A new cable series (AppleTV+) is coming next January paying homage to the bomber crews of World War II. This collaboration by the two men – Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks – who have been extolling the virtues and sacrifices of the “Greatest Generation” will follow their previous projects Band of Brothers and The Pacific.
The Pacific features a couple of episodes spotlighting Marine hero John Basilone. Basilone won the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal. He was rotated home to sell war bonds but demanded to be sent back into action. He was killed at Iwo Jima.
Basilone was a well-kept secret outside of our Coppola-Scorsese ‘gotta admit’ film library until Steven Spielberg honored the Marine’s achievements. Like Louie Zamperini, the Olympic runner whose story of wartime service and suffering inspired Angelina Jolie’s movie Unbroken, Italian American heroes take a back seat to fictional mobsters.
The new Spielberg-Hanks series is called Masters of the Air. I was hoping that one character would include air ace Capt. Don Gentile – Dominic Salvatore Gentile – another long-forgotten hero of our community. Unfortunately, the new series is limited to bomber crews in the European theater. Gentile was a fighter pilot who racked up some 30 German “kills.” This score was not without controversy, as 6 of the planes were destroyed on the ground and 2 in dogfights when he served in the Canadian Royal Airforce before America’s entry. Nevertheless, Don Gentile’s is a real, not fictional, story.
The Ohio-born Gentile, already a civilian pilot, tried to join the U.S. Air Corps in July, 1941 but didn’t have the required two years of college. So, it was off to Canada, and then to England, to fly Spitfires. That same year, Hollywood released A Yank in the RAF, starring Tyrone Power. Gentile must have seen that film between missions and wondered if he helped inspire it.
The Second World War didn’t entirely loosen up Hollywood’s Anglo lock on film heroes. Ethnic characters were introduced to widen the shared sacrifice. Jews and Italian Americans usually made the ranks as draftees with a sense of humor but no commanding presence. Two exceptions were Joe Rossi, second-in-command of a Liberty Ship in Action on the North Atlantic. The ethnically-neutral Rossi was played by Humphrey Bogart. The other film featured a Major Victor Joppolo, played by John Hodiak, in A Bell for Adano, an Italian American officer in charge of an occupied Sicilian village.
While the land and sea revealed the American ethnic mosaic, the air remained a bastion of Anglo privilege. No doubt the college requirement filtered only the best and brightest into flight schools and so Hollywood films. But the air war connected the Anglo brotherhood, as southern boys with at least one character named Tex, joined forces with their northern brethren to fade the Mason-Dixon Line. (The Black Tuskegee airmen didn’t make it to film until well after the war.)
When air ace Don Gentile came to fame in 1944 with General Eisenhower himself declaring him a “one man air force,” I wonder how many Americans pronounced the name Gen-TEEL-lay, or just Gen-TEEL? His ethnicity might have flown under the radar.
Air aces were coming from every service branch: the Marines alone had Joe Foss with 26 air victories, Robert M. Hanson with 25 victories, and Gregory “Pappy” Boyington with 22 Marine victories and 6 while serving with the Flying Tigers before the war. Other top guns were George Preddy, Charles H. MacDonald, Robert S. Johnson, David McCampbell, and Thomas B. McGuire, and Richard Bong (Swedish) – a survey of WASP America.
A stand-out on this list, and possibly the guy who topped it, was a Polish American named Francis Gabreski. He was an ace in both WW II and the Korean War. Among his derring-do, he flew 30 missions with the Polish squadron of the RAF and skipped his own wedding stateside to fly “one more mission” to Germany, where he crashed and was taken prisoner. After the war, he took on his toughest assignment: running the Long Island Rail Road – not so well.
As for Don Gentile, he was sent home from England after crashing his P-51 while doing stunts for reporters. He was later killed while on a training flight in 1951 at age 30.
A daredevil to the end. -JLM
Given that Italian Americans were one of the largest groups if not the largest ethnic group serving in the US Armed Forces, it truly is a long omitted part of the tale of growing up Italian-American, made more insane by native-born Italian Americans registering as enemy aliens, of which I could understand, but having to move from homes, if they were too close to the coastline was just insane, not to mention in danger of losing their homes and livelihoods,house arrest, …and for some families….mine included, the irony of an enemy alien mother having to try to visit her wounded for life son at a veterans hospital is one of the many just daily bumps and grinds of that “special generation”. Perhaps it may not be Hollywood drama enough but there certainly was a lot of family and personal drama associated with those times….
Italian-Americans, i.e. citizens of Italian descent, did not have to register as enemy aliens. Only Italian immigrants who never bothered to become citizens had to, like my maternal grandparents, who were not interned during the war, possibly because they had eleven kids who were citizens, including two who served in the Army during the war. My mother was a supervisor in a defense factory in Brooklyn during the war despite being Italian-American. Some Italian-Americans who had been involved in pro-fascist activities before the war were imprisoned, but they were not viewed as enemy aliens per se. Many pro-Nazi German-American citizens were also interned in the war.
Our Italic Institute was very much involved in lobbying Congress for a documentary on what we termed the 1942 Persecution. I refer you to our Research Library to find The Italic Way issues XXII, 1994 and issue XXXVIII, 2012. That Congress ignored our efforts is entirely the fault of then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY) who treated the issue as just another constituent request. That 10,000 Italian Americans – immigrants as well as their citizen children were forcibly evicted for six months from their homes on the West Coast with not a dime for relocation is still an outrage. That hundreds of fishing boats owned by their families were impounded or unable to support their livelihood is also an outrage. In desperation, after D’Amato failed us, we appealed to the Japanese American community to share some of the $50 million they received for public information on 1942 so we could make a documentary (est $750,000), we were refused. For my part, this blight on our patriotism in WW II must never be allowed to stand.
I cant really address what happened in the East Coast, but I think the West Coast experience was much different since the region was under the military security of General DeWitt, who was also responsible for the Japanese American removal on the West Coast, but ironically not in Hawaii where they were a major part of the population.
It is not so much that many people “did not bother to become US Citizens”, for a large group of immigrants of that era, many did not master reading and writing skills to the point of passing a citizenship test. In addition, this was post-Depression era, and most of that generation was putting a lot of energy into sustaining a family, so citizenship was not the highest priority. I don’t think people had any idea of what was coming down between Mussolini’s Italy and the USA. Yes, many Italian Americans participated in the war effort but native-born Italians had to register as enemy aliens and some had to leave their homes as well as their livelihoods if they were too close to the coastline….the entire west coast fishing industry, composed of Italian Americans was economically devastated. People have observed while the DiMaggios were playing big league baseball, their father was forbidden to fish as an enemy alien……..for the most part General DeWitt would have had a public relations issue arresting Joe DiMaggio’s father. Also, many US citizen Italian Americans kept in trust the lands of their Japanese American neighbors until they returned, including paying the taxes on the land…..another part of an untold story on the West Coast…….who helped the families of the interned…and that story is being lost as this generation passes on….