Once Italy surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, the Germans moved into the vacuum. Rome was declared an “open city” by the Italian government, meaning it was unoccupied and off limits to attack, but Germany rushed in troops for an occupation that lasted for nine months and subjected the citizens to the brutality of Nazi rule for the first time in the war. The Nazis rounded up Jews and sent them to their deaths in concentration camps, violently enforced curfews, and attempted to crush any opposition.

A story about Italian resistance to German occupation, Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film Roma città aperta (Rome, Open City) is recognized as the first classic film of what has become known as the neorealist movement. Shot in the city after the Germans had left but before the war was over, the stark black-and-white film remains powerful even as it nears  its 80th anniversary. Wrote novelist Virginia Baily for The Guardian newspaper in 2015, “It was one of the most visceral, gut-wrenching cinematic experiences of my life and I have carried images and sounds from it—the old ladies stalling the Gestapo while the resistance hero escapes across the roofs, the martial music playing as the German regiment marches down a deserted street, the tortured hero slumped in a chair, the priest in his black robes—with me ever since.” 

The film opens as those German soldiers march through Rome to make a nighttime raid on a downtrodden apartment building. They seek Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), a communist and a central figure in the resistance. The apartment dwellers do what they can to divert the soldiers, and Manfredi escapes across the rooftops. While the Germans search, they intercept a call on the communal telephone from Manfredi’s sometime mistress, Marina (Maria Michi), an actress who quickly hangs up when she realizes something is amiss.

One of the building’s residents is Pina (Anna Magnani), a plain-speaking widow with a son, Marcello. She is pregnant, and on the night the Germans arrive she is planning to get married the next day to Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), a soft-spoken printer. Her spiritual adviser is the priest Don Pietro Pellegrini (Aldo Fabrizi), who also serves as a central figure in the resistance.

In the meantime, the German Major Bergmann (Harry Feist) plots with the manipulative Ingrid (Giovanna Galletti) to stamp out the resistance and capture Manfredi. On Bergmann’s orders the Germans conduct another raid on the apartment building. This time they herd all the residents outside. When Don Pietro hears that one of the children from the building has a hidden stash of bombs and guns, he bluffs his way inside under the guise of giving last rites to a bedridden old man. He manages to hide the weapons before the Germans find them. 

Outside, Pina sees the Germans taking away Francesco. Frantic, she breaks free, and dashes down the street in pursuit of the truck carrying away her fiancé. The merciless Germans gun her down as her son watches. She dies in the street, cradled by Don Pietro. Partisans attack the truck convoy with the prisoners and Francesco manages to escape.

Bergmann and Ingrid have another tool they can use to find Manfredi: Marina. The cynical actress, angry with Manfredi and addicted to her creature comforts—which include drugs that Ingrid provides her—tells the Germans where they can find the resistance leader. The Germans descend as Manfredi and Don Pietro are bringing an Austrian deserter to safety and arrest the three men on the street. Bergmann forces the priest to watch as he has Manfredi brutally tortured, but neither the communist nor the Catholic priest divulge any information. Manfredi dies during his ordeal and Bergmann has the priest executed. Tied to a chair and praying for God to forgive his executioners, Don Pietro is murdered while the children from the apartment look on, horrified, before they trudge back into town, damaged in ways we can only imagine.

Rome, Open City was something of a change of direction for director Rossellini, who earlier in the war had made films for producer Vittorio Mussolini, the son of Il Duce. Even before the Germans had been forced out of Rome, Rossellini had begun thinking about making a movie about the resistance. He wanted “to show things exactly as they were,” he said. One of his collaborators on the story was another up-and-coming Italian filmmaker named Federico Fellini. Rossellini shot the film with little money, on location, and with film stock he scrounged—or even stole—from whatever sources were at hand, including cast-off snippets from other photographers. (The director said he stole stock from the offices of the U.S. Army’s Stars and Stripes news organization.) Most of the actors he used (with the notable exceptions of Magnani and Fabrizi) were nonprofessionals. He even used German prisoners-of-war as extras, including the soldier Pina slaps before making her ill-fated break. The result was a fiction film that looked and felt more like a documentary—in fact, the distributor Rossellini had obtained reneged on the deal, saying Rome, Open City wasn’t a “real movie.” But the film found a distributor in the United States and became a success, launching Rossellini’s international career and putting Italian neorealism—a genre embraced by other directors like Luchino Visconti and Vittorio de Sica—on the cinematic map. 

If you ask me, World War II’s coolest airplane is the Lockheed P-38 Lightning. It looks like something a kid might have doodled in a notebook while daydreaming in class. I became enthralled with the airplane in junior high when I read a book by Martin Caidin called Fork-tailed Devil: The P-38. I also made the Revell model kit of the Lightning flown by Richard Bong, America’s highest-scoring ace with 40 victories. I believed then that the P-38 was the war’s greatest fighter, but the more I read, the more I realized that the North American P-51 Mustang probably made a bigger impact. The P-38 was a much more complicated beast, and it experienced all sorts of mechanical issues in both theaters of the war, while the single-engine Mustang proved to be a relatively trouble-free “Big Friend” to American bombers over Europe.

In the Spring 2024 issue of World War II we told the story of a P-38 pilot, Laurence Elroy “Scrappy” Blumer, who flew in the European Theater. While the Lightning did perform valuable service there, it really made its reputation in the Pacific, where, among other things, P-38 pilots flew one of the most amazing missions of the war. On April 18, 1943, 16 Lightnings of the 339th Fighter Squadron under the command of Major John W. Mitchell flew out of Guadalcanal to shoot down Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack. They knew where to find the admiral because the United States had cracked a coded Japanese message that detailed his plans. And find him they did, after Mitchell led them on a circuitous 600-mile course over the ocean, guided only by his wristwatch, a newly installed navy compass, and dead reckoning. Amazingly, they arrived just as Yamamoto was descending over Bougainville Island to land in his Mitsubishi G4M1 “Betty” bomber on an adjoining island. (The deteriorating wreckage of the admiral’s Betty still lies in the jungle on Bougainville.)

Two pilots, Tom Lanphier and his wingman, Rex Barber, were later awarded a half credit each for the admiral’s Betty, but Lanphier publicly claimed he was the pilot who alone shot down Yamamoto’s airplane. Barber later came to believe that he deserved sole credit. When Barber contested the credit allocation in 1991 before a U.S. Air Force board, I wrote a magazine article about the mission and the ensuing controversy. I got to meet and interview Barber and Mitchell (Lanphier had died in 1987) and I did phone interviews with all the other surviving members of the mission, known as Operation Vengeance. It was quite a thrill to talk to these men and hear their personal recollections of this historic incident. I came to believe that Barber was probably correct, but the board decreed that there just wasn’t enough evidence to change anything after the passage of so many years. To this day Barber and Lanphier share the credit for shooting down Yamamoto.

I still treasure the memories of interacting with these men who had become part of history. I also treasure P-38 Lightning, a book I own by writer Jeffrey L. Ethell and illustrator Rikyu Watanabe. It’s a beautiful volume, with lots of foldout illustrations of the airplane, but my copy is special because it includes an inscription and signature by John Mitchell himself. I think that’s pretty cool—just like the P-38. 

