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

by Mark Harris

  Wyler was still glad to be in Washington; he felt he would stand a better chance of convincing the army to expedite his entry into service in person than by plaintive cable sent from Los Angeles. His friend George Stevens was still in Hollywood, unable to join up until he finished working off his contract for Columbia, but most of his other close colleagues had come east. Capra and Ford were fully occupied running competing fiefdoms, one in the army, one in the navy, Tola Litvak had just arrived to start working under Capra for the Morale Branch, and Huston, whose commission, unlike Wyler’s, had gone through without a hitch, had arrived in D.C. a month earlier and had already been given oversight of a short movie.

  Wyler must have envied the fact that his protégé had received an assignment so swiftly, but in fact, Huston was desperately bored and already chafing under the army’s authority. His trip to Washington had started out in high spirits: In April, Olivia de Havilland had joined director Mark Sandrich’s Hollywood Victory Caravan, a traveling ensemble of star fund-raisers for army and navy relief who had volunteered for a three-week whistle-stop tour of cities between Los Angeles and Washington. After she finished performing alongside the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Charles Boyer, Bert Lahr, Jimmy Cagney, and Groucho Marx, and the Caravan was received at the White House, she and Huston planned to have a romantic rendezvous in the capital. But when the time came, de Havilland had to rejoin the tour and leave for San Francisco right away, and Huston, who had thought the army would immediately put him behind a camera, instead found himself alone, poring over charts and protocols in an itchy uniform in a sweltering office.

  “I spent weeks and weeks doing nothing,” he said. “Christ, it was hot. I begged to be sent where the action was—China, India, England. I pulled strings to no avail. It looked as though I was going to see the war out from behind a desk.” When Huston had received his commission, the inducting officer noted that he was “forceful, capable, intelligent” but warned that he was also “self-centered” with an “odd personality.” The War Department now seemed determined to bring him to heel; the only thing the army seemed to care about was that Huston keep his jacket on at all times. He was almost in tears when he told Litvak how miserable he was. Capra sent him back to Hollywood for a brief trip to oversee the making of a short about the building of a B-25 bomber—“a propaganda film,” said Huston, “to make people give their services and go and make airplanes, and . . . to let them know that what they were doing was a great thing.” It may have lifted their spirits, but it did nothing for Huston’s, especially when he realized that Capra had essentially contrived the job as busywork.

  Wyler’s arrival in the capital, however, turned out to be perfectly timed. His expectations for the reception of Mrs. Miniver were modest; when Lillian Hellman emerged from a screening wiping tears from her eyes and Wyler asked her why she was crying, she sobbed, “Because it’s such a piece of junk, Willy! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! It’s so below you.” But when the movie opened on June 5, its impact was seismic. The New York Times called it “the finest film yet made about the war” and the first to “crystallize [its] cruel effect . . . upon a civilized people,” and wondered if it was “too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures ever made.” Time called the film “that almost impossible feat, a great war picture that photographs the inner meaning, instead of the outward realism of World War II,” and gave full credit to the “perseverance and talent” of its “softspoken, chunky, wire-haired” director, deploring the fact that he had not yet won an Oscar. The tone struck by the New York Post, which claimed the movie was “so rightly done that it glows with an inner light which is truly inspired,” reflected the near reverence with which it was received not just as a film, but as what Variety called “one of the strongest pieces of propaganda against complacency” yet made.

  Mrs. Miniver became almost instantly a part of the narrative America told itself about the war. Some critics complained of its sentimentality and manipulation—James Agee was so repelled by the still photographs from the movie that MGM sent him that he flatly refused to go see it for more than a year—but they were soon drowned out. More than one national magazine reprinted the entire text of the vicar’s climactic sermon, and President Roosevelt asked the Voice of America to broadcast it abroad as a speech. Nelson Poynter, Mellett’s right-hand man in the Office of War Information’s Hollywood bureau, gave his first major address to the studios the week after the movie opened and, urging them to make more pictures about America’s foreign allies, pleaded with them to “give us a Mrs. Miniver of China or Russia.” And Joseph Goebbels somehow got hold of a print; he called the movie “an exemplary propaganda film for [the] German industry to copy.”

  Roosevelt urged MGM to release Miniver as quickly and widely as possible; after playing for a record ten weeks at Radio City Music Hall, it opened around the country and became the year’s highest-grossing picture. The studio launched a major campaign in which various film luminaries, including Capra, declared the movie to be one of the ten best films ever made. And for once, Wyler, not his leading lady, was treated as the star—Time published a lengthy story about his background as a young boy growing up in Alsace-Lorraine, “wondering whether he was French or German” during World War I, and the reviewer for the Catholic World wrote that it was a shame that it had not “been some Catholic’s privilege to have directed Mrs. Miniver. Perhaps it was God’s retort to anti-Semitism to have chosen William Wyler.”

  The acclaim for Mrs. Miniver gave Wyler a card to play. In Washington, he was suddenly a figure of national stature, a symbol of Hollywood’s power to transform the public’s understanding of the war, and his name landed on every guest list. One evening, Sy Bartlett invited him to a going-away party for Major General Carl Spaatz, who was about to travel to Europe, where he would become commander of the Eighth Air Force and head of the Army Air Force’s European Theater of Operations. “When I spoke to him,” said Wyler, “I said, ‘General, I don’t know where you’re going’—which wasn’t true—‘or what you’re going to do, but somebody ought to make a picture about it.’” Spaatz called another general over and told him to take care of Wyler. “What do you want? Do you want to be a major?” he asked Wyler. “I thought he was kidding,” the director recalled. “I said yes, he says okay, next minute I was a major.” Wyler was rushed through his physical the next morning; the army doctors agreed to overlook his potbelly, his false teeth, and the fact that he was days from turning forty. “I’d never even been told how to salute,” he said. “I went and bought myself a uniform and I was in the Air Force.”

  Wyler’s literally overnight transformation was the rare exception in a bureaucracy that, six months after Pearl Harbor, had all but halted the movement to integrate Hollywood filmmakers into the armed forces and to bring their work either to soldiers or to the moviegoing public. “I was anxious to serve and give my talent to this war,” Capra wrote to Lucille in May, “and I found a tremendous organization dead set against my functioning.” By mid-1942, jurisdictional confusion was endemic: Were filmmakers supposed to answer to Mellett and the Office of Government Reports, or the Office of Civilian Defense, which was overseen by Fiorello La Guardia, or the Office of Facts and Figures, an information agency overseen by poet Archibald MacLeish, who ran the Library of Congress? Did the Division of Information within the Office for Emergency Management outrank the Office of the Coordinator of Information? Would the Signal Corps or the Morale Branch oversee the making of propaganda? Ironically, even as territorial squabbling paralyzed filmmakers in Washington, it gave the studios a measure of freedom they had never anticipated at the start of the war. With nobody telling them what to do, they simply started developing and greenlighting wartime romances, spy thrillers, combat movies, service comedies, and home-front melodramas; they retooled and updated franchises, turning Sherlock Holmes and the Invisible Man into anti-Nazi crimefighters; and each production head approved scripts based on his own instincts about what felt entertaining, p
atriotic, or both. By the time Roosevelt consolidated authority within the Bureau of Motion Pictures of the OWI, many of the three hundred war-themed movies that the studios would release in 1942 and 1943 were in development or production, and despite the midsummer announcement of a set of guidelines the films should follow, the bureau would never quite manage to keep pace with Hollywood’s production schedule.

  But in Washington, Capra found himself caught in a tussle between Osborn’s Special Services division and the Signal Corps, which had let him go and now wanted him back. “It’s almost a dime novel,” he told Lucille. “They thought they had all the picturemaking in the Army sewed up. Well . . . I started buying and stealing and collecting film, using my name and my bluff to get it. I started to hire writers and write scripts. I got [editors] and went to work. . . . When they finally woke up to the fact that I was making pictures all alone, they blew up, and made a demand that I turn over to them all my organization of 18 people, all my millions of feet of film that I had ferreted out, and all my cutting rooms and equipment. I was to go back to my desk again and merely become an advisor. . . . No Sir.”

