Category: Combat Uniform/Battle Dress
A Bridge Too Far: Sean Connery in British Battledress and Denison Smock as Roy Urquhart
Sean Connery in A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Vitals
Sean Connery as Major General Roy Urquhart, courageous British Army officer
Holland, Fall 1944
Film: A Bridge Too Far
Release Date: June 15, 1977
Director: Richard Attenborough
Costume Designer: Anthony Mendleson
Background
Operation Market Garden commenced eighty years ago this week through late September 1944, a daring yet ultimately ill-fated Allied attempt to secure key bridges throughout the Netherlands and advance into Germany. This major World War II operation was immortalized in the star-studded 1977 war epic A Bridge Too Far, directed by Richard Attenborough and adapted by William Goldman from Cornelius Ryan’s nonfiction volume of the same name.
Among the film’s ensemble cast, Sean Connery’s charisma commands the screen as Major General Roy Urquhart, the British officer tasked with leading the 1st Airborne Division (“Red Devils”) during the operation. Despite Connery’s star power, the real General Urquhart had no idea who Connery was, though his daughters were thrilled at the casting. Attenborough chose Connery not only for his acting chops but also for his striking resemblance to a younger Urquhart.
In a memorable scene before the airborne assault, Connery’s Urquhart reveals to General Browning that he’s never actually jumped out of a plane—an amusing confession for the man leading an airborne division. The moment becomes even more ironic as they spot asylum escapees laughing at them from the roadside, prompting Urquhart to quip, “Do you think they know something we don’t?” Continue reading
Apocalypse Now: Martin Sheen’s Tiger Stripe Camouflage as Captain Willard
Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now (1979). Photo by Steve Schapiro/Corbis.
Vitals
Martin Sheen as Captain Benjamin L. Willard, U.S. Army Special Forces officer
South Vietnam to Cambodia, Summer 1969
Film: Apocalypse Now
Release Date: August 15, 1979
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Costume Supervisor: Charles E. James
Costumers: Luster Bayless, Norman A. Burza, Dennis Fill, and George L. Little
Background
Francis Ford Coppola’s controversial war epic Apocalypse Now was first released 45 years ago today on August 15, 1979.
Shooting had started more than three years earlier in March 1976 with an initial plan to release on Coppola’s 38th birthday, April 7, 1977, but the production was delayed by logistics problems, unpredictable weather, and personnel issues ranging from Marlon Brando’s mercurial temperament and Martin Sheen’s stress-induced heart attack to grave-robbers attempting to sell actual human corpses to the production.
“We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane,” Coppola recalled in an interview used to begin the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse that chronicled the film’s troubled production.
After filming wrapped in May 1977 (more than one month after the original intended release date), Coppola busied himself on editing over a million feet of film as the already bloated budget continued to swell and the released date was pushed farther ahead. Coppola debuted the work-in-progress at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival, where it was met with prolonged applause and was awarded the Palme d’Or.
Three months later, the freshly completed Apocalypse Now finally landed in North American theaters, albeit only three at first—the Ziegield in New York City, the Cinerama Dome in L.A., and the University Theatre in Toronto—until it would be released in over 300 more theaters by October. The $9 million spent on advertising increased the final total budget to $45 million… considerably higher than the $2 million that Coppola, John Milius, and George Lucas had estimated to spend on it back in 1971.
The project had dated back even four years before that to 1967, when Lucas and Steven Spielberg had told Coppola’s then-assistant Milius to write a film about the ongoing war in Vietnam. Following Coppola’s direction to “write every scene you ever wanted to go into that movie,” Milius ultimately wrote ten drafts that blended contemporary anecdotes around the Vietnam War with allegorical inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. Once Coppola took over directorial control from Lucas, he also incorporated elements from Werner Herzog’s 1972 epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God and the legend of the Fisher King.
