James Stewart World War II

Zero Hour

Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe by Robert Matzen

Here is Lt.-Col. Jim Stewart one month after the D-Day landings. I chose this image for the cover of Mission because it reflects the toll of war on a man so recently thought of as youthful. He had by this time flown 14 combat missions, earned two Distinguished Flying Crosses, and supervised his bomb group’s D-Day bombing missions. The photo was found in Jim’s personal collection, which he had donated to Brigham Young University.

One of my favorite chapters in Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe concerns the run-up to D-Day, which Maj. Jim Stewart had a hand in, as did just about everyone in the Eighth Air Force. I well remember sitting in a Brigham Young University library looking at records from the 453^rd Bomb Group at Old Buckenham and feeling chills along my spine as I read a rare history of the 453^rd written during the war. It described “invasionitis”—the endless speculation over when and where the attack would take place—as it reached its peak, and then suddenly, after weeks and months of anticipation, the base went on lockdown. No one in or out. All leaves cancelled. No phone calls. All fliers on alert. Imagine how those guys felt—the invasion of Europe was at hand. It was Zero Hour, and they were literally on the front lines.

Now I’m researching my next book and looking at the impending invasion through the eyes of civilians in Nazi-occupied countries. As they felt the iron fist of Hitler’s Germany close around their throats, as Jews were sent away and innocent civilians were executed in reprisal for partisan raids, as young men and women were kidnapped off the streets where they’d lived all their lives and sent to Germany as slave labor or worse, the only hope of entire populations was an Allied invasion. Every day and every day and every day they waited and hoped and prayed, and it kept not happening. On the continent as in England and the U.S., rumors filled the vacuum of information as top-secret preparations continued. Loose lips could do a lot more than sink ships in May 1944—loose lips could result in a repulsed invasion and a prolonging of a war that had already killed tens of millions of human beings.

The landing craft that the B-24s couldn’t see as D-Day commenced.

Seventy-three years ago right now as I sit here in the New York time zone, B-24s took off from Old Buck to hit targets immediately behind the beach code-named Omaha on the Normandy coast. Jim Stewart briefed his bomber crews that they would be able to look down and see the mightiest fleet ever set to water, but upon return hours later, the pilots and bombardiers complained bitterly to Stewart that they had seen nothing because of heavy cloud cover. Among the things they didn’t see during those early June 6 sorties were their targets (Wehrmacht barracks and gun emplacements), which the bombardiers missed, and badly. Eisenhower had ordered a ‘Go’ to the operation despite continued lousy weather, and so shortly after dawn, tens of thousands of young men hit beaches that were supposed to be neutralized by bombing but hadn’t been softened at all. We know the result: Omaha was a bloodbath.

As the years pass by and the veterans of that day’s assault pass to glory, it becomes increasingly difficult to appreciate the gravity of D-Day, the shock of the headlines, the importance of the news to simply everyone in the world: to soldiers throwing up in landing craft in heavy seas knowing a storm of lead awaited; to parents across the ocean fearing for their sons in harm’s way; to oppressed civilians in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands desperate for liberation; to Jews heading for concentration camps or already there; and, yes, to Germans who could see their empire and dreams of a unified Europe slipping away. They knew that if the Allies got a foothold in France and headed toward Germany on one side with the Russians moving in on the other, the Reich was doomed.

For Baby Boomers (defined broadly as the children of service men who returned from WWII), D-Day is represented by The Longest Day, made by Darryl F. Zanuck’s 20^th Century Fox in 1962 over the course of 10 months at more than 30 locations in France. It’s an occasionally brilliant, mostly ham-handed, decidedly G-rated version of a brutal 24 hours in world history. If anything, The Longest Day trivializes what really went on as it lays on globs of irony that’s supposedly clever and amusing and gives us some of the more unusual casting in Hollywood history. Everybody who was anybody got a cameo to the detriment of what this epic picture might have been. Even 18 years after the event when The Longest Day was released, there was no way to convey what D-Day meant to the world. So many decades after that, it’s downright impossible to do justice to this day and these people on all sides, particularly all those men who stormed the beaches code-named Juno, Sword, Gold, Utah, and Omaha. All I can say is, I salute each and every one of them for what they gave the world—a chance for an end to the most catastrophic war in history. And beyond that, a chance for a peace in Western Europe that remains to this day. Stated plainly, the accomplishments of the men of D-Day will always dwarf any and all acts of terror, for it infused the continent with a steely resolve that I’m convinced will endure forever.

John Wayne and a bunch of guys who looked nothing–NOTHING–like the generation of young Americans who participated in D-Day. Press materials noted “an unusually large and attractive cast.” Um, agree about the large part, at least in the Duke’s case.

Home Sweet Home

I finally found a place where I fit in, and it’s France, because like me, the French are impatient and unfriendly-going-on-surly. I can’t overstate this enough: I’m not a fuzzy, cuddly person, so it was this introvert’s dream come true to go to Paris and be surrounded by millions of people who didn’t ask, “How was your day?” or care how my day was or come anywhere near making eye contact. Vive la France!!

