Five Came Back

Nothing like World War II has ever happened

to give us any idea of why...

there was such solidarity.

I think everybody could see that Western civilization was at stake

and they needed to fight or die.

When you strip away

all the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood,

what you're left with is:

what is the witness that you're giving to the world that you see out there?

John Ford and George Stevens were chosen by Eisenhower

to land in the invasion on D-Day.

And they gathered around them

a large group of cameramen and soundmen

to make the landing.

That means you know you're going to sacrifice some of those men.

There was no protected place from which to film the invasion of Normandy.

You are about to embark upon the great crusade

toward which we have striven these many months.

In company with our brave allies and brothers in arms on other fronts,

you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine.

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.

We will accept nothing less than full victory.

To capture the largest military operation of the war,

John Ford and George Stevens used hundreds of cameras and dozens of men.

The orders they gave were simple:

don't put yourself in unnecessary danger,

focus on what you see,

and take pictures of everything.

Nothing, I think, could prepare anyone

for the sheer intensity of the conflict and the violence on the beach.

Ford talked about, in one interview,

about seeing a man drown...

and the bodies littering the beaches.

I mean, it's... it's beyond imagination.

A lot of the footage that the Allied cameramen got on D-Day,

that is, the people under Ford and Stevens,

could not be shown in newsreels.

It could not be shown as propaganda.

It was just too brutal. There was just too much carnage.

Capra was in Washington,

anxiously awaiting delivery of the footage.

His team packaged it into a newsreel

that was distributed to theaters around the country.

Today, just as in these scenes,

the armies of the United Nations have made their first landings

on the soil of Western Europe.

Another of the great, decisive battles of world history has been joined.

This is the day for which free people long have waited.

This is D-Day.

The sheer human cost of that operation,

the numbers of people that died, was too pitiless.

By the end of the first day,

over 4,000 Allied soldiers had been killed.

After it was all over, Ford went on a tremendous drinking bender.

Alone, and without telling any of his men,

Ford made his way up the French coast to a house where officers were staying

and drank himself into a three-day stupor.

He was belligerent and incoherent.

Finally, the officers had had enough.

They summoned the men of Ford's unit to come and take him away.

That journey, that began in the studios of Hollywood

in the late '30s,

recruiting a ragbag army for what became Field Photo...

it ended in the carnage of D-Day.

Ford would never supervise Navy men again.

His war service was over. He was sent back to Washington.

That was the end of Ford's involvement in the war.

But Stevens... it was really the start of his life-changing experience in Europe.

Stevens did not predetermine what he wanted to see.

Just as he does in his movies,

he wanted to observe what was going on.

Stevens and his men traveled with the Army

as they liberated small French towns on the drive to Paris.

He didn't shy away from showing all aspects of war,

from the mundane...

to the terrible.

He had his unit shoot everything that he thought was important,

and that included very cinematic details.

It could be a little boy running after the troops.

It could be a church steeple that is half-destroyed.

They are the texture of war.

As they approached Paris,

Stevens got permission to go ahead of the American troops

and enter the city with the Free French Army

to film the liberation.

The footage he got there is some of the most ecstatic and thrilling

and unique footage ever shot.

Stevens wanted to shoot the surrender of Paris,

and that surrender happened in the Montparnasse train station,

and Stevens went in there with his crew and shot that surrender.

But he became panicked that it was too dark in there

and that he would not get the images of this pivotal moment in history.

And he told them, de Gaulle and the German commander,

that they had to restage it outside the station, in the sunlight,

so that he would be sure to get it.

Now, that is a Hollywood filmmaker.

We all believe getting the shot is more important than anything.

It was the last time Stevens staged any footage during the war.

Paris is free!

While all the world catches its breath at the news,

joyful Allied armies speed in through welcoming crowds.

In this hour, Paris, crowned with honor and glory,

does not forget:

the war is still going on,

and will continue for everyone, everywhere,

until the final day of total victory.