The story that emerged on screen centered around U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen), a troubled but talented paratrooper dispatched by the Studies and Operations Group (MACV-SOG) to assassinate the renegade Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a power-mad colonel ruthlessly commanding a rogue force of American, Montagnard, and local Khmer militia troops who view him as a demigod. Without the four-person crew being aware of his classified mission, Captain Willard joins a U.S. Navy patrol boat that takes him up the Nùng River to Kurtz’s outpost at a Khmer temple in Cambodia, where he has been ordered to “terminate the Colonel’s command… with extreme prejudice.” Continue reading
MASH: Donald Sutherland as Hawkeye
Donald Sutherland as Captain “Hawkeye” Pierce in M*A*S*H (1970)
Vitals
Donald Sutherland as Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, U.S. Army surgeon
Korea, Summer 1951 through Winter 1952
Film: M*A*S*H
Release Date: January 25, 1970
Director: Robert Altman
Background
Today would have been the 89th birthday of Donald Sutherland, the prolific and versatile Canadian actor who died last month at the age of 88. Born July 17, 1935 in New Brunswick, Sutherland rose to prominence as a steady supporting player through the ’60s—perhaps most notably in The Dirty Dozen (1967)—before his first major starring role in yet another war film, M*A*S*H (1970), adapted by screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. from Richard Hooker’s novel MASH: A Novel of Three Army Doctors. (The popularity of the film resulted in the eventual development of a TV show—starring Alan Alda as Hawkeye—that ran for nearly four times as long as Korean War hostilities.)
Set during the Korean War, M*A*S*H centered around around the irreverent Army doctor Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce during his tenure at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital. He’s assisted in his hard-drinking hijinks by fellow surgeons “Trapper John” McIntyre (Elliott Gould), Duke Forrest (Tom Skeritt), dentist “The Painless Pole” Waldowski (John Schuck), and former football star “Spearchucker” Jones (Fred Williamson), all while battling the uptight majors Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).
At one point, Major Houlihan asks the compound chaplain Father “Dago Red” Mulcahy (René Auberjonois) how “a degenerated person like [Hawkeye] could have reached a position of responsibility in the Army Medical Corps!” to which Mulcahy simply responds, “He was drafted.”
Sutherland’s Golden Globe-nominated performance established him as a star as his career ascended through the ’70s with starring roles in Klute (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), and Ordinary People (1980) while also continuing to provide memorable supporting appearances in movies like Little Murders (1971), 1900 (1976), and Animal House (1978).
What’d He Wear?
Apropos his rebellious attitude, Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye never presents himself in a perfect example of a U.S. Army uniform, instead mixing regulation gear with personal accoutrements that craft a distinctively irreverent look. Continue reading
The Longest Day: John Wayne’s M1942 Jump Uniform as Benjamin Vandervoort
John Wayne as Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort in The Longest Day (1962)
Vitals
John Wayne as Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin H. Vandervoort, commanding officer of 2nd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, U.S. Army
England to France, June 1944
Film: The Longest Day
Release Date: September 25, 1962
Directed by: Ken Annakin (British & French sequences), Andrew Marton (American sequences), and Bernhard Wicki (German sequences)
Wardrobe: John McCorry (uncredited)
Background
Eighty years ago today on June 6, 1944—a date immortalized as “D-Day”—the Allies began landing hundreds of thousands of troops in Nazi-occupied France, laying the foundation for liberating the continent and ending the European theater of World War II within the year.
D-Day often conjures images of daring Allied troops storming the beaches at Normandy under heavy German gunfire, but there were many other elements within Operation Neptune, from aerial and naval bombardments and local resistance operations to the airborne invasion preceding the famous amphibious assault.
Irish-born war correspondent Cornelius Ryan captured all of these aspects when he published The Longest Day, his definitive chronicle of D-Day pulled from his firsthand experience during World War II and his own exhaustive research to follow. Three years after the book was published in 1959, Ryan co-adapted his volume into an epic film that would pull together a wide international cast and crew, with Ken Annakin directing the sequences among the British and French, Andrew Marton directing the American sequences, and Bernhard Wicki directing the sequences from a German perspective. Actual D-Day participants from both the Allied and Axis powers served as consultants for the film, which also starred a number of World War II veterans like Eddie Albert, Henry Fonda, Kenneth More, Rod Steiger, and Richard Todd.
The Longest Day was a commercial and critical success, garnering five Academy Award nominations and setting a then-record as the highest-grossing black-and-white film to date. Among its star-studded cast was John Wayne, portraying the real-life 82nd Airborne parartooper Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin H. “Vandy” Vandervoort (1917-1990). Though Duke was nearly 30 years older than the real Vandervoort, his ruggedly macho screen persona instantly communicated Vandy’s reputation among no less than General Matthew B. Ridgway, who described the officer as “one of the bravest, toughest battle commanders I ever knew.”
