Flashback, December 1945: ‘They Were Expendable,’ Ford Tribute to Naval Courage, Premieres

They Were Expendable, MGM’s somber, stirring tribute to the American PT-boat sailors who first battled skeptical military brass about their craft, then Japanese invaders in the Philippines in the first desperate days of WWII, opened at Loew’s Capitol Theater in Washington, DC, in December 1945, with an audience including many in the military it honored, such as Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

Navy personnel also helped create the film, including screenwriter Frank Wead, a retired WWI pilot; director John Ford, a captain in the Navy Photographic Field Unit; and one of the two male leads, Robert Montgomery, a real-life PT skipper in the recently concluded war.

One key cast and crew member, however, was not involved in the war: the second male lead, John Wayne, who nevertheless used the movie to recast his image successfully as a towering American hero.

Ford and Wayne made 20 films over 35 years, but in certain ways this may have been the most pivotal. It certainly was the one that tested the most the boundaries of their working relationship and friendship.

Ford, who had enlisted in the Navy even before Pearl Harbor, had spent much of the prior four years in a documentary crew filming battles, including Midway (where he continued shooting even after being wounded, earning a Purple Heart for his gallantry). Throughout that time, he had been after Wayne to “get into” the fight.

But Wayne—34 and able-bodied at the outbreak of hostilities at Pearl Harbor—kept finding one reason after another not to join up. He had suffered an injury during college that continually hampered his function (though it hadn’t bothered him much while performing his own stunts several years before). He was the sole support of his family (though that status would change, as he was about to enter divorce proceedings). He couldn’t get out of a contract with Republic Pictures without triggering a lawsuit (though he didn’t test to see whether Republic head Herbert J. Yates was bluffing). He wrote Ford about joining his photographic unit but kept postponing joining until after his next picture.

In the end, Wayne was exempted from service due to his age and family status. That didn’t sit well with, for instance, Pacific Theater vets who, upon encountering Wayne on a USO tour, booed him raucously (an incident recalled in William Manchester’s WWII memoir, Goodbye, Darkness).

While not a draft dodger, Wayne had not pressed his case as vigorously as other stars had done. That rankled Ford, who before long was ridiculing him repeatedly in front of the entire crew.

The baiting was in keeping with the longtime on-set behavior of Ford, an alcoholic bully who would often pick one person on each film to abuse. The director had, in prior movies, taken Wayne to task for, among other things, “walking like a pansy.” 

Now, almost as soon as shooting began on Ford’s birthday in February—with co-star Montgomery serving inadvertently as a model of doing one’s military duty—Wayne found himself subjected to abuse on a subject that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the not-so-subtle imputation that he was a "shirker."

Ford may have reached his zenith in sadism when he asked why Wayne couldn’t even salute properly. Watching his co-star reduced to what another actor in the production called “a quivering pulp,” Montgomery had had enough. If Ford was subjecting Wayne to this treatment on his behalf, the director should stop the treatment right now, Montgomery said.

Ford eased up—but only on this movie. More than a decade and a half later, while shooting The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford asked James Stewart, a decorated pilot, what he had done in the war. Then he turned to Wayne to ask what he had done.

One has to ask why Wayne continued to endure this abuse—particularly by the early 1960s, the time of production on Liberty Valance, when he was a box-office institution. Gratitude to Ford for rescuing him from “B” Westerns with Stagecoach can only account for some of his forbearance.

True, there was also the possibility that Ford would offer Wayne the chance to play increasingly psychologically complex variations on the ideal of American manhood. But I think something else was involved, the same dynamic behind Montgomery’s work on this movie: the chance to learn from a master of movie-making.

By the mid-1940s, Montgomery—more famous these days, as I indicated in a prior post, as the father of Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery—was a highly regarded actor with his eye now trained on behind-the-camera work. A year later, he would finally have the chance to direct his first film, an unusual adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective novel The Lady in the Lake.  

