The Purple Heart of wartime propaganda that had a stereotypical portrayal of the Japanese (usually by actors of non-Japanese origin) as sadistic tyrants trying to wrest the secret of their aircraft carrier's location during torture sessions. The 16 air crews did arrive over Japan from the USS Hornet (CV-8). President Franklin D. Roosevelt said the crews came from Shangri-La, a fictional place described in the 1933 novel "Lost Horizon" by British author James Hilton. The USS Shangri-La (CV-38) was commissioned in 1944. "The Purple Heart" was based on the real-life story of eight Doolittle Raiders who were captured from two different crews: Lieutenants
Random Harvest Random Harvest Random Harvest is a novel written by James Hilton, first published in 1941. Like previous Hilton works, including "Lost Horizon" and "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", the novel was immensely popular, placing second on "The New York Times" list of best-selling novels for the year. The novel was successfully adapted into a film of the same name in 1942 under the direction of Mervyn LeRoy. Claudine West, George Froeschel and Arthur Wimperis adapted the novel for the screen, and received an Academy Award nomination for their work. Though the film departs from the novel's narrative in several significant ways, the