Trophies of War

Haystack on a Beach

In the spring of 2015, an American journalist named Clay Evans received a telephone call from 5,000 miles away. On the other end of the line was a Florida pilot named Mark Noah.

“We found the haystack”, Noah told him. Three days later, the journalist Evans hopped on a plane to a remote island in the South Pacific called Tarawa. There he joined up with Noah and a team of archaeologists at an excavation site on a sandy beach where the haystack had been discovered.

The ‘haystack’ referred to a mass burial ground. Hundreds of unidentified bodies were believed to lay in shallow graves that dotted the beaches of Tarawa. The goal of the excavation was to recover and identify bodies through forensic testing. Once identified, the dead could be returned to their families for proper burial.

Clay Evans’ trip to Tarawa was not purely journalistic. He was hoping to locate the remains of one individual in particular—First Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman Jr. of the US Marine Corps—and in doing so, bring a multigenerational search for answers to an end.

Island Hopping

Seven decades before Clay Evans arrived on the island, Tarawa had been the site of the bloody WWII Battle that took its name.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the US entered the war against Japan in the Pacific. American Naval planners adopted a strategy famously coined “Island Hopping” by its lead proponent, Admiral Chester Nimitz. The strategy pursued a piecemeal dismantling of Japan’s imperial possessions beginning in the South Pacific, gradually moving north towards the Japanese mainland.

Three days after Pearl Harbor, Japan began seizing the Gilbert islands from Britain, which had colonized the South Pacific atolls decades earlier. The Island Hopping strategy brought the Gilbert Island archipelago (along with tiny Tarawa) into the sights of the US Military. The island hosted a Japanese airfield which, if captured, could pave the way for American expansion to the next island chain and beyond.

The US planned to seize the island from Japan in November 1943.

Leap Frogging

The US Military had spent days preparing for the invasion. Nearby Naval vessels softened Japanese defensive positions by firing four million pounds of explosives onto the island. Amphibious landings and the ground invasion came next.

The battle was a short but bloody affair. After 76 hours of fierce fighting on beaches and in jungles, the US Marines prevailed. Nearly all of the 3,600 Japanese soldiers defending the island were killed. Most of the 1,200 Korean laborers, who had been forcibly brought to the island by Japan to dig trenches, were killed too.

Of the 35,000 American soldiers who participated in the battle, 1,600 were killed. At least 500 of them were never fully accounted for; their remains lost to time and tides.

Short Listed

A few months after the discovery of the burial site at Tarawa, a ceremony was held at the Marine Corps Museum in Virginia. Mark Noah—who had phoned Clay Evans with news of the burial site discovery—received the prestigious Honorary Marine award.

Noah was the founder of a non-profit organization, Flight History, which had sponsored the archaeological dig on Tarawa. The organization specializes in locating the remains of US servicemen deemed “unrecoverable”, fallen soldiers whose remains have never been recovered from battlefields abroad.

Only 93 Honorary Marines have ever been named; 92 of them are human. The other is Bugs Bunny.

Like Lieutenant Bonnyman, Bugs Bunny fought in the Pacific theater during the war. And just like Bonnyman, Bugs Bunny ended up in a haystack on a beach. But he made it home alive.

Support Our Troops

The Honorary Marine award is periodically bestowed upon patriotic civilians who have made “extraordinary contributions to the Marine Corps”. The list of honorees includes more than a few veterans of stage and screen.

Along with Bugs Bunny, actors Chuck Norris and Gary Sinise have been honored. Norris had a long history of public activism for the military and paid a visit to US troops stationed in Iraq in 2003. Gary Sinise received his award after endearing himself to the armed forces through his portrayal of the physically and psychologically damaged Vietnam Veteran Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump (1994), as well as for raising money for Veterans causes.

Tom Cruise famously received the Distinguished Public Service Award from the Navy for his positive portrayal of a fighter pilot in Top Gun (1986). The military took advantage of the hype around the film and set up recruitment booths near movie theaters.Top Gun reportedly led to a measurable increase in the Navy’s enlistment figures.

