14
Philip Beidler
As the last members of the American generation of 1941–1945 pass from the earth, current thinking about their representations in literature and film remains inflected by larger cultural arguments about US conduct of the war. Dominant across the decades has been the view encapsulated by oral historian Studs Terkel in his phrasing “The Good War”: a war against the Germans and the Japanese that had to be fought and had to be won – though by putting the title in quotation marks, Terkel showed that the crucial adjective had room for debate. Significant revisionary views have arisen in response, most notably those of Paul Fussell – a renowned cultural critic and badly wounded infantry veteran – marshaling in texts such as Wartime (1989) and Doing Battle (1996) a view of the war, even for the victorious Allies, as mercilessly horrific and brutalizing, all the while being “sanitized and romanticized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patriotic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty” (1989: ix). Still, the affirmative view seems to have prevailed, through the efforts of bestselling historians such as Stephen Ambrose and Rick Atkinson and filmmakers such as Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg. It was in hope of betokening critical awareness of such contending points of view that I entitled my own study of literature and film The Good War’s Greatest Hits (1998).
On one opening point, there is critical unanimity. Any account of American World War II literature and film must begin with corresponding representations of World War I, at the time still known as the “Great War” or the “war to end all wars.” Nearly all of such productions partook of a common generational perspective with recurrent emphasis on disillusionment and bloody futility. And so, as events in Europe and Asia began to portend an even larger prospect of renewed global conflict, such a mood in both literature and film of military mischance, blunder, betrayal of youth by bankers, treaty makers, and arms manufacturers dovetailed with the American mood of isolationism of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Adapted to the screen as major war films during the era were the bestselling novels of Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929, movie 1930) and A Farewell to Arms (1929, movie 1932), the first directed by Lewis Milestone and starring Lew Ayres, and the second featuring Helen Hayes, Gary Cooper, and Adolph Menjou. The great war film of the decade turned out to be Gone with the Wind (1939). More directly, 1940 brought the inspired Hitler–Mussolini slapstick of Charlie Chaplin and Jack Oakie in The Great Dictator, but by then no one thought the two funny at all.
As a new decade opened, nearly two years would pass before official American entry into World War II on 7 December 1941. In the interim, what Americans read as war literature centered on suffering allies. Given their historically close relationship with the United States, the British war predominated, with Jan Struthers’s Mrs. Miniver (1939) – conceived as a series of fictionalized news columns to the Times of London, and shortly a film, starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon – showing a Dalloway‐like upper middle‐class family learning to cope with life in early wartime Britain. Of a similar cast was William L. White’s Journey for Margaret (1941) – likewise the basis of a popular movie starring Margaret O’Brien – depicting the orphaned child heroine’s adoption by an American couple and wartime odyssey to her new home. A third, if somewhat improbable, bestseller was Alice Duer Miller’s The White Cliffs of Dover (1941), a book of poems not only spawning a popular movie but also becoming the basis of a Vera Lynn song that proved to be one of the most memorable of the war. Depicting various other war‐torn peoples, published as play scripts were Lillian Hellmann’s Watch on the Rhine (1941), about a refugee family taken in by an American upper middle‐class couple and beset by a fascist fellow house guest, and Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night (1940), set during the Russo‐Finnish War, just before the German attack on Russia, depicting a Finnish‐American family trapped between devouring totalitarian monsters. In 1941, Joseph E. Davies published a memoir of his prewar service as ambassador to Russia, Mission to Moscow, recast by 1943, with Walter Huston in the lead, as a heavily cosmeticized pro‐Soviet film. In 1942, again in a quick book‐to‐film transition, John Steinbeck published The Moon is Down, in which villagers living under Nazi terror in an occupied Scandinavian country become the moral victors and the Nazis the frightened prisoners of their own regime of terror and cruelty – with both book and movie drawing criticism for the depiction of the occupiers as psychologically vulnerable and human. Also appearing in 1942, Dragon Seed was the latest in the cycle of China novels by Pearl S. Buck, about experiences of Chinese villagers during the 1937 Japanese invasion and the atrocities associated with the conquest of Nanjing.
Still, Americans persisted in their isolationism, even as influential publisher Henry Luce, in a remarkably timed February 1941 special issue of Life entitled “The American Century,” predicted that they would ultimately break out of their fortress‐like solitude as a matter of grand historical destiny. Pearl Harbor, of course, would shortly serve as the stroke of such destiny. But first the nation would have to endure a string of Axis victories in Europe, North Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. For a long time, the print response would be a shocked silence. The Fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the German attack on the Soviet Union, the countless Japanese victories in the Pacific and South Asia, Indochina, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Wake Island, and Bataan seemed to freeze time into a catastrophic eternal present. Only in 1942 came news of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, a naval victory at Midway, and the first hard‐won recovery of a Pacific island base at Guadalcanal, and then shortly after, the Allied invasion of North Africa and, from bases in England, the launching of US bombing campaigns over Germany. To be sure, the relative paucity of early book‐length texts was more than compensated for by popular print production, with both early disasters and first steps in fighting back reported widely and in great detail in newspapers and magazines – for both of which, the era beginning in the 1930s and ending in the 1950s served as an American golden age. In every great metropolis, there were multiple major newspapers, as well as uncounted smaller city and small town dailies. According to the Newspaper Association of America, in 1940 the nation had a total of 1878. New York had seven; most towns with a population larger than 100 000 had two. It was also the era of the popular, mass‐market magazine, with Time, Life, Newsweek, Colliers, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday Evening Post a part of the cultural lives of many American readers. Meanwhile, in every corner of the globe sprang up ubiquitous military equivalents: the Army Times, Yank, Stars and Stripes, and countless individual unit publications from full‐scale newspapers to mimeographed handouts. The latter became important venues in the early stages for the small town columnist Ernie Pyle and relatively unknown cartoonist Bill Mauldin, both of whom by mid‐war were syndicated in major national media. At home, journalism likewise poured out over the air, in radio, newsreel, and, above all, Hollywood film. Major directors were commissioned to produce documentaries, beginning with the Frank Capra series Why We Fight, and including titles by John Huston, William Wyler, Darryl Zanuck, and John Ford, who honed new abilities to produce war film unprecedented in its scope and candor. As the newly ascendant popular form of cultural representation, feature movies quickly began to spring ahead of freestanding print texts, by the end of the war numbering around 200. Indeed, to undertake a survey of prewar, wartime, and postwar titles is to be struck by how many of them made it into film – in a significant number of instances, as will be seen below, the movie forms, frequently sanitized from their print origins for broad popular distribution, becoming the definitive version of the text for Americans.
