Fort Worth, Texas – When Army Air Forces Col. James M. Stewart returned to Hollywood following his decorated service as a B-24 Liberator bomber pilot in World War II, he seemed to put the war behind him, saying little about his experiences to the public and even to his own family.
But a journal found by his bedside after his death in 1997 sheds fresh light on the pain, complexity and even humor of his time in uniform. In an interview with Military Times this month ahead of the release of Jimmy, a new biopic about the It’s a Wonderful Life actor, his daughter Kelly Stewart Harcourt described the journal — and why she’s determined to keep it a private family treasure.
Harcourt, one of identical twin daughters Stewart had with his wife Gloria, described the journal as beginning before he deployed overseas in 1943 to England’s RAF Tibenham airfield to command the 703rd Bomb Squadron. It ended, she said, “almost mid-sentence” when the war came to a close. The journal, she said, had corrections made to entries, as if he was editing it for publication. Why he never moved to make it public remains a mystery.
In the journal, she said, he grappled with the added difficulty of being a public face — an Academy Award-winning actor — alongside being a serious and dedicated service member.
The journal “talked about his difficulty joining up and being followed by the press,” Harcourt said. “You know, at one point he says, ‘I feel like I’m an actor pretending to be a soldier.’ So he really wanted to shake the attention away from his movie life and just wanted to do the job of serving in the military. And then the effect the war had on him was pretty amazing and kind of devastating to read.”
While Stewart received a draft notice in 1940, he was initially rejected for being underweight. He worked on gaining weight and returned as an enlistee, entering the Army Air Corps as a private. With prior experience as a civilian pilot with a commercial license, he was able to obtain a commission, earning his pilot wings and serving as a flight instructor before ultimately deploying to support combat in World War II.
While overseas, he’d earn two Distinguished Flying Crosses, four Air Medals and the French Croix de Guerre with palm, flying 20 combat missions over Europe. On one bombing mission alone, Stewart lost 130 of his men, according to logbooks from the war.
Harcourt described an entry Stewart added to the journal after he’d been pulled off bomber missions and placed in a more supervisory role in England. The actor wrote, she said, about a catastrophic mission in which many crew members failed to return, and the crews who did wept with grief. But the next day, after a successful mission with no losses, he marveled to see the men laughing and celebrating.
He said, “‘It may seem strange after all those men who died yesterday, and tonight we’re laughing and singing. But I guess that’s the way things are in this dirty, lousy, stinking war,’” Harcourt recounted. “It was this really of-the-moment emotion that comes out of that diary.”
Certain moments that Stewart wrote about in his diary appear in the new film, Harcourt said, including a Hollywood going-away party in which the most popular actresses of the day kissed a handkerchief for him as a keepsake.
Harcourt said she tried to let Stewart’s story be told in a movie while declining to make it fully public, guided by what she thought her father would have wanted.
“I can’t ask Dad’s permission,” she said of publishing his raw perspectives on war.
Stewart would remain in the reserves of what would eventually become the Air Force following World War II, rising to the rank of brigadier general and even completing flights as an observer on a B-52 Stratofortress bomber during an Arc Light mission over Vietnam. He retired in 1968 after 27 years of service.
The film Jimmy is playing in theaters now.
