by Mark Harris
NINE
“All I Know Is That I’m Not Courageous”
MIDWAY AND WASHINGTON, JUNE–AUGUST 1942
It wasn’t the navy’s idea to send John Ford to Midway. In late May, Admiral Chester Nimitz called the director to tell him that several Field Photo cameramen would soon be needed to document a mission in the Pacific that he called “dangerous” but did not describe in detail; he asked Ford to identify and select a few good men for the job. Ford’s work on the Doolittle raid had pleased the navy, but he had been commissioned to serve primarily as a high-level administrator, not a roving combat cinematographer. Just two weeks earlier, Bill Donovan had sent him an official letter charging him to “exercise full responsibility” for Field Photo in Washington, D.C., giving him authority to oversee the payroll, secure office space and supplies, and approve any travel he deemed necessary. Ford’s unit already numbered more than a hundred men and was granted an annual operating budget of $1 million—more than twice the money that Capra had to spend. And where Capra complained repeatedly that he often needed as many as two dozen different departments and agencies to sign off on a single request, Ford answered almost exclusively to Donovan, who gave him a free hand.
When Nimitz made his request, Ford immediately volunteered himself for the mission without knowing where or what it was. Nimitz told him to pack a bag and get to Pearl Harbor, where he boarded a speedboat that took him to a westbound destroyer. A couple of days and five hundred miles later, they were joined by a flotilla of PTs, the inexpensive, wood-hulled, torpedo-armed vessels that were so fast and effective that the Japanese came to call them “devil boats.” As the destroyer resupplied them and they continued farther west, Ford began to wonder if something much more significant than the provocation of the Doolittle raid might be in the offing.
Midway Atoll was one of a cluster of tiny islands under American control located in the North Pacific about halfway between the California coast and Tokyo. Its strategic importance was evident in its name. Since Pearl Harbor, the navy had known that the United States could not hope to win the war in the Pacific without continuing to control the islands as a refueling stop for flyers. Aware that a Japanese attack on Midway was inevitable, the navy had been readying itself for a large-scale battle since April, something that neither Ford nor most of the men on the ship knew. When the destroyer reached Midway, Ford, assuming the navy wanted him to make a documentary about life at a remote outpost, started photographing the sandy, desolate island and its gulls and albatrosses, as well as the naval base, the PT boats, and their squadrons of laughing, joshing men, making what he called “a pictorial history of Midway” and not worrying about whatever was to come. “Up here for a short visit,” he wrote to Mary just days before the attack. “This is some place. Really fascinating . . . the food is delicious, best I’ve had in the Navy.
“I think at the time there was some report of some action impending,” he recalled. “But . . . I didn’t think it was going to touch us. So I . . . spent about 12 hours a day in work, had a good time up there.”
Ford finally learned what was in store two nights before the battle began. On the evening of June 2, Captain Cyril Simard, commanding officer of the Midway air station, told him that they had received intelligence that a major offensive by “Zeroes”—the long-range Japanese fighter planes that the Imperial Navy had deployed over Pearl Harbor—was planned for June 4, and that the men of Midway were ready to fight back with planes, PT boats, destroyers, and marines on the ground.
Simard suggested that on the morning of the attack, Ford position himself on the roof of the main island’s power station. Ford agreed, telling him, “It’s a good place to take pictures.” To his surprise, Simard had no interest in Ford’s plans for filming; what mattered to him was that the power station roof had working telephones. “Forget the pictures as much as you can,” he told Ford. “I want a good accurate account of the bombing. We expect to be attacked.”
Ford tested his equipment that night. The next day, a close friend, Captain Francis Massie Hughes, took him out on an aerial recon mission, drawling, “Well, it looks like there’s going to be a little trouble out there,” and muttering to Ford, “You and I are too damned old for this war anyway.” The quiet, businesslike, almost casual demeanor of both the officers and the young sailors and flyers in the days before the attack impressed Ford and moved him deeply. There was little bluster or bravado, he said; in fact, “they were the calmest people I have ever seen.” As he and Hughes flew through the cloudy skies, they spotted a couple of Japanese planes at a distance and reported their position to Nimitz. “I was amazed at the lackadaisical air everyone took,” said Ford, “as though they had been living through this sort of thing all their lives.”
