The Army Filmed Broken WWII Soldiers, Then Hid It

In the spring of 1945, the U.S. Army sent its most famous filmmaker in uniform — Major John Huston, director of The Maltese Falcon — to Mason General Hospital on Long Island. His orders: film the psychiatric casualties of the Second World War. Seventy-five returning combat veterans, real admission interviews, real hypnosis and narcosynthesis sessions, recorded as they happened. There were no second takes, because there is no second take of a man breaking down. The Army looked at the finished film — "Let There Be Light," its title drawn from the Book of Genesis — and locked it away. When the Museum of Modern Art scheduled a screening in 1946, military police seized the print. The official reason was privacy: the men's release forms had been "lost." The Army never asked for new ones. Instead, in 1948, it released a replacement film called Shades of Gray — the same subject, re-shot with actors, its own title card admitting the real patients had been removed. The film stayed sealed for thirty-five years. It took a Freedom of Information campaign to force its release in December 1980 — the same year post-traumatic stress disorder officially entered the psychiatric diagnostic manual. Huston's cameras had documented it in detail, thirty-five years early. Our new video tells the whole story through the National Archives' preserved reels — the men speak in their own voices, and the Army's replacement film testifies against itself. Sources and footage: NARA ARC 35924 (Let There Be Light, reels 1–6), ARC 24349 (San Pietro), ARC 36102 (Shades of Gray), Report from the Aleutians (1943).