The real Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort during Operation Overlord in June 1944, with the broken left ankle that didn’t stop him from leading his battalion in defending Ste.-Mère-Église.
A Bridge Too Far: James Caan’s M-1943 Combat Uniform as Staff Sergeant Dohun
James Caan in A Bridge Too Far (1977)
Vitals
James Caan as Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun, determined U.S. Army paratrooper
Holland, Fall 1944
Film: A Bridge Too Far
Release Date: June 15, 1977
Director: Richard Attenborough
Costume Designer: Anthony Mendleson
Background
Established in the United States after the Civil War, Memorial Day honors the memory of American military personnel who died during their service. This year takes on additional poignancy as the 80th anniversary of many pivotal World War II campaigns that cost American lives, from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge.
My great-uncle, Sergeant Joe Kordas, was among these fallen troops when he was killed in action on October 4, 1944 while serving in Holland with the 82nd Airborne. As I was born 45 years later, I naturally never had the opportunity to meet my uncle, but his memory is among those I honor on Memorial Day.
My understanding is that Uncle Joe was part of the 82nd Airborne Division’s fourth and final combat jump, parachuting into Holland in September 1944 as part of Operation Market Garden. This Allied offensive was designed to create an invasion route into the Netherlands as a combined force of American and British airborne forces (“Market”) would seize nine bridges, which British land forces (“Garden”) would then follow over. The largest airborne operation of the war to that point, Operation Market Garden was not an Allied victory and criticized by one of its planners as attempting to take “a bridge too far,” a phrase borrowed by historian Cornelius Ryan for his 1974 volume of the operation that was subsequently adapted for the screen by William Goldman.
More than a decade after he starred in his own star-studded World War II screen epic, The Great Escape, Richard Attenborough was again behind the camera for A Bridge Too Far, his third directorial feature. Chronicling the operation from the American, British, Polish, Dutch, and German points of view, A Bridge Too Far boasted a talented international cast including—but certainly not limited to—Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Hardy Krüger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell, and Liv Ullmann.
Most of this cast played real-life figures or composites of them, with one of my favorite performances being James Caan’s portrayal of Staff Sergeant Eddie Dohun, a noncommissioned officer in the 101st Airborne based on the real-life Sergeant Charles J. Dohun, to the extent that A Bridge Too Far was the first of Caan’s films I chose to rewatch after learning of the actor’s death in July 2022. Continue reading
Operation Mincemeat: Major Martin’s Royal Marines Battledress
Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley in Operation Mincemeat (2022)
Vitals
Matthew Macfadyen as Charles Cholmondeley, Flight Lieutenant (temporary), RAF Intelligence and Security Department, seconded to MI5
London, Spring 1943
Film: Operation Mincemeat
Release Date: April 15, 2022
Director: John Madden
Costume Designer: Andrea Flesch
Background
It was 80 years ago this week when a corpse identified as Major William Martin of the Royal Marines was discovered by Spanish fishermen off the Andalusian coast on the morning of Friday, April 30, 1943. Of course, sardine spotter José Antonio Rey María had no idea that the putrefying body in uniform that he brought to shore and delivered to the nearby regiment of Spanish shoulders was not a decorated British officer but instead a pawn in one of the most famous acts of wartime deception, known internally as Operation Mincemeat.
Though formally set in motion about four months earlier, the tactic originated in a memo circulated by Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, in September 1939, just weeks after Germany declared war on England. “It was issued under Godfrey’s name, but it more all the hallmarks of his personal assistant, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who would go on to write the James Bond novels,” alluded author Ben Macintyre in his volume Operation Mincemeat, which was recently adapted into a Netflix film of the same name.
Known as the “Trout Memo” for its metaphor comparing counterespionage to trout fishing, the memorandum offered a total of 51 proposed plans for “introducing ideas into the heads of the Germans.” Listed as number 28 was “A Suggestion (not a very nice one)” which Godfrey and Fleming freely admit was borrowed from colorful author Basil Thomson’s novel The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, consisting of “a corpse dressed as an airman,” with his pockets and belongings detailing falsified plans for an invasion.
