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

by Mark Harris

  In the wake of Pearl Harbor, most in Hollywood came to believe that even comedies, fantasies, and romances could contribute some passing commentary about democracy, freedom, shared sacrifice, or the “American way of life.” But at first the studios were still skittish—in those early weeks, they canceled the release of a couple of already completed military farces out of concern that the movies might be construed as mocking the armed forces. It was the wrong call. Over the past year, a series of cheap service comedies had turned a pair of radio comedians named Bud Abbott and Lou Costello into the highest-grossing stars in the movie business and transformed Universal Pictures into an impressive box-office force. It soon became evident that the start of the war had only increased the public’s appetite to see men in uniform onscreen in every possible genre. That hungry audience included children; in a December 1941 survey of underage moviegoers, kids revealed that their favorite picture of the last year had been Sergeant York.

  Any trepidation the studios felt about making war movies vanished within weeks. During the congressional hearings, York had made a speech in which he said, “It’s just as much the duty of the people in Hollywood to tell us the truth about Hitler’s outfit as it is [of] the newspapers.” The studios agreed with him, and ordered their New York story editors to scout appropriate material—“morale-building stories, biographies of Naval and American war heroes. Anti-Nazi, but especially anti-Italian works; and pro-Chinese anti-Jap tales.” But there were serious obstacles to translating that enthusiasm into production. The draft was going to create a major labor shortage at the studios, and hours for their thirty thousand employees would be shortened. Night shoots were now impossible; working days would, for the foreseeable future, end at 5 p.m., a cutoff mandated by the evening blackouts all along the California coast. The thriving nightlife of Los Angeles was curtailed, and nighttime movie attendance was sparse; the week after Pearl Harbor, one columnist noted that “about the only places that were lit up . . . were the Strip night spots that had equipped themselves with blackout protection.”

  Perhaps because the Nye Committee hearings were still so fresh in their minds, nobody who ran a studio—not even Harry or Jack Warner—was particularly eager to take charge, or to suggest a course of action unilaterally; what most of the moguls wanted was a cooperative emissary from the government, someone whose presence would formalize the fact that despite the recent acrimony, everyone was now on the same side. As one trade reporter wrote on December 11, “Hollywood wants to know to whom or what office it must answer.” Within two weeks, a plan began to take shape: President Roosevelt would ask Lowell Mellett, his recently appointed Hollywood-Washington liaison, to relocate to California and establish a bureau to deal with the content of motion pictures under the aegis of the Office for Emergency Management. Darryl Zanuck, now on active duty as a lieutenant colonel, would essentially serve as Mellett’s mirror image, traveling once a month to Washington to meet with War Department and national defense officials and serve as the industry’s first de facto lobbyist.

  Although Mellett’s purview was technically limited to the movies Hollywood would produce for government agencies, there was a widespread, and accurate, sense that he was going to weigh in about entertainment films as well. The industry was reassured when, just before Christmas, Roosevelt declared unequivocally, “I want no censorship of the motion picture. I want no restrictions . . . which will impair the usefulness of the film other than those very necessary restrictions which the dictates of safety make imperative.” But the studios were not entirely comfortable taking marching orders from Mellett, a former Washington, D.C., newspaper editor who had had only a few months of experience dealing with the film business. Variety suggested that someone who already commanded respect from Hollywood would have been a smarter choice, and argued that Roosevelt should have appointed John Ford.

  But Ford had no interest in riding a desk, even in a prestigious position, and he possessed little skill or instinct for shuttle diplomacy. Although he had a respect bordering on reverence for the trappings of military hierarchy, he wasn’t especially interested in answering to anyone within it. Back on September 9, “Wild” Bill Donovan, soon to become the head of the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, had made a formal request to Navy Secretary Frank Knox that the director be placed on active duty. Two days later, while Lindbergh was making his controversial speech, Ford was aboard the Union Pacific en route from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where he would undergo a physical, receive a waiver for the vision problems that had plagued him for years, and be inducted into the navy. (“Congratulations,” Zanuck cabled him, “but you still have to salute me as I outdate you.”) According to his biographer Joseph McBride, Ford’s initial fitness report rated him above average in initiative, intelligence, leadership, attention to duty, and aptitude for success. His marks were less impressive in the areas of military bearing, tact, and cooperation.

  Ford had shot How Green Was My Valley over the summer, using the Philip Dunne script that William Wyler had supervised, and retaining Wyler’s pick Roddy McDowall in the starring role. Before production, Fox remained nervous about the movie, particularly about any possible anti-British language in its depiction of the miners’ strike. “Inopportune to make this film now,” one producer on the lot wrote to Zanuck before production started. “Shouldn’t throw stones at England. Postpone until after hostilities are over.” Zanuck didn’t listen, and Ford, in one of his few textual revisions to the screenplay, actually played up the strike, paraphrasing some of Roosevelt’s pro-union language in the miners’ dialogue. In his hands, the Welsh clan at the heart of the film became, in spirit, more like his own Irish family—Ford later said that character actress Sara Allgood, who played the movie’s matriarch, “looked like my mother, and I made her act like my mother.” Any worry that Fox might have had vanished when Zanuck saw that, even in black and white and with a much more modest budget than originally intended, Ford had made a lushly emotional and affecting family saga. “Picture went over marvelously. Everybody crazy about it,” he cabled Ford as the director’s train neared Washington. “If this is not one of the best pictures ever made, then I will eat a film can.” The reviews were almost as warm; although many critics noted that—as almost everyone involved in the film already knew—the anecdotal, rambling nature of the book’s narrative hadn’t been given sufficient shape, they were impressed by its pictorial craftsmanship. Audiences found it irresistible as well.

  Throughout the fall, Ford had lived in a kind of limbo, away from his wife Mary, his son Patrick, and his teenage daughter Barbara, alone in a Washington hotel room four blocks from the War Department, ready to serve in a war that America had not yet entered but uncertain about what to do until then. (On his official entrance report, under “Experience Since Leaving School,” he wrote, “Motion picture industry entirely,” and under “Work for Which Best Qualified,” he wrote, “Anything pertaining to photography . . . propaganda films . . . documentary, training, etc.”) In the capital, he was treated as something of a visiting dignitary from a profession that could still turn politicians and naval officers into wide-eyed fans. In late October, he traveled to New York City for How Green Was My Valley’s premiere; the next night, he was back in Washington dining at the White House as a guest of the first family. The navy brass viewed Ford as a man of talent and importance. But in the absence of a war, he had no real function, and his usefulness was still in question. Although he had successfully prepared a team of 150 men to begin work in the new Field Photo Unit, neither they nor he had any navy experience or battle testing, and some still weren’t sure that Ford’s desire to serve would endure once he experienced the unglamorous life of a naval officer in Washington. “It is beyond my comprehension,” wrote one senior navy commander—a friend of Ford—to another, “why a man earning in excess of a quarter of a million dollars a year would be not only willing but anxious to throw that overboard in order to accept active duty and do a job for the navy in this em
ergency.”

  Donovan, a powerful figure who had Roosevelt’s trust, liked Ford and was inclined to grant him a good deal of unsupervised freedom, but that only made the director’s role more uncertain: Could a man who had stepped into the title of commander without a day’s military experience actually command? And did he even want to? When he was interviewed in November 1941, Ford said that his greatest desire while in Washington was to visit an art gallery. The story called him “strange,” noting that he had little to say about Hollywood and still less about the navy; he preferred to speak of Ireland. It did not inspire confidence.

