Trivia

The trial, as depicted in the film, was held at police headquarters in Shanghai, China, on 14 October 1942. The 8 men were condemned to death. Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz were executed by a Japanese army firing squad at sunset the next day. The remainder were given an Imperial commutation to life in prison. In 1943 Meder died from mistreatment and a variety of diseases he contracted because of it. The remaining four survived and were freed upon Japan's surrender in August 1945.

This film is based on the true story of eight crewmen of a US bomber that took part in the "Doolittle Raid" on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. The crewmen were Lt. Robert Hite, Lt. William G. Farrow, Lt. George Barr, Sgt. Harold A. Spatz, Cpl. Jacob De Shazer, Cpl. Dean Hallmark, Cpl. Robert Meder and Cpl. Chase Nielsen.

According to the article "Hollywood's Friends and Foes" by Colin Shindler in "The Movie", in 1943 "20th Century-Fox made 'The Purple Heart', best of the anti-Japanese pictures. Written and produced by 'Darryl. F. Zanuck' . . . it was intended to strengthen public hatred of the Japanese at a time when it appeared as if the war in Europe were stealing all the headlines. The film was not released until 1944 when the [US] War Department was prepared to concede officially that the Japanese had indeed been torturing American POWS. Zanuck would have been quite prepared to wait until the end of the war to release his picture, so strongly did he feel about it."

Many of the actors playing Japanese characters were not Japanese. According to the documentary Going Hollywood: The War Years (1988), many Japanese characters in films of the World War II period were played by Chinese actors. This was because 112,000 Japanese-Americans, who had lived in the US for years, were transferred to relocation centers and stripped of their property.

According to the book 'The Films of World War II" by Joe Morella, Edward Z. Epstein and John Griggs (1973), this film was "released shortly after the [US] government's publication of reports of Japanese torture of American prisoners of war" and as such its original cinema release "was extremely timely and moving."