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Post by bigdawgs on Feb 21, 2024 18:42:24 GMT -5
I wonder if anyone has seen it through whatever episode they are on now? I don't have Apple TV and haven't tried to catch it so far...until today. We have a small group of about 7 Vets who meet once a month for lunch and then usually watch a war or other history flick. One of the guys has Apple and we set up a plan to watch two episodes each time we meet over the next several months.
Today I saw the first two episodes and was impressed. It is early and not fair to make a judgement at this time, but so far, I think it is close to being as good as Band of Brothers and just a bit better than Pacific. You follow the 100th Bomb Group as part of the 8th US Air Force. These first two episodes take you on their maiden mission from the States to England and then on a couple of their first missions. The Mighty 8th suffered more deaths than any organization other than the Army (ground forces) during WWII. In these first couple of missions, you get the feel of what they went through. Their unit camaraderie reminds one of Band of Brothers and because it is one unit, they both are a bit easier to follow than Pacific. Both of it's predecessors were classics and it looks like this one will be as well.
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Vespula
Senator
"Panzerkönigin"
Posts: 3,814
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Post by Vespula on Feb 21, 2024 19:49:49 GMT -5
I am watching it regularly, and it looks like a very good depiction of what the air war over Europe was like. I have actually known B-17 and B-24 crew and support crew veterans from WWII. One of my dad's closest high school friends was a B-17 pilot who was killed over Merseburg in November 1944. I have also read numerous books about these aircraft and missions of the campaign. As a lifelong aviation nerd, I am fascinated!
At the point of the war depicted so far, the 100th is still flying the B-17F's, which were most vulnerable from the front because it was so lightly armed there. (The B-17G's were equipped with remotely operated twin .50 caliber chin turrets.) The Luftwaffe designed its attack tactics to exploit this vulnerability, and the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and bombardier were the ones killed first in those attacks. Once the plane began to drop after the attacks, the crew only had seconds to bail out. Otherwise the bomber would go into a spin, and centrifugal force would pin the airmen to the wall of the interior fuselage, and it was a prolonged plunge to certain death. One of my dad's high school classmates was a top turret gunner in a B-17. His plane was his by an 88mm flak round immediately forward of his position, so the entire nose fell away with the forward crew members inside. Baker, my dad's friend, already had a parachute on, so he unstrapped from the turret and fell free to open the chute. He was captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. Unfortunately, he was enlisted, so he was put into a camp with Polish and Russian POW's, where they were basically fed low quality vegetables and little meat, so he nearly starved before being rescued.
I will be interested to see how they handle the appearance of the P-47 and P-51 escort fighters. They made the greatest difference in the reduction of losses from daylight bombing. The Germans were more advanced in their technology, but they could not produce the numbers needed to meet the tidal wave of equipment and crews pouring in constantly from the USA. I am grateful to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg for showing this generation what it took to defeat a smart, powerful, and very dangerous enemy in a time when there were no targeting computers, universally available onboard radars, or fire-and-forget missiles.
One little nerd observation: the roundel insignia used on the aircraft so far have been accurate. The red outlined white-bar-outside-blue-circle-white-star roundel pegs the last episode as June 1943. Excellent!!
God bless them all, and may we never forget what they went through.
