Stars at War: Athletes and Entertainers in AmericaaEUR(tm)s Wars

By Marvin D. Pipher

This book outlines the lives and achievements of one hundred entertainers and athletes, mostly Americans, who served their nations well, both in times of war and in times of peace. It spans the period from the Spanish American War, 1898, up to 2020, but concentrates most heavily on World War II. The book was initiated in response to an apparent difference noted between the reactions of entertainers and athletes to the events of September 11, 2001, and those following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

It began as an effort to understand who those earlier people were, what they did, and why; to identify the one hundred who did the most during World War II; and to rank them in accordance with their achievements. This proved to be an impossible task since there was no way to identify the one hundred, and there was no common basis for comparison: some were truly heroic, some were wounded and some killed, while others simply served to the best of their abilities. The best that could be done was to categorize the men and women selected and subjectively rank them with their peers.

Over time, this effort expanded to be more inclusive: touching lightly upon the Spanish American War, World War I, the Korean War, Vietnam, the war on terror, and upon more recent events. Some of those presented herein served before becoming famous, some after; some volunteered and some were drafted, while others served as civilians in their chosen fields. Two became presidents of the United States. Three won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Aside from their service, however, these were truly remarkable men and women whose stories deserve to be told if for no other reason than to give us a glimpse into the kinds of people who made the United States the greatest nation in the history of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685708191

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Stars at War

Athletes and Entertainers in AmericaaEUR(tm)s Wars

Marvin D. Pipher

ISBN 978-1-68570-818-4 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88685-043-7 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-68570-819-1 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Marvin D. Pipher

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Introduction

Headliners

1

Ronald Reagan: A Star on the World Stage

2

Donald Trump: The Bravest Man in America

Top Billing

3

Eddie Albert: On a Day Long Ago

4

James Arness: You Go First and Take This Dynamite with You

5

Lew Ayres: A Different Kind of Hero

6

Rocky Bleier: True Grit

7

Maurice Britt: A Blast from the Past

8

Joe E. Brown: A Son's Mission Accomplished

9

Charles Durning: One of the Lucky Forty-Three

10

Douglas Fairbanks Jr.: A Master of Deceit

11

Tom Harmon: Lucky to Be Alive

12

Bob Hope: Thanks for the Memories

13

Jack Lummus: Into the Valley of Death

14

Lee Marvin: Keep Your Ass Down

15

Wayne Morris: A Strange Time and Place to Die

16

Audie Murphy: A One-Man Army

17

Ernie Pyle: America's Every Man

18

Claude Rains: The Little Man Who Wasn't There

19

Martha Raye: Honors for a Green Beret

20

Rod Serling: Twilight Terror in the Jungle Zone

21

Warren Spahn: The Hold Up at Remagen

22

James Stewart: It Was a Wonderful Life

23

Pat Tillman: Echoes of the Past

24

Harry Walker: The Quick and the Dead

25

William Wellman: The Daring Young Man in His Flying Machine

26

Ted Williams: The Real John Wayne

Showstoppers

27

Gene Autry: Back in the Cockpit Again

28

Chuck Bednarik: Thirty-Mission Man

29

Tony Bennett: Stay in Your Hole

30

Yogi Berra: Déjà Vu All Over Again

31

Lou Brissie: And Then There Were Three

32

Jackie Coogan: It's Not the Foreign Legion, but It's Close

33

Marlene Dietrich: She Came, She Sawed, She Songstered

34

Bob Feller: Lucky Feller

35

Henry Fonda: A Strange Case of Déjà Vu before the Fact

36

Clark Gable: Death Wish?

