They cannot come back into the civilized fold just by sticking out their hand and saying sorry. Sorry? Not sorry they caused the war, they’re only sorry they lost it. That is the hand that heiled Hitler. That is the hand that dropped the bombs on defenseless Rotterdam, Brussels, Belgrade . . . That is the hand that killed and crippled American soldiers, sailors and marines. Don’t clasp that hand. It’s not the kind of hand you clasp in friendship.48
Geisel completed his script for Your Job in Germany in late spring 1944 and began putting together a rough cut of the movie. For the voice-over duties, Geisel placed a call to the Air Force facility at Hal Roach Studios in Culver City—dubbed “Fort Roach”—where a number of actors were stationed and asked to audition two possible narrators. The officials at Fort Roach sent over two potential voice-over men: Sergeant John Beal—a leading man in smaller films like The Man Who Found Himself—and Lieutenant Ronald Reagan, a contract actor with Warner who had memorably played George “The Gipper” Gipp in the 1940 film Knute Rockne, All American. Geisel listened carefully as each man read from the script, then dismissed Reagan. “I guess it’s one of the few times anyone has said, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you’ to an incipient President of the United States,” Geisel, a lifelong Democrat, said later, with just a hint of pride.49
Geisel had a first draft of the script of Your Job in Germany completed by June; simultaneously, contractors at the Disney studios were working with Capra to put together a rough cut of the film, and Geisel dutifully submitted paperwork to headquarters to assure them the film was coming in exactly at its budgeted cost of $20,000. Given the sensitivity of the material, the film would need to be approved both by Cabinet-level officials and generals in the field—a process doomed to sluggishness, despite the increasingly critical nature of the project. By late August the Allied liberation of Paris seems to have sped along the approval process, as the War Department okayed Geisel’s first script, with some changes—but the commanding generals in the European combat zones were still needed for the film’s final approval.
With the help of Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Anthony Veiller, Geisel continued to revise and correct his script. Meanwhile Capra, assisted by Anatole Litvak—a Russian director who’d become an American citizen and proudly enlisted in the U.S. Army—worked quickly to assemble a first cut, completing a ten-minute rough by early November 1944. As the project officer for the film, it was now Geisel’s responsibility to get the film approved by the military commanders—which meant he was going to have to personally carry his script and his film cans directly to them in the European combat zones.
For purposes of having the project approved, Geisel was assigned to the Ardennes campaign in the Rhineland, officially serving as a liaison officer for the Information and Education Division in the European theater. On November 11, 1944, Geisel boarded a C-54 Skymaster military transport plane bound for Ireland, with a final destination of Paris. Here Geisel would find the escorts for his trip into the Ardennes Forest: Robert Murphy from the State Department, and Major John Boettiger, the son-in-law of President Roosevelt, whose name alone Geisel was quite certain would give his mission the heft it needed to ensure every general gave his film their attention.
On November 19, using a Michelin map as their guide, Geisel and his companions traveled by car from Paris through Verdun and into the recently liberated Luxembourg. As Geisel pulled in to Luxembourg City in the middle of a downpour, the sound of “a few distant booms” could be heard from the battlefront, only a few miles to the east. That night, even as fighting continued outside of town, Geisel went to see Marlene Dietrich perform for the troops at a theater in Luxembourg. When it was over, he walked back to his quarters in the middle of a blackout, carefully picking his way down dark, unfamiliar streets.
It was cold and rainy when Geisel and his escorts drove north into the Ardennes Forest on the morning of Monday, November 20. A light dusting of snow covered the roads, where it was quickly stirred and pounded into gray slush by a steady caravan of military vehicles. It was here, deep in the Ardennes, that Geisel was able to track down General Omar Bradley with the First Army and Brigadier General Frank McSherry at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force. Geisel showed his film to the generals in a small church, where “American college football scores were posted over a crucifix”50 (Ted may have noted without comment that Dartmouth had lost to rival Cornell two days earlier). Bradley and McSherry okayed the film—and with the first of his boxes checked, Geisel continued north toward Veviers, switching to a jeep when his car bogged down in the muddy roads one too many times.
