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

by Mark Harris

  When Wyler went back to Italy, Sturges asked him to try to get some aerial footage of the damage done by bombers to Rome and to Corsica, where the fleet of Thunderbolts in their movie was based. Although he couldn’t do it from an actual Thunderbolt, he didn’t need to, since this wasn’t supposed to be the record of a particular bombing but just a chance to flesh out the movie with what Wyler called “atmosphere shots.” The film could be shot by any cameraman who was willing to lie in the bottom—the “waist”—of a B-25, an American twin-engine bomber that was ideal for aerial photography, since it was low-flying and had plenty of openings through which to shoot with no obstruction.

  On April 4, 1945, the afternoon of the first night of Passover, Wyler boarded a B-25 bound for Grosseto, the city about a hundred miles northwest of Rome where the Allied Italian headquarters were now located. The plan was to make several runs back and forth over Corsica and then along the bomb-scarred Italian coast in order to give him a chance to shoot all the film he needed, then to drop an army captain off in Rome, and then to land in Grosseto, where Wyler would get off. He decided not to risk the possibility that a cameraman would fail to get the images he wanted; at some point during the flight, he crawled into the belly of the plane himself with an Eyemo, lay down, and started to shoot. The roar of the engines and the high shriek of the wind in the open plane caused him to lose his hearing, but he wasn’t worried; it wasn’t the first time that had happened. He would do what he usually did—wait for his ears to open up when the plane descended.

  Wyler didn’t realize anything was wrong until, shortly before the sun went down, the B-25 landed at Grosseto. When he stepped out of the plane, his ears still hadn’t popped, and he couldn’t find his balance or walk a straight line. “I thought it was nothing,” he said. “A lot of times, you step out of an airplane, and you can’t hear for a while.” He tried to smile when the airmen on the landing strip saw him and started imitating his drunken reel, but hours later, after he was indoors and far from the engine noise, his hearing had not returned.

  A surgeon at Grosseto examined him. “This is serious,” he said, and ordered that he be taken to a navy hospital as soon as possible. The next day, he was flown to Naples, where doctors examined him and wrote down their verdict so he could read it: His time in the army was over. And so was his time in the air; Wyler was told he could not risk another flight. Five days later, he was put aboard a ship bound from Naples to Boston. He was going home. And he was deaf.

  On April 20, the telephone rang at the Wyler home in Los Angeles. When Talli picked it up, she heard her husband on the other end of the line, but if she had not known he was calling, she might not have recognized his voice. Wyler had cabled her that he was on his way home, but he hadn’t told her the extent of the damage to his ears—something he didn’t yet know himself. For more than a week, he had been on a ship, alone, waiting to see if he could discern any improvement. A few days into the crossing, a tiny bit of hearing had returned in his left ear, but by the time he disembarked in Boston, it was clear to him that he was not getting better, and he plunged into depression.

  “Instead of a happy voice, I heard an absolutely dead voice, toneless, without emotions, totally depressed,” Talli said. “I was stunned and shocked and couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong. He sounded totally unlike himself, terribly disturbed. He talked as if his life was over, not only his career.”

  Wyler told his wife not to bother traveling east, and also said that he wasn’t coming home yet. He hung up and took a train to New York, where he entered an air force hospital at Mitchell Field on Long Island. Doctors examined him and told him that he had irreparable nerve damage in his right ear. They suggested that he have his adenoids removed, but they were not encouraging about the likelihood that the operation would do much to improve his condition.

  Wyler couldn’t bear the idea of a visit from Talli or his young daughters, and the few old friends he allowed to come to Mitchell Field to see him found a shattered man. “I’d never seen anybody in such a real state of horror,” said Lillian Hellman. “He was sure his career was over, he would never direct again.” They were, said Wyler, the “worst weeks of my life.”

  When the army doctors told him that there was little more they could do for him and released him from the hospital, suggesting that he might do better to see specialists in Washington, D.C., or in California, Wyler tried to resume his life. He took a train to the capital, checked in with some old colleagues at the War Department, and looked into the progress of Koenig’s new and improved draft of Thunderbolt. He still couldn’t hear, but he had at least regained his balance. From the capital, he called Talli and told her he would be home soon; he was taking the train from Washington to Los Angeles.

  Talli picked him up at Union Station. “He was terribly thin,” she said. “He wasn’t eating. His face was so drawn I almost didn’t recognize him.” Seeing her husband, she realized, for the first time, how serious his condition was. “You had to talk directly into his left ear,” she told Wyler biographer Jan Herman. “And you had to speak with great clarity or he couldn’t understand you. He felt very isolated.”

  Wyler was tormented by more than his physical problems. He was afraid that his loss of hearing “might affect the marriage,” he later admitted. “I wasn’t sure whether what worked before might work again.” Increasingly desperate, he had Talli take him to a hearing rehabilitation center for returning veterans in Santa Barbara. Psychiatrists injected him with sodium pentothal to try to determine whether a mental block was responsible for his deafness. When Talli next saw him, he was pacing back and forth in a padded room, trying to shake off the drug’s sedating effects. Psychiatrists told her that her husband’s hearing was perfectly fine—that once the drug took hold, he could hear what was being said two rooms away. It was not until years later that she realized they had lied to her in order to give her some hope that in the future, his condition might reverse itself.

