Bomber

The Bomber! Here is where it's made, and it's a marvel how they make it in its thousands already built, and tens of thousands to come. Where will they find the pilots to fly them? That's not mentioned. We did.

Carl Sandburg wrote the words spoken in this Academy-Award-Nominated short subject. Rare was the short subject about the War effort that did not get short-listed for the Best Short Subject Oscar. When it's written by a man who would eventually win three Pulitzer Prizes, two of them for poetry, it's not hard to understand why this one got that accolade. When you hear the words, it just makes it more apparent.

"Born of fire, to fight fire, with fire". This is quite an interesting short documentary about the manufacture of American bombers or "ships". What's also quite noticeable here is this massive military escalation in construction is being done without naming an enemy! The photography illustrating the welding, hammering, screwing and precision assembly is quite niftily put together and the sheer power of these flying fortresses is impressively demonstrated in the air, but the film is really over-scored and the fervency of the narrator becomes a bit overwhelming. At times, it's almost like someone is in a pulpit preaching the foreboding hell and damnation on any who test the might of the United States in the skies. That's probably what was intended, and there's no doubt the sheer scale of these operations is intimidatory and that's effectively shown here.

In a review I did on something World War II related recently, I said that while America wasn't the nation to directly contribute to the defeat of the Nazi's, the amount of vehicles and planes we could make made the critical difference. This really obscure short from the war shows how the industrial might of America was able to spam a near limitless stream of bomber planes at not only Germany, but Japan as well in order to cripple their war efforts. The film starts by showing a B-26 Marauder medium bomber being rolled out of a hangar, and the narrator says how the enemies of the american democratic way of life will be subjected to a rain of destruction from the air the likes of which have never been seen. Inside one of the facilities that makes these planes, we see how rows upon rows of wings are held by large chains from the ceiling of the factory. Also on display are the nose sections of the planes, the upper portion of which being the area where the pilots sit. The disassembled pieces of the planes are big enough to require the use of other machines to put them in place. Riveters constantly work on the wings before they're attached to the bombers. Before the engines are attached to the plane, they test them by putting them in wind tunnels and running them for 10 straight hours. All the while it is carefully monitored by engineers who write down any potential reliability problems they see. After the test, the entire thing is taken apart, then put back together and run for another 4 hours. During the last half hour, the engine is run on WEP (war emergency power), which is the highest speed setting it can go to. Even in the 40s, american designers were not willing to put planes in the air unless they were safe. A windsock on the roof of the hangar indicates windspeed and direction, and pilots get into the newly assembled planes to partake in training missions. As a medium bomber, the B-26 was not among the two main american types (B-17 and B-24) that caused the most damage to german infrastructure during the war, but it was used fairly liberally in the Mediterranean and in the Pacific against Japan. The early versions were well known to kill scores of inexperienced pilots as the plane had a rather high approach speed for landings. Dropping below an already intimidating 150 miles per hour would usually result in a stall and subsequent crash. This short was alright. I remember watching a similar film on the much more impressive B-29, the plane that would ultimately put an end to ww2. In that, they show much of the same processes used to build the aircrafts. Of course they're not exactly the same, but there's only so much you can learn by watching things like this without actually being there. While this short was undoubtedly made in order to make the american public feel that we were on the road to winning the war, I wouldn't say it qualifies as propaganda, as there are no exaggerations here. I once read something that said at the height of the strategic bombing campaign, a bomber was coming off an american production line every 40 minutes. It sounds unbelievable, but not that far fetched for the US.