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

by Mark Harris

  Anderson ended his script on a bleak and uncompromising note: “This war hasn’t made many heroes. It’s not a war in which heroes stand out. But nothing that great heroes ever had to face in world history has been tougher or sterner than what confronts the crews now flying our Fortresses over Europe. All too few of them complete that last assignment.”

  Wyler was dazzled by Anderson’s work, and sent it to Beirne Lay, asking for his notes and suggestions. Lay also loved it and returned it untouched, with nothing but the handwritten note “How about my polishing up Hamlet?” But both men soon realized that the wrenching, sorrowful notes that Anderson had sounded—of alienation during victory, of loss in the middle of celebration, of a bereavement that lingers long after the glow of a successful mission has worn off—were in direct opposition to the reason the army wanted the movie made in the first place. Wyler ended up using chunks of Anderson’s script throughout the film, which was now to be called The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress. But he reluctantly concluded that Anderson’s ending had to be jettisoned entirely. The picture would instead end with the footage Wyler’s team had shot of the king and queen’s congratulatory visit. And the new words to be spoken in the movie’s last minutes, which had been rewritten by a member of Wyler’s unit named Lester Koenig, tapped a different vein of sentimentality: “The ground crew were a little self-conscious about being dressed in fatigues,” the narrator says. “But the queen thought they were very nice.” What follows, perhaps inevitably, is some flattering footage of General Eaker as he gives the Belle crew orders for their “twenty-sixth and most important mission—to return to America to train new crews and to tell the people what we’re doing here, to thank them for their help and support, and tell them to keep it up so we can keep it up! So we can bomb the enemy again and again and again until he has had enough. And then we can all come home.” Even the initial grace note in Anderson’s draft was cast aside: In the final cut of Memphis Belle, Captain Robert Morgan is shown joyously buzzing the field.

  When Stevens arrived in London in late October 1943, it was for a considerably longer stay, and with a renewed sense of purpose. His six months in North Africa, Egypt, and Iran had produced nothing but the staged Tunisia footage he had turned over to Capra; he had spent the last two months back in the United States, trying to forget the futility of his time away and fill his days with as much fun as possible. At home in California, he took George Jr. to a doubleheader. In New York, he dined with Bennett Cerf, escorted the starlet Ann Shirley to the Wedgwood Room to hear Frank Sinatra sing, and enjoyed a reunion with Bert Wheeler, the vaudevillian had who starred in some of the first comedies he had directed a decade earlier. But Stevens didn’t linger; he was ready to return to service provided that this time he had an actual mission. “When I am put on the ground to make a film, I have to do a good job,” he wrote in his journal that fall. “These amateurs can stay out on a job indefinitely, no picture comes from their effort and so long as they keep a pleasant social relationship with the local command their job is accepted as well done. . . . [But] I cannot go off on an expedition and not make film.”

  Stevens’s new task—the first of a series of assignments that would keep him in Europe for the next two years—was an important one: Capra had directed him to organize a Special Coverage Unit (SPECOU) of forty-five cameramen and sound recorders to photograph the coming American landing in Europe. The Allies had started mapping out plans for the liberation of France as early as the summer of 1942, when it was code-named Operation Sledgehammer, but their first plan wasn’t feasible; it would have relied on the already overstretched British fighting forces with insufficient support from the Americans, who were then pouring all of their manpower into the war in the Pacific. A second iteration of the idea, Operation Roundup, which would have provided considerably more Allied troop strength, was discussed with a target date of April 1943, and also scrapped. But that August, at the Quebec Conference, the Allied chiefs of staff had begun strategizing in earnest about a third try, Operation Overlord, with a possible landing on the Normandy coast now planned for May 1944.

