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What the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High still tells us about air combat
- wazoox 8y agoReminds me this passage of "The name above the title", Frank Capra's autobiography (a great book everyone should read): I was coming downstairs from Admiral "Bull" Halsey's office. I would have to pass right by Admiral Nimitz. Was he waiting for me? Would be renege on the all-important Special Film Coverage directive I had written for him, and he had signed? Had MacArthur nixed the order to integrate all combat photography? Had the Air Force? The Marines? I hesitated, then saluted, and walked by him. "Oh, Capra! Can you spare a moment?" I went limp. "Of course, Admiral." Behind his desk, his back to me he faced a window that looked out over our sunken warships. "Sit down, please," he said, huskily. "I apologize for calling you in here. It"s just this --this --goddam sonofabitch of a war!". His hands clasped and unclasped behind him as he rocked slowly back and forth on his heels. Then, out of the depths of an overwhelming hurt, he cried out: "They cheered me... Three thousand of them... Eighteen-year-olds... Legs gone, faces gone... They cheered me... I sent them there .... They cheered me....". Then he turned, sat heavily on his chair, and with tears streaming down his face, he beat the table with both fists: "GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! What am I going to write to their parents? What can anybody write to their parents?..." He grabbed his wet face in both his hands. He was sobbing now. A father weeping for all the sons in the world. "Eighteen-year-olds... kids... boys... three thousand of them... They cheered me... I sent them there... they cheered me... GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! goddam sonofa--" His handkerchief was out now. Not once had he looked at me, directly. I sat as if transfixed. Tears had started down my cheeks. The white-thatched adminral blew his nose, composed himself, then looking at me with a shy little smile, he said pleasantly: "Thank you, Capra, Thank you." He had wanted to share his great pain with another human being -- someone that was not Navy. I rose to my feet, try to mumble something. I couldn't. So I smiled back and walked out. I had witnessed something rare. Something awesome -- the inside of a tormented human soul.
- kposehn 8y agoI wanted to buy this on kindle immediately - and can’t. Argh! What an amazing passage. Thanks for sharing.
- gadders 8y agoIt was worth me submitting this article, just so everyone could read that comment.
- incomplete 8y agocouldn't agree more.
- robodale 8y agoThanks for sharing that. Powerful stuff.
- harrumph 8y ago>Had the Air Force? There was no Air Force in WW2. This is probably an editing error, Capra or biographer likely referring to the USAAF (Army Air Force). Pedantry Officer concludes report.
- jki275 8y agoThere was absolutely an air force, it simply wasn't a separate branch of the service as it hadn't been broken out of the Army yet. Everybody knew what the air force was, it's probably an accurate quote.
- maire 8y agoThe USAAF split into a separate military service after the war, but it was still considered a separate unit within the army during the war. My father was in the Army Air Force during WWII - and he always said he was in the Army Air Force and not the Army. They were also nick named the Air Corps during the war.
- JBlue42 8y agoIf you're interested in WWII and film history, I recommend "Five Came Back" by Mark Harris. "In Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris turned the story of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 into a landmark work of cultural history, a book about the transformation of an art form and the larger social shift it signified. In Five Came Back, he achieves something larger and even more remarkable, giving us the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed Hollywood, through the prism of five film directors caught up in the war: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114047-five-came-back https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114047-five-came-back Also made into an excellent, 3-part documentary: https://instantwatcher.com/title/80060406 https://instantwatcher.com/title/80060406
- pjc50 8y agoIt's a nice meditative film review, and a piece of history; but what does it actually tell us about air combat? It tells us that WW2 strategic bombing suffered appalling losses, and that this left the survivors with what we would now call PTSD. Also the lesson of Catch-22.
- drmpeg 8y agoExcellent video describing why losses were so high. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoI think that video over emphasizes technical side of things and under-emphasizes that everyone was flying by the seat of their pants. Literally nobody on earth had experience in strategic bombing, it didn't even exist until then. The tactics had to be figured out as they went along.
- jarvist 8y agoContemporary accounts suggest that it was an almost intentional ignorance. People were addicted to the idea that heavy-bombers were strategically useful in Europe (when they just flattened civilian parts of cities, all the manufacturing was hardened); and that valiant gunners were doing something useful for their comrades (when data showed that stripping out the turrets + guns + gunners, and flying higher and faster would decrease losses). Freeman Dyson complains that operational-research was intentionally nobbled in bomber-command, even after great successes had been shown in the navy + coastal command: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBBI8Wnrfk&index=38&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBBI8Wnrfk&index=38&list=PL...
- ansible 8y agoAnd the technology just wasn't up to snuff either. The Norden bombsight was a technological marvel. An analog computer to figure out when to drop bombs based on speed, height, wind direction, etc. It worked fine in optimal conditions. But during wartime it wasn't that accurate in practice.
- magicbuzz 8y agoI haven’t seem the film, but I will try to find it. It’s good that some historical remnant - the control tower -remains. In NE Australia, there were a huge number of airfields that many hundreds of B-25s and other aircraft flew out from on missions to distant Pacific islands and back again. There is almost nothing remaining of that history as landing strips became roads or crops were grown over them.
- m0nty 8y agoIt's rare that these airfields have survived in the UK. Beaulieu Heath was an important airfield in WW2, but now it's almost invisible from the ground. Google Maps shows its layout quite clearly still: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8056961,-1.5015827,1429m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8056961,-1.5015827,1429m/dat... Worse perhaps is we're graudally losing that sense of history, of courage and sacrifice. I wouldn't want to be jingoistic about it, but I think people are unaware of what the wartime generations went through.
