Happy Independence Day to TPR’s American Listeners. Here’s a bit of OTR to bring pride to your patriotic hearts.

“And it wasn’t any ordinary guy who kept the Japs back that night. It was one of the most extraordinary guys in the world. You. Al Schmid. Marine.”

Pride of the Marines was based on the true story, originally appearing in Roger Butterfield’s book, of USMC Sergeant Albert “Al” Schmid, who received the Navy Cross for his heroic actions at Guadalcanal and the Purple Heart for injuries he sustained there.

Pride of the Marines is not a war story, though. At least not about battles and battlefield heroics. It’s of an ilk that surfaced, then receded for far too long in mainstream entertainment. . .

If you thought it was only recently that World War II had its darker side examined in popular American culture, you are quite mistaken. It is easy to see how such an impression could be formed, though. While films such as Gregg Toland’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Pride of the Marines, and other films and radio plays showing the extreme toll the War took were released and, in the case of both of the aforementioned films, received well-deserved Academy Awards, this darker side was understandably set aside for a time, in favor of tales of heroism and indomitable spirit, not long afterwards. The exploration of the horrors of World War II was largely left to the novelist until its veterans reached venerability in age as well as heroism.

In 1945 and ‘46, though, boys were still coming home. They and those who greeted them weren’t quite able to put it all behind them just yet, as much as they may have wanted to, and those of us who can only look back now, never really able to understand what they felt, have a few books on our shelves, a few gems of the screen, and a few, no less bright, of the airwaves to help us understand what happened.

The Academy Award Theater, which much like the Lux Radio Theater, featured as TPR’s Old Time Radio release on June 23, 2007, adapted movies for radio shortly after their release and invited the original actors into the studio to perform them, aired its adaptation of Pride of the Marines, starring John Garfield, Eleanor Parker, and Dane Clark, on June 1, 1946.

Al Schmid died of cancer in 1982; he is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Although he lost one eye permanently and, unlike John Garfield in the movie, suffered facial scarring as a result of the grenade shrapnel that blinded him, he did eventually regain partial site in his remaining eye, lived near a Veterans’ hospital in Florida, and, quite proudly, once caught a 130-pound tarpon.

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