No account can go without also mentioning those great iconic original war films of the era, which frequently entertained and heartened Americans of the times, even as they continued to hope against encroaching engagement. There were the two great Bogart productions, for instance: Casablanca (1942) with Ingrid Bergman and To Have and Have Not (1944) with Lauren Bacall. In both, a cynical, reluctant American must eventually make his stand against Axis evil – in the case of Rick Blaine, proprietor of the Café Americain, helping Bergman and her resistance hero love, Paul Henried, escape the Morocco of the Nazis and the Vichy French; in the case of Hemingway’s Harry Morgan, with the action transposed from the novel’s 1930s Cuba and Key West to 1940s Martinique, with the burnt‐out smuggler at last helping French resistance fighters to evade their Vichy pursuers.
Commercial war films dating from the immediate prewar era until the US cessation of hostilities against Germany and Japan numbered in the hundreds, not counting cartoons, newsreels, and movie shorts. At one end, urging a new national voluntarism, were the peremptory Yank in the RAF (1941), with Tyrone Power and Betty Grable, and at the other Donald Duck doing Hitler and Goering in the queerly belated Herr Meets Hare (1945). In between were these, among the best‐known combat films: Wake Island (1941), Flying Tigers (1942), Action in the North Atlantic (1942), Bataan (1942), Destination Tokyo (1942), Guadalcanal Diary (1942), Sahara (1943), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), Back to Bataan (1944), and They Were Expendable (1945). Extending into 1946 were Command Decision and Twelve O’Clock High, both about the air war; Battleground, about the crucial European Battle of the Bulge; and, the king of them all, John Wayne and the Marines in Sands of Iwo Jima. Other films featuring US women at war included Somewhere I’ll Find You (1942), So Proudly We Hail (1943), and Four Jills in a Jeep (1944); these were coupled with films about women’s broader role on the home front such as Since You Went Away (1944) and I’ll Be Seeing You (1944). Lighter offerings in the same vein were The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), Christmas in Connecticut (1945), The More the Merrier (1943), and The Clock (1945), featuring young lovers Robert Walker and Judy Garland in a wartime New York City romance.
Service comedies also proved popular, including You’re in the Army Now (1941), with Jimmy Durante, Jane Wyman, and Phil Silvers, a musical already in production and released barely a month before Pearl Harbor; Navy Blues (1941), with Ann Sheridan, Jack Oakie, Martha Raye, and Jack Haley; Caught in the Draft (1941), with Bob Hope playing his patented cowardly wise guy; and Buck Privates (1941), with Abbott and Costello. Later, more substantial hits included See Here Private Hargrove (1944), with Robert Walker; The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), adapted from the dispatches of Ernie Pyle, starring Burgess Meredith and Robert Mitchum; and Up Front (1951), from the wartime cartoons of Bill Mauldin, with Tom Ewell and David Wayne.
Dedicated musical and variety entertainment included Star Spangled Rhythm (1942), with Paulette Goddard, Betty Hutton, Bing Crosby, and Bob Hope; This is The Army (1943), an Irving Berlin reprise with future senator George Murphy, future governor and President Ronald Reagan, and Kate Smith, whose anthem “God Bless America” made her the official singing voice of the war effort; another remake of an earlier Berlin musical, As Thousands Cheer (1943), with Gene Kelly and Katherine Grayson; Winged Victory (1944), featuring Air Corps entertainers; Up in Arms (1944), with Danny Kaye, Dinah Shore, and Dana Andrews; Something for the Boys (1944), with Phil Silvers and Carmen Miranda; and Anchors Away (1945), with Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, and Gene Kelly. Also to be counted were more general morale boosters: James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), and Bing Crosby in Going My Way (1944).
After what might be understood as a predictable lag in print production, book‐length representations of the war were eagerly awaited and purchased in large numbers. Among the earliest depictions of American military resistance to Japanese depredations was William L. White’s They Were Expendable (1942), a novel based on exploits of PT boats in defense of the Philippines. The book was an immediate bestseller, serialized in Life and Reader’s Digest, and in turn the basis of a classic 1945 film with John Wayne and Robert Montgomery. Soon, other equally bracing works appeared showing American forces starting to make their way back. Captain Ted Lawson, a pilot in the Doolittle Raid, detailed the adventure from its training phases to the Chinese rescue and evacuation of many of the surviving participants in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1943, movie 1944); journalist Richard Tregaskis’s Guadalcanal Diary (1943, movie 1943) recorded the agonizing capture of that key island in the Solomons from superior Japanese forces. Also about Guadalcanal were John Hersey’s Into the Valley (1943), a brief but candid account of a marine rifle company undergoing their early experiences of combat, and Ira Wolfert’s The Battle for the Solomons (1943), a chronicling of individual actions on land, in the air, and at sea. From the Pacific also came Robert L. Scott’s inspirational account of air combat in the China–Burma–India theater, God is My Co‐Pilot (1943, movie 1945).
