'Gung Ho!': The Story of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders

I thought it was interesting that Carlson claims in the beginning that he was with Mao Tse Tung on his Long March. Apparently, Carlson takes the skills and lessons that he learned from the Red Army in Guerilla Warfare and trains a couple of hundred bad boy Americans how to kill and throw themselves on barb wire. The first half of the film follows the training and even has time for a bit of a love story with Noah Beery Jr. (best known from "Rockfile Files" perhaps).

The second half involves a submarine ride and a raid on an island held by the Japanese. The action is surprisingly intense. Some scenes, like the shooting of Japanese out of trees reach the level of brutal poetic metaphor. These action scenes detail fierce fighting and are surprisingly even handed with both American and Japanese troops biting the dust pretty regularly.

Unlike, "Walk in the Sun" where the audience is given the chance to know and care about each soldier, there is only a pretty stereotyped introduction and then they are molded into one tough killing machine. The title "Gung Ho" we learn means "harmonious work" and that is what we get with precision maneuvers and no hesitation in the face of death on the battlefield.

One could call this communist propaganda, but without films like this, could fascism East and West have been defeated?

A lot has been said about this picture's outrageous jingoism, and that's a valid point, but this wasn't intended to be a history lesson (although it's based on a true story), it was made as propaganda to further the war effort, and at that it succeeds. It's quite well made, the battle scenes are exciting and very well done, and it probably did what it was intended to do, which was to give the public something to feel good about; in 1943 the war wasn't going all that well for the Allies. Robert Mitchum was starting to get bigger parts about this time; he has a fairly substantial part here, and his laconic style is quite evident. Some of the dialogue is a bit difficult to get past (one soldier says he wants to join the unit that is being put together to raid a Japanese-held island because "I just don't like Japs"), and some of the heroics are a bit much, but overall it's no worse, and a bit better, than many of the war pictures to come out of Hollywood around that time.

This film, made in 1943, doesn't even try to hide its purpose. It's propaganda, pure and simple. Several scenes are shot and narrated in a documentary type of mode. The film was shot only months after the actual events took place. Randolph Scott was a good actor, but they threw this together so quickly that he didn't have time to do a decent job. Young (and I mean YOUNG) Robert Mitchum is the best actor in the film and he isn't nearly up to his usual standards. The story is good, and I believe that, given the language constraints of 1943, the film is as well written as it could be. The battle sequences are fair. There's a good bit of obvious choreography in the hand-to-hand scenes. Overall, judged against other films of its type, this one isn't too awful bad.

The campaign of Makin Island which was the very first piece of Pacific Island we invaded against the Japanese in World War II. It serves as the basis for this film. Not much of an island the island was directly between the Hawaiian Islands and a place called Guadalcanal. The theory was get in, destroy the Japanese base and communications and get out. That much is true. The rest of the film is Hollywood hype.

Randolph Scott plays a character based on Major Evans Carlson of Carlson's Raiders which was an elite unit of Marines trained to take the island. Carlson had seen service in China and was impressed with the Chinese guerrilla campaign against the Japanese there. He studied the tactics of Chu The who was the military commander of Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Communists. I don't know much Marxism, if any, Carlson took to heart, but after World War II it got him in no small amount of trouble. In an organization as conservative and tradition bound as the United States Marines he became a pariah. He died in 1951.

Since the Makin Island campaign was the start of our Pacific Offensive it was natural that Hollywood seized on the opportunity to make a quick B picture as a morale booster. Universal assembled a good cast that included a young Robert Mitchum before stardom. Besides Mitchum, I liked J. Carroll Naish and Sam Levene who gave good support to Scott. Levene played the typical serviceman from Brooklyn which by that time was becoming a cliché in war pictures.

Anyway Carlson's lasting contribution to the Marines was the phrase Gung Ho. So if you want to know how that got into the Marine vocabulary, see this movie.

I've seen this film several times and it reflects the patriotism of America during WWII. It actually intertwines real history with Hollywood fantasy by modeling the story from the Marine Corps' Raider Battalion. Randolph Scott's Col. Thorwald is loosely based on Lt.Col. Evans Carlson's philosophies and his own experience in China. I enjoyed seeing Noah Beery, who would later become James Garner's dad in "The Rockford Files", and Robert Mitchum, already possessing his laid-back approach to acting. Most war-themed movies made during the war were aimed to boost morale and make our boys into the heroes they eventually became, although at times the dialogue was over-the-top. Still entertaining, and gives an idea what a war with a purpose was about.