Although filmmaker John Huston made the film at the request of the Signal Corps and although the Army Pictorial Service, a division of the U.S. War Department, had it produced, the army confiscated the film when it was about to presented at a private showing at the Museum of Modern Art and subsequently refused to allow the release to any civilian audience. The general public had to wait until 1980, when on special orders of vice-president Walter Mondale the film eventually was allowed to go to the screens.
Huston later said that the Army was afraid of showing the American public its fighting men as emotional wrecks, even though the problem it presented was fairly wide-spread: as the film states at the outset "about 20 percent of all battle casualties in the American Army during World War II were of a neuropsychiatric nature".