My affinity for all things French began with my love of the works of Dumas and grew over the decades as I also became interested in World War II. Somehow, however, the movie Is Paris Burning? had eluded me because all along I had the impression it had to do with radicals in the 1960s, which interested me not in the least. But no! It’s about the end of Nazi rule in Paris in 1944 and was made in the mid-’60s as the French answer to Darryl Zanuck’s formula of taking a popular military book and turning it into a blockbuster picture with an all-star cast; Zanuck had just done it with Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day and director René Clément would repeat the process with Is Paris Burning? by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre (a book I haven’t read but need to).

The French have this understanding that they’re the coolest people on earth, and this theme permeates Is Paris Burning? In the last days of the occupation of the city, the Germans were besieged by various factions of Resistance fighters who squabbled amongst themselves. Into this scenario backpedaled German Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, given Paris to administer by Hitler. Their meeting comprises the first sequence in the picture and von Choltitz instantly becomes human and not your typical robotic Nazi when one of the Fuhrer’s aides asks the general if he’s nervous to meet Hitler. “Ja,” says von Choltitz, and that simple line of dialogue as delivered by Gert Frobe (fresh off Goldfinger) sets him up as a sympathetic character for the remainder of the picture. Hitler states that he is placing von Choltitz in charge because he has always been a loyal officer and the order is clear: If it looks like Paris is about to fall, burn it.

Throughout, Paris is treated like a beautiful princess, bound and gagged, held at knifepoint by thugs, and menaced periodically. The audience is held captive alongside her, and we don’t want a pore in her face or a hair on her head to be so much as touched.

Two of the cool kids, Marie Versini and Jean-Paul Belmondo of the Free French who are out to save the beautiful princess.

A parade of famous French movie stars marches through the picture: Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Alain Delon, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and so on. As with any all-star epic, some vignettes work and others fall flat. Frobe lugs the entire German P.O.V. on his burly shoulders for hours of run time and is more than capable of handling the assignment. We also see a fair number of American stars sprinkled in like salt and pepper to suit the tastes of U.S. audiences. First of these and a shock to see was my old friend Robert Stack. I wish I had had the foresight to ask him back in the day about Is Paris Burning? but I was woefully ignorant when I knew him. Most of the American actors in the cast play generals. Stack is General Sibert; Glenn Ford is a generic Omar Bradley; Kirk Douglas takes on Patton in name only and for a reported one-day’s work on camera. The French have this way of subtly or not-so-subtly portraying Americans as clods—even the good guys edging closer to break the German Occupation. In Paris today we Americans can be spotted at once, and we’re merely tolerated because we have money and don’t tend to carry bombs, but we’re notoriously gauche and anything we touch needs to be disinfected. That same view seeps down into the cans of film onto which Is Paris Burning? has been imprinted. I say this with great affection because the French are discerning and know gauche when they experience it, and when I interact with them I realize it’s up to me to deal with my lower status because all they want is my money and not my friendship.

The version of Is Paris Burning? I watched the other night On Demand ran about 3:20 but it went by fast and I’m reading that the original clocked in at more than four hours and a number of bits have been cut over the years, including E.G. Marshall as an American G-2 officer. I wonder if he was portrayed as just another American simpleton, rattling sabers and over-rounding the R’s in the dialogue.

I imagine Leslie Caron is thinking, Orson, you look terrible.

Orson Welles shows up playing Orson Welles playing a Swedish diplomat and looking, as usual, terrible. How do you become that just a quarter century after serving as Hollywood’s latest “boy genius?” Anyway, he spends a fair amount of the picture serving as the German commandant’s conscience; in real life Nordling the diplomat may or may not have influenced von Choltitz, who ruled Paris for all of two weeks, to spare the city and not carry out Hitler’s orders.

Wretched advertising poster for Is Paris Burning? I’d have taken a match to this campaign that left would-be audiences wondering what the hell this picture was about.

Director Clément supposedly was intimidated by making this picture and I can see why, starting with knowing he had a country full of critics awaiting–not just any critics but French critics–and with having at his disposal the entire city of Paris as a stage. When you see a line of German tanks in front of Notre Dame, you are looking at a line of German tanks in front of Notre Dame. The entire city center is on display with most of the action taking place on or around the Ile de France. For scenery alone this picture is magnificent, and Maurice Jarre used these stunning visuals as inspiration for a musical score that infuses scenes with romance and majesty as various French units—republican, communist, etc.—find ways to work together, contact the Allies, and systematically take back their city. Check out various clips on Youtube to get a sense of what I’m talking about, like this one where two Resistance leaders (Belmondo and French actress Marie Versini) brave snipers to get to the Hotel Matignon held by Vichy-French soldiers, walk in, and calmly take over. It’s French enough to make me cry, and do yourself a favor and watch the entire six-minute clip because after these two civilians review a line of French troops suddenly under their command (accompanied by Jarre’s scoring), just, WOW! Belmondo surveys the opulent 18^th century Matignon—shot on location—and sums it up with a blasé, “Adequate.”