Like the other performers, Bugs Bunny was recognized for his role in boosting the public image of the armed forces. His contribution dates back to the Second World War, when Hollywood and the US Military jointly engineered a sophisticated propaganda campaign to steer public opinion towards the government’s war aims.

Bugs Bunny would emerge as the manipulation machine’s undisputed superstar.

Pre-Screening

The government’s wartime propaganda operation predates Bugs Bunny’s involvement by several years. US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had long sought entry into WWII before officially declaring war on Germany and Japan in 1941. He believed a Nazi-dominated Europe was an existential threat to American security and felt that eventual American military intervention was inevitable.

But he faced a problem: Neither Congress nor the public had much appetite for joining another war in Europe. Roosevelt viewed this isolationist sentiment as delusional and spent several years persuading the public and Congress that joining the war was in the nation’s vital interest. Despite his pro-war agitations, the President’s hands were tied.

Given the constraints of de jure neutrality, the best Roosevelt could do was plead his case to the American People. He maintained a direct line of communication with the public during this period through nightly radio addresses famously known as “Fireside Chats”.

In 1940, during his 16th Fireside Chat, Roosevelt gave a speech known to historians as the “Arsenal of Democracy” address. The President announced the beginning of large-scale weapons shipments to the United Kingdom to aid their fight against Hitler. In the speech, the President described the British as “the spearhead of resistance to world conquest“ and insisted that if Britain fell to fascism, America could never be safe. This bellicose new posturing inched the nation closer to war.

The announcement of new military aid was a watershed moment for Britain and a special triumph for the nation’s spymasters, who had successfully orchestrated much of the policy shift from behind the scenes.

Her Majesty’s government was still grateful for the support. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

Crown Dependencies

By 1940, Britain was in a precarious position. Her European allies were lost to German occupation and Hitler’s Blitz air raids were wreaking havoc on London. The Crown believed that defeating Germany required enlisting the help of the United States, which possessed the population and unmatched industrial capabilities that could turn the tide of war.

Drawing the US into the conflict on the allied side became a top priority for the British government. To make it all happen, Her Majesty’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) conspired to steer American public opinion in favor of war.

In an October 1941 Navy Day address–six weeks before Pearl Harbor–Roosevelt nudged the nation even closer to war with a shocking announcement: The US had intercepted top-secret war plans from the German High Command. Roosevelt presented a map that revealed Nazi designs on the Western Hemisphere. Hitler’s master plan involved annexing the Panama Canal and conquering South America—a grave threat to American interests in the region.

Hitler’s secret map represented a frightening scenario, but it was a complete fabrication. The map had been forged and hand-delivered to the President by MI6.

Shaken and Stirred

The epicenter of British espionage in the United States at the time was called the British Security Coordination Organization (BSC), which operated out of Rockefeller Center in New York City. BSC specialties included planting anti-Nazi, pro-British stories in the American press as well as harassing and blackmailing prominent isolationists like the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh.

At its height, the BSC had 3,000 active operatives working in the United States. The most infamous BSC spy ring–known as The Baker Street Irregulars–operated out of the nation’s capital. The Irregulars’ mission was to wine and dine in Washington’s power circles to bring the American elite on board with the war.

The most notable spy of The Irregulars was a suave six-foot-six Welshman posing as an Air Force Attache stationed at the British Embassy. His real objective was to win the confidence of a prominent Washington couple–Clare and Henry Luce–and then bring their views in line with the Crown’s interests. Clare Luce was a prominent writer and future Congresswoman; her husband was a millionaire media magnate.

The Irregular agent’s attempt to cozy up to the couple got as far as the bedroom. He and Clare Luce began a long-running, top-secret love affair. Clare’s lascivious appetites reportedly became so ‘physically demanding’ on the agent that he asked his BSC handler for a different assignment. His request was denied. “Do it,” his superiors instructed him, “for England.“

Despite his scandalous undercover exploits, the spy in question is better known for his post-espionage career as a successful author of children’s novels. Roald Dahl’s classics include The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and James and the Giant Peach.

Flipping the Script

Everything changed after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Congress declared war and the public took up the cause. Japan had done Roosevelt’s dirty work for him: the President now had the green light to establish a formal bureaucracy for his propaganda ambitions.

