Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

by Mark Harris

  Ford wanted to get his crew to the front, which was near a port city called Bône about three hundred miles east of Algiers, as soon as possible. While Zanuck worked to secure transportation for him and his photographers, Ford strove to be as unobtrusive as possible, getting to know the men of D Company, and taking care that his own demeanor did nothing to fuel the resentment about entitled movie people with unearned officer’s commissions that Zanuck’s behavior was generating. The Allies were successfully pushing the Germans to retreat, but as they did, Ford recalled, “the Germans were making sporadic [air] raids. . . . Usually about half an hour after we would leave a port, the German planes would come over and blast hell out of the town, evidently looking for us,” as Ford’s Field Photo Unit moved up the coast, guided by a fishing schooner to which someone had attached a motor.

  Ford and his men landed at Bône and then, with the 13th Armored, made their way inland to Tebourba, just twenty miles from Tunis and at the moment they arrived the center of an intense firefight. D Company was under a near-constant barrage from German tanks and dive bombers, and Ford filmed whenever he wasn’t forced to take cover. By traveling along the coastline, he had managed to outpace Zanuck, who was genuinely worried by the time he reached the nearby town of Majae al Bab. “All along, I have inquired about Jack Ford and his O.S.S. boys,” he wrote in his journal on December 1. “I have been unable to locate them, although I have successfully made contact with several Signal Corps cameramen. . . . I have collected their film and resupplied them. . . . I am sure Ford is somewhere in this area and it worries me not to be able to find him.”

  Zanuck made it to Tebourba on December 3, after Ford had been there for three days, and on December 6 he ordered Ford and his men to retreat to safer ground and relieved them with Signal Corps photographers. Ford later told James Roosevelt that he had been under fire “twenty-four hours a day for six weeks” with virtually nothing to eat, a pointless exaggeration. But there was no doubt that, just as at Midway, he had put himself in harm’s way. This time, however, there would not be a John Ford movie to show for it; before retreating, Ford had to turn over everything he had shot—his footage of the siege of Tebourba, of Bône, of a captured German bomber pilot standing by his downed plane—to Zanuck, who was flying home to make his battlefront documentary. Ford was sent back to the United States by Coast Guard transport ship and didn’t get home until two weeks after Zanuck. He celebrated Christmas with a few of his Field Photo cameramen in the middle of the Atlantic, and arrived back in Washington, D.C., just in time for New Year’s Eve.

  Ford was deeply skeptical about Zanuck’s ability to pull together a credible pictorial record of the North African campaign, and so was Capra, who was unimpressed with Zanuck’s footage and increasingly frustrated at the weakly made accounts of the war to which American moviegoers were being exposed. While the British were managing to astonish U.S. audiences with documentaries, dramas, and hybrids like the air raid dramatization Target for Tonight, Capra felt that the Signal Corps was being stymied by territorial bickering—and particularly by Lowell Mellett. In September, Mellett’s pet project The World at War—the first movie with the opening title “The United States Government Presents” to receive a major national release—had opened. The film was an Office of War Information documentary that compressed the ten years of history Capra was planning to spread through seven Why We Fight scripts into one very brief movie—a cram session that, just as Capra was doing, traced both the history of Japan since the invasion of Manchuria and the rise of Hitler and German expansionism.

  Over the past year, Mellett had acted alternately as a moral scourge to studios and a self-styled representative of their interests to Washington. Early in the war, he had attempted to assuage the industry’s concerns by assuring them that the OWI and all other propaganda-producing agencies would keep their movies under thirty minutes so that they could run before, rather than instead of, the for-profit entertainment films Hollywood was producing. But with The World at War, he violated his own edict; he had his department prepare two different versions of the picture, one running forty minutes and one running sixty-six minutes, and encouraged the wide distribution of the latter as a feature film by providing it free of charge to theaters.

  Mellett’s standard, newsreel-style documentary received some admiring reviews—the New York Times called it “the sort of complacency-shattering picture we should have had six months ago” and praised “the vigor and sweep of its presentation.” The picture was a box-office failure, probably because it offered moviegoers no new information about the war itself and relied entirely on archival newsreel footage rather than freshly shot material. Nevertheless, its appropriation of Why We Fight’s approach to historical narrative rankled Capra, who had already spent the summer watching Ford reap praise for The Battle of Midway and was becoming increasingly irritated that he was stuck making training films while his colleagues documented the actual war.

  Capra had worked on Why We Fight for almost a year, and now, the first installment, Prelude to War, was ready to be shown. In October, he and Osborn screened the film in Washington for General Marshall. Over the next fifty-three minutes, Marshall watched exactly what he had hoped to see when he first gave Capra his marching orders—an illustrated lecture in which animation, newsreel footage, narration (delivered with calculated folksiness by Walter Huston), and blunt language combined to strike a balance between history lesson and rallying cry. Prelude to War took one of Capra’s earliest ideas—the notion that the war was a fight between those who wanted freedom and those who wanted slavery—and expanded it into a heartfelt American ideology that was more far-reaching than any that had yet been officially articulated as national policy. The picture began with references to Moses, Muhammad, Confucius, and Christ, moved with bracing rapidity through Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Garibaldi, and Kos´ciuszko, and then jumped dramatically to Japan, Italy, and Germany, presenting those countries as having imprinted evil in their national character over centuries—the German “inborn natural love of regimentation and discipline,” the Japanese people’s “fanatical worship of the God emperor,” and—reflecting Capra’s long-standing hatred for the common-man mob—the “mass, the human herd” that had led to the rise of Fascism in Italy. The populations of all three nations, the film explains, are “hopped up on the same idea. Their leaders told them they were supermen.”

