“As the war was winding down,” said Capt. Starr Smith of the 453rd Bomb Group, “Col. Jimmy Stewart came more often down to London from Hethel, putting up at the Savoy, going to the theatre, and entertaining friends at the hotel.” The Savoy, an Edwardian bastion on the River Thames in the heart of London’s cultural district, offered Jim not only luxury accommodations but insulation from the press and public as he began to come to grips with sixteen months of combat.
For those who had not been shot down and become a host for lice, the end of the war brought relief from flying missions and, in Jim’s case, the obligations of sending formations into harm’s way. But he didn’t enjoy real relief from the stress that kept food from digesting while sleep remained elusive; when sleep did come, nightmares came with it. Whether a soldier holed up at the Savoy with plenty of food and fine sheets or pilfered potatoes in rural Germany and slept with lice, the missions remained the missions and there was no escaping those memories.
In March and April, gates had opened in POW camps across all German-held territories, and detainees of Jim’s old 445th Bomb Group began filtering back in the direction of Tibenham. Lt. Barry Shillito of Pissed Off, one of the disaffected group of former fighter pilots, hopped a ride to Hethel to find Colonel Stewart there; Shillito was shocked at the change in his old squadron commander. Stewart was gray of face, with bags under his eyes and a furrowed brow. His full head of hair had begun to recede and was half silver. Jim had grown so thin that the skin hung from his neck. It was almost as if Jim Stewart had been imprisoned like the others. “He went flak happy there for a while,” said Shillito. “He wasn’t flying anymore, and he was quieter than I remembered.”
Stewart did not serve as air commander after the Achmer mission of March 21. By the middle of April, spring in England and Europe, the strategic war had been won and the Eighth Air Force ceased all combat operations. There simply weren’t any more targets to hit; Germany had been flattened largely by the RAF’s indiscriminate carpet-bombing campaign that had grown so brutal even Churchill said toward the end of March: “It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land.” But it was too late; Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Travers Harris, known as “Bomber” Harris or even within his own hierarchy as “Butcher” Harris, had overseen the annihilation of entire German population centers with years of nighttime incendiary bombings.
With nothing left to bomb, the air war became a ground war, with Allied and Russian armies closing in on Berlin to complete the total destruction of Germany. Hitler committed suicide the last day of April, and on May 7, 1945, the war in Europe ended.
On May 10, General Timberlake became the Second Bomb Division chief of staff, and Colonel Stewart rose to command of the Second Combat Wing. There were no more missions to fly, true enough, but the soldier who had risen through the ranks from that first morning on an L.A. street corner felt enormous pride in beating the odds, making his way to the European Theater of Operations, and completing twenty missions as the grand old man of the 445th and 453rd. This final promotion to wing commander served as recognition of a job well done and of the saving of lives. A commendation recognized Stewart’s job through the course of his career in the ETO, from squadron commander to group operations officer to wing executive officer to wing commander:
“Throughout the time you have been associated with this Command you have displayed the most intense loyalty and patriotism as evidenced by your own participation on important combat missions and encounters with the enemy in addition to your staff work. Your initiative, sound judgment, personality, and sincere devotion to duty has contributed immeasurably to the smooth operation of this Headquarters and the morale and efficiency of the men of this entire Command.”
In all he received the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, plus Distinguished Flying Crosses for the Ludwigshafen mission, when he covered the group on the wrong heading, and the Bremen mission that began Big Week. As with all American fliers participating in the air war over Europe, he received the Croix de Guerre with bronze palm from the French Air Force and a second as an alumnus of the 445th. For Stewart the decorations didn’t matter; the experience did. “I met the most wonderful assortment of guys you’d ever want to know during those four years in the service. I came to know what went on in their minds and hearts, I shared their hopes and fears and privations as an enlisted man, and I tried with all my might to lead and protect them when I became an officer.”
At the beginning of June 1945, Jim served as presiding officer in the court-martial of a Liberator pilot and copilot who led a mission that involved the inadvertent bombing of Zurich, Switzerland, by six B-24s on March 4, 1945. The circumstances were all too familiar to Jim—bad weather, inoperative Mickey equipment, and misidentification of terrain by the lead navigator who was convinced he was over Freiberg, Germany, as the formation looked for a target of opportunity. The navigator even compared wooded terrain, marshalling yards, and a stream with an aerial photo of Freiberg to confirm he had the right target. The pilot asked him if he was certain; the navigator said he was. The court-martial took place at Second Air Division Headquarters at Horsham St. Faith, just north of Norwich, and on June 2 the jury of twelve officers found both pilots not guilty.