At about 6:30 a.m. on June 4, Ford and his men hunkered down on the concrete roof. They were equipped with Eyemo and Bell & Howell 16-millimeter cameras and hundreds of feet of Kodachrome color film. Ford had assigned a young lieutenant named Kenneth Pier to the nearby aircraft carrier USS Hornet, but to work with him on the island, he had handpicked twenty-four-year-old Jack Mackenzie Jr., who had been an apprentice cameraman at RKO and had helped Ford on Gregg Toland’s December 7th project in Honolulu. Ford was fond of Mackenzie, who was about the same age as his own son; when it looked like he was about to be transferred to Wake Island, the director stepped in to keep him under his wing. The young man was eager for action; as he climbed the ladder to the top of the power station tower, he felt the only protection he needed was the rabbit’s foot he kept in his pocket. The tower, he said, was “the highest spot I could work from. . . . I could view the entire island unobstructed and far out to sea. . . . I had every advantage to get the pictures I wanted.”
Ford and his team started shooting film as soon as the first formation of what would eventually number more than one hundred Zeroes approached. “I estimated that I saw . . . from 56 to 62 planes” in total, he reported. While Ford filmed, he stayed on the telephone, relaying the news to officers in the power house fifty feet below whenever he saw a bomb fall or a plane get shot down. The marines, positioned in readiness on the island and in PT boats, started to fire back. Ford saw them take down three planes. Zeroes flew low to bomb the Midway airfield, at first concentrating on a decoy plane that the navy had positioned next to an empty oil tank as a distraction that was designed to waste Japanese effort and ammunition. (The actual planes had been camouflaged off the sides of the runway.) Then “hell started to break loose . . . the attack had started in earnest.”
“The planes started falling—some of ours, a lot of Jap planes,” Ford said. “One [Zero] dove, dropped a bomb and tried to pull out, and crashed into the ground.” Ford saw the Zeroes “dive bombing at objectives like water towers. . . . [The Japanese planes] got the hangar right away.” Ford had his camera trained on the building as “a Zero flew about fifty feet over it and dropped a bomb and . . . the whole thing went up. The place that I was manning, the power house, they evidently tried to get that. I think we counted 18 bombs.”
The last of those bombs tore a corner off the power station roof and blew Ford off his feet with his camera still running—its impact is visible on the film. “I was knocked unconscious,” he said. “Just knocked me goofy for a bit.” When he came to a minute or two later, a couple of young enlistees were telling him that he had a shrapnel wound in his arm; they wanted to get him off the roof to less exposed ground. “They came in and bandaged me up and said, ‘Don’t go near that Navy doctor, we will take care of you . . .’ Talking right under fire like that, it was very interesting.”
Mackenzie had also been knocked over by a bomb that had exploded within twenty feet of the power station, although before that happened, he said, “I got a swell shot of a Jap formation coming in straight toward me.” After that close call, he scrambled down the ladder and ran around to the front of the tower “to photograph the rest of the battle action. . . . The hospital . . . was smashed and on fire, and the commissary was all
busted up and burning something fierce.” Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pier was inside an American plane that had taken off from the Hornet, photographing as much of the sea-to-air combat as his position would allow.
