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

by Mark Harris

  Huston and Ambler angrily reunited with their crew back in Venafro; they were both disgusted that the sergeant and his men had refused to proceed and all but called them deserters. There was tension and uncertainty about what to do next. Ambler had hurt his leg jumping away from the mortar and was having difficulty walking. Faulty Signal Corps intelligence about the safety of the town had endangered all of their lives. But the next morning, Huston was determined to go back. To him, San Pietro felt like the center of the war. Pyle had already made his way there and was seen walking the roads, looking for soldiers to interview. A team from the British Army Film Unit had shown up as well, led by David MacDonald, who had overseen Desert Victory and was now perhaps going to do for the reputation of British forces in Italy what he had done for them in Tunisia. Ambler had been in England during Desert Victory’s postproduction and, its warm American reception notwithstanding, he knew enough about the film’s artifice—“carefully-lit matching close-ups . . . contrived . . . in Pinewood Studios . . . [with] make-up men waiting to dab on artificial sweat”—to take a jaundiced view of any combat documentary that made claims of complete authenticity. But Huston’s sense of competitiveness was sparked; he would not be outdone by the Brits this time. He, Ambler, and Buck set out again, this time by jeep in deference to Ambler’s injured leg.

  They made it all the way to what remained of San Pietro’s central piazza, where Huston started planning shots and mapping out a potential opening for the movie. Their work was interrupted by the sound of planes overhead—perhaps Allied, perhaps Axis—and howitzer fire. They raced toward one of the only buildings still intact—the church—and hid in its crypt, where, for the first time, they encountered some of San Pietro’s residents: six dirty, cowering villagers, three of them young children, who could have been there for hours or days.

  When the shelling stopped, all three men ran for the jeep and got on the road back to Venafro. In the Aleutians, Huston had had a few moments of uncontrolled terror, once when his plane crash-landed, once when a midnight air raid seemed imminent. Now he was just barely holding himself together. As they were crossing a bridge to get out of the town, their jeep’s wheels got stuck. They were temporarily frozen in place in an open vehicle, exposed on all sides. Huston exploded at Buck, who was driving. “Filthy little shit!” he shouted. “Dirty Jew bastard!”

  That night in Venafro, a livid Ambler asked Huston “whose side we were on in the war—the Allies or the editors of Der Stürmer?” Huston, ashamed, apologized to Buck. It was now clear that Capra’s idea to document the celebratory liberation of a town with villagers timidly emerging to cheer on the American troops was a fantasy. None of them knew what their next move should be.

  Rather than routing his concerns through Colonel Gillette, who would certainly tell him and his men to pull out, Huston decided to try to reach Capra directly and ask for further instructions from Washington. He spent the day writing a letter, and that night they all drove to an airfield near Naples, where Huston had friends in the army who would put his communiqué on the next plane. With little else to do for the rest of the night, Huston, Ambler, and Buck walked into a palazzo that the Fifth Army was now using as its headquarters in Italy. One large, drafty room had been turned into a makeshift bar. A lone couple sat there; they had clearly been drinking for some time. The man turned around. “You still shooting pictures, kid?” said Humphrey Bogart.

  The actor and his wife, Mayo Methot, had come to Italy as part of a goodwill tour. Huston introduced his colleagues, and they sat down to a long, sour, boozy evening. Methot, a onetime Broadway musical performer, was a serious alcoholic, so combative when under the influence that Bogart had nicknamed her “Sluggy.” She and Huston had always disliked each other, and as he ignored her, she turned truculent. The night ended with her barely coherent, slurring the song she had introduced on Broadway fifteen years earlier, “More Than You Know,” off-key as someone tried to accompany her on an old piano.

