Twelve O'Clock High - Production

Production

According to their files, Twentieth-Century Fox paid "$100,000 outright for the book plus up to $100,000 more in escalator and book club clauses." Darryl Zanuck was apparently convinced to pay this high price when he heard that William Wyler was interested in purchasing it for Paramount. Even then, Zanuck only went through with the deal in October 1947 when he was certain that the United States Air Force would support the production.

Twelve O'Clock High was indeed produced with the full cooperation of the Air Force and made use of actual combat footage during the battle scenes, including some shot by the Luftwaffe. A good deal of the production was filmed on Eglin Air Force Base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

Screenwriters Bartlett and Lay drew on their own wartime experiences with Eighth Air Force bomber units. At the Eighth Air Force headquarters, Bartlett had worked closely with Colonel Armstrong, who was the primary model for the character General Savage. The film's 918th Bomber Group was modeled primarily on the 306th because that group remained a significant part of the Eighth Air Force throughout the war in Europe.

Veterans of the heavy bomber campaign frequently cite Twelve O'Clock High as the only Hollywood film that accurately captured their combat experiences. Along with the 1948 film Command Decision, it marked a turning away from the optimistic, morale-boosting style of wartime films and toward a grittier realism that deals more directly with the human costs of war. Both films deal with the realities of daylight precision bombing without fighter escort, the basic Army Air Forces doctrine at the start of World War II (prior to the arrival of long range Allied fighter aircraft like the P-51 Mustang). As producers, writers Lay and Bartlett re-used major plot elements of Twelve O'Clock High in Toward the Unknown and A Gathering of Eagles, respectively.

Paul Mantz, Hollywood's leading stunt pilot, was paid the then-unprecedented sum of $4,500 to crash-land a B-17 bomber for one early scene in the film. Frank Tallman, Mantz' partner in Tallmantz Aviation, wrote in his autobiography that, while many B-17s had been landed by one pilot, as far as he knew this flight was the first time that a B-17 ever took off with only one pilot and no other crew; nobody was sure that it could be done.“

Locations for creating the bomber airfield at RAF Archbury were scouted by director Henry King, flying his own private aircraft some 16,000 miles in February and March 1949. King visited Eglin Air Force Base on March 8, 1949, and found an ideal location for principal photography at its Auxiliary Field No. 3, better known as Duke Field, where the mock installation with 15 buildings, including a World War II control tower, were constructed to simulate RAF Archbury. The film's technical advisor, Colonel John deRussy, was stationed at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, and suggested Ozark Army Air Field near Daleville, Alabama (now known as Cairns Army Airfield, adjacent to Fort Rucker). King chose Cairns as the location for filming B-17 takeoffs and landings, including the spectacular B-17 belly-landing sequence early in the film, since the light-colored runways at Eglin did not match wartime runways in England which had been black to make them less visible to enemy aircraft. When the crew arrived at Cairns, it was also considered as an "ideal for shots of Harvey Stovall reminiscing about his World War II service" since the field was overgrown.

Additional background photography was shot at RAF Barford St John, a satellite station of RAF Croughton in (Oxfordshire, England, UK). The runways and perimeter tracks at Barford St Johns are still in existence. Officially the airfield is in Ministry of Defence ownership following its closure in the late 1990s as a Communications Station linked to RAF Upper Heyford. Other locations around Fort Walton also served as secondary locations for filming. The crew used 12 B-17s for filming which were pulled from drones used at Eglin and from depot locations in Alabama & New Mexico. Since some of the aircraft were used in the 1946 Bikini atomic experiments, they could only be used for shooting for limited periods.

Twelve O'Clock High was in production from late April to early July 1949. Although originally planned to be shot in Technicolor, it was instead shot in black and white, allowing (as is noted in the main title sequence) all aerial footage to have been shot in actual combat by Allied and Luftwaffe cameras.