"Lies the Greatest Generation Told Us" Topic

"In John Huston's classic 1943 documentary, The Battle of San Pietro, American soldiers run into battle, gunfire all around. They fall backwards into trenches, the camera jolting with the concussive force of the explosions. Eventually we see corpses placed into body bags. That harrowing immediacy is one reason James Agee called it "as good a war film as any that has been made,"—but it was entirely fake, staged with the help of the U.S. military to create better propaganda. Along with other staged documentaries, it was presented to the public and swallowed as an authentic work of non-fiction.

This deception, along with stories of other staged World War II docs, is vividly detailed in Mark Harris' Five Came Back, the history of some of Hollywood's already-famous directors—Huston, Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, and George Stevens—who volunteered for service and chronicled the war for the U.S. military. The book expansively covers the directors' entire war experience (Wyler lost the hearing in one ear, Huston suffered PTSD) yet the sections about the fraudulent movies leap out, presenting a healthy challenge to the hagiographic Greatest Generation narrative that has shaped our sense of the war. And the truth resonates strongly with our own era, full of suspicions about government honesty—from the bogus reasons for invading Iraq to NSA surveillance—and our open-eyed acceptance of how fact and fiction merge even in so-called documentaries…"

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Armand

Can't read the article as most of it's behind a paywall. Sounds kind of hyperbolic. Wasn't it Churchill who said the truth is so precious in war that we must hide it beyond a bodyguard of lies>

I read the actual book electronically from my public library, so perhaps you could too. As pzivh43 notes, the preview of the article sounds more conspiratorial than my recollection of the book. The five directors volunteered for military service and had pretty free access to what they could film (realize that the technical aspects of 1940s filming were much different than today). Even the comment about "we see corpses placed into body bags" strikes me as more realistic than the Hollywood war films that were being produced for public 'entertainment.'

Oh no!
Hollywood directors showed Americans being courageous!
😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱😱