They Were Expendable

Gungy [guhnj] (adj) gung'y Navy Slang: To be particularly, perhaps ridiculously, motivated. Filled with love for the Naval Service and afire with patriotic fervor. "I just banged out five miles. I'm feeling gungy."

When I was a plebe at USNA, Saturday morning was "gunge day." After the morning run, we plebes would be permitted to sit on couches in the upperclass wardroom, hear some brief talk about a military subject, and watch a gunge movie. Something like 12 O'CLOCK HIGH or RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP or THE SANDS OF IWO JIMA. I was the guy who never really bought it, not really. Maybe it's the German in me, but I have this deep distrust for love of institutions; and rampant, "hail to the heroes" style patriotism makes me uncomfortable.

THEY WERE EXPENDABLE pushed gunge buttons I didn't even know I had. The opening credits include the ranks of people who worked on the film, including CAPT John Ford, USNR; CDR Robert Montgomery, USNR; CDR Frank Wead, USN (Ret); LCDR Joseph August, USN; and CAPTJames Havens, USMCR (Reservists represent!). The score weaves in chanties and traditional Navy songs I learned in Annapolis. The movie's first big action sequence, a Japanese airstrike on Subic Bay, made me want to want to be Robert Montgomery, commanding a squadron of PT boats in a desperate fight (Aside: if a movie can make an aviator want to be a surface warfare officer, it's gotta be something special!).

But THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, while certainly a gunge movie (it's wartime propaganda), doesn't tell the story of victory against impossible odds. It tells a story of loss, of underequipped and undermanned forces losing to a Japanese war machine that, at the time, appeared unstoppable. People sabotage their boats. The love interest is lost in Bataan. The heroes are ordered to flee, leaving their men behind to take their chances with the Japanese. And it's mostly handled in true military fashion. Shut up and do your job, and the best epitaph a man can hope for is that he did his.

Some of the film's elements don't fit, but they make sense when taken in historical context. When the men see MacArthur leave the Philippines, the film tries to sell it as an uplifting, patriotic moment. "There goes the great man," the PT sailors seem to think. While the reality is that line soldiers and sailors saw MacArthur's departure from the Philippines as a betrayal that helped earn him the nickname "Dugout Doug," the fact is that America needed heroes in the latter years of WWII, and there's no way a film of that period was going to show the American fighting man looking at the Great General with anything less than awe. The film also goes out of its way to wave the flag for those left behind. The flag waving doesn't fit in with the businesslike tone of the rest of the proceedings, but we should recall that this film was made in a time of total war, a time when America was preparing to fight its way back into the PI and rescue those whom we'd left behind.

Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, and Donna Reed are all fine here, with Wayne great fun as a fireball junior officer and Reed acting her butt off in pretty stock role. The action sequences are rousing and awesome, particularly when we recall that they were done with practical effects. This is a fine picture, a picture worthy of preservation, a gunge picture.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some pushups to do.