Help wanted - Glenn Ford's elusive WWII record
Hear ye, Organs!
I have a research problem and I need all the help I can get from movie buffs and Hollywood historians. The name of the game is Glenn Ford, the recently deceased American film actor.
Ford died on August 30, 2006. According to some media he 'died' several times before: in 1990, again in 1997 and twice in 2002. This time round his death seems pretty final, so I am writing an obit on him with a December-ish deadline. There is no doubt in my mind that he was a decent actor. I really love some of his work, particularly his roles in Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953).
However, I have run into trouble with regard to Mr Ford’s WW II record. My findings show Ford, like so many other actors in Tinseltown, has been confused with his own myth, probably to the point where he himself started to believe the latter. What interests me is: where does this myth come from and how did it arise?
Here’s the nitty-gritty.
According to a flurry of fan sites, film lexicons and obituaries in the American press at the time of his death, Ford was a hero in the Second World War. The story of his exploits runs more or less like this:
After 'Pearl Harbour' Glenn Ford served briefly in the Coast Guard Auxiliary. He enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on Dec. 13, 1942, and completed basic training at San Diego. He was assigned to John Ford’s OSS photographic unit. Ford, a Marine sergeant, was initially assigned to the Pacific theatre where he took part in Battle of Midway.
In late 1943 and early 1944 Ford built safe houses for Jewish refugees in occupied France. On D-Day he was in command of a camera crew filming the Normandy landings from the beach while under the constant threat of German small arms fire. For his contribution to the liberation of France, Paris awarded him the Legion d’Honneur in 1992.
Ford was also among the first Americans to enter the concentration camp at Dachau after its liberation by Allied troops, where he collected important evidence for the Neurenberg trial. Shortly after that, Ford happened upon a displaced persons camp in the woods around the town of Fernwald, several miles outside of Munich. An estimated 12-15,000 homeless Jews were living in camp, which appeared to have been overlooked in the post-war confusion.
Ford decided to help them. The survivors wept with gratitude to see an American who really cared. For seven weeks Ford brought food, books and medical supplies. The supply sergeants looked the other way as Ford loaded his jeep day after day, and headed up to Fernwald. "Ford alone was responsible for giving hope and life to approximately half of these 12-15,000 inmates over a 7-week period. Many women named their newborn sons after him in recognition and gratitude,” according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which honoured Ford with its Liberator’s Award in 1985.
The trouble with this story is that almost all of it is poppycock.
1. Knowledgeable patrons will immediately spot the most obvious gaffe: the Battle of Midway was in June 1942, i.e. well before Glenn Ford enlisted.
Now this may be a simple mix-up. There was another Ford present at that battle: director John Ford, who in April 1940 created a naval reserve unit of filmmakers, the Naval Field Photographic Unit. After Pearl Harbour, that unit was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. John Ford made a well-known documentary film of said Battle, Battle of Midway, the one with the gravelly Henry Fonda voice-over (“Behind each cloud etcetera …”). The mix-up will have been reinforced in 1976 when Glenn Ford played the role of Rear Admiral Raymond A. Spruance in the movie The Battle of Midway.
2. Because the part about Glenn Ford’s supposed activities behind enemy lines (‘building safe houses for Jews in France’, etcetera) seemed incongruent to me, I contacted Scott Baron, author of They Also Served: Military Biographies of Uncommon Americans (1998).
In his answer, Baron warned me that there are a lot of uncorroborated war stories about Glenn Ford, but that the actor himself never left United States territory during that entire war. I also consulted retired Navy Capt. James E. Wise Jr of the Naval Historical Center, who is the author of Stars in Blue: Movie Actors in America's Sea Services (1997) and Stars in the Corps: Movie Actors in the United States Marines (1999). According to Wise, too, Glenn Ford never left the U.S. during the war. He served at San Diego and at Quantico, Va., as a photographic specialist. In California in 1944, he staged and broadcast the radio program “Halls of Montezuma” after which he was honorably discharged from the Marine Corps in December 1944.
