Combat!

Combat! is an American television drama series that originally aired on ABC from 1962 until 1967. The exclamation point in Combat! was depicted on-screen as a stylized bayonet. The show covered the grim lives of a squad of American soldiers fighting the Germans in France during World War II. The first-season episode "A Day in June" shows D-Day as a flashback, hence the action occurs during and after June 1944. The program starred Rick Jason as platoon leader Second Lieutenant Gil Hanley and Vic Morrow as Sergeant "Chip" Saunders. Jason and Morrow would play the lead in alternating episodes in Combat!.

Development

Creator Robert Pirosh's early career in film was defined mainly by comedy films. After his service in World War II, his focus changed to telling the stories of lower-rank soldiers. He won an Academy Award for his 1949 screenplay Battleground, and directed 1951's Go for Broke! Both were noted for their realistic depictions of war, accuracy and portraying soldiers grappling with human vulnerabilities and ethical dilemmas. Those factors were central to Pirosh when, in 1961, he approached producer Selig Seligman with an idea for a television series. His proposal for an hour-long drama, called Men in Combat, would follow a small squad of enlisted men from their arrival in mainland Europe on D-Day to the liberation of Paris. Seligman's Selmur Productions was intrigued, and parent network ABC ordered a pilot.

Pirosh's pilot, "A Day in June", was shot over six days in December 1961. One day was spent shooting on location at Trancas Beach in Malibu, which stood in for Omaha Beach.

Series leads Rick Jason and Vic Morrow were unimpressed by Pirosh's pilot, and Morrow pondered quitting the show, fearing it would damage his career. The network committed to a thirty-episode season, and said Combat! would be complemented by another World War II drama scheduled for Friday nights, called The Gallant Men, where Altman had directed the pilot episode.

Production

thumb|Rick Jason (left) and Vic Morrow in a first-season episode

The series went into production on June 2, 1962 Episodes typically took six days to film, with a mix of soundstage shooting and heavy use of the MGM backlot for outdoor scenes. However, many scenes shot in the Hollywood Hills with parched grasses, eucalyptus trees and sandy soils were clearly unlike northern Europe, especially obvious in the color episodes. The first series opened with "Forgotten Front," telecast at 7:30 p.m. ET on Tuesday, October 2, 1962. Though it was the first to be broadcast, "Forgotten Front" was sixth in production order. The pilot, "A Day in June," would air as the eleventh episode, in December.

Jason said of the working conditions, "In the first year of the show, Vic and I were given dressing room suites in a building that hadn't been renovated in twenty-five years. We also had no dressing rooms on the outdoor sets (we were thankful just to have chairs). Vic went on strike the beginning of the second year and things got much better."

Broadcast history

Combat! premiered on ABC on October 2, 1962, and was broadcast for five seasons to become TV's longest-running World War II drama. In total Combat! aired 152 hour-long episodes. The first 127 episodes, spanning four seasons, were produced in black and white. The fifth and final season produced 25 color episodes. The show was developed by Robert Pirosh, who wrote the pilot episode.

Cast

{| class="wikitable"

! Character !! Season 1 !! Season 2 !! Season 3 !! Season 4 !! Season 5

| 2nd Lt. Gil Hanley || colspan="5"| Rick Jason

| Sgt. "Chip" Saunders || colspan="5"| Vic Morrow

| PFC Paul "Caje" LeMay || colspan="5"| Pierre Jalbert

| Pvt./PFC William G. Kirby || colspan="5"| Jack Hogan

| PFC "Littlejohn" || colspan="5"| Dick Peabody

| PFC "Doc" Walton || Steven Rogers || colspan="4"|

| PFC "Doc" || colspan="1"| || colspan="4"| Conlan Carter

| Pvt. Billy Nelson || colspan="2"| Tom Lowell || colspan="3"|

| Pvt. Braddock || Shecky Greene || colspan="4"|

| Pvt. McCall || colspan="4"| || William Bryant

Recurring Characters: Season 1 only (except Davis who appeared twice in Season 2)

Fletcher Fist as Cpl./Pvt. Brockmeyer 7 episodes
Joby Baker as Pvt. Kelly 3 episodes (killed in third)
John Considine as Pvt. Wayne Temple Jr. 2 episodes (killed in second)
Arnold Meritt as Pvt. Jerome Crown 3 episodes
Dennis Robertson as Pvt. Albert Baker 7 episodes
William Harlow as Pvt. Davis 5 episodes
Robert Fortier as Capt. Jampel 3 episodes

Prior to portraying Pvt. McCall, William Bryant made three guest appearances throughout the first four seasons. Throughout the whole series, however, Paul Busch portrayed multiple characters, the majority of them being German. Conlan Carter (a newcomer) was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in 1964 for his portrayal of PFC "Doc".