The downsides are there in plain sight. The title Is Paris Burning? is pretty awful as titles go and the 1966 publicity campaign reeked. It’s a black-and-white film, which of course disqualifies it for a portion of modern cinema goers. There’s no CG and nobody jumps out of a plane at 15,000 feet without a parachute and lives to tell the tale. Nor are there any zombies. Dubbing is an issue; dubbing has marred many an international picture. Here the actors spoke their native languages—French, German, English—and then were looped over depending on country of release. The result, nicht sehr gut, and I would have preferred subtitles. I’m blaming the dubbing for shortcomings in narrative flow because Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay, and with that comes pedigree. All in all, even though I’m German, feel free to give me an armband and sign me up for the French Resistance.

The Mission

I stood in high Pennsylvania winds last Sunday morning on what is ground zero to the core story of Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe. At my back was Gettysburg’s infamous Wheatfield, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the second day’s battle. A half mile at my front rose Little Round Top. And staring me in the face was a granite monument to the 11^th Pennsylvania Reserves, the regiment commanded by Col. Samuel M. Jackson. In murderous fighting on July 2, 1863, the 11^th Pennsylvania—part of Fisher’s Brigade of the Fifth Corps—was part of a charge down the slope of Little Round Top that checked Longstreet’s ambitious maneuver to hit the federal left flank. Afterward, a Union commanding general rode up to Jackson hat in hand and exclaimed, “Colonel Jackson, you have saved the day. Your regiment is worth its weight in gold; its weight in gold, sir!”

Thanks to men like Col. Sam Jackson, the Union was preserved.

The monument of the 11th Pennsylvania Reserves, with Little Round Top in the background. This ground was carpeted with the dead and dying on July 2, 1863, but Sam Jackson remained upright. It was here that union Brig. Gen. Samuel Crawford praised Jackson for saving the day.

Why is this ground zero to Mission? Sam Jackson was Jimmy Stewart’s grandfather, his mother’s father. Jackson’s regiment had been positioned at the foot of Little Round Top and received orders to hold against the Confederate advance at all cost. This his regiment did, and advanced probably no more than 1,500 yards that day, but hard-fought and bloody real estate it was. Standing amidst the monuments to so many regiments intermingled there and representing both Union and Confederate units, this hallowed acreage, I was hit by what Jackson had done, and how much it influenced James Maitland Stewart, the laid-back star of stage and screen.

Except Stewart wasn’t laid back at all. Stewart was high-strung and possessed a compulsion to serve—his Mission of the book title—that was born of his two grandfathers, Sam Jackson and James Maitland Stewart, Jim’s father’s father and a sergeant in the Army Signal Corps. Sergeant Stewart had fought his way through many Civil War battles, the last being Appomattox, where he then witnessed the surrender of Lee to Grant that ended the war. The estimable Jackson had died just before Jim was born in 1908, but old J.M. lived into the 1930s and Jim learned about service and sacrifice from this man above all others, one who had lived through America’s bloodiest war.

The Pennsylvania Memorial at Gettysburg, where S.M. Jackson gets top billing.

This past Sunday, November 20, I lectured at the Gettysburg Heritage Center, which includes an ambitious multi-media museum designed to entertain and educate even today’s short-attention-span learners. When I described Jackson’s advance and his connection to Jim to a packed Heritage Center house, there was a collective gasp. People just don’t realize what a giant shadow Jim’s grandfathers cast on his life. In effect, Jim was poured into a military mold and had no choice but to end up a soldier. It’s the reason he gleefully reported for induction after being drafted nine months before Pearl Harbor. With this action he turned his back on Hollywood luxury, a thriving avocation as a sexual athlete, and an Academy Award career with a giant, goofy grin and pulled an army private’s uniform onto his six-foot-four, 139-pound frame. After he was fingerprinted and sworn in before a throng of reporters and cameraman, Jim refused to talk to or work with the press for the next five years so he could concentrate on being the best soldier he could be. It’s unprecedented what he did and the way he did it.

Speaking of soldiers, I shared the microphone last Sunday with Clem Leone, 92-year-old veteran of the air war over Europe. Clem knew and flew with Stewart as described in Mission, and was shot down over Gotha, Germany, on February 24, 1944. I’ve never experienced anything quite like this stretch of two hours, sharing the stage and then sitting and signing books with my own hero who had lived history. It’s one of many things I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving 2016.

With Clem Leone at the Gettysburg Heritage Center event. Amidst an outpouring of love for Clem, who is a local celebrity, 97 books sold in 90 minutes.

A Question of Character(s)

I have a new book coming out in two weeks, Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe, published by GoodKnight Books. I wrote it because Stewart in World War II represents one of the last great untold stories of Hollywood. Jim never talked about what he did in the war, and so there was a vacuum of information about it. I also wrote Mission because I love a challenge, and his commitment to remain mum meant there were no quotes from him about his experiences in combat, so I was starting with nothing, but had to end up with everything or the concept wouldn’t be valid.

