Objective, Burma! is a 1945 American war film that is loosely based on the six-month raid by Merrill's Marauders in the Burma Campaign during the Second World War. Directed by Raoul Walsh and starring Errol Flynn, the film was made by Warner Bros. immediately after the raid.
Plot
A group of United States Army paratroopers led by Captain Nelson are dropped into Burma to locate and destroy a camouflaged Japanese Army radar station that is detecting Allied aircraft flying into China. For their mission, they are assigned Gurkha guides, a Chinese Army Captain and an older war correspondent whose character is used to explain various procedures to the audience.
The mission is an overwhelming success as the 36-man team quickly take out the station and its personnel. But when the airborne troops arrive at an old airstrip to be taken back to their base, they find the Japanese waiting for them at their rendezvous site. Captain Nelson makes the hard decision to call off the rescue planes, and hike out on foot.
To reduce the likelihood of detection, the group splits into two smaller units and plans to meet up at a deserted Burmese village. But when Nelson arrives at the meeting place, there's no sign of the other group. Eventually, they find a wounded comrade, Hollis, who tells them that the Japanese ambushed the other unit. The remaining soldiers head out on foot and come across an enemy encampment where the captured troops have been held prisoner but discover, to their horror, that they have all been tortured and mutilated. Only Lt. Jacobs remains alive long enough to relate what happened and begs Nelson to kill him before he dies of his injuries. The surviving group is attacked by returning Japanese soldiers and forced to retreat into the jungle. The men must then cross the swamps in their attempt to make it back to safety through the enemy-occupied jungle.
Fighting an almost constant rearguard action, Nelson's paratroopers also succeed as decoys leading Japanese troops away from the site of the British 1944 aerial invasion of Burma. They manage to reach the invasion force and are flown back to their base.
Cast
Production
Development
Jerry Wald claimed he had the idea for doing a film set in Burma in Christmas 1943, feeling this particular theatre of the war would soon be active, and hoping the movie could be made and released before then.
Lester Cole says the original story was written by Alvah Bessie who wrote a "dozen or so" pages before being pulled off the project by Wald and assigned to something else. The job of writing the story and screenplay was given to Cole and a new writer for film, Ranald MacDougall. MacDougall had been a creator and co-writer of the CBS radio series The Man Behind the Gun that was awarded a 1942 Peabody Award. He had been contracted to Warner Brothers, with this his second film after uncredited work on Pride of the Marines. "Ranald was a pleasure to work with," wrote Cole later, "bright, eager to learn, a facile writer of dialogue: we got along famously."
In his memoirs, Cole claims Wald was inspired by a book about an attempted British invasion of Burma called Merrill's Marauders, and he decided to change the troops from being British to American. However, Merrill's Marauders was an American unit.
The film was announced in January 1944, with Wald and Walsh attached. Errol Flynn was already being discussed as the star. Franchot Tone was mentioned as a possible co-star.
Shooting
Filming began in April 1944. By this stage, the Allied campaign had already started in Burma, meaning Wald was unable to do a Casablanca style cashing in on the film's release.
Cole says Walsh had "contempt for writers" but that Wald made him stick to the script.
The film was made with authentic World War II American military material, aircraft and gliders, due to their availability. Wald acknowledged that the plot bore a significant similarity to the 1940 film Northwest Passage.
Walsh said Flynn "was on his good behaviour because he was writing a book when I was not using him. Between being gung ho and typing his life story he had no time for anything more than a half a dozen drinks, which for him was almost total abstention."
Location
Exteriors were shot at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, California. Filming began on May 1, 1944, and was scheduled for 60 days, but shooting required more than 40 extra days due to bad weather and constant script changes.
The movie also contains a large amount of actual combat footage filmed by U.S. Army Signal Corps cameramen in the China-Burma-India theatre as well as New Guinea.