  After depicting German godlessness in a montage showing the destruction of churches, labeling Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito as “three gangsters,” praising the “free people of China and Russia” for fighting alongside America and England, and evoking the nightmare of a “conquering Jap army marching down Pennsylvania Avenue,” and showing a Disney-animated radio tower broadcasting the word “LIES,” Prelude to War sums up its case: “It’s us or them,” says Huston. “The chips are down. Two worlds stand against each other. One must die and one must live.” With little official guidance and not much to go on but his own instincts and Eric Knight’s passion for films “as tough and ferocious . . . as a super-bayonet,” Capra had made a case for war that felt like a nonfiction rhetorical extension of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe.

  When Prelude to War was over, Marshall turned around in his chair, scanning the back of the room for Capra. “Superb!” he exclaimed. “Colonel Capra, how did you do it? That is a most wonderful thing.”

  “Darling—Have so many things to tell you I don’t know where to start. . . . Marshall loved it!” the exuberant director wrote his wife. “He calls me over and says, ‘Capra, that’s a great job. Every soldier and every civilian should see that picture.’ We talked about 15 minutes. . . . Next day [Secretary of War] Mr. Stimson! He brought his wife. . . . The picture knocked them cold. This was the tough hurdle. After the picture Mr. Stimson got up and [walked] all the way across the room to shake my hand and say how fine it was. . . . Now the word was around Washington. . . . To top it all, a White House showing is temporarily slated for Tuesd
ay! . . . I’m a little dizzy.”

  Capra took Marshall’s comment about “every civilian” seeing the picture to heart. Although Prelude to War had been made expressly for servicemen, he started envisioning a theatrical release, and took a print to Hollywood, where he showed it to movie-business colleagues and started to lobby for a Best Documentary Oscar nomination.

  Mellett, feeling challenged, responded angrily. He wrote a note to Roosevelt calling the movie “a bad picture in some respects, possibly even a dangerous picture,” and added, “Engendering nervous hysteria in the army or the civil population might help to win the war, although I doubt it. It won’t help in the business of making a saner world” after what he called “the armistice.” Mellett’s use of the World War I term, reflecting a belief that the war might end with a truce rather than an Allied victory, might have been behind his aversion to films that inflamed Americans against Germany or Japan. But his argument was transparently disingenuous since The World at War and Prelude to War essentially covered the same material in the same tone.

  Mellett’s real motive may have been reflected in a wire he sent to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences shortly after he wrote to FDR. Responding to the Academy’s request to arrange a screening of Prelude for its members, he wrote acridly, “Appreciate desire of Colonel Capra’s Academy friends but suggest in all sincerity that they refrain from embarrassing him and other able directors who have entered armed services by confusing their present service as soldiers with their private careers.” Mellett was affronted that Ford had made The Battle of Midway with no input from the OWI and that Zanuck had apparently been given license to shoot his own movie in North Africa; Capra’s circumvention of his authority was the last straw. “This is the third instance in which a Hollywood director, put in a service uniform and given the government’s money to spend, has come up with a finished Hollywood product that has evaded scrutiny by the OWI,” he complained. “I hate to have to spend so much of my time trying to outwit these boys.” His remarks infuriated both Capra and General Osborn, who wrote to Mellett and told him he had impugned the director’s character and should apologize.

  Osborn also told Capra to keep his temper, admitting, “I don’t know what got into Lowell Mellett.” But Mellett wouldn’t back down, and in fact even raised the stakes by playing on the fears expressed by some movie-house owners that the government might try to control their wartime bookings. In letters, Mellett darkly alluded to the possibility that if Capra’s picture was permitted to play in theaters, the army would feel free to start forcing them to run propaganda films regularly. Capra countered by arguing that Mellett and the OWI shouldn’t be making movies at all. “I have no particular objection to them making semi-propaganda and information films, but then we shouldn’t be making them too,” he said, adding that Mellett’s office was systematically undercutting the propaganda effort by seizing all the best foreign footage for itself and leaving him to “beg, plead and steal what crumbs we can. If we don’t get a clear definition of duties between us we will be constantly in competition for the same material,” Capra warned, “and will certainly be giving . . . uncorrelated viewpoints.”

