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Good News from Chip Jones
Posted by Kimberly Allen
In December, parishioner Chip Jones took a moment to fill out our Good News form online - a new initiative St. Paul's launched last year to help spread the good news in parishioners' lives with one another.
The news? Chip 'celebrates another chapter in his writing life' as his third book, War Shots: Norm Hatch and the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Cameramen of World War II, arrives in bookstores this month. Below is his invitation to ALL of his friends at St. Paul's to a book signing this Saturday at Fountain Books (an independent bookstore at 1312 E Cary St. in Shockoe Slip).
From Chip: My third book will be in bookstores by early January, with a signing to which ALL my friends at St. Paul's are invited at Fountain Books, Jan. 8, Saturday, Noon. It's called War Shots: Norm Hatch and the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Cameramen of World War II, and tells about the life and times of the brave Marines who filmed combat from Tarawa to Iwo Jima. So I celebrate another chapter in my writing life, and hope anyone who enjoys history, Hollywood, or just a good story will come to Fountain Books on Cary Street at Shockoe Slip to join Debbie and me for the book's launch.
You can contact Chip directly at charlesvjones@verizon.net or (804) 747-7722.
From the Publisher
WAR SHOTS: Norm Hatch and the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Cameramen of World War II
by Charles Jones
(Stackpole Books, 2011, Hardcover $27.95)
http://www.warshotsbook.com/ (Web site still under development)
They shot some of the most iconic footage of World War II while risking their lives, yet the stories - and sheer guts - of the U.S. Marine Corps' combat cameramen have been overshadowed by the heroism of the men with the rifles. War Shots brings these photographers into sharp focus through the career of Norm Hatch, a true American character whose skill with a camera and knack for being in the right place at the right time thrust him to the fore of the effort to record the Marines at war in the Pacific.
After a Depression boyhood during which he crossed paths with the likes of Al Capone and Johnny Weissmuller, Norm Hatch joined the Marine Corps in 1939. A string of postings took him from boot camp at Parris Island to Washington, D.C., Franklin Roosevelt's retreat in Georgia, and eventually the March of Time newsreel series, where he honed the filmmaking skills that would serve him well throughout the war.
When American forces invaded Tarawa in November 1943, Hatch and his fellow Marine cameramen piled into landing craft and, with men falling all around them, waded ashore to film the savage four-day battle with the Japanese. Sent back to the United States, Hatch's footage - so disturbing that it needed Roosevelt's permission to be released - ended up in newsreels and then in the film With the Marines at Tarawa, which later won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject.
In February 1945, Hatch led a camera unit onto Iwo Jima, where Marines waged a brutal campaign for control of the island and gained enduring fame for raising the flag over Mount Suribachi. The motion pictures Hatch shot became another documentary, To the Shores of Iwo Jima. Hatch ended the war in the ruins of Nagasaki, where he and his team documented the aftermath of the atomic bomb.
Full of pulse-pounding accounts of combat and lively behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Hollywood and Washington, War Shots zooms in on Norm Hatch and the Marine combat cameramen of World War II, spotlighting their courage under fire - and behind the camera.
Charles (Chip) Jones is an award-winning journalist and author of two other military-themed books. His first book, BOYS of '67, won the 2006 Military Writers Society of America Gold Medal for Best Biography and was hailed as "an intimate and vivid account of a small band of remarkable Marines" by Pulitzer-winner Rick Atkinson. Jones lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he is communications director of the Richmond Academy of Medicine.
Tags: charles jones, chip jones, good news
