[The following takes place in the United States Navy in 1941.]
Halsey had been less than pleased earlier, in the spring of 1941, when his flagship had been tagged to assist with a new Warner Bros. film. The high-budget movie Dive Bomber was filmed at San Diego and Los Angeles with carrier footage captured on board Enterprise. The stars were Errol Flynn – a glamorous leading man known for his roles in such films as The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood - and Fred MacMurray, one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. Cameramen spent a week filming flight operations on the Big E.
On the day shooting wrapped, a cranky Halsey yelled down to the film crews and the Hollywood actors to “get the hell off my ship!” In spite of the admiral’s annoyance at the interruptions caused by the moviemakers, the Technicolor drama about Navy dive-bomber pilots would be inspirational to many fledgling aviators. Among those who watched Dive Bomber in late 1941 was one Ensign Eldor Rodenburg. Fresh from earning his Navy pilot wings at Opa-locka NAS (Naval Air Station) in Miami on October 20, 1941, Rodenburg took his future wife to see the movie. Little could he expect that in a matter of months he would be just like Flynn – flying Navy dive-bombers and doing it from none other than the Enterprise itself.
Source
Moore, Stephen L. “We Would Have One Helluva Celebration.” Pacific Payback: The Carrier Aviators Who Avenged Pearl Harbor at the Battle of Midway. NAL Caliber, 2014. 10, 11. Print.
Original Source Listed:
Tillman, Barrett. Enterprise: America’s Fightingest Ship and the Men Who Helped Win World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012, 25.
Further Reading:
Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey Jr., KBE
Dive Bomber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dive_Bomber_(film)
USS Enterprise (CV-6) / “The Big E”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(CV-6)
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