The Original CZ Forum
GENERAL => General Discussion => Topic started by: M1A4ME on September 16, 2018, 10:22:58 AM
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It's dark, today. Uniformly gray clouds. Raining off and on. A little windy, but not bad.
If you asked my wife what movie I have in the DVD player her reply would be, " Twelve O'Clock High."
Very good depiction of the early bad/worst days of the daylight bombing campaign carried out by the 8th Air Force over Nazi occupied Europe. No fighter escorts if they went in too far. Still learning the tactics. Still losing men and B17's in numbers they feared they might not be able to sustain.
How bad was it? The casuality rate among American air crews in Europe was higher than the casualty rate of the Marines conducting beach landings in the Pacific. Morale was so bad in the early stages that they separated the enlisted men into ground crew barracks and air crew barracks, so the ground crews would be less affected by regular losses of the buddies they lived in the barracks with.
Another great Gregory Peck movie. Watch it if you get the opportunity.
Oh, the only guns involved (visible) are the Bronwing .50's on all the B17's. You won't notice.
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Fantastic choice! Great film!
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Agree- good flick.
Read or listen to audio book-?To Kingdom Come? another story of the air war in Europe. Focuses on the Stuggart Raid- an abject failure militarily. But a great story about the men who flew it and their experiences to include after the raid and after the war. Highly recommend it
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The combat footage in 12 O Clock High is also real footage, since the movie was made in 1946, IIRC. Good flick, though the ending was a bit forced. A replica of the mug would be neat.
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Great Choice!
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A replica of the mug would be neat.
Ask and you shall receive!
https://archbury.net/product/toby-jug-replica/
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Neat! I am sitting here, raining and stormy outside and coughing my fool head off. Everyone I know is sick - REALLY bad time to reread The Stand.
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I remember years ago, watching 12:00 High in a Navy Leadership Class, I thought "Holy Cow", I get to watch a classic on Uncle Sam's dime? Most excellent!
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After reading your subject line, I expected the "punchline" to be something like, "instead I spent my time searching for and ordering a new gun!!" 8)
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The time Twelve O'Clock High is about is before the time Memphis Belle is.
If you watch TOCH you'll see the original commander complaining that his men needed to know there was a limit to what they would be asked to do. The answer was, "We're working on that."
By the time the Memphis Belle events occurred that limit had been set. Twenty-five missions. If a bomber aircrew completed 25 missions they got to go home. Up until the crew of the Memphis Belle did it, no one else had made it to 25 missions. In fact, at that time, the average life expectancy of a bomber aircrew over Europe was 13 (yes, thirteen) missions. The average life expectancy of a bomber air crew was 1/2 the number of missions they needed to survive in order to come home.
I read an article once that said here were over 80,000 US Aircrewmen buried in military cemetaries in Europe/Britain. Think about that one. There were raids over Europe where up to 60 bombers were lost. With a crew of 10 that meant 600 men shot down. Six hundred men, in one mission, captured, wounded, missing, dead. In a single mission.
If you watch TOCH, near the beginning you'll hear a radio transmission from Germany with an English traitor spewing propaganda (I believe he survived the war and was hung by the British when he was captured). He makes the comment, "I wonder who talked you into daylight bombing. It wouldn't be your friends the British, would it." Yup, the Brits tried it, lost so many men and bombers that they gave up on it and moved to night time bombing of Europe/Germany only as ineffective as that was most of the time, they couldn't affort the losses they sustained from daylight bombing.
Hell of a movie. Hell of time to live during.
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I am in Mannheim for a month, mostly new construction since the 50?s. Those bombings did a number on the cities.