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

by Mark Harris

  The script that Huston and Capra submitted to the War Department still retained some of the most overheated language from earlier versions, including narration suggesting that within Japan, the United States was characterized as “a fatuous booby with much money and much sentiment, but no cohesion . . . an immense melon, ripe for the cutting” and a voice-over adding that the average Japanese soldier “hates everybody who is not Japanese, particularly Americans. . . . Above all, he is a murderous fanatic” in the thrall of a religion that has “already brought suffering and death to untold millions.”

  Remarkably, the first response Huston received from the army was that he had not gone far enough. The Pentagon sent back a note attached to his draft in which it faulted the script for expressing “too much sympathy for the Jap people.” In particular, a line that acknowledged the existence of some “free-thinking” Japanese citizens would have to go. Impatient to get the movie finished, Capra decided to pull Huston off the project. Almost three years after he conceived it, he would write the final draft of Know Your Enemy—Japan himself.

  TWENTY-THREE

  “Time and Us Marches On”

  FRANCE, BELGIUM, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, AND ENGLAND, JULY 1944–JANUARY 1945

  The U.S. Army was getting closer to Paris every day, but not quickly enough for George Stevens. As he and his unit moved through France with the 4th Infantry Division in the summer of 1944, they were judicious about what they chose to photograph. With no opportunity to replenish their limited supply of film, they knew they had to conserve their resources for the liberation of the city that lay ahead. But during the advance, Stevens still wanted to document the ongoing capture of tens of thousands of German soldiers—some of them resigned, some relieved, only a few defiant—as they surrendered and were taken to the rear, where they were kept in makeshift roadside camps. By late July, the Allies were just two hundred miles from Paris; they had reached the bombed city of Coutances, where they drove the occupying German forces out after a siege of airstrikes. They were soon joined by Ernest Hemingway, who had been assigned by Collier’s magazine to follow the army through France.

  The mood of the Allies that summer was determined and, if not yet jubilant, extraordinarily optimistic. They knew that Paris would be retaken in a matter of weeks, and word had come to them that they would face little opposition. But the closer they got to the outskirts of the city, the more certain Stevens became that unless he took decisive action, he would miss everything that was worth filming. He had no ambition to make a stand-alone documentary the way that Wyler and Ford and Huston had, but the memory of traveling halfway around the world to record the North African campaign only to arrive after it had ended still stung. Stevens believed more than ever that his role was to document what happened as it happened, and knew that this time he would have to fight simply to make sure he had his SPECOU team’s cameras in the right place at the right time.

  The liberation of Paris and the arrest of various German and Vichy officials there would not in itself require a major military campaign; the Allies already knew that fiercer and more sustained fighting would likely come in their subsequent advance east to the French-German border at the Rhine. But the importance of retaking the capital more than four years after it had fallen to the Nazis was without parallel as an announcement to the world of Hitler’s weakened position. When it became clear that Eisenhower was going to allow the Free French, led by General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd Armored Division, to enter the city first, with American troops to follow, Stevens asked for, and received, permission for his unit to jump armies. He would drive in with the French, not the Americans, and film liberation day as it happened.

  On the road into the city, Stevens, as always, kept his cameras poised for the poignant, idiosyncratic, or surprising detail—a wide field covered in wooden posts that had been stuck into the earth to prevent enemy gliders from landing, a young GI giving an older soldier a quick haircut on the shoulder of the road, a dwarf in a jester’s cap walking casually away from a jeep full of amused GIs. Alone among his colleagues, he also took a few moments to document the behind-the-scenes work of the Signal Corps crews themselves; he filmed his men loading, cleaning, and preparing their cameras, and they in turn filmed him giving them instructions, chatting with soldiers, and reading to and ruffling the hair of a little French boy not much younger than George Jr.

