STORY OF G.I. JOE, THE 305
Background
During World War II Ernie Pyle (1900–1945) was Amer i ca’s most famous and
revered war correspondent. His plainspoken dispatches, reporting on the lives of
frontline G.I.s., appeared in hundreds of Scripps- Howard newspapers six days per
week and were eagerly devoured by millions of American readers stateside. In late
October 1943 Henry Holt published Here Is Your War, a book derived from Pyle’s
columns that covered “Operation Torch,” the North African Campaign (8 Novem-
ber 1942–13 May 1943), and “Operation Husky,” the campaign in Sicily (9 July–17
August 1943). The book became a bestseller and earned Pyle a Pulitzer Prize.
Months earlier, the U.S. Army’s Public Relations Division contacted in de pen dent
film producer Lester Cowan and tasked him with making a movie that would pay
homage to the ordinary foot soldier. Referred to Ernie Pyle by colleagues, Cowan
read his columns and quickly became convinced that they were the source mate-
rial he was looking for. Cowan approached Pyle and persuaded him that Here Is
Your War could be turned into a coherent film that would avoid the jingoistic hokum
and sentimentality all too evident in the war film genre at that time (Tobin, 1997).
After securing the movie rights from Pyle, Cowan hired playwright Arthur Miller
to pen a screen adaptation. In the fall of 1943 Cowan and Miller paid visits to Pyle
at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while he was taking a two- month
respite from the war. By mid- November 1943, Cowan had submitted Miller’s
film outline to Col. Falkner Heard of the Army Ground Forces. By March 1944
Miller had the first draft of a script completed. Bereft of fresh ideas, he dropped
out of the proj ect— though his script research into military life produced an in ter -
est ing nonfiction book entitled Situation Normal (1944). Over the next year and a
half United Artists screenwriters Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore, and Philip Steven-
son took over. With uncredited help from Ben Bengal and Alan Le May, they wrote
a series of revisions, partly to incorporate new material from Pyle’s latest columns as
the war dragged on ( these were collected in a second book, Brave Men, published
20 November 1944).
Production
Production began on 13 March 1944 with director Leslie Fenton (replacing Rich-
ard Rosson) helming a location crew and soldiers from the 104th Infantry Divi-
sion as they reenacted the Battle of Kasserine Pass at the California- Arizona
Maneuver Area (CAMA) in the desert near Yuma, Arizona. By mid- May produc-
tion had ground to a halt, with Cowan discouraged and his writers flummoxed by
a script that stubbornly refused to cohere. Another major stumbling block: Lester
Cowan could not find an actor to portray Ernie Pyle. He wanted Burgess Meredith
but Meredith was a captain in the U.S. Army and unavailable. Gary Cooper signed
on but then dropped out to join a USO tour. Lester Cowan put Leslie Fenton on
another film proj ect and, with Ernie Pyle’s help, convinced William Wellman to
sign on as director on 18 September 1944. In the weeks that followed Cowan con-
sidered a number of actors to play Pyle: Fred Astaire, Fred MacMurray, Walter Bren-
nan, and Barry Fitzgerald. He even considered Pittsburgh Pirates radio announcer
“Rosey” Rowswell and Pyle look- alike John M. Waldeck, a streetcar conductor from