As a World War II veteran of five campaigns in France, Belgium, and Germany, and then more recently in 2006, taking up a new “career” in filmmaking, I have produced two documentaries, Let Freedom Ring: The Lesson Is Priceless and Let Freedom Ring: Memories Of France.

These were filmed in 2006 and 2007 with young high school history teachers and combat veterans who served respectively in Belgium (Battle of the Bulge) and in France (D-Day, Normandy Invasion).

This new “career” that started at age eighty-one and has been ongoing for five years, is for the purpose of fulfilling my mission to reach young students with the message of the importance of freedom and the consequences of losing one’s freedom.

I am now seeking funding to distribute these films at no cost, which are in DVD format, primarily into the high schools in California where I live.

Now, a third documentary is planned. It is a film about the Eighth Air Force operations from England on daring daylight raids on German targets. Twenty-six thousand men were killed, more than the Marines in the Pacific. (more…)

Veterans Day, unlike almost any other holiday in America, is broadly celebrated and deeply revered throughout the country. In DC, it is marked by ceremonies at national cemeteries, in the heartland by parades and special church services, and in Hollywood by movies that have forever captured, and accurately depicted, the bravery of our men and women in uniform.

One such movie, “Saving Private Ryan,” is as priceless as it is ageless. And to me, the most valuable part of this great movie lies in the opening scenes, where Allied Forces land at Normandy under heavy German machine-gun fire, and succeed in their mission against seeming insurmountable odds.

In real life, the D-Day landing at Normandy (June 6, 1944) cost America roughly 2400 lives. That’s right, 2400 combat deaths in one day, at one location. The Americans who poured onto that beach, determined to break through the German forces, were scared and strained by the certainty that an enemy bullet or artillery shell could end their earthly lives at any second. Yet they did their duty, and in addition to the 2400 Killed in Action (KIA) there were untold thousands more wounded in action, and others lost to POW status and MIA (missing in action) status.

Like no other war movie I’ve seen, “Saving Private Ryan” puts the horror of all this before the viewer’s eyes by presenting battle scenes in a way that show the harsh realities of war. (more…)

“Objectivity is impossible,” self-styled “peoples’ historian” Howard Zinn once remarked, “and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity.”

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

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The casting of Robert Montgomery (1904–1981) in They Were Expendable was uncommonly appropriate. The suave, handsome actor made his name in debonair romantic comedies throughout the 1930s, but like John Ford he didn’t wait until America was dragged into war before enlisting. In 1940, fired up by the life-and-death struggles raging in Europe, he abandoned his M-G-M contract, went to France, and volunteered as an ambulance driver. Only a few weeks went by before he had it shot out from under him — one film magazine of the era reported (or perhaps exaggerated) that he narrowly avoided capture with the help of a French priest, and escaped the country mere hours before it fell to the Germans.

Back in the states he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and over the next three years served in many capacities before finding his way to the Pacific theater, where he met John Bulkeley and became his executive officer. Montgomery commanded a PT boat in many battles, and eventually headed up to Normandy as an operations officer for a destroyer squadron. While preparing for D-Day, he remembered later, “I saw Bulkeley on his PT Boat and waved to him. There was another man on the bridge with him. I had no idea then it was Jack Ford.” (more…)

“That bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes.”

– General Douglas MacArthur, describing his savior John Bulkeley –

In March 1942, facing imminent capture by the Japanese, America’s commander in the Far East was ordered to slip away to safety in Australia. The Empire of the Sun controlled both air and sea, and only a precious few Allied planes and ships remained in-theater, skulking through the night fog like pirates to avoid capture and running on little more than spit and baling wire. “Overhauling those motors without any replacement parts was a terrible job,” one of the few to escape that nightmare later remembered. “For instance. Any tank-town garage which overhauls a flivver back in the States always replaces the gaskets with new ones. Only we didn’t have any. Or any sealing compound. So those old gaskets had to be carefully removed, handled as gently as though they were precious lace, and laid back in place when the motors were reassembled.”

When MacArthur arrived at the dock with his family and key commanders, he found waiting for him a trio of tiny, dilapidated motor torpedo boats crewed by dirty, emaciated men with long, unkempt beards and wild eyes. Their skipper was a thirty-year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant named John Bulkeley, who for months had held his disintegrating squadron together by scrounging like a rat among the islands for gasoline, torpedoes, and other basic supplies. His boats were little more than plywood matchboxes, but Bulkeley had kept them active long after the rest of America’s Navy and Air Force had been destroyed or driven off. He made sneak assaults against transports, cruisers, destroyers, airplanes, landing parties — anything to frustrate the pace of the overwhelming Japanese invasion. Every time he attacked it was a fearsome David-versus-Goliath mismatch, but Bulkeley had done so time and again, sinking many enemy vessels. (more…)

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“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.” (more…)

For navel-gazing Republicans, in the throes of a full-blown identity crisis, the 30th anniversary of John “Duke” Wayne’s passing this June 11th, couldn’t come sooner, reminding us of what it was like when giants were in our midst.

The Duke, still ranked Americans’ all-time favorite film star, whose popularity only increases with time, was an “extremely close friend” of Ronald Reagan, said their close mutual friend, longtime Paramount Executive, A.C. Lyles.

Both “Duke” and “Ronnie” shared a clear moral vision concerning America’s greatness-only using force to liberate not conquer, as President Reagan characterized it five years, almost to the day, after Duke’s death, in his poignant tribute to the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” on June 6, 1984, commemorating D-Day, in which, Lyles said, “he just spoke from the heart.”

“Here, in Normandy,” said Reagan, “… the Allies stood and fought against tyranny, in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.”  (more…)