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hospitals and other convalescent centers.⁵⁸

      Throughout the 1940s, the military was constantly discovering “new film uses,” “more effective utilization methods,” and, perhaps most importantly, new sites of exhibition.⁵⁹ “Therapeutic films” became staples on hospital ships carrying psychiatric patients, and, by 1944, all Army and Navy transport vessels were equipped for 16mm film screenings. Medicine in Action, a series of short documentaries produced by the Navy between 1944 and 1946, often identified the institution’s “auxiliary hospital ships” as spaces of film exhibition, insisting on cinema’s therapeutic function for men recovering from “the wounds of war.” While the military’s use of cinema was often understood—and often publicized by the armed forces themselves—in terms of a pronounced commitment to instructing the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time, it was never intended to replace flesh-and-blood teachers—or, for that matter, flesh-and-blood therapists. In the words of an official statement from the Army, films “supplement but do not supplant the work of instructors.”⁶⁰

      In the armed forces, film was part of a multimedia economy that also embraced radio broadcasts and transcriptions, phonograph records, pamphlets, and symposia. Produced in collaboration with the Army, the CBS radio series Assignment Home was devoted to “veteran readjustment,” its scripts tending to detail trauma and psychotherapy in accordance with official military films. In fact, at least two episodes of the series were explicit “tie-ins” to the Navy’s 1945 documentary Combat Fatigue: Assignment Home, which the Army had adopted for its own use.⁶¹ Radio and, increasingly, television broadcasts were intended to supplement film instruction in ways that were difficult to achieve with such traditional conveyors of institutional information as recruitment officers. Indeed, Assignment Home was designed to duplicate “live instruction” and disseminate it to a broad swath of radio listeners, much as the Defense Department’s public-service television program The Big Picture (1950 – 1975) would later seek to spread information—including information about trauma and psychotherapy—via syndication.⁶²

      These new protocols were necessitated by the military’s broadening commitment to providing information about war trauma and psychotherapy. With the help of Chicago Film Studios, an independent company specializing in nontheatrical nonfiction film, the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery made a series of “essential films” for hospital corpsmen, many of them addressing the subject of psychoneurosis.⁶³ At around the same time, the Signal Corps was adapting psychologist John Dollard’s 1943 study Fear in Battle into its Fighting Men series of training films.⁶⁴ Dollard, a psychologist at Yale University’s Institute of Human Relations, had studied three hundred veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil War, his work helping to familiarize the Army with an array of psychosomatic symptoms (“feeling faint or weak,” “roaring or ringing sensation in ears,” “dryness of mouth and throat”).⁶⁵ Dollard, and the Signal Corps films based on his study, thus helped normalize trauma as a diversely symptomatic experience. Time magazine covered this confluence of academic inquiry and military training in November 1943, and Dollard, whose work emphasized the vast differences between the technologies of the two world wars, told Americans to expect more and greater cases of distress and anxiety.⁶⁶ But if film could reflect the results of Dollard’s study, so could it assure spectators of the reliability of military-psychiatric treatment. As an Army technical manual put it, filmmaking and filmgoing were among the “mental hygiene activities” intended to cultivate “a deeper appreciation on the part of military personnel of the wide range of individual personal and social needs and desires”—and of the accessibility and effectiveness of treatment.⁶⁷

      A number of military documentaries reflexively address this “therapeutic” use of film, directly depicting screenings designed to teach as well as to “heal.” The Air Force’s short Wings Up (1943), for instance, emphasizes the pedagogic as well as rehabilitative function of nontheatrical films, while the Army’s Follow Me Again (1945) presents motion pictures as key elements of the Army Education Program, assisting veterans in their transition back to civilian life. Similarly, the Army documentaries Diary of a Sergeant (1945) and Half a Chance (1946) both feature nurses who screen nonfiction films meant to “aid rehabilitation,” but they also, in showing their traumatized protagonists’ return to civilian life, suggest new uses for these institutional works.

      FIGURE 7. A therapeutic film screening for hospitalized servicemen in the Army’s Diary of a Sergeant (1945). Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.

      To be sure, some films were hardly “timeless”—hardly ceaselessly relevant amid seismic changes in military routines, objectives, and treatment protocols—but what was no longer needed in the armed forces could easily be made to matter to civilians. Often, a “declaration of obsolescence,” conveyed through a classified publication like the monthly Catalog of Training Films, came with recommendations for a film’s eventual use “beyond the armed services.”⁶⁸ This repurposing of “expired” documentaries was a major way in which the military, in David Culbert’s words, “contributed to what could be termed an audiovisual revolution in American higher education.”⁶⁹ The promiscuous spread of military documentaries via ever-expanding networks of nontheatrical distribution was difficult if not impossible to stop, as the Army itself discovered through its unsuccessful attempts to destroy all extant prints of the problematic Why We Fight entry The Battle of China, which continued to circulate, often in “minor,” sometimes literally underground locations (such as church basements) far beyond the surveillance capabilities of the armed forces.⁷⁰

      More frequently, however, the military actively encouraged this promiscuity even in the handling of films long believed to have been “banned” or otherwise “suppressed,” such as Let There Be Light. “At no time in our history has it been so important that the layman have some grasp of [psychiatry’s] principles,” wrote William C. Menninger in 1946.⁷¹ The military that had made Menninger a brigadier general seemed to agree. When Menninger’s words appeared in print, the disturbing realities that had precipitated the War Department’s temporary “publicity blackout” were no less conspicuous, and they required constant intervention in the convenient form of films (many of them limited to just two reels) that could be screened in a variety of nontheatrical locations. As Martin Halliwell writes, “despite the supreme confidence that many had in science and medicine, the number of cases of combat fatigue during World War II indicated that the nation, which seemed purposeful and prosperous on the surface, underneath suffered from uncertainty and anxiety.”⁷² It was documentary, with its lofty, Griersonian associations, that offered a way of exposing and, ultimately, managing this traumatic underside of institutional and everyday life—promising to reveal, as Paul Rotha had written in 1935, the “meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person.”⁷³

      TRAUMATIZING DOCUMENTARY

      The trauma-themed films that the military produced—or that it merely adopted, inspired, or critiqued—should be understood as documentary and realist works by dint of their direct, evidential engagement with trauma as a verifiable yet elusive consequence of World War II, one whose comprehension and eventual treatment was seen as requiring a number of creative strategies typically taken to be beyond the ken of such categories as “instructional film,” “industrial film,” and “training film.” While such overlapping categories arguably “belong,” in some fundamental sense, to documentary as a capacious parent genre, and while they were certainly used throughout the 1940s to describe military-produced works about war trauma, they tend to signify a rote functionality far removed from the actual patterns and purposes of trauma-themed films, which sought not merely to teach, and not merely to promote (in the sense intended by institutional advertising), but also to inspire and even rehabilitate.⁷⁴ Inspiration and rehabilitation were hardly incompatible with the aims of instruction and public relations, but they demanded a formal and discursive flexibility capable of accommodating everything from therapeutic role play to diagnostic encounters

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