  As 1942 drew to a close, the two men were still locked in an angry stalemate. Capra had gotten his Academy screening, but Mellett was still blocking a nationwide release for the film. However, Capra could take some satisfaction in the knowledge that Prelude to War was now being shown to all new army recruits, who had been greeting it with rowdy approval since October. And Knight, who had cowritten the film and was largely responsible for its hard-hitting style, was thrilled. He was still working in the makeshift Washington office that Capra had created in the Department of the Interior’s cooling tower, finalizing the scripts for several subsequent Why We Fight chapters while Capra remained in California. Every time Prelude to War screened in the capital, Knight told him that “there is always one instant reaction: ‘Everyone in the U.S. should see it.’” Knight did admit, with great good cheer, that after watching the movie, “I’m afraid a soldier will get the idea that he’s got to lick every German and Jap in the world to get victory.” And he added a surprising postscript to his letter: The Yorkshire-born Canadian army veteran had, at the age of forty-five, become a U.S. citizen. “Did you know I’m an American now?” he wrote. “I can’t say, ‘There’s the White House we burned’ anymore. Every night when I go home now, I say, ‘There’s our White House that those redcoat bastards burned up.’” Citizenship would give Knight security clearances that would make it easier for him to travel on army business. Six weeks later he was on his way to the Casablanca Conference in Morocco, a meeting at which Roosevelt, Churchill, and de Gaulle were to determine an Allied strategy in Europe for the next phase of the war, when his plane crashed, possibly as the result of antiaircraft fire from a German U-boat. All thirty-five passengers aboard were killed.

  TWELVE

  “You Might as Well Run into It as Away from It”

  THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND NORTH AFRICA, SEPTEMBER 1942–MAY 1943

  Nothing in John Huston’s experience, let alone in the minimal amount of army training he had received, had prepared him for life in the Aleutians. Huston left for the island of Adak in mid-September 1942, a week after Across the Pacific, the Humphrey Bogart espionage thriller he hadn’t quite been able to finish before being called up to duty, opened in New York. He approached his first major wartime assignment with the same kind of methodical precision that he brought to his preparation for any feature film. On graph paper and lined sheets, in tiny, clear handwriting, he kept lists of what he would need to make the documentary he was already envisioning (“aerial photos of Kiska,” “tactical maps,” “get names of men who’ve been decorated”) right alongside lists of what he would need to get through what looked to be a punishing autumn in the Bering Sea—“toilet articles,” “liquor,” “tobacco,” “bullion cubes,” and “two sets of heavy underwear per man.” A skilled draftsman, he also filled notebooks with pen-and-ink storyboard sketches in black and blue—an overhead shot of officers and flyers standing over a table studying battle plans; another of the same group, this time poring over a map to be filmed through the gap between an officer’s torso and the arm he’s resting on the map’s corner. “Over these shots,” Huston wrote in a note to himself, “explain the tactical principals [sic] by which the missions are planned.”

  Huston was, finally, going off to war. But he hadn’t counted on the drab, icy desolation that would overwhelm him when he arrived on the island of Adak. As he surveyed his new home, he started to create thorough, imaginative lists of every shot he wanted and roughed out a tentative script with notes about what images he planned to show in conjunction with particular pieces of narration. But the movie he had structured in his head, a sort of American version of the no-nonsense British documentaries he had seen in which crisp voice-overs described efficient strategy sessions and daring raids, had been conceived for a place that bore little resemblance to this barren landscape with its chilly northern light and uncanny quietude. Huston and his crew were five hundred miles from the Japanese-occupied island of Kiska—“nearer to the enemy than any other American territory anyplace in the world,” Huston wrote, and yet so far away that during the first weeks of his stay the army officers stationed there were fairly certain that the Japanese had no idea they were even present. What he called the “strange beauty [of] the Aleutians—undulating hills of spongy moss . . . without a tree or anything like a tree for 1500 miles” and sunny skies that could give way to dank, obliterating fog within a minute—was unearthly to him, and nothing could have seemed less like a battlefront.

  Everything on Adak felt makeshift. While the senior officers of Bomber Command and Fighter Command stayed in Quonset huts, the prefabricated shells made of corrugated steel and plywood that the navy had been using since the start of the war, the rank and file, including Huston and his five-man crew, lived in canvas tents scattered along the beachfront. Th
e airstrip, such as it was, consisted of interlocking sheets of metal that had been laid down by navy construction battalions (CBs, or “Seabees”), and the low hills on either side were dotted with dugouts for antiaircraft guns. There was loose talk of an aerial offensive to retake Kiska and Attu from the Japanese sometime in October, presumably before Huston’s forty-five-day stint was to end, but nobody seemed in any hurry to clarify exactly what those plans were. The constant threat of fog made for what Huston called “literally the worst flying weather in the world,” and the planes the army was planning to use, B-24 bombers, had problems; although they could cover the long distances that would be essential to the mission, they tended to break apart during rough landings, and the placement of their heavy fuel tanks made them more likely to catch fire than the B-17 Flying Fortresses that were being used in Europe.

  After Huston had been on Adak for a couple of weeks, he began to realize that the subject of his film might be the particular combination of boredom and fear that characterized life at this outpost—the anticipation, the mundane chores, the uneventful afternoons with nothing to do but wait for the sun to set, the lassitude (“Every day is Sunday,” he scribbled onto an early draft of the script), all of which could be unexpectedly cut short by orders for the men to abandon their chatter or poker games and head to their planes for a dry-run mission over Kiska or Attu.