ABSTRACT Title of Document: WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978 Robert Keith Chester, Ph.D., 2011 Co-Directed By: Dr. Gary Gerstle, Professor of History, Vanderbilt University Dr. Nancy Struna, Professor of American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park This dissertation interrogates the meanings retrospectively imposed upon World War II in U.S. motion pictures released between 1945 and the mid-1970s. Focusing on combat films and images of veterans in postwar settings, I trace representations of World War II between war‘s end and the War in Vietnam, charting two distinct yet overlapping trajectories pivotal to the construction of U.S. identity in postwar cinema. The first is the connotations attached to U.S. ethnoracial relations – the presence and absence of a multiethnic, sometimes multiracial soldiery set against the hegemony of U.S. whiteness – in depictions of the war and its aftermath. The second is Hollywood‘s representation (and erasure) of the contributions of the wartime Allies and the ways in which such images engaged with and negotiated postwar international relations. Contrary to notions of a ―good war‖ untainted by ambiguity or dissent, I argue that World War II gave rise to a conflicted cluster of postwar meanings. At times, notably in the early postwar period, the war served as a progressive summons to racial reform. At other times, the war was inscribed as a historical moment in which U.S. racism was either nonexistent or was laid permanently to rest. In regard to the Allies, I locate a Hollywood dialectic between internationalist and unilateralist remembrances. On one hand, narratives of the U.S. as the dominant wartime power affirmed the nation‘s benevolence and might, attesting to the United States‘ right to dictate the terms of postwar international politics. On the other, progressive filmmakers used images of the Allies to challenge postwar U.S.-centrism and bemoan the Cold War nation‘s military and economic mismanagement of international relations. Emphasizing the contested character of the war‘s cinematic image, the dissertation recuperates a tradition of dissent, complicating our understanding of World War II remembrance and postwar Hollywood history. The project also considers the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) Pictorial Division – the military‘s liaison with Hollywood – and the film industry. Drawing on DoD records, I show how the postwar state influenced representations of racial diversity, and how the military shaped images of the U.S. in interaction with its wartime Allies. WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978 By Robert Keith Chester Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2011 Advisory Committee: Professor Gary Gerstle, Co-Chair Professor Nancy Struna, Co-Chair Professor Mary Corbin Sies Professor Saverio Giovacchini Professor Jonathan Auerbach © Copyright by Robert Keith Chester 2011 For Isla, Nancy, Alex, and Sam, in the dim hope they will have no wars to remember ii Acknowledgements I have accumulated many debts, intellectual and otherwise, while researching and writing this project. I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, Mary Corbin Sies, Nancy Struna, Saverio Giovacchini, and Jonathan Auerbach, for their time, advice, and ideas. To Nancy and the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, I owe particular gratitude for steadfast support over the past eight years. I hope I have repaid the faith shown in me. In my time at Maryland, I have also appreciated and enjoyed the solidarity and talent of fellow graduate students in American Studies and History. Throughout the process of research and writing, Gary Gerstle has been an inspirational mentor and friend. As an editor, advisor, and thinker, his guidance and insight enabled me to approach sometimes daunting tasks with confidence and fresh impetus. The opportunity to spend time with Gary during a fellowship at Vanderbilt University in 2010 was valuable and productive (despite Nashville‘s numerous attempts to distract me). The gracious assistance of archivists at National Archives II, the Library of Congress, and the American Heritage Center in Laramie, Wyoming, has been indispensable. Special thanks, also, to the archivists at Georgetown University Libraries Special Collections, who helped me to navigate the Department of Defense Film Collection. The chance to talk with Lawrence H. Suid about war, cinema, and the U.S. armed forces was a great pleasure. Lastly, thank you to my wonderful wife, Jess, who has endured (and, I like to think, sometimes even enjoyed) more World War II cinema than should be asked of anyone for whom it is not a personal obsession. For her love, support, and unflinching optimism, I am forever grateful. While I have had much help in writing this dissertation, I should add that its deficiencies are all my own. iii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Identity Unknown: World War II, Race, and the Allies in U.S. Cinema, 1945-1978 ..............................................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Commemoration and Democratization: Veterans and the War‘s Racial Legacy in Progressive Hollywood, 1945-1949 ..............................................................................65 Chapter 3: Invisible Allies: World War II Cinema, the Cold War, and the Demise of Hollywood Internationalism, 1944-1951 .........................................................................147 Chapter 4: ―Time Will Heal the Wounds of Memory‖: Forgetting Pearl Harbor and Making Japanese American Citizens in Postwar Cinema................................................235 Chapter 5: No Aliens in Foxholes: Race, Citizenship, and the Combat Soldier in World War II Films of the 1950s ................................................................................................326 Chapter 6: Acts of Love, Acts of Sin: G.I.-Allied Romances, Military Masculinity, and Hollywood‘s Cultural Diplomacy in the 1950s ...............................................................413 Chapter 7: ―A Certain Hope Died‖: World War II, War in Vietnam, and the Fading Narrative of Military Assimilation, 1962-1971 ...............................................................484 Chapter 8: War without Victors: Cold War Détente, the Vietnam War, and U.S.-Allied Relations ..........................................................................................................................557 Chapter 9: Conclusion: The Death and Rebirth of World War II ....................................619 Film List ...........................................................................................................................642 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................657 iv Chapter 1: Introduction: Identity Unknown: World War II, Race, and the Allies in U.S. Cinema, 1945-1978 At the conclusion of United Artists‘ 1945 film Story of G.I. Joe, a late wartime combat picture based on the writings of journalist Ernie Pyle, the Second World War‘s most celebrated ―typewriter soldier‖ (played by Burgess Meredith) turns away from a line of American corpses laid out in Italian soil to follow the remnants of the U.S. Army‘s C Company, 18th Infantry, on towards Rome and victory. Backed by a hilltop line of white crosses, Pyle speaks in voiceover for the surviving veterans and martyred dead of World War II, addressing as he does so the coming victory and the subsequent task of shaping the war‘s legacy: That is our war, and we will carry it with us as we go from one battleground to another until it‘s all over. We will win. I hope we can rejoice with victory – but humbly – and that all together we will try, try out of the memory of our anguish, to reassemble our broken world into a pattern so firm and so fair that another great war can never again be possible. And for those beneath the wooden crosses, there is nothing we can do, except perhaps to pause and murmur, ‗thanks, pal, thanks.‘1 Behind Pyle‘s words, weary U.S. soldiers recede into visual indeterminacy, director William Wellman creating from these ―G.I. Joes‖ distant and indistinct silhouettes, blank screens onto which postwar doubts and dreams await projection. Killed in April 1945 by Japanese fire on Ie Shima, near Okinawa, Pyle did not witness the world premiere of Story of G.I. Joe in June or the final surrender of the Axis Powers that summer.2 It was all the more appropriate that having joined the ranks of 1 fatalities to whom he paid homage, Pyle should invoke the task of creating from the conflict a useable past, of remembering the war and reassembling the ―broken world.‖ Appropriate, too, that he should do so as a cinematic image, for motion pictures were a preeminent medium through which the war‘s significance was articulated, debated, and recast in postwar U.S. culture. In reference to a war so often later recalled with triumphalist clarity by U.S. filmmakers and policymakers, it is telling that Pyle‘s gesture lacked a sense of confidence concerning how ―the memory of our anguish‖ would be deployed. Leaving behind the patriotic pieties and propagandist certainties of the many war films made between 1942 and 1944, Story of G.I.