37

Sterling Hayden: Sailing, Sailing over the Nazi Domain

38

Tim Holt: A Glimpse of the World to Come

39

Tom Landry: Join the Army and See the Trees of France

40

Ed McMahon: No Second Banana Here and No Laughing Matter

41

Robert Montgomery: Perfect Casting

42

Tyrone Power: The Biggest Star Going

43

Will Rogers Jr.: In His Father's Footsteps but on a Different Path

44

Bert Shepard: A Day in the Sun

Real Troupers

45

Jack Benny: A Life-Altering Experience

46

Walter Brennan: The Bad, the Good, and the Lucky

47

MacDonald Carey: The Marine Who Missed the War

48

Art Carney: It Was a Very Short War

49

Tony Curtis: Not Much of a War, but What an Ending!

50

Buddy Ebsen: Oh! The Irony of It All

51

Hank Greenberg: Once Was Not Enough

52

Charlton Heston: A Hero Both on and off the Screen

53

Lena Horne: Actions Speak Louder than Words

54

Al Jolson: Let Me Sing a Happy Song

55

Nile Kinnick: Lost at Sea

56

Burt Lancaster: The Man on the Flying Trapeze

57

Frances Langford: The GI's Songbird

58

Joe Louis: Three Times a Hero

59

Victor McLaglen: Around the World in Eighty Ways

60

Glenn Miller: And the Band Played On

61

Paul Newman: A Man for All Seasonings

62

Pat O'Brien: Singing and Dancing through WWII

63

Mickey Rooney: Jeep Shows for the Troops

64

Kate Smith: This Was America

65

Robert Stack: Too Good a Shot to Go to War

66

Shirley Temple: A Lifetime of Achievement

67

Bill Veeck: A Party for a Peg Leg

Also on the Bill

68

Moe Berg: Baseball's Mystery Man

69

Humphrey Bogart: Payment for Services Rendered

70

Johnny Carson: The Ensign Gets a Dirty Job

71

Julia Child: She Knew All the Secrets of Southeast Asia

72

George M. Cohan: For He's a Yankee Doodle Dandy

73

Joe DiMaggio: War Is Just a Game We Play

74

Jane Froman: She Walked Alone

75

Carol Lombard: A Funny Lady's Fateful Flight

76

Christie Mathewson: A Baseball Legend's Sad Demise

77

Elvis Presley: All Things Great and Small

78

Spencer Tracy: What's a Guy to Do?

Added Attractions

79

Angelo Bertelli: Half a Season Is Better than One

80

Ernest Borgnine: Long Time a Sailor

81

Neville Brand: Villains Are Not Always What They Seem

82

Mel Brooks: He Laughed in the Face of Danger

83

Jerry Coleman: Beyond the Call of Duty

84

Sabu Dastagir: It's a Long Way from Riding Elephants

85

Kirk Douglas: The Best Intentions Go Agley

86

Eddy Duchin: Perfect-Pitch Man

87

Hank Gowdy: First to Answer the Call to Arms

88

Charles Buck Jones: Wrong Place, Wrong Time

89

Brian Keith: Looking Backward at the War

90

Burt Kennedy: From Cavalryman to Infantryman to American Hero

91

Jack Lemmon: Rehearsal for a Breakout Part

92

Bert Parks: On the Other Side of the Line

93

Lee Powell: The Last of the First Lone Ranger

94

Lewis Stone: The Man Who Served and Served and Served

95

Cecil Travis: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Hall of Fame

Performers on a Different Stage

96

Alec Guinness: The Force Wasn't with Him

97

Phil Marchildon: Against All Odds

98

David Niven: To Fight for King and Country

99

Basil Rathbone: The Man Who Looked Like a Tree

100

Richard Todd: The Man Who Met His Match

Acknowledgments

Appendices

Appendix A

Those Who Served before They Were Famous

Appendix B

Those Who Served after They Were Famous**

Appendix C

Those Who Volunteered1

Appendix D

Those Who Were Drafted

Appendix E

Those Who Were Wounded (or Injured)

Appendix F

Those Who Died or Were Killed in Action

Appendix G

Congressional Medal of Honor Citations

Bibliography

About the Author

To David Tabata and all those who served their country honorably and well but without recognition and especially to those in the sports and entertainment worlds who were overlooked in this endeavor.