Two major 1943 journalistic accounts of US combat in North Africa were Ralph Ingersoll’s The Battle is the Payoff and Ernie Pyle’s Here is Your War. The war at home, besides producing North Carolina newspaperman Marion Hargrove’s humorous account of basic training, See Here Private Hargrove (1942, movie 1944), resulted in such civilian classics as Jesse Stuart’s Taps for Private Tussie (1943), a light regional novel about a relief‐payment addicted hillbilly clan attempting to live off the $10 000 insurance death benefits of the decidedly unheroic eponymous hero; and William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy (1943), a bittersweet classic of the home front, centered on Homer Macaulay, the telegraph boy in a small California town who ultimately delivers news of the death of his own idolized brother – the latter having meanwhile sent his surviving army buddy to find the family he never had when he himself was a boy. As to the ongoing campaigns, Pacific and Atlantic, 1944 brought a reporting classic, Robert Sherrod’s astringent Tarawa, the Story of a Battle, a candid and clear‐eyed account of that savage and mistake‐haunted Pacific action. It also marked the appearance of Ernie Pyle’s best‐known book, Brave Men, compiled as he followed the war through Italy and northern Europe, until moving to the Pacific where he was killed on a small island called Ie Shima off the coast of Okinawa. In life and in a newly fashioned celebrity persona of narrative art, Pyle along the way had truly become the people’s journalist of the war. For soldier and civilian alike, here was big‐war reporting, the evolving chronicle of the grand campaigns, but always with a signature touch – the service members he encounters nearly always identified with civilian occupation, hometown address, sometimes even street and house number. Later in the same year, in large measure through Pyle’s personal agency, came the equally celebrated book of war cartoons, Bill Mauldin’s Up Front, the adventures of his two dogface infantrymen, Joe and Willie, accompanied by Mauldin’s own humorous but incisive commentary on soldier life and the conduct of the war. The first wartime literary texts were appearing at about the same time, in both cases about the grim, bloody, neglected Italian campaign, and both, it turns out, by literarily gifted crossover journalists. The first was John Hersey’s A Bell for Adano (1944, movie 1945), a quiet, humane study of an army major serving as an American Military Government functionary and his attempts to deal fairly with conquered Italian townspeople, albeit in the face of American loutishness and ignorance and a strutting, dictatorial division commander, with antics modeled visibly on those of George S. Patton. The second was Harry Brown’s A Walk in the Sun (1944, movie 1945), to this day one of the best books of small‐unit combat to come out of the war, or any war. Brown’s narrative was an account of a single abortive platoon mission. The mission is finally completed – even as we watch unit members being killed, one by one by one, to an ambiguous end, with no particular point, on just another day in the war. Indeed, early writers of this conflict seemed to fashion a quiet reproach to Walt Whitman’s dictum that the real war would never get in the books.
In the domain of wartime print, it is impossible to discuss overall production, distribution, and consumption without mention of reading made available to service members by the cooperative enterprise known as the Armed Services Editions (ASE). These titles, more than 1300 in number, were chosen by the Council on Books in Wartime, frequently for their emphasis on American democratic values, but also including many literary and popular classics hardly considered propagandistic. At the height of the project, around 123 million copies were in circulation – in military bases, forward areas, and even POW (prisoner of war) camps, and including such varied titles as The Odyssey, My Friend Flicka, The Education of Henry Adams, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (a particular GI favorite, it turns out), John Brown’s Body, Forever Amber, Moby‐Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Death Comes for the Archbishop, and countless others. The motto of the organization was “Books are Weapons.” In token of this commitment to its founding concept of patriotic strength through an informed military readership, by the end the series also contained such recent wartime favorites as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Guadalcanal Diary, and God is My Co‐Pilot.
Not surprisingly, given the release of American production capacity in nearly every field from wartime constraints, postwar publishing about the war underwent the burgeoning everyone was waiting to see. In a classic cartoon, featuring his two Up Front dogfaces in a late foxhole conversation, Joe is responding to Willie’s suggestion that even he may be struck by postwar literary ambitions. “Oncet I wuz gonna write a book exposin’ the army after th’ war myself,” he says. In the case of this particular war, writerly aspiration became rampant. Further, as evidenced by the wildfire success of Mauldin’s own book, it was matched by a near insatiable audience appetite. This proved so despite the fact that American attentions to images of the war were already being rivaled by the new postwar history happening before their eyes. Talk of “victory culture” in the immediate postwar era now betrayed many people’s more immediate concerns. De‐Nazification and Four Power occupation of Germany took shape quickly, with war crimes trials at Nuremberg and executions of major figures. In the Pacific, Douglas MacArthur kept himself in the news and achieved perhaps his true finest hour as proconsul in a democratizing, pacifist Japan. The Soviets, shedding overnight their guise as wartime ally, solidified their hold on Central Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic states, with Churchill making his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1948. That same year it was learned that the Soviets had achieved parity in global military terror with their own atomic weaponry. In the United States, communist witch hunts and McCarthyism had seized national politics. In Asia, communist forces achieved by 1948 a quick postwar victory over the nationalist regime of wartime ally Chiang Kai‐Shek and, two years later, after the invasion by North Korea of the United States, supported South Korea, the new regime of Mao Tse‐tung was pouring vast infusions of troops into the war against outnumbered and retreating Americans. By 1953 a fragile truce was achieved. In that year, accused atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted and executed. Eisenhower was elected President. The Cold War was in full cry.
