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Winged Victory

Costar Jeanne Crain (center) surveys the film's four-engined namesake. Another Winged Victory? What may be a genuine combat veteran, the Liberator's name inspired by the 1944 Fox film.

A B-24 Starred Movie

In late 1942, or perhaps early 1943, Warner Bros. proposed a film to be titled The Liberator - yes, a four-engine variety. The screenplay was to be written by famed American novelist William Faulkner and produced by Jack Chertok. The feature, suggested a motion picture industry release of the period, was to be "a drama built around Consolidated's famed B-24."

Warner Bros. had planned to release the film in 1943 but it never was produced. Though USAAF personnel assigned to the Liberators often complained that their contribution to the war effort was being repeatedly overlooked by the film and print media - usually in favor of "that other bomber," the Flying Fortress - the mass appeal of the B-17 was not to be denied.

When a group of seven American war correspondents including Walter Cronkite, who called themselves "The Writing 69th," showed up for the Eighth Air Force's February 26, 1943 mission to Wilhelmshaven, Germany, six of the seven, including the future CBS TV anchor reporter, insisted on flying in B-17s. It simply made better copy back home, they argued. Such was the media's love affair with "that other bomber." So it was up through most of 1944 that Universal's Ladies Courageous, today an all-but-forgotten hysterical "tribute" to the Air Corps Women's Auxiliary Ferry Squadron, was the only Hollywood feature to showcase the B-24 - and that was for a 90-second concluding film sequence!

Enter General of the Army Air Forces, Hap Arnold. In May of 1943 Arnold approached playwright Moss Hart to write a stage play faithfully based on the Air Force's training program. The general's concern, as with many of the major wartime productions to which he gave his blessings, would be to acquaint the public with the way in which the USAAF actually functioned as a military unit.

At Arnold's suggestion, Hart "drafted" himself as a buck private. With a bomber assigned to him, the playwright covered some 28,000 miles during a two-month period, visiting and taking a limited trainee role in the programs offered at twenty different air base training centers across the country. The resulting play Winged Victory, opened to a packed house on Broadway on the evening of November 2, 1943. Officially it was characterized as "a dramatic report to the nation on the preparedness of the Army Air Forces."

Viewing the New York production was Twentieth Century Fox film producer Darryl Zanuck. Zatmck was immediately struck with its potential as a major motion picture. Directed by George Cukor, the milliondollar production, a major film by 1944 standards, went before the cameras on June 15, 1944. As was the case with the stage play, all of the male roles were played by Air Force personnel, many of whom were veterans of the Broadway production. The group included a number of Air Force non-corns destined for more lucrative postwar film careers. They included Private Lon McCallister, Sergeant Edmond O'Brien, Corporal Don Taylor (actor and future director of Final Countdown and Red Flag: The Ultimate Game), Corporal Lee J. Cobb, Corporal Red Buttons, Corporal Barry Nelson, Corporal Gary Merrill, Sergeant George Reeves (seen in Gone with the Wind and the original television Superman), and Corporal Karl Malden. The female leads were ably filled by Jeanne Crain and Judy Holliday.

During the three-month shooting schedule Zanuck and Cukor were given access to seven different California Army and Marine posts including Fort MacArthur where the early induction scenes were filmed, Hamilton and Stockton airfields, and very likely Fairfield-Suisun Field (now Travis AFB) and the auxiliary Marine airfield at Camp Pendleton near Oceanside.

