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

by Mark Harris

  Ford, who detested the word “propaganda,” told Parrish never to use it again. “This is a film for the mothers of America,” he said. “It’s to let them know that we’re in a war, and that we’ve been getting the shit kicked out of us for five months, and now we’re starting to hit back.” In fact, Ford had already thought through exactly what he wanted The Battle of Midway to be: He envisioned the film as running eighteen minutes—a length that would allow it to play across the country in hundreds of theaters simultaneously since it could be booked to run before any number of main features.

  Ford soon joined Parrish on the West Coast, where they and a sound effects editor named Phil Scott began the work of turning The Battle of Midway not just into a movie, but into a John Ford movie—a short whose dialogue, music, profound sentiment, and emphasis on loss, duty, and sacrifice would be unmistakably of a piece with The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. An entire soundtrack—music, narration, dialogue, and the sound effects of soaring planes, ocean waves, PT boat motors, gunfire, and falling and exploding bombs—had to be created, and as each layer was added, the simple and straightforward footage, the vast majority of which had not been shot by Ford, bore his signature more strongly. Knowing that a great deal of music and overdubbed language would be necessary to compensate for the lack of synchronized natural sound, Ford asked two men, Stagecoach writer Dudley Nichols and an MGM screenwriter named James Kevin McGuinness, to prepare separate short scripts. He discarded McGuinness’s and used some of Nichols’s, but for the most part chose to rely on his own instincts to create an innovative amalgam of four voices—a baritone, newsreel-like narrator; a second narrator, more hushed and ministerial, who takes over during moments of particular solemnity; and the voices of an elderly mother and a well-informed, enthusiastic young man. The last two would serve as unseen audience surrogates who seem to be watching and commenting on the footage as it unspools, each reflecting what Ford thought an ordinary viewer’s stream of consciousness might sound like.

  To provide those voices, Ford turned to a quartet of actors whom he knew would awaken emotional associations in moviegoers on an almost unconscious level. The opening narration would be spoken by Donald Crisp, the patriarch of How Green Was My Valley. The gentler narration was to be read by director Irving Pichel, whom Ford had used as Valley’s narrator. And to play the mother and the young man—the voices of America—Ford recruited his Grapes of Wrath stars Jane Darwell and Henry Fonda, who were given an afternoon off from shooting William Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident to record his two-page script. Ford further reinforced the connections to those films by asking Alfred Newman, the 20th Century Fox musical director who had overseen The Grapes of Wrath, to create a dense score that, according to Ford’s specifications, had to include “Red River Valley,” which had been used as a prominent, evocative recurring theme in Grapes.

  Ford worked with extraordinary speed and decisiveness. Six days after he arrived in Hollywood, the soundtrack and first cut of The Battle of Midway were finished. Parrish challenged the director on some of his choices, particularly the insertion, over footage of wounded sailors, of an overdubbed exclamation from Darwell—“Get those boys to the hospital!” she implores as “Onward, Christian Soldiers” plays. “Please do, quickly! Get them to clean cots and cool sheets! Get them doctors and medicine, a nurse’s soft hands! . . . Hurry, please!” Parrish felt it was mawkish and manipulative; Ford kept it in. Concerned that he might encounter bureaucratic objections if any branch of the service was underrepresented, he also had Parrish clock their relative screen time, cutting in one place and filling in another until nobody could complain of being slighted. Just when Parrish thought the movie was done, Ford handed him a small spool of film, amounting to just over three seconds, and told him to splice it into the last third of the picture during a sequence that showed a memorial service at Midway for soldiers killed in action. It was a close-up of the president’s son, James, now a major in the Marine Corps, looking solemn. The shot did not match the others; Roosevelt was looking up, not down, and the light suggested either a different time of day or different weather. Parrish said that he didn’t recall hearing that Major Roosevelt was at Midway. Ford replied that perhaps he had been there without official orders, and told him to stop asking questions.

