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

by Mark Harris

  The day after Ford left France, Stevens took out his pocket journal and, for the first time since D-Day, made an entry, which he labeled, “D+16.” “Second morning in marshaling area,” he wrote. “Clear and bright morning after a very cold nite. Used the little sleeping bag that we picked up for the Navy job (D-Day). Procured personal carbine.”

  Stevens and his men had spent many of the days right after the Allied landing in tents they pitched over foxholes that they dug behind an airfield. In close quarters of a kind he had never experienced before, he got to know the soldiers under his command—and they, in turn, tried to figure him out. Ivan Moffat later remembered him as “a very volatile, moody man, capable of tremendous laughter and a good deal of anger, quite easily upset, changeable from hour to hour. . . . He [was] a man of a good deal of a curious kind of half-amused, wry jealousy or pseudo-jealousy, sometime pretended, sometimes not.” That may have been particular to his relationship with Moffat, an urbane, ambitious, and slightly show-offy young T/5 (a technician fifth grade, equal to a corporal) who was the only man under Stevens able to speak fluent French. At first, Stevens appreciated Moffat’s skill; then it started to grate on him; then, unsure what Moffat was saying at any given moment, he banned the speaking of French in his presence altogether. Moffat responded by writing a few lines of doggerel in which he joked about the new restrictions, and he showed them to his fellow soldiers. When Stevens saw the verse, “he laughed,” said Moffat, “and after that the rule was no longer enforced.”

  Stevens was “forgiving,” said Irwin Shaw. “There was none of the spit-and-polish martinet about him. And the guys really liked him—the discipline in his unit was very high, very good.” But his men didn’t know what made him tick any more than the actors on his Hollywood sets had. Stevens, playing off a popular caricature, would tell them that his Native American heritage—often mentioned, never confirmed—was responsible for his unreadable expression. More likely, it was Stevens’s way of using social discomfort to his advantage. Keeping his men uncertain about how he might react to them was his awkward way of asserting control. “He was taciturn, always grave-looking,” said Shaw, “even when he was cracking jokes.”

  The safety of his men was a constant concern, even though after the first few days they were out of the line of fire, though not out of proximate danger. The French coastline and some of the roads were still rigged with tripwires and booby traps; one of Stevens’s diary entries from late June was a set of roughly jotted sketches of what disguised land mines might look like. But what was foremost in Stevens’s mind was his assignment, and he surprised some of the men in his SPECOU unit when he made it clear that he believed their role was not only to document combat but to create a record of the entire campaign—what the Nazis had done to France, what the shelled villages and roads looked like, how the injured were treated. Stevens had never been to France, and if he occasionally had a tourist’s interest in what he saw, so did many of the wide-eyed American GIs who were then marching into Europe; he intended to document the war through their eyes, and to follow his own instincts about what to shoot as well.

  Early on, he wondered if he was straying too far from his original assignment. He was, after all, in the army in part as a propagandist; a year earlier, he had found himself in North Africa, staging a fake war in the spot where a real one had just been fought, in order to make Americans feel that they were winning. Now he was in the middle of a war being waged on a scale that would defy the ability of any filmmaker to tidy it up or turn it into a simple narrative of perseverance or bravery leading to inevitable victory. His only responsibility aside from protecting his men was, he believed, to shoot what he saw, and shoot it the way he saw it. As he stood with Moffat at a crossroads in the rustic cheesemaking town of Isigny-sur-Mer watching Allied supply convoys rumble along the cratered, bomb-blasted roads, he was struck by the juxtaposition of the machinery of war coming to save the day in an almost bucolic village that the machinery of war had all but destroyed just a few days earlier, and immediately thought of lifting up his camera as the trucks rolled through. “I’d love to take a few reels of that, just for future record,” he told Moffat.

  “Why don’t you, Colonel?”

  “And ship them back to the War Department?” said Stevens. “They’d think I’d gone nuts.”