  Stevens, of course, knew only what all of the other officers who were arriving in England that fall knew—that an Allied entry into Europe, either through France or Scandinavia, was coming, and that it would surely be decisive in the war. Just as he reached London, news came that General Dwight D. Eisenhower had been moved over from the Mediterranean Theater of Operations to command the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF); he would be based in the suburban London neighborhood of Teddington. Stevens had met Eisenhower over the summer in Tunis and the two had had a testy exchange when he asked the general if he planned to talk to General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, Rommel’s replacement, who had just been captured. Eisenhower, “to keep me in my place,” replied, “‘I’m here to kill Germans, not to talk to them.’” Stevens came away disliking him intensely: “What a horse’s ass he was . . . I’ll never forget it.” But that didn’t matter: This assignment would put Stevens in the center of the action for the duration of the war.

  In London, he began working with the men who would become his squad mates and closest companions on the front—Irwin Shaw, who was now assigned to his unit; Bill Mellor, his cameraman in Tunis; Tony Veiller, who decided to share digs with Stevens the day after his housemate Capra moved out and returned to the United States, and Ivan Moffat, a debonair, witty, and well-connected British screenwriter who had moved to America, become a citizen, enlisted in the Signal Corps, and was now back in the UK under Stevens’s authority. The British Army Film Unit had viewed Capra and Wyler as American eminences, but Stevens, despite years of success, was less familiar to them—the British hadn’t seen many of his films other than Gunga Din. “I didn’t really know much about . . . his work or anything else,” said Moffat. “There was no particular George Stevens cult in England.” Moffat and Stevens would end up working together for the next twenty years, but they didn’t connect instantly. “When I first met him, George didn’t like Citizen Kane!” he recalled. “He had been something of a philistine in his outlook before then, and rather boohooed anything that smacked of too much intellectuality.”

  Organizing a large unit of men did not come naturally to Stevens, who was not gregarious, made friends slowly, and felt caught between the desire to be their comrade and colleague and the necessity of serving as their commander. Like Wyler, he was flabbergasted by the difficulty of requisitioning supplies and expediting orders; the power struggles over his head seemed so byzantine that it was often unclear to him who could, or would, get SPECOU what it needed. Early in 1944, he reached out to Capra for help, begging him to cut through the red tape. “We have, as you might know, been anxious for clarification of the overall situation here,” he wrote. “Many different authorities have been making plans. . . . We have followed the simple procedure here of reminding the policy makers of the job we were sent here to do, and requesting the privilege of doing it.”

  Capra already knew firsthand of the frustration of working in London while decisions were being made an ocean away but admitted to Stevens that his hands were all but tied. “In some vague way,” he wrote from Washington, “I’m supposed to be in charge of all overseas combat photographers,” but “as you can well imagine . . . we have no direct communication or control over camera men at the front.” He told Stevens to hang in and predicted optimistically, “Don’t be surprised if a lot of us come bouncing in on you one day” to provide more support. That day never came; delayed and nonspecific encouragement was all that Stevens would ever get from Washington.

  Stevens was far from home when the surprising news came to him that the New York Film Critics Circle had, by a one-vote margin on the seventh ballot, voted him the year’s best director for his comedy The More the Merrier. It was the first major award he had ever won, and when his friend, Talk of the Town screenwriter Sidney Buchman, accepted for him in a nationally broadcast ceremony, he praised Stevens’s “special, uni
que, irreplaceable” quality as a director. Stevens was happy about the win, the gentle, lighthearted sensibility of his movie, in which war was little more than an abstract inconvenience and an impetus for romance, now felt impossibly distant and innocent. “Miss you and my boy more than you can know,” he cabled Yvonne shortly after the awards dinner. “Working endlessly on difficult job, for me much discouragement. . . . The main thing I am looking forward to is for this to end successfully. . . . Wish Hitler was in hell and am glad to help in any way to put him there.”

  The New York critics also honored Huston and Capra that winter, splitting a special award for documentary filmmaking between Report from the Aleutians and the first five Why We Fight installments. It was Why We Fight’s newest chapter, The Battle of Russia, that had convinced reviewers that Capra’s series was something much more than a set of history lessons for new GIs; together, the movies had come to constitute a democratic manifesto that encouraged Americans to view the war as a struggle of international allies, not just U.S. soldiers. Back in the spring of 1942, when Eric Knight had gone through the scripts and sent his eviscerating evaluation of them to Capra, he had exempted The Battle of Russia from his scorn, calling it the only script that “sounds as if it were written by a guy who had an ache in his gut.” Capra agreed, and with Mellett finally out of the way, he mounted an all-out campaign for the American theatrical release of the film while he was still in London, arranging screenings for Academy members and securing national bookings in November.

