Victory at Sea

Over the last two years a squad of NBC technicians and Navy people have been picking through 60 million feet of him, accumulated in ten countries and much of its heretofore secret, cutting and splicing it into a series of television documentaries on World War II at sea. They have knitted that film into 26 half-hour programs, added a narrator and a score by Richard Rodgers, and hired the NBC Symphony to play the music. The series starts at 1:30 p.m. this Sunday on WBZ; the Navy screened a preview of the first two episodes last night, and if they have any predictive value, Victory at Sea will be one of the best things to happen to TV since the apparent end of Dick Nixon's video career.

Except for one remarkable feature-length documentary, The Fighting Lady, too much of the film coverage of the Navy's war has involved blasting a beach or a kamikaze grazing a carrier's deck. They were, through necessity, limited to action as it looked from our side; because of security regulations, there was much of even that action which they could not show at all.

Now the Navy has opened its film libraries to NBC, and the network has supplemented the film with much material picked out of enemy files. The result is that Victory at Sea tells a tense and complete story. It shows what the wartime newsreel could only guess at: the beaming old ladies hugging Nazi submarine crews as the U-Boat men parade through Berlin; the Japanese pilot bowing to a Shinto Shrine as his carrier heels around into the wind northwest of Pearl Harbor; the American sailors laid out on their stretchers amid the trim officers' cars in that Harbor's parking lot.

Supplementing all this is some good narration and Rodgers' music, a tailored score which can pick up the eerie ping of sonar and whip it into a hauntingly effective theme for the running battle against the submarine. Victory at Sea looks as if it will be as good as anything scheduled for TV for some years to come.