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Post by bigdawgs on Feb 21, 2024 19:58:02 GMT -5
I am watching it regularly, and it looks like a very good depiction of what the air war over Europe was like. I have actually known B-17 and B-24 crew and support crew veterans from WWII. One of my dad's closest high school friends was a B-17 pilot who was killed over Merseburg in November 1944. I have also read numerous books about these aircraft and missions of the campaign. As a lifelong aviation nerd, I am fascinated! At the point of the war depicted so far, the 100th is still flying the B-17F's, which were most vulnerable from the front because it was do lightly armed there. (The B-17G's were equipped with remotely operated twin .50 caliber chin turrets.) The Luftwaffe designed its attack tactics to exploit this vulnerability, and the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and bombardier were the ones killed first in those attacks. Once the plane began to drop after the attacks, the crew only had seconds to bail out. Otherwise the bomber would go into a spin, and centrifugal force would pin the airmen to the wall of the interior fuselage, and it was a prolonged plunge to certain death. One of my dad's high school classmates was a top turret gunner in a B-17. His plane was his by an 88mm flak round immediately forward of his position, so the entire nose fell away with the forward crew members inside. Baker, my dad's friend, already had a parachute on, so he unstrapped from the turret and fell free to open the chute. He was captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. Unfortunately, he was enlisted, so he was put into a camp with Polish and Russian POW's, where they were basically fed low quality vegetables and little meat, so he nearly starved before being rescued. I will be interested to see how they handle the appearance of the P-47 and P-51 escort fighters. They made the greatest difference in the reduction of losses from daylight bombing. The Germans were more advanced in their technology, but they could not produce the numbers needed to meet the tidal wave of equipment and crews pouring in constantly from the USA. I am grateful to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg for showing this generation what it took to defeat a smart, powerful, and very dangerous enemy in a time when there were no targeting computers, universally available onboard radars, or fire-and-forget missiles. One little nerd observation: the roundel insignia used on the aircraft so far have been accurate. The red outlined white-bar-outside-blue-circle-white-star roundel pegs the last episode as June 1943. Excellent!! God bless them all, and may we never forget what they went through. My uncle was a navigator on a B24 flying out of N. Africa and later Italy. Made the run on the Ploesti Oil Fields. One of my other uncles was an ME 109 pilot, wounded in the war. Passed away from his wounds in 1956. I always wondered if the two had somehow ever met in the skies Europe.
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Post by bigdawgs on Feb 22, 2024 14:56:06 GMT -5
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Vespula
Senator
"Panzerkönigin"
Posts: 3,814
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Post by Vespula on Feb 22, 2024 18:12:36 GMT -5
Ploiești! God in Heaven, that was a slaughter. Only Schweinfurt even comes close. I read Ernest K. Gann's account of that one when I was 16. I saw documentaries about Ploiești about that same time and about a decade later. I can't imagine the level of fatalistic courage it took to perform those raids. It is even beyond the Doolittle Raiders in 1942 over Tokyo. It was literally do or/and die. The Messerschmitt and Focke-Wulf fighter pilots of 1944-1945 were often totally outclassed by the P-51 Mustangs even over Berlin. Although their Mustangs carried 4 - 6 .50 caliber machine guns, the Luftwaffe had 1, 2, and 4 20mm cannon, but with limited ammunition. In addition, the P-47s and newest Spitfires could penetrate German defenses as deep as Bremen, Dortmund, and Düsseldorf. It took incredible courage and resolve for the German pilots to fly those missions.
My deep respect to the courage all of them used to accomplish such missions!
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Post by theswan on Feb 22, 2024 20:47:22 GMT -5
I haven't heard of this. I will definitely check it out. I loved Band of Brothers, and the Pacific. So, if it's mentioned in the breath, I have to assume it's amazing
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Post by bigdawgs on Feb 22, 2024 23:13:00 GMT -5
I haven't heard of this. I will definitely check it out. I loved Band of Brothers, and the Pacific. So, if it's mentioned in the breath, I have to assume it's amazing The first two episodes were very good. It is a bit more like BoB because it is a single organization that you follow throughout the war. I suspect, like its two predecessors, it will be bloody because that is what it was like for the 8th Air Force and daylight bombing of Germany. Incredible losses, like Vessie mentioned above. I happened to be stationed in Schweinfurt in the mid 80s and it was interesting to meet some of the more important people in town. Kugel Fischer was the main ball bearing factory still in operation after the war. Herr Fischer, whose parents' factories had been destroyed so badly was a great supporter of our troops and their families. He and his brother poured a lot of money into that support. The dual raid by the 1st and 3d Air Divisions of the 8th Air Force took place on 17 August 1943. The 3d Division hit Regensburg and then, to fool the Germans, headed south to North Africa. Their target was the Messerschmitt factory. They hit it and caused major damage. But the division, which only had P47 support to the German border was under continuous attack by the Luftwaffe and lost 24 aircraft with 240 airmen. The second portion, delayed by 3 hours of bad weather in England, hit Schweinfurt and those ball bearing factories. They too had no fighter escort and were savaged, losing 36 aircraft and 360 airmen. German ball bearing production dropped in half almost immediately, but rapidly recovered to 100% and Germany never really ran short of this critical item for the rest of the war. The bombing campaign could not sustain such losses, adding emphasis to get the long range fighters that Vessie mentioned. As I said earlier, the 8th Air Force wound up having more deaths than any American organization in the war, outside of Army ground forces in Europe and the Pacific.