The Boeing B-17—or its computer-generated likeness—appears front and center in the AppleTV+ series Masters of the Air. The story of the 100th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force in World War II, MOTA is based on the book by Donald L. Miller. The 100th flew the B-17 Flying Fortress and some of its missions over Europe provide harrowing sequences in the series.

Here are a few classic films that feature the B-17 and are worth searching out.

Air Force (1943). Directed by Howard Hawks. Starring John Ridgely, Gig Young, Arthur Kennedy, Charles Drake, Harry Carey, George Tobias and John Garfield.
While B-17s are known primarily for their role in the European Theater, they flew in the Pacific as well. Howard Hawks’ Air Force tells the story of one such Fort, Mary Ann. After flying into the attack on Pearl Harbor, the airplane and its crew proceed to Wake Island and then on to the Philippines to take action against the Japanese. The production used real B-17B, C and D models, supplemented by model work when necessary.

The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944). Directed by William Wyler.
Director William Wyler left Hollywood to document the war for the U.S. and received permission to film an account of a B-17 crew on a mission over Germany. He ended up flying five missions with pilot Robert Morgan of the 91st Bombardment Group, two of them in Morgan’s regular plane, Memphis Belle. Wyler used his footage to create a composite twenty-fifth mission for Morgan and the crew of Memphis Belle. (While not the first bomber to complete 25 missions, Memphis Belle was the first to return to America after having done so and earned much public attention as a result.) Released on April 15, 1944, the New York Times called the film “a perfect example of what can be properly done by competent film reporters to visualize the war for people back home.” (The real Memphis Belle is on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.)

Memphis Belle (1990). Directed by Michael Caton-Jones. Starring Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz,
Tate Donovan, D.B. Sweeney, Billy Zane, Sean Astin, Harry Connick Jr., John Lithgow and David Strathairn.
The fictionalized film based on Wyler’s (and co-produced by his daughter) also tells the story of the titular B-17’s 25th mission but suffers from a willingness to embrace cliché as the crew faces a familiar litany of threats (bandits, flak, cloud cover, engine loss).

Command Decision (1948).Directed by Sam Wood. Starring Clark Gable, Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Brian Donlevy, Charles Bickford, John Hodiak and Edward Arnold.
Where MOTA focuses on what the B-17 crews endured during the war, Command Decision focuses on the commanders who sent them on their missions in what Brigadier General “Casey” Dennis (Gable, who actually flew some missions over Europe) calls “the weirdest kind of war on earth.” Watching B-17s and their crews head out on a mission, he says, “In a few hours from now they’ll be fighting on oxygen five miles above Germany. Tonight some of them will be dancing at the Savoy. Some of them will still be in Germany.” The film can’t escape its roots as a Broadway play (adapted from a novel) and remains mostly set-bound. A scene where Dennis has to talk down a B-17 bombardier flying for his wounded pilot suffers from some obvious model work that stands out in comparison to the actual combat footage used elsewhere.

Twelve O’Clock High (1949). Directed by Henry King. Starring Gregory Peck, Hugh Marlowe, Gary Merrill and Dean Jagger.
Twelve O’Clock High covers some of the same ground as Command Decision but does it much better. The focal point is General Frank Savage (Peck) who takes command of the snakebitten 918th Bombardment Group after its previous commander got too close to his men and efficiency suffered. Savage plans to whip the unit into shape even if it means the crews will hate him. The 918th does improve, but the stresses of command eventually take their toll on Savage. B-17 fans will especially enjoy a legendary stunt sequence when stunt pilot Paul Mantz performs a belly landing in a real Fortress. The film later inspired a television series.

The War Lover (1962). Directed by Philip Leacock. Starring Steve McQueen, Robert Wagner, Shirley Ann Field, Gary Cockrell and Michael Crawford.
This adaptation of John Hersey’s novel tells the story of a pilot (McQueen) and co-pilot (Wagner) of a Flying Fortress and the woman one of them loves (Field). The pilot, “Buzz” Rickson, is the war lover of the tile, a man who treads the “fine line between the hero and the psychopath” in the words of the squadron doctor. Filmed with three actual B-17s (and footage, including Mantz’s belly landing, borrowed from Twelve O’Clock High), the film boasts a strong performance by McQueen but is weakened by the romance in which Field’s character is used to explain the movie’s themes. “You are on the side of life,” she tells Wagner’s character; to Buzz she explains, “You can’t make love.… You can only make hate.”

Target for Today (1944) is also of interest. This wartime documentary provides a detailed nuts-and-bolts look at what it took to plan and fly B-17 missions over Europe. Cast with real military personnel and filmed largely on location, it will provide viewers with some key background for the events of MOTA.

The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress has found itself back in the spotlight after the January 26 debut of the AppleTV+ miniseries Masters of the Air. Produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman—who were also behind the series Band of Brothers and The Pacific—and based on the book by Donald L. Miller, the nine-part series tells the story of the 100th Bombardment Group—the “Bloody 100th”—during World War II. The group flew the B-17 , and the big four-engine Boeings should share top billing with human stars Austin Butler, Callum Turner and Barry Keoghan, even if most of the airplanes are the product of computer-generated imagery (CGI), along with three modern replicas. (The series should include a disclaimer that state, “No real B-17s were harmed during the making of this series.”)

The United States produced nearly 13,000 B-17s during the war. Today only 45 remain and only a handful of those are in flying condition. Two have crashed in recent years, the Commemorative Air Force’s Texas Raiders destroyed after an inflight collision with a P-63 Kingcobra at an airshow in 2022 and “Nine-o-Nine,” owned and operated by the Collings Foundation, in 2019.

The B-17 flights in MOTA, as it’s known, are brutal, violent and intense. That’s not at all the experience I had when I got to fly in a B-17 some years ago. I flew in Yankee Lady, the B-17G operated by the Yankee Air Museum of Belleville, Michigan. This B-17 was one of the last built, too late to see combat. It flew for the Coast Guard for a while after the war and then was converted for fire-fighting. The museum received it in 1986, when it needed a complete nine-year restoration before it could return to the air. It was briefly grounded in the spring of 2023 when the Federal Aviation Administration issued an airworthiness directive regarding an issue with wing spars but has resumed flying.

My flight went off without incident. There was no flak, no fighters, no blood, no worries about hypoxia or frostbite, no spent shell casings littering the fuselage interior. But I did experience the ear-pounding noise generated by the four Wright R-1820-97 engines. On the runway they idled with a loud throaty purr, but when the pilot pushed the throttles forward and Yankee Lady began its takeoff run, the entire airplane vibrated to the roar of the engines. I was sitting in the bombardier’s station in the nose of the bomber, watching as the trees as the end of the runway got closer and closer…and then we lifted up and soared over them.

It was a thrill to fly in the venerable Boeing. Maybe I didn’t get a sense of air combat, but I did get a sense of the airplane, which was not nearly as big—at least from the inside—as I expected. I’m sure it felt even more cramped for aircrew wearing bulky heated suits to protect them from the subzero temperatures at altitude.

I’m glad I got my chance to fly in a B-17 but I’m even happier that I didn’t have to experience what their crews did during the war.

Deep Sea Vision, a company based in Charleston, South Carolina, has obtained sonar images from almost 17,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean that might show the Lockheed Electra that Amelia Earhart was flying when she disappeared in 1937.

Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932). Those flights and others she made would have ensured her place in the history books, but much of the enduring interest in Earhart results from her disappearance. She and navigator Fred Noonan vanished over the Pacific during an attempted flight around the world in a Lockheed Electra 10-E, and people still speculate about what happened.

On January 27, 2024, Deep Sea Vision’s founder and chief executive officer, Tony Romeo, announced that he may have found the airplane. Romeo’s team had been using a $9 million Norwegian Hugin 6000, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), to search for the twin-engine airplane in the fall of 2023. When examining some data later, they noted an image taken some 100 miles from Howland Island on the sea floor 16,500 feet deep that could show the Electra. “I’m not saying we definitely found her,” Romeo told the Charleston Post and Courier, but the image was encouraging and appears to show an airplane. He plans to return to the area later this year with underwater cameras in an attempt to verify the object’s identity.

 There have been many theories about Earhart’s disappearance over the years. Romeo’s discovery, if substantiated, would indicate that Earhart and Noonan, unable to find their intended target of Howland Island (about 2,000 miles from Honolulu), were forced to ditch in the ocean and drowned. An organization called TIGHAR (The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery) speculates that they landed and perished on tiny Gardner (now Nikumaroro) Island. Others have theorized that they were captured by the Japanese and executed. In 2017 a History Channel documentary claimed to have uncovered a photo that showed Earhart and Noonan as prisoners on a dock in the Marshall Islands, but investigators quickly discovered that the photo was taken two years before they disappeared. A book from 1970 asserted that Earhart was still alive and living under an assumed name in New Jersey. (The woman in question sued the book’s author, and won.)

Time will tell if Romeo has truly solved the mystery or just added another intriguing chapter to it.

Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby, the Boeing B-17G featured on the cover of Aviation History’s Summer 2023 issue, has completed another journey and embarked on a new chapter in its existence. Since 1988 the bomber had been part of the collections of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, but in August the first pieces of the disassembled airplane arrived at the Smithsonian Institution’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, where it will eventually be reassembled and put on display. Currently a wing and fuselage are on display in the Boeing Aviation Hangar. In exchange, the Smithsonian had given the air force museum a B-17D it had in its collection called The Swoose. 

Shoo Shoo Shoo Baby had a checkered career. Named after an Andrews Sisters’ song (with an extra “Shoo”), the B-17G landed in Sweden on May 29, 1944, after engine failures on its 24th mission over Europe meant it could not return safely to England. Following the war, the bomber served as an airliner and performed other tasks for owners in Sweden, Denmark and France. France returned the Boeing to the United States in 1972 and after being restored it landed at the Air Force’s museum.

The Swoose has had its own interesting career—and was also named after a song. The B-17D—or portions of it, anyway—reached the Philippines in October 1941 as war with Japan became increasingly inevitable. When war did come, the B-17—originally named Ole Betsy—participated in the fighting and was damaged enough that it had to be pieced together with parts from several wrecked bombers. It acquired its name from a song called “Alexander the Swoose,” about a bird that was half swan and half goose. With Captain Frank Kurtz as its pilot, the airplane served as the personal transport for Lt. Gen. George H. Brett. The B-17 returned to the United States for a war bond tour and after the war it served as a war memorial in Los Angeles before ending up, disassembled, at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. The cobbled-together bomber is the only surviving B-17D. Kurtz, incidentally, named his daughter—the actress Swoosie Kurtz—after the airplane. The Air Force museum plans to restore The Swoose to its appearance when it served as Brett’s transport.

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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In his new book Duel in the Deep (Naval Institute Press), author David Sears tells a story that he subtitles “The Hunters, the Hunted, and a High Seas Fight to the Finish.” The central incident is the tale of an outmoded four-stack destroyer, the USS Borie, and its intense fight with the German U-405 on October 31, 1943, a “swashbuckling, no-holds-barred brawl of cannons, machine guns, small arms, and even knives and spent shell casings.” Sears builds up to that that epic struggle by outlining the ebbs and flows of the Battle of the Atlantic, when Germany’s submersible craft attempted to starve Britain into submission and keep the Allies reeling by sinking the ships carrying necessary food and supplies across the Atlantic. In a high-stakes game of technological cat and mouse, both sides attempted to gain the upper hand in the contest with advanced technology and, on the Allied side, intensive codebreaking work.

Sears, who served in the U.S. Navy aboard a destroyer himself, uses diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper interviews to bring his story to life. In this interview with World War II editor Tom Huntington, Sears talks about his book.

Miguel Granados was a colonel in Guatemala’s air corps who, accompanied by Lieutenant Carlos Merlen, flew a Ryan Brougham from Guatemala to Washington’s Bolling Field, arriving on July 31, 1929 — when this photo was taken. The six-day, 2,832-mile flight to Washington included stops in Havana, Cuba, and Jacksonville, Florida. The inspiration for the journey came from Charles Lindbergh’s Guatemala visit during his goodwill tour of Mexico and Central America in the Spirit of St. Louis the year before.

On their way to Washington, the Guatemalan flyers spent four days in Havana, where they waited to deliver a goodwill message to President Gerardo Machado, who had left for a weekend in the country. At their next stop in Jacksonville, the chamber of commerce threw a banquet in their honor. With the ground obscured by fog for most of the flight from Florida to Washington, Granados and Merlen — who were navigating with an ordinary road map — were forced to circle above Fayetteville, North Carolina, for half an hour before they could figure out where they were.

After reaching Washington, the two men presented a goodwill message from Guatemala’s President Lazaro Chacon to President Herbert Hoover at the White House. Then, according to an article in the New York Times, “The two fliers will spend the next two days visiting Mount Vernon and sightseeing in Washington, and will take off again Saturday, weather permitting, for a two-stop flight to Mexico City, where they plan to present greetings from President Chacon to President Portes Gil before returning to their home capital.” 

Director John Ford went on inactive status from the navy in 1944 to film an adaptation of They Were Expendable, William Lindsay White’s book about PT boats during the opening months of the war in the Philippines. The movie starred Robert Montgomery, who had joined the navy after Pearl Harbor and, like the character he plays, commanded a PT boat. John Wayne, who had not served in the war, was billed second. Back on a film set, Ford remained the same cantankerous needler he had been before the war and he zeroed in on “Duke” Wayne, one of his favorite targets. In Print the Legend, his Ford biography, author Scott Eyman relates how Montgomery watched the director rake Wayne over the coals. “Can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?” Ford asked in front of the cast and crew. Eyman related what happened next. “Finally, Robert Montgomery walked over, placed his hands on both sides of the director’s chair and said, ‘Don’t ever talk to Duke like that. You ought to be ashamed.’ The set fell silent. A break was ordered, and Ford ended up in tears.”

Despite the turmoil on set, They Were Expendable ended up being one of Ford’s finest films, a melancholic love letter to PT boats and to the navy in general. 

When the film opens in Manila on the eve of war in 1941, Lieutenant John “Brick” Brickley (Montgomery) wants to demonstrate the potential of the PT boats he commands. His admiral is dismissive (“In wartime, I prefer something more substantial,” he says). So is his second in command, Lt. (j.g.) Rusty Ryan (Wayne). Rusty wants a transfer to destroyers. 

