![]() ![]() He held his three carriers, Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown (which Yamamoto thought to be out of action after the Coral Sea), and reinforced Midway as best he could with some 100 aircraft,–many of them obsolete. With that knowledge, Admiral Chester Nimitz judged correctly that the main thrust at Midway would be a carrier battle. He did not know that, several weeks earlier, US Navy crypt-analysts had broken the Japanese code and knew in detail the disposition and timing of the attacks. Yamamoto held all the highcards, or so he thought: numerically superior naval forces–including carrier aircraft that were also qualitatively superior, flown by first-class veteran pilots–and surprise. Merrill's Marauders is a fine film, but I'm not sure it was worth Jeff Chandler's life.In the six months following Pearl Harbor, undermanned and ill-equipped US forces in the Pacific suffered a series of humiliating defeats mitigated only by Jimmy Doolittle’s April 18, 1942, raid on targets in the Tokyo area and by the standoff Battle of the Coral Sea in May.īuoyed by a string of easy Victories, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto sold the Japanese high command on his plan to extend Japan’s perimeter by seizing the Midway Islands, our western-most outpost in the Pacific still in American hands, while carrying out a simultaneous diversionary attack on the Aleutians. And he got good support from Claude Akins and Andrew Duggan as well. Warner Brothers provided a trio of their TV cowboys, Ty Hardin, Peter Brown and Will Hutchins in support of Chandler. Stilwell may have been Merrill's commander, but Slim was running the show. ![]() Joseph Stilwell, the American General in China, is played here by John Hoyt. The Commander of the Theater was Lord Louis Mountbatten, but the military genius over all was a very unsung British hero named General William Slim. The bulk of the fighting done in the China-Burma-India Theater was done by British and Commonwealth forces. Merrill's Marauders was a picked group of GIs from the Pacific Theater who were on a volunteer mission to be a part of the retaking of Burma. In fact in a crazy way the pain he was enduring in real life probably helped his performance because Chandler in the film is supposed to be under a physical and mental strain. Too bad he didn't live to see it because as Brigadier General Frank Merrill he gives one of his best screen performances. Maybe under other circumstances, he might have tended to health issues first. Chandler had just finally got free of his Universal contract and had signed a multi-picture deal with Warner Brothers of which Merrill's Marauders was to be the first. When the film wrapped he went for a needed operation and that was botched. With about six weeks of shooting left and not wanting to either run up the cost while on hiatus or having the film shelved altogether, Chandler continued in pain as his back got worse and worse. According to Marilyn Kirk's biography of him, while playing first base he stretched for a throw to his position and pulled his back out. He was injured while participating in a pick up baseball game among the cast and crew. The story of Jeff Chandler's death could almost be the subject of a black comedy. What a terrible tragedy and a terrible waste at the same time. Just as Clark Gable died from the strain of doing those roping scenes with wild horses in The Misfits, Jeff Chandler died because of the work required in the Phillipines location for Merrill's Marauders. ![]()
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