Video project opens door to hidden military history

Heather McPherson developed an interest in history after learning of her great-uncle, Ralph Ferguson, who was killed six days after landing on Omaha Beach on D-Day.

“I started researching his division and then once you get into one little group, it just expands and you realize how World War II and any kind of conflict in the world changes the scope of what people are thinking,” McPherson said. “So what happened in World War II, Vietnam, affects us still today.”

McPherson’s love of military history was rewarded this year when she served as a volunteer at Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC) at the University of South Carolina. MIRC will receive 8,000 cans of 35 mm films and 10,000 to 12,000 cans of 16 mm film from the Marine Corps, dating back to the World War I era.

Hundreds of films have already arrived, and McPherson has joined other volunteers and staff in working on digitizing, inventorying and archiving the entire collection of historic footage. Most of the cans are labeled, but the preserved footage still offers surprises.

“You don’t know what you were getting into until you starting looking through them,” she said. “And being a history buff, I wondered, ‘What’s the next (turn of the camera) crank going to come up with?’ Having it almost like it’s coming alive, where you see it on TV, but for some reason seeing it in that little 16mm film, felt like I was looking at it through that time period.

“It made it come alive for me.”

The project started about two years ago when Quantico contacted Greg Wilsbacher, curator of the Fox Movietone News Collection and the U.S. Marine Corps Film Repository at MIRC. The Marine Corps recognized that the collection was aging and they did not have the expertise or resources to maintain it.

“They knew that we had a strong reputation as film preservationists and conservationists, that we made films accessible throughout the world,” Wilsbacher said. “They asked if we wanted to partner with them to help preserve, digitize and make available the materials that they held and we said an enthusiastic, ‘Yes!’"

The footage varies from World War II basic training — recruits getting off a bus at Parris Island and receiving their initiation haircuts — to the landing at Iwo Jima to missiles being fired during the Korean War to more modern training and warfare.

“I’ve seen corsairs, spitfires and some of the aircraft carriers,” McPherson said. “That really stuck with me too. And there’s some prototype weapons as well as missile tests for the first time, or the prototype for the Hornet plane. It’s neat to think that I could be the first person looking at this since they filmed it.”

Right now, staff and volunteers are working through the first batch of the collection, while a second vault is being constructed for cold, safe storage.

“The nice thing is working with students like Heather who are passionate about history and want to understand history better and want to work with history,” Wilsbacher said. “The film is a historic object in itself. It’s aging, it’s decaying and needs special handling and care. And they bring an enthusiasm which we all appreciate.”

Wilsbacher also appreciates volunteers like Tim Klie, who served in the Marines.

“Tim Klie is a good representative of what role we like for veterans to play,” he said. “We can pull the film out of the can, we can prep it, we can preserve it, we can use our expertise to get it transferred, made available online, and get the high resolution up to Quantico for research purposes, but we’re not Marines, and we don’t have that experience and so we’re hopeful that Marines will step forward, and volunteer to help us kind of provide full descriptions of the contents that we have. It’s difficult to really try to describe what really is going on. But veterans can do that quite easily. That’s one of our great hopes for the collection.”

Klie, who was a platoon leader in Vietnam, has reviewed some of the videos and helped identify officers depicted in a 1980s meeting in Wei, Vietnam.

“One of the things that I found most interesting, and didn’t have any idea about, is the repository the university has and how it's growing and the stature its actually raising here,” he said. “The stature of the film archives. And I think the Marine Corps has been a great boom to that to let them say, here are our overflow and we want somebody, we entrust someone to do this. I think that’s a great honor for the university.”

While it's been interesting, it has also been emotional for Klie.

“I thought I was pretty detached, until there was an incident where the executive officer was talking about the killing of another officer who was the artillery officer for an observer and he kind of broke down emotionally,” Klie said. “I stopped the tape and went to Greg and said, ‘I have to go.’ I really haven’t been back at it since. And that was probably a month ago.”

As the historic film spins through a modern archiving device, Wilsbacher has seen fascinating footage. As for an examples, he cites the test of a jet boat at Quantico in 1944.

“During World War II, the Marine Corps was already aware that the standard amphibious assault vehicle was maybe too slow and the Marines are spending too much time exposed to the enemy fire before they could get to the beach,” he said. “They were obviously looking at an inventor to try to help them get a boat that can move faster from ship to shore. So we can get the Marines in a fighting position out of harm’s way, or at least to have them off the ocean and on land where they can do their work. And so, just off the shores of Quantico, there was some guy in a little boat, rigged up with a little jet kind of zooming up and down the Potomac as part of a very official set of tests. It’s a fully official test with a title that described the date and the results of the findings and the testament.”

Once all the films and photographs are saved — which is still at least a couple of years away — the collection will become publicly accessible.

“All of these films really belong to the American people,” Wilsbacher said. “They were shot by Marines. Our objective is to make sure that they are available to the general public for free to look at so that they can see this piece of American history. And that Marine Corps researchers, whether at Quantico, or just somebody in their own home who enjoys military history, can look at them.”

McPherson, who spent more than 200 hours on the project, is thankful for the opportunity.

“So many people today are forgetting what happened,” she says, referring to the wars of the 20th century. “To be able to preserve this shows it meant something. These men, who were 18 and 19 years old, people who were just trying to do what they were told, it wasn’t political for them, they were just doing their job. The preservation of it, is what really kept me going. Every day, those reels were getting longer and longer, but it’s working to preserve and honor those American heroes, men and women.”

For more information about the project contact curator Greg Wilsbacher by email at gregw@sc.edu or call (803) 777-5556