  Wyler’s years at war—what he later called “an escape into reality”—had come to an end he never could have anticipated: A release, this time final, from the medical care of the army, a disability check—“sixty dollars every month from Uncle Sam, tax free” for the rest of his life—and a future that seemed as uncertain personally as it did professionally. He still felt both a duty and a desire to finish Thunderbolt, although it was hard to imagine that the army would have any use for it. And he still owed Sam Goldwyn one more film on a contract that dated back to 1941. But how could he hope to make a movie when even background noise or music made it impossible for him to understand a sentence? That spring, as Wyler shuttled from one doctor to another, the war in Europe was ending. And nothing felt possible.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Where I Learned About Life”

  GERMANY, MARCH–AUGUST 1945

  George Stevens was not supposed to be on his own, but with Wyler’s injury and Ford’s abrupt departure from active duty, he was by March 1945 the last major American filmmaker covering the war in Europe. There had been a time, months earlier, when Capra had reassured him that reinforcements were just around the corner, but now Stevens knew it wasn’t true: The war filmmaking program was winding down, and he didn’t expect any help or guidance from Washington. When he finally got his marching orders, they came from Eisenhower, and they were simple and direct: Stevens and his crew were to join sixteen thousand American and British paratroopers as they began a final push into Germany. The SPECOU team’s job would be to document whatever they found there.

  The mission was called Operation Varsity, a one-day, largely airborne initiative on March 24 that brought Stevens from Paris to the banks of the Rhine, where the Allies captured three bridges and secured several towns and villages on the western border of a now severely weakened Germany. Over the next three weeks, he and his unit stayed with the army as General Bradley’s troops began their drive east toward Berlin.

  Stevens did his first substantial filming inside Germany on April 11—t
he day before President Roosevelt’s sudden death at Warm Springs—when American forces took control of Nordhausen, a town in the center of the country that had been the site of a huge underground plant used to build V-2s, the long-range ballistic missiles that the Nazis had used against England. During the war, more than fifty thousand prisoners had been kept at Dora, a nearby concentration camp whose inmates were used as slave labor in the Nordhausen missile factory. A week earlier, the RAF had bombed the town, destroying most of it and killing thousands. When Stevens got there, one of the first people he saw was an emaciated man on a cot. The man turned his head, smiled at the arrival of his liberators, then rolled over quietly and died. It was the first time Stevens had seen a concentration camp prisoner.

  Forty miles of tunnels had been dug into the side of a mountain at Nordhausen, and as Stevens began to film, he felt he was discovering, for the first time since he had entered the army, the dark heart of the war. It was almost impossible to shoot inside the murk of the winding factory passageways and dimly illuminated chambers, but he and Ivan Moffat wrote reports about what they saw, including a crematorium that had been used to incinerate those who had become too weak to work; it had been swept clean of ashes, and a pile of small human bones was mounded in a corner. As Stevens joined the army’s inspection of the facility and the camp, he realized that he had come upon a scene of mass murder on a scale he had never imagined possible. “So completely without record of their past lives had these creatures been left,” he wrote in the memo he sent back to Washington accompanying the Nordhausen footage, “that of two thousand odd men and women and children it was possible to identify but four men by name and nationality.”

  The War Department had long been aware of Nazi atrocities, but Stevens’s account was among the first eyewitness reports to come from an American officer inside Germany. On April 15, he sent his superior officers a communiqué calling Nordhausen “as stark an example as could be found anywhere of the utter German indifference to human life reaching a very high peak of brutality side by side with a supreme example of technical perfection in the science of mass destruction.” That day, the Allies liberated the camp at Bergen-Belsen, where they discovered fifty-three thousand famished, freezing prisoners living and dying in filth. Four days later, Capra received his first report from the army film unit at Belsen at the same time as Stevens’s footage arrived in Washington. From that day forward, the primary mission of men in the Army Pictorial Service would change. They would no longer be combat photographers; they would be gatherers of evidence.

  But before those orders came through, Stevens and his eighteen-man unit were sent from Nordhausen to Torgau, where, for the last time in the war, he was asked to serve as a chronicler of the ceremonial for newsreels. On April 25, the armies of the United States and the Soviet Union, which had fought throughout the war on separate fronts, finally came together at the Elbe. The joining of forces was more than just symbolic: The U.S. and the British armies had been advancing east from France and Belgium as the Russians moved west; their meeting at the river would mark the moment at which Germany had been taken from both sides, and serve as an affirmation of the intentions of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union to win the war and forge the peace jointly.