In a nutshell, what I knew going in was that James Stewart flew heavy bombers over Germany as a member of the U.S. Army Eighth Air Force. I discovered in my research over the next 18 months that this was no tin soldier. Stewart was smack-dab in the middle of WWII, the most horrific nightmare in human history, and writing about something of that magnitude posed not one but a series of cascading challenges. How much can I assume the reader knows going in? How much do I have to set the stage? I can’t provide the whole history of the Great War and Hindenburg and Hitler and the rise of the Nazi Party but they’re all relevant to why the United States (and Jim Stewart) went to war, just as is the global Great Depression, the oppression of the Jews, and Germany’s aggressions against Poland and other countries. The reader also needs to have a basic understanding of the United States military before and during the war. In other words, Mission is supposed to be about Jimmy Stewart but it called for a whole lot of context.

Nineteen-year-old T. Sgt. Clem Leone graduates gunnery school and will soon meet up with Capt. J.M. Stewart.

I grant you that my biographical model is unorthodox: I always try to craft interesting stories rather than just tell you, the reader, “Jim did this, then Jim did that,” I decided to present readers with the German side through three supporting characters, Dolfo Galland, the ace German fighter pilot; Selma Lesser, the German Jew hiding in Berlin; and Gertrud Siepmann, the daughter of a German naval engineer. To let you see the American side I didn’t just feature Jim; I also told the story of Clem Leone, a young B-24 radioman from Baltimore. They’re all real people who lived during the war (I interviewed two of the three extensively), and through their eyes I was able to access a great deal of critical background in relatively few words.

So what happened was, I wrote the manuscript for Mission and gave it to some smarter people than me to review—two were experts on the Eighth Air Force and three were experts on classic Hollywood. All were expecting a straight bio of our boy Jimmy and what they got was a cast of characters led by Jim and supported by these others.

I had braced myself for a strong reaction to my unorthodox model and Whoa, Nellie, did I get it! To me, these other sets of eyes and experiences deepened our understanding of Stewart, his world, and what he faced. Two of the Hollywood experts had major objections, and passionate ones at that. They advised that these other characters had to GO because they got in the way and would put readers off who were expecting a book on Jimmy Stewart, although one of the two offered a solution: If I felt I must keep these characters, the best place for them was in an appendix at the back of the book where they’d be safely out of the way.

Gertrud Siepmann and her sister Anne in Eppstein, Germany during the war. Today Gertrud goes by the name Trudy McVicker and lives near Chicago.

Well, what a pickle, because I have tremendous respect for all my reviewers, and they cared enough to level with me that I had a big problem on my hands. The trouble was, I had constructed my story in a particular way and to lose the other characters meant ripping the frame out and starting over.

My editor supported my concept because Fireball, my telling of the Carole Lombard story, had been a big success and was just as unorthodox a biography. It was my call, and what a tough one to make.

My solution was to drop Selma the German Jew, and cut back the narrative of the other supporting characters to lean, hard-hitting snapshots of these lives lived in parallel to, and then intersecting with, Jim’s. I didn’t want to lose Selma; I had discovered her diary-style letter to family, 22 pages of single-spaced German text written just after the end of the war, and I had had the letter translated with care. What a story it tells—all the brutality of the Nazi regime and the death and suffering of the war wrapped up in one woman who lost everything, with the coup de grace a bombing mission by Jim and the boys over Berlin that destroys even her place of hiding. I will detail her story in a future column because Selma Lesser’s is a voice that must live on.

I’m glad I kept my other characters; when Publishers Weekly reviewed Mission a couple of weeks ago they singled out Clem and Gertrud, and I felt such relief that these people were seen as assets to the narrative about Stewart.

I’ll have a lot more to say about Mission in coming weeks, so stay tuned. In the meantime, please visit the GoodKnight Books website to learn more. (Imagine what a great Christmas gift Mission‘ll make.)

Going All the Way

An interesting situation arose when I routed the manuscript for Mission for review to key subject matter experts who had helped in its development. Two are Hollywood historians, one is a WWII historian, and two are aviators who flew with Jim Stewart in the war. One of the fliers took umbrage with my depiction of Jim’s sexual exploits in pre-war Hollywood, and most stridently so. No spoilers here, not for a book still four months from release (and the embargo is still in effect), but suffice to say Jim was a far busier boy than you’d expect during his five-plus years in Hollywood prior to joining the military in 1941. The flier said, basically, that in his day you didn’t speak of such things, and he didn’t want Jim to be remembered that way.

I did some soul-searching after receiving this feedback because I greatly admire the man who delivered it, and I wondered if he was right that this type of information has no place in a book about Stewart’s military career. Here are the meanderings of my mind as I thought it through:

You’d never know it from the characters she played onscreen, but MGM contract star Ann Rutherford was another of the busy ones around town.