  “Whether you’re right

  Whether you’re wrong

  Man of my heart

  I’ll string along”

  Huston thought the evening was “embarrassing.” As for Ambler, he had found his time in the company of a Hollywood director not only distasteful, but pointless. He had no intention of returning to Venafro or of waiting for Capra’s reply; as far as he was concerned, the San Pietro project was unsalvageable. They would have to start again and find a new town that would fit their concept. “We still thought it possible to make that sort of documentary in a forward area without ‘reconstruction,’ ‘re-enactment’ or other essential falsification,” he wrote. “We had not yet understood that for us, with our brief from Washington, nothing but falsification would be of any use, or even possible.”

  EIGHTEEN

  “We Really Don’t Know What Goes On Beneath the Surface”

  WASHINGTON, THE CHINA-BURMA-INDIA THEATER, ITALY, AND NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1943–MARCH 1944

  John Ford wondered if the war was over for him. The imbroglio over December 7th had not resulted in any kind of reprimand; in fact, Ford had gotten some credit for saving the film. But as his colleagues from Hollywood were shuttling to and from Europe on high-level missions that put them close to the front lines, he was planted in Washington, supervising short informational and training films for Field Photo but shooting nothing himself. An officebound bureaucrat was the last thing Ford had imagined he would become when he left Hollywood for the navy, and despite his extensive responsibilities, it felt like a kind of impotence. Some directors didn’t see themselves as actual film shooters; John Huston, for example, remarked that he “didn’t take one successful photograph during the whole war. . . . I carried the cameras as a sort of token. . . . The camera separates one from the world.” But for Ford, the opposite was true; it was the camera that connected him to the world, and when he wasn’t behind one he could feel lost, almost derelict.

  He had already served longer than any other director; perhaps it was time to go back to his old life in California, to make a war film rather than film the war itself. MGM was actively urging him to get back to his real job; Louis B. Mayer had acquired the rights to a nonfiction bestseller called They Were Expendable, an account of the brave, doomed attempt of a fleet of American PT boats to defend the Philippines against overwhelming Japanese force in 1942. Mayer saw it as a project for Spencer Tracy, and thought Ford, also a rough-hewn, hard-drinking Irish Catholic, would be a perfect match for him, especially with his firsthand knowledge of the war in the Pacific. Ford liked the idea; as early as the spring of 1943, he knew that he wanted to make it his next film. But when MGM asked Bill Donovan if he would consider taking Ford off active duty so that he could make the picture immediately, Donovan said no. That was fine with Ford—any sign that the navy still believed it had some use for him was encouraging—but the director himself was torn. He was now fifty years old, months away from the birth of his first grandchild, with his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary approaching. And his long separation from Mary seemed to have strengthened his sentimental attachment to her. “I guess we might just as well break down and confess we miss each other—what the hell,” he wrote to her. “I pray to God it will soon be over so we can live our life together with our children and grandchildren and our Araner. . . . I’m tough to live with—heaven knows and Hollywood didn’t help—Irish and genius don’t mix well. But you know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

  Ford had practical reason to consider requesting an early discharge. He was earning just $4,000 a year from the navy, and although his annual profit checks from the movies he had made before the war were ten times that, his yearly income was still only a small fraction of what it had been in Hollywood. His business manager had recently told him that he was overdrawn and that he and Mary would have to remain on a tight budget for the rest of 1943. But he never seriously considered leaving the navy; it would have felt selfish to him, perhaps even cowardly. Since the war had started, he had watc
hed with increasing contempt as John Wayne had made and broken one vague commitment after another to join up. Wayne’s star had risen since his breakthrough in Stagecoach and he was now in constant demand in Hollywood; he talked earnestly of going into the army or the navy, but always right after the next movie. In the spring, when Ford point-blank offered Wayne a spot in Field Photo, he had declined, and he declined again when the offer was reiterated in August. At the end of 1943, Wayne, who had four young children, was reclassified from 3-A (a deferment granted to men who had exceptional family obligations) to 1-A (fully eligible). Republic Studios, where he was under contract, jumped in quickly to have him reclassified again as 2-A, a deferment granted to those whom the armed forces deemed should keep their civilian jobs in the national interest. Wayne never would enter the war; he would fulfill his commitment to the armed services by doing a USO tour, getting no closer to combat than the starring role in Republic’s The Fighting Seabees. Ford found his behavior reprehensible.