  Capra had written to executives at Warner Bros. and Paramount asking them to free up some new writers for the job, which they did. (“Frankly and sincerely,” the head of Warners’ publicity department wrote him back, “we consider our whole Warner Bros. setup as another agency of the government. . . . We all want to do more than our share to win this fight.”) Other studios were more cautious, beginning a dispute that would have far-reaching consequences after the war by warning Capra that any time their writers spent away from Hollywood in his service would have to be tagged on to the end of their contracts. But Capra got his men, and began work on a new approach to the lecture adaptations.

  As early as March 15, Capra had leaked to the press that he was working on a series of movies intended to show Americans “why they are fighting.” But it was during a research trip to New York in April that his idea for how to make them began to come into focus. Over the last few years, the Museum of Modern Art had amassed an extensive collection of pro-Nazi propaganda films and newsreels. They weren’t hard to find. Well into 1941, at least one theater in the heavily German American Manhattan neighborhood known as Yorkville would draw large crowds of Nazi sympathizers for pro-Hitler documentaries like Campaign for Poland and Victory in the West; the films, made under Goebbels’s supervision, were intended to advance the Third Reich’s position that Germany “has been forced to defend itself over and over again” through the centuries and that the Treaty of Versailles represented “the rape of Germany.” Through private acquisitions from Germans who were willing to sell their prints, the museum had pulled together enough footage to give Capra a clear picture of what the other side was seeing.

  Among those movies was Triumph of the Will, of which the museum owned one of only two copies then known to exist in the United States. Many of Capra’s fellow directors had seen it in the 1930s, when Leni Riefenstahl had visited Hollywood, but Capra had not, and by 1942 her work was considered so incendiary that he needed to obtain special clearance from the Signal Corps to view it. When he and Litvak emerged from the screening onto West 53rd Street, Capra was shattered: “The first time I saw that picture, I said, ‘We’re dead. We’re gone. We can’t win this war.’”

  Capra’s gloom reflected a moment when American optimism about the eventual outcome of the war was at its nadir. The Philippines had just fallen in the battle of Bataan, a three-month engagement that had resulted in ten thousand Allied deaths; fifteen thousand Americans had been taken as prisoners of war. Corregidor, the last point of resistance in the islands, would fall within weeks. Both in the Pacific and in Europe, the enemy seemed, to many, invincible. Watching Riefenstahl’s movie, “I could see where the kids of Germany would go any place, die for this guy,” said Capra. “They knew what they were doing—they understood how to reach the mind. ‘Surrender or you’re dead’—that was what the film was saying to you. So how do we counter that? How do I reach the American kid down the street?” It was a serious question, since even if Capra and Osborn were granted the budget they had requested, they would still have to make all the movies they planned at a minuscule average cost of under $20,000 per picture.

  Then Capra had an idea that would give the Why We Fight series much of its power; he would save money and drive his point home by incorporating as much Axis propaganda footage as possible, but with new narration that underscored the horror of what was being shown. “Let our boys hear the Nazis and the Japs shout their own claims of master-race crud,” he said, “and our fighting men will know why they’re in uniform.” Capra’s notion wasn’t entirely new; two years earlier, a well-regarded documentary called The Ramparts We Watch, produced by the newsreel company The March of Time, had made similar use of a pro-Nazi film called Feuertaufe (Baptism of Fire). But Capra was energized by what he saw as an opportunity to turn Nazi filmmaking against itself. And his new strategy would also allow him to exploit what Osborn called a “gold mine” of Japanese, German, and Italian footage that had been impounded by the Treasury Department.