Direct entry into the war shifted the focus of the campaign from one of persuasion to one of morale boosting and mass censorship. That switch required new tactics. New tactics required new agents.

The President found them in the Press, and in Hollywood.

Chamber of Horrors

One month after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8985, establishing the Office of Censorship. The new agency’s mission was to prevent secrets from falling into enemy hands by monitoring all communications passing into and out of the United States.

The Director of the Office of Censorship was granted “absolute discretion” over the new agency’s operations. Roosevelt handpicked Byron Price for the job, a man with all the bona fides necessary to lead a censorship regime. He was recruited from the Associated Press, where he served as Executive News Editor.

During the first two years of the war, the Office of Censorship maintained tight control over the press, although many news outlets signed up to the propaganda agenda willingly. Of special concern to the government were the gruesome photos of the realities of war that press bureaus were receiving from their foreign correspondents in the field. Fearing a hit to public morale, newspapers were banned from publishing all photos of US casualties, which were gathered by the Pentagon’s media censors and hidden in a secret file known as the Chamber of Horrors.

After the war, Byron Price received the Medal of Merit from the President for his service as the Nation’s top censorship official. He went on to lead the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the film industry’s content moderation and ratings organization.

Epic War Films

In 1942, Roosevelt turned his attention to Hollywood. He established the counterpart to the Office of Censorship, a new agency called the Office of War Information (OWI). Where the Censorship Office was tasked with monitoring the media to protect state secrets, the OWI’s responsibility was to ensure the entertainment industry’s participation in the government’s propaganda regime.

A New York Times reporter named Elmer Davis was chosen to lead the OWI. He quickly established the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures, which began coordinating directly with Hollywood studios to produce films and cartoons supporting the war effort. Davis understood his mandate clearly, offering the following pep talk to his colleagues,

The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.

Like his counterpart at the Office of Censorship, Elmer Davis was awarded the Medal of Merit by the President for his wartime leadership of the OWI.

The Disney Reconnaissance

Throughout 1940, the German armed forces swept across Western Europe. This was bad news for Britain, which found itself as the sole remaining European power opposing the Nazis. It was even worse news for the Walt Disney Company.

The studio released Pinocchio in February of that year, but production had been expensive and the film underperformed at the box office, leaving Disney in a tricky financial position. Fantasia was planned for release later that year. Studio executives were counting on ticket sales from Europe–especially the lucrative French market–to remain solvent. But by the time Fantasia was released in November 1940, the Nazis had captured Paris. Theaters were shuttered and Disney lost its most important foreign markets.

Disney’s situation continued to deteriorate throughout the remainder of 1940. As a result of the losses from Pinocchio and Fantasia, the studio was forced to conduct mass layoffs–the artists’ division was hit particularly hard. These firings led to a bitter labor dispute and by early 1941 the studio’s employees were on strike. The fraught negotiations lasted for more than six months and made a lasting impression on Walt Disney himself, who claimed the strike had been covertly organized by Communists.

Daddy Warbucks

Disney’s fortunes turned abruptly after Pearl Harbor. Twenty-four hours after the attack, representatives from the Navy phoned Walt Disney with an offer: a contract to produce training films for newly conscripted soldiers.

Just like Britain, which no longer found itself fighting Hitler alone, American entry into the war offered the Walt Disney Company a new lifeline. The studio served as an institutional resource for the government’s propaganda campaign by freeing up its own staff to produce films for the military. At one point, over 90% of the studio’s employees were devoted to the production of training and propaganda films. The revenue from this partnership helped keep the studio afloat and its artists employed.

By the end of the war in 1945, Disney had entered into contracts with every branch of the US Military. The studio had effectively ceased operating as an entertainment company and became a functional arm of the State.

Now Playing Everywhere

The degree to which patriotism and financial necessity served as incentives for Disney’s military alliance is up for debate. But it’s worth noting that the studio may have had no choice. Walt Disney realized it was an offer he couldn’t refuse when he looked out his office window while taking the Navy’s sales call. Earlier that same day, the US conducted its first major troop movement after Pearl Harbor: hundreds of US soldiers moved onto the Walt Disney studio lot in Burbank, California.