Over the same period, movies maintained the upper hand with a steady production – but now increasingly joined by major postwar literary texts across a range of genres. At one end of the literary spectrum there appeared no great volume of soldier poetry as in the Great War, but, reflecting shifts in educational curricula and literary and popular tastes, as well as selections representative of the Book of the Month Club, Literary Guild, and other venues, there did come an outpouring of memoir, journalism and reportage, fictional narrative, short story collections, and, above all, the mass‐market popular novel. War poetry as a genre came and went mainly as the work of pup tent poets in fugitive publications, often by individual military units. A few nationally visible figures appeared, notably Randall Jarrell and Richard Eberhart, both Army Air Force service members but not combatants, famously anthologized in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (1945) and “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment” (1945). The title of a signature, Pulitzer Prize‐winning volume was V‐Letter by Karl Shapiro (1944). The great infantryman‐poet of the war, Louis Simpson, a Caribbean immigrant fighting in Europe as part of the 101st Airborne Division, would have to wait his time, in poems such as “Carentan” (1949) and others, to partake of World War II poetic revision in the spirit of honored soldier predecessors such as Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon.
Novels – along with major works of diary, memoir, journalism, and reportage – were appearing in large numbers, in case after case quickly transformed into major Hollywood movies. Few would surpass, both for popular success and critical acclaim, one of the great curiosities in the immediate postwar inventory: a slim book by middlebrow historical writer MacKinlay Kantor entitled Glory for Me (1945) that would evolve into the William Wyler movie The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). In fact, Kantor, working in Hollywood, had as early as 1944 been engaged by Samuel Goldwyn, fascinated by an article he had read in Time magazine about returning veterans, to produce a film treatment on the subject. Instead, the scriptwriter returned with a novel in the form of a narrative poem something in the vein of Stephen Vincent Benet. This involved the return to a fictional middle American town, Boone City, after the war’s end, of three quite disparate discharged service members: a grizzled, combat‐hardened infantry sergeant, Al Stephenson, formerly a socially prominent banker; a lieutenant and former bombardier, Fred Derry, previously a drug store clerk; and a maimed seaman, Homer Wermels, with both hands replaced by prosthetic metal claws. After substantial travails of readjustment, all three make peace between their military experience and new civilian identities; and thus the first great book‐to‐film vision of a postwar nation made itself into a genuine American classic, portending for the veteran a mythologized future as it honored wartime memory quickly receding into the past.
A second postwar classic achieved immense popularity and praise in book form, even as it took the process of literary and artistic evolution even further. Mr. Roberts, beginning as a cycle of stories about the backwater Pacific Navy, the largely autobiographical work of a first‐time author, Thomas Heggen, appeared in a bestselling print version in 1946, was reshaped into an abbreviated Broadway play in 1948, and then recast into movie form in 1957. The secret of Mr. Roberts’ success lay with the conception of its title character, a faithful subordinate mediating between a tyrannical captain and the bored, frustrated crew of a supply ship working the rear areas of the great ocean war. Besides the despised skipper, with his totemic potted palm tree, Roberts is supplied with a colorful supporting cast: the unmilitary, sex‐and‐booze obsessed subaltern Frank Pulver, the bemused, ironic ship’s doctor; a boatload of unruly enlisted sailors finding brief respite in a drunken island liberty. At the end, after a general uprising in which he has championed the downtrodden crew, the last of Roberts’s requests for transfer to a fighting ship is grudgingly approved. A letter arrives detailing his death in a Kamikaze attack. Pulver marches up the stairs to the captain’s cabin, shouting for that worthy and all the world to hear that he has just thrown the damned palm tree overboard.
Less remembered today, although at the time regarded as a major representation of the European air war, was William Wister Haines’s Command Decision (1946), a book swiftly transformed into a 1947 play and a 1948 film, with the latter starring Clark Gable, Charles Bickford, and Walter Pidgeon. The focal subject, narrated through scenes centered at an American airbase in Great Britain, is the much‐heralded US Eighth Air Force daylight precision bombing campaigns conducted at secretly hideous cost to pilots, planes, and crews. The central crisis involves a commander deemed a butcher for sending forces repeatedly against heavily defended German airplane factories far beyond the range of fighter cover. His sanguinary logic is impeccable. The factories are building new German jet fighters; they must be destroyed now with horrific casualties before the fighters themselves can make even these unimaginably worse. Subplots involve newspaper reports, a visiting Congressional appropriations committee with great influence in the development of an eventually independent US Air Force, and the sudden appearance of an assistant air chief rumored to be the present commander’s replacement. All of the worst scenarios take place as imagined. The fighting air general is replaced at the end of a narrative remarkably candid about top‐level infighting, with journalists, politicians, and careerist officers waging their personal battles while planes and aircrews suffer suicidal casualty rates.
