Harold Russell was a Canadian expatriate in his early 30s living in Cambridge, Massachusetts working at a food market in the years before WW2. But when he heard President Franklin D. Roosevelt give his famous "Day of Infamy" speech, Russell joined the Army the very next day. "I made a rush to the recruiting office," Russell explained in his 1949 autobiography Victory in My Hands, "not out of patriotism but because I thought of myself a failure." He served as a Sergeant before becoming an instructor in parachuting and explosives. Russell had been training troops at Camp MacKall in North Carolina on June 6, 1944 when a supposedly defective TNT fuse went off in his bare hands, resulting in the amputation of both of his arms below the elbow.
Russell immediately went into a deep depression during his stay at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland not opting for the initial limb replacement the doctors suggested. "I don't need to be beautiful," Russell insisted until discovering mechanical hooks, or what he would call "scary hooks," in a medical film and had mastered the prosthetics in 6 weeks. It was his mastery that got his Army Superiors impressed enough to cast him in a training film called "Diary of a Sergeant" (1945) which William Wyler had seen and immediately offered him the role of Homer Parrish in a film adaptation of McKinlay Kantor's novella "Glory For Me."
Russell rejected the role multiple times until giving in.
Homer Parrish, a petty officer in the Navy, comes back to Boone City after World War 2 ends along with two other men (Frederic March and Dana Andrews). He had lost his hands from burns attained when his ship was sunk and uses mechanical hooks to great success. But now back in America, Parrish returns to his fiance and next-door neighbor, Wilma, and eventually pushes her away not wanting to burden her with his handicap despite her protestations.
Variety considered Russell "inspired casting [...]."Bosley Crowther of The New York Times describes Russell's portrayal as "incredibly fine" and "has responded to the tactful and restrained direction of Mr. Wyler in a most sensitive style."
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