Guest cast

thumb|Sal Mineo and Vic Morrow in a 1965 episode

The majority of the guest stars appeared as additional squad members, French citizens or German soldiers. In the first season, the then little-known Ted Knight and Frank Gorshin made appearances. Other notable guest stars included:

Directors

Directors for the series were: "We did everything from crawling under barbed wire with live .50 calibre machine bullets whizzing over our heads, to swinging across a muddy pond on a rope, to pulling the pin on a live grenade and throwing it properly, to running an obstacle course," Jason later wrote. "It was much more than I’d had to do in [World War II] for my real basic training in the Air Corps."

Morrow noted that the instructors who worked with the cast at Fort Ord had one common request: not to act like John Wayne. "Poor John," Morrow told a reporter. "I wonder if he knows he's almost a dirty word in the Army."

thumb|Rick Jason and [[Luise Rainer in 1965]]

Wesley Britton, son of a World War II veteran, wrote:

In 1997, TV Guide ranked the episode "Survival" #74 on its list of the 100 Greatest Episodes.

Original tie-in novels

Over the course of the series run, Lancer Books released three original paperback novels based on it by Harold Calin, a genre novelist who was concurrently building a catalog as one of the publisher's mainstay authors of World War II novels. The titles are Combat! (1963), Combat!: Men Not Heroes (1963) and Combat!: No Rest for Heroes (1965). The books represent their author's adaptive "take" on the TV series—a kind of "alternate storytelling universe" that was similar, if not exact—rather than strictly adhering to canonistic details and continuity. It's likely that Calin got the tie-in commission from Lancer before the series aired, and had to produce the first book to hit the stands shortly after the show debuted; thus he may have had little more to go on than some publicity material and/or a pilot script (and the series would change significantly from the pilot) and/or a show bible, and had to make best guesses without the opportunity to see an actual episode. In that pre-VCR era, even actual episodes would only have been available to him as they aired, with no way to preserve them for reference. And in that circumstance, a number of tie-in writers would likewise create similarly "approximate" novels, whose follow-ups might remain consistent to their own internal continuity.

Interestingly, an original novel that more accurately presents the series' tone and characters—whose author had clearly had time to absorb a number of aired episodes before writing—is one that was crafted for younger readers: Combat!: The Counterattack by Franklin M. Davis Jr. (1964, Whitman Publishing, pulp pages, laminated cardboard hardcover), who himself had a long and distinguished military career and thereafter became an author of war novels and thrillers.

Other media

Coloring books, board and video games, and home media inspired by the show include:

In 1963, Saalfield Publishing published a 144-page coloring book based on the television show. A second coloring book was published the following year, featuring a different cover.

In 1963, the Ideal Toy Company released a board game whose cover featured images of Lt. Hanley and Sgt. Saunders along with the show's logo. However, the game itself had nothing to do with the series; it was a World War II strategy game for two players, each controlling six soldiers. The game had two basic benchmarks for victory: capture the opposing headquarters, or capture all of the other player’s soldiers.

The Super Famicom game, Sgt. Saunders' Combat!, was based on the television show and released only in Japan. It allowed players to re-enact crucial World War II battles in Western Europe and North Africa. The names of fictional officers in addition to real-world officers (i.e., Karl Bülowius, Joachim Peiper, and Anthony McAuliffe) are used in order to maintain a sense of historical accuracy.
In the 1990s, A film version of the show was attempted by Savoy Pictures, and later went into development by Todman/Simon Productions for Paramount Pictures, a script was penned by Bill Wisher, and Bruce Willis was in talks to star in the film, with Walter Hill slated to direct, but nothing came to fruition.
Image Entertainment has released the entire series on DVD (Region 1). They released each season in two-volume sets in 2004 and 2005. However, all episodes are the time-compressed versions that were distributed by Worldvision Enterprises for syndication; each comes in at 46 to 47 minutes, instead of the original runtime, which was 50 to 51 minutes.
On October 9, 2012, Image Entertainment released a five-DVD collection of 20 episodes called Combat! – 50th Anniversary Fan Favorites.
On November 12, 2013, Image released Combat! – The Complete Series, a 40-disc set that features all 152 episodes of the series.

References

Bibliography

Davidsmeyer, J. (1996, 2008) Combat! A Viewer's Companion to the Classic WWII TV Series. Strange New Worlds: Sarasota, Florida. ()