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

by Mark Harris

  Zanuck had only himself to blame for the degree to which the press turned on him. In his years running 20th Century Fox, he had always fancied himself a writer, but he was also a sentimentalist who brought some of the unfortunate tropes of his studio movies to a book that purported to be journalism. His account of his conversation with a black deckhand in the merchant marine (“Ah been goin’ to sea steady foh the las’ ten yeahs, an’ no little to’pedo trouble is gonna make me quit”) turned the sailor into—in Zanuck’s own delighted assessment—“a perfect double for Stepin Fetchit.” And his assessment of the Germans (“Hell, you want to kill them all in cold blood, smother the entire bloody race. . . . No sir, there is no alternative”) was, even by the standards of the time, tone-deaf. It was one thing to vilify Hitler and another to appropriate his fantasies of racial annihilation.

  During his time in North Africa, Zanuck had not made a good impression tooling around in his blue Chevrolet, toting boxes of cigars and an expensive sleeping bag, and insisting on visiting his studio’s abandoned headquarters in Algiers, where, as the staff sergeant who accompanied him recalled, he “strolled about his fief with all the sureness of the sovereign in his own bit of extraterritoriality in a foreign land.” At times he seemed unable to distinguish between war and a war movie—“I feel like a character in an Edward G. Robinson epic,” he wrote—and in the middle of one air raid, he insisted on being allowed to fire off a tommy gun. The ill will Zanuck generated during his time in Algiers made its way back to the United States, and by the time he released his documentary, At the Front in North Africa, the press was downright derisive, referring to the film as “Darryl Zanuck’s War.” To many who saw it, the picture seemed padded; it was light on actual combat footage and filled out with what one review dismissed as “arty shots of tank treads, dawns, sunsets, [and] many another ill-placed frippery. . . . It has all the Zanuck fingerprints: It is flamboyant, melodramatic, sometimes corny, sometimes hysterical.” Zanuck’s team of more than forty Signal Corps and Field Photo cameramen had in fact captured some strong images of air and tank combat in the siege of Tebourba, but he couldn’t resist putting himself at the film’s center; he can be seen in At the Front in North Africa looking authoritative, serious, and supervisory, and brandishing a cigar.

  When the Truman Committee decided to take aim, Zanuck was the easiest, and certainly the biggest, target. In a series of hearings, the committee questioned whether he was using his positions as the head of the Academy Research Council and the Army Training Film program to push military contracts for movies toward 20th Century Fox, whether he had sufficiently separated himself from Fox by placing his stock in the studio in a blind trust (he had not), whether drawing an army salary while he was still being paid by Fox represented a double dip at the expense of the American taxpayer, and whether the officer’s commissions that he and other filmmakers had received after Pearl Harbor were given because of merit or fame. Zanuck was furious and humiliated, telling the committee that he thought it was “a dirty, lousy outrage to do such a thing to a patriotic American. . . . I am to blame for being a sucker and trying to help my country. . . . They will never catch me . . . ever doing anything again for anybody.” Zanuck indignantly offered to resign his commission, but his manifestation of high dudgeon was met with scorn. “I think he is an officer in the Army and he ought to stay there,” Truman replied. “The Army has spent a lot of money training him. . . . Why don’t you send him to school and make a real officer out of him? I cannot understand how an officer would want to quit. . . . I don’t believe in these fellows backing out.”

  The committee publicly cleared Zanuck of any malfeasance, but the office of the army inspector general, which had initiated a separate, private investigation into his financial relationship with Fox, did not, and Zanuck did in fact agree to resign his commission that spring to avoid further bad publicity. His experience felt like a cautionary tale to both Ford and Capra, whose names were thrown around in the hearings as well. Ford had kept scrupulous records of his own time in North Africa and he made sure that almost all of Field Photo’s work was labeled as classified; in the wake of the December 7th imbroglio, he stopped bragging to journalists about having been in high-risk combat and kept a low profile in Washington. When the committee, casting a wide net, requested information on his stock holdings and on the income he had received from movie profits during his two years in the navy, he had Bill Donovan respond with a letter assuring them that his record was clean. Capra was similarly called to account for the monies he had received for Meet John Doe and the still-unreleased Arsenic and Old Lace, but like Ford, he had no apparent conflicts of interest, and once it became clear to the senators that no directors were drawing full-time salaries from studios while cashing army paychecks, they lost interest.