David Tabata, fourth from right in front row; author, third from right

Introduction

I was a nine-year-old boy living in Hermosa Beach, California, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, old enough to know what had happened but too young to do anything about it. My first recollection of that event is walking past Hooper's Drug Store at the corner of Pier and Hermosa Avenues with my best friend, a Japanese classmate named David Tabata, and seeing a stack of Los Angeles Daily News with the headline War Extra—War Is Voted by Congress. It was December 8, 1941.

Shortly thereafter, David seemed to have disappeared. I had no idea why. I only knew that he didn't live on Tenth Street anymore, and he was no longer at Pier Avenue School. It was only much later, and long after the war, that I finally surmised that he and his family must have been interned for the duration.

Growing up during World War II and so close to Hollywood, I had two primary interests: the war and the movies. I heard about American heroes like Colin P. Kelly Jr., Pappy Boyington, and Gen. George S. Patton Jr. I wore my Eisenhower jacket proudly and, like every other boy, followed the war news with intense interest. At the same time, like every other boy and girl I knew, I went to the movies every Saturday, paid my fifteen cents, and watched as Hollywood's heroes refought the recent battles won or lost so far away. Somehow, it was hard to distinguish the real from the reel celluloid heroes. In fact, I don't think anyone my age was even aware of the difference.

As a result of the war, some of the true Hollywood heroes weren't even part of my formative years. While John Wayne, William Bendix, Gregory Peck, Peter Lawford, Errol Flynn, and others were fighting the war on the back lots of Culver City, people like Wayne Morris, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Stewart were off fighting the real war. But like David Tabata, they too had simply vanished from the scene.

When the war finally ended, those real heroes began returning to what, at that time, were considered their jobs, as movie actors, although while they were gone, many of them had been replaced by younger, newer stars or by other actors who for one reason or another had avoided serving. It was only then that I became aware that Clark Gable's wife had been killed in an airplane crash while on a bond selling tour, that Gable himself had been a waist gunner in bombing raids over Europe, that Jimmy Stewart was a bomber pilot, and that Glenn Miller had disappeared while on a flight over the English Channel, but that was about the extent of it. I also came to learn that Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox and Joe DiMaggio of the New York Yankees had each lost three years of their careers to the service of their country, and that a lady named Jane Froman had been severely injured while on a USO tour, but I didn't know what any of them had done or why. But I always wondered and somehow kept those thoughts in the back of my mind.

They were brought to the forefront on September 11, 2001, by Al-Qaeda's sneak attack on the World Trade Center which, to my mind, appeared to mirror Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor some sixty years earlier. The events were similar, but it seemed to me that something had changed in those twelve intervening lustrums, and the change wasn't for the better. True, there was a tremendous outpouring of patriotic sentiment, and many high-sounding words were spoken. But following 9/11, there wasn't the rush to the induction centers that December 7, 1941, had engendered and, with one notable exception, no celebrities volunteered. I couldn't help but wonder, what kind of people were those populating Hollywood's film studios and America's athletic fields in 1941?

So having retired the week before 9/11 and having time on my hands for the first time in many years, I decided to see if I could determine who those people were, what they really did, why they did it, and how their service had benefited our country and impacted their lives and careers. When I began looking into it, however, I soon discovered that a lot more personalities from the entertainment and sports worlds had served, both in times of war and in times of peace, than I had ever imagined. Some were Americans by birth; some became citizens while some others achieved celebrity in America but never became citizens. By the end of 1944, for example, more than 1,500 members of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) were in the armed forces, and of that number, forty-nine were either major stars or leading men.

As I delved deeper, I also found that some of these people were truly heroic, while others had seemingly been given more credit than was their due. Some had volunteered long before the war even started, saw serious action, and were highly decorated. Some were unknown to me. They had been killed. Others had volunteered with every intention of fighting for their country but, through no fault of their own, never saw action—but they served. One, a nondescript officer, spent almost the entire war in Culver City, California, but went on to become president of the United States of America and is generally credited with ending the Cold War by peacefully bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union.