  At Ford’s order, the completed print of the movie was taken in turn to each studio chief for private screenings. While the film played, Parrish and Jack Bolton, a lieutenant commander and early Field Photo recruit, stood by, waiting to bicycle the print to the next Hollywood lot. Bolton told Ford that, with the exception of Columbia’s Harry Cohn, who urged the director to use recreations and miniatures to make the battle scenes more vivid, the reception was “wonderful.” There would be no recreations, Ford said. The picture was finished.

  Ford returned to Washington and left the print with Parrish, telling him to arrange one more screening before bringing the movie to the capital. Gregg Toland and Sam Engel had returned from Hawaii and were now working on December 7th on the 20th Century Fox lot, filming the scripted scenes that they hoped would allow them to expand what they had already shot into a full-length feature. Ford wanted his movie screened for them and instructed Parrish to call him afterward and report their reaction. In Parrish’s telling, Toland and Engel watched The Battle of Midway silently until, when the movie was almost over, they saw that Ford had scored a burial at sea using “My Country ’Tis of Thee.” The moment felt too close to a sequence the two had excitedly described for Ford when he first arrived in Honolulu.

  “The son of a bitch stole our scenes,” Engel shouted at the screen as an ashen Toland slumped in his seat. “The bastard sabotaged our movie—everything we’ve been working on for six months.”

  When Parrish recounted what he had overheard to Ford, the director simply replied, “Maybe he’s right,” and shrugged it off, telling him to get on a plane with the movie as soon as possible. The navy was getting impatient; officers were beginning to show up at the San Fernando editing room. Parrish hid the negative under a bed in his mother’s house and flew to Washington, where he finally realized why Ford had inserted the shot of James Roosevelt. The first official screening of The Battle of Midway would not be for navy brass, but for the president, his wife, and his senior advisers. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would also attend, and Ford knew they would be watching the president as closely as the movie.

  What Roosevelt and his men saw that afternoon was perhaps the most personal, idiosyncratic, and directorially shaped movie made by any Hollywood filmmaker under the auspices of the federal government during World War II. The Battle of Midway begins with a musical collage—“My Country ’Tis of Thee” giving way to “Anchors Aweigh” and then to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “From the Halls of Montezuma” as American soldiers splash into the surf at Midway and bring the flag of the Sixth Marine Defense Battalion to the island. Then Ford cuts to the nature shots he had taken of the atoll before the attack started—the rocks, the low scrub on the horizon, and the waddling birds. “These are the natives of Midway,” the narrator drolly remarks over a Looney Tunes–like musical accompaniment. “Tojo has sworn to liberate them.” “Red River Valley” plays on accordion as the sun sets on the peculiar, unspoiled landscape and the contemplative men who have arrived there, and then, with an ominous roll of thunder, Crisp explains that an attack is coming.

  As soldiers and sailors prepare for battle, Ford introduces the chatter of Fonda and Darwell—“That fella’s walk looks familiar! . . . Why, that’s young Will Kinney! He’s from my hometown of Springfield, Ohio! He’s not gonna fly that great big bomber . . . !” “Yes, ma’am. That’s his job. He’s a skipper!” “Well, Junior Kinney! Good luck! God bless you, son.”

  When American planes start to take off from the Midway landing strip, Ford used the post-dubbed roar of their engines to eradicate the soundscape of music and voices. For the next several minutes, Roosevelt and his men saw the rawest battle footage American cameras had yet c
aptured. Buildings are set aflame; the smoke appears to turn day into night. A plane on fire spirals toward the sea. Gunfire sprays from a carrier deck; a fighter crashes in the distance. Ford used virtually every frame of actual battle footage he had, and supplemented it with shots of American flyers taking off from the carrier as the crew cheers them on from the deck. And for the first time ever, the impact of a bomb on film was presented in its most literal form; Ford chose to include several “mistakes” in which the camera was rattled so hard by an explosion that the film was jolted loose from its sprockets. All of this, with every yellow fireball and plane in blazing color against a blue sky, was so new that it would be hard for viewers accustomed to black-and-white footage to process it as “news” rather than as the latest manifestation of Hollywood technical wizardry. Ford knew that, which is why, to conclude the film’s astonishing combat sequence, he had had Irving Pichel record what would become the movie’s best-remembered line of narration. As the U.S. Navy raises the American flag at Midway, he says quietly, “Yes. This really happened.”

