New Video Of Pearl Harbor Attack Uncovered

Film Part Of New Documentary

Albert How, Staff Writer
April 14, 2001, 4:07 a.m. EDT

HONOLULU -- Scott Freund and Tim Csabanyi are prison guards for a living. They work together in Santa Clara, Calif.

But outside of prison walls, Csabanyi is a part-time documentary filmmaker and Freund a closet historian with a fascination with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Together, they're rewriting history.

A year of research led them to never-before-seen video of the Pearl Harbor attack (pictured, right), video shot by the Japanese themselves.

"We think it's significant because the public has never seen it," Freund said. "This is important stuff to better understand the attack."

The video had been sitting in the National Archives for decades until Freund and Csabanyi uncovered it during research for a new documentary on the Dec. 7, 1941 attack.

It wasn't an easy job.

"The film was in really bad shape," Freund said. "We tried to enhance it."

Then Freund went to painstaking lengths to verify its authenticity, wanting to make sure the film wasn't Japanese propaganda. He matched parts of the video to known facts of the attack, such as the position of certain ships in Pearl Harbor.

Freund said that one second of the video shows the explosion of the USS Arizona. According to Freund, the video was taken from the opposite side of the Arizona from where the USS Solis was sitting.

The Solis was the ship from where the film that most people have seen the devastating explosion of the Arizona was shot (pictured, left).

"The Pearl Harbor survivors are my heroes," Freund said. "And film footage that's never been seen should be analyzed by the park and by historians so everyone has a better understanding of what really happened at the attack."

The film also shows footage before the attack from one of the six aircraft carriers from which 350 Japanese planes were launched. Part of that film contains the first known picture of Cmdr. Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who radioed the famous words "tora, tora, tora" to the Japanese fleet, signaling the beginning of the attack.

The newly discovered footage will be one of the centerpieces of Freund and Csabanyi's three-hour documentary, which is scheduled to show at the Pearl Harbor visitor's center beginning on Memorial Day. More than 50 Pearl Harbor survivors were interviewed for the film.

They also donated the new footage to the National Park Service for research purposes.

"It's always wonderful to get new information," National Park Service superintendent Kathy Billings said. "This is new information researchers can use to analyze what's going on with the ship today."

The big-budget epic "Pearl Harbor" is scheduled to premiere the same day as Fruend's and Csabanyi's documentary.

Fruend says he's absolutely going to see the movie, starring Ben Affleck and Cuba Gooding Jr. But he adds, "This is Pearl Harbor the real story."

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