The pretense for the US military invasion of Disney was unrelated to the studio’s ability to produce propaganda. The Japanese shock attack on Hawaii raised fears of an invasion of the West Coast. The military anticipated Japanese air raids on California’s defense industrial sites and Lockheed had an aircraft manufacturing facility three miles away from the studio lot. Disney’s facilities offered an ideal air defense staging site in case of trouble. The garrison used the Disney parking garages as ammunition depots and its large sound stages were converted into aircraft maintenance and repair hubs.

The military occupation of Disney lasted for eight months.

Brothers in Arms

After Disney was conquered, the other Hollywood studios got on board with the war effort, though with some initial trepidation. In 1942, legendary Looney Tunes animator Tex Avery was working on an anti-Hitler cartoon called Blitz Wolf. One studio executive at MGM cautioned Avery to be circumspect in his depiction of Hitler, “After all, Tex, we don’t know who’s going to win the war”.

Disney’s rivals at Warner Bros also joined the propaganda campaign. But where Disney served as a de facto arm of the military, Warner Bros remained an independent creative studio. Their contribution to the war was different.

Disney managed to keep most of its superstars away from the front lines. Mickey Mouse certainly never held a rifle. The closest any of them got to action was Donald Duck, who starred as a forced laborer at a German arms factory in 1943’s Der Fuehrer’s Face. But after just one shift, Donald Duck suddenly awakens safely in bed. Realizing it was just a nightmare, he ends the skit by declaring “Am I glad to be a citizen of the United States of America!“. Der Fuehrer’s Face won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards that year.

Unlike Disney, the Warner Bros studio bosses were not so squeamish. They did not hesitate to enlist their biggest stars in the war effort at home and abroad.

Buy American

In 1943, Warner Bros released a short animated musical called Any Bonds Today?  to publicize the government’s campaign to sell debt to the public to raise funds for the war. In the film, Bugs Bunny sports a star spangled top hat and–along with fellow patriots Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd–sings, dances, and tosses promotional pamphlets toward the audience.

Legendary composer Irving Berlin wrote the film’s score after a request from Henry Morgenthau Jr., then U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. All royalty payments for the film went directly to the war effort.

A year after the bond selling campaign, Warner Bros began deploying their heroes directly into battle.

The Eastern Front

After Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin became an ally of the United States. Before the war, the public attitude in America towards the Soviet Union was decidedly hostile. The elite detested Russia’s anti-capitalism and much of the general public was offended by the Soviet’s atheist, church-persecuting ideology.

The new wartime alliance meant the US government needed to bring public sentiment in line with state policy, which required softening the image of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The media quickly absolved Stalin of tyranny and gave him a full rebranding. TIME Magazine named him Man of the Year in 1942. The press began referring to Stalin affectionately as ‘Uncle Joe’. And who could say no to supporting Uncle Joe? Warner Bros certainly couldn’t.

The studio released a propaganda film called Russian Rhapsody in 1944. In the film, Hitler is seen flying a bomber aircraft towards Moscow. Unbeknownst to the Führer, tiny Russian partisans–Gremlins from the Kremlin--infiltrate the aircraft. The Gremlins sing Russian folk songs in unison while beating, stabbing, and electrocuting Hitler before finally ejecting him from the aircraft. After falling thousands of feet to the ground, the skit ends with Hitler crushed as the sabotaged aircraft crash lands on him.

The Western Front

Hitler managed to survive his encounter with the Gremlins from the Kremlin and made it back to Germany. But in January 1945, Herr Meets Hare premiered and Bugs Bunny confronted the Führer directly.

After making a wrong turn at Albuquerque and ending up in Germany, Bugs Bunny came face to face with the German High Command. His first act of psychological warfare was to seduce Hermann Göring (prominent Hitler advisor and Holocaust planner) by donning a sexy Viking Princess drag getup. He then cleverly foments a rift between Göring and Hitler by convincing the former that the Führer had awarded him a counterfeit medal made of fool’s gold. Göring curses Hitler for the insult and swears revenge.