  On the night of August 24, Stevens and the 2nd Armored were camped a few miles outside of Paris. They had halted their advance at about 2 a.m. and planned to take the city at dawn in order to avoid nighttime snipers. Once the army arrived at the edge of the city the next morning, Stevens and his men no longer had to look for surprising moments; they just filmed the history unfolding in front of their eyes, in what became some of the most well-remembered images captured by American filmmakers during the war. When footage of the citizens of Paris pouring out of their homes and shops, filling the streets and weeping and shouting for joy, reached American movie screens, the shots served as a symbolic bookend to images of the broken and sobbing populace that Americans had seen when the city fell to Hitler in 1940. This time, the men and women threw bouquets of wildflowers and cheered; they held their babies up to be kissed and waved flags from their windows. They pulled shy, grinning soldiers off their cars and tanks to hug them, and some of the bolder GIs reciprocated by pulling the girls up onto the jeeps for a short ride alongside them. It was, Stevens told his son, the greatest day of his life.

  “One knew at the time it was going to be the most exhilarating day,” said Ivan Moffat. “I mean, it couldn’t help but be, particularly as we thought that the war was pretty much over and that the Germans were in headlong retreat. . . . The atmosphere was . . . intoxicating, exhilarating, with these thousands and thousands of people embracing us, embracing each other under an absolutely brilliant sky, Paris looking absolutely marvelous, not at all shabby . . . an atmosphere almost like a bullfight.”

  Stevens’s instincts as a director took over immediately. In Hollywood, his style had been internal and deliberative; here, it was intuitive, swiftly decisive, and all-encompassing. Every scene of military might and ceremony made it into the film he sent home—the tanks and trucks, along with an endless procession of soldiers on foot, coming down the Champs-Elysées past the Arc de Triomphe; de Gaulle, Bradley, and Montgomery standing on a small portable bridge that had been turned into a makeshift reviewing stand; flowers being placed at the memorial for the Unknown French Soldier of the First World War. But for posterity, he made sure that his men documented scenes of anger and retribution as well, even knowing that they would probably be too raw for use in newsreels. In one sequence, French civilians angrily shove and pull at German officers and Vichy officials as they’re marched out of a truck. In another, a woman, her hair crudely chopped off and her face covered with dirt, is pushed around and taunted by a seething crowd; someone has drawn swastikas on her cheeks and forehead. Stevens’s men were even able to shoot some unexpected action: A handful of Germans who refused to surrender were still firing from some rooftops, and their cameras caught it. “He didn’t have to do it,” Moffat recalled. “The whole situation was exposed to danger . . . and he wasn’t frightened. . . . When there was sniper fire and so forth breaking out and one of the drivers tumbled out of the Jeep and went and hid behind a tree . . . George came out from under cover and drove the Jeep off the road himself.”

  Stevens left no doubt who was in charge, capping the day with an extraordinary act of brio. He had set up his equipment inside the Montparnasse railway station to photograph the official German surrender, in which General Dietrich von Choltitz, who had been the military governor of Paris for just two weeks, would turn over his power to General Leclerc and be taken into custody. Stevens wanted to be certain that the exact moment at which Paris became a free city again was recorded, and when the surrender was completed, he worried that the low indoor light in which it had taken place would render the film unusable. He told Choltitz, Leclerc,
and de Gaulle that he needed them to do it again, this time in the bright daylight of the street just outside the station. Fortified by a few drinks, Stevens barked at Choltitz, “C’est la guerre, General, c’est la guerre!” All three men agreed to his request, and Stevens’s “second take” of the handover was the one shown around the world.