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Vespula
Senator
"Panzerkönigin"
Posts: 3,814
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Post by Vespula on Mar 15, 2024 16:02:04 GMT -5
I am watching it regularly, and it looks like a very good depiction of what the air war over Europe was like. I have actually known B-17 and B-24 crew and support crew veterans from WWII. One of my dad's closest high school friends was a B-17 pilot who was killed over Merseburg in November 1944. I have also read numerous books about these aircraft and missions of the campaign. As a lifelong aviation nerd, I am fascinated! At the point of the war depicted so far, the 100th is still flying the B-17F's, which were most vulnerable from the front because it was so lightly armed there. (The B-17G's were equipped with remotely operated twin .50 caliber chin turrets.) The Luftwaffe designed its attack tactics to exploit this vulnerability, and the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and bombardier were the ones killed first in those attacks. Once the plane began to drop after the attacks, the crew only had seconds to bail out. Otherwise the bomber would go into a spin, and centrifugal force would pin the airmen to the wall of the interior fuselage, and it was a prolonged plunge to certain death. One of my dad's high school classmates was a top turret gunner in a B-17. His plane was his by an 88mm flak round immediately forward of his position, so the entire nose fell away with the forward crew members inside. Baker, my dad's friend, already had a parachute on, so he unstrapped from the turret and fell free to open the chute. He was captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. Unfortunately, he was enlisted, so he was put into a camp with Polish and Russian POW's, where they were basically fed low quality vegetables and little meat, so he nearly starved before being rescued. I will be interested to see how they handle the appearance of the P-47 and P-51 escort fighters. They made the greatest difference in the reduction of losses from daylight bombing. The Germans were more advanced in their technology, but they could not produce the numbers needed to meet the tidal wave of equipment and crews pouring in constantly from the USA. I am grateful to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg for showing this generation what it took to defeat a smart, powerful, and very dangerous enemy in a time when there were no targeting computers, universally available onboard radars, or fire-and-forget missiles. One little nerd observation: the roundel insignia used on the aircraft so far have been accurate. The red outlined white-bar-outside-blue-circle-white-star roundel pegs the last episode as June 1943. Excellent!! God bless them all, and may we never forget what they went through. I finished watching the series last night, and I feel disappointed with it compared to the very well done Band of Brothers and the much more sympathetically made The Pacific. I didn’t feel that there was much character development in this one, but the biggest flaw was the ignorance of technology displayed in the use of aircraft during the course of the story line. Unlike today’s very slow and calcified development of aircraft for military use, the Americans, British, Germans, Japanese, and Russians were innovating and producing advanced aviation technology and designs and a pace even faster than the amazing advances of World War I. There were lots of big errors in the story in this regard, but one thing I noticed was that they only had 5 technical advisors as compared with hundreds of behind-the-scenes crews for the production and CGI functions. Although there were many minuscule details that they did get right (like the change of USA insignia between 1942 and 1945 from blue circle with white star to the addition of white horizontal bars to the left and right of the insignia, first with a red border, then without the red border. linkWhat they got very wrong: 1. The B-17 evolution. As correctly shown in the early episodes, the B-17F was the primary type of the aircraft that was deployed in the ETO. The Luftwaffe very quickly learned that the rear and sides of the bomber were very well defended, high and low, especially in formations. The F model had the fatal flaw of poor armament in the nose, thus exposing the bombardier, pilot, and co-pilot to the highest probability of casualty in a nose-on attack. A very famous example of this type is Memphis Belle, which has now been rescued from the misuse and deliberate attempt to destroy it by the city of Memphis (the mayor there in the 1990’s thought it had been used by the Confederate army during the Civil War). The B-17G is the one you are most likely to see at an airshow or in a museum. It was introduced in quantity during 1944, and it added a remotely controlled “chin” turret with twin .50 caliber machine guns, plus one manually operated .50 caliber on the forward port and starboard sides, so it was 4 times deadlier against a frontal attack than the F model (it was like attacking a P-51B head-on). By this point in the war, American and British fighters had so overpowered the Luftwaffe over Britain that the American USAAF stopped using camouflage and olive drab colors on their aircraft and left them in bare aluminum with national and squadron markings only. This version of the B-17 was still vulnerable to advanced Luftwaffe technology, but it offered much better protection because of improved fighters to escort them. 2. American fighters. This element of the air war was done so poorly, I could have been a better technical advisor when I was in the 7th grade. Let’s look at the pitiful cameo of the Tuskegee Airmen in episode 8. We first see them in North Africa in P-40E Warhawk fighters. That is pretty close to right, but there are some pictures of them with Tiger Shark mouth schemes, and that is pure fiction. They never used that scheme. They were, however, equipped with the obsolescent, slow, low altitude P-40 in their first deployments and had to encounter Bf-109F and G fighters as well as various Fiat, Macchi, and Regianne Italian aircraft, some of which were considered better than the German types. Nevertheless, the Tuskegee fighter pilots learned quickly to deal with them. They did NOT leap straight into the most advanced P-51D fighters from there, as depicted. They went to P-47s (a huge, fast, and incredibly tough fighter that was superb in ground attack and superior to most other fighter types in Axis use in late 1943-1944.) link Only after that did they get the P-51B, then the famous P-51D types. The only allied fighter we ever see in the series is the late-war P-51D Mustang. It is a pretty aircraft and was very instrumental in protecting the B-17 crews from late 1944 through war’s end, but the P-51 was a failure at first because it had American-made Allison engines. It was only after the British and Americans got together and put the Spitfire’s Merlin engine in the Mustang that it became the premier Allied fighter we associate with World War II. Not only was it faster than almost any piston engine German and Italian piston engine types, it could escort bombers all the way from England to eastern Germany and back. The 99th Squadron’s Red Tails became most famous for using these and reputedly never allowed even one escorted bomber to be shot down. link3. German fighters. According to this series, Germany had Messerschmitt Bf-109G’s and, well yeah, they mentioned FW-190’s but never showed any. In fact, the 109 really was a highly numerous fighter type, but the Focke-Wulf FW-190A was a much more dangerous fighter – faster, more heavily armed, and was a match against any of the advanced Allied fighters, including the Spitfire Mark V – Mark XIV versions, the P-47D, and even the P-51B – D types. The Bf-109G typically had one 20mm cannon in the propeller hub and two 13mm (.51 caliber) machine guns in the upper cowling. Some had a 4 x 20mm gun array under each wing and a 30mm cannon in the propeller hub, but these were about 70mph slower than the regular production models. As shown in the episodes, they and the FW-190s could carry two unguided rockets that were similar to the Nebelwerfer rockets used by land artillery. link Germany also had larger, heavy fighters, like the twin engine Bf-110, Me-410, He-219, and even specially equipped Ju-88 and Do-17 twin engine bombers that could carry incredible ordnance to rip a bomber apart in midair. 4. Jet and rocket fighters. What the series never showed were the Wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) of the Luftwaffe – the Me-262 twin jet fighter and the Me-163 rocket fighter. link The 262 was faster than anything the Allies had with a maximum speed of 540 mph and four 30mm cannons in the nose. It had less than 45 minutes of fuel per flight, but its ability to outrun even Mustangs made it fearsome against bombers. It could also carry up to 4 unguided rockets. The little Me-163 could only blast off and achieve almost 600 mph, then cruise glide on its broad, swept wings. It carried one 30mm cannon in each wing, but it was only useful for one pass. (A firsthand account I was told by Sgt. Glen Baker, top turret gunner on a B-17G, was that he saw some of them climb to the altitude of his formation, but they only circled around and were unable to shoot before gliding back down.) Still the 163 did achieve some shootdowns, and it showed that the days of propeller aircraft were over. I do not intend to say that the series was completely bad, but it seemed to veer off the rails in episodes 7, 8, and 9 from its intent and became a mix of The Great Escape, 12 O’Clock High, and The Gallant Hours. I had a strong feeling that budgets became tight, corners were cut, and the project was hurried to a finish. Masters of the Air told a menagerie of stories, but it lacked the visceral power of Memphis Belle, Tuskegee Airmen, and Battle of Britain. The real histories of these brave men are so much more, but then again, I was born just 6 years after the end of World War II, and I grew up around men like these and knew others like them through my 60’s. It makes me like a member of their family, so my expectations are far too high, and their deeds are far too great for any movie or TV series to ever do them justice in my eyes.
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Post by bigdawgs on Mar 15, 2024 17:52:53 GMT -5
Great and fascinating review Vessie. Next Weds will see episodes 3 and 4.
12 O'Clock High is one of the great war movies in how it depicted unit cohesiveness and the challenges of leadership, particularly in times of great duress.
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Post by geauxtigerfan on Mar 15, 2024 18:29:14 GMT -5
I am watching it regularly, and it looks like a very good depiction of what the air war over Europe was like. I have actually known B-17 and B-24 crew and support crew veterans from WWII. One of my dad's closest high school friends was a B-17 pilot who was killed over Merseburg in November 1944. I have also read numerous books about these aircraft and missions of the campaign. As a lifelong aviation nerd, I am fascinated! At the point of the war depicted so far, the 100th is still flying the B-17F's, which were most vulnerable from the front because it was so lightly armed there. (The B-17G's were equipped with remotely operated twin .50 caliber chin turrets.) The Luftwaffe designed its attack tactics to exploit this vulnerability, and the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and bombardier were the ones killed first in those attacks. Once the plane began to drop after the attacks, the crew only had seconds to bail out. Otherwise the bomber would go into a spin, and centrifugal force would pin the airmen to the wall of the interior fuselage, and it was a prolonged plunge to certain death. One of my dad's high school classmates was a top turret gunner in a B-17. His plane was his by an 88mm flak round immediately forward of his position, so the entire nose fell away with the forward crew members inside. Baker, my dad's friend, already had a parachute on, so he unstrapped from the turret and fell free to open the chute. He was captured and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. Unfortunately, he was enlisted, so he was put into a camp with Polish and Russian POW's, where they were basically fed low quality vegetables and little meat, so he nearly starved before being rescued. I will be interested to see how they handle the appearance of the P-47 and P-51 escort fighters. They made the greatest difference in the reduction of losses from daylight bombing. The Germans were more advanced in their technology, but they could not produce the numbers needed to meet the tidal wave of equipment and crews pouring in constantly from the USA. I am grateful to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg for showing this generation what it took to defeat a smart, powerful, and very dangerous enemy in a time when there were no targeting computers, universally available onboard radars, or fire-and-forget missiles. One little nerd observation: the roundel insignia used on the aircraft so far have been accurate. The red outlined white-bar-outside-blue-circle-white-star roundel pegs the last episode as June 1943. Excellent!! God bless them all, and may we never forget what they went through. I finished watching the series last night, and I feel disappointed with it compared to the very well done Band of Brothers and the much more sympathetically made The Pacific. I didn’t feel that there was much character development in this one, but the biggest flaw was the ignorance of technology displayed in the use of aircraft during the course of the story line. Unlike today’s very slow and calcified development of aircraft for military use, the Americans, British, Germans, Japanese, and Russians were innovating and producing advanced aviation technology and designs and a pace even faster than the amazing advances of World War I. There were lots of big errors in the story in this regard, but one thing I noticed was that they only had 5 technical advisors as compared with hundreds of behind-the-scenes crews for the production and CGI functions. Although there were many minuscule details that they did get right (like the change of USA insignia between 1942 and 1945 from blue circle with white star to the addition of white horizontal bars to the left and right of the insignia, first with a red border, then without the red border. linkWhat they got very wrong: 1. The B-17 evolution. As correctly shown in the early episodes, the B-17F was the primary type of the aircraft that was deployed in the ETO. The Luftwaffe very quickly learned that the rear and sides of the bomber were very well defended, high and low, especially in formations. The F model had the fatal flaw of poor armament in the nose, thus exposing the bombardier, pilot, and co-pilot to the highest probability of casualty in a nose-on attack. A very famous example of this type is Memphis Belle, which has now been rescued from the misuse and deliberate attempt to destroy it by the city of Memphis (the mayor there in the 1990’s thought it had been used by the Confederate army during the Civil War). The B-17G is the one you are most likely to see at an airshow or in a museum. It was introduced in quantity during 1944, and it added a remotely controlled “chin” turret with twin .50 caliber machine guns, plus one manually operated .50 caliber on the forward port and starboard sides, so it was 4 times deadlier against a frontal attack than the F model (it was like attacking a P-51B head-on). By this point in the war, American and British fighters had so overpowered the Luftwaffe over Britain that the American USAAF stopped using camouflage and olive drab colors on their aircraft and left them in bare aluminum with national and squadron markings only. This version of the B-17 was still vulnerable to advanced Luftwaffe technology, but it offered much better protection because of improved fighters to escort them. 2. American fighters. This element of the air war was done so poorly, I could have been a better technical advisor when I was in the 7th grade. Let’s look at the pitiful cameo of the Tuskegee Airmen in episode 8. We first see them in North Africa in P-40E Warhawk fighters. That is pretty close to right, but there are some pictures of them with Tiger Shark mouth schemes, and that is pure fiction. They never used that scheme. They were, however, equipped with the obsolescent, slow, low altitude P-40 in their first deployments and had to encounter Bf-109F and G fighters as well as various Fiat, Macchi, and Regianne Italian aircraft, some of which were considered better than the German types. Nevertheless, the Tuskegee fighter pilots learned quickly to deal with them. They did NOT leap straight into the most advanced P-51D fighters from there, as depicted. They went to P-47s (a huge, fast, and incredibly tough fighter that was superb in ground attack and superior to most other fighter types in Axis use in late 1943-1944.) link Only after that did they get the P-51B, then the famous P-51D types. The only allied fighter we ever see in the series is the late-war P-51D Mustang. It is a pretty aircraft and was very instrumental in protecting the B-17 crews from late 1944 through war’s end, but the P-51 was a failure at first because it had American-made Allison engines. It was only after the British and Americans got together and put the Spitfire’s Merlin engine in the Mustang that it became the premier Allied fighter we associate with World War II. Not only was it faster than almost any piston engine German and Italian piston engine types, it could escort bombers all the way from England to eastern Germany and back. The 99th Squadron’s Red Tails became most famous for using these and reputedly never allowed even one escorted bomber to be shot down. link3. German fighters. According to this series, Germany had Messerschmitt Bf-109G’s and, well yeah, they mentioned FW-190’s but never showed any. In fact, the 109 really was a highly numerous fighter type, but the Focke-Wulf FW-190A was a much more dangerous fighter – faster, more heavily armed, and was a match against any of the advanced Allied fighters, including the Spitfire Mark V – Mark XIV versions, the P-47D, and even the P-51B – D types. The Bf-109G typically had one 20mm cannon in the propeller hub and two 13mm (.51 caliber) machine guns in the upper cowling. Some had a 4 x 20mm gun array under each wing and a 30mm cannon in the propeller hub, but these were about 70mph slower than the regular production models. As shown in the episodes, they and the FW-190s could carry two unguided rockets that were similar to the Nebelwerfer rockets used by land artillery. link Germany also had larger, heavy fighters, like the twin engine Bf-110, Me-410, He-219, and even specially equipped Ju-88 and Do-17 twin engine bombers that could carry incredible ordnance to rip a bomber apart in midair. 4. Jet and rocket fighters. What the series never showed were the Wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) of the Luftwaffe – the Me-262 twin jet fighter and the Me-163 rocket fighter. link The 262 was faster than anything the Allies had with a maximum speed of 540 mph and four 30mm cannons in the nose. It had less than 45 minutes of fuel per flight, but its ability to outrun even Mustangs made it fearsome against bombers. It could also carry up to 4 unguided rockets. The little Me-163 could only blast off and achieve almost 600 mph, then cruise glide on its broad, swept wings. It carried one 30mm cannon in each wing, but it was only useful for one pass. (A firsthand account I was told by Sgt. Glen Baker, top turret gunner on a B-17G, was that he saw some of them climb to the altitude of his formation, but they only circled around and were unable to shoot before gliding back down.) Still the 163 did achieve some shootdowns, and it showed that the days of propeller aircraft were over. I do not intend to say that the series was completely bad, but it seemed to veer off the rails in episodes 7, 8, and 9 from its intent and became a mix of The Great Escape, 12 O’Clock High, and The Gallant Hours. I had a strong feeling that budgets became tight, corners were cut, and the project was hurried to a finish. Masters of the Air told a menagerie of stories, but it lacked the visceral power of Memphis Belle, Tuskegee Airmen, and Battle of Britain. The real histories of these brave men are so much more, but then again, I was born just 6 years after the end of World War II, and I grew up around men like these and knew others like them through my 60’s. It makes me like a member of their family, so my expectations are far too high, and their deeds are far too great for any movie or TV series to ever do them justice in my eyes. Great writeup Prof.
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