The other Ford again was present at the Normandy beaches on June 6th, 1944, observing the amphibious landings on Omaha Beach from the deck of the USS Augusta. Some of his 400-strong unit were among the first troops in, others had already been infiltrated behind the German lines as witnessed by the remarkable story of George Hjorth that surfaced in 1998.* Of course, Glenn Ford in 1952 played the role of a US soldier parachuted into French territory in the film The Green Glove…
So, beside the fact that Glenn Ford never set foot in France or Germany in those years, his dismissal from active duty in December 1944 probably takes care of any doubts regarding the Dachau and Fernwald stories. They must be fake. You will not be surprised that I have contacted both the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles and the archives of the Chancellerie de l’Ordre de la Legion d’Honneur in Fontainebleau. Pending their answers, I am left with the following two questions.
1. How much of Glenn Ford’s fake war story can be attributed to his (later) films ot to mix-ups with other Fords, other movie stars or other prominet Americans?
2. How is it possible that such a fake war record remains unchallenged over the years?
Can anybody help me. Are there any Ford fans in the audience? What do your books about film say about Ford and the war?
* Los Angeles Times 10/23/98
The Mystery of the Missing Film
After 50 years of secrecy, George Hjorth can now talk about shooting footage of the D-day invasion and other WWII events from behind German lines. But the products of his efforts can't be found.
By H.G. REZA, Times Staff Writer
George Hjorth's orders that June morning 54 years ago were mysterious: Afterparachuting into occupied France with his three cameras, he was to hide in front of the German lines at Normandy and film whatever happened on the beach. It was before dawn on June 6, 1944, and Hjorth was in the dark, literally and figuratively. He had no idea what to expect on that now-fabled stretch of coastline.
Only when the invasion began did he learn that his mission was to film the D-day landing of the U.S Army's 1st Infantry Division and 29th Infantry Division at Omaha Beach--from the German side.
But whatever he saw, Hjorth (pronounced "Yorth") was under standing orders not to discuss it for 50 years. Even today, the Cypress retiree's mission remains an enigma: The film he shot, called unique by historians who recently learned of it from declassified documents, is missing.
"We're hunting it down," said Douglas Brinkley, a professor of history and director of the University of New Orleans' Eisenhower Center. Hjorth’s movie footage and photographs--probably gathering dust in a government archive—are the only known invasion pictures from the German perspective shot at the Normandy beaches, he said.
And recovering the film is important because "it shows how [Gen. Dwight D.] Eisenhower and the [Office of Strategic Services] saw the important need to capture on film what they knew would be the greatest invasion ever," Brinkley said.
Reluctant to Speak of Wartime Work
Hjorth, 77 and a retired McDonnell Douglas executive, never saw the film he shot on D-day. A few days after photographing the invasion, he was thrown out of a screening room by an Army lieutenant who declared the film top secret and threatened to court-martial him if he viewed it, he said.
Details of Hjorth's exploits were revealed this year when the government began declassifying OSS files. The declassified records also revealed new information about Ford's band of filmmakers and their work for the OSS.
Upon volunteering for the OSS, Hjorth had to sign an agreement that prevented him from speaking of his wartime activities for 50 years. Today, he talks about his wartime work only reluctantly. He agreed to recall his D-day exploits only after news accounts reported that amateur military historians who have worked with Brinkley were attempting to locate Hjorth's D-day film.
Melvin Paisley, a World War II fighter pilot and former assistant secretary of the Navy, said Lars Andersen and he have been combing the National Archives for Hjorth's footage.
"It's important because it's such a unique situation. Until the records were declassified, we didn't know that OSS photographers like Hjorth were actually dropped behind enemy lines," Paisley said. "Nobody knew about it because the men who did it weren't allowed to talk about it. . . . But now that we know about Hjorth's film, you can bet we're going to find it."
Hjorth said he is proud of the work he did for the OSS but prefers to forget about the war.
Among the images Hjorth would prefer to forget are pictures of the Buchenwald death camp and film he shot of another Nazi atrocity in France, where he photographed the corpses of dozens of civilians who were trapped in an underpass and burned alive. As an OSS photographer he was called upon to document these scenes as viewed by liberating American forces.
Hjorth kept few mementos of his days in the OSS. Forbidden to talk about his wartime exploits, he said that whenever he was asked what he did in World War II, he simply replied, "Oh, I took pictures."
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Originally Posted by Kraxis
That sounds exactly like the military. Catch-22 is closer to fact than most people realise 
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