On reaching Veviers, Geisel was both shocked and pleased to find the shell-pocked but newly liberated town in a state of near elation. Hidden stashes of burgundy were broken into by the locals and served to the Americans in what Geisel called their relatively “swank” accommodations.51 And yet ambulances still rumbled through the town, Geisel noted, with “two pairs of bare feet in each back window”—a reminder of the killing going on just over the horizon. It all made him feel “elated in a depressed sort of way,” he later said.52
Geisel spent Thanksgiving Day 1944 in the old Dutch city of Maastricht, eating a huge morning meal with American officers—a cheerful experience that was only momentarily marred when Geisel got locked in a bathroom when the doorknob broke off.53 The contrast between the Dutch people and their American liberators was not lost on Geisel, who noted in a travel journal that “poverty [is] more apparent here. People digging in garbage cans.”54 Later that afternoon, he and his companions finally made it into Germany, arriving in the city of Aachen, the first German town to be liberated by the Allies, who had overtaken the heavily defended city on October 21. Much of the town was in ruins—several medieval churches were damaged or destroyed—but the still-euphoric American occupiers greeted Geisel warmly, offering him his second Thanksgiving meal of the day, a generous serving of “wienerschnitzel, wursts, and wassail.”55
As Geisel made his way through the city, he was saddened and horrified by the devastation of the war on the German people and the surrounding landscape. Channeling the same haunted war-weariness he’d seen in his own German relatives, Geisel noted his impressions of the battle-scarred city in a stunned, almost staccato manner:
We go through a typical destroyed house. Broken toy in the plaster. In a cupboard with the rain soaking through—somebody’s hope chest of linens. A doctor’s lab. Broken bottles + test tubes. An inch of water on the floor. Take apart models of a cow + a horse. Chaos.56
His sympathies, however, went only so far. Later in the winter, Geisel toured the site of the recently abandoned Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in the French Vosges Mountains. As he walked among the abandoned clothing and examined the single crematorium, Geisel found it all almost too terrible to comprehend—surely, he thought, human beings couldn’t be that cruel to one another. The single crematorium, he insisted, “could never have been used to get rid of bodies of mass-murder victims,” while the so-called torture table—where Nazi doctors had carried out cruel human experiments—he was certain had to be “a conventional embalming table.” It was a nearly unfathomable horror—so much so that Geisel worried it wouldn’t be believed. Until the stories were thoroughly investigated and proven to be true—and they would be—Geisel advised that anyone “writing information to troops should be cautioned to steer clear of all German Atrocity Stories unless they have been doubly and triply checked and found absolutely true . . . If we overplay one detail and have to retract, our audience will be apt to disbelieve everything.” Until that time, he continued, it was already terrible enough “that human beings were actually locked up in them. There is enough horror in that to condemn the Nazi system forever.”57
In his journal, Geisel also catalogued what he saw as the four most pressing problems that needed to be immediately addressed in Germany to ensure its successful—and nonfascist—reentry on the world
’s stage. On his list, between “police force” and “coal,” he wrote: “Children. Education.” After seeing concentration camps and other despicable signs of Nazi cruelty, Geisel remained more concerned than ever about the effect of Nazi propaganda on German children. Left on their own, he worried they might still be inclined toward what he called “the Super Race Disease, the World Conquest Disease.”58 Watching and listening to German children soaked in a fascist doctrine had convinced Geisel that his initial wariness had been correct; instilling the principles of peace was going to be hard work, both now and in the future.
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With Robert Murphy’s help, Geisel learned that several of the generals whose approval he needed for his film had set up headquarters in a battered castle nearby. Geisel tucked his film cans under his arm and headed for the medieval structure, walking into a war-ravaged venue that was oddly beautiful. “All the water mains were broken and the water was coming down the marble stairs,” recalled Geisel. “And there was no electricity; it was lit by candles. We were surrounded by figures in armor holding sixteenth-century banners.”59 It was in this setting that Geisel found the Allied commanders involved in a formal meeting with the newly appointed civilian leaders of the city—“people who claimed they weren’t Nazis,”60 Geisel said somewhat skeptically. The Allied commanders were lined up along one side—Geisel respectfully took his place at the end of the row of officers—while the new city government leaders faced them across the candlelit hall. In a show of respect, the Allied generals crossed the hall, then slowly walked down the length of the German line, shaking hands with each German leader.
The irony of the moment was not lost on Geisel. “[Your Job in Germany] was based on the Army’s ridiculous nonfraternization policy in Germany,” he noted incredulously. “The generals all shook hands with them, and then I—holding these cans of film which said you should never shake hands with a German—had to move the can from my right arm to my left arm so I could shake hands.”61
Geisel would still get all the signatures necessary for the approval of his film, barring one: General George Patton, who allegedly stood up halfway through a showing of the film, growled “Bullshit!” and stalked out of the room.62 Patton’s objections, however, were expected; even General Eisenhower had recently admonished the general to “get off your bloody ass and carry out the denazification program instead of mollycoddling the goddamn Nazis.”63 Ultimately, the film was given the go-ahead by Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, chief of staff for the Supreme Headquarters, who approved the movie on the condition that it not be shown until after V-E Day—whenever that might be. He also ordered that the film be recut with some additional war footage and without some of Geisel’s snarky commentary, such as his advice in the film’s closing moments to “Just be a good soldier. Leave all the bungling to the State Department.”64
Situated back in Paris in early December 1944, Geisel made his last edits to the script and shipped it off to Capra to put into final production. Then it was back to Luxembourg, where he was stationed at First Army headquarters. “The Army thought I should see war firsthand, so I’d know what I was writing about, so they sent me to some interesting action here and there,”65 Geisel said. He had no idea how interesting the action was about to become.
While at First Army headquarters, Geisel ran into Ralph Ingersoll, his former editor at PM, who was now serving as a lieutenant colonel with Army intelligence. While neither man recorded exactly what they talked about, Geisel likely mentioned to Ingersoll that during his nearly eight weeks in Europe, he had yet to experience any real fighting. Ingersoll immediately picked up a map and pointed to the Belgian municipality of Bastogne, about forty-five miles to the north. Ingersoll promised Geisel he would be just far enough away from any real danger.66 Geisel took Ingersoll’s map, hailed a driver, and headed for Bastogne.