There were also those who, although not in the military in the true sense of the word, were often nearer the fighting than many who were. These were the entertainers, many of whom went far beyond the call of duty to bring a sense of home to America's troops scattered around the world. Some of these men and women performed for months on end, often alone, and many times at their own expense. These few were just as much heroes and heroines as the men who were doing the fighting. They shared the dangers, trudged the same mud, suffered the same heat, fought the same mosquitoes, and often were just as scared—but they did their jobs as they saw them. One comic even climbed a palm tree on a small pacific island to entertain a lone soldier who was on lookout and couldn't make his show. That same entertainer, whose son had been killed earlier in the war, even flew on five combat missions—the missions his son never got to fly—by special order of Gen. Douglas MacArthur himself.

This book is my attempt to tell the stories of some of these remarkable men and women as simply and honestly as possible, with emphasis on their service to their countries, since their careers are generally well-known. Their careers, however, are also briefly outlined so readers unfamiliar with their lives and careers may better discern the impact of their service on their careers and so younger readers may learn who these people were. These are stories which should be told and retold for, aside from the careers which made them famous, these men and women are truly American heroes.

I should also explain that when I began the investigations which led to this book, I had no intention of writing one. I simply set out to dispel some long-standing questions in my own mind: Who exactly were these people, and what exactly did they do? As a retired engineer, I also thought it would be fun and interesting to try and rank them according to the relative significance of their achievements, much as has been done with the one hundred greatest pitchers and hitters in baseball and the one hundred greatest quarterbacks in football. Unfortunately, I found this to be a quite impossible task.

Unlike baseball hitters, where you are dealing for the most part with apples and apples, I found myself dealing with apples, peaches, plums, oranges, all sorts of vegetables, and a few nuts. I had that officer in Culver City, a child star who became a US ambassador; World War II's most decorated soldier, a comedienne who dedicated much of her life to entertaining America's fighting men right at the front, a roving adventurer, a marine who was shot in the ass on Iwo Jima, a soldier who played baseball in the States and in Hawaii for the duration of the war, a couple of would-be spies, a navy pilot who shot down seven Japanese planes, and many more. Some volunteered long before World War II even began, others joined later, and still others waited to be drafted or served reluctantly. Some were heroic almost beyond belief, while others merely served. In short, there was a little of everything.

To make matters still worse, many of these men and women never spoke of their service, and those who wrote their autobiographies generally made light of their achievements. Unlike some of today's politicians, none of them considered him or herself to be a hero. As a result, some of their efforts are well-documented, while others are less so, and in many instances, accounts of the same activities and exploits vary in significant detail. The best I could do, I found, was to identify those personalities whose exploits are sufficiently well-documented to permit a complete profile, resolve any discrepancies in my own mind, and separate these men and women into broad categories, hoping to group them with their peers. These categories became the sections of this book. They present and discuss the exploits of ninety-five American athletes and entertainers. Those lacking in sufficient documentation are grouped in the section entitled Added Attractions, but they are just as interesting and just as heroic as the rest.

It should also be noted that although the focus of this book is on Americans who served the United States during World War II, it goes beyond that by encompassing some personalities and events from as early as the Spanish American War and as late as the war in Afghanistan and the election of 2020, both in times of war and in times of peace. Also included are a few foreign-born Hollywood stars who fought for their countries of origin before becoming American citizens and five who lived and worked in the United States but did not become American citizens. These latter five are presented in a separate section entitled Performers on a Different Stage. They were included in the book because their efforts supported America in its wars and their exploits were simply too interesting to leave out.

I hope the readers of this book will enjoy learning a little bit about the ninety-five extraordinary men and women and truly fine Americans presented in this book, as well as their five allied performers, as much as I enjoyed learning and writing about them. In doing so, he or she may find a few new friends and perhaps, as I did, be forced to reevaluate some who had previously been misjudged.