Sex wasn’t invented by the counter-culture of the 1960s. Sex was a favorite pastime of Hollywood citizens going back to the first days of hand-cranked cameras in the silent era. All roads in my research for Errol Flynn Slept Here, Errol & Olivia, and Fireball led to, well, sex. Errol Flynn was a big fan of indiscriminate sex. So was Clark Gable. Carole Lombard nurtured a healthy sexual appetite and did what came naturally and so did Jean Harlow. Even—dare I say it—Olivia de Havilland succumbed to pleasures of the flesh in an environment in which many of the world’s most beautiful, suddenly rich and famous people were crammed into a few square miles of exotic Southern California real estate, with no rules or chaperones. It became a matter of sport and ego to see who could bag whom, and Marlene Dietrich might be the prototype for sexual athletics as will be revealed in Mission when she looked at her lovers not as men or women or actors or people but as “conquests.”

If you’re a 30-year-old heterosexual guy and your day-job requires you to kiss Hedy Lamarr or Lana Turner—women whose every move is of interest to an entire movie-going world—what the heck are you going to be inclined to be thinking about but, My God this is a beautiful woman! If you’re a heterosexual woman known as a glamour queen and the script says today you will be romancing Flynn, Gable, or Doug Fairbanks Jr., and you’re looking into their eyes all day long, feeling their beating hearts, are you supposed to turn that off along with the soundstage lighting at 6 in the evening?

Olivia de Havilland tells a funny story about being in the clinches with Flynn shooting the love scene for Robin Hood over and over and “poor Errol had a problem with his tights.” You betcha. He was 28; she was 21. Nature was taking its course.

Why, Robin, I do believe you’re happy to see me.

There was a whole lot of nature going on in Hollywood by the 1930s when Jim Stewart reached his prime. Going into the Mission project I had heard that Stewart was known for having a “big stick” and I couldn’t even imagine it from this small-town product with a strong Presbyterian upbringing, but son of a gun, America’s boy next door had a side to him that reveals a lot about who he really was and what his psyche needed. “He had an ego, like all of them,” said a man who knew the older Jimmy Stewart well.

A picture started to emerge for me as I searched for the “real Jimmy Stewart,” not the lovable old guy on Johnny Carson, but the young one roaming Hollywood and then, seemingly inexplicably, running off with a big grin to join the Army nine months before shots were fired by Americans in what became WWII. And part of the story of who Stewart was, a significant part, involved his Hollywood love life, which meant that after all my soul searching, the juicy stuff stayed. I decided to go all the way … just like Jim.

Stewart once told his perturbed BFF Henry Fonda, “Hank, I don’t steal your dates. They steal me.”

Those Damn Peaks

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Carole Lombard and dignitaries just off the east steps of the Indiana State House in Indianapolis on January 15, 1942. As of now, she had less than 36 hours to live.

If you’ve read Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3, you know the significance of January 16; a year ago, since the date coincided with the fall of weekdays culminating in Friday January 16, I conducted a Twitter campaign to take you minute by minute through Carole Lombard’s last hectic 36 hours of life in real-time. That exercise taught me just how fast she careened toward her own death. It’s 11:30, she’s here; it’s 12:15, she’s there; 2:05, time for a wardrobe change to be here at 2:15. She had spent Thursday January 15, 1942 dashing and appearing. Make a speech, sell bonds, dash a few blocks to raise a flag, change clothes, go to a tea, change clothes, go to dinner uptown, then motorcade to the evening “gala.”

Mary Anna Johnson was a young federal researcher when she saw Carole Lombard board TWA Flight 3 in Indianapolis. Mary would be bumped from Flight 3 before it crashed, and tell me all about the experience 70 years later.

Last year’s Twitter recreation of the timeline for today, January 16, took a more linear turn. Imagine you’re flying west on a TWA red-eye, and it’s the middle of the night and you stop in lonely Indianapolis. Modern air travelers have no frame of reference for what a DC-3 interior was like. Basically you sat in the equivalent of a big tin can, sloped uphill, in terrific noise. You can’t imagine the noise of two commercial transport engines on either side of you, so if you got on the plane at LaGuardia or Newark and hopped your way west, by the time you reached Indianapolis, you were bushed. Sleep, when it came at all, was fleeting and fitful. Then as you sit in the silence of a darkened tarmac (the tinnitus of those engines still in your ears), your flight attendant, known then as an “air hostess,” announces that a VIP is boarding and please respect her privacy. Onto the plane steps Carole Lombard, her mother, and their PR man, with Lombard still wired from all she had experienced in the last 18 hours, from her first appearance in Indianapolis on.

As I write this I guess she’s somewhere over Missouri and now she’s sleeping fitfully and fleetingly while flying beside and in front of two passengers who are spitting mad at her for making them travel by air at all. Spitting mad. This is one of many aspects of the story that people don’t quite get because there are no photographs to depict it and few eyewitnesses spoke of it, but this party was Unhappy with a capital Un. Carole’s mother, whom she knew as “Petey” sometimes and “Tots” most of the time, would go to her fiery death furious at her daughter. PR man Otto Winkler would spend his last day trapped on the tin can and anticipating an air disaster because he had dreamed it would happen. So here he is right now over Missouri, expecting the worst after he had expended all his energy in Indianapolis and then hadn’t slept all night. Imagine, just imagine…

