78 DAWN PATROL, THE [AKA FLIGHT COMMANDER]
dove and remained submerged for only 6 hours, not 16, before returning to its base
at St. Nazaire for repairs (in early December, not at Christmastime, as in the movie).
The Allied air raid on the U- boat base and the sinking of U-96 as it returns home
is a complete fabrication, obviously concocted to convey the utter futility of war
(U-96 actually survived most of the war; it was decommissioned when it was sunk
by the U.S. Eighth Air Force in the port of Wilhelmshaven on 30 March 1945).
Allied air attacks on the U- boat facilities in France did not commence until October
1942, a full year after the film’s time frame.DAWN PATROL, THE [AKA FLIGHT
COMMANDER] (1930; REMADE 1938)
Synopsis
The Dawn Patrol is an American Pre- Code World War I film directed by Howard
Hawks (a former World War I flight instructor). Starring Richard Barthelmess and
Douglas Fairbanks Jr., the film follows the fighter pi lots of the 59th British Squad-
ron of the Royal Flying Corps as they cope with the stresses of combat on an almost
daily basis. When it was remade in 1938 under the same title, the original was
renamed Flight Commander.Background
The Dawn Patrol originates with John Monk Saunders (1897–1940), an Oxford-
educated Rhodes Scholar and U.S. Army Air Ser vice flight instructor in Florida
during the First World War whose great regret in life was not being able to secure
an air combat posting to France during the war. A screenwriter specializing in avia-
tion pictures, Saunders wrote the treatment for William Wellman’s Wings (1927),
the film that won the first Acad emy Award for Best Picture in 1929. That same year
director Howard Hawks— himself a WWI Army Air Corps veteran who served in
France— asked Saunders to write a story for an aviation movie that would serve as a
starring vehicle for Ronald Colman, with Samuel Goldwyn as producer. Drawing
on the recollections of humorist Irvin S. Cobb, who had known WWI Royal Flying
Corps (RFC) pi lots, and from his own conversations with British and Canadian ex-
fighter pi lots during his time at Oxford (1919–1920), Saunders wrote an 18- page
treatment entitled “The Flight Commander” that dramatized the stoical fatalism and
comradery exhibited by fliers facing death daily. Hawks purchased Saunders’ story
for $10,000, then sold it for the same amount to First National- Vitaphone, a newly
acquired Warner Bros. subsidiary, after Goldwyn passed on it. First National pro-
vided a $600,000 production bud get. With the change in studios Ronald Colman
was eliminated as the pos si ble star of the movie; Hawks cast Wings star Richard
Barthelmess in his stead and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in the supporting role of what
would be Hawks’s first “talkie.” Hawks then hired Seton I. Miller to turn Saunders’
story into a screenplay and later hired Dan Totheroh— a WWI combat veteran—to
polish dialogue. Hawks also hired many of the pi lots and cameramen who had just
worked on Howard Hughes’ WWI aviation epic, Hell’s Angels (1930).