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

by Mark Harris

  “Whew! Christmas is approaching fast,” Stevens wrote in his journal on December 5. He and his team were just inside Germany awaiting orders to advance further, and there was little to do but kill time. “Wrote 8 letters today, 3 to Yonnie, 2 to George . . . took me all day,” he noted. “As I was writing to Mom tonight, many airplanes were overhead. For a while I thought it was the Luftwaffe but as they kept right on flying by I became aware that it was the RAF.”

  The limbo in which he found himself ended abruptly ten days later, when the German army launched a major counteroffensive that caught the Allies off guard. Stevens was writing a letter to his wife when the ground outside quaked; they were being shelled, and German paratroopers were landing all around them. The enemy was, he wrote, “raising hell all over the place” in a sector near the Germany-Belgium-Luxembourg border that had been securely in Allied hands for two months. The Americans began a hasty and chaotic retreat. “IMPOSSIBLE,” Stevens wrote in his journal on December 18, the day he turned forty. “The stunned look on the faces and this remark was all one could hear from the civilians as the news started to get around that the Americans were going—‘liberation in reverse.’ That phrase kept running through my mind. The situation has been quite confused today.” The Battle of the Bulge—the last major show of German strength during the war—had begun. Over the next six weeks, before the Allies crushed the Wehrmacht, nineteen thousand American soldiers would lose their lives and forty-seven thousand more would be wounded in the single deadliest engagement of U.S. forces in the war.

  Stevens, suddenly in the thick of combat, filmed scenes of devastation that shook him badly—people running for shelter to escape German fire and barely able to find an intact roof to hide under or a doorway that bombs had not already blown apart. “He had never understood or been faced with the proportions of horror and cruelty he was suddenly witness to,” said Moffat, “and he took it very, very hard. There was a great deal of homesickness—the feeling that this might drift on for months and months and months.” On the front of his jeep, he painted the words TOLUCA LAKE—the name of the San Fernando Valley neighborhood in Los Angeles where he and his family lived—and when he couldn’t summon the energy to write letters, he sent movie footage home as a present instead. Just before the Germans had begun attacking, he received a package from Yvonne and George Jr. full of Christmas and birthday gifts. Ten days later, he finally had a chance to open them, and he had one of his men turn the moment into a small movie for his family. The filmed message he sent them starts with a close-up of a stack of crated howitzer shells—no doubt a shot that was designed to excite George Jr.—then the camera tilts up to take in Stevens, who is smoking a pipe and jauntily leaning against his snow-covered jeep. Someone tries to write MERRY CHRISTMAS in the snow on the hood just before the reel of film runs out. When the next one begins, Stevens and his men are standing by their vehicle in an abandoned, largely demolished square in the German coal-mining town of Eschweiler, about thirty miles west of Cologne. He opens a cardboard box and removes a wrapped gift inscribed “To Dad from Mama and George,” bringing it close to the camera so that the inscription, which is written on a five-pointed star held by a cutout greeting-card angel, is visible. He opens it and holds the contents, a shaving kit filled with candy, up to the lens. He looks at the camera and beams. There’s a card in an envelope labeled “To Dad,” and he starts reading his son’s letter. As he opens another present, the men look up to see a plane roaring overhead, and they pack up the boxes and quickly drive away.

  In January 1945, Capra pulled Stevens out of the action temporarily. He needed the director to go to London and supervise the planning for a documentary about the Allies in Europe called The True Glory, which was to be the first joint British-American film venture since Tunisian Victory. Once he got to England, Stevens discovered there wasn’t much for him to do; the movie’s codirectors, Garson Kanin for America and Carol Reed for Britain, had it well in hand, and Paddy Chayefsky, a young GI who had been wounded at Aachen, was already drafting a screenplay. The reassignment seems to have been made in order to give Stevens, who had been traveling with Allied troops for seven months without a break, a chance to get some rest and regain his strength. In short order, he left London for Paris, where he and his unit received a commendation from Eisenhower for their work.

