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World War 2 on Broadcast TV
By my headline, I don’t mean television programming during World War Two, though believe it or not there was such a thing. The major combatants all had some version of TV up and running during the war, though few owned receivers to watch the programming. The ad above is from an edition of the New York Daily News from 1944! It tells of a program that made television available to some U.S. military hospitals at the time. But that’s a miniscule niche in the scheme of things. Instead today’s post is about shows with World War 2 settings that aired during the heyday of broadcast TV from the early 1960s through the early 1980s.
Why not start exploring the subject earlier? Though TV was going strong by the ’50s, it was still “too soon”. Emotions were raw, memories were fresh, and the post-war order had yet to settle down. Though there had been plenty of WWII films during the war, TV as a medium was at once intimate and trivializing. Naturally the war was a terrific machine for the generation of stories, but breaking those stories up with commercials for corn flakes…perhaps not so respectful. A couple of series were tried in the U.S. in the ’50s, but none were major successes or stood the test of time. By the early ’60s though, 20th anniversaries began to roll around. Nostalgia became a factor that would sweeten the the pot.
Other factors, probably even more important, had to do with technology and expense. In the late ’40s and ’50s most television shows were broadcast live out of studios. Obviously, this technique precluded things like realistic battle scenes. The Cisco Kid (1950), a western, was the first show that was filmed for television. The method was roughly twice as expensive as the conventional technique. But as the television business grew, so did advertising revenue, and so did production budgets. By the ’60s, it was flipped — most of the shows were pre-filmed. And this was when WWII began to be explored as a setting for TV series.
Here are some of the shows from that period.
Combat! (1962-67)
Writer Robert Pirosh (A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, etc) served in uniform during the war. He returned a changed man and made it his mission to document the experience in films like Battleground (1949), Go for Broke! (1951), and Hell is for Heroes (1962). Combat! followed a U.S. army platoon, let by a lieutenant (Rick Jason) and a Sergeant (Vic Morrow) as they performed missions in France. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is very much an exponent of this genre, which I believe dates to Lewis Milestone’s influential A Walk in the Sun (1945). The emphases is on realism and relationships among characters. For this reason, it’s exceedingly strange to me that Howard Hawks never made such a film, but he didn’t. At any rate Combat! was essentially an athology show. Jason and Morrow and a handful of others (Shecky Green among them!) were regular cast members, but every episode would have guest stars who be at the heart of the episodes as expendable dogfaces, hundreds of recognizable actors among them. (These characters would almost always die tragically — it was kind of the point of the series). The show’s lingering fame has been enhanced by the fact that Robert Altman cut his teeth on the series, directing ten of its best episodes. Another director (and writer) who worked on the series early in his career was Burt Kennedy, who became associated with westerns.
Navy Sit-Coms:
1962 saw the launch of the true sit-com classic McHale’s Navy (1962), which I wrote about at some length here. The success of the show spawned two others that were not unrelated.
The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1965) was based on a 1960 film starring Jack Lemmon and Ricky Nelson, concerning a sailing vessel that is employed for espionage and sabotage purposes on the Pacific theatre. This short-lived show starred Jack Warden and Gary Collins.
Another in the same vein was the sit-com version of the Henry Fonda stage and screen vehicle Mister Roberts (1955), though it was surely more immediately prompted by its 1964 sequel Ensign Pulver, starring Robert Walker. Roger Smith, late of 77 Sunset Strip played the title character, a disgruntled naval officer forced to serve on a supply ship under an incompetent captain (here played by the aptly cast Richard X. Slattery). It’s actually a terrific idea for a series. Mr. Roberts’ predicament is Godot like, or more to the point, Gilligan’s Island-esque. Mr. Roberts never gets his transfer, so you can keep going with episodes, theoretically forever. But in reality, it only lasted a season. All three of these shows went off the air in 1966, though McHale’s Navy went into heavy syndication.
But of course! I wrote about this anomaly here.
The Rat Patrol (1966-68)
“Rats”, of course meaning “desert rats”. The heroes were a quartet whose unit rode around in a jeep patroling the Saharan sands during the North Africa campaign, hazing and harrassing Rommel’s Afrika Korps troops (or equally small bands of them) wherever they found them. Christopher George (whose name has always struck me as an amusing mash-up of Christopher Robin and Curious George), Gary Raymond, Lawrence P. Casey, and Justin Tarr were the quartet. And what a better show if they were also a rock group like The Beatles or The Monkees! Quartets are magical! Anyway, one of the show’s prime selling points at the time was that it was “In Color”, always included in promos for the show. Though the show only lasted two seasons, it went into syndication thereafter.
Garrison’s Gorillas (1967-68)
This unapologetic rip-off of The Dirty Dozen starred Ron Harper (later of the Planet of the Apes TV show), Cesare Danova (Elvis’s rival in Viva Las Vegas), et al. , with recurring characters played by Jack Klugman, Larry Storch, and Richard Kiley. It lasted a single season, to be replaced by The Mod Squad.
70s Sit-Coms
In the wake of M*A*S*H and the nostalgic Happy Days, several sit-com creators sought to roll the clock back just a few years earlier, though with less success.
I was a big fan of Operation Petticoat (1977-79) throughout its two seasons. Based on the 1959 film with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, it concerned a U.S. naval submarine charged with the mission of transporting a gaggle of army nurses, causing much comic sexual tension thereby! The first season of the TV version starred John Astin and a pre-Halloween Jamie Lee Curtis, et al. although there were major cast changes for the second season.
Meantime there was Goodtime Girls (1980), a show with a home-front, Rosie the Riveter theme, starring a pre-Ghostbusters and Designing Women Annie Potts, a pre-Private BenjaminLorna Patterson, a post-Mary Tyler Moore ShowGeorgia Engel, a pre-TJ HookerAdrian Zmed, and a pre-Bosom Buddies and NewhartPeter Scolari.
I wrote about this quintessential 70s series here.
Baa Baa Black Sheep (1977-79)
Loved this show as well! It concerned a a unit of U.S. Marine aviators in the Pacific Theatre in World War Two. Robert Conrad played the real life Major “Pappy” Boyington, who led a troop of flying misfits nicknamed the “Black Sheep Squadron”. One of the cast regulars was a young John Laroquette.
The Winds of War (1983)/ War and Remembrance (1988)
Dan Curtis, previously associated pretty exclusively with horror, directed this TV mini-series adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel about the lead-up to the war, presenting as a “major television event”, in the vein of Roots, Holocaust, Shogun, etc. The “all star” (i.e. semi-cheesy) cast included Robert Mitchum, Ali MacGraw, Jan-Michael Vincent,John Houseman, Polly Bergen, Topol, Peter Graves, Victoria Tennant, Ralph Bellamy, et al. The sequel War and Remembrance, which covered the actual war years, followed five years later.
By this point Baby Boomers had begin to take the reigns of leadership in broadcasting and folks old enough to remember the war were dying out, so World War Two kind of slipped away as a popular television subject. There is a gap of a decade before Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Tom Brokaw’sThe Greatest Generation (1998) sparked Band of Brothers (2001), for example.
This is one of several World War Two related posts on Travalanche. For a finding aid listing many of them go here.
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