  For the most part, though, Stevens gave himself license to film whenever he had the impulse, and the result was a kind of home-movie account of France after D-Day that remains the most detailed visual document of those critical weeks. He had his men photograph two French townsmen holding up their flag in front of a wrecked building; Stevens can be seen showing them how to do it and then giving them the “OK” hand sign. The SPECOU unit filmed a wounded American soldier on a stretcher inside a coffinlike crate being lifted onto the deck of a ship with a grappling hook. They shot Stevens and another soldier digging what appears to be a grave in a grassy field; they shot a young GI chatting with an old Frenchman in front of a torn wall poster, a little French boy chasing after Stevens and Bill Mellor as they walked down a road, the American flag being raised next to the French one in the open balcony window of a home in a newly freed town. They photographed the shell of a ruined cathedral at twilight and roofless schoolhouses silhouetted against the afternoon sky. They shot camouflaged tanks rolling out of the woods, and GIs opening their rations and digging through their gear looking for packs of Camel cigarettes. And whenever he saw them, Stevens would have his men film road signs to orient viewers as they passed through dozens of tiny hamlets and villages.

  Stevens had his unit look for the funny, the incongruous, the idiosyncratic, and the unexpected. “He would never go about anything very directly,” Moffat wrote. “If there was something to be seen that a crowd was looking at, he would always look at the crowd looking at the scene. His was always the sense of indirection.”

  By July 4, 1944, the SPECOU team had been entrenched for a couple of weeks at Allied army HQ in Carentan, a small town near Cherbourg a little less than a mile back from enemy lines. There, Stevens filmed medal ceremonies involving Patton, Bradley, and British general Bernard Montgomery, and color footage of GIs relaxing, sunbathing, reading old issues of Life magazine, and eagerly opening letters from home. They had put up a sign at the entrance to their campground that featured mileage markers and directional arrows pointing toward New York, Paris, London, and “Shirley (4500 miles).” The men in Stevens’s unit are identifiable in the candid film by the yellow-on-black sleeve patches they wore, which read “Official US War Photographer.” At Patton and Bradley’s instructions, Stevens and his men would accompany the army for the next two months as it moved southwest from Carentan to Brittany and then west toward Paris. It was on this 450-mile journey along often dangerous roads that Stevens started to collect the images that would define for a nation of moviegoers the Allied push into Europe and the turning tide it represented. They were exactly the pictures that John Huston had hoped to find and instead ended up manufacturing in San Pietro—ecstatic villagers emerging from their shattered homes to greet the American liberators, young women throwing flowers, children scampering alongside the convoys hoping for a chocolate bar. His cameras also captured images of the dangers American soldiers faced—GIs can be seen jumping and scattering after a land mine in the middle of a road detonates unexpectedly.

  Stevens filmed the dead as well, in footage so disturbing it never reached the screen. He photographed French civilians, the victims of bombings, lying along a country road, his cameras not lingering on the images but holding on them long enough so that the lifeless eyes and expressions of slight, openmouthed surprise would haunt anyone who saw them. And no matter what his men encountered, if they were holding cameras, Stevens’s orders to them were to do their job and never look away. Soon after the army began its push toward Brittany, the team came upon a pair of dead soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms. “They were near a farmhouse,” Shaw said. “They’d been abandoned on stretchers by their own
medical corps guys. They were all mangled, and both very young, and . . . we took pictures.” The SPECOU team had been told that the Germans would sometimes wire the corpses of their own soldiers with explosives or place them on top of land mines. “We all warned everybody, stay away, don’t touch,” said Shaw. “So George got a big stick and poked them. It [was] macabre. Just to make sure . . . so we could get closeups and all that. I think they were the first Germans we’d seen since the beach.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “If Hitler Can Hold Out, So Can I”

  HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, JULY–DECEMBER 1944

  In July, John Ford got the Araner back. The navy had chartered his boat right after Pearl Harbor, painting it black for camouflage and then using it to lead a fleet that watched for submarines off the California coast. Ford had turned over the ketch for a promised fee of one dollar plus permission to fly the flag of the Naval Reserve permanently after it was returned to him. He never collected the dollar, but he did fly the flag.