Ford had not been precisely at the center of the action, much of which was dispersed over miles of ocean. The power station roof was more a gateway, and although he had an ideal vantage point from which to witness the approach of the Zeroes, much of the most intense fighting on the atoll itself took place behind him, and the battle’s critical engagements were far out at sea, well beyond the visibility of anyone stationed on the island. But, first among all directors who went to war, Ford had, without question, been in the right place at the right time. Most of the fighting at Midway happened that day, and when the last fires were put out and the skirmishes ended three days later, the United States had won what would turn out to be the war’s most important battle in the Pacific. For months before Midway, the story that had been brought home to Americans in papers, radio broadcasts, and newsreels was one of noble defeat—of young American fighting men holding out as long as they possibly could at Wake Island or Bataan or Corregidor, trying to buy the navy some desperately needed time to rebuild its fleet after Pearl Harbor. Their valor was measured in the number of days or weeks they could stand their ground before the Japanese navy inevitably outmanned and outgunned them, and their stories would soon be told in almost a dozen Hollywood movies. Midway brought America welcome news not just of a victory, but of a turning of the tide. The navy had lost 150 planes and more than three hundred men, but Japanese casualties numbered in the thousands, and the United States had destroyed four of Japan’s six aircraft carriers, a deficit from which the Imperial Navy never recovered.
The significance of Midway would become clear within the week, but in the immediate aftermath of the battle’s first day, Ford was shaken to his core. He had seen an American flyer bail out of his plane only to be shot out of his parachute harness by a Japanese gunner. “The kid hit the water and the Jap went up and down strafing the water where he had landed, even sunk the parachute,” he said. “I only prayed to God that I could have gotten a picture out of it.” Mackenzie, who had not been injured, spent the days after the battle “photographing records of the destruction, interrupted only as each rescue squad with wounded and fatigued men who had been adrift in little rubber boats were brought in.”
News of the victory they had achieved came to the men at Midway fitfully; at that moment, the American losses felt much more immediate and real on the island. Ford watched the young men who had seemed so unconcerned and laconically confident just a day or two earlier being loaded onto stretchers and into body bags. In the run-up to Midway, he had spent some time with one group in particular, filming the men—mostly inexperienced, some barely out of their teens—in Torpedo Squadron 8. Cameras had captured them singly and in pairs, horsing around, mugging, posing proudly in front of their planes aboard the Hornet, drawing faces or warnings to the Japanese on their torpedoes with chalk. On the day of the battle, they had been the first to approach Japan’s aircraft carriers, and had done so without any cover. The Japanese shot them all down within minutes. Of the thirty men in the squadron, twenty-nine were now missing or dead. The sole survivor, a young ensign named George Gay, watched his comrades perish as he hid under his plane’s seat cushion in the sea with only his nose and mouth above water, hoping that the Japanese would mistake him for debris.*
“I am really a coward,” Ford said later. “Courage is something that, I don’t know, it’s pretty hard to find . . . All I know is that I’m not courageous. Oh, you go ahead and do a thing, but after it’s over, your knees start shaking.” The bravery of the boys he had watched go into battle, most of whom he had met just days before the end of their lives, humbled him. “They were kids,” he said, “having a swell time. None of them were alarmed. I mean, [a bomb] would drop . . . they would laugh and say, ‘My God, that was close.’ . . . I was really amazed. I thought that some kids, one or two, would get scared, but no, they were having the time of their lives. . . . I have never seen a greater exhibition of courage. . . . I figured, ‘Well, when this war is over, at least we are going to win it if we have kids like that.’”
As navy medics tended to what the official medical report described as a three-inch surface laceration on his left arm, Ford had little time to sort through his own sense of loss within victory, or his conflicting feelings about his own courage compared to that of the men he had watched fight that day. The war was a narrative; he had been sent to Midway not simply to record a conflict but to turn it into a story that could be told to the American people. Ford’s first words about the battle were simple: “OK. LOVE, JOHN FORD,” he cabled his wife days later. The press did the rest. By the time Ford got back to the United States, he was a hero; all he had to do was agree to play the part. His injury in the line of duty had made national headlines; the gossip columnist Louella Parsons described his arm as “rendered almost useless” by shrapnel (in fact, his wound was categorized by the navy as nonincapacitating). Parsons also caught Mary Ford off guard, securing a one-sentence “interview” that she managed to spin into a portrait of Mrs. Miniver–like home-front stoicism. “Mary is a wise Navy wife who never talks,” she wrote knowingly. “All I could get her to say about John’s bravery in filming the Battle of Midway . . . was ‘I hope we can see all the pictures.’ . . . But you won’t get her to say that she fought the Battle of Midway from her chair, or that she burns the midnight oil thinking of her husband filming movies right where the shelling and the bombing are the thickest.”