  But the Truman Committee had made its point by using Zanuck to raise questions about the complicated power-sharing arrangements between the War Department and the movie industry. After the hearings concluded, lines of authority were simplified; the Academy Research Council, which had served as an important liaison between the War Department and the studios since before Pearl Harbor, was now marginalized, and the Signal Corps, rather than General Osborn’s looser and more filmmaker-friendly Morale Branch, would henceforth have authority over just about everyone in uniform who was making pictures for the army.

  While the hearings cast light on the danger of financial impropriety when studio executives kept a hand in the movie business after they received commissions, larger questions about the creation of propaganda and the oversight of army filmmakers continued to fester. Truman had made it clear that he thought it was a mistake to put directors in uniform in the first place; he believed they would better serve their country as consultants rather than as officers. But it was far too late to undo a policy to which the Roosevelt administration and the War Department were already committed.

  George Marshall had brushed off Senator Holman’s accusations that Prelude to War was a government-financed advertisement for Roosevelt’s reelection, but Capra and Mellett remained in a standoff over whether it would receive a theatrical release. After the film won an Oscar, Capra got Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson to argue that the movie should be shown nationwide; at the same time, Mellett persuaded the War Activities Committee, the Hollywood board that acted as a kind of sponsor for war-related documentaries seeking theatrical release, to support him in opposition.

  It was Mellett who finally overplayed his hand, defying even his own boss, OWI head Elmer Davis, who had told him to back down. “That goddamned Lowell Mellett!” sputtered Patterson a couple of weeks after the Oscars. “I talked to Elmer Davis . . . and he told me that by all that was holy [the Why We Fight films] would be shown and there’d be no more fooling about it and now there is more fooling about it!” Finally, on April 22, Mellett gave in. “Torrid conference today,” Colonel Stanley Grogan cabled General Alexander Surles, who ran the army’s Bureau of Public Relations and wanted Prelude to War in theaters as soon as possible. “Industry took stand pictures are not worth showing and will not draw audiences, lacking entertainment value, etc. . . . Elmer Davis very helpful, Lowell Mellett not at all helpful. . . . Army is to use Prelude to War as a test picture. . . . [Radio City] Music Hall, NY will be furnished with one print by OWI for showing one week in May. . . . Only way out of an impasse since industry and war department plus Lowell Mellett cannot agree.”

  Capra’s victory was pyrrhic. By the time Prelude to War opened, it was, in every sense, old news, a late-arriving history lesson that reached the general public at a moment when moviegoers were much more interested in what happened last week than they were in troop movements in 1931 Ethiopia. Reviewing the film for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther said he hoped Americans would find it “inspirational” but admitted that “its effectiveness with the public . . . is questionable. Its generalizations are vague and it leans heavily on patriotic symbolism. . . . It leaves many obvious ‘why’ questions complet
ely unanswered.” And while James Agee felt that the script that the late Eric Knight had overseen and redrafted was “respectably written,” he wasn’t convinced that Prelude to War was anything more than exactly what Marshall had originally requested—an effective illustrated lecture “the broad contents of [which] are wearily familiar to many.”