  Those are the only four words heard during the middle section of The Battle of Midway. After the conclusion of the combat sequence, in which Ford does not allow narration to compete with what “really happened” for the viewer’s attention, the movie recedes by degrees to the more familiar, though still deeply personal, contours of a documentary. The two narrators return—“Men and women of America, here come your neighbors’ sons, home from the day’s work! . . . There’s Jimmy Patch—seven meatballs on his plane.” (A “meatball” was a kill, presumably a reference to the Japanese flag.) Fonda and Darwell resume their conversation excitedly, with a sense that they have recovered from their own awestruck silence.

  In the last third of the movie, Ford avoids triumphalism or exultation. “The Battle of Midway is over,” Crisp says. “Our front yard is safe. But a big job is still to be done.” The film’s final minutes are notably somber and mournful, a representation of the costs, not the spoils, of war. The audience is informed that planes are still searching for men “who fought through to the last round of ammunition, and through to the last drop of gas, and then crashed into the sea.” Exhausted and wounded Americans, smiling but bandaged and bloodied, are seen being carried on stretchers to the bombed Red Cross hospital—“the symbol of mercy the enemy was bound to respect,” the narrator says, making the case that was then being drummed into American civilians and servicemen that the Japanese were particularly dangerous because they did not honor the rules of war. The final shots are devoted to a burial of “our heroic dead,” a ceremony at which a number of naval officers are identified on camera. The last of them was Major Roosevelt.* His name was the last word spoken in the movie.

  The impact of The Battle of Midway on its White House audience that day was such that nobody in the room had much time to consider what the film didn’t do, or might have done differently. Ford’s work was not explanatory or informative—he didn’t devote more than a few sentences of narration to reporting how the battle unfolded or what was at stake. The movie completely shrugged off several of the mandates that Lowell Mellett and Frank Capra had outlined; Ford was not interested in making a case about why Americans were fighting, or reiterating democratic principles, or provoking any greater anti-Japanese sentiment than its intended audience already felt. Most strikingly, he had chosen to end an account of America’s first great victory of the war on a note of elegy and loss. But such was the film’s power that any consideration of a different approach was moot. When the president saw his son onscreen, he turned to the room and said to William Leahy, his chief of staff, “I want every mother in America to see this film.” Ford had gotten his wish; the navy would not be allowed to strip The Battle of Midway for parts, and the newsreels would be scooped. Five hundred Technicolor prints were struck, and 20th Century Fox, in partnership with Hollywood’s War Activities Committee, agreed to distribute the film nationwide in September.

  Ford returned to his duties in Washington, awaiting his next posting, but he had one more job to do. The loss of Torpedo Squadron 8 still haunted him. Footage of some of the men who had died had been used to flesh out the central sequence of The Battle of Midway—a minor bit of chronological fakery, since the shots of the pilots in front of their planes had actually been filmed a couple of days before the fighting started. But Ford wanted to pay them a greater tribute. In the weeks after The Battle of Midway was finished, he assembled all of the film that had been taken of the men of the squadron—about eight minutes in total—into a reel memorializing them. He appended a set of opening titles to the footage in which he praised the men for having “written the most brilliant pages in the glowing history of our Naval Air Forces,” and made sure that each man’s brief moment on camera was preceded by a title with his name and rank. He then had the movie reduced to 8-millimeter film—a size that would allow it to run on inexpensive home-movie projectors—and had copies of Torpedo Squadron 8 hand-delivered across the country to each of the dead men’s families. He rarely spoke of what he had done, and the movie was not shown publicly for almost fifty years.

  TEN

  “Can You Use Me?”

