Robert Mitchum lobbied for the lead role. However, the real Col. Dean Hess wouldn't hear of a former jailbird portraying him. He personally approved Rock Hudson instead.
Lt. Maples accidentally strafes a truckload of civilian refugees that happened to be near a convoy of North Korean troop trucks. In the real-life incident, it was a fishing junk full of civilian refugees who were near an amphibious assault being made by North Korean landing craft.
Director Douglas Sirk broke his ankle while shooting a scene in March of 1956.Assistant directors John Sherwood and Marshall Green shot some of the Arizona footage. In May of 1956. Sirk was back on the set, working from a wheelchair.
The gold flying helmet with the United Nations emblem that Rock Hudson wears was Dean Hess' real helmet. It was a Navy-issue helmet that Hess scrounged from a Navy pilot who crash-landed at their airfield in Korea (since the Navy pilot was going to be issued a new helmet as a result of the crash-landing). The helmet is now on display at the US Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, OH.
This was the feature playing at the movie theater in Where Is Everybody? (1959), the first episode of the series.