The one thing that always haunted John Wayne was the fact that he didn’t serve his country during World War II, and what hurt the most was that he spent the rest of his life and career being branded a ‘draft dodger’ as a result. However, it turns out that he did contribute to the military effort in other ways.
It became the easiest way to get under his skin, too, with his mentor, father figure, and close friend, John Ford, repeatedly calling him out on set because of his failure to enlist. And yet, the man he endearingly called ‘Pappy’ was the driving force behind Wayne’s secret intelligence-gathering missions.
Instead of heading to the front lines, Wayne used his star power to headline a succession of flag-waving and jingoistic pictures that stirred up patriotism in the cinemagoing public, with some of Hollywood’s most powerful people insisting that the best use of ‘The Duke’ during the war was as a movie star.
He didn’t enlist, and he filed for a deferment because he was the sole provider for a family of at least four, but it wasn’t as if he showed no interest in active combat. In fact, his deferment was rescinded at one point when the army needed as many men as it could get, only for the studios to intervene and ensure he wasn’t drafted “in support of national interest.”
‘The Duke’ even applied to the Office of Strategic Services in 1943, only to be turned down. For the next three decades, the ‘draft dodger’ tag weighed heavily on his shoulders, which was cruelly ironic when he and his close friend Ward Bond had actually assisted Ford when he was surreptitiously gathering intel ahead of the war under the guise of a lads’ fishing trip.
While the trio would sink beers, smoke cigars, and play cards when they were cavorting around Ford’s yacht, the Araner, they also had ulterior motives. “Some of these fishing trips were secret intelligence missions which myself and Ward Bond found ourselves caught up in, and we were happy to do so,” Wayne told Michael Munn.
“For years, Pappy kept his pre-Second World War naval activities a secret,” he explained. “Which meant that Ward and me also had to keep silent.” The United States Navy confirmed that between 1935 and 1939, the director used the Araner to secretly photograph shipping lane activity along the coasts to see if Japan was making concerted efforts to build a presence near the America/Mexico border.
What went unmentioned was that Wayne was also there on several of these reconnaissance missions, which he wasn’t allowed to talk about. Whenever ‘The Duke’ was blasted as a draft dodger, it stung even more because he knew he’d assisted Ford on pre-war intelligence operations but couldn’t say a word.