But as he was playing the lead in They Were Expendable, Lt. John Brickley (based on the real-life war hero Lt. John Bulkeley), the actor—a bit nervous about not being in front of the camera for three years during the war—was thinking about the next turn in his career. He didn’t protest when Ford, after filming a scene according to his suggestion, then told him to take the reel home with him, as they wouldn’t be using it.

Weeks later, after Ford suffered an injury while on location in Florida, he had Montgomery film action sequences while he was recuperating. In what must have thrilled the actor, Ford later claimed that he couldn’t tell the differences between these scenes and those he had filmed.

As for Wayne: Playing Brickley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant "Rusty" Ryan, was not only a chance for a high-profile role in something besides a western, or even for making sizable elements of the public forget his less-than-glorious part in the war, but also an opportunity to learn lessons in directing from the universally acknowledged master of the art.

By this time, a project of his own was germinating in Wayne’s mind: making a film about the Alamo. Over the next 15 years, he would hire researchers and put much of his own money behind this account of the legendary last-ditch stand against Santa Ana. Even now, he was absorbing by osmosis how to frame shots and other aspects of film.

The Alamo was similar to They Were Expendable as a study of sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. But, if film could be likened to song, Wayne had learned the words but not the music that would make the experience indelible.

Over the course of his long career, Ford assembled a de facto stock company of actors who, for better or worse, were willing to endure his on-set dictatorship. He knew their talents and fit roles to them, and had learned to work even more smoothly with screenwriters such as Wead and Frank Nugent (a former movie critic who would write the script for The Searchers and other classic Ford westerns).

Wayne could not count on the same assets in making The Alamo. He could not secure actors he had hoped for principal roles (Clark Gable, Charlton Heston), so he had to hope that the ones he did secure (Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey) would mesh well with each other under his direction—a hope unfulfilled in the final product. 

More fatally, for all his interest in recreating the Alamo with almost documentary exactness, Wayne lacked Ford’s intense psychological identification with his material. From Midway to D-Day, Ford had not just filmed men under fire but also, as one himself shooting amid the roar of battle, he had imbibed their attitude toward war as a matter of stoic grace under pressure rather than an exercise in jingoism.

Some of the best moments in They Were Expendable are of men suddenly facing awesome odds with silent, grim but certain resolution: being told, one by one, at a social gathering that Pearl Harbor has been attacked, or, through a fluke of fate, losing one’s place on the plane taking select sailors to the comparative safety of Australia. The Alamo exhibits none of this fatalistic attitude. It is more committed to waving the flag than in honoring the qualities that led men to carry it in the face of death.

The result: while They Were Expendable did not lure a war-weary public to the box office, it has increasingly won critical acclaim as one of the best WWII movies, while The Alamo is a long epic that, for all its admirable intentions, lacks the psychological insight, pacing or extraction of actors' best talents so characteristic of Ford classics.

This Day in WWII History (FDR Signs Japanese-American Internment Order)

February 19, 1942—Disregarding even some of his closest advisers, Franklin D. Roosevelt committed one of the worst violations of civil liberties in American history by signing Executive Order 9066, which authorized the U.S. military to forcibly remove Japanese-Americans from their homes on the West Coast as a matter of wartime necessity.

At one stroke, more than 120,000 people—none of whom were ever found to have committed treason or similar acts against the United States—were interned in 10 concentration camps, losing their jobs, then prevented by barbed wire, sentry towers and gun-toting guards from leaving—all without trial or even charges levied against them that they could contest. When the executive order was lifted and the camps closed three years later, this massive population—both “Issei” (resident immigrants)—and “Nisei” (native-born Americans with Japanese parents) —emerged to find, in many cases, that they couldn’t reclaim their property.

In times of war, Presidents have, more often than not, curtailed the rights of some Americans. (Historian Garry Wills has noted that James Madison, during the War of 1812, was the one conspicuous exception.) But it is hard to think of a more egregious infringement of wartime civil liberties than Roosevelt’s—not only in terms of the number of people affected, but also because of the blatant zenophobia involved.

