Capra produced this film as a follow-up to the Why We Fight series. At the time it came out it was regarded very highly. Capra was most fastidious about avoiding cliches about black people that had dogged most Hollywood product from the beginning. Like the Why We Fight pictures, this one was intended initially just for service members but was soon released to the general public, where both black and white audiences received it very positively.
In World War II American Black soldiers were still segregated in the armed forces, and would be until the Truman administration. As critic James Agee put it at the time it was made, “To many people the screen presentation of the Negro as something other than a clown, a burnt-cork Job, or a plain imbecile, will be more startling and more instructive than we are likely to imagine.”