Stop after stop followed as the TWA’s transcontinental Flight 3 hedge-hopped west, stopping to pick up and drop off passengers and mailbags and to top off the tanks for the next leg. Then there’s another aspect of the thousand aspects to the story: the Army Air Corps guys. They had gotten onto the plane in dribs and drabs and by the last stop, the unscheduled stop in Las Vegas, there were 15 of these fliers on the plane as passengers, and only four civilians. One of the reasons I decided to write the manuscript I’m finishing today, Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe, is because of the affinity I feel for the Air Corps boys after writing Fireball. Newspapers reporting the crash of the plane gave the impression these young men were all pilots, but they weren’t. They were also co-pilots, navigators, radio men, and engineers. They were parts of flight crews in the Ferrying Command who took medium and heavy bombers east to the war, then snagged commercial flights back to California and did it over again. In the coming months these young guys were expecting transfer to American bases where they would train Air Corps conscripts because experienced Air Corps fliers were in short supply. Then after promotions they’d head to Europe or the Pacific as senior-level officers or non-coms.

A TWA DC-3 transcontinental Sky Club of the kind that crashed on this date in 1942 killing the flight crew, 15 Army Air Corps fliers, and four civilians, including Carole Lombard.

The life of an army aviator wasn’t easy because their ships were reliable and yet not at all reliable. We were then just out of the era of the biplane and still figuring out multi-engine aviation. Here’s something else to think about: When TWA Flight 3 took off into the Las Vegas darkness on this night, January 16, the 15 fliers sat there in the noise analyzing climb rate and engine performance. They could feel the overweight ship laboring to reach altitude because this is what they did for a living—they flew multi-engine planes. And since they were flying out of McCarran, an army airfield, they all knew Vegas and the dangers of the surrounding mountains and must have been wondering where those damn peaks were. But some of them also knew the pilot, Capt. Wayne Williams, because he had been teaching classes for the Army in multi-engine flying so they’d figure, with Capt. Williams up there, we’re OK.

They weren’t OK. A whole bunch of little things happened along the way that conspired to put Mt. Potosi in the way of Flight 3 as she power-climbed to altitude. The result: fireball—the image in my mind for years as I’d fly through Vegas and look over at Potosi and imagine what the people of Las Vegas witnessed in the western sky this night at about 7:30 local time. From 30 miles off they saw a little pinpoint of light that represented 22 humans going up in flames. I’m very fond of, and feel close to, all of them, not just Carole, Petey, and Otto, and on this January 16, with the trees barren and the sky appropriately gray, I’ll look at my watch and think about where they were and what they were doing on this, the last day of their lives.

Mt. Potosi, Nevada. Imagine TWA Flight 3 coming into view from the right and power climbing toward the distant peaks. At just about dead center in the photo she hit the rock cliff walls just below the peak in the dark at 185 miles per hour.

Mall Rats

From the very beginning, Hollywood has corrupted the history of World War II. Did you know that? There’s a not-so-subtle fiction in the war pictures that started coming out of the studios from 1942 on, and as late as Saving Private Ryan the warping continued.

I’m talking about the ages of the actors playing soldiers in that war. I grew up thinking that WWII was fought by middle-aged men. My favorite war movie of all is Battleground, the 1949 MGM blockbuster about the Battle of the Bulge starring 33-year-old Van Johnson, 35-year-old John Hodiak, and a couple handfuls of other MGM contract players. Granted you saw a few younger guys like Marshall Thompson (age 24), Ricardo Montalban (age 29), and Richard Jaeckel (age 23). But co-starring was 47-year-old George Murphy playing a character named “Pop” and aged-well-beyond-his-years Douglas Fowley as a G.I. with dentures. None of these guys represent the real fighting men of the Ardennes Forest.

I stumbled upon another MGM war picture the other week, The Men of the Fighting Lady, about a Korean-era aircraft carrier and landing there were the supposed hotshot pilots, Van Johnson (again, now 38), Keenan Wynn (38), and Frank Lovejoy (42).

Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Eighth Air Force by Robert Matzen

Battleground, starring Van Johnson and John Hodiak. Great cast, great picture. But the guys in it are too old.

I’m smack-dab in the middle of the real WWII these days writing about the Eighth Air Force, and I am astonished about how young these pilots under Jim Stewart were. He was an “old man” of 35 when he commanded a bomber squadron operating out of England, and all his pilots, and I mean all his pilots, were 22 or 23 or at the oldest 24 years of age, guys right out of college. The technical sergeants serving as radio men and gunners were 19 and 20. If you go to the mall and look at the kids hanging out there giggling and trying to look adult, or visit your local high school or college campus, that’s who fought World War II. That’s representative of the 400,000 Americans who died and whose names are carved in honor rolls in every town in the United States. Among the front-line personnel, the privates were 18 or 19, the sergeants were 20, lieutenants 22, and captains and majors 24. Stewart had a hell of a time getting off the ground when he earned his wings at an advanced age of +30. They were reluctant to let a man that old and slow behind the controls of a four-engine bomber—he didn’t have a prayer of operating a fighter plane, which all the pilots wanted to do.

