Battle Hymn (film)

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Battle Hymn
Directed by	Douglas Sirk
Produced by	Ross Hunter,
Written by	Vincent B. Evans Charles Grayson
Starring	Rock Hudson, Anna Kashfi, Dan Duryea
Music by	Frank Skinner
Cinematography	Russell Metty
Editing by	Russell F. Schoengarth
Release date(s)	1956
Running time	108 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
IMDb profile

Battle Hymn was a 1956 film starring Rock Hudson, who played Colonel Dean E. Hess, a real-life United States Air Force fighter pilot in the Korean War. Hess wrote an autobiography of the same title which was published concurrent with the release of the film.

In the film, Hess had accidentally dropped a bomb on an orphanage in Germany during World War II, killing 37 orphans; he enters the ministry after this, but at the start of the Korean War, he volunteers to return to the cockpit and is assigned as the senior USAF advisor/Instructor Pilot to the Republic of Korea Air Force, flying F-51D Mustangs. As he and his cadre of USAF instructors train the South Korean pilots, several orphaned war refugees gather at the base, and he solicits the aid of two Korean adults (En Soon Yang, played by Anna Kashfi, and Lun Wa, played by Philip Ahn) and establishes a shelter for the orphans. When the Communists begin an offensive in the area, Hess evacuates the orphans on foot and then later, after much struggle with higher headquarters, obtains an airlift of USAF cargo planes to evacuate them to the island of Cheju where a more permanent orphanage is established.

The gold flying helmet with the United Nations emblem that Rock Hudson wears in the movie was Dean Hess's actual helmet. It was a Navy-issue helmet that Hess scrounged from a Navy pilot who crash-landed at their airfield in Korea (since the Navy pilot was going to be issued a new helmet as a result of the crash-landing). The helmet is now on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio.

Hess actually donated all of his profits from the film and the book to the network of orphanages he helped to establish.

[edit] Differences between the film and actual events

There were significant differences between the film and real-life as recorded in Hess's book. Most prominently, En Soon Yang was approximately 50 years old at the time, and was full blooded Korean (instead of half-Indian as created to match Anna Kashfi's screen image); she was a personal friend of Mr. and Mrs Syngman Rhee, the President and First Lady of the Republic of Korea, and was introduced to Hess by them; and she survived the war and was still alive at the age of 100 in 2000. Hess had already been an ordained minister when he became a fighter pilot in World War II, was not as emotionally affected by the accidental bombing of the German orphanage as depicted, and was recalled to active duty in 1948, two years before the start of the Korean War.

In the film, there was an incident where a pilot named Lieutenant Maples (played by James Edwards) accidentally strafes a truckload of civilian refugees that happened to be near a convoy of North Korean troop trucks. In the real life incident, it was a fishing junk full of civilian refugees that happened to be near an amphibious assault by North Korean landing craft.