He arrived in the city only a few hours before the German forces began laying siege to Bastogne, pushing through the Allied lines as part of what would come to be called the Battle of the Bulge—some of the bloodiest days of fighting since D-Day in June 1944. “The thing that probably saved my life was that I got there in the early morning and the Germans didn’t arrive until that night,” Geisel said later. “I found Bastogne pretty boring and . . . got on the other side of the line and got cut off.” Caught in a downpour, Geisel lost his sense of direction and wandered aimlessly before running into a military policeman who had also lost his way. “We learned we were ten miles beyond the German lines,” Geisel said.67
“Nobody came along and put up a sign saying, ‘This is the Battle of the Bulge,’” Geisel said later. “How was I supposed to know? I thought the fact that we didn’t seem to be able to find any friendly troops in any direction was just one of the normal occurrences of combat.”68 After three days of hunkering down, they were finally rescued by a British unit clearing out the last of the retreating Germans. “The retreat we beat was accomplished with a speed that will never be beaten,” Geisel recalled later.69
Safely back in France for the holidays, Geisel spent his Christmas at an officer’s holiday party, having gorged himself on peanut butter and salami sandwiches and gotten slightly drunk on lemonade spiked with gin. He would ring in the New Year on the Champs-Élysées, marking the beginning of 1945 by standing pensively in the rain to pay his respects at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Ten days later, he was back in California at Fort Fox, where the final cut of Your Job in Germany was rolling off the spools in the editing room, approved for release once Germany surrendered. Mission accomplished.
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Frank Capra had a problem. Since mid-1942, he’d been working on draft after draft of a film script aimed at educating American soldiers on their Japanese enemy. With a working title of Know Your Enemy: Japan, Capra intended for the film to provide soldiers with a quick history of the Axis nation, its people, its government, and its culture—but the project had derailed quickly, with Capra bickering with one screenwriter after another over exactly how to approach the subject. Capra was trying for a delicate balancing act, making a film that he hoped would be both a clear-eyed history and a hard-hitting condemnation of Japan and the Japanese people. The first script, completed in 1942 by Angels with Dirty Faces scribe Warren Duff, had been poked, prodded, picked apart and put back together again by several other writers, including Carl Foreman, who’d later write High Noon and The Bridge on the River Kwai; Maltese Falcon director John Huston; and a young aspiring novelist named Irving Wallace. But Capra was unhappy with everything he’d seen so far; mostly he thought the scripts were too sympathetic toward the Japanese people.
Wallace griped that Capra was too naive to understand the nuances of the war with Japan. “He was totally unsophisticated when it came to political thought,” said Wallace. “He came up with a simple foreign policy toward Japan. It added up to this: the only good Jap is a dead Jap.”70 What Wallace didn’t realize was that Capra had been ordered by the military brass to make that simple policy a central tenet of the film. The real problem, however, was that even the U.S. government wasn’t sure what its own policies were regarding Japan. “The central question, which caused the most difficulty, was ‘Who in Japan is actually to blame for this war?’” said historian William Blakefield. “[Was it] the Japanese people? The Emperor? A small band of militarists?”71 Without any real guidance from the military, Capra was flummoxed—and, frankly, a bit exhausted—by it all.
Capra, pleased with the work that had been done on Your Job in Germany, asked Geisel in February to assist him on a new draft of Know Your Enemy: Japan. The two of them worked together quickly and relatively harmoniously, coming up with a script that walked the very fine line Capra had sought between documentary and propaganda. The new script did a manageable job of concisely summarizing five hundred years of Japanese history and culture, and still managed to have it both ways w
hen it portrayed the Japanese as a war-loving society made up of a peaceful people who had been deceived and betrayed by their leaders. The script was completed in April 1945; a month later, Capra would be gone, honorably discharged from the Army and awarded the Distinguished Service Medal—an honor that so touched the normally unflappable Capra that he vomited in the moments before the medal was pinned to his chest. With Capra gone, it would be up to Geisel to oversee Know Your Enemy: Japan’s final approval and release.
At the request of the assistant secretary of war, Geisel added information to the beginning of the film explicitly praising the bravery of the Japanese Americans who fought in the war, and added new footage of American victories in the Pacific as quickly as such footage became available. But the War Department continued to be concerned the film showed “too much sympathy”72 for the Japanese people. Until the U.S. government could determine and articulate its own position, it was going to bury the film. The film was marked confidential and was endlessly delayed while the War Department continued its foot-dragging.
Victory in Europe officially arrived on Wednesday, May 8, 1945, with the formal surrender of Germany. While Geisel had been ordered in November 1944 not to release Your Job in Germany until after V-E day, the film had subsequently been cleared for release on April 13, 1945—the day after the death of Franklin Roosevelt. Victory in Europe, however, didn’t mean the war was won; in fact, the war seemed far from over in the Pacific theaters that spring, and Geisel was following with increasing alarm the intelligence he received each week regarding battles in Burma and Okinawa.
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