That zenophobia was not solely—or even mostly—a product of the shock and anger over the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor three months earlier. It was an unfortunate byproduct of the circumstances in which Japanese first came to the United States in the late 19^th century.

Among other things, Japanese immigration was blamed for undercutting demand for American workers and even for threatening American womanhood. So much agitation grew for legislation to exclude the race that in 1908, the Japanese and American governments came up with a "Gentlemen's Agreement," by which Japan restricted emigration to the U.S., while the U.S. admitted wives, children, and other relatives of immigrants already resident.

The racism lingered and, in one sense, blinded the American military to the nature of the dangers presented at Pearl Harbor. The commanders there believed that sabotage or espionage by Japanese agents posed a greater threat than external air attack. (In fact, some carriers were bunched together to prevent the chance of sabotage, leaving them more vulnerable to Admiral Yamamoto's daring dawn attack from the air.) 

Remarkably, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox  still claimed, in the hours after Pearl Harbor, that the attack resulted through the work of Japanese-American fifth columnists.

Naked prejudice became the order of the day, starting with influential columnist Walter Lippmann, who provided the kind of hysterical wartime justification for curtailing liberty that thoughtful people often regret later: “Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.”

But the reigning sentiment was given its bluntest form by Lt. Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command. “The Japanese race is an enemy race,” he wrote. “And while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”

Yet the movement toward incarceration was hardly universal. It might be expected that James Rowe, an aide in the Justice Department, and his boss, Attorney-General Francis Biddle, might object to the measure. 

More surprising was the opposition of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, hardly a champion of civil liberties. Not only did he immediately refute Knox’s claim of a fifth column, but he opposed mass internment. "The necessity for mass evacuation is based primarily upon public and political pressure rather than on factual data," he wrote Biddle in early February.

The decision, then, came down to one man: Roosevelt. For a long time, his defenders claimed that he acceded to unstoppable public opinion. But Greg Robinson’s By Order of the President (2001) put this matter in a different light by examining the President’s long-held belief that the Japanese-Americans were biologically "incapable of being true Americans," making him more prone to accepting the worst assumptions about their possible conduct.

It would be three and a half decades before Congress established a commission whose final report, concluding that the internment resulted from “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership,” recommended reparations of $20,000 to each surviving internee, and several years more before both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush issued formal apologies for the policy.

Incredibly, the internment of Japanese-Americans is not being viewed universally these days as an object lesson in the dangers of wartime hysteria, but as a possible precedent for tough if “necessary” steps that might be taken today. As far back as December 2015, Donald Trump gave an interview to Time reporter Michael Scherer that should have alarmed voters. He might not “make America great again” (who said it ever stopped being great?), but he sure is making history unexpectedly relevant.

Asked at that time if he would have supported the internment in WWII, Trump responded: “I would have had to be there at the time to tell you, to give you a proper answer. I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer.”

The then-candidate followed with one of his redundant, ridiculous non-sequitur rants that still reveal much—admittedly nauseating—about his mind: “It’s a tough thing. It’s tough. But you know war is tough. And winning is tough. We don’t win anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We don’t win wars anymore. We’re not a strong country anymore. We’re just so off.”

As it happens, there are more similarities between the Japanese-Americans of 1942 and immigrants from Muslim countries than might meet initially the eye. Those similarities do not redound to Trump’s favor.

