America in WWII - (Page 44) BOB HOPE and The Road to GI Joe less and funny, and full of responsibility, too, although he carries it lightly and gaily. There isn’t a hospital ward that he hasn’t dropped into and given a show; there isn’t a small unit anywhere that isn’t either talking about his jokes or anticipating them. What a gift laughter is!” Hope made a cameo appearance in the one-hour 1943 training film Welcome to Britain, starring Meredith, which tried to explain the English people and their customs to newly arriving American GIs. (In the words of one reviewer, the documentary shows that “British coffee is awful, their beer is warm, they have a fetish about tea.”) Hope shows up in a scene with a taxi driver, discussing the English monetary system of pounds and shillings. The Gypsies did their first USO combat zone shows that summer in North Africa, Italy, and Sicily. Palermo offered them both their largest audience—19,000—and a narrow escape with their lives when 100 Nazi Junker JU-88s with a fighter escort divebombed the docks, destroying the area around the troupe’s hotel a few blocks away. Hope said that returning safely to the States that fall “was something of a letdown. Hollywood was tinsel and make-believe and happy endings. Where we had been was mud and reality and horror.” Along the road to the end of the war, Hope met his heroes Winston Churchill, Jimmy Doolittle, and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as other famous leaders such as General George Patton. Years later he admitted, “I miss the immediacy of feeling you’re a part of history, even though you’re not. Yes, I miss the wars, probably because I had the best of the excitement and the least of the danger.” by Richard Sassaman It didn’t take Hope long to figure out how to win an audience of troops. “The essential element of foxhole humor, in Hope’s view, is that the GI laughed hardest when the joke was on him,” Faith wrote. In Hope’s words, “[The GI] can take it. He’s laughing off the icy cold, the searing heat, the bugs and the scorpions, his fears and his frustrations.” He also believed that the GI’s “real enemies, even after war broke out, were never just the Germans or the Japanese. The enemies were boredom, mud, officers, and abstinence. Any joke that touched those nerves was a sure thing.” “There are some cynics who say I never met a war I didn’t like. They’re the ones who haven’t smelled it close up, in the hospital wards…. Politics didn’t matter to me. I never saw a 75mm shell wearing a Willkie button.” (Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me) “What a beautiful swamp you have here…. It’s a top-secret base—even the snakes can’t find it. If you wanna hide from your draft board, this is the place to do it.” (live at Noemfoor, off New Guinea) HE FOLLOWING SUMMER, 1944, the Gypsies were off again, logging more than 30,000 miles in the South Pacific, giving more than 150 performances on remote backwater islands, places like Eniwetok, Tarawa, Kwajalein, Saipan, and Majuro. Hope called it “Loew’s Malaria Circuit” or “the Pineapple Circuit.” At one show, the troupe found out that a Japanese soldier had been killed a few hundred yards from the stage. T N CAUGHT IN THE DRAFT, Hope played a movie star who enlists in the army (along with his agent and chauffeur) because he wants to impress the base colonel’s daughter (played by Dorothy Lamour). In real life, of course, Hope, unlike stars such as Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable, did not enlist. Some questioned his courage, carping that he kept appearing onstage in front of soldiers to stay out of the army. (When one GI in the back of a crowd in Tunisia, shortly after the August 1943 invasion of Sicily, yelled “Draft dodger!” at him, Hope quipped, “Don’t you know there’s a war on? A guy could get hurt.”) Respected commentators such as combat reporter Ernie Pyle and novelist John Steinbeck disagreed with Hope’s critics. In a column for the New York World Telegram on September 16, 1943, Pyle wrote that he had traveled in two different cities with Hope’s Gypsies during air raids “and I will testify that they were horrifying raids. It isn’t often that a bomb falls so close that you can hear it whistle. But when you can hear a whole stack of them whistle at once, then it’s time to get weak all over and start sweating. The Hope troupe can now describe that ghastly sound.” Steinbeck, who had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for The Grapes of Wrath and would win the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, spent the second half of 1943 as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. He wrote a column published on July 26, 1943, that was probably the finest review Hope ever got for his wartime work. NATIONAL ARCHIVES I Above: Langford cracks up onstage on Majura, in the Marshall Islands, in July 1944. At one Pacific base, when she purred the first line of “I’m in the Mood for Love,” a marine shouted, “You’ve come to the right place, honey!” The audience roared. Opposite, top: Hope tweaks show material en route to a Pacific stop. Thomas, Langford, and Romano snooze. Opposite, bottom: By war’s end, Hope’s name was synonymous with the USO. 44 AMERICA IN WWII OCTOBER 2007
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