When Hollywood Went To War
by Spencer Warren

The active participation of Hollywood in World War II, so different from the broad anti-American, anti-West stance of contemporary Moviedom, stands as a vivid measure of how divided our country is today, and of the gulf separating the culture elite from regular Americans.

Many of the top movie stars volunteered for service and even insisted on combat duty when their commanders wanted to give them safety behind the lines. James Stewart, aged 33, volunteered for the Air Force and paid for his own flying lessons so he could qualify as a bomber pilot, subsequently leading twenty combat missions over Germany. Clark Gable, aged 41, volunteered for the Air Force after his wife, the great comedienne Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash returning home after leading the first national war bond tour. Overturning the wishes of his commanders, Gable flew a number of bombing missions over Germany as a combat photographer. Robert Montgomery, aged 37, joined the Navy and commanded a PT-boat in the Pacific before serving as an operations officer on a destroyer on D-Day. Earlier, in 1940, he left Hollywood to volunteer as an ambulance driver during the Nazi invasion of France. (Montgomery was a leading conservative who helped lead the fight against communist infiltration of the movie craft unions after the war; in 1947 he passed the torch to Ronald Reagan, who succeeded him as president of the Screen Actors Guild.)

Older men, prominent directors, also volunteered. William Wyler ( Wuthering Heights, The Best Years of Our Lives, Ben-Hur), flew combat missions over Germany as a photographer. The footage he shot became his deeply moving 1944 documentary about a B-17 crew, The Memphis Belle, A Story of a Flying Fortress. Wyler suffered permanent hearing damage as a result of his service. George Stevens (Gunga Din, Shane) headed the unit that photographed (in color) D-Day and the final campaigns in France and Germany, including the liberation of Dachau. John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) made a documentary on location about the war in Italy, The Battle of San Pietro. And John Ford, the most prestigious director of the time, having just won the best direction Oscars in 1940 for The Grapes of Wrath and in 1941 for How Green Was My Valley (he also won for The Informer in 1935 and, in 1952 for The Quiet Man), signed up with the Navy, aged 46.

Ford always was considered the director with the best luck in terms of weather and other circumstances. And so it was his Irish good luck that landed him on tiny Midway Atoll, about 1000 miles northwest of Hawaii, on June 4, 1942, when the huge Japanese armada, bent on finishing the job it started with such treachery against Hawaii on December 7, 1941, launched its bombing attack. Ford was acting as a forward observer in the powerhouse and had a 16mm camera loaded with color film. As all hell broke loose, Ford kept his position and started filming – with his eye fixed to the lens, he was hardly in a position to protect himself as enemy fighters shot up his building with machine-gun fire. A piece of concrete struck him in the head, knocking him out cold. Regaining consciousness, he resumed filming until shrapnel tore a hole in his upper arm, sending him to the infirmary.

Thus, his 18-minute documentary The Battle of Midway is absolutely the real thing, although it actually misses the strategic center of the battle – our naval aircraft, Dauntless dive bombers, flying off of our three carriers destroying all four of the enemy carriers, for the loss of one of ours. This was the decisive turning point of the war in the Pacific and the greatest naval victory in U.S. history.

But the point here is Ford’s portrait of our men in battle. The narration, by three of Ford’s favorite actors (Henry Fonda, Donald Crisp and Jane Darwell (Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath)), plus his friend, director Irving Pichel, ties the amazing images to central themes of Ford’s Hollywood films: family, belonging, home, community, and the living bond between present and past, the living and the dead. This is Ford’s America.

At the outset we are told Midway is “your front yard.” Before the attack we see B-17 reinforcements landing, and the one female voice, Jane Darwell, asks, “Is that one of them Flying Fortresses?” “Yes, M’am,” Fonda’s voice replies. “Why, that’s young [name indistinct on my video copy],” Darwell exclaims. “He’s not going to fly in that great big bomber?” Ford then shows a photograph of the boy’s father, standing beside his train locomotive – “Thirty-eight years on the railroad,” we’re told. Then we meet the mother, knitting in her parlor, “just like the rest of us mothers in Springfield or any other American town,” Darwell says. And the sister, Patricia, sitting nearby. “She’s about as pretty as they come,” Darwell comments, to which Fonda enthusiastically replies, “I’ll say so.”

To many readers this might sound awfully corny. But it is heartfelt and genuine, and offers a tangible picture of how our country saw itself in those long ago days, when its sons and some daughters were being shipped off to places few had ever heard of to defend hearth and home. Yes, it is indeed Norman Rockwell. As the B-17s then take off, Darwell’s motherly voice prays, “Good luck. God bless you, son.”