Otherwise, the new Second Combat Wing commander faced only logistical challenges; mainly, how to transition 9,000 men of the 389th, 445th, and 453rd Bomb Groups home. It took him the summer months to do it, and while at Hethel he learned of the dropping of atom bombs on Japan and, on August 14, that Japan had surrendered. The most terrible war in the history of humanity had come to an end.
Finally, on August 27 he boarded the British liner Queen Elizabeth with many of his Second Combat Wing comrades as part of a contingent of 14,860 returning servicemen for the five-day trip to New York City.
On Friday, August 31, a great clamor aboard ship announced sighting of the Statue of Liberty from open ocean. The men had seen such hardship, lost so many friends, changed so much inside, that tears flowed freely and splashed into the brine.
Two hours later, the first face Jim beheld on the North American continent, aside from that of Lady Liberty, belonged to forty-three-year-old weather-beaten Leland Hayward: “I’ll never forget,” said Jim, “he was standing at the bottom of the gangplank with a bunch of red roses. How he got onto the pier, I don’t know—absolute top secret, no one was allowed….”
Hayward tried to lead Jim away from the Queen Elizabeth as newspaper reporters swarmed them. Stewart ran their gauntlet with many variations of, “I have no plans; I’m just happy to be home.” In truth, the passage from England hadn’t allowed him room to even sit down a lot of the time, but it gave him room to think about the army he loved and the movie stardom that had given him a comfortable life. Simply put, he couldn’t imagine life in a peacetime air force, settling into a routine of drudgery. He was still Jim Stewart, the guy who so easily grew bored; for the past four years he had been flying, teaching, training, planning, fighting, commanding—something different each day, a different mission to prepare for or to lead and different challenges to face. In the North Atlantic he had decided to leave the service; he planned to announce it to his parents that evening. Confetti and silver balloons rained down from the upper decks of the ship, and the bands of Cab Calloway and Sammy Kaye serenaded from the dock. Jim told Leland he wanted to hang around the ship before heading to the St. Regis Hotel where Alex and Bessie anxiously awaited his arrival. “Wait a few minutes,” said Jim. “I want to stay until a few of my boys come ashore.”
The few minutes turned into hours as he identified men he knew and received their salutes when they stepped off the ship. “I just wanted to savor every moment,” said Jim, “so I decided to see everyone else off the ship first.… There’s this expression of living in the moment. I didn’t want the moment to end.”
Jim was staring down the barrel of an uncertain future, and as he looked into each face, so happy and so triumphant now, he had to wonder what lay ahead for these fellas after all they had seen and done, all the friends they had lost, the death they had dealt or witnessed, some of them POWs, and God only knew what they had experienced in captivity. Now, here they were, dispersing into a world without flak or fighters, but full of younger, fresher, better-clothed men who had stepped into their pre-war world and taken their jobs and in some cases their girls. They would be facing families who had become strangers; people who could never relate or understand. And those nightmares and shakes and the need to dull the pain of horrors witnessed or friends lost or simply the accumulation of stress that ground a soul down to nothing—each salute exchanged both ways carried the meaning of all that had come before, and all that lay ahead.
When Jim finally walked away from the Queen Elizabeth, he could take satisfaction in having overcome incredible odds to participate in the war effort on his terms, overseas, in combat, not getting a taste of war and then bowing out, but fighting a sustained war on two fronts, against the Axis and against the press, bombing the former and beating away the latter; only on rare occasions did they get nearly as close as they had on induction day and never in such great numbers.
After Stewart reported in at the processing center at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, to obtain a thirty-day leave, he and Hayward proceeded to the St. Regis, where Alex and Bessie laid eyes on their son for the first time in two years. They were shocked by what they saw—their boy had aged what seemed two decades. He was now a decorated war hero, a full colonel with silver eagles on his shoulders and a command authority that made Alex uneasy. It still meant everything to please Dad, even for a bird colonel weighed down with hardware on his chest, and Dad still wanted to be pleased. He would always want that.
On Saturday, September 1, Jim was required to attend a press conference at the office of Maj. Gen. Clarence Kells in Brooklyn. Questions from reporters focused on the resumption of Stewart’s motion-picture career, and Jim said he would like to return to Hollywood and make some comedies. “Why comedy?” he was asked. He replied that the world had seen enough drama and needed some relief from it. One reporter wrote of the eyewitness encounter that Stewart was “a bit gray after four-and-a-half years in the army, and thinner than when he won the Academy Award in 1940.”