  The War Activities Committee had struck 250 prints of Prelude to War and had agreed to make the film available for no charge to any exhibitor who wanted to show it; any profits from ticket sales would go to war relief. (The sales pitch to theaters read, “Brother, can you spare 55 minutes of screen time?”) But even with a lurid ad campaign touting it as “the greatest gangster movie ever filmed. . . . More vicious . . . more diabolical . . . more horrible than any horror movie you ever saw!” Prelude to War was a dismal failure in theaters, and a film that soured exhibitors on giving over their screens to feature-length propaganda for the duration of the war. Swept up by his desire to outmaneuver Mellett, Capra hadn’t considered that a moviegoing public that was being offered two or three new war-related pictures every week would have no interest in paying for a crash course in the not very recent history of Fascism. Mellett’s fears that average Americans would be alarmed and terrified by the information in the Why We Fight series had proved to be unfounded, but their indifference was at least as disappointing to Capra. The final insult came from General Surles, who was bitterly convinced that Mellett’s office had somehow sabotaged the film by poor-mouthing it to theater owners. After all, Surles insisted, movie theaters had ways of drawing “large audiences to lousy pictures when[ever] they felt like it!”

  With the war well into its second year, generic sops to patriotism and adroit use of newsreel footage were no longer enough to stir a jaded public or to make a war documentary worth showing in theaters. Moviegoers didn’t want the story behind the war—they wanted the war, brought home in pictures they couldn’t see anywhere else. When William Wyler had insisted that recreations of dogfights and bombings could be no substitute for the real thing, he had already been away from home for six months, but his understanding of changing American tastes would prove prescient, and his stubbornness was now paying off with a degree of firsthand war experience that not even John Ford could claim. After his mission over Wilhelmshaven, Wyler stayed on with the 91st Bomb Group at Bassingbourn, getting to know the crews, figuring out how to prevent his equipment from freezing at high altitudes again, and waiting for another opportunity to fly. It came when the newly repaired Memphis Belle was brought back into the rotation of active B-17s. Robert Morgan, who had piloted the Jersey Bounce with Wyler aboard, returned to the Belle, and as Wyler spent more time with the Belle’s young navigators and gunners, its radioman and its copilot, his almost paternal feelings toward the men convinced him he had found the subject of a great film.

  The crew of the Belle, in turn, came to admire Wyler’s bravery and lack of pretense; if he was never quite one of them, he was at least welcomed into their ranks with generosity and respect. “I knew he was this great Hollywood director,” navigator Charles Leighton told Wyler biographer Jan Herman. “But I liked the way he worked. He wasn’t bossy or offensive. What amazed me was why a guy like him would do something he didn’t have to. I remember thinking, ‘What a way to make a living. Coming along with us just for pictures?’ The guy had guts.” In the name of getting a good shot, Wyler was willing to take risks that even the most cocksure young flyers thought were foolhardy. Morgan and the men were shocked when Wyler and Bill Clothier insisted on lying flat along the belly of the B-17 so that they could shoot footage through the ball turret, the position on the plane’s underside that allowed a gunner to fire in all directions. Wyler wanted to use the vantage point to capture a wheel’s-eye view of the Memphis Belle’s takeoff and descent, a decision that could have gotten him killed if the plane had had to make the kind of rough, runway-scraping landing that had put more than one B-17 out of commission. He got his footage, but some of the men thought he was crazy to have tried in the first place.

  Wyler flew his first mission in the Memphis Belle, a bombing run over U-boat bases at Brest and Lorient, on April 16, 1943. Shooting conditions were, as always, almost impossibly difficult. “It was all done with these 16-millimeter cameras you had to wind,” he said. “If you wanted to change the film you had to take off your glove, but if you took it off for more than one or two minutes you would lose fingers from frostbite. Being on oxygen, your efficiency was at a minimum. Taking three steps was like walking a mile. If you filmed out of one side—the windows were open because the machine guns were sticking out—the exposure would be different than from the other side. By the time you looked through the camera the fighter plane coming at you was gone. If you took time to look through, by the time you were ready to shoot you were over a target.”

