LITMIR.BIZ

      FIGURE 1. A Navy psychiatrist addresses the traumatized viewer in the service’s Introduction to Combat Fatigue (1944). Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

      This short Navy film, Introduction to Combat Fatigue (1944), demonstrates many of the principles that motivated the military’s use of documentary realism as a form of instruction and therapy during and after World War II. Addressing hospitalized soldiers suffering from various symptoms of combat trauma, the officer-narrator also, at least implicitly, addresses a number of other spectators for whom the film was expressly produced: psychiatrists in “special Navy hospitals” where film screenings were essential components of group psychotherapy; nurses, hospital corpsmen, and medical officers not directly involved in such psychotherapeutic sessions but nonetheless committed to the rehabilitation of the “war neurotic”; non-psychiatrists (both line and medical officers) likely to encounter cases of “battle fatigue”; and, finally, those charged with using trauma-themed documentary and realist films in order to “screen and diagnose” soldiers, “in a manner similar to Murray’s thematic apperception and Rorschach’s ink blot tests.”¹ For the members of this latter category (committed, the Navy Medical Department maintained, to “a strictly limited experimental purpose”), cinema’s diagnostic potential was tied to its capacity to “trigger” emotional responses, chief among these a fear of both the “real” (footage of combat) and the “faked” (dramatic reenactments and other staged performances).² The contradictory dimensions of this understanding of cinema—the sense that the medium was potentially traumatizing and, at the same time, potentially therapeutic—reflected broader contradictions in the military’s frequently contentious engagements with the so-called “war neuroses” and their treatment.

      If a Navy film like Introduction to Combat Fatigue, with its soft-spoken officer-narrator providing psychological counseling through direct address, was seen as a means of soothing the soldier-spectator, it was also, with its dramatic reenactments providing vivid reminders of the horrors of combat, viewed as a probable source of shock for men already primed to avoid all representations of war. Managing such a paradox was the job of the film itself, as the officer-narrator himself avers, pointing out the therapeutic value and documentary legitimacy of a skillful, “useful” combination of devices. But this obligation also extended to therapists responsible for leading pre- and post-screening discussions and, in the process, emphasizing that a documentary like Introduction to Combat Fatigue is, after all, “just a film,” albeit one with the capacity to diagnose, treat, and even “cure” the titular condition.³

      Introduction to Combat Fatigue may initially have been intended for hospital screenings, but, like a great many of its military-sponsored counterparts, it enjoyed remarkably expansive wartime and postwar itineraries—an indication not simply of the importance of war trauma as a cinematic subject but also of the proliferation of venues for nontheatrical nonfiction film. (As producer and critic John Grierson had observed in the interwar period, there is “more seating capacity outside the commercial cinemas than inside them.”)⁴ If the nontheatrical realm had previously been estranged from some of the military’s cinematic efforts, the requirements of “total war” helped to change that. “War has broken these bottlenecks,” wrote the editors of Look magazine in 1945, stressing that state-sponsored documentaries—including films about “the study and treatment of damaged minds”—would “be readily available for general use,” especially in classrooms.⁵ Faced with the “gigantic problem” of “mental disease” among members of the armed forces, military psychiatrists increasingly informed the public that they were “acutely aware of the psychic injury to an enormous number of servicemen, a far greater number than are diagnosed as psychiatric patients, or [than] ever get into the hospitals for that matter.”⁶

      Documentary film, in a variety of styles, was seen as a key means of alleviating concerns about the high incidence of psychoneurosis—a tool for treating soldiers, instructing medical officers, and assuring the general public that, paradoxically, the military was a place where mental health might be restored. “Joe Smith’s mental health actually improved in the Army,” claims the narrator of the service’s Shades of Gray (1947), pointing to a pseudonymous enlistee who “could be any American,” so effective and egalitarian is the military’s alleged commitment to psychotherapy. Often coordinating its pursuit of the general public with the U.S. Office of Education (which had its own industrial training films to circulate), the military ensured that documentaries about trauma and psychotherapy would travel widely despite their exclusion from commercial exhibition. In the spring of 1945, the Office of Education prepared a “postwar proposal” that stressed the lasting value of military documentaries, noting that “the Army has stated that the use of training films speeds up training as much as forty percent,” and that “the Navy reports that students learn thirty-five times faster and that facts are remembered up to fifty-five percent longer.” Such claims, and their unqualified endorsement by the Office of Education, helped to normalize the use of military documentaries beyond the armed forces, including in businesses and schools.⁷

      BATTLE SCARS

      “Wars don’t leave people as they were.”

      —Marina (Ann Baxter) in The North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943)

      This

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