On December 11, 1941, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. Four days later, Cpl. James Stewart appeared on a radio show called We Hold These Truths that was broadcast on all four national networks in commemoration of 150 years since ratification of the Bill of Rights. Orson Welles narrated, Leopold Stakowski conducted the National Anthem, an all-star cast participated, and President Roosevelt read a message at the end of the show. Yet Jim had to be ordered to appear; he wanted nothing to do with public appearances as a Hollywood star because these trivialities of “public relations” and “recruiting Air Corps” kept him away from his goal of shipping out to fight.
On December 31 Stewart received his pilot rating and promotion from corporal and air cadet to second lieutenant in the Air Corps Reserve, trading in serial number 39230721 for an officer’s number, 0-433210. He had won his wings and earned a pay raise to $245 per month. A little more than two weeks later, the war hit home: Fun-loving Carole Lombard, with whom he had worked at Selznick Studios in the 1939 comedy-drama Made for Each Other, was killed along with her mother and one of Strickling’s press men at MGM, Otto Winkler, while returning home from a trip back east to sell war bonds. Fifteen Army Air Corps fliers from the Ferrying Command had been lost as well when the DC-3 in which all were riding hit a mountain in dark of night not far from McCarran Army Air Field in Las Vegas. Stewart felt gut-punched. Lombard was a dishy dame, loud, talked a mile a minute and cussed a blue streak, but he hadn’t met anyone so down to earth in all his Hollywood years. She was one hell of an on-screen kisser, softest lips in the business. And Otto Winkler had died too. Wink was a round little man who worked in the publicity department, worked like the devil in fact. Stewart would see Wink hustling around the lot, usually joined to Clark Gable at the hip. And Wink had attended Jim’s going-away party at MGM.
Two days after Lombard died, Jim’s status was changed from Air Corps Reserve to active duty in the Air Corps. Twelve days after that he was required to attend a birthday party for FDR (who did not attend) at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in the heart of his old stomping grounds. He appeared in his Air Corps uniform for the sake of reporters and showed off newly earned silver wings.
Late in February he was obligated by Hollywood tradition as the incumbent Best Actor winner to present the Best Actor award for the top performance in 1941, again in uniform, at the Academy Award dinner and ceremonies in downtown Los Angeles. It was a strange night at the Biltmore Hotel on South Grand, strange for so many reasons. First and foremost, the Biltmore Bowl hummed with life but at a lower key, maybe because the war was on everyone’s mind, or was it merely the absence of the king and his queen? Gable had always attended these things in general discomfort, as if anchored to a spot of floor, while Lombard would flit about the room dressed to the nines and huddle here with one group, there with another, occasionally pealing with laughter that could be heard across town, it seemed. Now she was dead and Gable was God knew where. Certainly not here.
Lieutenant Stewart stepped back into the world in which he had formerly resided. It already had been a year since he had sat in attendance not thinking he could win for The Philadelphia Story. It was to have been Olivier’s award, or Chaplin’s, or Fonda’s for the best performance of all by far in The Grapes of Wrath, yet Jim had won. Now, he stood here at the Biltmore again, tall as always among the people he knew well and knew barely, moguls, directors, writers, producers, and players, with all their quirks and all their drama. Over there, Ginger; over there, Maggie; over there, Norma. Crawford was still Crawford, and Jim saw Hank, aloof as always, and Buzz. Many men present were in uniform—more than Jim expected. John Huston came over and mentioned that he had enlisted in the Army Signal Corps and would soon be inducted. Then Huston started talking about doing a recruiting picture with Jim, nothing big, just a short subject that Huston would direct, and Stewart listened politely. But Jim wasn’t really there at all. His head, perched on his lanky frame, looked about, but his brain had remained at Moffett. Moffett was where he wanted to be this night.
Buzz Meredith broke the news prior to dinner and the presentation that he would be inducted into the U.S. Army the next day. Buzz had Olivia de Havilland on his arm; Livvie recently had plunged deep into one of those top-secret affairs with Huston that everybody in town knew about. Such a thing wasn’t like Livvie at all, but maybe one had to dive into such situations at least once in life. Jim had done it with Norma, jumped in to find the water icy and uncomfortable, and now dark loner Livvie had leapt, and Jim knew there was no way it was going to end well for anybody, not given this cast of characters. Tonight, Livvie was up for Best Actress against her sister Joan Fontaine. Such a poisonous pair these sisters were, and when Jim and Livvie made eye contact and small talk, each knew the deepest secrets of the other and Jim had never seen her strung so tight.
That evening Jim stood on the dais and presented the Best Actor Oscar to a typically uncomfortable Gary Cooper for his performance in Sergeant York. Howard Hawks had directed York; Jim knew Hawks from countless interactions at airfields since Hawks was a pilot who had made aviation pictures and liked his planes like he liked his women: fast. So Coop won an Oscar but Livvie did not; Livvie lost to Joanie, and the devastation on Livvie’s face was something that no one there that night, at least no one who knew her, could ever forget.
When the evening ended, Jim was grateful to fly north and away from madness, affairs, awards, and petty jealousies. He was in the air, the place where he could be nothing but himself and deal with nothing but a set of controls. Jim was happy to leave that mess back there on the ground far behind. “You’re like a bird up there,” he said of flying. “It’s almost as if you’re not part of society anymore. All you can think about is what you’re doing and you have a complete escape from your worldly problems.”
In April John Huston received his commission in the Signal Corps and Lieutenant Stewart was assigned to the Motion Picture Unit for the short recruiting film that Huston had mentioned at the Academy Awards dinner. Except it wasn’t hotshot Huston, fresh off The Maltese Falcon, who would head north to meet up with Stewart to make the recruiting tool. It was thirty-eight-year-old Warner Bros. director of short subjects Owen Crump who pulled in to Moffett Field with a caravan of studio grip trucks. Jim was in the air in an AT-6 trainer when they arrived, and he observed the commotion below, unaware until this moment of the intrusion of a movie production unit at his base.
