DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

By Jack Ballo

I live in an old house in New Jersey that has been in my wife’s family for over 100 years. While moving things around in the attic one day, I found a box of 23 letters from a soldier who wrote home to his mother. The soldier was my wife’s great uncle, an uncle she never knew anything about. It was as if he never existed, but he existed to me. I heard his voice in those letters and I knew that I had to tell his story.

I had a lot of questions about the attack itself, but the fact that most of the families of the casualties never knew what happened to their sons is what moved me to make this movie. The few historians who even know about the Rohna attack would tell you that it stayed classified due to an oversight, as if the War Department forgot to declassify the files of the largest loss of life at sea in the history of US war. “It was lost in the shuffle,” is what one historian said. My feelings about this are very different; I don’t believe that 1000 mothers who lost their sons under such mysterious circumstances allowed the War Department to forget the Rohna disaster.

Ken Burns meets Dateline NBC is how I describe the Rohna Classified documentary. The film starts by taking a rich historical look at life in the late 1930s to the early 40s from the perspective of WWII veterans who were just kids with dreams, trying to figure out their future. 1015 of those kids were killed on their second day of war when one of the first radio-guided missiles ever used in war was steered straight into their ship.

I went into this filmmaking journey always thinking about the mothers of the soldiers who were not only misled by the US War Department, they were abandoned by them when they needed them the most. While researching for the film I would think about Pat Tillman's mother and her unwavering commitment to find out the circumstances behind her son’s death in Afghanistan. Later I learned that, like the Tillman story, there are many other similar stories in recent years where military official misled or lied to Gold Star families. Apparently, avoiding embarrassment and responsibility for mistakes in the military has been going on for a long time. Maybe this documentary can bring attention to this problem and make a change in policy that prevents this injustice from taking place.

My original goal for this documentary was to simply shed some light on the secret attack. However, after several trips to the National Archives I started piecing together important facts of the attack and the secrecy surrounding it that have never been brought up before. Documents that I discovered started to tell a story about a conflict, but it wasn’t a conflict involving the war. It was a conflict between War Department officials regarding how much information to give to the casualty families about the attack, if any at all. The Bureau of Public Relations was adamant about telling the casualty families that their boys died, but War Department officials refused their request and sent out "Missing in Action" telegrams to all of the casualty families even though they knew the soldier’s were dead.

It would be five agonizing months before the families would receive another War Department telegram stating that their loved one died without any other information. It’s hard to imagine the heartache and suffering the families of the casualties went through over those five months living with false hope that one day their son or husband would walk through the door again.

I learned a lot about the War Department’s handling of the attack from the documents and reports discovered in our research, but I already had a pretty good understanding of what went wrong on the day of the attack. The cables and pulleys that were needed to release the lifeboats were all rusted together and then painted over with heavy black paint making most of them impossible to release. The lifeboats were unusable thus forcing every soldier who was not killed by the blast to jump off the burning, sinking ship into freezing cold water with nothing but a lifebelt; a lifebelt that had to be inflated. Instead of wearing naval life jackets that would have protected them from the cold temperatures and keep them above the harsh waves, they were issued lifebelts that they didn’t even know how to use. These M1926 lifebelts were designed for amphibious assaults. They would be worn by soldiers as they departed landing crafts on beaches. They were not designed for soldiers on ships that were traveling through the rough and dangerous waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

The documentary points out problems, lots of problems, but I am well aware that war time is difficult and mistakes will happen. I also realize that decisions get made at all different levels of authority and that we may never get all the answers. However, the film does ask important questions. The same questions that I believe the parents and wives would have asked War Department officials 80 years ago if they had known the truth.

In 2008, my co-producer, Michael Walsh, had the insight to interview Rohna survivors. Looking back, the survivors firsthand accounts were instrumental in getting the story from the men who were there. In the documentary, they talk about the problems with the lifebelts and lifeboats as well as other aspects of the secret attack. Michael, who was my story consultant, interviewed a total of 45 survivors over twenty years and wrote two books about their experiences on that fateful day.

I believe that ROHNA CLASSIFIED can bring attention to the War Department’s handling of the secret disaster as well as honoring the forgotten soldiers and getting this film into the history books. Equally important is recognizing the pain that the parents and wives went through not knowing how their loved one’s died. I’ve heard many stories about the heartache that trickled down to their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. It may be hard to believe, but the injustice of it all carries on in the families today.