The Victory Despite its significant damage and incompleteness, the Victory is held to be one of the great surviving masterpieces of sculpture from the Hellenistic period. The statue shows a mastery of form and movement which has impressed critics and artists since its discovery. It is particularly admired for its naturalism and for the fine rendering of the draped garments. It is considered one of the Louvre's greatest treasures, and it is today displayed in the most dramatic fashion, at the head of the sweeping Daru staircase. The loss of the head and arms, while regrettable in a sense, is held by many to enhance the statue's depiction of the supernatural. The Victory soon became a cultural icon to which artists responded in many different ways. For example, Abbott Handerson Thayer's A Virgin (1892-93) is a well-known painted allusion. When Filippo Tommaso Marinetti issued his Futurist Manifesto in 1909, he chose to contrast his movement with the supposedly defunct artistic sentiments of the Winged Victory: "... a race-automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the 'Victory of Samothrace'." Numerous copies exist in museums and galleries around the world; one of the best-known copies stands outside the Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas. The Rolls-Royce radiator figurine, Spirit of Ecstasy, was also based on the Nike of Samothrace. The first FIFA World Cup trophy, commissioned in 1930, designed by Abel Lafleur was based on the model. This statue was a favorite of Frank Lloyd Wright and he used reproductions of it in a number of his buildings, including Ward Willits House, Darwin D. Martin House and Storer House. It also features in the novel Seven Ancient Wonders, where it is fictionally made part of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia. Books Winged Victory is a 1934 novel by English World War I fighter pilot Victor Maslin Yeates. It concerns World War I, the existence pilots lead and the fear involved in flying early biplanes. Its protagonist, Tom Cundall, plans to leave the Royal Air Force when his service is up and live on a West Country farm with his friends. However, by the time he is due to leave the air force, all his friends have "gone west". This leaves him a broken man. Yeates based the character Tom Cundall on his friend, the author Henry Williamson. It was Williamson who encouraged Yeates to complete the book after World War I. The narrative combination of action, pathos, humour and humility set against the huge casualties of the RAF in 1918 makes Winged Victory one of the forgotten classics of Great War literature. The book is semi-autobiographical, V.M. Yeates having served with 46 Squadron flying Sopwith Camels in 1918 and also having lost all his friends in the war. T.E. Lawrence praised it on its release with the words "Admirable, admirable, admirable. One of the most distinguished histories of the war...masterly". However, it went out of print due to a lack of a publisher and was soon forgotten. Yeates died in 1934 from tuberculosis. It had a resurgence in popularity with RAF pilots during World War II because of its accurate descriptions of air warfare. Perret's There's a War to be Won, to be Won (1991) examined the role of US Army ground troops in WW II. In Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II, the author focuses on the part played by the Army Air Forces in the same conflict, and also covers how WW I's fledgling Army Signal Corps air service evolved into the world's mightiest air force. Perret's chronicle is one not only of a hard-won triumph but also of errors and terrors; of political battles for turf between and within the military services; of leaders with heads in the clouds and feet of clay; of American aircraft often inferior than that flown by our enemies; and of the heroism of--and sometimes horrifying price paid by--the bomber and fighter crews who had to fly through hell and back in order to attack their targets. A valuable military history and a notable contribution to the long-running debate over the ability of air power alone to achieve national objectives.

History has not revealed who determined that the B-24 would be the film's featured bomber, but a reported 27 late-model Liberators were secured for the motion picture. An additional 55 BT-13s and scores of multi-engine T-50 Bobcat trainers, a handful of P-40s and P-47s, six Higgins assault boats and 40 anti-aircraft guns along with the services of some 3,000 Army and Marine personnel were acquired for the production.

Among the Army pilots signed to the production were three 72nd Fighter Wing, 2nd Air Force P-47 instructors from Strother Field, Winfield, Kansas: Lt. Louis R. Lenz, Capt. Warren A. Blakely and Capt. J.D. "Jerry" Collinswortth. Collinsworth had already become an ace flying Spittires in North Africa and Sicily with the 307th FS, 31st FG. He had six FW-190s to his credit.

The Kansas-based pilots arrived over Oceanside, California, after a fuel stop in Albuquerque, on August 13, 1944 with a trio of P-40Ns for the production. The Camp Pendleton airfield, the site for the film's B-24 Pacific island base set, was then known as Marine Base Camp Callen.

Today, Collinsworth remembers, "The field looked real hot from the air when we arrived. We'd already tasted the hot weather at our stop in New Mexico. The field was situated in a little narrow, shallow valley. I thought, `My, how hot, look at that dried grass.' But, when we landed and I rolled back the canopy hood I was really surprised how cool it was with the breeze off the ocean."