“He landed,” said Owen Crump, “taxied up to where we were all waiting, got out. He was furious. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? I’m not going to do a damn thing for this! Not a damn thing!’”
Crump, who had banged out the screenplay in hours and was now on the hot seat to bring home footage featuring Lieutenant Stewart, begged Jim for a few minutes to explain the premise. They went off for coffee. Crump related the recruitment goals for his modest picture—100,000 young men for the Air Corps, including 15,000 captains, 40,000 lieutenants, and 35,000 flying sergeants—not to mention gunners and ground crew. It would be called Winning Your Wings, and it was hoped that Stewart would describe the glamorous life of an Air Corps flier.
Jim flipped through the script and grew calmer. “Sorry,” he said, “I didn’t understand. Sure, I’ll do anything you want, whatever.”
“The crew was waiting and Jimmy said hello to all of them,” said Crump, “then got in his airplane and circled the field again, because that’s the way the film started, and he rolled up to the camera into a close shot and he got out and who was it but Jimmy Stewart!”
That morning, Jim quickly studied the script, landed his trainer, and stepped out of the cockpit in uniform and parachute to deliver a forty-five-second introduction to camera. The same morning, Crump directed Jim in short on-camera inserts and voiceover narration. As uncomfortable as Stewart was making this picture, it didn’t show. He delivered the line, “Your commission in the air forces is waiting!” with such conviction that men practically vaulted from their theater seats to enlist. He did not mention to these men, or their mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and sweethearts, that there would be opposition in those skies, namely Axis air forces, or that flaming death might well result from flying around in the gleaming new planes depicted in aerial beauty shots. He spoke of keeping the war “from our own shores,” and espoused the “cause of decency.”
Camera negative was trucked back to Hollywood for post-production and insertion of B-roll of recruits, active duty personnel, and heavy aircraft on the assembly line—in this case B-17s.
Winning Your Wings scored big for the U. S. government as a short subject shown in American movie theaters. The abilities of James Stewart the actor masked his reluctance to appear for the Motion Picture Unit, as he seemed confident and dashing and ready to take on the Axis all on his own. The sword had two edges: Winning Your Wings proved to be a winner of a recruiting picture and feather in Stewart’s cap, but would lead to more requests for public relations work, which would deter him from a path to service in combat.
At Moffett, Jim kept angling to position himself for assignment overseas, which meant he would need to be flying fighters or bombers. He could never become a fighter pilot, not at six-four and almost thirty-four years of age—fighters required the split-second reflexes of twenty year olds. That left Jim with the bombers. But someone somewhere within Air Corps Headquarters had placed a hold order on Stewart’s file that listed him as “branch immaterial” and then as “static personnel,” so the only option open for such a pilot was as a flight instructor. He was flying a lot, instrument flying, night flying—was all this flying just meant to keep him busy? Keep him distracted? Then he was ordered to attend instructional courses in how to teach piloting skills, and in April 1942 received a transfer to Mather Army Airfield, east of Sacramento, which for the past eight months had been stamping out navigators for the crews of the four-engine heavy bombers now in production in plants around the United States. There Stewart took more classes in flight training for twin-engine aircraft; once certified as a twin-engine instructor, he would qualify to fly the Mitchell B-25B medium bomber now coming on line—bombers like the sixteen under the command of Lt. Col. James Doolittle that flew off the U.S.S. Hornet and dropped bombs on Tokyo, Japan, in a daring April 18 raid. There hadn’t been much for the Air Corps to cheer about to this point; now, thanks to the Doolittle raid, energy around Mather spiked.
While Jim had been serving at Moffett Field, Pearl Harbor was bombed. At that time, the U.S. Army operated fewer than 300 bombers divided into fourteen bomb groups. More than fifty other bomb groups existed on paper only. The Army Air Forces organized quickly after Pearl Harbor under Lt. Gen. Henry (Hap) Arnold, who put Maj. Gen. Carl Spaatz in charge, with Brig. Gen. Ira Eaker appointed to run bomber command. These bright, highly experienced Air Corps officers would run something to be called the Eighth Air Force, which commenced operations in January 1942. The next month, General Eaker traveled to England and set up headquarters for the Eighth Bomber Command, but he remained a lonely man until some of his fliers began filtering over in May. All he could do in the meantime was look embarrassed as the RAF bombed Germany nightly with the Americans nowhere to be seen.
Back in California, Lieutenant Stewart became a twin-engine instructor, taking up rookie pilots from the Mather runways six hours a day. It was at Mather he looked in the mirror and noticed some gray hairs mixed in with the brown—the rigors of Army life were showing. He also wore down and at the end of July required a furlough to return home to Vinegar Hill. “The army’s fine, but I’m tired out,” he told a reporter on landing at the airport in Pittsburgh, where Alex and Bessie greeted him.
A month later he was 3,000 miles away on weekend leave in Hollywood, where he met twenty-six-year-old, brown-haired, brown-eyed singing star Dinah Shore at the home of the Haywards. Shore’s soft manner, self-deprecating humor, and Tennessee drawl bowled over the lieutenant and romance took off. For the remainder of 1942, Stewart spent weekends with Dinah in Hollywood, or she traveled to Jim’s new base, Kirtland Field, New Mexico, to spend weekends in hotels with him. In between they exchanged letters, and Stewart found an outlet for the sexual frustrations of life on army bases. By now it had become clear that you could take the boy out of Hollywood, but you couldn’t quite take Hollywood out of the boy. Not yet, anyway.