Five Came Back

Mark Harris, “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War” The Penguin Press, 2014, 444 pp.

This is a history of the American war effort in WWII from the perspective of the five Hollywood directors that enlisted and contributed greatly to the presentation of that conflict to the American public, often at great personal risk.  The directors are well-known, even today:  John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens.  They all voluntarily joined because, as Ford put it, they were ashamed to sit out the war “in mockie-land while the good people are fighting.”  (I read this book in May 2017,  and in July 2017 Netflix has put it on their site as a special).  Both are equally good.).

Ford was the first to see the war coming and had already signed up in September 1941.  Soon afterward, after filming the April 18, 1942, Doolittle raid, he found himself on Midway Island during what is now recognized as the most crucial battle of the Pacific War.  He was manning a camera as Japanese Zeros strafed and bombed the beaches.  A shell fragment wounded him in the arm.  (He had positioned himself in an exposed tower).

Capra was the only one of the five not to experience combat but he supervised what the author calls “the single most important filmed propaganda of the war,” the Why We Fight series (1942-45), required viewing for members of the armed services.

William Wyler enlisted in the Army Signal Corps and was soon flying on bombing missions over Germany, angling for shots through the ball-turret of a B-17. He is most noted for the remarkable documentary, “The Memphis Belle.”  At a White House preview, President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned to Wyler and said, “This has to be shown right away, everywhere.”

John Huston interrupted an affair with Olivia de Havilland and proceeded to his first assignment in the Aleutian Islands.  Later he finally saw action in Italy, where he made one of the most memorable combat films of the war, the grim — and totally stage-managed — “The Battle of San Pietro” (1945).   Later he produced “Let There Be Light” (1946), a documentary about soldiers being treated for what was then called “battle neurosis” or “psychoneurosis” — a portrait so painfully raw that the Army suppressed it for 35 years.

It was Stevens who recorded some of the most horrific scenes to emerge from the war. As the commander of the Special Coverage Unit of the Army Pictorial Service, he crossed through the gates of Dachau. Stunned and sickened, he walked amid the corpses and skeletal survivors, compulsively shooting film, duty bound to capture on camera a spectacle beyond belief. Stevens and his crew “would no longer be combat photographers,” Mr. Harris writes, “they would be gatherers of evidence.”

The book is rather compelling once you start reading it, especially if you are already familiar with WWII.

My Notes:

Pg. 101:  On the morning of December 7, 1941, Catholic churches across the U.S. were denouncing Greta Garbo’s comedy Two-Faced Woman.  Thanks to an organized campaign by the National Legion of Decency, the church’s censorious watchdog group, stern condemnations of the movie’s depravity rang from every pulpit.  The movie contained the risqué line “I like older men; they’re so grateful.”  Later that same morning something more important occurred.

Pg. 110:  John Ford was placed aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet to film the Doolittle raid which occurred April 18, 1942.  The film consisted mostly of footage of the sixteen B-25 bombers used in the raid taking off from the carrier.

Pg. 272:  John Ford began to have contempt for John Wayne who made and never kept commitments to join the war effort.  (Wayne was 38 years old when war began and had four kids).