War and Remembrances

At 3 a.m., Dec. 7, 1941, Lt. Cmdr. Kenjiro Ono, on the Japanese aircraft carrier Akagi 250 miles northwest of Honolulu, heard Bing Crosby sing “Sweet Leilani” on an all-night radio show broadcast from the city. As Bob Hope tells it, it wasn’t that Ono, communications officer of Japan’s 1st Air Fleet, was a Crosby fan--he was waiting for the weather report. The forecast was good--and so the surprise attack that was to start World War II was on.

A global war that got under way to the tune of a Crosby song? It’s a detail Hollywood would remember. On Dec. 7, along with millions of Americans, the movie industry also went to war.

“It was the last year of innocence,” Bob Hope, whose name is still synonymous with entertaining troops, recalled during a series of recent interviews with many who worked in the entertainment industry at the time. He started entertaining the troops eight months before Pearl Harbor and was to broadcast all but a few of his weekly radio shows from military bases during the next few years.

Philip Dunne, who wrote the script for the 1941 Oscar winner “How Green Was My Valley,” says many in Hollywood were gearing up for the war in 1939.

“Newspaper publisher) William Allen White formed an educational organization called the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. We organized a meeting out here where I actually got Harry Chandler (publisher of the Los Angeles Times) and Charlie Chaplin to the same meeting. Chaplin stood up and said, ‘Let’s stop horsing around, the real reason for this meeting is to endorse the (pro-interventionist) Roosevelt for a third term!’ ”

Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, Dunne was in New York, where he worked for the Office of War Information, making propaganda films for foreign consumption.

“What we were really trying to do is show that we had the power to win the war. . . . We realized that there was going to be a big scramble afterwards and we were trying to head off the Soviets--for that reason some of our pictures were as politically left as we could possibly get,” he says. “And one South American president ran a Bell helicopter film six times to reassure himself he was on the right side.”

Julius Epstein, who, with his twin brother Philip and Howard Koch, co-wrote “Casablanca,” says, “In Detroit they were building tanks, in Hollywood we were making pictures; both for the same reason.”

Epstein, who was to work for a short period for Col. Frank Capra on the “Why We Fight” series says, “There was no censorship on ‘Casablanca’ at all. I remember, though,” Epstein laughs, “every (Army) squad in a movie always had a Brooklyn boy and a Texan to show it was a national effort.”

“There was no censorship; the pressure was on to be patriotic but everybody was very anxious to comply,” Dunne remembers.

That included Koch (whose other credits include “Sergeant York”). “In 1942, Jack Warner called and said he and his brother had had lunch with President Roosevelt,” Koch says. “Roosevelt said he would like to correct the bad understanding of the Soviet Union who was, of course, our ally. He handed them a copy of the book ‘Mission to Moscow,’ written by Ambassador Joseph Davies and a sympathetic treatment of the Soviet Union, and asked them to make a movie of it. When they told me this was wanted by the President of the United States, I couldn’t turn it down.

“The picture was very well reviewed but times changed and the Cold War arrived,” Koch says. “Suddenly ‘Mission to Moscow’ was on the ‘bad’ list and Warner said I had slipped communist propaganda into their picture. I was blacklisted for four or five years; my wife and I went to England and worked under assumed names.”

All the finger-pointing, however, was far in the future--in 1941, people still dealt in certainties; America was good, Germany and Japan were evil.

Milton Berle, who went on to entertain patients in more than 12,000 hospital wards before the fighting stopped, remembers being “very interventionist, terribly involved in it. There were more enlistments from the Hollywood group than anyone ever thought would happen. Hollywood and this industry was more involved and more dedicated than any other, because laughter was the best thing to get these soldiers’ and sailors’ minds off what they were doing.”

As Berle recalls, stars flocked to the enlistment centers. Among them: Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Robert Taylor, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., David Niven, Glenn Ford, Jackie Coogan, Alan Ladd, Gene Autry, Jackie Cooper, Tyrone Power, Ronald Reagan and, of course, Jimmy Stewart, then the No. 1 star in the country.

