Posted on 11/05/2018 1:29:09 PM PST by aimhigh
After the US’s entry into World War II, Hollywood filmmaker William Wyler (best known today for The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday, and Ben-Hur) volunteered for the US Army Air Forces. Serving as a major, he directed documentaries about the air war in Europe and the Mediterranean. In 1943, he and his crew brought 16mm color cameras aboard Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses on bombing runs over Germany. The resultant film, 1944’s The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, purported to show the final mission of the bomber Memphis Belle. (It was actually pieced together from several different missions.)
All of Wyler’s raw footage from the various missions was recently discovered preserved in the National Archives, which then partnered with Vulcan Productions and Creative Differences to make a new documentary from the material. While all the men who flew the Memphis Belle have since passed, Cold Blue director Erik Nelson and his crew got some of the few surviving veterans of the Eighth Air Force to speak about their own experiences aboard B-17’s during the war. The Cold Blue, screening this weekend at the AFI Fest in Los Angeles, recounts what it was like to fly such dangerous missions in planes that were neither heated nor pressurized.
(Excerpt) Read more at hyperallergic.com ...
I bet it will be incredible!
Today such gems would never be found there, instead replaced by American White Trash Pickers.
AFI fest here in L.A.? Normally I pass on it but this is worth it.
I think I saw a documentary like that. It was about the Memphis Belle.
Bkmk
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Go to Youtube. There are really good docs on the Eight Air Force and even the old BBC Battlefield series, where there was one or 2 episodes about the bomber squadrons bombing both Berlin and Japan. I dont want to spoil the ending but the krauts and Japs get their asses kicked.
"Cold Blue" Trailer. Poem "Ball Turret Gunner" - "When I die, they wash me out of the turret...with a hose."
I'm always in awe when I see photos of the very young men in those planes.
Thanks for the thread. I bet that will be an amazing movie. Incidentally, Peter Jackson, the Lord of the rings director, is currently restoring World War I footage and will use it in an upcoming movie.
Yes, all episodes of the Battlefield series are on youtube. It is among the best military series ever made, IMO.
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarrell, 1914 - 1965
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
The Best Years of Our Lives is a favorite of mine.
The original documentary was much better than the movie from the ‘80s. That vulgar piece of trash really upset me.
Yes! That I am dying to see, my granddad fought in that. He was a Scot and was a pipe major in the Queens own Cameron highlanders. Never told my mother or anybody in the family what happened to him while he served till the day he died in 1983. I still have his bagpipes and his straight razor with the leather he used to sharpen it
Assuming you're referring to the movie "Memphis Belle," my uncle, a WWII B-24 waist gunner veteran of over 30 missions, loved it and said it was pretty realistic. He even had to sweat out his last mission like the men in the movie, but his last mission was a little less eventful.
I love the old WW II and pre-WW II color footage because it shows what things actually were like. Indeed, utterly vile as Hitler was, one of the few good things he did was order as much official German photography as possible to be done in color. Some of the really good material is from the 1930s.
What theater did he fly in and was he Navy or Army?
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