Beyond the Line of Duty

A Warner Brothers Short Subject.

Hewitt T. Wheless, a young Army Air Corps pilot, acts BEYOND THE LINE OF DUTY in returning his badly damaged Flying Fortress safely to base during the Japanese attack upon the Philippines.

Wheless, a former Texas cowboy, plays himself in this excellent little film, which was awarded the Oscar for Best Two-Reel Short Subject of 1942. Without a wasted moment or unnecessary scene, it shows how he had all the ‘right stuff' to become one of the first of America's combat heroes of World War Two.

When this Short was released in November of 1942, Captain Wheless was 29 years old. When he retired in 1968, he was the Assistant Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. Lieutenant General Wheless died on September 7, 1986, at the age of 72, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who narrated BEYOND THE LINE OF DUTY 44 years earlier.

After Pearl Harbor, Hollywood went to war totally against the Axis. Not only did many of the stars join up or do home front service, but the output of the Studios was largely turned to the war effort. The newsreels, of course, brought the latest war news into the neighborhood theater every week. The features showcased battle stories or war related themes. Even the short subjects & cartoons were used as a quick means of spreading Allied propaganda, the boosting of morale or information dissemination. Together, Uncle Sam, the American People & Hollywood proved to be an unbeatable combination.

In the early days of the US involvement in WWII, things were amazingly grim. Over a period of several weeks, they not only were attacked at Pearl Harbor but lost battle after battle throughout the Pacific. Because of this, the government wanted a hero...someone who they could believe in and convince them that the war was winnable. That hero was Captain Hewitt Wheless...a man who was given the Distinguished Service Cross after somehow landing his badly battered B-17 bomber after a bombing run gone awry. In this film, Warner Brothers studio increased the public's awareness of Hewitt by featuring him in this short film about his life and military career.

The film follows Hewitt from his joining the Army Air Corps just before WWII and shows him working his way towards winning his wings. Then the film re-creates the bombing run. Now here is where things go somewhat wonky for folks like me who know WWII aircraft....and are obsessive about it. The attack is somewhat sloppy as instead of using planes that looked like the Mitsubishi Zero fighter, they used a wide variety of planes---including quite a few German Stuka dive bombers. To the non-plane enthusiast, it would be like substituting a VW Bug for a Ford Mustang...very obvious and sloppy. Still, despite the technical problems, it IS an interesting and true story and is worth seeing.

By the way, Hewitt remained in the service and eventually became the head of the Strategic Air Command.

This short, winner of an Oscar, recreates the heroic actions of an Army Air Corp crew, focusing on the pilot, Hewitt T. "Shorty" Wheliss. This was used as a pitch for war bonds and stamps. It's very well done and deservedly won. Contemporary viewers will be interested in the narrator, one Ronald Reagan. A side note: playing a cowboy is an actor named Glenn Strange, who is best known to many as Sam the bartender of the Longbranch Saloon on "Gunsmoke" and also did a turn as Frankenstein's creation, one of many to follow Boris Karloff. Turner Classic Movies runs this as filler now and again and invariably runs it in March as part of its "31 Days of Oscar" setup. Recommended.

If you remember in the Clint Eastwood film Flags Of Our Fathers the three survivors from that famous Iwo Jima photograph were taken from combat and put on a bond tour to sell war bonds and to make various other morale boosting public appearance endeavors. This film is another of those endeavors and in this case about an Army Air Force pilot.

With Ronald Reagan narrating, recent war hero Captain Hewitt T. Wheless who before the war was a young kid working on a ranch during his summers in Texas to pay for school, signs up for the Army Air Corps. The film we see is a dramatization of his story with Wheless playing himself from his days on the ranch, through his training and a description of the mission when he tangled with a squadron of Japanese planes in a running dogfight and a crash landing. He got the Distinguished Service Cross for this action.

Besides Clint Eastwood's film another things came to my mind in watching the film. First the narration of the film was taken over by President Roosevelt himself in one of his fireside chats where he describes Wheless's action. FDR did another such broadcast and that night one of his listeners was Cecil B. DeMille who heard the story of a Navy doctor named Corydon Wassell and who then proceeded to do a film version of his story with Gary Cooper.

Wheless was admittedly no actor and was probably more nervous playing himself than in combat. He was a short man and he reminded of another short Texas hero from World War II, Audie Murphy.

The film while nothing great cinematically is still a reminder of times when America really looked up to its war heroes.

You can tell the actual fliers in this movie because they speak their lines in dull tones: Major General Harmon, who reads his own speech given to the graduates of the the Army Air Corps training program as if he has bad eyes and can't see them clearly on a blackboard, and Captain Hewitt T. "Shorty" Wheless. Well, he says "Yes, sir" well enough. Perhaps he had been practicing it.

This Warner Brothers Oscar-winning short is about Captain Wheless, his training as an Army Air Corps pilot and the details of the mission for which he won the Distinguished Service Cross, as narrated by Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I suspect it was Roosevelt who won the Academy Award, even if he participated through a transcription of one of his Fire Chats.