There are stories of guys who landed at Normandy Beach and didn’t take their boots off for the next six weeks; at the end of it they didn’t have to peel off their socks because they had liquefied. These guys didn’t eat or sleep for days and they were digging foxholes everywhere they went. Facing life-or-death situations at every turn. It was survival of the fittest and the fittest were 18, not 40.

When Tom Hanks played Capt. Miller in Saving Private Ryan, he was 42 years old. In the real war, someone the age of his son would have been Capt. Miller.

Alan Hale, a hard-lived 51 at the time of Destination Tokyo.

The actors go where there’s work, like they always have. During the war, studios churned out war pictures because that’s what people wanted to see, and who could play in their product but the men they had under contract, those not off to war themselves, and this talent pool was what it was. It only became burlesque occasionally, like when Alan Hale played a flier in Desperate Journey at age 50 or a submariner in Destination Tokyo at 51. For Hale it was a living and he was a fine character actor, and it’s always nice to see him. Just keep in mind you are looking at Bizarro World War II when it’s being fought by Alan Hale. We’d be speaking German right now if the war had been fought by Alan Hale. Or Harry Carey (a whopping 65 at the time he made Air Force) or George Tobias (43 in Air Force).

What’s another benchmark of World War II pictures? The Longest Day, I guess. You might as well call it The Longest of Tooth Day, with John Wayne the 55-year-old paratrooper leading Red Buttons the 43-year-old paratrooper. I guess this is one of the reasons my friend Clem, who fought in World War II and bailed out of two crippled planes in two months (a technical sergeant not yet 20) and lived out the war in a German prison camp, doesn’t care for war pictures. He sat through Unbroken increasingly disgusted, muttering as he is wont to do, “That’s not history, that’s Hollywood.” The reality of it was that when 19-year-old Clem hit the earth after his first bail-out he broke a leg; in the second he was looking out for his still-broken leg and broke some ribs. So you think Red Buttons at 43 could have been a real paratrooper?

Next time you see a veteran of World War II, think how young he was when he saw what he saw and did what he did. Think how fast he grew up. Think how many years he has lived with the memories of his friends dying around him during training or on the ground, in the air, or at sea. It’s an incredible story of the most brutal war in history fought by kids who these days might not be entrusted to do their own laundry or take out the trash.

The Longest Day: Stuart Whitman, 34 but looking older, is saying to John Wayne, “Colonel, recon says St. Lo has a Denny’s up there to the right. The senior special is still being served, but we have to wheel you over right now.”

On the eve of war

I came across this letter on a Facebook (posted by Brian Lee Anderson) Carole Lombard fan page. It’s written in Lombard’s own hand for Movie Mirror magazine in celebration of Thanksgiving 1939, and I find it evocative on a couple of levels. I don’t know how much prepping she did or who might have helped her with this piece. This was her RKO period so it’s not a Russell Birdwell/Selznick PR piece, and maybe it’s just Carole being Carole and winging it. The sentiment is beautiful, democratic, and gives a nod to the fact that, hey, worldly possessions are important. It’s better to have them than not to have them.

The handwriting itself shows an unusual amount of concentration and workmanship from someone who often scribbled like your average M.D. A handwriting analyst might say that the lack of slant in one direction or the other indicates a practical, down-to-earth person, which she certainly was, and the occasional backward slant reveals a rebellious streak that just couldn’t be contained.

Carole Lombard at about the time she wrote her Thanksgiving 1939 open letter in Movie Mirror magazine.

To me the allusion to world events hits closest to home because in working on my new manuscript, Mission: James Stewart and World War II, I am forced to confront human suffering that’s at the least uncomfortable and often devastating. She wrote her Thanksgiving message about a year after Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass symbolizing the beginning of the end for Jews in Nazi-occupied territories. She wrote it two months after the invasion of Poland that sent refugees streaming westward. She wrote it with the German war machine rising to strike against France and England and with Hitler rallying hundreds of thousands in Nuremberg. She wrote it as the conflict between Japan and China raged for its second year. She wrote it in anticipation of a war that would claim more than 400,000 American lives, including her own.

The Allies would prevail in what would become World War II, and their spoils included the writing of the history of it. I continue to struggle to uncover accounts of civilians under the rain of Eighth Air Force bombs because the losers in war don’t get to tell their stories. But if war is hell, then those unlucky enough to watch 200 B-24 Liberators fly over and unload their “cartons of eggs” truly knew what hell was all about. Before you say, “Well, they were the enemy, that’s what they deserved,” consider that the bombs fell on civilians who had learned that challenging Nazi authority meant death; on Jews hiding in Berlin basements for years; and on Dutch, French, and Polish nationals forced to work in German factories. Tens of thousands of these humans were blown back to their molecular components by the Americans of the Mighty Eighth.

And that’s what I see written between the lines of Carole Lombard’s Thanksgiving 1939 message. There’s a palpable sense of foreboding, that history was about to blow through in the form of a worldwide cyclone and no one, absolutely no one, would be spared.