In Italy, Wyler was struggling to complete a new assignment.

As a follow-up to Memphis Belle,

the Army wanted him to showcase a new plane.

The P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bomber.

Wyler, with Memphis Belle, he had so many places to put cameras.

Suddenly, he sees a single-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt

and how can he get creative with that?

Where could he put his cameras?

He had to figure out places to put the cameras on the plane

and not mess up its aerodynamics.

Behind the pilot, shooting forward and back.

Under the wing.

In the wing, timed with the guns.

Wyler felt the mounted cameras on the planes

didn't provide enough footage to tell a complete story,

so he also filmed extensive devastation on the ground.

While Wyler was figuring out

the story he wanted to tell with Thunderbolt,

the Army sent him on various assignments across Italy and France.

On June 5, 1944, he filmed the liberation of Rome.

Citizens of Rome organize welcoming ceremonies.

After more than 20 years of fascism, they are free again.

In Paris, Wyler met with Stevens and asked him for help.

Wyler's hometown of Mulhouse had just been liberated by the Allies,

and he was looking for a way to get there.

After the liberation of Mulhouse,

patriotic Frenchmen were able to bring their flags out into the open.

Stevens recommended a trusted colleague:

Ernest Hemingway's younger brother Leicester,

who was a driver in the Army.

Wyler wanted to go home, and this was his opportunity.

Wyler and Hemingway left without telling anybody.

But Wyler, of course, brought along a film camera.

Like George Stevens,

William Wyler was a documentarian in the most literal sense.

He wanted to record what he saw,

and he wanted to give not just a sense of what was happening,

but how it looked and how it felt.

After days of travel, they finally arrived in Mulhouse.

Wyler was heartened to see his father's old shop still standing.

When he got back to Mulhouse, there was no one there.

The Holocaust had claimed all of them.

Hitler's Shoah, Hitler's genocide, had been so successful there

that there was no one left.

Wyler returned to Air Force headquarters

to find he'd been reported missing in action.

He was ordered to go back to Italy

and complete the long-delayed Thunderbolt.

Wyler felt he needed more images of the devastated Italian coastline,

so he went up in a B-25 bomber to shoot the footage himself.

My father flew in B-25s in World War II.

He said they were really noisy,

but, of course, he was only comparing it to nothing,

because he had not been on anything but a B-25

when he was fighting in Burma.

My dad told me that you had to wear ear protection

because you couldn't hear yourself think if you didn't have your ear guards on.

With all the time that William Wyler spent in the B-17

making Memphis Belle,

he got on the B-25.

And after one mission, after one flight,

he couldn't hear anything when he got down.

At first, he thought it was temporary and his hearing would come back.

The next day, Wyler was examined by an Army doctor in Naples.

The doctor handed him the diagnosis on a piece of paper.

The damage was permanent. Wyler was deaf.

His time in the Army was over.

A day earlier, he had been one of the foremost documentarians

in the Armed Forces.

Now he was a disabled veteran going home.

So much of his cinema was as much about the ear as it was about the eye.

The performances and just the beautiful words

that were written for Wyler to direct actors to speak.

Wyler returned to Hollywood,

but he believed that his directing career was over.

After the liberation of Paris,

Stevens and others thought the war was near ending.

But, in truth, it wasn't nearly done.

And what Stevens found himself on

was a long, cold, hard, brutal,

violent slog to Germany.

Winter warfare on the Western Front.

The Allies grinding relentlessly ahead through heavy bogs

that slow down both machines and men.

One night, they woke up and the earth was shaking,

and the Germans had counterattacked.

In December, 1944,

the Germans launched a fierce counteroffensive.

Over the next six weeks,

tens of thousands of Allied troops were killed or injured

in the Battle of the Bulge.

Stevens and his men pressed on, filming the devastation and the aftermath.

He had been traveling with the Allies nonstop for seven months now,

sick and sleeping outdoors most of the time.