When Hollywood Enlisted, the Studios and Stars Who Went to War in 1942

Try to picture the scene. It is the winter of 1942, and a leading man at the top of his career, with a contract, a mansion and a face that sells tickets in every town in America, stands in a recruiting office. He has the option of waiting for a call. He has the option of a deferment, or a nice desk job making morale pictures, or a bond tour with free dinners. Instead he asks where to sign, and he asks for the cockpit.

Now try to picture the same scene in your favourite modern awards ceremony, with all the speeches. I will wait.

I am not here to scold anybody. I am here to tell a story that deserves to be told, and that happens to be one of the best chapters in the history of American popular culture. In 1942, the film industry did something that its descendants might find hard to believe: it saw itself as a part of the country, and it went to war.

December 7, 1941, and what came after

The attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, ended the argument about whether America would take part in the war. Within days, the country was mobilising, and the film industry, centred in a few square miles of Southern California, was mobilising with it. Hollywood in 1941 was a business of enormous reach. Movies were the mass entertainment of the age, and a few hundred theatres could show the same film to millions in the same week. A government that wanted to reach the public could do worse than to ask the studios for help.

The studios said yes, and they did it in three ways: they sent their people, they made films, and they raised money and spirits at home. Let me take them one at a time.

The stars who put on the uniform

Jimmy Stewart is the best-known case, and for good reason. He had already won an Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story when he joined the Army in early 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and he was among the first major stars to do so. He trained as a pilot, flew B-24 bombers over Germany as an officer in the Army Air Forces, led bomb squadrons and rose to the rank of colonel by the end of the war. He stayed in the Air Force Reserve afterward and retired as a brigadier general. He did not talk much about it. That, too, is part of the story, because he came home and went back to work without making a speech.

Clark Gable is the second great example. He was, in 1941, arguably the biggest star in the business, "the King of Hollywood" in the studio's own publicity. In January 1942 his wife, the actress Carole Lombard, was killed in a plane crash while returning from a war-bond rally in her home state of Indiana, where she had sold a very large amount of bonds. Gable enlisted in the Army Air Forces in August 1942, completed officer training, and flew combat missions over Europe with a bomber group, filming material for a recruiting picture about aerial gunners. The man could have sat out the war in the most comfortable way imaginable, and chose to be shot at.

They were not alone. Henry Fonda, one of the screen's most respected actors, joined the Navy. Other leading men, directors and technicians went into the services, and many served in ways that never made the newspapers. The pattern held across the industry. An observer in 1943 could have walked down a studio street and noticed that half the familiar faces were gone.

Directors went too. John Ford, one of the great directors of American film, headed a wartime field photographic unit as a Navy officer and was at the Battle of Midway in June 1942, where he was wounded while filming. His documentary of the battle won an Academy Award. William Wyler flew with bomber crews to film The Memphis Belle, a documentary about the crew of a B-17 who completed their tour of duty. Men who knew how to light a scene and cut a film found that those skills were useful in combat zones, where a camera could carry the war home.

Frank Capra and the case for explaining the war

Frank Capra, the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life, was already a major figure when he entered the Army, and the Army, to its credit, put him to work at what he did best. He was commissioned in the Signal Corps and given the job of explaining to American soldiers why they were fighting.

The result was the Why We Fight series, seven films made between 1942 and 1945, beginning with Prelude to War. They were built from newsreel footage, captured enemy film, animated maps and narration, and they laid out the case against the Axis powers in terms that a young draftee could grasp. The series was made for the troops and was later distributed for public viewing. I want to be careful here: the films were propaganda, openly, and propaganda in a good cause. They told the viewer, in plain words, that the enemy was a threat to free people. You can disagree with some of the choices Capra made, but you cannot say he was unclear about what he believed.

I put the point this way because conservatives are sometimes embarrassed by the word. There is nothing shameful in telling a free people why a war is just. The shame would be in refusing to do it. What distinguishes good wartime persuasion from bad is whether it tells the truth and whether it is aimed at defending liberty, and in the case of Capra's films the answer to both questions was yes.

The Hollywood Canteen

At home, the industry did what it could to look after the men on their way to war. On October 3, 1942, the Hollywood Canteen opened on Cahuenga Boulevard in Los Angeles. It was the idea of the actors John Garfield and Bette Davis, with the support of the industry's unions and guilds, and it was a free club for servicemen. Soldiers and sailors passing through Los Angeles could come in, eat, dance and talk with stars, who volunteered as hosts, waiters, musicians and dishwashers. A serviceman might find himself being served a sandwich by an actor he had watched on a screen back home, which was surely the whole point.

It was staffed largely by volunteers and run on donations, with no admission charge for the troops. Hundreds of performers took part before the Canteen closed in 1945. There is something particularly moving about it. A lonely nineteen-year-old on his way to the Pacific, who had spent the last month in a barracks, was given a few hours in which the glamour of the movies was put at his service. The industry that usually sold him a fantasy for the price of a ticket gave him a real evening for free.

