Norman T. Hatch, a former Marine cinematographer whose Academy Award-winning footage of a punishing American victory in the Pacific during World War II was so grisly that it had required White House approval before it could be released, died on April 22 in Alexandria, Va. He was 96.
His death was confirmed by his son, N. Thomas Hatch Jr.
Armed with a .45 caliber pistol, Staff Sergeant Hatch, 22 years old at the time, waded ashore on tiny Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943 at the beginning of a 76-hour battle that would claim the lives of an estimated 1,000 Marines and sailors and more than 4,000 Japanese soldiers.
When the fighting ended, the United States had claimed one of its first victories in the Pacific.
Standing up to keep his hand-cranked 35-milimeter Bell & Howell Eyemo camera dry, and filming through thick black smoke, Sergeant Hatch thrust himself so deeply into the combat that he captured vivid close-ups of Marines firing at enemy troops only 15 yards away.
“That’s the only time, to the best of my knowledge, in the Pacific War that the enemy was in the same frame as us in a fighting stance,” he said in an interview with the Naval Institute. “The film shot on Tarawa was a first because it showed what combat was really like. It showed it up close and dirty.”
Somehow, he escaped the war unscathed, having fired his pistol only once.
“When I was looking through the viewfinder, I was living in the movie,” he said. “I was disassociated with what was going on around me.”
His raw footage was edited into a 20-minute film titled “With the Marines at Tarawa,” which won the 1945 Academy Award for best short documentary.
Years later, after he had long left the service, Mr. Hatch recalled that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been reluctant to release gruesome images of dead Marines floating in the waters off Tarawa, but that the journalist Robert Sherrod had convinced him that bringing the grim battle home would rally Americans behind the war.
It had been Mr. Hatch’s choice to risk his life to get those images.
“I was told by guys on the front line that I didn’t have to be there, and I would quietly tell them that I did,” Mr. Hatch told NPR in 2010. “The public had to know what we were doing, and this was the only way they would find out.”
A month before the Oscars, which Mr. Hatch did not attend, he had landed with fellow Marines on Iwo Jima; his footage there was incorporated in another documentary, “To the Shores of Iwo Jima.”
Mr. Hatch assigned his colleague Bill Genaust to film the Marines’ flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi. A small flag had been installed, but a larger one was ordered to be placed on the island’s highest point. Mr. Genaust’s footage was used to confirm that the historic photograph of the flag-raising, by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press, had not been staged. Mr. Genaust was killed in action a week later.
Norman Thomas Hatch (he was not named for the Socialist leader Norman Thomas, his son said) was born on March 2, 1921, in Boston and raised in Gloucester, Mass. His father, Irving, an ex-boxer and Pinkerton strikebreaker, was an auto dealer. His mother was the former Ruth Frances Colby.
Norman was an early camera buff, joining his friends on expeditions to a downtown burlesque theater to secretly photograph the dancers. After graduating from high school, he joined the Marines at 18; his parents, he said, could not afford to send him to college.
As a Marine he trained with documentarians who worked for Time Inc. creating the “March of Time” newsreels. He was then assigned to the Marine Corps Photographic Services Branch as a staff sergeant.
A propaganda film featuring Sergeant Hatch and his footage was released in 1944 as “I Was There Tarawa.”
He married the former Lois Rousseau. Besides his son, he is survived by his wife and a daughter, Colby Hatch.
After the war, Mr. Hatch sold photographic equipment and later ran a photo agency. He also worked as a civilian audiovisual adviser in the Pentagon and as a consultant to the White House press office and to Congress. He rose to major in the Marine Corps Reserve.
He also collaborated with Charles Jones on a book titled “War Shots: Norm Hatch and the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Cameramen of World War II” (2011).
Tarawa measured about 400 acres, and after the battle the casualty toll raised questions, even among those in the Pacific Theater high command. In his autobiography, in which he was critical of the Navy, Lieut. Gen. Holland McT. Smith wrote: “Was Tarawa worth it? My answer is unqualified: No.”
But Adm. Chester W. Nimitz, who became commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, disagreed. “The capture of Tarawa,” he said, “knocked down the front door to the Japanese defenses in the Central Pacific.”
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