In the final scene, Bugs Bunny performs a ruse by feigning capture in order to access Hitler’s headquarters. While smuggling himself into the building, Bugs Bunny slips into a Stalin disguise. Hitler flees his office in panic when Uncle Joe appears in the room.

The Führer never recovered from this humiliation. Within six months, Hitler would be dead and the Reich would surrender.

The Pacific Theater

Five months after Lieutenant Bonnyman died fighting at the Battle of Tarawa, Bugs Bunny was deployed to the Pacific to face the Japanese in a Warner Bros propaganda film called Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips.

The film opens with Bugs Bunny arriving on a pristine, unnamed island “somewhere in the Pacific”. While admiring the island’s natural beauty, he falls under heavy enemy bombardment and jumps into a haystack on the beach to hide. After emerging from his hiding spot, Bugs Bunny finds his courage and singlehandedly defeats the Imperial Japanese Army.

Highlights of the film include Geisha drag, sumo wrestling, and a gag in which Bugs Bunny doles out explosive ice cream bars to Japanese soldiers while berating them with racial epithets.

As a result of the racist caricatures (the term “nips“ was a common slur for Japanese people at the time), the cartoon has since been taken out of circulation by the studio.

War Trophies

On the evening of March 15, 1945 two closely-watched wartime contests were reaching climactic endings.

On the Eastern Front, Germany and the Soviet Union clashed in Ukraine for control of the city of Kharkiv. After three months of battle, Germany was preparing a dramatic final counterattack to seize the city.

Meanwhile, 6,000 miles away, Hollywood’s A-List was gathering for the 17th Annual Academy Awards in Los Angeles. The most anticipated race of the night was between Barbara Stanwyck and Ingrid Bergman–the two front runners for Best Actress. In the months leading up to the ceremony, MGM and Paramount had been wooing members of the Academy to help secure the prestigious Oscar for their respective starlets.

Barbara Stanwyck was nominated for her starring role as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity. In the film, her character plots to have her husband murdered for insurance money. Stanwyck’s performance defined femme fatale for the noir era and Dietrichson is remembered as one of the greatest villains in cinema history. But when the votes were tallied, Barbara Stanwyck came up short. The Oscar for Best Actress went instead to Ingrid Bergman for her role in the film Gaslight, in which she portrays a housewife whose husband plans to steal her jewelry after having her committed to an asylum.

Despite her loss, a small consolation for Barbara Stanwyck: The trophy presented to Ingrid Bergman wasn’t a real Oscar. Due to wartime metal rationing, the statuettes handed out were made of plaster covered in bronze lacquer. The replicas were accompanied by an IOU from the Academy.

Downballot Victories

The night of the Academy Awards went as poorly for Stalin as it had for Barbara Stanwyck. Germany won the battle in Ukraine and wrested control of Kharkiv from the Red Army. The city was destroyed and 40,000 Russian soldiers were killed. Despite the setback, the day was not a total loss for the Allied powers: The US Military achieved a decisive victory in Los Angeles.

Two Academy Awards for documentary filmmaking were handed out that evening, one for Feature Length and another for Short Form. Of the five nominees across both categories, four were propaganda films produced by the US Military, as were both winners.

A podium sweep by the military filmmakers had been a foregone conclusion. Since the conspicuous introduction of awards for documentary filmmaking in 1942, promotional war films had won every time.

The Oscar for Best Feature Length Documentary was awarded to the US Navy for producing The Fighting Lady, a film following the life of sailors aboard an Aircraft Carrier heading to war in the Pacific. The winner for Best Documentary Short Film went to the propaganda department of the US Marine Corps for a film called With the Marines at Tarawa.

Both the plaster replica and the official Oscar Statuette for With the Marines at Tarawa are kept on display at the Marine Corps Museum in Virginia–the same venue that hosted Mark Noah’s Honorary Marine induction ceremony.

Box Office Bombs

Despite the positive reception that the Tarawa documentary enjoyed from the Academy, the film received a mixed reception from audiences. The film footage showed dead and dying American soldiers on screen for the first time, bringing home the realities of war to a shocked public.

The Roosevelt Administration relied on the free press to handle damage control. Newspapers published the truth about casualty numbers, but downplayed the cost by coating the grim figures with patriotic encouragement.

