10 War Movie Actors Who Were Actually There
5. Clark Gable
Another icon of Hollywood's Golden Age, Clark Gable was also one of the film industry's most enduring presences, featuring during the silent movie era of the 1920s before making the transition to talkies in the subsequent decades, where he became one of the most famous leading men of all time.
Like many of his peers, Gable's film career was interrupted by World War II; he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force in 1942, serving as an aerial gunner in bombing missions over Europe, during which time he developed a propaganda film designed to recruit gunners to the Air Force, called Combat America, which incorporated actual combat footage of Gable's time over Europe. Gable's official combat record registers five missions, although it has been claimed that he partook in more unofficially.
Gable only took a few WWII-set Hollywood assignments after the war, including Homecoming, where he portrayed a wartime doctor in the European Theatre, and Command Decision, where he played a commanding officer in the USAAF 5th Bomber Division. Of his films set during the war, perhaps the best was Run Silent, Run Deep, a Robert Wise-directed submarine thriller set in the Pacific that cast the Gone with the Wind actor opposite Burt Lancaster, who had himself contributed to the war effort as a part of the U.S. Army's Special Services division.
None of these genre efforts ever really matched the acclaim or stature of Gable's most famous works, but his wartime contributions lend an added level of gravitas to their proceedings.