TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH 327
Background
In February 1942 United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) Brigadier General
Ira C. Eaker was sent England to establish the U.S. Eighth Air Force to conduct
daylight, high altitude “precision” bombing of Nazi Germany that was often far
from precise. One of the staff officers accompanying Eaker was Bierne Lay, Jr., who
served briefly as the Eighth Air Force’s historian and film unit commander. Lay
went on to command the 487th Bomb Group, was shot down, managed to evade
capture, and returned to friendly lines and further ser vice. After the war Lay, a free-
lance writer, resumed his civilian trade. In the spring of 1946 Sidney “Sy” Bartlett
(born Sacha Baraniev), a screenwriter and another Eighth Air Force veteran,
approached Lay and proposed that they collaborate on a novel and screenplay based
on their war experiences. While Bartlett and Lay were in the midst of their labors,
the air war in Eu rope was dramatized by yet another Eighth Air Force veteran, Wil-
liam Wister Haines, whose Command Decision appeared as a serialized novel in
Atlantic Monthly (1946–1947), then as a successful Broadway play (1947–1948),
and fi nally as an acclaimed 1948 movie, appropriately starring Clark Gable, a deco-
rated air combat veteran in real life. Scooped but undaunted, Bartlett and Lay
finished their work and sold the screenplay, entitled Twelve O’Clock High, to Dar-
ryl F. Zanuck’s 20th Century Fox in February 1948 for a hefty $100,000. Four
months later Harper & Bros. published the novel version, which earned mostly rave
reviews and became a bestseller.
Production
The casting of the film’s lead character, General Frank Savage, turned out to be an
involved pro cess. John Wayne was offered the part but turned it down, as did Clark
Gable, who had already played essentially the same role in Command Decision
(1948). Dana Andrews lobbied hard for the part but was ultimately passed over.
Edmond O’Brien, Ralph Bellamy, Robert Preston, Burt Lancaster, James Cagney,
Van Heflin, Robert Young, and Robert Montgomery were also considered before
the role fi nally went to Gregory Peck in January 1949. Peck had initially refused
the part because he found the script too similar to Command Decision but director
Henry King persuaded him to change his mind. King also literally went the extra
mile for location scouting. Flying his own private plane, King visited Eglin Air Force
Base in the Florida panhandle on 8 March 1949 and found the perfect location for
most of the shoot a few miles north of the main base, at Eglin Auxiliary Field No. 3
(aka Duke Field), where a control tower and 14 other buildings were later con-
structed to create the fictional RAF Archbury. On the recommendation of the
film’s technical advisor, Col. John deRussy, King chose Ozark Army Airfield near
Daleville, Alabama, as the site for filming B-17 takeoffs and landings, including a
spectacular B-17 belly- landing sequence, because the light- colored runways at Eglin
did not match war time runways in England, which were black macadam less vis-
i ble to enemy aircraft. Additional background photography was shot at RAF Bar-
ford St. John in Oxfordshire, England, and at other locations around Eglin AFB
and Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The crew used a dozen B-17s for filming, borrowed
from Eglin and elsewhere, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, which had pledged its