Then, “the Japs attack!” Black smoke billows skyward from bombed oil tanks. The rapid pop of anti-aircraft guns and the roar of engines fill the soundtrack. Hangars are bombed. Debris flies everywhere. Our boys leap into action. The camera shakes from explosions nearby. And amidst the fury of the battle, Ford creates one of his classic noble compositions, instantly recognizable to admirers of his movies: a low angle shot, looking upward, slightly to one side, of a flag pole as the Stars and Stripes are run up to the top. And on the soundtrack we hear a chorus solemnly singing this from the Star Spangled Banner:

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.

The narrator observes quietly, “This really happened.” Sixty-five years on, the scene sends a chill down one’s spine.

Following a brief sequence of the battle at sea (“The invasion forces were hit and hit and hit again”), Ford turns to the warriors returning from battle. “Men and women of America,” the narrator says, “Here come your neighbors’ sons. Home from a day’s work. You ought to meet them.” To the accompaniment of Anchors Aweigh, we see one Navy pilot after another, goggles up, smiling, climbing out of their cockpits, their names announced on the soundtrack. Again, every Ford admirer will be reminded of similar scenes, of troopers returning after patrol or a battle, in Ford Western classics like Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949).

And the aftermath: the search for survivors at sea and the burial of the honored dead. With a big orchestral treatment of Onward Christian Soldiers on the soundtrack, we see first the happy rescued smiling from their stretchers – Logan Ramsey, Frank Fessler, and others. As ambulances drive up to rush the wounded to the hospital, Darwell’s motherly voice returns, entreating: “Get those boys to the hospital. . . . Quickly. . . . Get them doctors and medicine. And a nurse’s soft hand. Get them to the hospital. Hurry. Please.” At this, the chorus picks up from the orchestra with the lyrics of Onward Christian Soldiers. Eight years later, in his Western Rio Grande, Ford’s first scene is of the cavalry regiment filing back into the fort after a campaign, with the wives looking on anxiously at the column of wounded men being pulled in makeshift stretchers. To achieve true artistry, the artist must be expressing feelings from deep down within his soul. This was John Ford.

Finally, burial and divine service, for some, on land, for others, at sea. The chorus softly sings from My Country, ‘Tis of Thee:

land where my fathers died,

land of the pilgrims’ pride

As the chaplains recite their prayers and the honor guards fire their salutes, the chorus continues:

long may our land be bright

with freedom’s holy light;

protect us by thy might, great God, our King.

And with the last shot of the Stars and Stripes flying in the wind, the black smoke still darkening the sky, the chorus very softly ends:

Amen.

Music plays a ritualistic role in Ford’s Hollywood films: the Welsh miners’ hymns in his Oscar-winning How Green Was My Valley and the famous song She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and other Army songs in his Westerns, to cite only two examples.

The dead also feature importantly in Ford’s films, because he saw life as a living continuum between past and present: the protagonist speaks of his life and love directly to the grave or portrait of a lost wife or brother in Judge Priest (1934), My Darling Clementine (1946) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). How Green Was My Valley and The Long Grey Line (1955) both end with overwhelming shots of much loved lost ones living on in eternity, bonded with the living. For Ford, the spirit of the past was alive, inspiring the present. The Star Spangled Banner sequence above gives vivid witness to his abiding faith.

This is pertinent for us today. President Bush declined the invitation of the organizers to attend the sixty-fifth anniversary commemoration on Midway. Nor did he attend Pearl Harbor’s sixty-fifth anniversary ceremony. He thus lost a golden opportunity to invoke, not the abstract, universal ideals (democracy the world over) that are beloved of the neocon radicals who draft his speeches, but our history – great stories, patriotic American and Christian songs and living symbols. He could have used our historical culture to emphasize and renew our unique, concrete identity as the American nation, as Ford did in his film and as President Reagan did at Normandy in 1984. He also could have used this opportunity to educate the public how elites wedded to “diversity” and “multiculturalism” are hollowing out our historical cultural identity by not teaching in the schools great events like Midway and, indeed, much if not most of our nation’s history. Such omissions demonstrate the elites’ disrespect for the memories of the men who fought and died for today’s young Americans.

The President could have explained how this hollowing out impedes assimilation of new immigrants into what the old school patriotic liberal President Franklin D. Roosevelt called “our American civilization” and “culture” when he commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty in October 1936. And the President could have further explained how the hollowing out endangers America’s survival, as the unique nation we have been for two centuries, especially in the face of the current mass immigrant- illegal alien invasion and a radical Muslim threat. That’s what a conservative president would have done.

Spencer Warren is ConservativeBattleline’s movie critic.