Similarly neglected at the time as a chronicle of air operations was James Gould Cozzens’s Guard of Honor (1948), about a young fighter general being groomed for the top, for the moment cast into a world of stateside training bases as petty fiefdoms, filled with bored administrators reigning over useless research and training directorates, producing interminable pointless memoranda and manuals. As if in anticipation of Joseph Heller’s Catch‐22 (1961), here is the dark, absurdist war behind the war, of military and political careerism, the faceless world of the war‐breeding system. In Cozzens’s text, superannuated and supernumerary colonels and majors, lieutenants, and captains fill chairs in offices, attend meetings, and conduct public relations campaigns. A unit of African American fliers training for combat is subjected to vicious harassment and bigotry. The boy general’s birthday is celebrated with a combined arms training exercise where parachutists wind up drowning in the Florida swamps. Public relations keeps it all quiet, and the war goes on. These would be joined by a third addition to the strategic bombing saga, another neglected classic, in this case co‐authored by writer Sy Bartlett and experienced airman Beirne Lay: Twelve O’Clock High (1948). As with Command Decision, this too centered on aerial combat in Europe and the strain on commanders and crews alike, in this case involving relief from command of a brave but compassionate unit leader for insufficient production and the breakdown from nervous strain of the formerly stern and impervious immediate commander who has replaced him. Of further interest here was the text’s production genealogy. Written first as the basis of a film script, the book actually appeared first as a 1949 movie, justly praised for its political and psychological insight, starring Gary Merrill, Dean Jagger, and Gregory Peck, and then brought out as a novel. Nor was this the end of the production. In the 1964–1967 television seasons, Twelve O’Clock High became a popular weekly series. The first two seasons were in black‐and‐white, incorporating much realistic‐seeming World War II documentary footage. An abortive third was in living color. At the end of the first season, as if in its own ruthless promotion system, the original commanding general was killed off in favor of a younger actor.
Far more heralded than any other print text at the time was Tales of the South Pacific, a slight book of 1947 by James Michener centering on relationships among American military personnel, French colonials, and islanders of the region, which in a bare two years had been transformed, with Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza in the starring roles, into possibly the most beloved musical drama in Broadway history. In fact, the Rodgers and Hammerstein South Pacific derived from a small, sanitized handful of the book’s 19 interlinked chapters, all narrated by an unnamed naval officer serving as the local admiral’s roving emissary and centered ultimately on one major action, a massive naval and marine assault on the fictional island of Kuralei. Mainly, however, it is about the backwaters of the Pacific war, full of rear‐area supply and administration types, time‐servers, scroungers, wheeler‐dealers, and assorted American, native, and mixed‐race women in this largely male world. Further, for all the exotic charms depicted, it is actually a grim, unlovely book. Race is a nasty issue. French‐imported Vietnamese laborers (including Bloody Mary and the exquisite Liat) are “Tonks”; Melanesians are “Niggers.” Even the parts made charming in the musical are in the book more than occasionally charmless. Bloody Mary sells her daughter Liat to Joseph Cable, the upper‐crust Princeton‐educated marine lieutenant. The nurse‐ingénue Nellie Forbush is nearly raped twice, once by a womanizing Navy officer, and later by gang of enlisted renegades at the gates of the plantation of her suitor and eventual husband Emile de Becque. In the last chapter we learn that, as a result of the Kuralei operation, most of the interesting characters die – rakish pilot and lover Bus Adams, nonpareil scrounger Tony Fry, brave lieutenant Joe Cable. The rear‐echelon lothario has gotten home alive, safe stateside with wife and family.
Two other unsettling productions of 1947, each achieving in time their own classic status, were John Horne Burns’s The Gallery and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. The first, centered again in the administrative and logistical backwash of war – in this case, Naples, the rear administrative headquarters for much of the Italian campaign and the site of the titular commercial arcade where everything turns out to be for sale – became known for decades as an underground classic, one of the few texts to introduce gay themes into the literature of the war. The second, early play by Miller, often considered a rehearsal for the elegiac American Dream poetics of Death of a Salesman (1949), has a special wartime twist. Here the story of success concerns a protagonist who has become wealthy during the war selling defective cylinder heads for aircraft engines. Such emphasis on profiteering shortly earned the author an invitation from the House Un‐American Activities Committee.
Meanwhile, memoirs and various other non‐fiction accounts began to appear. Some were the work of insiders such as Harry Butcher’s My Three Years with Eisenhower (1946); some were the witness of civilian victims, such as Primo Levi, author of Survival in Auschwitz (1946). In that same year appeared John Hersey’s Hiroshima, written from the perspectives of six ground‐zero survivors of the war‐ending atomic bombing. From the European campaign came Hugh Trevor‐Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Celebrity authors published major books. Bill Mauldin attempted to reprise the incredible popularity of Up Front with Joe and Willie as returned veterans on the postwar American scene in Back Home (1947). From the top echelons of command, General Dwight D. Eisenhower published Crusade in Europe (1948). In the same year appeared the first installment of Winston Churchill’s multi‐volume The Second World War; and 1948 also marked the appearance of two of the long‐expected “big” novels of the war, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions, both eventually the basis of major Hollywood films a decade later. The latter, quite predictable transformation now seems already imminent even in the 1948 advertising copy. Both are recognizable as big genre books almost by their very titles, already in the making as genre movies. Both writers seem clearly to have understood the postwar literary and cultural dynamics of big war–big book–big movie transitions.
