Duncan Maxwell Anderson - Music: The Greatest Generation's Secret Weapon

The Songwriter Goes to War: The Story of Irving Berlin's World War II All-Army Production of This Is the Army

In the title linked article, Duncan Maxwell Anderson writes:

When I was about eight years old, home from school with a cold, I was allowed to play my favorite phonograph album. It was a set of 78 R.P.M. records whose black-and-white cover photo showed 150 or so soldiers in uniform. Splashed across the top in block letters were the words "This Is the Army."

It was an original cast recording of a Broadway musical revue produced in 1942, America's first full year of World War II, produced by Irving Berlin to raise money for the war effort. The cast members were all soldiers. One of the tiny faces on the cover was my uncle Alan Anderson, the show's stage manager. Listening in 1963 in my pajamas, I was awestruck, looking through this window to the heroic times my parents' generation had known.

[snip]

The Department of War, eager to boost the morale of the beleaguered American troops, decided to send the cast of "This Is the Army" into combat zones from Europe to North Africa to New Guinea. The actors and musicians, like all soldiers, were dogged by submarines, air raids and bomb scares. They performed in movie theaters in bombed-out European cities and on improvised stages in the tropical bush, often to the accompaniment of anti-aircraft fire a few miles away.

My Uncle Alan, still busy at 87, has written a book about that battlefront tour called "The Songwriter Goes to War." The show's first front-line audience was a group of 1,000 men from the U.S. Fifth Army, who were trucked to a small-town opera house in helmets and combat boots during their siege of Monte Cassino. Burned-out G.I. Joes sat down with barely a murmur, waiting in silence for the show to start, staring into space.

The Julliard-trained conductor struck up the overture, and the orchestra played it to its booming finish with Broadway polish. Backstage, the cast and crew wondered what was wrong. The house was silent.

"And then it started like a wave," writes Anderson. "First applause, then whistling, stamping, yelling. It felt almost like hysteria . . ." As the songs and comedy sketches began, "the laughter was all belly."

[snip]

Decca has released a CD of the original cast recording I played in my bedroom in 1963. Glorious in itself, it's also a reminder of what we owe the men who fought, and the men who sang and danced. Their achievement was incalculably greater than the deeds they performed. Together, they saw past the disasters and reverses that constituted mere reality. Guided instead by the intangibles of optimism and will, they won the war.