  Twenty-one Flying Fortresses and Liberators went out that day, and not until the Belle returned to Bassingbourn did Wyler learn that he had lost one of the small handful of men he had personally recruited. Harold Tannenbaum had died when the B-24 in which he had been filming was shot down. He was forty-six years old. It would be Wyler’s task, as the head of his unit, to write a letter of condolence to his widow. “I’d seen a good many go over and not come back,” he wrote to Talli. “But it makes a difference when it’s one of your own men, and you got him into the army and sent him on the particular job.” Wyler was shaken, but a month later he was back in the air over Lorient, “hanging out the window with a camera in [his] hand” as dozens of German fighters buzzed around the formation of B-17s.

  By that point, General Eaker had become concerned about what might happen if Wyler were to be captured by the Germans. He was far and away the most prominent Jewish filmmaker in the army and was now internationally known for Mrs. Miniver, and after Wilhelmshaven it was no longer a secret that he was flying missions over Germany and occupied France. A celebrity on an active air force base was a ripe target and a potential threat to everyone’s safety; when the king and queen of England made an official visit to Bassingbourn in the interest of raising morale and strengthening Anglo-American relations, even they wanted to meet Wyler. “Talked with Queen about 5 minutes while King and generals waited,” Wyler, who filmed the visit, wrote in his journal. “Spoke of Mrs. M, going on missions, RAF, etc. . . . she was charming, interested—loved Mrs. Miniver.”

  Around that time, Beirne Lay told Wyler he was grounded, but he ignored the orders and went out on a fourth mission, this time in a plane nicknamed the Our Gang, after Hal Roach’s popular series of Little Rascals shorts. His decision almost proved fatal. The Our Gang was part of a mission over the port city of Kiel in northern Germany that was the target of the largest airstrike Wyler had witnessed so far; at one point he looked out of the plane’s ball turret and counted 160 B-17s in perfect formation. Kiel was about 550 miles north of Mulhouse, where Wyler had grown up, and when he was a boy and his town was under German control for long stretches of the First World War, he had been taught about the city’s strategic importance in school. As the Our Gang, which was leading the formation, approached Kiel, Wyler crawled around the belly of the plane, getting good aerial shots but using his film sparingly, intending to save most of it for the beginning of combat. It escaped his notice that the tube of his oxygen bottle had come loose, and he blacked out. “Bad show,” he wrote in his diary. “Good thing I came to—so dopey I thought I was dead—strange feeling—don’t think I like it. Thought of Talli and Cathy naturally and what a fool I was to go.” It took all of the effort and concentration Wyler could muster to crawl, then climb the few feet to the nose of the plane, where he could reattach his breathing tube, a task that felt like “a 5-mile run.” Wyler and the crew returned safely. Just three days later, the Our Gang was shot down.

  By the time Wyler, again in defiance of orders, flew his fifth and final mission on May 29—an extremely dangerous raid on Saint-Nazaire in which more than a dozen Flying Fortresses were shot down—he knew he had everything he
needed to make the movie he had come to England to make. Although the documentary he had in mind would use all of the good footage that he and Bill Clothier had shot on many different flights in many different planes over the last few months, it would tell the story of only one B-17, the Memphis Belle, which had just flown its twenty-fifth mission, a benchmark that rendered its entire crew eligible for home leave. Wyler was awarded the Air Medal, a decoration that had been established a year earlier for any serviceman or officer in Europe who had flown five sorties, and Eaker and Lay told him to return to the United States and take the next ninety days to turn the footage he had amassed into a movie. “Suggest brushing up Cathy on use of word Daddy and prepare Judy for an early introduction,” he cabled Talli. Almost a year after he had said goodbye to his wife and two small children, Wyler was going home.

  A few days before he arrived in New York City, his friend John Huston’s Report from the Aleutians received its first public showing at the Museum of Modern Art. The screening was a hard-won victory for Huston, who had returned from Adak almost six months earlier. The Signal Corps had not really known what to do with him once he was back in the United States. In the early part of the year, there had been some talk of plans for a propaganda film about China and Burma that he would oversee alongside James Wong Howe and some members of Ford’s Field Photo Unit. Huston had expected orders to come through that would have sent him to Asia in March, but the plan was scuttled with no explanation, and he was left to wonder if superior officers had something against him.