Then the war comes. 

In one early scene, Rusty receives a finger wound that becomes infected and Brick orders him to the hospital on Corregidor. There he strikes up a brief romance with nurse Sandy Davyss (Donna Reed). Like everything else in the movie, the romance is realistic and understated. Rusty invites Sandy for dinner at the hut serving as the officers’ club, where sailors hidden in the crawl space beneath the building serenade them. It’s a touching scene, but Ford understands that romance is impossible under these conditions. The last time the two speak is over a field telephone as Rusty prepares to depart on a mission and Sandy remains on Corregidor as the Japanese move closer. The conversation gets cut off abruptly when higher-ups commandeer the line. Rusty—and the audience—never learn Sandy’s fate. 

Ford uses his own naval experience to create a sense of authenticity. There’s no place for cinematic heroics. Earlier in the film, as Brick chafes at the limited role his boats have been given, the admiral compares the situation to a baseball game. If the manager tells you to hit a sacrifice bunt, that’s what you do. “You and I are professionals,” he says. At the end, when Rusty decides to give up his seat on the last plane out to Australia so he can join the guerrilla fight against the Japanese, Brick calmly reminds him that they have their orders. Rusty sits back down. 

Brick’s PT boats do see combat and those who like watching these speedy plywood craft in action will enjoy those sequences. They also get one vital mission when they spirit “the General” out of the war zone so he can continue the fight from Australia. Although the General remains nameless, audiences certainly recognized him as Douglas MacArthur. In real life, John D. Bulkeley, the Medal of Honor recipient on whom Montgomery’s character is based, did transport MacArthur and his family south to safety on Mindanao, where B-17s then flew them to Australia. 

One of the movie’s greatest strengths is its eye for detail—when Brickley grabs a pair of scissors to estimate the distance on map; the terrified faces of wounded soldiers on Corregidor as Japanese bombs fall; the cook’s instructions to use a pinch of salt in the pancake batter; the way Sandy brushes her hair and puts on a string of pearls before sitting down to dinner with the officers; the fact that Rusty demands aviation fuel (PT boats used Packard engines adapted from airplanes). It is also beautifully filmed, with haunting shots of the shadowy and wet tunnels of Corregidor and some pulse-pounding sequences of PT boats dodging shell bursts. 

They Were Expendable turned out to be one of John Ford’s best films, but it was not a huge box office success when it was released at the end of 1945. It is a war movie in a minor key—subdued and somewhat melancholy. It matches the film’s subject matter: the American experience in the Philippines at the start of the war did not go well, either. No doubt, audiences who had just seen the terrible war come to an end were not eager to relive its grim early days, no matter how beautifully photographed.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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James M. Fenelon’s second book is “Angels Against the Sun: A WWII Saga of Grunts, Grit, and Brotherhood.” It tells the story of the 11th Airborne Division. Nicknamed the “Angels,” it was the only airborne division the United States sent to the Pacific Theater, but ironically it fought largely as infantry as it battled its way through the Philippines and participated in the bloody battle for Manila. Fenelon is a former paratrooper himself, have served for 12 years in the military, and he is a graduate of the U.S. Army’s Airborne, Jumpmaster, and Pathfinder schools. His first book was “Four Hours of Fury,” an account of the U.S. 17th Airborne Division and its combat jump over the Rhine River in March 1945.

In this interview, Fenelon talks to World War II magazine editor Tom Huntington about “Angels Against the Sun.”

The “dam busters” mission has gone down in history as a legendary feat by the Royal Air Force. On the night of May 16, 1943, 19 Avro Lancasters of the recently created 617 Squadron took off from their base at RAF Scampton. Their mission: to breach three dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley and deal a major blow to the enemy’s industrial capability. Led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the airplanes of Operation Chastise carried a specially designed “bouncing bomb” developed by inventor Barnes Wallis. The dam busters managed to breach two of the dams, but at great cost. Eight Lancasters were lost, and 53 airmen were killed and three captured. The Germans were able to repair the damage relatively quickly. Despite the losses and the Germans’ quick recovery, the feat captured the British imagination as an example of the bravery and innovation that was needed to win the war. 

The Dam Busters, the 1955 film about the mission, is based on the 1951 book of the same name by Paul Brickhill and Gibson’s own account, Enemy Coast Ahead (published posthumously in 1946). The movie opens as Wallis (Michael Redgrave) experiments at his home trying to bounce marbles across the water in a tin basin. It’s part of his scheme to design a bomb that can destroy German dams. Conventional weapons don’t work because the water dissipates the force of their explosions. Wallis theorizes that a bomb skipping across the surface would hit a dam and sink before exploding at the base, where the water pressure behind it would amplify the explosion’s effect. Officials are skeptical, and their doubts only increase following failure after failure. Finally, Wallis achieves success, and the mission moves forward.

Playing Gibson, who had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly, is actor Richard Todd, a World War II veteran himself. Gibson finds that the mission will be no piece of cake. The four-engine Lancasters will have to go in very low—60 feet above the water on their final approaches—and the bomb drops need to be precise. The film embraces one dam busters legend by asserting that Gibson got the idea of how to determine proper altitude when he noticed the spotlights at a theatrical performance. He is inspired to mount two downward pointing spotlights on each bomber, adjusted so the beams will converge on the water at 60 feet. To determine range, the bombardiers use a simple wooden hand-held sight. 

Director Michael Anderson opted to shoot the film in black and white to give it a grittier, documentary feel. It also allowed him to incorporate actual footage from the bomb testing, but with one drawback: aspects of the weapon remained classified at the time, so the filmmakers had to paint over the test footage frame by frame to hide the bombs’ shapes and the fact that they spun backwards (which allowed them to “crawl” down the side of the dams before exploding). The end result may have preserved secrecy, but the alterations are obvious. 

The special effects in general have not aged well. Ground fire is clearly an animated effect and some of the model work doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The filmmakers might have been aware of this. The first aerial shot of one of the dams is clearly a model, but then the camera pans back to show that it is, in fact, a model, one constructed for the aviators’ training. What remains timeless are the sequences of the Lancasters. The production was able to procure four of them for the shoot—only 10 years after the war’s end the bombers were already in short supply—and the sight and sound of these mighty Merlin-powered beasts roaring by at low altitude will please aviation aficionados. The attack sequences remain exciting, models notwithstanding.

Those battle scenes inspired George Lucas when he was creating the final attack on the Death Star in 1977’s Star Wars, and a comparison of the two films will show some startling similarities and even some shared dialogue. (They also shared the talent of Gilbert Taylor, who did special effects photography on Dam Busters and was the cinematographer for Star Wars.) The attacks are not the only thing that might have inspired Star Wars. The hairstyle worn by Wallis’s movie wife (Ursula Jeans) has more than a passing similarity to the “cinnamon buns” sported by Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in Lucas’s movie.  