“Stewart fought a good war,” Charlton Heston says in the vernacular of the time, which meant Stewart saw combat rather than just watching from a safe distance. Heston, a student at Northwestern University when the war started, basically sat out the conflict in the Aleutians where his unit, the 11th Air Corps, waited for an invasion of the Japanese homeland--which never came. “I learned more about the war playing Captain Garth in ‘Midway’ than being in it,” former staff-sergeant Heston laughs.

“I was drafted nine months before Pearl,” Stewart recalls with a smile. “I told them I had over 400 hours of flying in and a commercial pilot’s license, but they said I was too old to enter flight school in the Army (there was not a separate Air Force until after the war). But less than a week after Pearl Harbor, they gave me my commission.” Stewart trained pilots for a couple of years before being assigned to fly B-24s in Europe and surviving 20 combat missions over Germany. “Pearl Harbor really got me into the Air Force and into the war,” he drawls. “It gave me a chance to cut out the idea I was too old.”

“Sweet Leilani” notwithstanding, World War II wasn’t exactly a vintage war for music. But Frances Langford, who toured with Bob Hope’s “gypsies,” made something of a classic of “I’m in the Mood for Love” and, of course, Kate Smith made a second national anthem of “God Bless America.”

“All a kid had to do to win a singing contest,” Hope laughs, “was just sing ‘God Bless America.’ ” And the Armed Forces Network, headquartered in the old Fox studios, recorded the songs and entertainment and distributed it to troops around the world.

After Pearl Harbor, fear of Japanese bombing raids led to the only occasion the Rose Bowl game wasn’t played in the Rose Bowl--the contest between Duke and Oregon State was relocated to Duke’s stadium in Durham, N.C.

That fear also had its humorous side when all of Los Angeles panicked over an incident that eventually inspired Steven Spielberg’s “1941.” Hope remembers: “I was coming home from a show, and had to jam on the brakes when I hit a traffic jam at the top of Mulholland. We couldn’t figure out why these hundreds of cars were stuck on the top of a mountain. Finally, one of the cops pointed to the sky over (a blacked-out) L.A. where we could see flashes of light and said that a Japanese sub was shelling the city. Turned out the coast artillery had been shooting at a barrage balloon.”

If there were few jokes in the headlines, there were quips on everyone’s lips . . . from Berle’s “My sister married a second lieutenant . . . the first one got away” to Hope’s “I don’t think there are enough girls around this base. Today I saw 26 sailors standing in line to buy tickets to see a hula dancer tattooed on a guy’s chest.”

Dorothy Lamour, determined to be involved, got the endorsement of then-Treasury Secretary Robert Morgenthau to launch the first of what became a series of star-studded war-bond tours. “I sold more than $300 million in war bonds, and that was cash; it didn’t include pledges,” she says. Martha Raye may have entertained more troops than anyone else. Joe E. Brown (whose son was killed in 1942), Jerry Colonna, Jimmy Durante, Danny Kaye, Esther Williams and Paulette Goddard were others on the “foxhole circuit.”

Many also appeared at the Hollywood Canteen, opened by Bette Davis and John Garfield. Berle recalls: “When the boys were on leave we entertained them there. We clowned and stars like Betty Grable and Betty Hutton and all the girls were there and would dance with them. We all pitched in.”

Epstein adds: “When Warner Bros. did ‘This Is the Army’ (a film inspired by Irving Berlin’s musical of the same name) they asked us to volunteer to work on it--no salary. We said yes but had a disagreement on the story and they threw us off. That was the only opportunity Philip and I ever had to work with Ronald Reagan,” he laughs.

The actor who would be our 40th President spent most of his war as adjutant for the 1st Motion Picture Unit and narrating training films at “Ft. Roach,” the Hal Roach studios in Culver City.