The Gallant Men

The Gallant Men was an hourlong television series that dramatized the exploits of Able Company, 36th Division, Fifth Army, during the Italian campaign in World War II. It aired for a single season (1962-63) on the ABC television network. Twenty-six episodes were produced and aired.

The series was among three set in World War II that ABC ordered for the 1962 fall television season. (The others were drama Combat! and comedy McHale's Navy.)

Principal Characters

Upper row, left to right: Reynolds and McQueeney, Fontaine, Ridgely. Lower row: Slattery, Davis, Gothie and La Starza.

The Gallant Men featured an ensemble cast nominally led by William Reynolds and Robert McQueeney. Many episodes focused on a specific character instead of the whole group. The principal cast included:

• Robert McQueeney as Conley Wright
• William Reynolds as Capt. Jim Benedict
• Robert Ridgely as Lt. Frank Kimbro
• Richard X. Slattery as Sgt. John McKenna
• Eddie Fontaine as PFC Pete D'Angelo
• Roland La Starza as Pvt. Ernie Lucavich
• Robert Gothie as Pvt. Sam Hanson
• Roger Davis as Pvt. Roger Gibson

Wright was based on Ernie Pyle, an American journalist whose newspaper columns about life in combat zones were wildly popular back home. Pyle spent much of his time in Italy with the Army's 34th and 36th Divisions. Though Wright wasn't featured in every episode, most begin and end with his narration, presumably excerpts from his columns.

The character list presents a simplified cross-section of Army organization. For example, while Kimbro is the only lieutenant viewers see, a company captain such as Benedict would have overseen four lieutenants, each in turn in charge of a platoon composed of up to 42 soldiers. Within Kimbro's platoon, viewers typically see only the five principals (McKenna, D'Angelo, Lucavich, Hanson and Gibson), with the roles of other soldiers filled by guest stars, bit players or nonspeaking extras. No commanding officer higher than Maj. Jergens (Robert Fortier) is regularly shown, so Able’s context within the organizational structure of the Fifth Army is unclear. During the Italian campaign, the 36th included three infantry regiments: the 141st, the 142nd and the 143rd. To which regiment Able Company belonged is never explicitly stated.

The Gallant Men also presents a visual fallacy common to World War II films and television shows: actors who are noticeably older than typical soldiers would have been. The characters' ages are never given on-screen, but the actors were in their early to mid-30s when the series was filmed in 1962. The average age of an American combat soldier in World War II was 26. By contrast, Sgt. McKenna is a career Army man and therefore reasonably older than a sergeant who had been drafted or volunteered.

Structure and Format

Each episode follows a typical format: a cold open, three to five acts and an epilogue. Unlike most television series, The Gallant Men did not employ an opening title sequence. The cold open would be followed by a commercial break, and the episode's title was displayed on-screen at the beginning of act one. The cast is listed at the end of each installment, just before the production credits are shown. Voiceover artist Dick Tufeld announced the actors' names and the characters they played, punctuated by a film clip of an artillery shell being fired.

The Gallant Men is not a docudrama, so for the most part the violent and bloody Italian campaign exists as a backdrop for the series. Many major events the real 36th Division encountered (the disastrous attempt to cross the Rapido River, the costly Battle of Monte Cassino, and the landings at Anzio) were not depicted in the series. The plots of Gallant Men episodes tend to feature stories about personal drama, romantic interest, political and social friction, and combat on a small scale.

Beyond the pilot episode, few references are made to real places and events, making a side-by-side comparison of the show's timeline to actual history very difficult. Based on Wright's narration, the series takes place between September 9, 1943, and late spring 1944 (the real 36th Division entered Rome in early June). A press report indicated a prospective second season might have moved the action to France and Germany, which would have paralleled the real 36th Division's deployment in the late summer of 1944.

Creation and Development

Creator William T. Orr.

The series was created by Warner Bros. television executive William T. Orr, who was credited as the show's executive producer. Orr said he hatched the idea of a World War II dramatic series around 1959 or 1960, under the working title Battle Zone. Orr pitched his idea to the three major American TV networks, all of whom declined to commission episodes. Orr persisted, believing there was a market for a war-centric drama. Warner financed a pilot in 1961 on the premise that Orr could sell the show more easily if network programming executives could see a finished episode.

The pilot episode, shot in late 1961 and early 1962, was penned by Halsted Welles, whose credits included the Western film 3:10 to Yuma. Robert Altman was tabbed to direct, and Warner’s Richard Bluel was brought in to handle day-to-day production. Altman and Bluel were given a $170,000 budget (nearly $1.5 million in 2020 dollars). The two studied John Huston's 1945 documentary The Battle of San Pietro to prepare for filming the pilot, which takes place partly in and around San Pietro.

ABC picked up the series under the new title The Gallant Men and added it to the network’s fall 1962 schedule. The deal called for 26 episodes and an option to produce additional episodes in spring 1963.

Series production began in late May 1962. Seven of the principal cast (McQueeney, Reynolds, Slattery, Ridgely, Fontaine, LaStarza and Gothie) underwent basic military training under the tutelage of two veterans of the Italian campaign. The cast practiced terminology, weapons and action sequences. They rehearsed in part on a Warner Bros. outdoor lot marred by trenches and bomb craters.

Ahead of its debut, The Gallant Men was seen within the television industry as a bellwether for future shows set in World War II. If it and Combat! were successful, the logic went, they would open the door to similar shows, much in the same fashion Westerns proliferated in the 1950s and early 1960s. Television ratings analyst James Cornell went further, predicting The Gallant Men would win its Friday-night timeslot.

Warner Bros. wanted to get the U.S. Army's blessing and assistance on the series. The Army assigned Lt. Col. David Sisco, a veteran of the 36th Division who served in the Italian campaign, to serve as technical advisor. However, Sisco was granted the power not just to comment and advise, but to object to storylines and request script alterations that would paint the Army in a positive light.

On the Air

Dell comic book cover.

The Gallant Men debuted Friday night, October 5, 1962. The television environment in the fall of 1962 was a tough one for a freshman show. ABC slotted the series on Friday nights at 7:30 p.m. ET, opposite the popular and long-running CBS Western Rawhide (one of the year's top-25 programs as measured by viewers). Additionally, The Gallant Men followed an hour assigned to local ABC stations, denying it a strong lead-in audience. It was followed at 8:30 p.m. by animated comedy The Flintstones, an odd tonal juxtaposition.

On the strength of the pilot episode, The Gallant Men drew off enough male viewers to partially weaken Rawhide. The success was short-lived; by November and December 1962 the show’s average rating was 17.9 -- meaning nearly one in six television sets in America tuned to The Gallant Men, a hit by modern standards but considered disappointing in the era of limited competition among three major networks.

Though The Gallant Men initially drew respectable critical reviews, ABC's scheduling decisions did the show no favors. When The Roy Rogers Show was cancelled in December 1962, network programmers moved The Gallant Men into its vacated Saturday night timeslot (7:30 p.m. ET). But if it was an effort to juice the show's ratings, it was a bust; the new timeslot was opposite Jackie Gleason. His CBS series was the 17th-most popular show on primetime American television that season, presenting even stiffer competition than Rawhide.

In late February 1963, turmoil at the network and studio level brought the show to a close. ABC announced it would not order any additional first-season episodes, simultaneously closing the door on a second season. The same week, it was announced Warner Bros. television head and Gallant Men creator William T. Orr would be moved out of the department. He was succeeded by Jack Webb of Dragnet fame. Warner re-evaluated its television strategy as networks cooled to the action-adventure format the studio offered.

However, ABC did not pull The Gallant Men from its schedule after the cancellation announcement. The network aired the remainder of produced episodes in their assigned Saturday night slot, ending with "Tommy" on March 30, 1963. Though pre-premiere promotional materials said the series would take viewers “from Salerno to Rome,” The Gallant Men ended with Wright and the men of Able Company in mountainous terrain north of Naples, some 90 miles southeast of Rome.

After Cancellation

A 1964 trade magazine ad promoting The Gallant Men in local syndication.

At the same time The Gallant Men's cancellation was announced, entertainment trade magazine Variety reported Warner Bros. moved quickly to sell some of the scripts it had commissioned but not yet produced to rival WWII drama series Combat! Three of Combat's season two episodes are credited to Gallant Men writers, which may indicate the effort was partially successful. The materials for fourteen more unproduced episodes reside in the Warner Bros. archives at the University of Southern California.

In the spring of 1963 the U.S. Army used clips from The Gallant Men and Combat! as recruiting tools to entice young men to join the service. The Army even developed a slogan around the now-moribund series: "Join the Gallant Men of the U.S. Army."

The Gallant Men also begat a 1963 Dell Gold key comic book and a Louis Marx Company playset. The comic book featured two standalone stories that were not drawn from aired episodes. The playset featured small plastic figures based on Benedict, Wright, McKenna, D'Angelo and Kimbro. The figures came in individual packs or a box set, and were designed to integrate with Marx's iconic "little green Army men" playsets.

By autumn 1963, Warner Bros. sold the 26 completed Gallant Men episodes to local stations as part of its television syndication package. The show ran in markets across the U.S. for at least another five years, and apparently to some degree of success -- one Warner Bros. ad claimed Gallant Men reruns beat first-run primetime network programming in New York City in the fall and winter of 1963-64. The most recently-known airing of the series took place on cable channel AmericanLife TV, from 2005 to 2007.

In 2012, fifty years after the series debuted, Warner Bros. released The Gallant Men on DVD. The complete series is available in the six-disc set.