Review: I Hear No Bugles By Robert Winston Mercy.
(Merriam Press, 2008)
By Wesley Britton
Even in the first
days of the silent movie era, film producers knew well the value of celluloid
stories as propaganda. Before World War I, those opposed to America’s involvement overseas
cranked out tragic tales designed to discourage any support for the then feared
“Merchants of Death.†Just as quickly, once war was declared, Hollywood shifted gears and found itself a
major contributor to recruitment drives. Scripts now starred small-town heroes including
little girls exposing saboteurs in Grandpa’s lab and high-flying aviators shooting
down fellow aces, all part of the vital effort to crush the Wiley “Huns†at
home and abroad.
From that point forward, war movies resonated
with the themes of valor, glory, and stoic self-sacrifice in which anyone
anywhere could find themselves elevated morally and spiritually by doing their
patriotic duty. Onscreen, whether battling Southern rebels, Indian tribes in
the Old West, or German U-Boats, a soldier’s life was something to aspire to,
yearn for, and a glorious death on the battlefield was preferable to returning
home to a devoted sweetheart without having come of age in the trenches. The
impact of so many films with these motifs is immeasurable, especially on the
“Greatest Generation†which was moved into action as much by the gallant epics they
saw in theatres as well as the newsreels shown after Pearl
Harbor.
One story from these times is unique. The
opening pages of a new memoir by Robert Winston Mercy, I Hear No Bugles, begins with scenes of a young American drawn into
a soldier’s life due to what he had seen in moviehouses. Then, we learn about
the life of a front-line infantryman in North Korea discovering just how
war was never what was shown in dark auditoriums. Then, bringing his story full
circle, Robert Winston Mercy came home to become first a stunt-man and then a
contract player at MGM playing the very roles he’d grown up watching, only this
time as military commanders in TV series like Combat!, Maverick, and Playhouse 90.
The first paragraph
of I Hear No Bugles makes Mercy’s
thesis clear:
“The effects of propaganda films cannot be
underestimated, particularly in this era of contending political and religious
dogmas that relentlessly threaten to make this century even more unimaginably
bloodier than the last. Indisputably, film is second to literacy in the
intellectual, philosophical and moral development of the human species. The
defunct uniformed `press-gangs’ of history that `Shanghaied’ young men into
military service have been supplanted by the more subtly hypnotic persuasion of
TV and the movies. Every image, symbol and mode of, each delivered word is
meticulously crafted to extract the desired emotional and moral support from
its national audience. Those ships, planes, submarines, helicopters, tanks and
the expended ammunitions of the armies of soldiers we see on the screen are
freely given to the studios for that explicit purpose.â€