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16. "That fellow Capra5 "M officers under his command in 1942. "Forget that. You are working for a common cause. Your personal egos and idiosyncrasies are unimportant. There will be no personal credit for yourwork, either on the screen or in the press. The only press notices we are anxious to read are those ofAmerican victories!" The films Capra produced during his Army service in World War II, including the Why We Fight series of troop indoctrination films, won him great praise and honor, yet his ownname never appeared on the screen. He was deeply moved when Winston Churchill privately complimented him on September 29, 1943, for makingthose films. But when Churchill recorded a foreword to the series for British audiences under Capra's direction, declaring that "I have never seen or read any more powerful statement of our cause or of our rightful case against the Nazi tyranny than these films portray," he gave the public credit not to Capra himself but to "the American Army under the authorityof General Marshall, their famous chief of staff." To a degree that seemed remarkable to those who had known only his public braggadocio and had not known him as a quiet and doubt-plagued craftsman, Capra accepted his wartime anonymity, managing to subordinate his ego to a higher loyalty. "Capra was a team player," recalled Brigadier General Frank McCarthy, Marshall's secretary during the war. "He displayed no self-interest at all." Though disappointed over having to accept a desk job in Hollywood rather than heading a combat photography unit like John Ford's, he covered his disappointment well, in many ways thriving under military discipline. His immediate superior, Colonel Edward Lyman Munson, Jr., told the Army he considered Capra "oneof the best-rounded officers I have ever seen; he would succeed at any assignment in the Army." " ost of you were individuals in civilian life," Capra wrote the 4 5 4 F R A N K C A P R A Relieved of the burden of thinking for himself, Capra performed brilliantly in carrying out official policy, surrendering his increasingly troublesome creative independence and transforminghimself into a cog in the American propaganda machine. As General Osborn wrote Marshall in 1943, "[BJeyond his undoubted technical genius, [Capra] has a sincerity of purpose and a loyal simplicity of character which have enabled him to get the help of innumerable people in Government and in the Army and in Hollywood; and he has an indomitable energy and belief in the cause, and has worked unbelievable hours to get his results." Endorsing Osborn's recommendation of Capra for the Legion of Merit, Marshall added a note at the bottom of the letter, "Capra has done an outstanding job, unobtrusively and without the usual prima donna complications." "The war was a very significant change for Capra, a very revealing part of his character," said Paul Horgan, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and biographer, who worked in Capra's unit and served as a liaison between the Pentagon and Capra's creative staff. "I always thought that Capra's smiling ego—which was so utterly detached from other people, like Caruso's—was part of his great power: with utter charm he would be above the battle at all times. But I don't think his ego impinged on his work in the war. No one worked more patriotically or threw all of himself into his work in the war more than Capra did.He was 1,000 percent in agreement with policy directives. Nobody [above him] ever suggested an artistic or technical change, but a message or policy would be directly uttered and Frank would accept it." "Capra was proving to [the top brass] that he was 100 percent American ," said Carlton Moss, a civilian writer in his unit. "If they had told him to stand out at Hollywood and Vine and let them take potshots at him, he would have done it, because he was grateful, because he had come here and been given the opportunity." Capra often recalled his early wartime skirmishes with Signal Corps bureaucrats—those residual tokens of his individuality he displayed so proudly in later years—and he insisted, "It was difficult for me tofunction. I felt very uneasy in the military. Any kind of a dictatorship, I'm uneasy." Yet Pete Peterson, who worked with Capra throughout the war as a writerproducer , said, "I never once saw him blow his top. I would see fires building up in him...

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