  Capra found perhaps his most valued right-hand man in one of the new recruits to his unit. Eric Knight was an unlikely propagandist; he was a British émigré who until recently had been toiling as a film critic for a small newspaper in Philadelphia and, less successfully, as a contract screenwriter at 20th Century Fox. In 1941, he had written a novel called This Above All, a moving, Miniveresque story of British wartime courage that caught Capra’s attention. He cabled Knight with a concise request: “Producing important series information films for armed services. Your experience & talent would be invaluable to us. Please phone me collect War Department 6700 Extension 5208 or can arrange meet you in Washington or New York.”

  It was, Capra later said, “love at first sight. Knight had all the talents that could be compressed into a single writer: Wit, compassion, sensitiveness, an intriguing style, and a great, great love for human beings.” Although he was exactly Capra’s age—forty-four—he seemed to carry with him an extra generation or two of knowledge and wisdom; he had been an army captain in the 1920s and was already a grandfather. And unlike some in Capra’s unit, Knight had no trepidation about telling the director exactly what he thought. When Capra asked him to go over the attempts his new team of writers had made at revising the discarded screenplays, he responded with an impassioned letter that ran eight single-spaced pages. “You asked me to read the scripts and I’ve been at them all night,” he began. “What I have to say of them I know you can take. This isn’t Hollywood and you’re one of the least Hollywood guys in the game. . . . Anyway, it’s what I see as truth and it’s the only way I know how to write, and that’s why I sat eight months at Fox in hell. The scripts are very good. And man, that’s the goddamdest thing a man could say of anything in this world. Because the films are going to be seen by an army that can’t be ‘very good.’ It’s got to be the best goddamed fighting army in this war. And you aren’t a ‘very good’ producer and director. You’re the best bloody film man standing on this green earth at this moment of existence. And these films have to be the finest ever made.”

  Knight felt the screenplays were dry, factual, and numbingly informational, and that they desperately lacked fiery rhetoric and a cohesive theme. A writer who took them on, he said, would need “to pull them all into a strong unity” in which the goal is “to make every soldier in the army sure right down to his boot-tips that this is a JUST war . . . The same angle must be pounded, pounded, pounded. I’m sorry if I sound hot, but . . . we’re fighting a bloody war for existence, and by god we’ve got to fight with films. . . . The scripts I read don’t have that unity. . . . It often sounds to me as if the men who wrote them were writing cold facts, and didn’t care very much one way or another how the film-watcher received those facts. Dammit, that’s not good enough.” He went on to give page-by-page notes on all the scripts before ending, “To hell with it. I’m tired. I hope
you don’t think me a presumptious [sic] bastard. . . . It was swell meeting you. You’re a grand guy, as I always knew you had to be to make films like you have.”

  Capra had assigned Knight to try his hand drafting a script for a Why We Fight movie about the Battle of Britain, but he was so impressed by the passion and detail of his notes that after Knight’s letter he made the Englishman the de facto supervising writer for the entire series. Capra had hoped to get the first movie, Prelude to War, in front of audiences by May, a deadline that had come and gone. But he now had a clear set of goals for the series that he could propose to Mellett: He told him the movies would be devoted to “making clear the enemies’ ruthless objectives, promoting confidence in the ability of our armed forces to win, showing clearly that we are fighting for the existence of our country and all our freedoms, showing clearly how we would lose our freedom if we lost the war, [and] making clear we carry the torch of freedom.”

  After that statement of primary principles, Capra listed some additional objectives that were eventually deemed inessential; they included exposing the “economic evils” of the Third Reich and promoting “better understanding between nations and peoples.” But Mellett approved his plan, and on June 6, 1942, a directive was issued creating the 834th Signal Service Photographic Detachment, Special Services Division, Film Production Section. Capra had eight officers (including Wyler, who was just getting his commission) and thirty-five enlisted men in his charge; by the end of 1943 he would oversee 150 men. He was at that moment the most powerful American propagandist of the war. But he was about to be overshadowed by a longtime rival. The day the directive came through, John Ford was six thousand miles away on a navy ship, recovering from shrapnel wounds he had received the day before. He had just filmed the Battle of Midway.