  In September, Donovan had brought Ford out of limbo with an assignment to travel to the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations as an observer for the OSS. As a trip to the front, it lacked anything like the urgency of Midway; Ford and two Field Photo colleagues were sent to New York and put on a freighter that would take two months to reach its destination, and the mission came with a request that Ford temporarily turn over his duties running the unit he had created to a colleague, Ray Kellogg. But it didn’t matter: Ford was happy to be in the field again.

  His two months in Burma and China did not result in a major documentary, but it did get him back in the thick of things. He got off to a slightly rocky start because of his overfondness for military dress when he lingered in Calcutta, awaiting some tailored uniforms, and Colonel Carl Eifler, head of the Burmese OSS detachment, told him, “You’d damn well better be here within twelve hours or I’ll court-martial your ass!” “You old bastard—who the hell do you think you’re talking to?” Ford replied. Eifler, who did not know whom he was talking to, told him he didn’t care. But tensions dissolved once the men met and Ford got down to work. It soon became apparent that Donovan had sent him across the Pacific for reasons having more to do with internal Washington politics than with the need for a great director at this particular battlefront. Ford’s job was to make a visual case for the usefulness of Donovan’s new intelligence agency abroad by shooting footage of officers at work that could, if necessary, be shown to Congress as a pitch for further appropriations to the OSS, and he fulfilled his assignment without complaint. He and his men shot some material for newsreels and shorts, mostly concentrating on cooperative endeavors between the Americans and the Burmese—troops working together, supply planes arriving. He also did some aerial reconnaissance, and even made his first and only parachute jump into the jungle, saying Hail Marys all the way, in order to film the Kachins, an indigenous tribe that had been working with the OSS. And he spent some time training cameramen to use 35-millimeter equipment for geographic surveys from the air as part of the Intelligence Documentary Photographic Project, known within Field Photo as “Ippy Dippy Intelligence.” He spent New Year’s Eve in China, and left for Washington a couple of weeks later.

  The rightward drift of Ford’s politics, which began around this time, was fitful and remains difficult to trace. Before the war, he had never allied himself with isolationists, as many conservatives did; unlike Capra, he had always been staunchly anti-Fascist, and he was in sympathy with Roosevelt on many issues. But in early 1944, fervent anti-Communism began to dominate his thinking.

  In his biography Searching for John Ford, Joseph McBride suggests that Ford’s time in Burma, particularly under the hard-right General Albert Wedemeyer, influenced his political retrenchment. He notes Ford’s fears that Communist ideology was insidiously pervading American life and his own industry, a suspicion that, in the Ford family, was frequently connected to a degree of hostility toward Jews that set him apart from most of his fellow directors. Nothing that was happening in Germany or Europe seems to have altered a level of anti-Semitism that letters suggest was a kind of lingua franca among the Fords. When he was on his way to Burma, he had written Mary from aboard ship that one of the travelers with whom he was sharing the voyage was a Jewish doctor he called “The Yid.” Mary, who was spending much of her time at home volunteering for the Hollywood Canteen, complained to him that the organization was dominated by leftist Jews who hated the Irish, and at around the same time, the Fords’ son Patrick expressed disgust that Jews had overrun the navy’s public relations department, where he worked. “Yid,” “hebe,” “mockie,” and worse show up in the Fords’ letters, but the recurrence of the terms seems to stem less from deep-seated hatred than from a kind of cultural parochialism that probably persisted from their middle-class Irish Catholic upbringing. Ford himself believed that Catholics and Jews, as outsiders, should make common cause; he had said to his longtime agent Harry Wurtzel at the start of the war that “we’ve got to win . . . because Jews like you and Catholics like myself and family, who have no place in the world, can’t let these bastards succeed.” And although he distrusted Jews as a group, he was fond of announcing that some of his best friends, including Wurtzel, were Jews. (One of Ford’s letters to Wurtzel begins, cordially, “Dear Christ-Killer,” suggesting that Ford, raised to think of Jews as a historical enemy, often disguised his genuine unease with them as arm-punching bonhomie.)

