Thirty Seconds Over the Caine Mutiny Battleground

Van Johnson, another of my favorite actors, died this past week. When Paul Newman died earlier this year, I dedicated an entire week of posts as an homage, but with Johnson, I'll just due today's post as an homage. He was in a ton of movies, and I always thought him to be a very versatile actor who could hold his own in just about any genre and sharing screentime with legends and holding his own. My most favorite of his roles though were the war movies he did and he did several. Three of my favorites of his were:

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
The Caine Mutiny
Battleground

And all three speak to aspects of the ups and downs we in the Body of Christ face daily.

In Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which was released while World War II still raged in November of 1944, Johnson played an Army pilot of B25 bomber which was part of the famed Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in which Army bombers were launched at sea from US Navy Carriers. The movie is a docudrama of how the men trained and cooperated to get the mission done and how they made it back home after crash landing in Japanese occupied areas of China. The crew of the B25, the entire squadron, the cooperation of Army & Navy, the cooperation of Chinese nationals, and on and on speak directly to how cooperative effort with each person doing their part and each sacrificing something of there own, be it a living space on the ship, or volunteering for hazardous, potentially life-threatening, duty.

In The Caine Mutiny, a fictional drama set in World War II in the Pacific, Johnson plays the XO (second in command) to the Captain of a US Navy minesweeper (the Caine) and actually seizes command of the ship out from under the Captain in a storm after several incidents lead him to believe the Captain is mentally unfit. The finale is Johnson's character's court martial for mutiny, and the verdict (I won't play spoiler here) but it speaks directly to both what an effective team can do under effective leadership, and strategies (both good and bad) for dealing with ineffective leadership in a crisis.

Finally in Battleground, Johnson plays Holley, a member of 101st Airborne Division besieged in Bastogne by the Germans during the Battle of Bastogne. Holley is the resident complainer and comedian of his squad, who resists all efforts to make him out to be a good soldier, all the while being relied upon by his superiors because he is a good soldier (despite the attitude). I have to admit, I modeled much of my attitude in the Marine Corps on him (until I made Sergeant and an attitude adjustment became necessary). Be a go to guy without "acting" or outwardly acknowledging that you are the go to guy. Sometimes we do that within the Body of Christ too, we know we have the spiritual gifts necessary to accomplish something, but we deny them publically as we don't necessarily want the responsibility that goes along with the utilizing of those gifts in ministry. And like the 101 at Bastogne, we are besieged daily by sin, evil, and secular culture and we must rally together to hold our Holy Ground and keep the faith.

So I pay my respects to Van Johnson, a very underrated talent (never once even nominated for an Academy Award, which is just silly) who influenced me through his films. May he rest in peace, and may God bring peace to his family and friends who mourn his loss this week.