  Although he was still officially on active duty, Ford, back in the United States after D-Day, was removed with jolting swiftness from the role he had had in the navy until then. A return to the front was not in the offing; he was in his office in Washington, D.C., in early August, then in Los Angeles with his family for two weeks, then in the capital again with nothing much to do for Field Photo or the OSS. The war in Europe continued with escalating intensity, but he would not be a part of it. His service was over, and he was, in some ways, desperate to have something to show for it. Ford’s relationship with honors for his work had always combined feigned indifference with intense need; he had not shown up to collect any of his three Academy Awards for Best Director, but they had mattered so much to him that he had taken to telling people he had actually won four, counting the Oscar for December 7th even though he didn’t direct it. Awards were a validation, a benchmark of recognition, and a yardstick of comparative success; they were also, even in the 1940s, the object of unseemly obsession in Hollywood.

  That may explain why, even before his time in the military had officially ended, Ford became what his daughter called a “ribbon freak.” He wanted a Silver Star, which was given to members of the armed forces for “gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States,” and he asked the secretary of the navy to approve one for him. He also wanted a Distinguished Service Medal, which Frank Capra was soon to receive, a Naval Reserve Ribbon, given to men who had spent ten years in the Reserve, and a second Purple Heart to go with the one he had gotten after Midway; he claimed he was eligible because he had received an injury during a London bombing and explained that unfortunately he could not remember the name of the doctor who had treated him. He even asked for a Croix de Guerre from Belgium. For Ford, such decorations were among the only indices of bravery and valor he could trust, in part because he believed that they would provide a kind of proof toward posterity. In the fall, he received word that Junius Stout, one of his young Field Photo cameramen, had been killed. Stout had been atop one of the huge floating rectangular artificial breakwaters that had been towed in to Omaha Beach as part of the Mulberry harbor; he had survived that only to be shot down while flying back to England to be commissioned as an officer. Twenty years later, when Ford spoke of Stout’s death, medals were still foremost in his mind. He said, “He did a fine job riding that big box—he got a Silver Star for it.”

  Even members of his own family thought Ford’s quest for military honors was “shameless,” but it may have come from a desire to quell his own fear that he had not done enough. He had seen so many men risk—and sometimes lose—their lives in the line of duty that he needed some form of tangible evidence that his own work in the navy had meant something. And although he had now firmly decided to make They Were Expendable for MGM, he was terribly concerned that the movie be seen as an extension, not a termination, of his service. In his request to the War Department to be placed on inactive status, he wrote, “The picture would have a big Navy motif which at the present would be very timely,” and promised that he would return to work for the OSS as soon as it was completed. At the same time, he needed to make his navy colleagues believe that his departure was happening involuntarily and against his better judgment. “I have been ordered to Hollywood to do a commercial picture . . . and I am leaving tonight,” he wrote to Albert Wedemeyer, the general under whom he had served during his OSS trip to Burma and China. “While I will at least get a chance to spend Christmas with the folks and play with my grandson’s electric train, still I’m a bit ashamed that a great warrior like me should be in mockie-land while the good people are fighting. . . . I am getting a big chunk of dough for the picture, which I am turning over into a trust fund. . . . That at least clears my conscience a bit.”

  Ford was telling the truth about the money—although the widely published reports that he would be paid $300,000, “the highest salary yet given a Hollywood film director for one picture,” appear to have been hyperbolic; the somewhat lower six-figure salary he did receive was a sum that no director but Capra had yet been paid. And Ford did, as promised, place the money in trust, but he omitted from his public statements the fact that he had no choice: The memory of Zanuck’s vilification by a congressional committee for failing to put his Fox holdings in trust while in the army was still fresh, and long as Ford was an officer, even one on inactive duty, the armed forces would not be happy if he pocketed an extravagant salary for a civilian job.