  Ford was not a dilettante, but he knew that people thought he was eccentric and that his own behavior didn’t always help his case. He was sloppy, he was curt, and he didn’t care that the dark glasses he wore to protect his weak eyes made him look intimidating and remote. During the shooting of a movie, he could be warmly sentimental one moment and caustic the next. The combination was appealing to some of his recruits—Robert Parrish, a twenty-five-year-old film editor turned second-class petty officer who soon became one of Ford’s most reliable deputies in Field Photo, loved his brashness and autocracy, treating him with what Parrish’s wife, Kathleen, called “respect, awe, and a little bit, ‘That old son of a bitch . . .’” But others who had worked with him in Hollywood stayed away. When Philip Dunne was approached about joining Field Photo, he pointedly declined, saying, “I don’t know that [I’d] like very much being a lieutenant (jg) when Ford is the commander.” Ford explained himself years later by saying that on movie sets, “I’m very courteous to my equals, more than courteous to my inferiors . . . and I’m horribly rude to my superiors. So-called.” He was half joking, half bragging.

  Ford was prepared at least to attempt to toe the line when it came to military conduct, but the navy still viewed him as something of a wild card. His first two assignments in the weeks after Pearl Harbor were low-stakes, short-term jobs that kept him far from the action. Donovan sent him to Reykjavik to film a report on Iceland’s viability as a future hub for Allied landings and transports, and then to Panama, where he was to prepare a one-reel (ten-minute) study of the security of the canal. Both movies were for military use only, and neither would require the deployment of a full Field Photo crew; they were tests of Ford’s ability to carry out an order efficiently, and he almost certainly knew it.

  The results, including Ford’s extensive written reports, impressed Donovan enough to give Ford something more important to do. In early 1942, he was ordered to oversee the War Department’s first significant piece of filmed propaganda. Within just a few weeks of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the navy decided to make a documentary that would reassure Americans about the fleet’s preparedness, focusing on the speedy rebuilding of the ships and planes that had been Japan’s targets. In fact, the bombing had done a staggering amount of damage; although it had spared American aircraft carriers, two-thirds of the naval air fleet on the ground was destroyed or damaged, and four of eight battleships were sunk, capsized, or blown up. The movie Ford was to produce for the navy, which had the working title The Story of Pearl Harbor: An Epic in American History, was not intended to tally the damage or to provide an honest assessment of whether the navy had been adequately prepared for an attack, which was already a subject of intense public debate. The movie was simply meant to relay to the American public the news that the fleet was well on its way back to fighting strength. And the navy wanted it made quickly.

  Gregg Toland, who had been instrumental in helping Ford organize the cinematographers in Field Photo, had been yearning for an opportunity to direct, and Ford gave him the assignment, sending him to Honolulu at the beginning of January along with Lieutenant Samuel Engel, a journeyman writer-producer whose Hollywood experience consisted mostly of movies like Charlie Chan in Rio and Viva Cisco Kid; Ford wanted him to help Toland prepare a script. Six weeks later, when Ford had not heard from either man or been sent a single can of footage, Donovan told him to go to Hawaii and find out what the hell was going on.

  In Ford’s official naval oral history, he reported that when he arrived in Honolulu, he found the army and navy “all in good shape, everything taken care of, patrols going out regularly, everybody in high spirit. . . . Everybody had learned their lesson from Pearl Harbor.” But even the idea that a lesson had been necessary was controversial, and Ford discovered with some alarm that the free hand he had given Toland and Engel was threatening to result in a movie that was less a can-do rallying cry than an indictment of American apathy and inattention before the attack. Left to his own devices, Toland had decided to turn the Pearl Harbor project into his unofficial feature directorial debut; instead of a twenty- or thirty-minute documentary that could run in theaters before the main feature, he had mapped out a full-length scripted drama that would include extensive recreations of the Pearl Harbor attack. The execution of Toland’s idea would also require a long shoot on the Fox lot in Los Angeles, where he had gotten Walter Huston to agree to play “Uncle Sam” (depicted in the script as a neglectful old man taking a long nap in a hilltop getaway), character actor Harry Davenport to play the embodiment of Sam’s stricken conscience, and a newcomer named Dana Andrews to play the ghost of an American soldier who had been killed in the attack.

