The Agony of Victory

Twelve O’Clock High

The year is 1942, and the Nazis are in the ascendant. You are American fighter pilots, based in southern England. You are the only American presence in the theater of northern Europe, and you have been flying at night, bombing Nazi installations in Denmark and the Netherlands, but never getting too close to Germany itself, and thus not accomplishing a whole lot. Still, the missions are dangerous, and many of your fellows never come home.

Why are you fighting? Who knows? You don’t think about it. Your commanding officer, Colonel Keith Davenport (Gary Merrill), is a brave man, and he identifies with you, so when you get the feeling you are a “hard luck” outfit, he has not the heart to argue about it. It is a job to tear your guts out.

And there is the problem. If the 918th Airborne is to succeed, if it is to help turn the tide of the war, you cannot have men who think they cannot win, no matter how many of their friends die in action. You must somehow learn to love by setting your love aside. So a new man is placed at the head of the outfit, a rugged, no-excuse-taking, relentless taskmaster, General Frank Savage (Gregory Peck). As he has said to his friend, Colonel Davenport, if you identify yourself too closely with your men, you will lose the capacity to command them. And sure enough, the first time Savage appears on the post, and the gatekeeper passes him by without checking his credentials and without saluting, he makes the driver come to a sudden halt, he gets out of the car, and he gives the guard a dressing down. “Get a good look at me,” he says. “If you or any other man on this post passes by me, even if I’m a block away, without a salute, you won’t know what fell on you.”

Men & War

The film is Twelve O’Clock High (1949), perhaps the most unusual and cerebral war movie I have ever seen. If you are looking for Top Gun special effects, this is not your film. In fact, we see no airborne action at all until well into the second half, and most of it is real footage saved by the American and German armies—footage that will hold you spellbound, precisely because it is not choreographed. You see the tail gunner open to the air and death. You see the bombs as they are dropped. You see the planes in terrifyingly close formation, and you can almost feel the wind whipping the wings.

But your interest will not be in the mechanics of it all. It will be in the men who are there, and in these men not as Hollywood characters—for Twelve O’Clock High avoids all the pleasing cliches, the southern farm boy next to the Italian son of the Bronx, the sensitive boy in spectacles next to the football player—but as men, simply men, about whom you know next to nothing, except in their roles at war, and in their fears, their skill, their hard-learned obedience, their exhaustion, their survival, and their death.

You will think that General Savage is there to whip the crew into shape, and sure, that is a part of it, but his command is tenuous, and every single pilot has requested a transfer out of his outfit. He has called one of them, the foot-dragging Lt. Colonel Ben Gately (Hugh Marlowe), “yellow” and ordered him to paint the words “The Leper Colony” on his airplane, “because in it you’re going to get every deadbeat in the outfit. Every man with a penchant for head colds. If there’s a bombardier who can’t hit his plate with his fork, you get him. If there’s a navigator who can’t find the men’s room, you get him. Because you rate him.” I am sure that many men in the audience in 1949 had some memory of such a confrontation, some knowledge that in war, one kind of human thing to do is at odds with another thing, perhaps less obviously human, and knew that General Savage was a gift to this outfit, a gift they did not at first know how to appreciate.

Savagery & Protection

Well, we have seen such stories before—think of John Wayne teaching a group of herd-driving boys to be men, in The Cowboys (1972), or Jack Webb doing the same for raw marine recruits in The D.I. (1957). I am not saying anything against such films. They tell the truth. But there is a part of the truth they do not tell, and perhaps cannot tell. In Twelve O’Clock High, we see that General Savage’s demeanor toward the men is, in part, an act. It is not that he is insincere. But he must walk a tightrope between failure because the men hate him, and failure because he dares not risk being hated so much. And he is not a hateful man. The film shows us many a conversation between him and his adjutant, Major Stovall (Dean Jagger, who won and deserved an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor), wherein we see that the general wants and needs friendship as much as anyone.

The emotional climax of the film comes as a shock. I will not spoil it by revealing the outcome. It is well prepared for by a series of tense dramatic scenes, characterized not so much by action as by human faces and few words. We know that Colonel Davenport has been tried beyond the bounds of a man’s endurance; all we need is to look into Gary Merrill’s expressively ugly and masculine face to read the signs of depression, grief, and futility. Major Stovall, a “retread” from the First World War, a paper-pusher who wants at least one more go at it in the air, is our touchstone of sanity. He knows what General Savage is up to. He approves of it—with reservation. After one of the runs—a success, not a failure—he has this to say:

I got drunk because I am confused. I was thinking, which is a thing a man should not do, and all at once I couldn’t remember what any of them looked like. I, I couldn’t see their faces, Bishop, Cobb, Wilson, Zimmy, all of them. All of you. They all looked alike, just one face. And it was very young. It confused me. I think I shall stay drunk until I’m not confused anymore.

But this same Major Stovall will stow himself away on one of the planes to do a little bombing himself.

“Did you get anything?” asks the general.

Stovall wipes off his spectacles. “My glasses were frosted over some,” he says with a mischievous smile, “but I think I got a piece of one.”

“Ours or theirs?”

And then comes the real test. The boys will be flying over Germany, in broad daylight, to do precision bombing, from a low altitude. And as Savage tries to do the pull-up to haul himself into one of the planes—an exercise we have seen many times already—he cannot manage it, his arms give way, and he must be led off the tarmac. The mission is run, and all the while the planes are away, the general sits in a chair in the middle of a room, in shock, unable to speak, unable to move. The man who began his command of the 918th by demoting a pilot who broke formation to try to assist his roommate who had gotten hit—chewing him out in front of a hundred men, and then commanding that everyone be given new roommates immediately, so that “group integrity” would come first, not friendship—that man now feels so intensely for the men he has trained, whose allegiance he has won, that he is stock-still, at the edge of a complete mental breakdown.

Twelve O’Clock High, then, is less about war, though it is certainly about that, than it is about men, men in the male protective group, men in their friendships and their duties, which are not always in accord with those friendships, men who lead because they must, and men who share in the leadership by sometimes hearty, sometimes agonizing, obedience. It is a fallen world we live in, and sometimes nothing but such agony will serve, and triumph.