Some of Ford's footage was included in a documentary film that was shown to Allied leaders of World War II, namely British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the USSR's Marshall Josef Stalin. The film sent to the Allied leaders was never released to the public and may be lost but in 2014, the U.S. National Archives surfaced 33 minutes of film on four reels that are believed to be this compilation. Upon investigation the Imperial War Museum found it had similar footage. NARA digitized these four reels and uploaded the footage to the Internet.
Former NARA moving-pictures archivist Steve Greene also unearthed an OSS field ledger that describes this film; the ledger states that the Allied-leaders edit was 4000 feet long. Per the Kodak online film calculator, if the film was 35 mm and 24 fps, it would have been about 44 minutes long.
The field ledger entry reads as follows:
Another source surfaced by Greene, U.S. Navy officer Frederick A. Spencer's personnel file, describes this cut as well, and indicates that Roosevelt saw the film on June 18, 1944: