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WARTIME
EXPERIENCES OF
Lieut. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
OF ACTION and drama there was a-plenty, and there was even a Hollywood star aboard ship in the North Atlantic to take the leading role. But the film world missed out on this one.
This was the United States Navy's affair, and nobody realized it more than Lieut. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who felt with his shipmates that this was every man's 'show in the daily business of winning the war on "shoot on sight" orders given by President Roosevelt before Pearl Harbor.
He had good reason to feel that way, and to shy away from playing a star role, even if his junior grade lieutenant's stripes had been substituted for the gold braided sleeves of an admiral.
Four _ months on active duty on a destroyer and a battleship as a reserve officer, called into the Navy's front line, Doug has seen the grim side of war, has sighted the menacing periscope of the Nazi U-boat in the cold gray waters of the North Atlantic. Heroics in the movies are nothing compared to this new role which Doug has played without benefit of cameras or script.
Acting has not been forgotten — just put in moth balls for the duration. But when his career as a film star is resumed, Douglas says that he wishes public reaction would be — "Look at that officer being an actor," instead of vice-versa. That was what the blue jackets aboard his destroyer had to say when they viewed aboard ship his latest film, "The Corsican Brothers."
Down in Washington the other day Douglas told me that his men evidently were not movie fans. The sailors, accustomed to meeting the tall, lean actor only as an officer, were unable to disassociate the Navy from the man they knew. In the dueling scene, Fairbanks reports, the men shouted "Go get 'em, Sir, go get 'em."
Now temporarily on shore duty, Lieut. Fairbanks took a few minutes off recently from his work at the Navy Department to tell me a few facts and impressions of his trick with the Navy at sea. By the time this article reaches print Fairbanks may be standing on the bridge of another ship in either the Atlantic or Pacific, as Navy orders come without advance warning.
So they came to Lieut. Fairbanks last October. He had not long been back in America from a special mission to South America, where he was assigned by the State Department.
Substituting active ill-will toward the axis for goodwill to our Southern neighbors, Doug turned to the antiaircraft batteries in the "sky forward" of his ship, which must remain unnamed due to necessary censorship. Needless to say, Doug gained more than practice in giving the order, "Men, ready, fire!" This was before Pearl Harbor, but don't forget the Presidential order of "Shoot on sight in defense of our hemisphere."
But when war did come to America in the form of the Japanese attack, December 7, every ship on the Atlantic was informed by code that the hour had struck. When the words came rattling off the ship's code set, Douglas by in "Radio Central"— the communica
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