Five Came Back

The first shock was that the war would not perform. A Hollywood director builds a scene: places the light, blocks the actors, calls for another take if the first is wrong. Combat offered none of this. Ford filmed the Battle of Midway in June 1942 from an exposed position on the island, hand-held, the camera shaking as bombs fell around him — he was wounded during the shoot. The footage was jumpy, scratched, sometimes out of focus. By the rules of the studio it was unusable. By the rules of the war it was the most honest thing anyone had brought back, and Ford kept the shaking in.

Capra faced a stranger problem. Ordered to make films that would explain to American soldiers why they were fighting, he discovered he had almost no footage of his own — the enemy had made the best war films in the world. He solved it by turning the Nazis' own propaganda against them, cutting German and Japanese footage into the Why We Fight series so that the enemy seemed to indict itself. It was a brilliant act of editing, and it raised a question Capra never fully resolved: was he telling the truth, or making better propaganda than the men he opposed?

Between the directors and their footage stood the army, and the army had opinions. It wanted films that would recruit, instruct, and reassure. It did not always want the truth. Ford's Battle of Midway was released, but only after wrangling — its rawness unsettled officials who preferred a cleaner story. Huston ran into the wall hardest. His documentary The Battle of San Pietro, shot in Italy in 1943, showed American soldiers dying and villages in ruins with a frankness that alarmed the War Department. The film was cut, delayed, and released only after the campaign it depicted was safely over, its impact managed.

Huston's next film went further and paid for it. Let There Be Light, made in 1946, filmed traumatized soldiers in an army psychiatric hospital — men who stammered, wept, could not walk without shaking. Huston meant it as a portrait of recovery and dignity. The army suppressed it, citing patient privacy, and kept it effectively banned for decades. It was one thing to show the enemy's cruelty; it was another to show what the war had done to American minds. That line — between the wound you may photograph and the wound you may not — runs through the whole chapter.

Harris's larger argument sits in the space between propaganda and witness — the two things a war camera can do, and the fact that the same man often did both. Capra assembled truth out of enemy lies; Huston insisted on truths the army would rather bury; Ford kept his shaking frames because the shake was the point. What the five discovered, collectively, is that the moral weight of an image does not live in the image alone but in what it is asked to do. That discovery does not stay behind in the archive. It followed them home and reshaped the kind of films a serious director could now make.

Look at what came after. Wyler returned to direct The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, a film about veterans struggling to re-enter civilian life, made with a plainness and emotional honesty that his glossier prewar work had not reached — one of its actors was a real veteran who had lost both hands. Stevens, the maker of comedies, turned toward heavier subjects; he would eventually direct the film adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, unable, as Harris shows, to leave the camps behind. The lightness had gone out of him.

Five went and five came back, which is what the title promises and also what it withholds. They returned to studios that had kept their offices warm, to careers that resumed on paper, to an industry eager to forget the interruption and get back to entertainment. But the interruption had gone all the way through them. Ford, Wyler, Huston, Stevens, and Capra came home carrying footage of Midway and Dachau, of psychiatric wards and burning villages, and none of it could be filed away as neatly as a finished picture.