First, in both instances, the bans were targeted at very specific groups, though the language in the executive orders (or the statements of the Presidents) might indicate otherwise. FDR’s order never specifically used the word “Japanese,” but he allowed army personnel in “military areas” to remove “any or all persons” from this area of the West Coast. Similarly, government lawyers claimed in court that Trump’s Muslim ban was not directed at the religion, but public statements by Rudy Guiliani, describing his part in framing the legislation, indicated otherwise

Second, the scope of the restrictions was, in one sense, oddly limited. The most logical source for relocated Japanese-Americans should have been on Hawaii, as this was where the original attack occurred. But Japanese-Americans on the island were deemed too important to be deal with in this way. Moreover, Americans of German and Italian ancestry did not fall under the purview of this order, even though those countries were also at war with the U.S. Trump’s executive order was similarly blinkered. The 9/11 plotters, for instance, came from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but neither of those countries are covered by the plan. By an amazing coincidence, neither is any Muslim country where The Trump Organization does business.

Third, the restrictions tarred entire groups indiscriminately. More than a hundred thousand Japanese who had never done anything wrong were regarded with suspicion. Government lawyers were similarly hard-pressed to cite how Muslims from the seven countries constituted a unique threat.

“Take a look at what FDR did many years ago and he’s one of the most highly respected presidents,” Trump has said. But FDR is esteemed for other aspects of his Presidency, not this exclusionary policy. Presidents such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson have seen their stock fall in recent years for failing to protect the rights of minorities. What makes Trump think that the same thing might not happen to FDR—not to mention himself?

This Day in Economic History (Marshall Plan Maps European Postwar Recovery)

June 5, 1947—Two years after the end of a war that had devastated Europe, George C. Marshall, the American “organizer of victory” over fascism, announced a plan to rescue the region from economic collapse, setting the stage for an alliance that eventually defeated another totalitarian power.

The Marshall Plan, proposed in a commencement address at Harvard by the Secretary of State, pumped nearly $13 billion in aid into the European economy. While initially it comprised mostly desperately needed shipments of food, staples, fuel and machinery from the United States, the focus turned to investment in industrial capacity that paved the way for long-term recovery.

A couple of aspects of this plan were extraordinary:

  

I    1) Its size. “Almost $13 billion” doesn’t sound like much, but that was in 1947 dollars. That translates to $107.1 billion in 2011 currency.  It was an amazing amount of money committed by a nation that itself had recently endured a decade-long depression. 

        2) Unprecedented generosity of victors. Living in a world recreated by the Marshall Plan, it’s easy to lose sight of the break with the past that this represented. But going back to the Romans—and even beyond—it was a far different story, writes David Fromkin, in his history In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur: The Generation That Changed America’s Role in the World (1995): “Prior to twentieth century America, the rule had been: losers pay. Now one of the victors chose to pay. A country that had been so isolationist that it regarded nothing that happened abroad as of vital concern took upon itself responsibility for the whole of the European continent: so far had it traveled in so short a time.”

Marshall, notes Fromkin, was one of a quintet of Americans (also including Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Douglas MacArthur) who came to adulthood when Theodore Roosevelt helped thrust the nation onto the world stage, then played roles a decade later when the United States entered WWI under Woodrow Wilson. In essence, they brought to fruition the Wilsonian concept that, in Fromkin’s words, “those who had won the world should serve the interests of all of its peoples, everywhere.”

The Army Chief of Staff during the war, Marshall had been tapped by President Harry Truman to become Secretary of State at a time of administration unrest and European fear. The prior head of the State Department, James F. Byrnes, had seen his relationship with his former friend and Senate colleague deteriorate because of Byrnes’ failure to keep the President informed and his disagreement with the domestic Fair Deal program, which he regarded as socialistic.

Once Truman appointed Marshall to the office, the President confided to his diary, “We'll have a real State Department now.” And so it was, particularly in the formation of the Marshall Plan.

Several people had a hand in the drafting of the proposal (more formally known as the European Recovery Program. A number of State Department officials, including the author of the famous containment “long telegram,” George F. Kennan, along with the President’s counsel, Clark Clifford, and Truman's later Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, contributed bits and pieces. The initial draft was created by Soviet expert Charles Bohlen, then revised by Marshall.

