Not a movie, but it’s covered in surprising involvement in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, of all places.
Don’t know if this is mentioned in the video (haven’t had time to watch it yet), but heavily armed and armored B-17s were experimented with in Europe as bomber escorts. The idea was, they couldn’t be readily identified, and it was hoped Luftwaffe pilots would attack them the same way they went after ordinary bombers.
The only trouble was, they were too heavy and slow to keep up with the bomber formations, especially after the other aircraft had dropped their bombs.
Heh. A literal flying fortress.
Somewhere between 16-19 .50 cals, two MoH and a bunch of DFC. wow.
Boeing YB-40 Flying Fortress
Most had 16 .50 but other had even more. But it was also the extra armor and the extra ammo that weighed them down along with two extra turrets. They are heavy. There are reports of 30 guns including cannon.
That name originally meant just that. They were intended to defend the United States from seaborne attack, essentially as extensions of American coastal defenses. This was demonstrated to foreign powers by intercepting the Italian passenger liner Rex at sea in 1938.
British historian John Keegan devotes an entire chapter (“Flying Fortresses”) to the development of American air power in his book Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America.
Black and White in Color, from France
Martin Caidin relates a story about a YB-40 gunship in Italy in his book “Fork-Tailed Devil: The P-38.” Seems a P-38 made a forced landing and was captured intact by the Axis. After wringing all they could from the plane, they used it as a stalker, picking off lone, straggling bombers who relaxed when they saw a “Little Friend.” The counter to this was a YB-40.
This book is free on Kindle for amazon Prime.
I’d like an even handed telling of the life of Richard III.
The Rochambelles
(Pardon the thread-necromancy. I just got back online after over a year off.)
Fair enough but I have a feeling this means we won’t be seeing a good Pavlov’s House movie anytime soon.
Did you see the TV show The Endgame? It had hilariously bad timing. The show featured Russian “good guys” (they did evil things but for good reasons and they tried not to hurt civilians) versus Ukrainian bad guys. And then the show was released in the first week after Russia invaded Ukraine. By the end of the series (only ten episodes and it did not get a second season) the main character had changed from being Russian to being Brazilian and the bad guys were only ever referred to by their family name and not their nationality.
My husband reminded me of the “war”–I think we originally heard about that in Cracked–the other day when I told him about how an emu helped stop a hit and run driver who was fleeing on foot when he came to a wildlife sanctuary and decided he could “fight emus” (he attempted a “kung fu kick”) and could get past one protecting its chicks:
In case that’s behind a paywall, try this link: Driver fleeing crash scene thwarted by 'emu attack' in Wiltshire field | ITV News West Country
Assuming I havent already said this upthread…I want to see Tigers in the Mud
A novel about a German tanker who held Americans in contempt for their shitty tactics, was terrified of the Soviets and in the end after the war, while being briefly held in the barbaric open-air internment camps…he just changes into some civilian clothes snuck in and basically walks out and goes home.