After the press conference Leland Hayward drove Jim to Connecticut, where Maggie treated her old friend to a fried chicken dinner and all the Hollywood gossip he could handle. He was already thinking about the likelihood of a return to motion picture work and honestly didn’t know if he would be welcomed back. It was easy to compare Jim to fellow MGM star and warrior Robert Montgomery, who had been home for nearly a year after joining the navy and serving in Europe. Montgomery had worked immediately upon his return to pictures in John Ford’s war picture, They Were Expendable, starring John Wayne.
Jim had asked Leland how the landscape looked in Hollywood, and Hayward provided a brutal assessment: Everything was different. For starters, Hayward had just made a deal to sell his agency, Hayward-Deverich, to the new power brokers in town, MCA, which meant Jim was now represented by a young tiger named Lew Wasserman. The biggest nightclubs had been bought and sold and come and gone. Many established male leads were washed up or hanging on at the end of long studio deals. Exclusive contracts were passé; the smart player kept his options open because the industry was experiencing an incredible state of flux. Hayward had gotten his hot new client Greg Peck some one-shot deals at various studios and it was working out—Wasserman would undoubtedly, surmised Hayward, recommend this course for Jim. It was a lot to think about for a man back in the United States for just twenty-four hours.
Jim spent two nights with his parents at the St. Regis Hotel before heading by train to Indiana, Pennsylvania, where Doddie and Ginny had prepared celebrations, such as a parade. When Jim heard about the plans, he cancelled them. “I didn’t want to be treated as some kind of hero,” he said. “There were plenty of other heroes—real heroes—that earned that honor. For me, going home was a private thing.”
Private and yet not private. Life magazine sent its premier photographer, Peter Stackpole, to document the homecoming for the September 24 cover story. Stackpole photographed Stewart by the town courthouse as well as in front of the hardware store, behind its counter, out fishing, and at home with his parents and sisters.
“I plan to just loaf while I’m here,” said Jim. “And talk. I haven’t talked so much in years. It’s good to be home with your family.” He slept in the same bedroom where he’d spent his teens, the room in which he had followed Lucky Lindy across the Atlantic.
It was almost as if he had never left, that the war was all an imaginary thing. But no, a youth had indeed gone off to war to fulfill a mission, and in a sense the youth had died over there. A battle-scarred, middle-aged man had returned and soon he must take a hard look at sobering facts. He was thirty-seven and looked fifty, and his career as a Hollywood romantic figure was over. He wanted to make a comedy, but that type of picture seemed to be out of fashion. Fox was still making musicals, but who was doing comedy? Detective pictures seemed to be the thing and shadowy melodrama with dames and guns. Murder seemed to be big—but after what he had just seen, the last thing he wanted to make was a picture about death.
“Several of the stars that had been developing nicely came back to find that their momentum was gone,” said Hollywood historian John McElwee. “To me, it was all about momentum. If you were out of pictures for two or three years, it wasn’t going to help you. You practically had to start over.” It wasn’t just Jim; many others who had gone off to fight were just returning to Hollywood in the autumn of 1945. Fonda was one, along with Gene Raymond, Tyrone Power, and Warner Bros. stars Ronald Reagan and Wayne Morris.
“Pre-war and post-war are like two different lives,” said McElwee. “Everybody was hugely affected by the war. It’s like you scooped those years out of people’s lives.” With the established stars absent, a new crop of male actors had moved into starring roles, including Gregory Peck, Dana Andrews, Cornel Wilde, Paul Henreid, and many others. At MGM, Van Johnson starred in pictures that five years earlier might have gone to Jim. If not Johnson, then John Hodiak. John Wayne had ascended to prominence through constant work during the war years. Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas were months away from their first big pictures. It was a crowded field and many stars-turned-soldiers who had been entrenched in Hollywood before the war suddenly had no guarantee of steady work once they hung up their uniforms and returned to the soundstages.
Fonda said, “Some of the fellas who’d been big stars before the war came back looking like hell. That happened to Clark Gable. He looked ten years older. Jim had also aged quite a bit.”