  As Toland acted out scenes from the film he was imagining, Ford said little, but he was unsettled by the scale of its vision. He didn’t pull the plug on the movie, but soon after he landed in Hawaii he decided to take over some of the filmmaking himself, shooting basic, newsreel-style footage of ships and planes being rebuilt, of storehouses of munitions being refurbished, of masses of enlisted men working together with energetic aplomb. He didn’t tell Toland and Engel to scrap their approach to the movie, but he did warn them to be circumspect, the clear implication being that the less the navy knew about actors, special effects, and reenactments, the better; all that work could be done back in Hollywood, away from prying eyes. But Toland still felt he had Ford’s confidence, writing in a letter to Samuel Goldwyn that he and Engel were “doing a great job of our assignment.”

  Ford stayed on in Hawaii to oversee production of the movie, which would now be called December 7th, until early April. During the days, he and his team worked with a briskness that was dictated by necessity; in Honolulu, all cars had to be off the streets by 7:30 p.m. and curfews were so strictly enforced that anyone who found himself at a friend’s house at 9 p.m. was expected to stay there for the night. That seems to have led to some drunken evenings, but Ford stayed focused; he wrote Mary that while he missed her terribly, he hadn’t felt so well in years. He was happy to be in Hawaii doing “terrifically vital” work, telling her, “Naturally one can’t write a great deal of what is happening here, but somehow I like this place better now than ever.” He joked with her about colleagues who suddenly wanted to be a part of Field Photo (“I love that request for Frank Borzage—‘Couldn’t he get a commission because he’s drinking something awful!’ I’m afraid, honey, he’s got to get a better reason than that.”) He kidded about his contempt for the actors Ward Bond and John Wayne, whom he imagined were scanning the Southern California skies for possible air raids while they still collected studio paychecks. (“Ah well—such heroism shall not go unrewarded,” he wrote, “it will live in the annals of time.”) After several weeks, Ford finally lost his temper when an admiral started suggesting shots. “Sir, do you ever direct complete movies,” Ford snapped, “or do you just kibitz when you have nothing better to do?” Turning away from the admiral, he barked at his cameraman, a young sailor named Jack Mackenzie, “Put the camera on a tripod. Let’s stop wasting time. We’ve got a lot of work to do today.”

  The next morning, when Ford received orders to leave Honolulu immediately, Robert Parrish assumed it was as punishment for having mouthed off to a superior. In fact, Ford’s work in Hawaii had only bolstered the navy’s confidence in him; he was now being placed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet to film one of the first secret missions of t
he war, the Doolittle raid on April 18. The raid was the first Allied airstrike over Japan, and was planned not as a major tactical advance but as a confidence-builder engineered in part because, in the words of General James Doolittle, “Americans badly needed a morale boost.” The film Ford shot was not action-packed—it consisted mostly of footage of the sixteen B-25 bombers used in the raid taking off from and returning to the carrier landing deck.* But Ford, who took exceptional care to capture images of male camaraderie throughout the war, interspersed the aerial shots with scenes of African American sailors on the deck waving and smiling at the pilots, a reminder that the armed forces included them even though individual units were segregated. The brief series of shots, which was recut—sometimes excluding the African Americans—and used in newsreels, was the closest American cameras had yet gotten to combat.

  If Roosevelt had wanted to name a coordinating chief from within Hollywood, Capra would have been the obvious choice, not Ford. Having run both the Academy and the Screen Directors Guild, he knew his way around bureaucracies, he had become an expert negotiator and, any lingering hurt feelings about Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in the capital notwithstanding, he commanded respect in both Washington and Hollywood. Capra already had the trust that Lowell Mellett would never quite manage to earn, and he didn’t share the distaste for authority that rendered Ford and so many other directors unsuitable for the job. But he was a foreigner from a country with which the United States was now at war; right after Pearl Harbor, his older sister, Ann, who had never been naturalized, was briefly listed as an “enemy alien.” His appointment to such a prominent position would have been freighted with unwelcome controversy.