Mailer, the younger, debut author, went to war in the Pacific, it is said, so he could write the big novel of the Pacific war, the European most likely in his estimation having already been taken. A Harvard aeronautical engineering undergraduate who detailed as a clerk and cook in an old Texas National Guard cavalry regiment, he got himself just enough combat experience on an Intelligence and Reconnaissance mission to feel he would write about battle with authenticity. Meanwhile, he populated the novel with various figures embodying mythic strains of ideological conflict. The leftist intellectual is represented in lieutenant Robert Hearn; the fascist general, with homoerotic overtones in his relationship with Hearn, is Cummings. The senior patrol NCO Croft represents the irredeemable strain of violence in the American character undergirding the nation’s history since its dark beginnings. In technique, one sees the dark influence of post‐World War I writers such as Ernest Hemingway and, particularly in the experimentalist flashback sections, John Dos Passos. The closest model in the historical novel of ideas is Tolstoy. Altogether, Mailer comes off as the young genius and budding public literary celebrity, writing the Great American Novel of the war on his way perhaps to the Great American Novel of the century. For all the literary celebration, when the big movie finally arrived, it did so relatively late in the cycle as a pale 1960s imitation of earlier films. The garish cast included Cliff Robertson – to be remembered for another combat film, PT 109 (1963), as World War II naval Lieutenant John F. Kennedy – as Hearn, Raymond Massey as Cummings, and Hollywood war movie standby Aldo Ray as Croft.
In contrast to the boy prodigy, Irwin Shaw was both an experienced war correspondent and an established writer, a rival of Hemingway for the favors of Mary Welsh, and, in the latter novelist’s derisive phrasing, just another Brooklyn Tolstoy. Accordingly, The Young Lions, with its multiple protagonists – the German Christian Diestl, the New York playboy Michael Whitacre, and the alienated American Jew Noah Ackerman – and the complex love story/war story trajectories finally bringing them together in a gripping European battlefield denouement, already had bestseller and big movie written all over it. It did not disappoint. In the latter, Marlon Brando starred as a blond, thoroughly Nordic Christian Diestl, with Mai Britt as his illicit lover (unfaithful wife of his captain, played by Maximilian Schell), Dean Martin as Michael Whitacre, Montgomery Clift as Noah Ackerman, and Faith Lange as his New England beloved. At least in retrospect, the novel version now seems one of the most writerly, if conventionally so, of the big books, painstaking in its almost Dickensian registration of social and psychological particulars, and singularly bold in its depiction of brutal US Army anti‐Semitism among both officers and men.
For post‐1945 popular readers at least, novels increasingly became the coin of the realm. Accordingly, at the turn of the decade, texts such as Mailer’s and Shaw’s would be breathlessly joined by new bestsellers from James Jones, Herman Wouk, and Leon Uris. In the interim, even the grand old man of American war fiction Ernest Hemingway would make his own contribution to the military harvest. He had begun the decade with For Whom the Bell Tolls, a wide‐screen epic of the Spanish Civil War, and followed with a 1000‐page historical anthology of writing about combat, Men at War (1942), prefaced by 30‐plus pages of his own manly pontifications on the subject. Now he weighed in with Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), an embarrassing chronicle of wish projection, set in postwar Venice and featuring a dying miles gloriosus infantry colonel based on his 4th Division military mentor, Buck Lanham, with whom he spent the last winter of the war, and his romance with beautiful, adoring 19‐year‐old Italian contessa, also based heavily on the author’s infatuation with his own Venetian muse, a young noblewoman named Adriana Ivancich. Mercifully, one might say it seems at once a geriatric updating of The Sun Also Rises and an attempt to recapture the elegiac luminosity of Death in Venice. In the very name of his old soldier, Hemingway must have sensed his own failure on all fronts. He is Colonel Robert Cantwell.
That same year, Henry Luce’s Life, the gold standard of wartime photojournalism, came forward with its immensely popular deluxe volume, Life’s Picture History of World War II, with introductory section essays by novelist John Dos Passos and running text by journalist Robert Sherrod, a compilation of the best photography of the war by nearly every famous practitioner of the era. The turning of the second half of the century likewise brought forth two more of the classic big‐volume novels of the war, Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1951) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), both quickly translated to the screen in classic films, the first starring Humphrey Bogart, Van Johnson, and Fred MacMurray, and the second Burt Lancaster, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, and Montgomery Clift. Of The Caine Mutiny, it might be said to be a kind of Young Lions version of the Navy war, with a love story and a complex multi‐character war story culminating in the titular event and subsequent court martial – the latter also the subject of a prizewinning 1953 Broadway play. From start to finish, Wouk’s literary aim was high as well, with Melvillian inscriptions recognizable from both Moby‐Dick, in the mad Captain Philip Queeg, and the love–hate Billy Budd subplot with his pet junior officer Willie Keith. In contrast, Jones’s From Here to Eternity is not in fact about the war but rather the old Army 25th Hawaiian Division in the months just before the war – a collocation of enlisted Depression‐era castoffs and time‐serving NCOs and officers. These are all suddenly plunged, as was Jones, who was actually present as a member of the unit on 7 December 1941, into the Japanese war subsequently represented by the author in the lives of infantry soldiers in works such as The Thin Red Line (1962), reprised twice as a Hollywood movie (1964, 1988), and considered to the present one of the finest depictions of Pacific island jungle combat, and the posthumous Whistle (1978).
In 1953 came what might be considered the last great 1940s‐style big novel of the war, Leon Uris’s Battle Cry. It, too, quickly became the basis of a big movie, with Van Heflin as Marine regimental commander Highpockets Huxley, combat‐movie regular James Whitmore as Huxley’s faithful communications sergeant, and rising war movie standbys Tab Hunter and Aldo Ray as all‐American marines. And so came the completion of what might be considered a great cycle of primary military novels of the war centered on the major classes of American combat participants. Battle Cry became the great Marine novel of the war, as The Young Lions was the great Army novel of combat in the European theater, and The Naked and the Dead of Army combat in the Pacific. The Caine Mutiny, flanked by Mr. Roberts and Tales of the South Pacific, became the great Navy novel, as did Command Decision, with Twelve O’Clock High and Guard of Honor in a similar relation, the great Air Corps novels of the war.
