He lacked focus and would not talk about his experiences in the war with anyone.įorney tells of how when Stewart got the part of George Bailey in the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, whenever he did the parts where George Bailey was breaking down in the movie, the film crew recognized that Stewart wasn’t acting. He had the classic symptoms: he had lost weight and looked sickly, was depressed, rarely slept and when he did he suffered terrible nightmares of planes getting hit and men screaming and falling from the sky.
When Stewart came home he was clearly suffering the effects of PTSD.
Stewart returned home from the war with the invisible scars of PTSD. On one of the missions he participated in his unit alone lost 13 planes and 130 men to enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire. According to Forney’s article, in the final months of the war, Stewart was “grounded for being ‘flak happy,’” a term that implied PTSD in that era. Like so many who have survived the realities of combat, Stewart was not untouched by the experience of Post Traumatic Stress. By the end of the war he was recognized as one of the most respected and decorated pilots in his unit. He volunteered himself for every mission he could. Even there the higher ups wanted to keep him out of harm’s way, but Stewart would not have it. He piloted B-24 Liberator bombers over Germany for the next 18 months. Stewart was deployed to England with the 703rd Bomber Squadron. The actor eventually flew in missions over Europe. Their permission, as Forney explains, was reluctantly given. It wasn’t until 1944 that he was finally able to convince his superiors to let him be deployed to Europe. He wanted to get into the war, to fly combat missions. This did not sit well with Stewart, according to Forney’s article. Because of who he was at the time, he was assigned to making recruiting films, attending bond rallies, and to training younger pilots. As a result, he was commissioned a 2nd Lt. One of the things I had not known was that Stewart was already and accomplished civilian pilot. Stewart was initially asked to take part in promotional videos for the military. “The country’s conscience is bigger than all the studios in Hollywood put together, and the time will come when we will have to fight,” he answered. He was asked why he enlisted at the time, given the fact that he was already at the top of his craft in Hollywood. In 1941, at the age of 33, Stewart was awarded an Academy Award Oscar as best actor for his role in the movie, “The Philadelphia Story.” But WWII had begun and shortly after achieving this highest honor in his profession, Stewart enlisted in the U.S. More on that below.īeing a “baby-boomer,” I, of course, knew that Jimmy Stewart was a WWII veteran bomber pilot, but Forney’s article revealed much more about Stewart’s military history than I had ever known. His article gave me a deeper appreciation of the man and Hollywood actor Jimmy Stewart and the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And for his son, Lt. Though there is a unique connection to my own history in part of this story, the history I encountered in Forney’s article was completely new to me. This line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet came back to me when I ran across a story written by Ned Forney recently. “There are more things in heaven and earth than in all of your philosophies, Horatio.”