  After so many nights spent in tents, camps, and foxholes since June, Stevens was tired, but in Paris his spirits soared. For the first time in weeks, he could wash his clothes and sleep in a bed. Irwin Shaw bet him that the war would be over in two months; Ernest Hemingway poured champagne and announced that he had just “liberated” the bar of the Ritz hotel, which only weeks earlier had been Luftwaffe headquarters. On September 1, Stevens wrote to Yvonne for the first time in two weeks. “The days and nights all ran over themselves and became pretty much one thing: The struggle to get to Paris . . . with the responsibility of getting in first thing and photographing the activity,” he explained. “That we did, but the doing and the two weeks before were the most exciting, the most unbelievable time of my life. Including some of the great moments with you my little angel. . . . The morning that we came into Paris was the wildest thing that I have ever seen. The civilians lined the streets and went mad as the tanks and armored cars came in. They stood in the streets and cheered as the shooting went on all around them. Our jeeps brought in the first cameras and I believe the first American flag, which we got from a Frenchman just outside the city. Then at the break of day we were off and three hours later after a ride that [western movie stuntman] Yakima Canutt would have wanted $500 to do, we stood under the Eiffel Tower, but not for long. . . . More of a ride through town then we holed up in a railroad station, stood off the last attack that Natzies [sic] made before they surrendered. . . . There is much I could tell you and will in further letters but I do hope you and Georgie have seen the newsreels that carried our film. We have heard that the films of the liberation of Paris were the best ever taken of anything like that. We are completely exhausted at the moment and hoping to get a chance for a few days rest but time and us marches on.”

  Within a week the Allies were on the move again, and Stevens and his team rejoined the American forces and traveled with them as they went east; the plan was to cross over into Luxembourg, then Belgium, and then northern Germany. As the army rolled across liberated France, Stevens felt inspired by every new destination. Arriving in Reims, he visited a champagne factory and started to think, for the first time since he had entered the war, about returning to Hollywood filmmaking—perhaps even to romantic comedy, something about the bottles of bubbly he saw that day. “For whom was [each bottle] destined?” he wrote in his journal. “For a wedding? For a romance? Would it excite some poor mortal into an act that would change the whole course of his life? . . . When and where would they be opened in 1947 [or] perhaps 1967? What a story if one could just sit in that dark cave and foresee. A delightful movie could be made . . . so provocative to the imagination. . . . Enough speculation for one day. We drove on in the evening. It was very cold and we put on our Army greatcoats and stopped beside the road to Verdun and had cheese from a K-ration and cut a loaf of ‘du pain.’”

  Stevens kept his cameras at the ready at all times. As they approached the border and the weather got worse, beginning what was to be the coldest European autumn and winter in twenty years, he grew somber. He filmed fields of white crosses and, here and there, Stars of David, row upon row of open graves that had been dug for Allied soldiers and civilians who had been killed in airstrikes. He also photographed the returning refugees he saw, sometimes alone, sometimes in twos and threes, trudging along the road toward the soldiers, bundled in the few clothes they owned, carrying whatever they could hold in a suitcase as they walked back into France. His unit had acquired a dog that followed them from town to town, capering for the cameras and begging for scraps of rations. His health began to suffer again; sleeping outdoors after long and arduous days was taking its toll. He was smoking constantly, and as the air got colder his asthma worsened. In just a few months, he aged visibly.

  In early October, the Allies crossed into Luxembourg, where Stevens filmed a group of Axis collaborators in the country’s main prison. “It is a wet day,” he wrote in his journal, “and a good one for the photography of such a cheap yarn. When they march these prisoners through the streets, a little boy about ten marches bravely in the front rank. Probably his father is the prisoner marching by his side.”

  What remained of the SPECOU team was exhausted. Shaw’s bet was now a distant memory, a childishly exuberant prediction made in the elated aftermath of a single victory. The war was nowhere near over, and with every day that the troops dragged themselves through another few miles of ice and mud, the end seemed farther away, not closer. Supplies were scarce, but alcohol was plentiful, and there was always more to be had in the next village. The men in Stevens’s unit drank constantly and often excessively. “My new Jeep driver . . . came in drunk at 2 o’clock,” he wrote. “He wanted to talk to the Colonel. Tell me what he liked and what he did not like about the outfit. He is the third one of these old Army boys who has done the same thing. I generally try to have an enlisted man deal with a drunk enlisted man, because a drunk does not know how to take an order to do what he should do for his own good, and such an incident provokes serious countermeasures.”