- jabl 8y ago> Worse perhaps is we're graudally losing that sense of history, of courage and sacrifice. I wouldn't want to be jingoistic about it, but I think people are unaware of what the wartime generations went through. While it pains me as a ww2 buff to say this, I do think that as a society we have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with WW2. And, it's not like it ever made sense to turn East Anglia into some kind of WW2 air war museum. After the war, people wanted their farmlands back, and wanted to continue their lives, and they had every right to do that.
- KineticLensman 8y agoOne clue to the existence of old airbases (at least in the UK) is in the names of the new streets that have been built over or near them. For example this map of Christchurch [0] is centred on 'The Runway', and street names reference the following WW2-era aircraft: Brabazon, Halifax, De Havilland, Viscount and Blenheim. Similarly, this map [1] of St Ives has streets that include Comet, Wellington, Blenheim, Canberra, Lancaster and others [0] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.7378007,-1.7376243,16.5z?hl=en-GB https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.7378007,-1.7376243,16.5z?h... [1] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Comet+Way,+Saint+Ives+PE27+3UX/@52.3406011,-0.0805388,17z https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Comet+Way,+Saint+Ives+PE...
- g051051 8y agoWhen I was in the Navy, they showed us that film as part of leadership training. Our instructors said the portrayal of discipline, leadership, and the burdens of command was perfect. Except for the very end, which they felt was a bad Hollywood ending.
- SaintGhurka 8y agoI saw it in leadership training course in the California Conservation Corps. I imagine it was inserted into the curriculum by a former military officer or NCO.
- slededit 8y agoNaturally they wouldn't want it seem like it was OK for commanders to "lose it".
- g051051 8y agoIt wasn't that he "lost it", just they way he did.
- slededit 8y agoAh the style of the time was heavy dramatics. A holdover from the stage where you needed exaggerated expression to make up for the distance of the audience. Still I didn’t find it nearly as bad as other examples from that era. “A Street Car Named Desire” for example takes it to another level.
- cafard 8y agoI saw a copy of the novel at a used book sale this month, and was interested to find that one of the authors was Beirne Lay, Jr., whose piece on the Regensburg raid appears in a Library of America volume on reporting WW II. I'm not sure why I didn't put down my 50 cents when I saw it--the next day it was gone.
- rkachowski 8y agoI've read the article, but I can't seem to answer the question "what does the film still tell us about air combat?". It seems to be more of a history of the movie's production and the people involved.
- hw_penfold 8y agoWell, the air combat of that period represents an odd microcosm of behaviors never to be repeated again, by another human civilization. Even if we wanted to fight another war the same way, it wouldn't make sense to even try it. The trajectory of technology, and the circumstances leading to the qualities of the arms race and adaptive conflict within the period, means it was it's own little golden era of truly curious nightmares. Riding a piston engine, in an uncompressed cabin, all the way to the stratosphere, all with the intent of using optical telescopes in good weather, so that you can drop kilotons of dumb bombs blessed with prayers that might guide them to a decisive target nestled among civilians? To learn from that is to arrive at the understanding that the pace of technology must be permitted to trend with a civilization's capacity for its rational utilization. Moving the progressive sequential improvement of technology at speeds faster than the sophistication of those that might benefit from it can produce a malignancy that backfires, to the harm of all those it could possibly (or even impossibly, in a hypothetical sense) touch.
- incomplete 8y agoww2 buff here... whilst relatively accurate, this movie in no way explains why and how the daylight (and night) bombing campaigns over germany almost failed. i would strongly recommend watching this talk by steven blank @ the computer history museum: "the secret history of the silicon valley". the talk even OPENS with clips from 12 o'clock high! :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo TL;DR: it was radar.
- Balgair 8y agoHey, as an WW2 buff, do you where I can get a list of ALL the bomber nicknames (Picadilly Lilly, Memphis Belle, etc)? I'm trying to train a neural net on them for generation of new 'authentic' nicknames.
- ggm 8y agoRobert Buderi's book on radar is a good read on that. Alas, not electronically available (it should be) but worth seeking in print.
- jloughry 8y agoTwelve O'Clock High is a masterclass on running a software project. The higher-ups can see that something is wrong with the team; it's not performing as well as it ought to. The outsider comes in, figures out what the problems are, and fixes them. Not an easy fix, not a quick one, and it takes an awful toll on several people. But the team ends up working well again. I show this movie to everyone I can. It's full of lessons.
- Animats 8y agoNo, it's not. Pushing people that hard to finish some ad-supported web site / delivery service is not appropriate. Are you prepared to pay lifetime PTSD benefits? Which is why we need unions.
- jloughry 8y agoYou're right. Those people weren't working on a software project; they were in a fight for their lives—literally—with an enemy they just barely won against. It's not the same thing at all. But it is worth watching for the depiction of how hard humans can work, together, for a common objective when the ONLY thing that matters is getting through. I can't think of a single major character not damaged, broken, or killed by the end of the movie. I guess it resonated because that's the only kind of environment I've ever worked in. Yay, Lockheed.
- programd 8y agoAnybody interested in an excellent history of the WW II European bombing campaigns should pick up “Bomber Command” by Max Hastings. I covers everything from technology, to strategy, to ethics, and more. Top notch history book. https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-Classics/dp/0760345201 https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-Classi...
- ggm 8y agoHastings is somewhat partisan on this. I recommend reading him but read others too. Like Solly Zuckerman 'from apes to warlords' or the recent books on P.M.S. Blackett and the birth of Operations Research