Headliners

The challenge of statesmanship is to have the vision to dream of a better, safer world and the courage, persistence, and patience to turn that dream into reality. (President Ronald Reagan)

1

Ronald Reagan: A Star on the World Stage

Ronald Reagan is not generally credited by his political enemies with being particularly intelligent, nor was he considered to be an intellectual, but then again, neither was Abraham Lincoln. During their political careers, both men were constantly abused and disparaged editorially by an unfriendly press and by the political cartoonists of their day. Lincoln was portrayed as an Illinois hayseed; Reagan was just an uninformed actor or an amiable dunce who had to be told how to play the role of president and what to say. But both men lived by well-thought-out and long-standing principles which allowed them to good-naturedly ignore fallacious arguments and stinging criticism and to change America (and in Reagan's case—the world) for the better. It is hard to imagine what America, and the world at large, would be like today if these two men had not been presidents of the United States of America.

Ronald Reagan enrolled in the US Army Extension Program on March 18, 1935, and by December 1936, had completed fourteen courses. He then joined the army's Enlisted Reserve Corps at Des Moines, Iowa, as a private in Troop B, 332nd Cavalry. On May 25, 1937, he was appointed a second lieutenant in the Officers' Reserve Corps of the Cavalry and, on June 18, 1937, accepted his officer's commission and was assigned to the 323rd Cavalry. During most of this time, Reagan was a radio sportscaster. His motion picture career began in 1937 but was interrupted following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when, on April 19, 1942, he was ordered to active duty.

Reagan had not expected this since, as the result of a physical examination performed at March Field in March 1941, the army had designated him for limited service—eligible for Corps area service command, or War Department overhead only due to his poor eyesight. (Reagan was so nearsighted that when filming long-range shots requiring good vision, he was forced to wear large rigid, experimental contact lenses.) His first assignment was as liaison officer of boarding troops bound for Australia at the San Francisco Port of Embarkation, Fort Mason, California. Later, he was transferred to Army Air Force Intelligence in Los Angeles, California. There, while serving with the First Motion Picture Unit and the Eighteenth Army Air Force Base Unit, he acted as personnel officer, post adjutant, and executive officer. Operating from the old Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, his units trained combat camera crews, produced training films, and developed a new technique for briefing bomber crews prior to their missions.

The technique involved producing simulated aerial views of target areas with up-to-date bomb damage so pilots and bombardiers could see in advance of their missions exactly what they could expect to see. Reagan narrated the films and identified the features leading to the target areas. By war's end, Reagan's units had produced some four hundred training films for the Army Air Corps. Promoted to first lieutenant on January 14, 1943, and to captain on July 22, 1943, Reagan was discharged from active duty on December 9, 1945, at Fort MacArthur, California, whereupon he resumed his motion picture career.

In 1947, Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), a labor union representing film actors in the United States, which he had joined on June 30, 1937. He served in that capacity for six terms, helping Hollywood through the breakup of the studio system, an attempted communist takeover of the motion picture industry, and the advent of television. This broadened his executive experience and sharpened the negotiating skills he would use so effectively years later in confronting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in his efforts to end the Cold War. By the mid-1960s, Reagan's acting career had wound down, and he was heavily involved as a spokesman for the Republican Party. Then in January 1966, he was persuaded to run for governor of California against the Democrat incumbent Edmund G. Pat Brown.

Reagan won with 58 percent of the vote to Brown's 42 percent, and a plurality of almost a million votes. Upon assuming office, however, he discovered that the previous administration had concealed the fact that California was in its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and, for the past year, had been spending a million dollars a day more than it had been taking in. Reagan ordered a hiring freeze on government employees, mandated a 10 percent across-the-board cut in all agencies, and was forced to break a campaign promise by raising taxes but with a further promise to lower them again as soon as the situation was under control. In 1968, he was informed that the California treasury now had a $100 million surplus, and he did just that. Realizing that when the state legislature learned of the surplus they would find ways to spend it, he announced it to the people of California and suggested that when the California taxpayers computed their taxes that year, they should only pay 90 percent of what they owed. Reagan was reelected governor in 1970, this time with 53 percent of the vote, and continued his efforts to reduce the size of California's government. In 1974, he refused to run for a third term, leaving office with California once again on a sound financial footing.