The special effects, however, are not the only thing about The Dam Busters that has aged badly. There’s also the matter of Gibson’s dog, whose name is a racial slur that would have been, at the very least, offensive in 1955 and has since become completely unacceptable, and it’s a word that is woven throughout the movie (the dog’s name provides one of the code words the busters use to signal a dam breach). American distributors considered overdubbing to change the name to “Blackie,” but did not. Although the dog’s name is historically correct, modern audiences will find it jarring, or may think they stumbled into a bit of pointed Blazing Saddles-style social satire by mistake. No doubt this aspect of the film is the reason why The Dam Busters is impossible to find on any streaming services; a 2021 Blu-ray release, though, offers a restored print of the film and plenty of extras.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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Aviation comes with some inherent risks and that can lead to tragedy. Such was the case at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s 2023 AirVenture, the annual show that takes place at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Over the course of the week-long event on July 24-30, four people lost their lives. Two died when their North American T-6 Texan, a World War II-era training aircraft, crashed into a nearby lake. They were identified as Devyn Reiley, 30, and Zach Colliemoreno, 20. Two other attendees perished in a crash between a RotorWay 162F helicopter and an ELA 10 Eclipse gyrocopter. Thomas Volz, 72, and Mark Peterson, 68, died in the crash and two others were injured. Both accidents took place on July 29.

I attended the show but had departed by the day of the accidents. As I did last year, I flew out from central Pennsylvania as a passenger in a 1962 Piper Comanche owned and flown by Tom LeCompte, a friend, pilot, aviation enthusiast, and writer (Tom’s account of the airplane accident that killed singer Patsy Cline appeared in the Autumn 2022 issue of Aviation History.)

We did things a little differently this year by making an overnight stop in Dayton, Ohio, to visit the National Museum of the U.S Air Force. Talk about a lot of airplanes! The museum is huge and contains multitudes. I was most impressed by the B-36 Peacemaker and the XB-70 Valkyrie, both gigantic airplanes that pushed the bounds of aviation technology in their time. I also took so many photos and videos in the World War II gallery that I nearly drained the battery on my phone. I ended up having to borrow Tom’s so I could take more photos. Even after spending five hours at the museum, we didn’t see everything. I guess I will have to go back.

The next stop was in Madison, Wisconsin, where Tom had plans to link up with a group of Mooney pilots to take part in a mass fly-in to Oshkosh. There were 54 planes—51 of them Mooneys, two of them Pipers, and one RV. So, we were definitely one of the odd planes out, but the Mooneys welcomed us aboard anyway.

There was a briefing session the night before the flight. As a right-seater, my job was essentially to keep quiet and not distract the pilot, a task I was reasonably certain I could handle. Then the pilots went over everything they needed to know, including the schedule, takeoff and landing procedures, radio frequencies and so forth. The planes would all take off and fly in elements of three—Tom and I were the #3 airplane in the Romeo element—and there was also a lead and a tail pilot. After the briefing, all the pilots went out the parking lot to do the “dirt dance,” in which they all walked through the flight so they knew exactly what to do.

It was quite a sight the next morning to watch all those airplanes taxi out and line up on the runway in Madison, and something else altogether as the elements took off one by one and soared above the Wisconsin state capitol and on to Oshkosh. The fight was only about 35 minutes or so and I kept myself busy taking photos and videos. Sometimes prop wash created a little turbulence, which increased my already high levels of adrenaline. Tom kept focused on Romeo 1 in front of us; Romeo 2 in our rear was similarly focused on our Piper. The two Romeos seemed so close I felt like I could throw a rock and hit them (which, naturally, I did not attempt). It gave me a new respect for the World War II pilots who did this kind of thing on a regular basis—while other pilots were trying to kill them. Fortunately, we encountered no hostiles on our flight, and we all landed safely, with our wheels hitting the runway at the same moment as Romeo 1’s did, exactly as we were supposed to.

And then we were at Oshkosh. There are two things you can expect if you attend the AirVenture. First, you’ll see lots of airplanes. Second, you’re likely to experience some thunderstorms. The first thunderstorm hit that evening but left us unscathed, although the wind had my tent performing some interesting gyrations.

II spent the next few days watching the historic aircraft that had gathered for the event. There was a lot to see! I’d look up and see the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Doc or the B-17 Flying Fortress Aluminum Overcast fly over. I watched a long-winged Lockheed U-2 do a flyby low over the runway at Wittman field. In the afternoons aerobatic airplanes twisted, twirled and spewed smoke during the airshows. The sounds of jets and propellers filled the air at all times. The really big airplanes—including a Super Guppy and a C-117—occupied the expanse of Boeing Plaza. Nearby was the newly restored P-51C Thunderbird, which had once been owned by actor James Stewart and record-setting pilot Jackie Cochran. Vintage aircraft had their own section, as did warbirds from World War II and other conflicts. An aviation village sprang up in the fields around the airport as thousands of private airplane owners set up camp next to their craft.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There were also talks and demonstrations and hundreds of vendors offering anything connected with aviation, from airplane tech to baby clothes. The EAA Aviation Museum is nearby, too, and I spent some time there looking at their collections. Later in the day we could sit in front of our tents and watch as everything from an F-22 to a flight of Texans soared by. There’s really nothing like it. The EAA estimates the show had a record attendance of 677,000 people. More than 10,000 airplanes flew into Wittman and surrounding airports. There were 3,365 showplanes at the event, which the EAA broke down as 1,497 vintage aircraft, 1,067 homebuilts, 380 warbirds, 194 ultralights, 134 seaplanes and amphibians, 52 aerobatic airplanes and 41 rotorcraft. Some 40,000 people camped out in the facility’s 13,000 campsite. Those are all big numbers.

Tom and I set out for home on Wednesday morning, but not until we had to wait out another thunderstorm that turned the sky an ominous gray and pelted Oshkosh with driving rain. We were packed and ready to go but had to wait out the storm in the Mooney group’s big tent. Stray lightning bolts were still snapping to the ground off in the distance as we lifted off from Wittman and made our way around the perimeter of the storm before crossing Lake Michigan and continuing the journey east. The show we left behind was still untainted by the tragedies to come on Saturday.

Here are a few more photos from the show.

You will see lots of great airplanes at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. At the 2023 event, one of the highlights was the P-51C Mustang Thunderbird, which had just returned to flyable status after a restoration by AirCorps Aviation of Bemidji, Minnesota, for the airplane’s owner, Warren Pietsch. The newly restored Mustang made its first flight on June 5, less than two months before it flew to Whittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh.

The airplane has a remarkable story. Its wartime history remains cloudy, but it may have been constructed in 1943. After the war, the airplane was purchased as surplus by actor, pilot, and Air Force veteran James Stewart in partnership with racer Joe DeBona. It won the Bendix race in 1949 with DeBona at the controls, setting the Bendix speed record for piston-engine aircraft of 470 mph along the way. That record still stands. Aviator Jackie Cochran, who broke a few records of her own, later owned the airplane. Now restored to pristine status, Thunderbird was a star attraction at the AirVenture, both on the ground and in the air, where it thrilled audiences at the event’s airshows.

Here we have an interview with owner Pietsch, as well as a walkaround of the airplane and some photographs of one of the most beautiful airplanes to attend the AirVenture this year.

One day last month I heard an airplane flying over my house and from the sound I knew it had to be something unusual. And it was. When I dashed outside and peered up, I saw a Ford Tri-Motor passing overhead. Within minutes I was in my car and driving to the local airport.

