Adults who had lived it in the flesh, and those too young at that scary time to retain distinct memories, all couldn’t wait, gathered once weekly over exactly half a year to listen to sonorous Leonard Graves describe heroic World War II achievements at sea, in the air, on the battle- and home-fronts.

Earlier sixteen-frame news footage suffered during the Depression because of the twenty-four-frames-per-second adopted for sound. But the uncovering of previously unknown material in many countries, improved though costly techniques that repeated every second frame to “stretch” sixteen into twenty-four, and massive media and military coverage of the conflicts in Europe and Asia, facilitated the new “compilation documentary,” often premièred on the infant medium of television. So popular was the National Broadcasting Company’s Victory at Sea, realized with full cooperation from the Department of the Navy, that, christened Project Twenty Unit, its producers were retained for other era efforts. Cut, edited down to a hundred-eight minutes by Isaac Kleinerman, producer Henry Salomon’s film reached vaster audiences with theatrical release twelve months later.

Cut a further thirty minutes, again by Kleinerman, and directed by Donald B. Hyatt, a 16 mm version follows Titanic and the Roy Ward Baker “documentary-style” A Night to Remember to wrap up the Donnell Library Media Center “Drama on the High Seas” trilogy. Its television voice replaced since ’54 by the less baritone, less effective Alexander Scourby’s, the narration initially seems stiff from today’s less uncritically patriotic standpoint. The same goes for the fondly remembered Richard Rogers score, later a successful vinyl album, with the “Beneath the Southern Cross” selection given Hammerstein lyrics for Me and Juliet and a Perry Como hit single, “No Other Love.”

There are surprises, although, of course, so much material has been omitted from the original. Sensitivities have changed, as well, so the not inaccurate appearance of only two African-American GIs among white combatants jolts as a reminder of armed forces segregation until well after the War. So, too, do the briefest mention of “sixty-six Japanese cities swept by hurricanes of fire” from incendiary bombs prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the less than a minute devoted to POW conditions and concentration camp liberation.

From the same root, cutting, the present version devotes more time to the home front, to the European Theater, and the crucial struggle against North Atlantic U-boats to transport matériel from this “arsenal of democracy.” The final reel brings back what is most remembered: the first widely released images of U.S. dead awash on atoll beaches, amphibious island-hopping operations; bucking carrier decks receiving crippled pilots and planes, the smoky boom of battleship cannonades, B-29 missions; the great typhoon and Bushido of a dying Empire’s funeral-shrouded kamikazes pledged to “destroy with my own body the [1,500] ships that menace our holy soil.”

The half-century since is ten times that distance in our frame of mind. The large not young audience was silent, reliving and moved by real images, some captured from the Axis enemy; into it, even the cheerleader voiceover and “stirring” music grew appropriately acceptable. Fifteen years after the TV series, Andrew Sarris wrote out against a different type of “documentary [where] ugliness and awkwardness are subtly transformed from technical necessities to truth-seeming mannerisms.” Active viewing is participatory, bringing to the screen the individual’s life and experience. The horrific opening invasion recreation in otherwise pedestrian Saving Private Ryan involves us passively. Caught ugly and awkward, off-kilter and grainy, a one-wheeled fighter plane careening toward the carrier bridge and filming photographer, the drained marines and bandaged cigarette-smoking wounded, depth-charge concussions, pre-landing LST fear, and joy at post-VJ Day safe return and reunion with loved ones, that is all too real, the non-fiction account of a generation’s heroes.

(Released by NBC Film; not rated by MPAA.)