How Acting Legend Eddie Albert Served Our Country in WWII
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, before audiences knew him from Green Acres, Roman Holiday, or The Heartbreak Kid, Eddie Albert had already survived one of the most brutal battles of World War Two. Historian and Our American Stories regular contributor, Roger McGrath, shares the story of the young actor who paused his rising Hollywood career, joined the Navy, and found himself piloting a landing craft at Tarawa, where thousands of Marines were killed or wounded in only a few days.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.0 | And we return to our American stories. |
| 0:17.7 | And now it's time for another Hollywood Goes to War story from Roger McGrath. |
| 0:23.1 | Eddie Albert played a sadistic prison warden in 1974 as The Longest Yard, starring Bert Reynolds. |
| 0:29.6 | Roger McGrath is the author of Gunfighters, Hollywoodman, and Vigilantees, Violence on the Frontier, |
| 0:34.5 | a U.S. Marine and former history professor at UCLA, Dr. McGrath has appeared |
| 0:39.3 | on numerous history channel documentaries, and he's a regular contributor for us here at Our American |
| 0:44.5 | Stories. Here's McGrath with the story of Eddie Albert. |
| 1:06.8 | Eddie Albert is probably best remembered for starring in the television series Green Acres, which aired from 1965 through 1971. |
| 1:13.5 | In this series, he plays a New York City attorney who escapes the frenetic life of the metropolis to live the life of a gentleman farmer near the town of Hooterville. |
| 1:18.5 | He and his glamorous Hungarian wife, played by Ava Gabor, are the proverbial fish out of water, |
| 1:25.5 | trying to adjust to their new life on the farm and their new down-home |
| 1:29.1 | friends. Long before the highly popular green acres, though, Albert appeared in movies, |
| 1:38.0 | beginning with Brother Rat in 1938. All together, he appeared in more than 80 movies, both as a leading man and as a supporting actor, and was twice nominated for an Oscar. |
| 1:51.0 | While Eddie Albert was a highly recognizable actor to generations of movie and television fans, his World War II service in the Battle of Tarawa is largely unknown. |
| 2:03.6 | Eddie Albert is born Edward Albert Heimberger in Rock Island, Illinois in 196. |
| 2:13.6 | His father is Frank Heimberger, and his mother is Julia Jones. |
| 2:19.2 | He is the first of five children. |
| 2:21.8 | His paternal grandparents are German immigrants. |
| 2:25.1 | His mother's parents are immigrants from Wales and from Germany. |
| 2:29.5 | The family moves to Minneapolis when Eddie is one. |
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