![]() ![]() This is their story and Irving Berlin's story, the story of This Is the Army. They told me what he and his work had meant to them and how the experience of working with him had transformed their lives. So I talked to as many of the men as I could, and with tears in their eyes, they described their experiences in the wartime show and with Irving Berlin. As you can imagine, it was a deeply moving experience for all, an opportunity to savor victory, but also an opportunity to bid a final farewell.Īt the time, I was researching my biography of Irving Berlin, As Thousands Cheer, and was eager to learn more about this important but forgotten episode in Berlin's career. They had faithfully convened every five years, ever since the company disbanded at the end of the war, but now the men were getting too old and their numbers too small to justify any more gatherings. I discovered the story when I had the great luck to catch up with many of the soldiers who had belonged to the show's company when they converged on New York's Theater District to hold their fiftieth-and final-reunion. It then toured the nation, and later the world, and was eventually made into a movie, starring the handsome young Lt. It is a story about the biggest and best-known morale-boosting show of World War II-Irving Berlin's This Is the Army, which began life as a Broadway musical designed to raise money for the military. (NARA, 208-N-4115-FF)īy today's standards, some of this story will sound old-fashioned, if not racist or at least archaic, but keep in mind that it took place in a much different era, in a much different America, and belongs to its time and place. In This Is the Army, Berlin recreated the role he had played in his World War I hit Yip! Yip! Yaphank. ![]()
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