By the time I got there the Tri-Motor had landed. The airplane belonged to the Experimental Aircraft Association and was in town to give paying passengers short rides. I signed up and almost before I knew it, I was sitting in the cramped passenger compartment, just behind the even more cramped cockpit. One of the three Wright engines was just outside my window—and so were the wires that manipulated the control surfaces. This was not a modern airliner. In fact, it had been built in 1929, the 146th of 199 Tri-Motors Ford built. This one had been flown by Pitcairn Aviation through the early 1930s, when Eastern Air Lines purchased the airline. After retiring as an airliner, the Tin Goose was used to fight fires in Idaho. After that, it flew paying passengers (much as it does today) until a violent thunderstorm in Wisconsin left the airplane broken into pieces in 1973. The EAA purchased the wreckage and completed its restoration in 1985. The Tri-Motor today flies in the colors of Transcontinental Air Transport, a precursor to TWA that flew the Fords on combination airplane/train trips across the country. 

I had never flown in a Tri-Motor before, so I was looking forward to the experience. I was not disappointed. The pilot fired up the engines one by one and within minutes we were taxiing to the runway. At the end the pilot pushed the throttles forward, the engines roared, and we were moving down the runway and into the air. What a thrill! And what a strange feeling to fly over my house where, less than an hour before, I had been gazing up at this airplane as it flew by, completely unaware that I would soon be aboard this piece of aviation history. You can read more about the Ford Tri-motor here.

Here’s a video of my Tri-Motor experience. Scroll down to see more more photos.

On the afternoon of December 7, 1941, director John Ford and his wife were attending a luncheon at the home of Rear Admiral Andrew C. Pickens in Alexandria, Virginia. The host excused himself to take a call from the War Department. When he returned, he told his guests that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. “We are at war,” he said.

Ford was ready.

He had been born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on February 1, 1894, the son of Irish immigrants who had settled in nearby Portland, where the elder Feeney operated a bar. Young John played on the Portland High School football team and graduated in 1914. His high school nickname, probably because of his football prowess, was “Bull.”

When Feeney’s older brother Francis headed west and found work as an actor and director in California, young John followed—and assumed his brother’s stage name of Ford as well. Eventually John Ford began directing his own films. By the time of Pearl Harbor he was one of Hollywood’s most respected directors, with a resume that included The Iron Horse (1924), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and even a Shirley Temple film, Wee Willie Winkie (1937). In his 1939 Western Stagecoach, Ford turned a relatively obscure actor named John Wayne into a star. That was also the first movie Ford shot in the Southwest’s Monument Valley, a setting he made iconic in his postwar Westerns.

Yet for all his talent, John Ford was a flawed human being with a strong streak of pure New England cussedness. “Actors were terrified of him because he liked to terrify them,” said John Carradine, who acted for Ford in several films. “He was a sadist.” Ford became known for the way he needled his actors, especially Wayne, during filming and for his tendency to go on drunken benders between projects. According to one acquaintance, “It was as though God had touched John Ford at the beginning of his life and said, ‘How would you like to be a very unique man—like no one else. However, you may scare some people.’”

Ford had always nursed a love for the sea, perhaps inspired by his youth on Maine’s Casco Bay. In the 1930s he enlisted in the Navy Reserve with a commission as a lieutenant commander, and as tensions with Japan increased, he sometimes used his yacht Araner to shadow any Japanese vessels he encountered off the California coast. He started the Eleventh Naval District Motion Picture and Still Photographic Group in 1939 as a means of documenting the navy’s activities in the impending war and began recruiting friends from all aspects of the film industry to help. As he later said, “They are writers, directors, some actors, but mostly technicians, electricians, cutters, sound cutters, negative cutters, positive cutters, carpenters, and that sort of thing.” The navy called the 47-year-old Ford to active duty in September 1941 as a lieutenant commander and he went to Washington, where his photographic unit was assigned to work under William J. Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

In his new role Ford visited Iceland and Panama to survey the military situations there. After the attack on Pearl Harbor he received orders to head to Hawaii to film the aftermath. He and a crew embarked on the trip west on January 4, 1942. Twelve days later he was at Pearl Harbor, which he found “in a state of readiness. The Army and the Navy, all in good shape, everything taken care of, patrols going out regularly, everybody in high spirit[s]…”

On April 18, 1942, Lt. Col. James Doolittle and his raiders took off in twin-engine B-25 Mitchells from the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo. Although the Doolittle Raid did little physical damage to Japan, it dealt a psychological blow. Shocked by the American attack on its mainland, the Japanese military decided to move aggressively across the Pacific to prevent any more raids. One of its targets was a tiny atoll with an airstrip 1,110 miles northwest of Hawaii called Midway. It was little more than a speck in the vast Pacific, populated mostly by a species of albatross that people called gooney birds, but Midway was also the U.S. Navy’s westernmost base and home to a Marine detachment. Pan American World Airways had used Midway as a base for its Clippers, and navy submarines fueled there, too. A pair of Japanese destroyers had shelled Midway on the night of December 7, 1941, and the Japanese speculated that perhaps Doolittle’s men had taken off from the atoll for their attack. Furthermore, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack, believed that if he threatened Midway, he could draw the U.S. Pacific Fleet under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz out from Hawaii and into battle.

The U.S. Navy had cracked Japanese codes and knew that Midway was in the crosshairs, and Nimitz wanted Ford to photograph the fighting once it erupted. Sometime in late May 1942 he summoned Ford to his office at Pearl Harbor, said he had a dangerous assignment for him, and told him to report to Admiral David W. Bagley. Ford and cameraman Jack Mackenzie Jr. were soon zipping across the harbor in a speedboat for a rendezvous with a destroyer that was already underway. “Hadn’t the slightest idea what I was doing, where I was going,” Ford said. “I found out when I got on board the destination was Midway.”

All was quiet on Midway when Ford and Mackenzie arrived. “All the year around it’s the same out there on that little Pacific island,” Mackenzie told American Cinematographer magazine. “The grandest place in the whole ocean to find absolute quiet and peace—if that’s what you want.” Ford spent time photographing the island’s gooney birds and the PT boats that had accompanied the task force. He remained doubtful that the Japanese would really attack but, forewarned by the codebreakers, the navy had been scrambling to bolster the atoll’s defenses by flying in more aircraft and reinforcing the ground forces. “By June 4 there were 121 combat planes, 141 officers and 2,886 enlisted men on the atoll,” noted Samuel Eliot Morison in his history of naval operations during the war. 

On June 3, Ford said, Commander Massie Hughes invited him aboard a PBY Catalina flying boats for a patrol. At first they saw nothing, Ford claimed, but then they got a glimpse of enemy vessels through a break in the clouds. When a couple of Japanese airplanes appeared to spot the PBY, Hughes headed into the clouds, and then descended for a wave-hugging return to Midway. 

Something, Ford realized, “was about to pop.” Another Catalina spotted what appeared to be the Japanese invasion fleet and the commander of Naval Air Station Midway, Captain Cyril T. Simard, sent out B-17s and Catalinas to attack the vessels, with little result. Simard expected the Japanese to attack the next morning and suggested that Ford place himself on top of the powerhouse, where he would have a good view of the impending action as well as a telephone link to headquarters. Ford and Mackenzie set up and went to bed.