By now there was a new war – Korea – to write about, often in both a literal and literary reprise of World War II novels and movies. Michener returned with The Bridges at Toko‐Ri (1953, novel 1954), a Navy aircraft‐carrier saga, quickly made into a movie with William Holden as a successful lawyer recalled to deadly aviation duty, Grace Kelly as the exquisite young wife, and Frederic March as the kindly admiral father figure. Meanwhile, other authors started looking back to the old war, producing such disparate works, ranging from action‐adventure to traditional service comedy, as Pierre Boulle’s Bridge over the River Kwai (French 1952, English 1954, movie 1957); Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants (1954, play and television drama 1955, movie 1958); William Brinkley’s Don’t Go Near the Water (1956, movie 1957); Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956, movie 1957), James Jones’s Some Came Running (1957, 1958); Alistair MacLean’s The Guns of Navarone (1957, movie 1961); and John Hersey’s The War Lover (1959, movie 1962). Psychologically notable among them, in anticipation of Richard Yates’s classic of postwar veteran anomie, Revolutionary Road (1961, movie 2008), were Wilson’s and Jones’s texts for their linkage of the war memory of the veteran with the postwar duties of life in the age of what William Whyte called The Organization Man (1956). With Day of Infamy (1957), a blow‐by‐blow account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Walter Lord produced the first of a line of great popular docu‐histories, where he was quickly joined by Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day (1959, movie 1962); The Last Battle (1966); and A Bridge Too Far (1974, movie 1977).
One might mention related postwar specialty categories. One included nuclear terror films such as On the Beach (1957, movie 1959); Fail‐Safe (1964); and Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). Another treated atomic mutation in black‐and‐white sci‐fi classics such as Them (1954) and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). Increasingly bizarre service comedies also proved popular with Operation Petticoat (1959), The Horizontal Lieutenant (1962), and The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1960). Surely one of the oddest commemorative pairings of book and film involved Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, author of the autobiographical To Hell and Back (1949, movie 1955), who signed on to play himself re‐fighting World War II in Technicolor guts and glory. A counterpoint, White Christmas (1954), showed veterans of the Battle of the Bulge again in the snow, partaking of postwar peace and prosperity, honoring a beloved commanding general fallen on hard times with a sentimental tenth‐year reunion at his New England ski resort.
As the generation of the war began to slip away as a primary audience for war films, they supplied their own replacement, through the baby boom, with 1950s and 1960s teenagers. Accordingly, a new generation of films brought new generations of actors and movie concepts. In addition to productions already mentioned came Away All Boats (1956), about a Pacific War attack transport; Heaven Knows Mister Allison (1957), with a nun (Deborah Kerr) and a Marine (Robert Mitchum) marooned on a Pacific Island; With Wings as Eagles, a chronicle of naval aviation, with John Wayne and a radiant Maureen O’Hara (1957); The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), a rare depiction of the Sino‐Japanese War; Run Silent, Run Deep (1958), with an aging Clark Gable as a submarine commander; Never So Few (1959), with Frank Sinatra in the Burma theater; The Gallant Hours (1960), with James Cagney as Admiral William “Bull” Halsey; Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), with riveting courtroom performances by Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, and Judy Garland; and Captain Newman, M.D. (1963), a Gregory Peck–Angie Dickinson–Tony Curtis tragicomedy set in a military mental hospital and featuring arresting performances, as war‐damaged soldiers, by Eddie Albert and Robert Duvall.
In a new decade, the second since the great conflict, movies now seemed to be increasingly moving away from the feel of wartime and the shared experience of a generation.
Action‐adventure, entertainment, and shameless star vehicles appeared in a bizarre miscellany. Hell is for Heroes (1962) was the quintessential GIs versus Germans shoot ’em up; Merrill’s Marauders (1962) made it GIs versus the Japanese; The Longest Day (1962) initiated a golden age of docu‐cameo‐epic. The Great Escape (1963) immortalized Steve McQueen in a German POW escape classic; The Americanization of Emily (1963), a comic love story with James Garner and Julie Andrews, recast the Normandy invasion in a cameo role; Father Goose (1964) featured Cary Grant as drunken, lascivious Solomon Islands coastwatcher dragooned into shepherding French schoolmistress Leslie Caron and her gaggle of adolescent charges; The Battle of the Bulge (1965), with myriad star cameos including Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews, and Robert Shaw, comprised a Technicolor rehash of The Longest Day model, this time in the Ardennes; King Rat (1965) reprised POW Steve McQueen, this time in a Japanese prison camp; In Harm’s Way (1965), a saga of naval war in the Pacific, reunited an aging John Wayne and Patricia Neal; None But the Brave (1965) featured Frank Sinatra versus the Japanese on a worthless island; Von Ryan’s Express (1965) featured Frank Sinatra versus the Nazis on a POW train.
A much darker, uncommonly ambitious attempt to depict the big war in Europe was The Victors (1963), with a miscellaneous international cast ranging from George Hamilton, George Peppard, and Albert Finney to Elke Sommer, Melina Mercouri, and Jeanne Moreau, filmed in gritty black‐and‐white and spliced with archival wartime documentary footage. Churchill, Eisenhower, and Hitler are filmed, along with advancing Allied soldiers, civilian survivors, collaborators, profiteers, opportunists, and all other manner of specialists in corruption, prostitution, the black market, and the like. Midway in the film occurs the execution by his own troops of a US deserter, clearly modeled on that of Private Eddie Slovik. GIs are trucked in to witness the punishment, somewhere in snowy northern Europe. It is accompanied by a voice‐over of Frank Sinatra singing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” At the end, somewhere in occupied Berlin, a GI and a Russian struggle and kill each other over disputed passage among ruins; as the camera rises from the scene, their bodies take the shape of a V. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with its own signature “V” – the dit‐dit‐dit‐dah of wartime Morse code – hammers in the background.