  Ford decided to use the money he would be paid to fund a sustained act of charity; he spent $65,000 to buy an eight-acre plot of land in Reseda, California, from Sam Briskin, a Columbia Pictures executive and close associate of Frank Capra. On the property, Ford established what he called “the Farm,” a large clubhouse and private resort that he created as a refuge for the veterans of his Field Photo Unit; it included a bar, a pool, tennis and badminton courts, and six bedrooms, including one that was permanently reserved for Bill Donovan. The Farm’s multiple functions were a direct expression of Ford’s competing instincts for veneration and sentiment, grandiosity and generosity. It was in part a memorial, with the names of a dozen men in Field Photo who had died inscribed on the wall of an adjoining chapel. It was also an attempt to recreate the all-male, alcohol-saturated camaraderie of the Emerald Bay Yacht Club, his Hollywood getaway between movies in the years before the war. And, like Emerald Bay, the Farm was operated under archly ceremonial bylaws devised by Ford that included an annual parade and a specification that women would be allowed to visit on only one day a year. Not incidentally, it was also a shrine to Ford himself, with pictures and records of his accomplishments prominently adorning the walls.*

  The press gave extensive coverage to Ford’s decision to fund the Farm—which was formally called the Field Photo Memorial Home—reporting, with excessive generosity, that he would forgo his salary from MGM in order to create a “rehabilitation and benefit fund” for “former Hollywood studio technicians . . . in various war theatres.” (The rehabilitative function of the Farm was dubious, and in later years Ford angrily rebuffed a suggestion from Robert Parrish that he turn it from a luxe hideaway into low-cost veterans’ housing.) The news stories also ended up burnishing “Commander Ford”’s already secure public reputation as a war hero by making it clear that he would be back on active duty in the navy as soon as his picture was finished.

  His plan was met with considerably more skepticism by his old boss Zanuck. Ford had spent most of his career under contract to 20th Century Fox and still owed the studio one more picture; when Zanuck heard that his return to work would be at MGM instead, he was furious. Ford hadn’t even called Zanuck himself to discuss his decision; he had simply sent word that since They Were Expendable was to be made while he was still on duty and the navy itself was cooperating with the picture, his contractual obligation to resume his work for Fox once his service was over did not yet apply. Pleading for sympathy, he also told a go-between at the studio to let Zanuck know that he had just return
ed from Europe in order to “recuperate from shock and wounds sustained in combat.” Zanuck, who knew the director’s propensity for self-aggrandizement better than anyone in Hollywood, replied, “I do not choose to believe all the facts as related by Ford, including the wounds.” But he was unwilling to play the role of a studio overlord thwarting such a public act of patriotism and charity, so he gritted his teeth and told Ford he could make the movie.

  In the fall of 1944, Capra was also looking toward Hollywood. “What are you going to do after the war?” had become a commonplace conversational opener among stateside officers who believed that victory was in the offing, and Harry Warner’s barb about the dangers of being forgotten if he stayed away too long had clearly struck home. In late summer, he had signed to produce a movie called The Flying Irishman and asked Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, the couple that had recently taken a crack at Know Your Enemy—Japan, to write the script. Capra had conceived the project as a tribute of sorts to Eric Knight, whose death in 1943 remained the most personally painful loss he had suffered since the war began. Knight had published a series of fanciful, interconnected short stories called The Flying Yorkshireman about an English immigrant to America who could fly, and Capra thought it would make a good vehicle for the twinkly character actor Barry Fitzgerald, who had become a household name after the success of Going My Way. Capra had bought the rights a couple of years earlier, refusing to surrender them no matter how long the war continued—“if Hitler can hold out,” he told his agent, “so can I.” He hadn’t decided yet whether he would direct the picture himself, but he felt more than ready to return to work. The idea of studio servitude, however, held no appeal for him; after so many years at Columbia, he had been without a contract since Meet John Doe, and he found that it suited him. The war had postponed but not altered his plans to become a completely independent producer-director, and in August he began discussions with Sam Briskin about forming a new company, to be called Liberty Films, that would allow him complete autonomy.