THE LEADING MAN

On August 12, 1943, Clark Gable—Hollywood’s top leading man, the star of such box-office blockbusters as It Happened One Night and Gone with the Wind—nearly lost his life in the skies over Germany. As a captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces, Gable was flying in a Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress named Ain’t It Gruesome. He had brought along a 16-millimeter movie camera loaded with color film as part of his assignment to make a recruiting film.

At 42, Gable was a generation older than most of the crewmen he accompanied into combat. Nevertheless, he was there out of duty—not so much to his country, but to his late wife, actress Carole Lombard, who had pushed him to sign up just before her own death in a plane crash. The army brass didn’t have much use for the aging star as a gunner, his chosen specialty, but they did want to exploit Gable’s celebrity appeal. So there he was, perched precariously in the plane’s top turret, wedged behind the gunner to get a better view. That’s when the B-17’s radio operator, Master Sergeant Fletcher Cupp, heard a noise that sounded something like a dropped tin can.

A German shell had penetrated the aircraft and come up through the flight deck. As was later determined from the angle of the hole, the 20mm shell missed Gable’s head by inches. It wasn’t until after the bomber landed that Gable realized the shell had