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Episode 10 - “Beneath the Southern Cross”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2024

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Summary

EP10, which brought coverage of South Atlantic action to Victory, was a late addition to series planning. As outlined in chapter 4, Henry Salomon had in fall 1951 obtained compelling wartime film of the Caribbean, Brazil, Ascension Island, and more. He reduced New Guinea campaign coverage to a single episode, EP13, with the “vacant” EP10 used to present the newly acquired footage.

All EP10 locales are in or around the Atlantic, nearly all of them in the Southern Hemisphere. The program begins with a straightforward setting of Rodgers's SUB, as bone-simple as the theme's debut early in EP1, while “Somewhere in the south Atlantic … A German submarine keeps a secret rendezvous. With supplies exhausted after weeks of preying on Allied shipping, the U-boat makes contact with a supply submarine—a ‘milch-cow’ from which it will take on fuel, food, ammunition.”

The sea is hardly calm, underscored after 1:40 [A] with rumbling bass-line chromatics followed immediately by SONG-SEAS and then GER. Rodgers's SUB returns at 2:35 with Bennett's minor-key flutes and clarinets above as the U-boats’ transfer of supplies concludes.

Still in South Atlantic waters, the scene shifts at 3:01 (J-3) to one of the war's infrequent passages of Japanese submarines beyond the Pacific and Indian oceans, and J-tunes mix freely with GER and SUB as nowhere else in Victory. We hear the repeated seconds that Bennett uses for Japanese naval communication, his analogue to the Allies’ TELE. These subs’ destination is a German U-boat pen in the north Atlantic, likely August–September 1942, “to demonstrate to blockaded Germany its loyalty to the common cause—fascism.” The Japanese sailors are feted there by Doenitz himself, as we briefly see and “hear” a dockside brass band. Musically, at 3:39 is a one-phrase “German” tune [B], immediately repeated a minor third higher. Though composed for the already-completed EP16, this melody was heard first in EP9 (at 22:27). Bennett's distinctive new treatment, underscoring the German-Japanese conclave, is the music's phrase-ending punctuation by J-2. Another J-tune, J-3, then follows at 4:06. The Axis partners’ celebration continues at 4:17 [C] with a similar musical pairing: Bennett's EP1 SUB-extension with an accompanying figure above used repeatedly in Victory's “Japanese” scoring.

EP10, like most Victory episodes, is not perfectly linear, and at 4:54 it shifts back in time to late 1939, before the US officially entered the war.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Music for Victory at Sea
Richard Rodgers, Robert Russell Bennett, and the Making of a TV Masterpiece
, pp. 198 - 206
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

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