They Were Expendable (1945)

(1945) Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed

Written by Frank Wead. Directed by John Ford

“You and I are professionals. If the manager says, ‘Sacrifice,’ we lay down a bunt, and let somebody else hit the home runs ... our job is to lay down that sacrifice.

“That’s what we were trained for – and that’s what we’ll do.”

Beautifully filmed, thoughtfully acted, and regarded by many as the best film made about World War II, They Were Expendable tells its story with a minimum of bloodshed and a profound regard for heroics far different from the kind usually celebrated in gung-ho tales of unblinking, unflinching, gun-wielding Apollos. This is a story of the ordinary men who actually fought our nation’s battles … and of the deeply personal price they paid for their service.

Watching this, one begins to understand why so many of that generation declined, in the decades that followed, to talk of their experiences. For some, it was the sheer horror of what they saw and heard – but for many, many others, the silence came from quieter pools of memory. From the simple understanding that there was no way to put such sacrifice into words. So many good men and women who just stepped forward to take the bullet, or the blow. Or the responsibility. So many more lost to winds of chance, a surge of fate.

The film was made by men who were there, in the backwaters of the Philippines, as American generals left and Japanese bombs fell like rain. The stories it tells are mostly true. It’s the kind of movie that you watch realizing that the reality must have been something, very, very like this.

That these were the people, this was their character, this was what it was like to lose.

They Were Expendable is about losing. Not going down in an Alamo-like burst of brutal glory, but of feeling all that you care most about eroding like the sand ‘neath your feet as a wave pulls back out to sea. These were the mostly anonymous men and women who held a failing line as long as anyone could, while far, far away, their nation struggled to find the strategy and resources to win.

None of those who stayed, those last days, had time to explain why they did. Watching this, we realize that none of them had to.