Simard was right about the attack, although the morning of June 4 started off calmly enough. “Everything was very quiet and serene,” Ford said. He and Mackenzie shared the powerhouse with some Marines who had also stationed themselves on the roof. The filmmakers had a pair of 16mm cameras loaded with color film. Sometime around 6:30 that morning Ford was scanning the sky with binoculars when he spotted the first black dots that meant incoming Japanese aircraft. There were 108 airplanes in all, including 36 Nakajima B5N “Kate” bombers, 36 Aichi D3A “Val” dive bombers, and 36 Mitsubishi A6M “Zero” fighters, and they had been launched from four carriers about 200 miles out to sea. Midway’s radar had already picked them up and the defenders were braced for the onslaught. “Everybody was very calm. I was amazed, sort of, at the lackadaisical air everybody took,” Ford said. It was  as though this kind of thing happened all the time.

The Japanese planes roared in to attack. According to Ford, the lead pilot shocked everybody by flipping his Zero on its back and flying upside down about 100 feet off the ground in a show of bravado. “Everybody was amazed, nobody fired at him, until suddenly some Marine said, ‘What the Hell,’ let go at him and then shot him down,” said Ford. “He slid off into the sea.”

Then the attack started “in earnest.” Bombs exploded nearby, shaking the cameras. A plane dropped a bomb on the garrison’s hangar, which exploded. A piece of concrete struck Ford in the head and briefly knocked him out. “Just knocked me goofy for a bit, and I pulled myself out of it.” Recovering, Ford continued to film despite also receiving an ugly, three-inch shrapnel wound in his arm. 

Mackenzie, who kept a lucky rabbit’s foot in his pocket, had also been knocked down by the blast, and he regretted missing a shot of the explosion because he had been reloading film when it happened. He recovered and scrambled down a ladder to the ground and resumed shooting. “By this time [the Japanese] had riddled the hangars and set them on fire,” he recalled. “The hospital too was smashed and on fire, and the commissary was all busted up and burning fierce and one of our oil tanks was on fire sending a plume of heavy black smoke up into the atmosphere. It was a merry little hell all around.”

It appeared to Ford that the Japanese avoided bombing the runway, perhaps, he thought, because they hoped to capture the island and use it later. They did bomb alongside it, and they focused a lot of attention on an airplane the Americans had left out in the open as a decoy. From what Ford saw, the enemy wasted a lot of effort to destroy it. “[T]hey lost about three planes trying to get to that fake plane, as it came into a cone of fire that was pretty dangerous,” he said.

One incident that angered Ford happened as he peered through his binoculars and saw a Zero attack and kill a Marine who had bailed out of his airplane. “This kid jumped and this Zero went after him and shot him out of his harness,” he said, and then the Japanese pilot returned to strafe the water where the Marine had come down. 

Ford told his debriefers how impressed he had been by the Marines around him. “They were kids, oh, I would say from 18 to 22, none of them were older. They were the calmest people I have ever seen. They were up there popping away with rifles, having a swell time and none of them were alarmed.” He added, “I was really amazed. I thought that some kids, one or two would get scared, but no, they were having the time of their lives.”

But not all of them had escaped with their lives. Forty-nine of the atoll’s Marine defenders had been killed. Their aircraft—F4F Wildcats and obsolete F2A Brewster Buffaloes—were outmatched by the Japanese Zeros, and attacks flown from Midway against the Japanese vessels proved inconsequential at best and resulted in the loss of more aircraft. 

The attack on the atoll lasted only about 20 minutes. The Japanese did not return to follow it up with an invasion because they ran into difficulties out to sea. Yamamoto had accomplished his goal of drawing the Pacific Fleet into battle, but the results were not what the Japanese had desired. American carrier-based dive bombers pounced on the Japanese ships and sank four of its aircraft carriers—and one reason the American airplanes found the enemy ships at a disadvantage is because the carriers had to recover, refuel, and rearm the aircraft that had returned from the attack on the island. Although the U.S. lost the carrier Yorktown, the Battle of Midway at sea proved to be a disaster for Japan and a turning point in the Pacific war.

Ford returned to the United States with the raw footage from his small portion of the fight as well as footage shot by another of his cameramen, Lieutenant Kenneth M. Pier, who had been aboard the carrier Hornet at sea. He began shaping the footage into a short film with the assistance of some Hollywood friends—Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell from The Grapes of Wrath provided voices, Donald Crisp from How Green Was My Valley added narration, and Alfred Newman, who oversaw music for Twentieth Century-Fox, wrote the score. Ford insisted that his editors include a brief shot of Major James Roosevelt, the president’s son, in the final cut. If he did that to curry favor with Roosevelt, it worked. After screening the 18-minute short at the White House, the president told his chief of staff, “I want every mother in American to see this film.” The Battle of Midway began appearing in theaters, as a short before the main feature, in September. Critic James Agee called it “a brave attempt to make a record—quick, jerky, vivid, fragmentary, luminous—of a moment of desperate peril to the nation.” 

“Even now, far removed from Midway and the war, The Battle of Midway resonates,” wrote Ford biographer Scott Eyman. “It remains one of Ford’s great achievements.”

Ford had a bumpier experience with another film from his unit. Cinematographer Gregg Toland had taken the lead in putting together a documentary about the Pearl Harbor attack, but the military men who previewed the work gave it scathing notices. They objected to the way the filmmakers had recreated events for their cameras, the film’s virulent portrayal of the Japanese, and the way it left the “distinct impression that the Navy was not on the job,” in the words of Admiral Harold Stark. Ford had it recut from 85 minutes to 34, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voted December 7th best short documentary at the 1944 Oscars. 

Ford continued his work for the navy. He ventured into harm’s way again in late 1942 when he oversaw shooting in North Africa. One person he encountered there was Darryl F. Zanuck, the production chief of Twentieth Century-Fox, for whom Ford had made The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. Zanuck had received a commission in the Signal Corps and was working on his own documentary. “Can’t I ever get away from you?” Ford grumbled to him. “I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that if I ever go to Heaven, you’ll be waiting at the door for me under a sign reading, ‘Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck.’”

Ford later went to Asia to film activity in Burma and China, and in June 1944 he supervised filming of the D-Day landings, activity marred when he went on an epic three-day bender in mid-June. Once he sobered up, Ford spent time aboard a PT boat commanded by John D. Bulkeley, who had rescued Douglas MacArthur from Corregidor in March 1942 and was the centerpiece of William Lindsay White’s book They Were Expendable, an account of PT boat crews in the Philippines. (See “Battle Films,” page 76.) When Ford returned to the United States to start work on the film version of White’s book, his time in the war zones were over. 

After the war, Ford continued his film career, directing a series of classic Westerns with John Wayne. (Ford enjoyed needling Wayne over his lack of service in the military.) Those films included Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and The Searchers (1956). The director is now considered one of the great artists of Hollywood’s Golden Age. When filmmaker Orson Welles, no slouch behind the camera himself, was asked who his three favorite directors were, he answered “John Ford, John Ford, John Ford.” 

For the rest of his days, until he died in 1973, Ford remained proud of his navy service and was “shameless” in his pursuit of official medals and ribbons. Befitting a man who had a character in one of his movies say, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” Ford often burnished the legend of his experiences at Midway and elsewhere. In truth, he had no need to embellish.

this article first appeared in world war II magazine

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They say there’s no business like show business. Maybe one day we’ll find out.