  In early 1944, Ford, for the first time, cast his lot publicly with a group of virulently anti-Roosevelt Hollywood colleagues whose anti-Communist rhetoric helped to set the table for McCarthyism. Their leader was Sam Wood, a well-known Hollywood director whose credits included Goodbye, Mr. Chips; The Pride of the Yankees; and, most recently, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls that had managed to erase all anti-Fascist and leftist ideology from the screenplay, spreading the thin story that remained over nearly three hours. Wood’s own daughter believed that it was his failure to win an Academy Award for directing Mr. Chips that started to sour him on Hollywood; he began to mutter incessantly about Communism, listing in a little black notebook the names of colleagues whom he was sure were subversives, and he soon turned from “a charming man” into “a snarling, unreasoning brute.” Wood’s rhetoric won over a number of people in Hollywood, from Victor Fleming to Gary Cooper to Walt Disney to John Wayne, and together they formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Among the members of its executive committee was Ford’s friend James McGuinness, who had a couple of years earlier been one of the writers to whom Ford turned when he needed a voice-over script for The Battle of Midway. Since Ford wasn’t in Hollywood for the series of meetings and discussions that preceded the MPA’s public launch in February 1944, it is possible that McGuinness brought him into the fold; in any case, Ford wrote a forty-dollar check that made him a founding member and put him at odds with most of his Hollywood associates in the Signal Corps and Field Photo.

  That included Capra, whose own anti-Communism, based largely on the fear that he himself would be the target of red-baiters, did not lead him to join the MPA. Capra, back in the United States after his long stay in London, saw himself as a servant of the army and, by extension, of the Roosevelt administration for as long as he was on active duty; his job was to convey the government’s political ideals, not to express his own. It was not always easy for him to decipher what those ideals were. Almost two years after he had conceived the Know Your Enemy series, Capra was still struggling with the first installment, about Japan. After an initial false start with a failed treatment that trafficked in overt anti-Asian racism, he had turned to a filmmaker who promised a completely new approach.

  Joris Ivens was a Dutch-born socialist documentarian whose pro-Soviet political sympathies had led the FBI to label him a “dangerous Communist.” He would have been an unlikely candidate to join Capra’s team except for his impeccable reputation as a filmmaker and his international experience: He had shot d
ocumentaries in the Netherlands and Russia as well as New Deal–era propaganda shorts for the U.S. Film Service and the National Film Board of Canada, and in 1937 his anti-Fascist documentary about the Spanish Civil War, The Spanish Earth, was shown at the White House, after which he had dined with the Roosevelts. Capra had used footage shot by Ivens in at least two of the Why We Fight films. When Capra asked him to direct Know Your Enemy—Japan, Ivens agreed on the condition that he could pick his own screenwriter—Carl Foreman, a former member of the Communist Party who was then a private in the army.*

  Ivens moved to Los Angeles, where he took a job as a steelworker in a shipyard in order to make ends meet while he and Foreman worked on the project for nine months, all the while under FBI surveillance. The twenty-minute film they ultimately created included a sequence animated by the Walt Disney Studios in which Emperor Hirohito was depicted as a kamikaze pilot nosediving toward earth; as he plunged, his ceremonial robes gradually changed into a uniform of the Imperial Army. The narration that Foreman wrote to accompany Ivens’s footage bluntly indicted a cabal of Japanese businessmen and military leaders as “the real rulers of Japan—the power-hungry generals and admirals, the money-made industrialists, the grinning hypocritical politicians [who] want to rule the world.”