# The Story of G.I. Joe
**The Story of G.I. Joe** is a 1945 American black-and-white war drama directed by William A. Wellman, based on the writings of the [Pulitzer Prize](https://www.edgepedia.org/pulitzer-prize)-winning war correspondent [Ernie Pyle](https://www.edgepedia.org/ernie-pyle) and following a single infantry company through the North African and Italian campaigns of World War II. It was produced independently by Lester Cowan for Lester Cowan Productions and released by [United Artists](https://www.edgepedia.org/united-artists), with Burgess Meredith as Pyle and Robert Mitchum as Lieutenant Walker.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release | 13 July 1945 (copyright records list the title officially as *G. I. Joe*); 108–109 minutes, black and white[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE) |
| Literary sources | Ernie Pyle's *Here Is Your War* (1943), on the North African campaign, and *Brave Men* (1944), covering Italy and France[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE) |
| Cast | Burgess Meredith (Ernie Pyle), Robert Mitchum (Lt. Walker), Freddie Steele (Sgt. Warnicki), Wally Cassell, Jimmy Lloyd[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE) |
| Honors | Four Academy Award nominations, including Mitchum's only Oscar nod of his career; New York Times "ten best" list of 1945[2](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf) |
| Preservation | Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2000; National Film Registry, 2009; original negative lost, restoration assembled from duplicate negatives[3](https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/01092024_academy_film_archive_national_film_registry_preserved_films.pdf) |
| Contemporary reception | General Dwight Eisenhower called it "the greatest war picture I've ever seen"; critic James Agee called it "a tragic and eternal work of art"[4](https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/sites/default/files/aaj_2000.pdf) |
## Spoilers
### Plot
North Africa, 1943. Ernie Pyle ([Burgess Meredith](https://www.edgepedia.org/burgess-meredith)) arrives at C Company of the 18th Infantry a civilian among soldiers, apologetic and slouched, notebook in hand. The men are suspicious of a correspondent who might make them into copy, and the film lets Pyle earn his place the way the real one did: by listening, asking one tired soldier one question, and getting a whole life in answer. Lieutenant Bill Walker ([Robert Mitchum](https://www.edgepedia.org/robert-mitchum)) runs the company with a calm that costs him visibly; he has been promoted out of the line he loved and now carries the weight of every order he sends down.
The campaign grinds on. Wellman shoots it as a long march rather than a series of set pieces: dust, mud, rain on helmets, artillery that arrives as crater and noise instead of spectacle. The men fill the waiting with griping and card games, and the film treats a dry pair of socks as a major event. Sergeant Warnicki (Freddie Steele), a hard career soldier, is handed a dead comrade's personal effects, including a violin, and carries them through the campaign like a duty he cannot put down. He effectively adopts a young soldier, Private Mew (Bill Murphy), and the losses around him begin to erode the hardness that defines him.
**The Kasserine Pass sequence is the film's most famous stretch, and Wellman stages it almost entirely inside a command tent.**[13](https://trailersfromhell.com/ernie-pyles-the-story-of-g-i-joe/) There is no sweeping battle footage to speak of. Instead, news arrives piece by piece of American units retreating or being captured, and the drama is the faces of the officers absorbing it, the disaster assembled out of reports rather than images. It is combat deliberately refused as entertainment, and it sets the film's rules for everything that follows: the war is what happens to men who are mostly waiting for it.[13](https://trailersfromhell.com/ernie-pyles-the-story-of-g-i-joe/)
The campaign moves to Sicily and then Italy, and the film's most extraordinary piece of pure filmmaking arrives there: in one unbroken shot, a jeep roars to a halt and deploys an anti-tank cannon that knocks out an enemy pillbox, the whole maneuver captured without a cut.[13](https://trailersfromhell.com/ernie-pyles-the-story-of-g-i-joe/) Elsewhere, Mitchum and Steele deal with snipers holed up in a church tower, a passage modern critics compare to the tower sequence in Tarantino's war films; in another remembered moment, a German soldier slides down a church bell rope as two Americans riddle him with bullets.[14](https://www.nytimes.com/1945/10/14/archives/story-of-gi-joe-whos-to-blame.html) The monastery fighting outside [Monte Cassino](https://www.edgepedia.org/monte-cassino) gives the film its grimmest terrain, though later historians note the staging there is the one place the film bends the truth, since no one could actually move that close to the position.[15](https://history.companyofheroes.com/monte-cassino/the-story-of-gi-joe-monte-cassino-movie/)
Warnicki's erosion comes to a head in the scene people who saw it in 1945 never forgot: the tough sergeant, having absorbed one loss too many, hears his infant son's voice on a phonograph record mailed from home, played on a broken machine, and cracks up.[16](https://variety.com/1944/film/reviews/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1200414426/) Steele plays it not as a collapse but as an ending, a man's reserves simply running out. The film sends him back to duty without pretending a cure has happened, a treatment of combat fatigue decades before anyone called it PTSD.
Then comes the film's cruelest and most honest stroke. Walker, promoted and ordered away from the company to a safer post, is killed almost immediately by a stray shell fragment. No last words, no heroic death for the best officer in the regiment, just a report and a hole. Characters the audience has lived with for an hour simply stop appearing, exactly the way they did in Pyle's columns, and the anti-climax of Walker's death is the film's whole thesis about what infantry war actually does.
The ending returns to Pyle and the company, diminished and still moving forward. Rome falls, and the film closes on a hopeful note: Pyle walks off into the sunset, Berlin next.[17](https://www.avclub.com/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1945-1798229784) What the audience of April 1945 knew, and the film does not acknowledge, is that Pyle himself had been killed by a sniper on a Japanese island shortly before the premiere.[18](https://loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf)
### Characters
**Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith):** the real Pulitzer-winning war correspondent, played with slouched, apologetic warmth. A civilian in the line, he writes elegies for men who then have to keep fighting, and the film is honest about the oddness of that position. Variety noted that Meredith's Pyle functions as a commentary on the war rather than the war itself.[16](https://variety.com/1944/film/reviews/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1200414426/)
**Lieutenant Bill Walker (Robert Mitchum):** the company commander, in Mitchum's first major role. His acting is almost nothing at all, and it is riveting: he carries command the way a mule carries freight, silently and with visible cost.
**Sergeant Warnicki (Freddie Steele):** a real war hero playing a version of the men he fought beside, a tough career sergeant whose hardness runs out over the course of the campaign.[16](https://variety.com/1944/film/reviews/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1200414426/)
**The company:** Wally Cassell as Pvt. Dondaro, Jimmy Lloyd as Pvt. Spencer, Jack Reilly as Pvt. Murphy, and Bill Murphy as Pvt. Mew, alongside actual combat veterans of the African, Sicilian, and Italian campaigns.[6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/375/the-story-of-g-i-joe)
### Interpretations and controversies
The hopeful ending has been debated for eighty years. The film premiered two months after Pyle's death, and viewers knew that one of the most famous journalists in the world had not survived the war, but the picture lets his stand-in walk into the sunset without a word about it.[17](https://www.avclub.com/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1945-1798229784) Some read this as wartime reassurance; others as the film's one act of sentimentality in a picture that otherwise refuses it. Historians have also quibbled with the monastery scenes, judging the close movement there militarily impossible.[15](https://history.companyofheroes.com/monte-cassino/the-story-of-gi-joe-monte-cassino-movie/)
### Sequels, prequels, and universe
None. The film stands alone, though its title character, Ernie Pyle, has been portrayed again in later television and film treatments of his life.
## Origin in the Army and in Pyle's columns
The project began in 1943 in the Pictorial Branch of the Army's Public Relations Department, which wanted a film to spotlight the infantry just as earlier Hollywood pictures had celebrated the Navy and the Air Corps. Producer Lester Cowan, an independent, initially planned to build the film on an unfinished play by Clifford Odets, then turned to Pyle's newly published book *Here Is Your War*, a compilation of his columns from North Africa. Pyle at first scoffed at the idea that the book could become a credible movie, but Cowan's persistence won him over.[2](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf)
**The screenplay.** Cowan brought in the then-obscure New York writer [Arthur Miller](https://www.edgepedia.org/arthur-miller), who worked with Pyle at Pyle's home in [New Mexico](https://www.edgepedia.org/new-mexico). Miller and Pyle agreed that the combat unit as a whole, not any single soldier, should be the dramatic heart of the story, but disagreed on the theme: Miller wanted the unit to stand for the war's moral imperative, while Pyle wanted simply to show the everyday bravery and grit of the foot soldier. Pyle's vision prevailed, and after the first draft Miller was replaced. Leopold Atlas, Guy Endore, and Philip Stevenson carried the script forward, expanding the storyline to include Company C's exploits in Sicily as depicted in Pyle's next book, *Brave Men*.[2](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf)
**Securing Wellman.** Wellman, the director of *Wings* (1927), *A Star Is Born* (1937), and *The Ox-Bow Incident* (1943), and a former World War I flyer with the Lafayette Flying Corps, initially rejected Cowan's offer because he felt the infantry had a history of disrespecting fliers. Cowan persisted, and after a meeting with Pyle in New Mexico, Wellman agreed to direct. He later wrote that he realized "the great need for such a picture and what it would mean to the thousands of kids that were fighting," and that he and Pyle polished the script together day after day.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE)
## Production
Filming began in mid-March 1944 on location at the Army's California-Arizona Maneuver Area in the desert near [Yuma, Arizona](https://www.edgepedia.org/yuma-arizona), and continued at Palmdale and [Fort Ord](https://www.edgepedia.org/fort-ord) in California, with studio work at Culver Studios (then Selznick Studios), where a detailed bombed-out Italian village set was built.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE) In early May 1944 production shut down so a new ending could be written to "accommodate changes in the war"; Cowan had lined up locations comparable to the French Channel coast, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Holland in anticipation of the Allied invasion, and by late August 1944 he arranged to shoot victory celebrations in American cities. War Department records indicate he also considered an ending including Pyle's death in April 1945. None of these proposed scenes appear in the final film.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE) When production resumed on 15 November 1944, the picture carried a two-million-dollar budget.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE)
**Casting.** Cowan first signed [Gary Cooper](https://www.edgepedia.org/gary-cooper) to play Pyle; Cooper bowed out to join a USO tour, and negotiations moved to [Fred MacMurray](https://www.edgepedia.org/fred-macmurray). Other candidates mentioned included [Fred Astaire](https://www.edgepedia.org/fred-astaire), Cowan's reported first choice, James Gleason, Walter Brennan, Barry Fitzgerald, and even a Pyle look-alike streetcar conductor nominated by 1,200 St. Louisans. Burgess Meredith, an Army captain placed on inactive status for the production, was not cast until late October 1944; War Department records indicate he was Pyle's own choice.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE)
**Authenticity.** More than 150 combat veterans of the North African and Sicilian campaigns played themselves as extras and bit players, coaching the professional actors and re-creating battles they had recently fought.[2](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf) Pyle himself visited the set for a week in October 1944 and another in December, and wrote in his February 1945 column that the War Department had furnished two companies of real soldiers, trucks, tanks, and guns, and that the production had "slaved to avoid 'Hollywooding' it."[5](https://erniepyle.iu.edu/wartime-columns/in-the-movies.html) For added reality, Wellman blended footage from [John Huston](https://www.edgepedia.org/john-huston)'s war documentary *San Pietro* into the Sicilian combat scenes.[2](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf)
## The film's approach
The narrative is episodic and impressionistic, following the chronology of the actual battles without building tension through dramatic manipulation. Pyle serves as the connective tissue, commenting on the action in intermittent voice-over as he moves among the soldiers of Company C: Lieutenant Walker, who rises from lieutenant to captain; Sergeant Warnicki, who searches Italy for a phonograph to play a recording of the son he has never met; and Private Dondaro, who carries a bottle of perfume and dreams of women.[2](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf) • [6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/375/the-story-of-g-i-joe)
Wellman favored long shots over close-ups and group shots over individual portraits. Cinematographer Russell Metty, later known for *Spartacus* (1960), created sharp black-and-white contrasts to highlight the bombed-out bleakness of the North African and Italian scenery. Except for one brief shot of a German prisoner of war, the face of the enemy is never shown, only his planes, bombs, and bullets.[2](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf) The film ends with a death, without music, without credits, and without flag-waving, months before the war in Europe ended.[7](https://rogersmovienation.com/2024/08/24/classic-film-review-the-story-of-g-i-joe-1945-raised-the-bar-on-combat-films-and-launched-mitchum-to-stardom/)
## Reception and legacy
Released after the war in Europe had ended, the film was praised for its "starkly realistic" documentary quality and appeared on the New York Times "ten best" list for 1945.[8](https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/gdc/gdcebookspublic/20/19/66/74/68/2019667468/2019667468.pdf) It received four Academy Award nominations: Best Supporting Actor (Mitchum), Best Screenplay (Atlas, Endore, and Stevenson), Best Original Song (Ann Ronell for "Linda"), and Best Score (Louis Applebaum and Ann Ronell).[9](https://www.firecityillusion.com/the-story-of-gi-joe-enhanced-restoration.html) The Army Journal account records that the film made Robert Mitchum a star and was acclaimed by soldiers and critics alike, with Eisenhower's and Agee's endorsements.[4](https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/sites/default/files/aaj_2000.pdf)
Pyle never saw the finished film. He was killed by machine-gun fire on the Pacific island of Ie Shima on 18 April 1945, two months before the American release.[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE)