The Kansas City Star published an article headlined “US Toll Not Too High. Looks Worse than It Is.” The headline, along with its unhelpful subtitle, “Losses Appear Shocking Because Bodies Littered Beach in Short Period of Time” were received poorly by readers.

After Tarawa, the Island Hopping campaign brought the remote Marshall Islands into the Navy’s crosshairs. Ahead of the invasion, the New York Times printed an editorial preparing the public to stomach heavy losses again. The Times ended the piece with a call for stiff resolve,

…the Japanese mean to hold the Marshalls, as they did Tarawa, to the death of their last man…No matter how carefully we plan the operation, it is equally certain that our losses will be heavy. We must steel ourselves now to pay that price.

LIFE and Death

The release of the Tarawa documentary coincided with a period of softening media control in the United States. The defining moment of this shift occurred two months prior to the fighting on Tarawa with a dramatic feature in LIFE Magazine, which published full-page photographs of US soldiers killed in the Pacific. The editors at LIFE included an op-ed to accompany the feature in which they explicitly stated that publishing the photographs was permitted by government censors.

The historical record is unclear on why, exactly, the government loosened its control of the press. Some accounts give Roosevelt credit for simply doing the right thing, suggesting that he acted out of a conviction that Americans deserved to see the truth about the war their country was waging.

The role of good old fashioned journalistic hustling played a role, too. Reporters at LIFE Magazine had been dogged in their attempts to persuade military censors to agree to release the photos in the weeks before publication.

Other interpretations hint at ulterior motivations. The bond-selling campaign that Bugs Bunny promoted had been waning and there were concerns about slowing productivity among workers in the war economy. According to some reports, releasing the photos was meant to renew the public’s determination by triggering a sense of urgency.

A final theory deserves consideration. It is possible that Roald Dahl’s scandalous courtship with Clare Luce may finally have borne fruit for the British spy agencies. LIFE Magazine was the crown jewel of the media empire controlled by her husband, Henry Luce. Gaining influence over Luce’s influential media assets had been a priority for British spies all along.

Strange Bedfellows

The end of WWII in 1945 ushered in a New World Order. The United States and the Soviet Union had been wartime allies against a common enemy. After the war, the world was sorted into opposing Communist and Capitalist blocs and the former allies became enemies. Fun Uncle Joe was demoted to pariah and pervert.

The alliance between Hollywood and the US government soured as well. The government’s policy focus pivoted from opposing Nazism to opposing Communism, which brought Hollywood under sudden and unexpected Congressional scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), an investigative body that pursued allegations of Communist influence in Hollywood.

Of all the falling outs of the early post-war period, none was more bitter and personal than that between the US government and Bugs Bunny, whose transition to civilian life was not going well. His evolution from decorated war hero to disgruntled, unhinged veteran did not take long.

The stories of HUAC witch hunts, Walt Disney’s revenge on organized labor, and Bugs Bunny’s terrorist rampage merit further investigation and will be addressed in future reports from Cahoe’s World.

Needle in a Haystack

Clay Evans, the journalist in search of Lieutenant Bonnyman, was at the dig site on Tarawa for a few days when one of the Flight History archaeologists called him over to a newly discovered gravesite. Having memorized Bonnyman’s dental records, the archaeologist had a good hunch of whose remains had just been uncovered.

The discovery was an emotional moment for Clay Evans. “I climbed down in the trench, eyes stinging with tears, trying to hold the camera steady as she slowly revealed the outlines of a burnished skull and jaw”, he recalled.

Seventy-one years, six months, and five days after the Battle of Tarawa, First Lieutenant Alexander Bonnyman Jr. had been found; and Clay Evans’ search for his grandfather had come to an end.

A few months later in Knoxville, Tennessee Lieutenant Bonnyman was laid to rest with full military honors. Clay Evans attended the ceremony with his 81 year-old mother. She had been a young girl when her father was killed in action at Tarawa. The ceremony ended with a Marine Corps Honor Guard presenting her with a flag, neatly folded 13 times into the shape of a triangle.

Lieutenant Bonnyman was posthumously awarded both a Purple Heart and the Medal of Honor.