Don’t Call Him “Jimmy”

In 1952 James Stewart played a doctor wanted for murder in The Greatest Show on Earth. Through the course of picture, he never appeared without clown makeup.

It’s happening again: I’m on the trail of an elusive subject, trying to figure him out, following clues leading to deconstruction of his personality to the elements, then examining them and reassembling the human. This time, I’m finding the exercise frustrating. Well, as frustrating as usual.

The subject is James Stewart, Hollywood leading man from 1937 to the early 1970s, not to mention war hero, political conservative, and deity to what seems to be an entire demographic of the U.S. population. One of the first things I learned: He didn’t favor the familiarity of “Jimmy.” I interviewed his movie and television co-star Julie Adams recently and picked up on the fact that she called him not “Jimmy” but “Jim.” Said Adams, “I always called him that, and so did everyone else; I don’t think he liked Jimmy.”

The biggest heartbreak about the only picture Carole Lombard and James Stewart made together was the amount of money this contrived melodrama lost at the box office.

This is a tough nut to crack, this chasing down of a deified figure. There are a thousand stories out there of good deeds done by James Stewart, and I’m finding nothing juicy, nothing to humanize him. It takes me back to trying to decipher the real George Washington—not the capital city, not the university, not the bridge. The man who started it all. Eventually I got at this guy, who was in youth an ambitious, hot-tempered (did you know he was a redhead?), self-educated natural athlete who dearly loved the ladies. A theme of one of my documentaries was that GW pursued the married Sally Fairfax—which earned the video a ban by a major Christian DVD distributor! George Washington loved freedom, all right—the freedom to make an untaxed fortune, and it was self-interest, not altruism, that started him down the revolutionary road. Eventually, he was willing to give up everything for the good of his fellow Americans. Everything. And believe me, he had a lot to lose. The courage of convictions that grew within him, the awareness to know what was required of a leader, and a pre-existing and unshakeable self-discipline, all combined into what became the most admired man in the world. All that said, it was interesting that he had a violent temper; it was interesting that he pursued the wife of his best friend. It was all part of the same package.

In the end, I figured out George Washington, and I admired his human failings because he fought these parts of himself on his way to immortality. So now I have to learn the failings of James Stewart. He’s practically got the Knights Templar guarding his image; to me their protection harms his legacy rather than protects it. Isn’t a subject of biography interesting precisely for what he or she overcame in life? The inner conflicts? The failings? The handicaps? The demons?

The next book will be about a lot more than James Stewart, but he’s the focal point like Carole Lombard was in Fireball. I’ve been busily watching Stewart pictures of late, most recently Broken Arrow with Jeff Chandler and, as Stewart’s love interest, 16-year-old Debra Paget, nearly unrecognizable sans trademark heavy eye makeup. Yes gang, I said Stewart had a 16-year-old love interest to his 41! Today, they call that statutory rape, and even in the context of a picture made in 1950, I grew a little fidgety looking at their clinches.

James Stewart with Debra Paget.

I’m blazing a trail of pictures I never gave a hoot about. Another one I caught recently was The Naked Spur co-starring Janet Leigh and Robert Ryan and before that Strategic Air Command with June Allyson. I could always take or leave James Stewart as an actor, which, really, makes me a match as a biographer because I’m starting out neutral. No image to protect. No axe to grind. Oh, sure, he’s perfect in It’s a Wonderful Life and I really liked Harvey—although I never bought him as an alcoholic in that picture. His ingenuousness and his playing against cynical Henry Fonda worked beautifully in The Cheyenne Social Club. His body of work is simply outstanding and the more you think about the variety of his pictures, the more impressive Stewart becomes. He was much more the chameleon as an actor than he appears at first blush. Like when he played a clown in the circus and on the lamb from the cops who stayed in makeup throughout the film. This wasn’t John Wayne or Errol Flynn playing 17 variations of his public persona; Stewart could be a man with a past, a killer, a voyeur, or an obsessive-compulsive. Throughout the 1950s you never knew which James Stewart you’d meet in the dark.

James Stewart picks up his mail at a rented Brentwood home in 1936, soon after arriving in Hollywood.

What the hell made this guy tick? He played the accordion and built model airplanes as a pastime during years most young men his age spent getting laid, or trying to. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps nine months prior to Pearl Harbor at a time when a majority of Americans were staunch isolationists trying to look the other way from an inevitable war. Instead of cashing in on celebrity and spending the war in his crisp uniform stateside, getting laid some more, he itched for combat and finally got an overseas assignment that landed him smack in the middle of hell. He sounds too good to be true, and maybe he was.

I’ve already got some great clues about the real James Stewart and how he got that way. For the record, I’m determined to confine my book to a particular theme and not encroach into the territory of a writer also developing an aspect of Stewart. I don’t feel that my book on Stewart will be competing with anybody else’s because I think one will complement the other and demand for both will be heightened.

I encourage all of you to help me write this book. What do you know about Stewart that can help me grasp his character in the way I ultimately understood others I’ve chronicled? Your opinions, insights, and clues are welcome as we embark on this grand new adventure into the past.