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

by Mark Harris

  One film close to Capra’s heart had, however, been successfully completed against steep odds and considerable resistance within the army itself. It had been two years since William Wyler, disheartened after his encounters with racism and segregation in the American Midwest and South, had bowed out of making The Negro Soldier, but Capra had not given up on the idea. He had brought in a director named Stuart Heisler who had in 1940 made a minor children’s movie called The Biscuit Eater, about two little boys, one white and one black, who raised a dog together. Capra felt his handling of the material had been sensitive, and Heisler took his new assignment seriously; when he was told to start developing a script for The Negro Soldier in late 1942, his first request was to collaborate with Carlton Moss, the black writer Wyler had found. Moss had graduated from a black college in Baltimore and had aspirations to write screenplays. He came to Washington and worked on his script at a lunch table in the Library of Congress, one of the few research facilities that had an unsegregated cafeteria.

  General Osborn had been Capra’s closest ally in almost every one of his fights to get a movie made, but when Capra sent him Moss and Heisler’s proposed screenplay with a letter strongly endorsing it, the general was discouragingly cool to the proposed film. “It is undoubtedly a powerful script,” he wrote to Capra. “But the fact that it is, as you say in your letter, an emotional glorification of the Negro war effort puts it in a different class from the [movie] we had intended and makes us very doubtful about showing it to the troops without changes. . . . Who is going to see the Negro picture? Under what circumstances? What effect is it desired to [produce]?”

  The army was at that moment caught in a bind created by its own hypocrisy: It wanted to make a movie that would convince skeptical African American men and their families that this was their war too, but only if it could avoid the subject of racism altogether and find a narrative of inclusion that would somehow manage not to unsettle any white GIs. There was little in the way of progress that a movie could showcase; the armed forces were still segregated by unit, and the Army Air Corps had not even allowed black pilots or mechanics in its ranks until 1940, when the Selective Service Act outlawed racial discrimination in the induction of soldiers. Many high-ranking officers still freely espoused the belief that the army’s 875,000 black soldiers lacked the intelligence for overseas deployment, and racism among the rank and file was so endemic that when the OWI’s Sam Spewack went to England in late 1942, he reported back to Capra that “apparently the big problem here is the fact [that] the British are nice to our Negro troops and the white soldiers resent it.”

  Hollywood wasn’t much better. In 1943, black characters were depicted as inferior in 80 percent of the movies in which they appeared, and minstrel-show stereotypes were still the rule, especially in entertainment films that depicted African Americans in uniform. The year’s highest-grossing picture, the musical revue This Is the Army, featured as its highlight Joe Louis and an all-black male chorus in a number called “What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear.” The lyrics explained that “Mr. Dude has disappeared” and that black men were trading in their “Lenox Avenue . . . flashy ties” for “olive drab.” The chorus danced in front of a painted backdrop of strutting, bug-eyed caricatures in gaudy coats and hats. The message that the exuberantly performed song intended to send was that the army offered black people a chance to straighten up and fly right, not that their contribution to the war effort would be meaningful enough to matter to white America. The determination to avoid any commentary on the unhappier aspects of race relations in the United States was only reinforced by the OWI’s own guidelines, which as late as 1944 stated that “films in which there is reference to racial minorities should avoid showing segregation wherever possible, and not deal too lengthily with sharp contrasts between the conditions of majority and minority peoples.”

  Capra didn’t back off from his insistence on making The Negro Soldier, nor did he reassign it. Over the following year, Heisler and Moss continued to work on the film. “I’ll say this for him,” Moss said many years later. “We had all the money we wanted, and he did leave us absolutely alone. . . . If Capra had been hostile, personally hostile in this area, the film would never have been made. He could have sabotaged it.” By October 1943, they had a movie ready to show, and with Capra still working on Tunisian Victory in England, his replacement Anatole Litvak arranged a screening for senior army officers. He got back a number of requests, all of which were meant to soothe white sensitivities. Even though the film’s primary intended audience was not white GIs but soldiers in all-black platoons, the role of black enlistees in combat was to be deemphasized lest it raise hopes among African Americans that they would be welcome on the front lines. A scene showing a white physical therapist administering aid to a black soldier would have to be eliminated since its inclusion might stoke fears that in the new army white men could be subservient in any way to black men. And for the same reason, the film’s depiction of black officers would have to be, if not eliminated entirely, underplayed.

  Heisler and Moss made the necessary revisions and held their breath when in February 1944 the movie was shown to the New York press and, soon after, to an invited audience of African Americans at a theater in Harlem. The lights went down, and the first image they saw on the screen after the War Department insignia was a large crowd of African Americans—played by actors who had been hired for $10.50 a day—as they entered a church. A black sergeant sings a solo, and then a minister—the most crisply spoken, uncaricatured black preacher ever seen in an American film up to that point—takes the pulpit and delivers his sermon. The preacher, played by Moss himself after he and Heisler failed to find an actor whom they thought was suitable for the role, invokes Joe Louis’s fight against Max Schmeling, seen in newsreel footage, and then tells the congregation that now, “these two men . . . are matched again, this time in a far bigger arena and for far greater stakes.” African Americans of all generations, conservatively dressed, hushed and attentive, are shown in the pews as Moss’s preacher moves into a selective history lesson about how black people have helped safeguard the country’s liberty from 1660 all the way through the 371st Negro Infantry in World War I. He follows with a quick, Capra-esque tour of great black Americans— Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, judges, a North Pole explorer, a surgeon, musicians, publishers, educators, curators, sculptors, singers (represented by a shot of Marian Anderson), an orchestra conductor, and Jesse Owens.