But Hollywood had changed in an even more fundamental way. Jim’s old flame Olivia de Havilland had stirred the pot when she fought Jack Warner and won release from her studio contract—she claimed that her time spent on suspension for refusing to make what she considered to be inferior pictures counted toward the seven years of service she had agreed to; Warner argued that only the time she actually worked on the lot counted toward the contract. The decision in favor of de Havilland changed the way studios did business—tying themselves to stars for seven years at a time—and now independent production companies were springing up all over town. Did Stewart owe MGM eighteen months on his contract because he had voluntarily entered the service? Or had he been drafted, with the situation out of his control? And did the de Havilland decision mean he was now a free agent in any case? It seemed that MGM should be welcoming its hero back, except…
Stewart had made his position clear about making any war pictures. Imagine The James Stewart Story on the big screen, with the man himself in the left seat of a B-24 going head-to-head with the Luftwaffe over Frankfurt. This was Louis B. Mayer’s big idea for Stewart’s return to filmmaking: a war picture about James Stewart. But Jim had already said no. He had already decided never to use his wartime experiences for publicity purposes; soon this embargo grew to include any conversation about his combat missions. Ever. It was a simple, flat-out no.
On the West Coast, Louis B. Mayer came face-to-face not with the shy and retiring kid he knew but a high-ranking combat officer and a star who had aged out of any youthful roles. Jim himself had quoted a one-liner in his Brooklyn press conference that he’d been using with his officers in England for a couple years: “I’m just not a young fella anymore. I guess I’d only be suitable for playing grandfather to Mickey Rooney.”
That left only the war-hero angle for Metro to exploit if they offered Jim a deal, but this upstart clearly wasn’t going to play ball with Howard Strickling’s publicity department. As a result and amidst a great deal of fatherly fanfare in their face-to-face meeting, L.B. “released” Jim from a contract that had grown as obsolete as the leading man himself, citing the fact that Stewart was a war hero to whom everyone owed a debt of gratitude, and as such, he should be given his freedom to make pictures anywhere he chose. Of course if Jim wanted to return, he could do so on a standard long-term contract. But just as Hayward predicted, Lew Wasserman advised Jim not to return to MGM under such conditions, but to become an independent player instead.
According to a story later told by Jim, the gentle Mayer veneer fell away in a closed-door meeting when Stewart said no to a contract offer. L.B. ranted that Jim was a “son of a bitch,” who “would never work in this town again.” Somehow, after flying through flak over Bremen and Frankfurt and wiping out jet fighter bases, hearing a Louis B. Mayer diatribe no longer seemed terrifying.
Jim Stewart was a man at sea, untethered by his old employer, yet also away from the regimentation of the service, the adrenalin rush, the striving toward great accomplishments, and the defying of odds with an extraordinary collection of brothers in arms who had become like sons to him. Combat fatigue and shell shock were the terms of the day for what eventually became known as post-traumatic stress disorder, but whatever the name, Stewart suffered along with millions of other combat veterans who had returned to homes the world over, to friends and family who just couldn’t understand what they had experienced.
“I saw too much suffering,” he confided to a reporter. “It’s certainly not something to talk about.” He kept it inside from everyone, but then how could anyone who had remained stateside understand what he had gone through, beginning with the men he had lost in training at Boise and then the intensity of the run-up to war? What could he say about seeing B-24s shot to pieces beside him in formation or colliding into a fireball over Tibenham? How could he convey how it felt when so many ships hadn’t come home from Gotha? Or to write all those letters home, especially when he knew that the men he was telling mothers and fathers and wives about were dead? Why would he want to talk about his failings as a leader, as when a dozen ships in his formation dropped bombs on an innocent French town? For that matter, how many women and children had died under his bombs? Jim expressed it as: “Sherman said, ‘War is hell.’ How right he was; how truly he spoke.”
At Andrews Field near Washington, D.C., Jim received his discharge from military service, and enlisted in the Officers Reserve Corps because in fact he had been the happiest in his life in the service; he had said so. He didn’t want to give that up.
There was only one thing left for him to do now: give Hollywood a shot. When asked about his future he had told a reporter in Indiana, “I hope I get my old job back.” But MGM wasn’t an option—neither side wanted that. What, make more pictures like Ziegfeld Girl? Hell, he might as well retire to the hardware business now and save himself a whole lot of heartache. But he had to give Hollywood a try because acting was the only thing he had ever liked to do, the only thing that could hold his attention. So there he was in mid-September 1945, back in southern California as just another veteran with no guarantees, no place to live, and no prospects that he would ever make a picture again.