In 1976, Reagan was induced to try for his party's nomination as a candidate for president, but he lost to President Gerald R. Ford who then lost the presidency to Jimmy Carter. For the next four years, Reagan watched President Carter as he brought the country to near ruin with soaring interest rates, high unemployment, high inflation, low American morale, and an increasing communist threat from overseas. On November 13, 1979, he announced that he was once again a candidate for president, and this time he won the nomination. Then partly because of Carter's self-proclaimed misery index, which then stood at 19.3 (the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate) and despite his age, he was elected the fortieth president of the United States.

When he took office, Reagan was immediately confronted with an array of problems which had been created during the previous administration. Among them, inflation had peaked at 14.8 percent and was running at 12.8 percent; unemployment stood at 7.4 percent; interest rates, even to the most qualified borrowers, were at historic highs (20 percent); America's prestige abroad was at an all-time low; Iran was holding American hostages which Carter had been unable to free; and most seriously, America's military capability had been gutted, emboldening the Soviet Union which, in seeking to expand its communist empire, had invaded Afghanistan.

Reagan struggled with these problems over the next eight years and, despite the opposition of a Democrat-controlled Congress and Senate (except for two years), achieved remarkable results. Prior to his presidency, liberal economists had always maintained that the unemployment rate had to be kept above 6.2 percent to prevent runaway inflation, and the economy was always manipulated to do so. Reagan dispelled that myth by reducing unemployment to 5.4 percent, while dropping the rate of inflation from 12.8 percent to the range of 3–4 percent. He promised to cut taxes, and he did so, cutting them to less than half what they had been during the previous administration and, along the way, reducing the top individual tax rate from 78 percent to 35 percent. He promised to appoint the first woman to the United States Supreme Court, and on July 7, 1981, he nominated Sandra Day O'Conner for a position on that court. He promised to rebuild the nation's military arsenal and strength, and he did. And he said he would confront the communist threat from the Soviet Union, and he did that too.

Reagan, unlike his predecessors, refused to rely on the theory of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which he considered to be the stupidest thing he had ever heard of, to prevent World War III. He felt that rather than try to limit the number of weapons designed to kill people, it would be far better to try to build a system to save people. To do so, he called for the development of what he termed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a national defense against incoming ballistic missiles. His political opponents derisively termed it Star Wars and said it couldn't be done. Fortunately for the American people, and for the world at large, the Soviet leaders had more faith in America's capability to develop such a system than Reagan's political opposition, and Reagan knew that the Soviet economy could not bear the burden of developing their own similar system. The Soviets did everything in their power to make Reagan bargain away SDI, but Reagan adamantly refused to do so, saying that SDI was not on the table. But as a gesture toward world peace and friendship, he said that when SDI was developed and proven, the United States would offer the system to the Soviet Union and to any country that wanted it. At first, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev didn't believe Reagan, but as he came to know him, a certain amount of friendship and mutual trust developed. This eventually led to the agreements by which the United States and the USSR would reduce, rather than limit, their nuclear arsenals. The Cold War was beginning to thaw. Soon it would end peacefully, and before long, the last vestige of that war, the Berlin Wall, would be torn down just as Ronald Reagan had asked.

Ronald Reagan's tax cuts, coupled with his emphasis on sound money, deregulation, and free trade, created a vast economic expansion and produced the longest sustained period of prosperity in America's history, carrying all the way through the 1990s. But his greatest achievements must be bringing an end to the Cold War, eliminating the threat of nuclear annihilation, and doing something unprecedented in world history—ending a long-standing confrontation with an avowed enemy state without resorting to war. Because of his efforts, for the first time in world history, an empire, the Soviet Union, collapsed without war or revolution.

2

Donald Trump: The Bravest Man in America