  Then, halfway into the forty-minute movie, a question comes from the congregation: “What about the infantry?” The speaker is the mother of a soldier named Robert who’s about to go to officer candidate school. As she reads a letter from her son recounting his experiences, the audience follows, in montage, a sterling and dapper young man from his induction and intake interview through training and service and all the way up through Pearl Harbor (depicted in staged footage that was borrowed from December 7th). It was Heisler and Moss’s intention to introduce black moviegoers to the rigor and pride of army life, but what made a stronger impression on the crowd was that, for the first time, black men in military service were being portrayed straightforwardly and uncomedically; they’re shown relaxing, playing ping-pong, using the base library (one reads from An Anthology of American Negro Literature), and even dancing with WAVES at an all-black club. The audience is then told that “black, brown, yellow and white men” are about to give the Nazis a big surprise: “The men we knew as caterers, printers, bricklayers, cooks, entertainers, carpenters, bellboys, schoolteachers, farmers are today soldiers in a modern army . . . every man schooled in the meaning of teamwork . . . every man ready to do his share.” The Negro Soldier’s final image is the same V-for-victory sign that ended all of the movies produced by Capra’s unit.

  The Negro Soldier was received far more positively than Capra or its creators had anticipated. Richard Wright, whose novel Native Son had been published a few years earlier, attended the Harlem screening
and told a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle that before the picture started, he had written down thirteen offensive black stereotypes on the back of his program—Excessive Singing, Indolence, and Crap Shooting among them—and intended to make a mark next to each one as it appeared onscreen. He didn’t check off a single box and told the reporter that he found the movie “a pleasant surprise.” Langston Hughes called the picture “distinctly and thrillingly worthwhile,” and New York’s black paper the Amsterdam News marveled, “Who would have thought such a thing could be done so accurately . . . without sugar-coating and . . . jackass clowning?”

  Moss knew that The Negro Soldier wasn’t perfect; he told journalists that it was tailored to “ignore what’s wrong with the Army and tell what’s right with my people.” Time magazine commented that “the makers of the film have not included any of the dynamite implicit in the subject” such as “friction between Negro soldiers and white soldiers.” A columnist for the New York Post who liked the movie and respected its representation of “the dignity and expertness with which Negro men and women are serving in the Armed Forces” nonetheless warned that “what it does not show . . . is the fact that even in our own country, there is a difference between the way we treat the white man and the way we treat the colored man.” But the overall reaction to the picture was strongly positive. After the Harlem screening, several members of the audience asked Moss, “Are you going to show this to white people?” When Moss asked why, they said, “Because it will change their attitude.” Soon after that preview, the Signal Corps decided that The Negro Soldier would be shown not just to GIs but to the general public; it would be commercially marketed with the slogan “America’s Joe Louis Vs. The Axis!”

  The army made one hundred 35-millimeter prints available for theatrical distribution, but its original ideological intent remained unchanged: The Negro Soldier was meant to attract black men into the armed services, not to sell the rest of America on the value of their contribution. Accordingly, the picture was booked to play almost entirely in black movie houses in the South; its distribution was more widespread in the North and West, where its reach extended to some theaters in predominantly white towns and neighborhoods. By the middle of the year, it had become what one newspaper called “the real sleeper of the season,” playing in more than three hundred different theaters in the New York area and another 250 in and around Detroit.

  Moss hoped The Negro Soldier might open doors for him in Hollywood, and decades later he told Capra biographer Joseph McBride that it was not until after the movie became a success that he and Capra had their first conversation of any substance. “Why don’t you go to some of those rich colored guys and start a company for yourself?” Capra asked him. When Moss replied that there weren’t enough wealthy black men to finance any kind of competitive studio, Capra seemed disappointed, and suggested to Moss that if that were the case, maybe he would be better off leaving the country. (In later years, Capra took much more credit for a hands-on role in shaping the film than his actual participation merited. He claimed that Moss was a hothead who “wore his blackness as conspicuously as a bandage” and filled his script with an “angry fervor” that Capra had to eliminate with the explanation that “when something’s red-hot, the blow torch of passion only louses up its glow.”)