(The one person who preferred not to have his name on the program was the President. At that point, his popularity was plummeting, and more and more pundits and Democratic Party regulars were discounting his reelection chances. Truman, wanting the program to have a chance of success, believed that its best chance for passage was through association with Marshall. Anyway, the President reasoned, his Secretary of State was as responsible as anyone else for it, so why not attach his name to it?)

In a sign of Marshall’s prismatic style, there are no glittering phrases in the Harvard commencement address, just a solid summary of the facts and options—the kind of convincing presentation that he had made while Army Chief of Staff to President Roosevelt. As it was, the situation in Europe was so dire that it required no rhetorical amplification.

The German economy had been on the equivalent of a war footing once Hitler began his massive rearmament program shortly after coming to power, and we know now that he looked to Eastern Europe—and the dispossessed properties of the nation’s own Jews—as a means of disguising the utter failure of the Nazi-planned economy. Losses in Eastern Europe deprived Germans of their prior safety valve, and Allied air raids damaged the country’s infrastructure. And matters weren’t much better throughout the rest of Europe, even among the victors (who, after all, had to endure their own privation and sacrifice).

Besides its offer of massive aid, the Marshall Plan appealed to Europeans for another critical reason: they would participate in the plan’s execution. The Truman Administration recognized that, though the physical infrastructure of the continent might be close to a state of collapse, its intellectual infrastructure—in this case, its business culture and acumen—remained intact. Leaders in these countries would know best where their most urgent needs were. By securing their buy-in to the program, Truman and Marshall were also gaining their political good will and trust.

The latter would be sorely needed, because Joseph Stalin was intent on frustrating the aims of the program. It wasn't simply, as historian Walter LaFeber observed in an interview for a PBS American Experience documentary on Truman, because Germany “was the nation that had invaded the Soviet Union twice in 30 years and this was the nation that Stalin had essentially fought World War II for to keep down forever.” Stalin’s paranoia and thirst for absolute power not only played no small role in the Soviet dictator having his Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav M. Molotov, reject the plan out of hand as “totally unsatisfactory," but also compelled the nations of Eastern Europe—by this time, behind the Iron Curtain—to turn down the much-needed aid, too.

In the end, Soviet intransigence and saber-rattling tipped the balance toward Congressional approval of the plan. Both sides of the aisle had qualms about the massive aid, with both Arthur Vanderberg (R-Mich.), chairman of the Senator Foreign Relations Committee, and Sam Rayburn (D-Texas), the once-and-future Speaker of the House, initially incredulous about the amounts requested. A Soviet-backed coup in Czechoslavakia in February 1948 finally woke Americans and their representatives to the susceptibility of starving masses to totalitarian appeals, \and in April—10 months after Marshall first made the proposal—the European Recovery Program was passed by Congress.

Outright fear, then, accomplished what both altruism and enlightened self-interest could not. Even without the Red Army, however, as Acheson told Congress, the situation had to be dealt with. Such economic uncertainty reigned in Germany that Lucky Strike cigarettes were the only valuable, common currency.

Truman, Marshall, Acheson, and the other great minds behind the plan recognized what has become glaringly obvious in recent years: the globalization of finance and commerce. The Great Depression in America, they knew, had been exacerbated by the simultaneous downturn in Europe, which deprived the United States of markets for its foodstuffs and materials. Europe could go “down the drain” without the program, Truman told Rayburn: “And you and I have both lived through one depression, and we don’t want to live through another one, do we, Sam?”

In this regard, it is instructive to regard the predicament now confronting Barack Obama. The President, The New York Times reported the other day, is “at the mercy of actors in Europe, China and Congress whose political interests often conflict with his own.”

The situation faced by the Truman Administration, however, was arguably worse. Yet, led by Marshall, the State Department faced up to their issues soberly and with faith. “Avoid trivia,” Kennan recalled Marshall’s one piece of advice on preparing recommendations on how to save Europe. It’s not a bad strategy to be employed in the current—and any future—complicated, international financial situation, either.