Ford was being recommended for medals and honors and heralded by his colleagues (“We were thrilled at account of Midway action and congratulate you on the splendid part you played in it,” George Stevens cabled him on behalf of the Directors Guild), and his relationship to the official narrative of his heroism moved by degrees beyond mere tacit consent and into enthusiastic reiteration. As time passed, the work of other cameramen at Midway went largely unmentioned. (“I did all of it,” he told Peter Bogdanovich decades later. “We only had one camera.”) Ford started to tell stories about how one Japanese pilot had gotten so close to him that he could see his sinister smile, and he described his working relationship with his Field Photo cameramen in brazenly self-flattering terms: “I had one boy with me, but I said, ‘You’re too young to get killed,’ and I hid him away, I thought in a safe place. I just kept reporting,” he said. “I was wounded pretty badly there . . . however I managed to come to long enough to finish the job.” By 1944, Mackenzie had been excluded from the story of Midway so thoroughly that he felt compelled to set the record straight in a first-person account of the battle for the magazine American Cinematographer in which he wrote specifically about what he and Kenneth Pier had filmed, mentioning Ford respectfully, but only once. Pier’s footage, said Mackenzie, “had a lot to do with the success of the picture that was released to the public.”
Ford returned to Los Angeles in mid-June with four hours of silent film—about five hard-won minutes of which showed explicit combat—and his instincts as a director soon overrode any concern he may have had about observing navy protocol. He was, not without justification, zealous about guarding his footage and slightly paranoid. He knew that what he and his men had captured was unlike anything American moviegoers had seen before, not just in its up-close view of war and its toll, but in the fact that they had chosen to shoot in color, which audiences in 1942 viewed as less “real” than the black and white of newsreels. Studios at the time reserved Technicolor for fantasies, musicals, spectacles, and travelogues, and Ford himself had only made one color picture, Drums Along the Mohawk.
Ford knew that once the navy took possession of his footage, he would lose control of it; the best shots would be indiscriminately parceled out to newsreel companies by a War Department that was more eager to share visual evidence of an American triumph as quickly as possible than to wait for the polished movie that he believed could
have exponentially greater impact. In Hollywood, Ford had all of the footage printed; then he returned to Washington and showed it to his Field Photo recruit Robert Parrish, who had assisted him during the editing of How Green Was My Valley. Using the authority Donovan had given him a month earlier, Ford gave Parrish the footage and ordered him to take it back to Los Angeles that day. “Never mind the [travel] orders, I’ll send them on to you later,” he told Parrish. “And don’t bother to change your clothes. Just pick up the film and get out to the airport. The navy censor will be around here looking for our film. I want to be able to tell him I don’t have any film.” Ford feared that the navy would immediately assign “associate producers and public relations officers” to oversee the project. “The four services will start bickering over it and the goddamn thing will get so bogged down in red tape that we’ll never get it released. . . . Get in your mother’s house [in Los Angeles] and hide until you hear from me.”
Parrish did as he was told. He found a small film lab and editing facility in the San Fernando Valley, away from prying eyes, and began to organize the footage and cut some sequences together. Ford told him not to worry about navy men “snooping around,” assuring him, “There’ll be no problem. They’d never expect an enlisted man with no orders to be working on a classified project.” Since some of what Field Photo had captured was grisly and far more graphic than anything that had ever gotten past army censors, Parrish asked Ford whether he intended to make the movie as an intelligence document to be shown only to senior officials within the War Department, the White House, and the newly formed Office of Strategic Services, or was it to be a propaganda picture intended for public consumption?