re: World War 2 soldiers who went on to be famous

Wayne Morris







WM w/director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and the Kid Galahad cast

quote:

---

While filming Flight Angels (1940), Morris became interested in flying and became a pilot. With war in the wind, he joined the Naval Reserve and became a Navy flier in 1942, leaving his film career behind for the duration of the war. He flew the F6F Hellcat off the aircraft carrier USS Essex.

A December 15, 1944, Associated Press news story reported that Morris was "credited with 57 aerial sorties, shooting down seven Japanese Zeros, sinking an escort vessel and a flak gunboat and helping sink a submarine and damage a heavy cruiser and a mine layer." He was awarded four Distinguished Flying Crosses and two Air Medals.

---

quote:

---

After the war, Morris returned to films, but his nearly four-year absence had cost him his burgeoning stardom. He continued to act in movies, but the pictures, for the most part, sank in quality. Losing his boyish looks but not demeanor, Morris spent most of the fifties in low-budget westerns, but he also appeared as a weakling Lieutenant Roget, one of the main characters, in Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957).

---

Presumably Kubrick was aware of Morris' record, and was amused by the casting of a war hero as a battlefield coward.

Wayne Morris with Kirk Douglas and Ralph Meeker in Paths of Glory



The forgotten Hollywood war hero: Wayne Morris

His grave at Arlington