Editor’s note: Point Loma weighs in on some Veteran’s Day thoughts. I want to ensure that our Air Force and Army brethren far-deployed are in our prayers. It is 101 years- almost to the minute- since the Armistice that ended the most cataclysmic event in human history. Up till then. Don’t thank a Vet today. Be one.
-Vic

Victory At Sea

Today is Veteran’s Day, so there is a lot of retro programming on the tube. One of these I discovered late last night was the two-hour movie version of Victory At Sea.

Originally a 26-part series of half-hour episodes aired by NBC in 1952-53, it featured a score by Richard Rogers who developed the themes, and Robert Russell Bennet who provided the orchestral scores. It was the brainchild of Henry Salomon, a reserve LCDR working as a researcher for historian Samuel Eliot Morrison, and it involved scouring the worldwide naval film archives and the writing of a gripping narration drawn from the multitude of hours of combat action film of that era.

The series aired in black-and-white at 1500 on Sundays, and won several awards, including an Emmy and a Peabody for film documentaries. There were 26 shows overall, and by a strange turn of fate, I got to see all of them the summer of 1982 when I was stationed at NAS Whidbey Island. The series grabbed my attention, so I became a slavish devotee.

What I loved about it was the stories of heroic action against almost impossible odds, the majesty of the music, awe-inspiring scenes of warships at sea, and the sense of high drama infused by the sobering and sometimes mournful narration of Leonard Graves. NBC later made an amalgamated movie-length version narrated by Alexander Scourby that debuted in 1954 (ironically the same year that Vic was born, I do believe). That show is what I saw last night – and the story of tragedy, sacrifice, heroism, and triumph it tells is still just as compelling as it ever was.

I didn’t intend to do any serious writing tonight, since I just completed a 48-hour marathon writing and re-writing of a piece which you gentle readers will see later on – a part of it was gut-wrenching. So, this will be mercifully short compared to what I normally turn out.

No one would ever call me a real religious man. I know well that I am profane and tend to toss out F-Bombs like party bead necklaces at a Fantasy Fest Parade. But I am also not afraid to get down on my knees to pray to the Almighty – still a naughty schoolboy at heart with a guilty conscience, hedging his bets with the hereafter.

I love to sing the Navy Hymn, and usually wind up teary-eyed at the end. Tonight, I was arrested by Scourby’s recitation of a Royal Navy prayer early on in the show. It may or may not be in some Anglican Book of Common Prayer somewhere, but it exists on film. It’s the real inspiration for this piece, and I thought it fitting to offer it up as a benediction for our Navy and Marine Corps shipmates deployed out there on the sharp pointy end on Veteran’s Day; so here goes:

“Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the Heavens and ruleths the raging of the Sea, who has comforths the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end, be pleased to receive unto thy almighty and gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, and the Fleet in which we serve. Amen“
I remain your faithful servant.

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