The story begins back in September 2022, when Aviation History’s editorial offices received an email from an employee at HBO Max (since renamed simply Max). Would Aviation History give HBO permission to use the cover of the magazine’s Autumn 2022 issue in an episode of the fourth and final season of its series “Succession”?

Our answer: Yes.

For those not aware of “Succession,” the acclaimed series focuses on the Roy family, led by patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the ill-tempered and foul-mouthed founder of a global media empire called Waystar Royco. As ill health forces Logan to contemplate his own mortality, his children begin jostling to take over once he steps down. Kendall (Jeremy Strong) seems in the best position to assume the crown, but siblings Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) also have ambitions, while their half-brother Connor (Alan Ruck) aims at running for president of the U.S. Through the show’s four seasons, the Roys engage in back-stabbing, skullduggery and scheming to gain control of the family business. And they do some of that on aircraft, especially private jets and helicopters. Why not make Aviation History part of the cast?

Well, when the season ended with the series finale on May 28, none of us here managed to pick out the cover. Turns out, it made its very tiny cameo appearance in episode three, “Connor’s Wedding.” Look closely at the back wall in the airport during the Roy children’s press conference and you can see it on the magazine rack. (Take our word for it.)

We think Aviation History acquitted itself well onscreen, and don’t blame us if viewers found their attention straying from the activity in the foreground as they wondered, “How can I get my hands on that magazine?” To quote “the father of modern acting,” Konstantin Stanislavski, “There are no small roles, only small actors.”

We just hope that if “Succession” ever returns to the screen, it will tell the story of how the new owners of Waystar Royco try to gain control of a group of history magazines that fights against its acquisition.

Now, that’s a show we would watch.  

On April 14, 2023, a new museum about Amelia Earhart opened in Atchison, Kansas, the town where the aviator was born in 1897. The Amelia Earhart Hangar Museum features interactive exhibits intended to celebrate the legacy of the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as a passenger in 1928 and solo in 1932) and inspire young people to perhaps follow in her footsteps. “We want people to take away the fact that she truly is relevant today,” says Karen Seaberg, the museum director and the founder and president of the Atchison Amelia Earhart Foundation.

The museum’s centerpiece is the last remaining Lockheed Electra 10-E, the same type of aircraft Earhart was flying on an attempted round-the-world flight when she disappeared over the Pacific in July 1937. In other exhibits, visitors can get a sense of what it was like to rivet an airplane, experience how aviators from Earhart’s time navigated by the stars and explore the Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines that powered the Electra. They can also hear recordings of Earhart’s voice and climb into a life-size reproduction of the Lockheed’s cockpit.

Listen to Seaberg talk about the museum and take a look at the facility in this video.

S.C. Gwynne’s latest book, “His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine,” details the story of the British airship R101, which crashed and burned in France on October 5, 1930, killing all but six of the 54 people onboard. Gwynne, whose other books include “Rebel Yell” and “Empire of the Summer Moon,” tells not just the story of the R101, but also at the problematic history of rigid dirigibles. Like the Hindenburg, which would go down in flames less than seven years later, the R101 got its lift from flammable hydrogen, which was contained inside enormous, 10-story-tall gasbags made out of cow intestines. Known as “goldbeater’s skins,” the intestines reached the airship factory in five-gallon buckets from Argentina, and then women workers stretched them flat, scraped them, and glued them to a lining of thin cotton fabric. Gwynne says the R101 used the intestines from half a million cows. In this interview with Aviation History editor Tom Huntington, Gwynne explains that rather surprising fact and talks about much more.

His Majesty’s Airship: The Life and Tragic Death of the World’s Largest Flying Machine 

by S.C. Gwynne, Scribner, May 2, 2023

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With To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945, John C. McManus completes his trilogy about the Army’s role in the Pacific War. The previous books were Fire and Fortitude, which covered the period from the attack on Pearl Harbor through 1943, and Island Infernos, which covered 1944. The final volume looks at the final calendar year of the war and includes the battles for Manila and Okinawa and the Japanese surrender. “What sets his work apart is the depth of his research coupled with his extraordinary writing skills and his eye for details,” wrote James M. Scott in his review of McManus’s book in World War II. “McManus digs deep into primary source materials, from after-action reports to the individual letters and diaries penned by soldiers. The result is a kaleidoscopic view of the war, from the commanders back in headquarters down to the individual infantrymen huddled in foxholes.”

John C. McManus is a professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Here, in an interview with World War II editor Tom Huntington, he talks about To the End of the Earth.

To the End of the Earth: The US Army and the Downfall of Japan, 1945

by John C. McManus, Dutton Caliber, May 2, 2023

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Airshow attendees who want to see a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress thunder overhead or even take a flight in one are going to be disappointed this year. The Federal Aviation Administration has issued an airworthiness directive that will ground all flyable B-17s due to an issue with wing spars. The AD will go into effect on June 1, 2023, and require inspections of the wing spars and repairs where necessary.

A vital structural component of an airplane’s structure, the wing spars are also where the wing attaches to the fuselage. The B-17 has four spars in each wing and the FAA had become involved after the spars had separated from the fuselage in a B-17. “The FAA considers this AD to be an interim action,” the directive stated. “The inspection reports that are required by this AD will enable the FAA to obtain better insight into the nature, cause, and extent of the discrepancies found on the affected airplanes. The information from the reports will help the FAA evaluate the risk to develop a long-term solution that will address the unsafe condition. Once final action has been identified, the FAA might consider further rulemaking.”

The Yankee Air Museum in Belleville, Michigan, which operates the B-17 “Yankee Lady,” had already grounded its airplane in response to the expected ruling. In an email sent out on April 15, the museum said, “The Yankee Air Museum decided to proactively cease flight operations of the B-17G Flying Fortress ‘Yankee Lady.’ Recent inspections of other B-17s have discovered wing spar issues. As a result we expect a mandatory Airworthiness Directive to be issued by the FAA in the next few weeks regarding the matter. Out of an abundance of caution, we are temporarily ceasing our B-17 flight operations and awaiting direction from the FAA regarding necessary inspections and repairs that will be required. It is expected that the B-17 will not fly during the 2023 flying season. Please note that this only affects the B-17.”

The Yankee Air Museum also offers flights in the North American B-25 Mitchell “Rosie’s Reply,” the Douglas C-47 Skytrain “Hairless Joe,” the UH-1H Huey “Greyhound” and a Ford Trimotor.

Starting in 1935, Boeing and other manufacturers produced almost 13,000 B-17s. Currently there are only six airworthy B-17s left, and only three of those were still flying. The other two are “Sentimental Journey,” a Commemorative Air Force (CAF) aircraft based in Arizona and the Ericson Aircraft Collection’s “Ye Olde Pub” in Oregon. The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) also has a flyable B-17, “Aluminum Overcast,” but grounded the airplane in April 2021 due to concerns about the spars.

The CAF’s B-17 “Texas Raider” was destroyed after an inflight collision with a P-63 Kingcobra at the Wings over Dallas airshow on November 12, 2022. The B-17 “Nine-o-Nine,” owned and operated by the Collings Foundation, was destroyed in a crash at Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, on October 2, 2019, killing seven of the 13 people aboard. Neither accident was related to the wing spars.