The Office of War Information, and the cautionary note

Not everything in the story was admirable, and I would be a poor guide if I pretended otherwise. In June 1942, the government created the Office of War Information, and within it a Bureau of Motion Pictures, headed by Lowell Mellett, to coordinate the cooperation of the studios with the war effort. The bureau reviewed scripts, issued guidance on what kinds of stories would help the war, and encouraged producers to include themes of the home front, sacrifice and alliance.

The studios mostly cooperated willingly. Hollywood, after all, had its own reasons to want the war to go well. But a government bureau reading scripts is a government bureau reading scripts, and the arrangement raised fair questions then and raises them now. It is one thing for a studio to choose to make a patriotic picture. It is another for an agency to hold a pen over the screenplay. Some in Congress thought the bureau had slipped from information into propaganda, and the OWI's domestic operations were cut back in 1943.

I raise this because a good conservative looks at any government involvement in speech with some scepticism, even in a good cause, and even in wartime. The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." The Hollywood of 1942 was cooperating voluntarily, and it was a free choice by free men, but the shape of the cooperation shows how easily a good cause can lead to an overreaching office. I discuss the modern version of that worry in The Disinformation Governance Board Lasted Four Months, and That Was Too Long and, from a different angle, in NRA v. Vullo and the Unanimous Rule Against Government Jawboning.

The model, then, is voluntary patriotism. The great thing about 1942 was not that the government told the studios what to do. It was that the studios and the stars looked at the country and decided what they owed it.

What the movies did

During the war years, Hollywood released a stream of pictures about the war itself and about the world the soldiers were fighting for. Some were serious dramas, some were adventure stories, some were comedies, and some were musicals designed to send audiences out of the theatre in a good mood. They were not all great films. Some were, in fairness, rather bad. But the movies as a whole carried a sense of common purpose that is hard to find today.

It would be a mistake to think the effort was all flag-waving. Many of the films that audiences of the time loved were about ordinary people and about home, family, courage and sacrifice. That is why the industry's patriotism worked: it did not sound like a sermon. It sounded like the stories people already liked. I have made a similar point about why movies that love America keep drawing crowds in Movies That Love America Still Sell Tickets, and Hollywood Keeps Forgetting, and I would say that the audience of 1942 and the audience of today have more in common than the industry likes to admit.

An argument, in numbers

Let me set out what the 1942 example shows, in order.

1. An industry can see itself as part of the nation. The film business did not treat the war as someone else's problem. It treated it as its own.
2. Sacrifice from the top earns credibility. When the biggest stars in America put on uniforms and went to war, nobody could say that Hollywood was asking others to do what it would not do itself. That is the root of moral authority.
3. Voluntary service beats compelled service. The Canteen, the bond tours and the enlistments came from the industry. The few instances in which government tried to shape content produced the controversies.
4. Patriotic culture works best when it is good culture. The pictures that lasted were the ones that were good stories first.
5. None of this required hiding the industry's other duties. Hollywood still made comedies, romances and adventures. It simply did not pretend that entertaining the country and serving it were different jobs.

The steelman, and the answer

A sceptic will say that all of this was easy. The war was popular, the enemy was monstrous, and nobody had to think very hard about whether the cause was just. Patriotism costs nothing in a unanimous country.

That is partly fair, and I accept the first half. The unity of 1942 was unusual, and no one can manufacture it. But the conclusion does not follow. Stewart and Gable were not under pressure to enlist in the most dangerous service available. They could have found a safer way to contribute, and plenty of people did. They chose the harder one. The point is not that the country was unanimous, but that the industry, when unanimity existed, did not hide behind it. It joined.

And one of the lessons is about the other half of the story. A few years later, in the Cold War, the industry's relationship with the country was strained by the blacklist, a different and more troubling story that I discuss in The Hollywood Blacklist Was Wrong, and Conservatives Should Say So Plainly. The point is not that Hollywood has only ever been admirable. It is that for a few years, in a time of real danger, it was.

What it would take

Can it happen again? I think the answer is that it can, if the industry wants it to. The audience is there, and so are the stories. What is required is not a government order but a decision, by people who run studios and platforms and write the cheques, that they are a part of the country, and that the country's story is worth telling with affection. An industry that spent the war years treating the American flag as an honoured thing, and its fighting men as heroes, has a model to follow. It is not a model that requires agreement on every issue. It requires only a basic loyalty, the kind that says: when the country is in danger, we are with it.

I would also say that this is not only Hollywood's job. Every industry, every institution and every profession has the same question to answer. Is it a part of this country, or only a tenant in it? The answer shows in the choices it makes.

The case in brief

1. After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood's stars, directors and studios joined the war effort, from Jimmy Stewart's bomber missions to Clark Gable's combat service and John Ford's footage at Midway.
2. Frank Capra's Why We Fight films explained to soldiers why the war was just, in plain and truthful terms.
3. The Hollywood Canteen, opened in October 1942, put the industry's glamour at the service of ordinary servicemen for free.
4. The Office of War Information's script review is the cautionary note: voluntary patriotism is the model, and government direction of content is the risk.
5. An industry that sees itself as part of the country can again serve it, if it chooses to.

What you can do: find a classic film from the war years at your library, watch it with your family, and talk about what the people who made it believed they owed their country.