  WASHINGTON AND HOLLYWOOD, AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1942

  Ford’s decision to keep the Japanese faceless and undefined in The Battle of Midway was less a matter of caution or sensitivity on his part than the reflection of a propaganda policy that by the summer of 1942 was hopelessly muddled and conflicted about what America’s enemy should look like on movie screens. Some in the War Department thought military films should take their cues from a new Hollywood genre the press was worriedly calling “hate pictures” and depict the Japanese not just as another race but as a virtually subhuman species of scrawny, simian death-dealers. Others believed, even in the war’s darkest days, that an Allied victory was inevitable, and that the reintegration of Japanese Americans into society would soon follow. They pressed filmmakers to pursue an alternative approach that would present the Japanese as a simple, primitive people who had been hypnotized by a spooky, ghost-filled religion—Shintoism—and by megalomaniacal leaders bent on world domination. But even within that faction, a rift opened between those who felt that in War Department propaganda, Emperor Hirohito should serve to embody a nation’s evil just as Hitler and Mussolini did for most Americans, and others who contended that since Hirohito would likely remain in power even after the war, it would be wiser to use General Tojo as the face of Japan’s lust for conquest. That was met with the counterargument that “Americans . . . will be better haters—and thus better fighters and workers—if they are not beclouded with the false idea that the enemy is a bunch of poor, misguided people who deserve more pity than bullets and bombs.”

  The conundrum of how to handle Japan was threatening to stop Capra in his tracks just as he was starting work on his new Know Your Enemy series. He had proposed three films that would explain to American fighting men the cultural, military, and sociological history of the people and armies of Japan, Germany, and Italy. As his roster of projects grew, he had become frustrated by the fact that the writers and directors he needed were a continent away, and also by the endless negotiation it took to get Hollywood to free them up and the army to pay for them. In July, he convinced General Osborn to let him move his unit from Washington to Los Angeles, where Darryl Zanuck agreed to rent him an unused 20th Century Fox stage on Western Avenue for a dollar a year. Osborn told Capra that “so far as it means we would see you less often, we all regret the necessity for you being out there,” but he added warmly, “We know that the films you will bring out will carry a hallmark of quality. . . . If they fall short of what you could do with more time and less difficulties thrown in your way, that is just part of the war and don’t let it worry you.”

  Capra was heartened by the endorsement of his efforts—Osborn promoted him to lieutenant colonel in August—and he was elated to be back home in California, where he could preside over his own, bureaucracy-free kingdom. He rallied his
troops on the empty lot that had been nicknamed “Fort Fox,” telling them, “Some carping individuals will accuse you of fighting ‘the Battle of Hollywood.’ Don’t argue with them. This is a total war fought with every conceivable weapon. Your weapon is film! Your bombs are ideas! Hollywood is a war plant!”

  But if that was the case, the bombs weren’t going off, and what the plant was manufacturing was of questionable value. Hollywood no more knew how to depict the Japanese than Washington did, and, left to their own devices, the studios chose approaches that were at best obvious and at worst savagely racist. At Columbia, Harry Cohn took Capra’s own 1937 film Lost Horizon, cut twenty-five minutes out of it, and rereleased it in an attempt to capitalize on an offhand joke President Roosevelt had made that the American army had built “a secret base at Shangri-La” from which to attack Tokyo. What had been made as a fantasy about a Himalayan utopia was now being resold as propaganda, with a tacked-on prologue explicitly setting it during the Sino-Japanese War. And 20th Century Fox had just completed a low-budget picture called Little Tokyo, U.S.A., that traded on the conviction that a Japanese nest of covert agents had operated in the United States for a decade. The movie portrayed Japanese Americans as part of “a vast army of volunteer spies” whose members posed as flower merchants and friendly, quasi-assimilated citizens while actually operating in robotic allegiance to what one thickly accented character calls “our revered home-rand.” As they plot to destroy the Los Angeles water system, they sneer that America’s “stupid complacency will aid us greatly,” and ominously prognosticate “the end of the white man’s domination.” The movie’s hero, a Los Angeles cop, calls them “an Oriental Bund” numbering twenty-five thousand in Los Angeles alone—“half-pint connivers” who are “getting ready to tear us apart.” A voice-over batters away at the point, warning moviegoers that America must not be lulled into a “false sense of security” since it already “slept at the switch once.”