  With the successful release of the movie, Capra could at least check off one project as having been completed to his satisfaction. Know Your Enemy—Japan was now on its fourth and most unlikely creative team, the husband-and-wife duo Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, best known in Hollywood for writing the Thin Man movies. Know Your Enemy—Germany also was stalled; Capra had recently pulled Theodor Geisel off the Private SNAFU cartoon series and asked him to try his hand at a new draft. Capra had to beg Osborn for the resources to complete the two films, arguing that “the lack of general information on Japan itself is so appalling that we would be derelict in not doing something. . . . Know Your Enemy—Japan and Know Your Enemy—Germany are on the list to be made and have been officially approved. What I am asking for now is that you insist they be completed.” But as the War Department prepared to pour resources into Europe, it was less inclined than ever to allocate money or personnel to the Signal Corps. Even the final two installments of Why We Fight, The Battle of China and War Comes to America, were, Capra angrily told General Surles, “limping along under reduced staff due to the stealing of personnel away from them. The taking away of [Anthony] Veiller . . . and Litvak and other key personnel has certainly raised hell. . . . I must say again that all these pictures will suffer from now on.”

  Capra was still looking for new stories to tell, and according to some biographies, he chose that moment to commission a propaganda short about the $11 billion in American aid that had gone to Russia under the Lend-Lease Act, dispatching George Stevens to film supply lines at the border between Iran and Turkmenistan, which was then a Soviet republic. The timing of this assignment seems improbable, and accounts suggesting that Stevens made a quick trip to Tehran just before the Allied landing in Normandy almost certainly stem from a typographical error in government records.* Stevens was still in London, waiting to deploy his SPECOU unit in France—a mission that Capra would have been unlikely to interrupt for a nonurgent project. By May, Stevens was heading west to Bristol, a staging area for the army. He took an evening train out of the city to prepare for his journey east, and he noted the somber atmosphere in his diary. “It is the gloaming when the train pulls out,” he wrote. “All the blackout [curtain]s have not [yet] been drawn when we leave the station. The interior lights are extinguished and we roll along for a while in the restful period of the long English springtime twilight. . . . From the train interior one could hardly distinguish the expressions on people’s faces as they stood there saying goodbye. The naval officer standing in the coach door said goodbye to the woman wearing the tweed coat and felt hat—He stayed there . . . until the very last. The order to close the doors—and the shout from the woman guard, ‘Draw the blackout.’ Then the train pulled out—9.50 exactly. Wartime London stations at dusk. Desperate goodbyes.”

  A few weeks later, the orders every American soldier in England had been awaiting for months came through. Stevens, Ford, and their teams were to cross the Channel and prepare to start filming as 156,000 Allied troops landed on the north coast of France. D-Day was one week away.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “If You See It, Shoot It”

  FRANCE, JUNE–JULY 1944

  John Ford, who loved to tell war stories, didn’t talk about D-Day for twenty years. George Stevens, a prolific letter writer and journal keeper, fell uncharacteristically silent, leaving three weeks almost blank in his diary. At first, the events of June 6, 1944, were too overwhelming for them to recount clearly to their loved ones—Ford made no mention at all of what he had seen and experienced on the beaches of France in a letter to his wife two days later—or even to themselves. The two men were there to supervise the creation of a filmed record of D-Day and its aftermath, but they found that simply describing what took place before their eyes was almost impossible. Ford later said that he perceived those first twenty-four hours “in disconnected takes, like unassembled shots to be spliced together afterward in a film.” What happened on Omaha Beach was war on a scale so large and at times so horrific that he felt he could not grasp it; he fought simply to concentrate on what was right in front of him. “My staff and I had the job of ‘seeing’ the whole invasion for the world,” he said, “but all any one of us saw was his own little area. . . . As I think back on it now, I doubt if I saw—really saw—more than twelve of our men at one time.”

  The collective effort to photograph the Allied landing in France was, as an attempt to amass a comprehensive real-time document of a military campaign, without precedent in the history of warfare. Five hundred 35-millimeter cameras, each loaded with magazines that contained four minutes of film, were mounted on the fronts of ships and tanks and rigged to operate without manual supervision, and
another fifty cameras were placed in the first wave of landing craft. Dozens of American cameramen and almost two hundred still photographers were assigned throughout the Allied platoons to capture material for newsreels, papers, and magazines, and Ford and Stevens were each in charge of dozens of soldiers who found themselves under enemy fire while they were manning cameras.

  Ford and Stevens were not close friends—they were both introspective and hard to read, and in Hollywood they largely avoided the company of other filmmakers—but they did admire and respect each other. Ford thought Stevens was an “artist”—a word he rarely used about fellow directors—and Stevens felt a kind of kinship with Ford as well; they were men who often found themselves at a loss for words, and in Ford, Stevens saw someone who, like him, had discovered “in motion pictures the only medium in which he could express himself.” Ford was running Field Photo under the supervision of the navy and Bill Donovan at the OSS. Stevens was working for Capra and the Army Pictorial Service, and, typically, they had not been asked by the armed forces to coordinate their efforts. Nonetheless, in the weeks leading up to D-Day, Ford reached out to ask his colleague for help. Ford had been working with other Allied film units, giving the British and the Canadians a crash course in war photography and telling them to concentrate on their own country’s soldiers while filming, but the British army didn’t have enough cameramen on its ships to do the job, and Ford’s Field Photo Unit would already be stretched thin covering navy ships. Ford contacted Stevens and asked him if he could spare some camera operators from his SPECOU unit for the British. Stevens readily agreed, volunteering to serve on a British ship himself during the trip across the Channel and joking that Ford would owe him “two bottles of booze” from liberated France for his efforts.