Right. I find that a bit jarring too. Almost as bad as American SBDs bombing Pearl Harbor in every TV documentary ever made.
Models E–G of the B-17 had provision for additional guns in the nose, usually in the form of field modification kits. Some of the combinations that ensued were pretty wild.
I think the C and D models (and maybe some E examples too) had a ventral bathtub position instead of a ball turret, with the gunner lying prone and the gun pointing backwards, if you can imagine that!
There’s one movie (can’t think of the name right offhand) made during WWII that starts with a B-17 crew flying over the Pacific when the raid on Pearl Harbor is announced. They spend the rest of the picture trying to evade the Japanese and make it to Australia. It’s a good movie, but the really interesting parts are the ones filmed inside the mockup of a B-17C/D that is uber-accurate.
As special effects get better some portrayals improve. But, they look too good. Maybe, we’ll get wax museum perfect reproductions presented in grainy BW to look authentic. Mmmm…Orwellian history.
I.ve seen that but forget the name. There were a couple of dozen Cs that were made available to Hollywood because they were useless for anything else. I think they were also used for bond drives.
I was inside the B-17 owned by the CAF when they came to Holman Field in St Paul back in 1984. I got to sit in the nose compartment, where they showed me how the Norden bombsight worked.
The thing that struck me about the airplane was just how vulnerable the crew was to enemy fire. You could punch through the skin with a screwdriver, and the armor plating in places didn’t offer much protection. I would have been scared shitless flying into combat in it.
Growing up, I always thought you’d be pretty safe inside a bomber. I know now that’s not true for any of them, whether American, British, German, or some other kind. It amazes me that more of them weren’t shot down and more aircrew weren’t killed.
Yeah, I got a MATS ride in a B25 once. I felt like I was in a Piper Cub with two huge engines.
Movies don’t convey the vulnerability of being suspended a couple of miles up on lightweight materials while people shoot a you. The term flying fortress is misleading (Army propaganda).
It is rare for a movie this old to still have first class production values, not to mention great acting and an outstanding story. It doesn’t get much better than this. Oh, and other reasons too…the characters are for the most part anonymous, regular joes, not a “great man” as in Patton.
Wow…yeah. If you haven’t read the story of Jimmy Stewart, the actor who “quit” Hollywood during WWII to contribute to the war effort, you should. He was a B17 pilot and some form of squadron commander. I think he got totally stressed out and had to stop, which I understand to be a common form of retirement for people fighting in a war. IIRC, on his last flight, there was a gaping flak hole right under his feet, through which the freezing cold wind filled the cockpit. He was a fairly skinny guy; this must have been harrowing and painful. He had seen friends get shot down during missions, too.
This is one of the best examples of actual “heroism” I can think of. His keeping his crew together, returning them safely, made him a hero. However, his sort of being moved away from combat and retired was, for him, no doubt painful and embarrassing. Another case of “he never talked about it,” and you can see why. So much negativity associated with it.
My grandpa was a similar case, but frontline junior officer in Patton’s outfit. He was particularly disposed to not talk about it, but he had two sons constantly needling him to talk about the war. I know some of his official records and citations, and can only imagine some of the details. (Like, after the combat action that earned him his silver star, he was listed as “sick” for a while, a week or two. As if they were letting him de-stress.)
I’ve read many times that flak was the worst, because there was no way of firing back at it, and you never knew when a lucky shell was going to find you.
And then there were “Scarecrow shells”…
Schräge Musik refers to the upward firing cannons installed on night fighters like the Bf110. All the pilot had to do was get in below and slightly behind a bomber to shoot it down. Most of the time, they were never detected until it was already too late.
Patton is an example of a war movie that kind of isn’t a war movie. Movies like Das Boot, Saving Private Ryan or Stalingrad are about what war is like for the men that fight them. Patton is about Patton. It’s a a character study about a very, very unusual man.
Stewart flew a B-24 Liberator, the USA’s other primary heavy bomber in Europe, which looked totally different from a B-17 but had broadly similar capabilities.
I believe the very early models of M4 Shermans did have problems with exploding because their ammo racks weren’t properly protected, but once widespread usage of Shermans began to occur by Normandy they wound up having a much lower chance of exploding than even German tanks.
Of course this is one of those things where something that happened only at the very beginning would follow it for the rest of its service life.
In a face to face battle, a sherman is not going to do well vs a panther.
Now, our tanks had many advantages- mass production, and long term reliability. (The USSR had mass production but poor reliability). Not to mention we could & did build a dozen shermans for every panther.
But certainly American tanks were by no means deathtraps.
Nope, at least to the “loved part”. Fighting off a dozen shermans with a single tank was not gonna be a fun thing.
Wait, while totally a sidetrack, this is totally not true. Whether or not the strategy or having more, worse tanks, was a good one or not, its 100% true that an individual Sherman tank was inferior to an individual Panther or Tiger tank.
True, but not much to pick between a Pkw IV and Sherman. The long 75 on the IV had better penetration, but the sherman was, faster, more reliable, and it’s gun was more versatile.
Sure in a pure tank battle, the Tiger was tough to beat, but a 155mm Howitzer or a P47 would make short work of it.