  As the army moved into Belgium, Stevens had a strange and unexpected encounter with his former life. “I came upon a theater in this little town the Germans had just left,” he said, “and they were showing Gunga Din! The kids were more interested in the film than they were in the Sherman tanks going through the damned town!” Hollywood beckoned, but distantly and faintly. Letters from colleagues in the industry would reach him weeks after they were written, and the news they shared felt remote. “Though you have been out of circulation,” his agent Charles Feldman told him, “not a week goes by but that some producer calls me in, attempting to discuss with me a possible deal for you upon your being released from the service.” Stevens wasn’t interested; like Capra, he did not at that moment envision following years in the army and an eventual victory over Hitler with a return to the oppression of a studio contract. Feldman put out some feelers nonetheless. “Jack Warner says he will make you a most attractive proposition,” he wrote. “Darryl feels you belong at his studio. . . . Naturally . . . I tell them that I feel quite sure that George Stevens Productions will have to be set up in a most independent manner and under the best possible percentage terms and guarantees ever dished out.”

  It was almost November when Stevens set foot on German soil for the first time, when the Allies crossed from Belgium into Aachen, the westernmost city in Germany. Eisenhower had thought it would be the site of an easy victory, but resistance was fierce and there were thousands of casualties on both sides in a three-week battle that virtually destroyed the all but evacuated town. The victory had been won by the time Stevens crossed the border, and he mailed home souvenirs—a piece of a silk parachute that had been used in the initial invasion, a German soldier’s belt, and anything else he could grab that he thought might interest his son. “The big Nazi flag is of value since it was taken by us at the surrender of . . . the first big German city to fall,” he wrote to George Jr. “The two flashlights are very good. . . . They belonged to German soldiers. Take your pick. . . . The three Hitler stamps were laying along side of the body of a dead German officer, who was killed fighting in the cemetery at Aachen.”

  Stevens’s approach to his duties rankled some who served with him. The battle for Aachen had been a significant one—the first moment that the Allies were fighting the Nazis on their home turf—but his unit had not sent home any combat footage for the newsreels; Stevens, who was sometimes thought even by the soldiers who served under him to be overprotective of his men, had grown more worried about their safety since Paris. He had kept them in the rear, well away from the fighting lines. The extensive work he had done filming the drive forward throu
gh France into Europe did not impress some in the army who felt his only job was to photograph victories that could be spliced together into newsreel-ready packages. Stevens received little guidance from Washington until November, when a letter from Capra that was both self-flattering and undermining arrived. “I’ve been hoping against hope to get a letter from you,” he wrote to Stevens, “but you seem to be as allergic to writing as I am. George, I want you to know that as always, I personally have the greatest confidence in, and admiration for your ability and devotion to your job. . . . There has been much criticism of your outfit by returning ‘heroes.’ I never believed a goddam word of it and said so plenty. But some of it stuck, particularly when I was away. . . . Unfortunately, I’ve been so swamped with top priority work that I haven’t been able to pay much attention to what is going on in the [war] theatres. Stick to it George, and please know that you have guys here that are pulling and pitching for you, even though it must seem to you that at times you and your gang are forgotten men.”

  Capra had a personal reason for getting in touch with Stevens; he wanted him as an equity partner in his new company Liberty Films after the war ended. Capra was the wealthiest director in Hollywood, but his plans for Liberty were on such a large scale that he knew he would need another couple of directors to cofinance the venture, and he assumed that Stevens—who for years had worked in the same kind of restrictive atmosphere at RKO as Capra had at Columbia—would probably be just as eager to go independent as he was. Stevens wrote him back expressing “great joy in mudville” at his letter, telling him he was completely unconcerned about being the object of backbiting in Washington, and thanked him for “the kind and stimulating things you directed to me personally. . . . I at no time had any doubt that you felt I was carrying on here as expertly as it was possible to do.” But he told Capra he wasn’t ready to make a decision about his postwar future yet, and asked if they could talk more about Liberty when he got back to the United States.