In charge of the USAAF air units at the field for the Winged Victory production was a Col. Dunham. Joining Capt. Collinsworth 's P-40s at the field were an unknown number of B-24s, possibly from the Fairfield-Suisun base near Sacramento and three or four P-47s flown in from Pocatello, Idaho.

To more properly sumulate a South Seas bomber base, the studio had reportedly transplanted 1800 palm trees to the Marine camp. Of the scenes filmed there Collinsworth remembers flying his fighters up and down the Pacific beach as background "atmosphere" for a Christmas-time G.I. party on the shore.

Jerry Collinsworth also vividly recalls the final moments of a dangerous B-24 mission in which wounded film hero Edmond O'Brian slides his damaged Liberator to a dust-filled halt off the end of the runway. There he shuts down the engines and is carried off the bomber on a stretcher to be greeted by his faithful dog. The fighter pilot recalls the dog's trainer had stuffed a tennis ball in the actor's collar so the K-9 would appear to lick the hero's face.

Even more interesting, was the stoty later related to Collinswotth by one of the B-24's crewmen. The supposedly battle-scarred Liberator had been towed off the runway and set up, its wheels half buried in dirt. Cameras had also been set up to capture the wounded O'Brien at the controls as he shut down the bomber's engines.

Collinswotth continues: "From what I was told by one of the B-24 fellows, O'Brien was in the left, seat. A second lieutenant, who really flew the airplane, was in the right seat. Before they began filming the scene the lieutenant was going to start the engines up and then shut them down for the cameras, you know, after this terrible mission. I was told that O'Brien looked down from the cockpit and saw a fellow with a fire bottle waiting for the first engine to crank over. The actor asked the pilot, `What's that fellow doing there with the fire extinguisher?' The lieutenant said, ‘Oh, he's down there just in case the engine backfires ... in case of fire.' O'Brien is supposed to have said, 'You mean to tell me there's a possibility of an engine catching on fire by starting it!' 'Well,' said the lieutenant, 'anything is possible, but we very seldom have any problem.'"

O'Brien is supposed to have said, "Not with me on board it won't!" With this the actor bolted for the bomb bay exit. "What made it so ironic," Collinsworth reflected, "here some of us had returned from combat and here's a guy whose sole duty was making movies for combat training and the general public."

Today, most film historians have all but forgotten Winged Victory. Certainly beyond the picture's important propaganda value of the period, the film's dramatic elements have not well withstood the test of time. Undoubtedly the motion picture's greatest worth today is to be found in its faithful recounting of the USAAF's wartime training program and its all-too-rare footage of that wonderful, long-overlooked warhorse: the B-24 Liberator!

James H. Farmer. Winged Victory A B-24 Starred Movie. Reprinted From Briefing, Fall 1989. The Journal 2nd Air Division. Volume 45 Number 1, Winter 2006.

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Winged Victory Jolly wartime hi-jinks as Moss Hart's hit Broadway show is brought to the screen by Cukor. The story concerns the men (and women) from all walks of life who joined the Army Air Force, and the training they received. With lots of theatrical set pieces, including several leading men of the time camping it up in drag, and a host of future stars including Lon McCallister, Jeanne Crain, Edmond O'Brien, Lee J. Cobb, Red Buttons, George Reeves and Judy Holliday. Quality is good, but not spectacular.

Winged Victory There is no bitter snarl nor self-pity in this classic novel about the air war of 1914-1918, based very largely on the author's experiences. Combat, loneliness, fatigue, fear, comradeship, women, excitement - all are built into a vigorous and authentic structure by one of the most valiant pilots of the then Royal Flying Corps.

Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II Winged Victory is, without question, the most comprehensive and most thorough single-volume history of the USAAF in World War II. The range of topics treated and sources mastered is breathtaking. Everything is included: the men, the planes, strategy, tactics, successes, and failures. I have no doubt but that this will be immediately accepted as the standard one-volume account of an era in the history of air power.

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