  William Wyler arrived in Paris at about the same time. When the Allies landed at Normandy, he had been in Italy for the liberation of Rome; he had shot footage of Nazi insignias and posters of Mussolini being torn from the walls and thrown into the street. One day in Los Angeles, Talli Wyler picked up a copy of the New York Times and saw her husband’s face in a crowd shot at the Vatican, where Pope Pius XII had granted public audiences to Allied officers after their victory and invited the press to photograph them. “You have a most holy and uplifted expression,” she joked to him in a letter. “Positively saintly.”

  Wyler had not anticipated being in the middle of such momentous events when he was sent to Italy; he had gone there to begin preparation for Thunderbolt, the documentary about P-47 fighter planes that he intended as his followup to The Memphis Belle, and after the liberation, he had stayed on in Caserta to start working on a screenplay treatment for it. Through the summer, he had struggled with the project; unlike the Belle, which was a B-17, Thunderbolts could not accommodate cameramen while in the air, so he would have to figure out a way to install cameras in fixed positions alongside the machine guns, and also find a narrative for his film that didn’t simply repeat what he had done in his earlier documentary.

  Within the space of just a few months, the army’s priorities had changed so rapidly that the assignment Wyler had been given already seemed irrelevant. An explanatory short like Thunderbolt now lacked urgency, and in Italy, Wyler was treated less as an active-duty filmmaker than as a curiosity, a celebrity whose company was sought by the top brass; at one point he was summoned to Capri for a “high-level mission” that turned out to be a weekend-long poker game with General Eaker of the air force and Bill Donovan. Wyler himself found it difficult to give Thunderbolt his full attention, and spent much of the summer traveling around Italy, documenting the devastation wrought by bombs from both sides in towns and cities north of Rome. Later in the summer, he was reassigned to Saint-Tropez to film the Allied landing there, a decision he later called “a joke,” since “the Free French [Army] and the Resistance [already] had everything under control.”

  In France, Wyler had become obsessed with trying to get to Mulhouse, the Alsatian town in which he had spent most of his childhood. He stayed with the Allies as they moved north through eastern France, through Lyons to Besançon. He was just eighty-five miles short of his destination when he was ordered back to Paris to finish his movie. He had been working on Thunderbolt with John Sturges, an aspiring director who would go on to a long career in Hollywood,* but both men were unhappy with the quality of the footage they had. By late November, the veteran director William Keighley, who was now overseeing the Signal Corps’ motion picture unit, had become impatient; Wyler had been tasked with making the movie more than six months earlier, and it was still nowhere near finished.

  Wyler stalled, pleading for more time. “First, the subject matter is very difficult,” he said. “It’s not a simple story of one mission, from start to finish, like The Memphis Belle. . . . Second, I didn’t have a crew of my own.” He told Keighley how hard it had been to get effective high-altitude images on color film, and added that “the weather has been so bad we haven’t shot a foot of film in almost two months.”

  Wyler signed off by saying, “Here’s hoping we can both sit in a director’s chair again soon,” but Hollywood was far from his thoughts. He was still determined to get to Mulhouse, and he decided to enlist Stevens’s help. The two men had not seen each other since they briefly crossed paths in Washington years earlier when Frank Capra was setting up his film unit. In Paris, they met for a meal, and Wyler, who was aware that Stevens had passed through Be
lgium and knew his way around the region, told him that he wanted to get to the Belgian city of Bastogne—which was near the French border and about half a day’s drive from Mulhouse—and asked for the name of a driver who could get him there.