  For a few days, Stevens could try to forget the nightmarish tunnels and vaults of Nordhausen. The first Russian soldier they saw at the Elbe was “a bald-headed private,” Moffat recalled. “They had some quite old privates in the Russian army. . . . He had a big spool of wire on his back and he came up to me . . . and grinned. ‘Capitaliste!’ he said, to me, then pointed to himself and said, ‘Communiste!’ and grinned again.” The footage Stevens’s unit shot at Torgau is cheerful, almost manic in its desire to seek out comedy. The Americans imitated the Russians, the Russians imitated the Americans, the camera became an excuse for clowning. They filmed a drunken man in a top hat, staggering around the riverbank holding a freshly killed rabbit, then falling over. Stevens can be seen jovially trying to convince a young, grave-looking Russian soldier to shake his hand. He filmed the Russians dancing and the Americans laughing and clapping; he shot footage of the Russians teaching the Americans how to use a Soviet-made machine gun and of the Americans teaching the Russians how to use an Eyemo camera. A mood of celebratory cultural exchange prevailed; at the water’s edge, someone had placed a large painted mural adorned with the slogan “East Meets West” in which an American GI, with the Stars and Stripes and the Statue of Liberty behind him, greets a Russian soldier for the first time as both men wipe their boots on a fallen Nazi flag.

  After the war, some would criticize the Allies for lingering at Torgau and wallowing in triumphalism at a time when Berlin hadn’t yet been taken and most of the camps were still under Nazi control. “People talk glibly of why we didn’t push on to Berlin,” Moffat wrote later, explaining that the feeling that the “war couldn’t last long” overwhelmed all of them. At the Elbe, they felt they “could relax”; there was “no enemy . . . for the first time,” a “nice feeling if you’re driving around in a Jeep.”

  For Stevens, Torgau turned out to be a final interlude before unremitting horror. Less than a hundred miles to the north, thousands of Russian tanks were rolling into Berlin, and he assumed that he and his team would join the Allies there to film the defeat of Hitler and the Nazis in their last stronghold. Instead, they received orders to proceed south to Dachau. The 99th Infantry Division was about to liberate the camp. Stevens and a dozen of his men loaded their jeeps with Browning machine guns, confiscated German artillery, K-rations, and camera equipment and started to drive, with one member of the unit standing in the back of each car, his gun at the ready, scanning the horizon in all directions. They had three hundred miles to cover quickly, but no other unit in Germany at the time had sound cameras, and Stevens assumed that he and his team might be needed to record filmed testimony from both the prisoners and the guards.

  They stopped only to down their rations quickly, or to film what felt like the step-by-step disintegration of Hitler’s army that revealed itself to them with every new turn of the road. Fallen planes with swastikas on their tails dotted the countryside; the number of American and British flyers they had hit was hatchmarked in paint near the wings. They passed hundreds of German army POWs penned along a riverbank, waiting, with expressions of stunned devastation, to be loaded into the backs of empty trucks by impassive American soldiers who monitored them at riflepoint. When Stevens’s unit reached Dachau, they dropped their gear in a house where they were to be billeted with another film unit that had just arrived from the south, and they drove to the camp.

  It was almost May, but patches of snow and ice still covered much of the frozen ground behind the fences. Stevens and his men bundled themselves in greatcoats that had been taken from SS guards and drove through the gates. What Stevens saw there would change his life and work, and profoundly alter his understanding of his own nature. “It was,” he said, “like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions.”

  At first, he was numb. Not knowing what else to do, he loaded his camera and started to film: A desiccated corpse by the train tracks. Another inside a boxcar, half covered in snow. Then, farther into the boxcar, another, naked, frozen, blue. A field full of skeletal dead men on their backs, their eyes open to the gray sky. A pile of striped pajamas. A second boxcar, this one full of dead bodies, some with bullet holes, many with the unmistakable marks of torture and privation, piled in a bloody tumble of limbs. Outside, row upon row of the dead, and then, row upon row of men and women who only looked dead. Their heads were shaved; the starvation they had endured made their ages hard to guess and their genders indistinguishable until the Americans started to strip off their clothes for delousing.

  No rumor or report that Germany had long housed factories of death had prepared the first Allied soldiers into the camps for the cruelty, the desperation, the pestilential squalor, the waking nightmare of what they encountered. Some of the crematoria stil
l had their flames lit. Typhus ran rampant through Dachau; the prisoners were sprayed with DDT, turning from side to side naked as the insecticide cloud enveloped them. Stevens aimed the lens of his camera skyward to film the smoke that was still drifting from some chimneys, then back down to eye level, where piles of naked bodies—hundreds of them—were mounded six and eight feet high. “We went to the woodpile,” he said, “and the woodpile was people.”

  Some thirty thousand prisoners were found alive at Dachau, but many of them were barely holding on; help was slow in arriving, and there was no place they could be moved immediately and cared for in such numbers. For some of the men in Stevens’s unit, simply bearing witness to so much suffering without taking action themselves was impossible. They abandoned their cameras and became nurses, comforters, ministers. One of them put down his equipment and started wandering from bed to bed in the camp’s first makeshift infirmary, letting the dying dictate letters to their relatives while he wrote around the clock. He didn’t stop or sleep for days. Stevens kept filming, his camera pushing into corners and shadows, his movements steady as he recorded the carnage that surrounded him. His eye was unwavering and unsentimental. He was not in search anymore of small, personalizing details but of images that would capture both the vastness and the specific sadism of crimes against humanity of a kind he had never imagined. Dachau, he said later, was “where I learned about life.”