  The Battle of Russia was the first Why We Fight picture since Prelude to War to be approved for distribution to civilian audiences. It was initially supervised by Capra, written by Veiller, and, while Capra was abroad, completed by Anatole Litvak, who was widely acknowledged as its director. Like the previous films in the series, this one was, as the New Yorker put it, a “scissors and paste” production that was cobbled together out of previously shot film—everything from foreign newsreels of anti-Soviet atrocities to silent pictures from twenty-five years earlier and footage from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 film Alexander Nevsky that was used to fill in Russian history. But the Russians, who provided the Signal Corps with extensive footage from their own news films, war reports, and propaganda pictures, had documented their own struggle with skill and power, and Capra and Litvak had a wealth of material about the siege of Leningrad and the sustained and heroic Stalingrad campaign on which to draw. Unlike the first four installments, which each ran about fifty minutes, the eighty-minute Battle of Russia was designed to leave its audience, both in and out of uniform, in a fevered state of patriotic militarism. It did so with such effectiveness that James Agee insisted, in an uncharacteristically naïve burst of enthusiasm, that not a moment of it was ever intended “for propaganda, always for the maximum of human and emotional force.” It was Agee who a month earlier had urged the War Activities Committee to approve the picture for public release, calling it “the best and most important war film ever assembled in this country.” The Russians agreed; the Cinema Section of the USSR Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries met to discuss the impact of the film and admiringly called it “a real super-powered celluloid bomb.”

  After the end of the war, The Battle of Russia’s unblemished version of Russian history and what Agee described as its “figure-skating” around the German-Soviet pact would be used by proto-McCarthyites to tag Capra as soft on Communism. But in late 1943, its portrayal of a people who, according to the opening narration, “for all time shattered the legend of Nazi invincibility” had a profound impact on those who saw it and helped to cement Capra’s reputation as first among all the American filmmakers who were contributing to the war effort. The essayist Alfred Kazin, then a young soldier stationed at an army base in Illinois, was shaken and excited by what he saw. This was not “the trustworthy old American movie magic working on us like a liberating storm”; it was “the real thing . . . Russia as my parents had not been allowed to see it.” Watching the picture on the base, he said he lost “all separateness, [felt] absolutely at one with the soldiers in the dark theater. It was a physical shock . . . how much I had been worked over, appealed to.”

  Huston’s award for Report from the Aleutians was a vindication of his battle with Mellett to have the film released at its full length, but he wasn’t in New York to savor the moment. In early November, he and Eric Ambler had arrived in Italy with ambitious plans to make the war’s first serious American nonfiction film about the results of an Allied ground campaign. They were joined by Jules Buck, a bright, even-keeled lieutenant in the Signal Corps who had been a mainstay of the small team Huston had brought to the Aleutians. The director described Buck as “my one-man army throughout the war” and had requested him as a right-hand man as soon as Capra had told him to go to Italy.

  Naples had been hit by more than a hundred airstrikes from both sides by the time Huston got there, including an August assault by four hundred Allied B-17s from which it had not begun to recover. The city, he wrote, was “like a whore suffering from the beating of a brute. Little boys were offering their sisters and mothers for sale. . . . Rats appeared in packs outside the buildings and simply stood there, looking at you with red eyes, not moving. . . . The souls of the people had been raped.” The “unholy” place that Naples had become was at that moment a magnet for Americans who wanted to document war at its most searing and destructive. In his first days there, Huston met Robert Capa, the Hungarian Jewish combat photographer who had been covering the Allied campaign in Sicily and Italy for Life magazine. Ernie Pyle, the roving correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain whose GI’s-eye-view columns had made him one of the most widely read American war reporters, was also on the scene, hoping to accomplish in print something akin to what Huston wanted to do on film.