  Stevens told Wyler he had just the man, Ernest Hemingway’s twenty-nine-year-old brother, Leicester, a driver for the army and a daredevil who would not flinch at the idea of motoring into dangerous territory. Wyler started making plans to leave Paris right away. The next day, he and Hemingway were in a jeep filled with magazines of film and enough supplies to get them across the border to Bastogne two hundred miles away. From Bastogne, they drove to Luxembourg, where a general tried to persuade Wyler to make a Memphis Belle–style documentary about the men of the Ninth Air Force, whom he said had driven the Germans from Bastogne with a single day of bombardment. Mostly as a courtesy, Wyler shot some footage of the flyers and their planes, but he didn’t linger. Soon he and Hemingway moved on to Strasbourg, where the writer André Malraux was leading a ragtag platoon of local armed resistance fighters. “He ran his own war,” Wyler recalled. “He took me to several of his posts. . . . There was a fierce loyalty to him wherever we went—all these fellows with old-fashioned rifles and . . . one tank. . . . Anyway, we talked about movies and he was very interested in making a documentary. . . . He said we must meet again after the war.”

  Wyler and Hemingway continued on. His quest to reach his boyhood home was all he could think about, even though he had no idea what, or who, he would find there. His parents had left the town almost twenty years earlier for California, where they had lived near him and his brother Robert; their father, Leopold, had died of a stroke just before the war began. Wyler didn’t know if the relatives or friends he had tried to help emigrate years earlier had ever made it out of France, or whether the shops and homes so familiar from his youth would still be standing; Mulhouse had been a major staging center for German troops in the region, and thus an Allied target.

  When they reached the town, Wyler had Hemingway drive him down the Rue du Sauvage. His father’s haberdashery, the Magasin L. Wyler, was still there, unchanged, and Henriette Helm, the woman to whom the Wylers had turned over their business when they left for America, was standing in the doorway. She greeted Wyler effusively and handed him a set of folded bills—the money she had set aside representing his family’s share of the store’s profits for the last four years, about $4,000 in all. The store, she explained, had survived only because Wyler’s father had been Swiss, not French, and because she followed the rules of occupation to the letter, including displaying a picture of Hitler in the shop window every year on his birthday. Collaboration had become a fact of daily life for almost every resident who was still there. But when Wyler, speaking Alsatian for the first time in years, told her that he was in the American air force, her face fell and she gestured sadly at the ruined buildings in the town’s center. When the people of Mulhouse had heard that American planes were coming to free them, she told Wyler, they had run into the street waving white bedsheets to signal that they were friendly. The planes bombed them anyway. Children were killed.

  “You know you’ve got big factories here working for the Germans, that this is a big railway depot,” Wyler replied. “We’re fighting a war, Madame Henriette.” Wyler explained that the Allies had dropped leaflets warning residents to evacuate; she was not mollified.

  Wyler’s tour through Mulhouse was brief and heartbreaking. The local synagogue still stood, but the Jews were gone, and nobody could say where they were now. He could not find a single member of his mother’s family or any of his childhood friends. He went to the town hall seeking help. The mayor of Mulhouse told him, “Take my advice, don’t look for anybody. If you see people you know, be glad they’re alive. But don’t look for them. You won’t find them.”

  Wyler returned to Paris, and walked into air force headquarters to find the office in an uproar. He had neglected to tell anyone he was leaving. The air force had reported him as missing in action, and the Hollywood Reporter had picked up the story. Wyler told HQ that he had been shooting additional footage for Thunderbolt, dashed off a letter to Talli reassuring her that he was fine, and got out of France as quickly as possible, returning to Italy, where he now knew he had to finish his movie.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Who You Working For—Yourself?”

  HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, ITALY, AND NEW YORK, FEBRUARY–MAY 1945

  On February 21, 1945, after three weeks of fighting, American and Filipino forces retook Bataan. The victory, at the site of one of the most devastating losses for the Allies three years earlier, came just two days before John Ford started shooting They Were Expendable, a movie he said was intended to honor a group of American soldiers in the Philippines who had, in those first months after Pearl Harbor, been “glorious in defeat.”