**Preservation.** The Academy Film Archive preserved the film in 2000 and restored it in 2009 with support from [The Film Foundation](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-film-foundation); because the original negative was lost, the restoration was pieced together from a 35mm nitrate duplicate negative belonging to rights holder Larry Stern, a nitrate duplicate negative in the BFI collection, and a 16mm duplicate negative, with sound restored at Audio Mechanics.[3](https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/01092024_academy_film_archive_national_film_registry_preserved_films.pdf) The Library of Congress selected the film for the National Film Registry in 2009 as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.[10](https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/) In 2024 Ignite Films issued an enhanced restoration on Blu-ray and DVD, timed to the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, including a reconstruction of the long-lost 1945 nitrate trailer.[9](https://www.firecityillusion.com/the-story-of-gi-joe-enhanced-restoration.html)
Later critics have kept the film in the front rank of combat pictures. David Denby, staff writer at *The New Yorker*, called it probably the grimmest, most poetic, and least cliché-bound of the World War II platoon films, a mix of documentary footage, location shooting, and staged studio pieces with a unified, fatalistic mood.[11](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/13/soldiering-on-david-denby) The Australian Army Journal credits it as the first serious attempt to reflect documentary-style realism in the portrayal of American soldiers in Italy, and notes that within a few years the combat genre bent toward imitating it.[4](https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/sites/default/files/aaj_2000.pdf)
## Note on the release date
The film's release date is disputed. The AFI Catalog and copyright records give 13 July 1945,[1](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE) while Turner Classic Movies states the film "wasn't released until September 1945,"[6](https://www.tcm.com/articles/375/the-story-of-g-i-joe) and a French account places the release in June 1945.[12](https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2011/10/05/lumiere-2011-militaires-et-cinema-heros-et-censeurs_5990297_3476.html) The copyright date of 13 July 1945 is the best-documented figure.
## References
1. [G. I. Joe (1945), AFI Catalog of Feature Films](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/24602-G.-I.-JOE)
2. [Amy Dunkleberger, "The Story of G.I. Joe," National Film Preservation Board, Library of Congress](https://lcweb2.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf)
3. [Academy Film Archive: National Film Registry Preserved Films (G.I. Joe entry)](https://www.oscars.org/sites/oscars/files/01092024_academy_film_archive_national_film_registry_preserved_films.pdf)
4. [Australian Army Journal, Issue 2000 (combat film survey)](https://researchcentre.army.gov.au/sites/default/files/aaj_2000.pdf)
5. [Ernie Pyle, "In the Movies," wartime column, 14 February 1945, Indiana University](https://erniepyle.iu.edu/wartime-columns/in-the-movies.html)
6. [James Steffen, "The Story of G.I. Joe," Turner Classic Movies](https://www.tcm.com/articles/375/the-story-of-g-i-joe)
7. [Roger Moore, "Classic Film Review: 'The Story of G.I. Joe' (1945)," Movie Nation](https://rogersmovienation.com/2024/08/24/classic-film-review-the-story-of-g-i-joe-1945-raised-the-bar-on-combat-films-and-launched-mitchum-to-stardom/)
8. [The Conscience of Cinema (on Joris Ivens and The Story of G.I. Joe), Library of Congress](https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/gdc/gdcebookspublic/20/19/66/74/68/2019667468/2019667468.pdf)
9. [Ignite Films press release, 2024 enhanced restoration of The Story of G.I. Joe](https://www.firecityillusion.com/the-story-of-gi-joe-enhanced-restoration.html)
10. [Complete National Film Registry Listing, Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/complete-national-film-registry-listing/)
11. [David Denby, "Soldiering On," The New Yorker, 13 February 2012](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/02/13/soldiering-on-david-denby)
12. ["Lumière 2011: Militaires et cinéma," Le Monde, 5 October 2011](https://www.lemonde.fr/cinema/article/2011/10/05/lumiere-2011-militaires-et-cinema-heros-et-censeurs_5990297_3476.html)
13. [https://trailersfromhell.com/ernie-pyles-the-story-of-g-i-joe/](https://trailersfromhell.com/ernie-pyles-the-story-of-g-i-joe/)
14. [https://www.nytimes.com/1945/10/14/archives/story-of-gi-joe-whos-to-blame.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1945/10/14/archives/story-of-gi-joe-whos-to-blame.html)
15. [https://history.companyofheroes.com/monte-cassino/the-story-of-gi-joe-monte-cassino-movie/](https://history.companyofheroes.com/monte-cassino/the-story-of-gi-joe-monte-cassino-movie/)
16. [https://variety.com/1944/film/reviews/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1200414426/](https://variety.com/1944/film/reviews/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1200414426/)
17. [https://www.avclub.com/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1945-1798229784](https://www.avclub.com/the-story-of-g-i-joe-1945-1798229784)
18. [https://loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf](https://loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/g_i_joe.pdf)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1934 to 1962*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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