  Ambler was still wary of his American counterpart, whom he found a “bit pretentious”; he couldn’t stand Huston’s grandiosity, his mannered way of speaking, or his habit of surveying the landscape from behind air force–regulation dark glasses that seemed to give him “a somewhat exaggerated view of [his] own might.” He also thought Huston’s posturing was intended to conceal his growing awareness that the assignment he had been given seemed silly in the face of the horrifying realities they were now witnessing on every street corner. “He was probably too appalled to say . . . that the idea of a film about the little people of Italy that dear old Frank Capra had dreamed up . . . would be in Naples preposterous.” But the two men were stuck working together against a common foe. Colonel Melvin Gillette, the same Signal Corps lifer who had made it so difficult for George Stevens to get anywhere near the action in North Africa, was now in charge of the army photographic section at Caserta, and had little interest in helping Huston realize his ambitions.

  Without Gillette’s approval for supplies and equipment, there could be no documentary, and he stalled the team for a month. “John set out to make Colonel Gillette believe that a good movie made while we were under his jurisdiction would bring him credit,” Ambler wrote. “In the end, I think, John bored him into giving way.” Gillette and Huston struck a deal: If he pleased Gillette’s commanding officer by shooting some boilerplate newsreel footage of the U.S. Army joining forces with the Goums, a unit of Moroccan and Algerian fighters that had just arrived in Italy, Gillette would give him everything he needed.

  Weeks of waiting had brought Huston, Ambler, and Buck closer together, especially after a hepatitis epidemic turned so many rooms at army headquarters into quarantined convalescent wards that the three of them were forced to bunk in the same room. Ambler came to admire Huston’s persistence, if nothing else; Huston conceded that Ambler, “except for his snoring . . . was a good man to have around.” By December, according to Ambler, they had formulated a plan to find “a small town immediately after the enemy had left, and then make a film of what happened next to its inhabitants.” They had settled on San Pietro, an ancient comune forty-three miles northwest of Naples from which the Germans
had finally been driven after ten days of heavy bombardment and shelling during which many American soldiers were killed, three-quarters of the Allied tanks in the battle were blown up, and the town itself was destroyed.

  Buck secured a jeep, and he, Huston, Ambler, and a three-man Signal Corps camera crew drove to nearby Venafro, where they set up camp in a farmhouse and started planning their first day of shooting. But after an initial scouting expedition, the sergeant in charge of the cameramen returned, clearly rattled. The all-clear that the Signal Corps had given Huston back in Naples had been premature. San Pietro was still spiderwebbed with German mines, booby traps, and tripwires. It was also completely abandoned; no relieved or joyous returning villagers were anywhere in sight.

  The roads to San Pietro were open, however, and Huston decided they should venture out on foot with Buck’s Eyemo camera and see if they could find anything worth filming. Ambler, whom Huston called “one of the coolest men I’ve ever seen under fire,” was apprehensive, believing that Huston “still had not understood” the degree to which he was putting himself and his team in harm’s way. The trip started benignly; they happened upon a group of cheerful soldiers from Texas who were excited to see the camera and thought they might be lucky enough to make it into an American newsreel. Buck shot some footage of them, and then they moved on. When they had almost reached the town, Huston stopped suddenly. He and Ambler turned and saw a GI kneeling by a tree, aiming his rifle. “For an instant he looked alive, but only an instant,” Ambler wrote. “A mortar bomb fragment had sheared away the whole of one side of his head.”

  As they turned to look at the spare, leafless, rocky woods around them, they saw that the way forward was littered with the corpses of American soldiers, and the town of San Pietro, visible a quarter mile away, appeared to be little more than rubble and the charred skeletal shells of what had once been buildings, only a few of which were left standing. The Italian interpreter would go no farther, nor would the sergeant and his cameramen—not for the sake of a movie. Huston and Ambler kept moving forward with Buck, past the dead. As Buck started to film, a mortar shell shrieked past their heads and, with the camera still rolling, they tumbled into a ditch together. They left San Pietro as quickly as possible.