  “I like that,” he explained. “I despise these happy endings, with a kiss at the finish. I’ve never done that.” Despite the recent good news for the Allies, Ford had no intention of appending a rah-rah epilogue to the script, or of rewriting the history of America’s setbacks in the early days of the war in the Pacific. “What was in my mind was doing it exactly as it had happened,” he said. “We are sticking to facts. Lieutenant Bulkeley did not go back to the Philippines.” If that threatened to strike a discordant note at a moment when American moviegoers were celebrating a hard-won turnaround in the war against Japan, Ford, as he headed to Key Biscayne, Florida, for the start of location shooting right after the birth of his second grandson, betrayed no concern about being out of step with the times. He wanted to fulfill Secretary Forrestal’s wish that the film “would be helpful to the Navy”—which was the only reason the OSS had agreed to release Ford from his duties and let him make it—but not if it meant making an inaccurate film. They Were Expendable was to serve not only as a tribute to the valor of the men of the U.S. Navy, but as a memorial to those who were killed in action; Ford hoped his movie might, in General MacArthur’s words, “speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way” for what he called the “great victory” that had just taken place.

  There were some areas in which Ford’s fidelity to the truth was less strict. When they had been together in a PT boat after D-Day, Bulkeley had said with embarrassment that he thought William White’s book-length portrait of him, on which the movie was to be based, was wildly exaggerated. In 1942, Bulkeley had won the Medal of Honor for his “dynamic forcefulness and daring in offensive action against the Japanese . . . with a complete disregard for his own personal safety” in the fight to hold the Philippines, but he told Ford he didn’t think he deserved the honor. “The whole thing happened at a time when the country was looking for heroes,” he said. “Frankly, I’ve already had too much publicity.” Ford wouldn’t hear it; to him, Bulkeley was a hero—“the most decorated man of the war,” he would frequently (and incorrectly) claim, “and a wonderful person.” The navy had a regulation against active-duty officers being identified by name in motion pictures, so in Frank Wead’s screenplay, Bulkeley was changed to “Brickley.” The minor alteration was, in a way, the first permission Ford gave himself to take possession of the story told in They Were Expendable and to begin to turn it into the kind of war narrative he wanted to create.

  Working closely with Wead, he developed a script about two men, Brickley and Rusty Ryan, a fictionalized version of his right-hand man,* each of whom represented a side of Ford’s own personality. Ryan is a hothead, a good sailor hungry to command his own fleet of PT boats; he operates by his own rules and resents the know-nothings who outrank him. “From here on in,” he says at the beginning of the movie, “I’m a one-man band.” Brickley is the levelheaded adult who understands the importance of discipline and structure and respects the chain of command; paradoxically, he achieves personal glory by insisting that personal glory doesn’t matter. (“What are you aiming at, building a reputation o
r playing for the team?” he asks Ryan.) “Listen, son,” Wead and Ford had him tell the younger man in what would become the movie’s most famous line. “You and I are professionals. If the manager says sacrifice, we lay down a bunt, and let somebody else hit the home runs. . . . That’s what we were trained for, and that’s what we’ll do.”

  Ford wanted They Were Expendable to offer a lesson about forgoing maverick impulses or dreams of heroism in favor of the greater good, and he also wanted it to serve as a tribute to underdogs—not just his two protagonists, but the PT boats themselves, which are dismissed by a senior navy officer in the opening scene as not “substantial” enough to do any good in the war and over the next two hours prove that verdict wrong. The story told by Ford and Wead—who shared a title card as director and screenwriter—isn’t only Brickley’s and Ryan’s. It goes much further than the book—and much further than many in the navy, including Bulkeley, thought the facts merited—in making the case that small vessels were able to do the dirty work of the navy, darting in and out of tough spots while under fire in order to level torpedoes at Japanese ships, even though skeptics belittled the wood-hulled PTs in favor of destroyers, battleships, cruisers, and aircraft carriers and claimed that their only real value was as couriers and messenger boats. The “they” in the title refers to the navy’s attitude toward both the PTs and the sailors who manned them, and the story, which covers the four months after Pearl Harbor, becomes an articulation of one of Ford’s favorite themes—that the marginalized can prove indispensable.