In the new popular medium of television, the occasional World War II drama series such as Combat or Twelve O’Clock High became mixed with something wartime audiences even in their strangest visions might never have imagined: World War II as 30‐minute situation comedy. Following Donald Bevans’s and Edmund Trzcinski’s Stalag 17 (play 1953, movie 1953) came Hogan’s Heroes, starring comedian Bob Crane, a depiction of wily allies and farcical Nazis, set in a German POW camp. Following on from They Were Expendable, with a nod to the PT 109 Kennedy legend, appeared Ernest Borgnine and Tim Conway in McHale’s Navy. Looking back on earlier productions such as South Pacific or Don’t Go Near the Water, one might well ask, what kind of people would turn World War II in the Pacific into a Broadway musical or the epic of a pink submarine? The answer: the same ones who would turn it into a two‐front war of the TV sitcom.
As the nation moved through the Vietnam era, World War II film increasingly moved into garish adventure and entertainment, almost as if to resurrect the Technicolor war in a new key. Popular classics of the era, ranging from spectacle to parody, included The Dirty Dozen (1967), Anzio (1969), Catch‐22 (1970), Patton (1970), Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Midway (1976), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Cross of Iron (1977), and MacArthur (1977). Meanwhile, John Wayne staged his own Vietnam World War II movie reenactment in The Green Berets (1968). Over the last decades of the century also came more considered and reflective productions such as The Big Red One (1980), Das Boot (1981), Empire of the Sun (1987), Memphis Belle (1990), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
In the print domain, largely the work of new experimentalists, ever more complex, problematic late‐stage representations of the mighty conflict contended for status as the Great American Novel of the war. At the same time, given the largely dark and revisionary cast of efforts including Joseph Heller’s Catch‐22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and given the near unanimity of American commitment at the time to the war effort, it is worth recalling in retrospect how many groundbreaking 1940s and early 1950s literary texts from the outset – that is, even during wartime and the immediate postwar era – proved themselves to be unusually revealing and critical of US military and political life. Careerism became a great theme, with a recurrent emphasis on political generals and lesser time‐serving incompetents. The armed services were indicted for racism, anti‐Semitism, sexism, homegrown totalitarianism, profiteering, cowardice, officiousness, and stupidity. Ubiquitous “fuckups,” frequently eventuating in pointless loss of life, resulted in even more shameful cover‐ups. Meanwhile, there was the universal dominion of what Paul Fussell called “chickenshit”: “petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant ‘paying off of old scores’; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances” (1989: 80).
The new revisionary novels may have been at times thematically and stylistically unfathomable to those who lived through the war and its immediate aftermath. As to the pacifist politics of Catch‐22 and Slaughterhouse Five, it might even now be profitably remembered that both were written by combatant‐survivors of some of the worst horrors that the war could offer. As to the last item in the trilogy, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: for all the grand conspiracy theories and quasi‐scientific inscriptions of paranoia enshrining it in the canon of postmodern apocalypse, it still stands forth in haunting echo of a vast body of documentary literature and film. About the last world war, it was (to borrow Alfred Kazin’s astute phrasing) also about the next war, a culmination of the century’s literature of the war‐breeding system.
Meanwhile, a vast overseas literature would emerge about the Holocaust in Europe and Japanese atrocities in Asia and the Pacific. As to domestic American memory, ever more popular and bestselling titles would tell the story. Studs Terkel’s watershed collection of oral histories would be called “The Good War” (1984). The titular ambiguity would go quickly by the board. Tom Brokaw would write about his wartime forebears in The Greatest Generation (1998). Stephen Ambrose, eventually in conjunction with film artists Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, would chronicle a group of airborne infantry soldiers grown to Shakespearean stature in Band of Brothers (2001). In weird oscillation, the carnage at Omaha and the feel‐good ending engineered by Hanks and Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan (1998) would be played off against the bloodbath of Quentin Tarantino’s irredeemably violent Inglourious Basterds (2009). As documentary celebrations in the large view, Ken Burns would produce The War (2007) and Hugh Ambrose The Pacific (2010). Toward the end would come a remarkable array of candid, clear‐eyed memoirs by old soldiers: Willliam Manchester’s Goodbye Darkness (1980), Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed at Pelelieu and Okinawa (1981), Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle (1996), and Robert Kotlowitz’s Before Their Time (1997).
In books and movies alike, as the generation of the war began die off, the new century seemed to mark a turn from the big‐war, big‐book, big‐movie impulse back to the reflective viewpoint of the individual combatant. This would be a function also of the media of production and consumption – the compact disc, the personal computer, the e‐reader, the smartphone – not to mention the increasingly distanced and atomized nature of the idea of warfare itself. In the hindsight of history, the foot soldier would stand tall, as he had in millennia of warfare extending as far back as Xenophon’s Anabasis, and as he would now turn out to appear again in the new literature of ensuing American wars. Vietnam War classics such as Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War (1977) and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), or those of the Desert Wars, Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds (2012) and Phil Klay’s Redeployment (2015), would confirm that Harry Brown, James Jones, Paul Fussell, Eugene Sledge, and a few others had it right. No matter what the war, the book, or the movie, the mission for every infantryman who has ever lived – or died – would always have been the same beneath the sky of history: A walk in the sun.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 5 (THE LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR I).