While the literary-influenced idea sounds nothing short of fantastic, it found a foothold in “the corkscrew mind” of Charles Cholmondeley, a young, shy, and somewhat eccentric Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve officer who served as secretary for the top-secret XX Committee, so named as the Roman numerals for twenty also form a “double cross”… which should provide some hint into both the type of work conducted by the group as well as the minds that directed it. Continue reading
Apocalypse Now: Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore
Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979)
Vitals
Robert Duvall as Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, U.S. Army Air Cavalry commander and surf fanatic
Vietnam, Summer 1969
Film: Apocalypse Now
Release Date: August 15, 1979
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Costume Supervisor: Charles E. James
Costumers: Luster Bayless, Norman A. Burza, Dennis Fill, and George L. Little
Background
Happy 90th birthday, Robert Duvall! Today’s post looks at one of the most recognizable roles from the actor’s prolific career, his Academy Award-nominated performance as the gung-ho surf enthusiast Colonel Kilgore in Coppola’s war epic Apocalypse Now.
Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s you-probably-had-to-read-it-in-high-school novella Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now needs little introduction, nor does Kilgore’s famous monologue celebrating the aromas of incendiary devices after commanding his 9th Cavalry squadron to attack a VC-held village to the tune of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”.
White Christmas: Captain Wallace on Christmas Eve 1944
Bing Crosby is joined by an exuberant Danny Kaye in White Christmas (1954)
Vitals
Bing Crosby as Bob Wallace, U.S. Army captain and popular entertainer
European Theater, Christmas Eve 1944
Film: White Christmas
Release Date: October 14, 1954
Director: Michael Curtiz
Costume Designer: Edith Head
Background
Merry Christmas Eve! The prologue of perennial holiday cinema classic White Christmas begins exactly 75 years ago today, Christmas Eve 1944, as the title card tells us…
Private First Class Phil Davis is proudly assisting Captain Bob Wallace, evidently a known entertainer on par with Al Jolson, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, or—um—Bing Crosby, as they host a “yuletide clambake” for the men of the fictitious 151st Division, providing the type of entertainment that Davis boasts would cost $6.60 or even $8.80 stateside. Continue reading
Steve McQueen’s Navy Uniforms in The Sand Pebbles
Steve McQueen as Jake Holman, Machinist’s Mate, 1st Class, U.S. Navy, in The Sand Pebbles (1966)
Vitals
Steve McQueen as Jake Holman, maverick U.S. Navy Machinist’s Mate, 1st Class (MM1)
Yangtze River, China, Summer 1926 through Spring 1927
Film: The Sand Pebbles
Release Date: December 20, 1966
Director: Robert Wise
Costume Design: Wingate Jones, John Napolitano, Bobbie Read, and James W. Tyson
WARNING! Spoilers ahead!
Background
The Navy League of the United States organized the first Navy Day on October 27, 1922, to commemorate the birthday of Theodore Roosevelt who—before becoming the 26th President of the United States—had long championed the U.S. Navy and had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Set four years after the establishment of Navy Day, The Sand Pebbles begins in 1926 China, “a country of factions trying to unite to become a nation… through revolution…” according to the opening text. Continue reading
Allied Uniforms of The Great Escape
Richard Attenborough, Steve McQueen, Nigel Stock, and Gordon Jackson in The Great Escape (1963)
Today marks the 75th anniversary of “the great escape”, the mass breakout of allied airmen from the Luftwaffe-operated Stalag Luft III in Sagan-Silesia—now Zagan—in Poland on March 24, 1944. Of the 76 men who escaped, only three made it to freedom and 50 of the group were murdered by the Nazis in retaliation.
Film: The Great Escape
Release Date: July 4, 1963
Director: John Sturges
Wardrobe Credit: Bert Henrikson
Paul Brickhill, one of the Allied officers who had worked on the various tunnels used for the escape, wrote the definitive account of prison camp life, the famous March 1944 breakout, and the subsequent fallout in The Great Escape, published in 1950.
Thirteen years later, a star-studded cast reenacted the incident in The Great Escape, a now-classic war movie that dramatized this real-life story of heroism, humor, and tragedy.
Today’s post—coinciding both with the 75th anniversary of the escape and the 89th birthday of the film’s star Steve McQueen—examines the uniforms of the Allied airmen, sorted by each major character’s surname. Continue reading