16 ATTACK!
excellent reviews and solid box office returns and recouped its production costs
more than twice over.Reel History Versus Real History
The movie is fictional but its culminating incident— the deliberate killing of an
army officer by fellow soldiers— has lots of historical pre ce dent. Mutinous be hav-
ior is often associated with the Vietnam War (in the course of the war an estimated
1,000 officers and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) were “fragged,” resulting in
about 100 deaths and 700 injuries) but such things have, of course, occurred in
all American wars. Before the United States desegregated its military in 1948, muti-
nies were most often racially motivated. Anti- segregation protests by African
American ser vicemen deemed “mutinies” mostly occurred stateside during World
War II at Dale Mabry Field (Florida), Fort Bragg (North Carolina), Camp Robinson
(Arkansas), Camp Davis (North Carolina), Camp Lee ( Virginia), Fort Dix (New Jer-
sey), Freeman Army Field (Indiana), and other bases. Black soldiers fired on white
soldiers in mutinies at Camp Claiborne (Louisiana) and Brookley Air Force Base
(Alabama), and at least one mutiny occurred in a combat theater. Though it does
not address the most common cause of mutiny during World War II Attack! does
constitute a salutary move away from the knee- jerk triumphalism of war time war
films and a healthy break with Cold War ideology by daring to suggest that “The
Good War” wasn’t all good and that the military establishment mirrors the injus-
tices of society as a whole— a theme explored with great efficacy by Stanley
Kubrick’s WWI- era Paths of Glory (1957).