Rebels to Reels: A biography of Combat Cameraman Daniel A. McGovern USAF

This is the fascinating true-life story of the man who filmed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki only weeks after the dropping of the atomic bombs. This three-part, meticulously researched biography tells the full story of how the often harrowing colour and black and white footage we have today was shot and of how McGovern saved it for posterity despite decades of US government suppression.

Earlier, Big Mack was designated cameraman and photographer to US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt before being chosen to train the very first combat cameramen of World War II for the then United States Army Air Forces. Rebels to Reels, for the very first time, tells the full story of McGovern’s time at the White House in the wake of Pearl Harbour and of how he later trained his USAAF combat cameramen before he himself deployed to England from where he flew six perilous combat missions over Nazi occupied Europe. Readers glean a unique fly on the fuselage experience as Rebels to Reels brings them on McGovern’s B-17 missions as he filmed combat footage for Hollywood director William Wyler’s acclaimed 1944 documentary, The Memphis Belle - A Story of a Flying Fortress.

This biography also contains Dan’s remarkable accounts of his post-war involvement in the Roswell UFO Incident and Project Blue Book, of filming atomic test detonations in the US and the Pacific and also of the transition of the earlier US Army Air Corps into the US Army Air Forces and ultimately, the United States Air Force as McGovern witnessed it over the course of his remarkable career. However, Dan’s story begins not in America, but in Ireland where, as a boy and the son of a policemen of the Royal Irish Constabulary, McGovern associated with the infamous Black and Tans as he eye-witnessed the Irish War of Independence unfold which ultimately led to the partitioning of Ireland.