Searching for Halifax NP711

Saw this film recently. It's hard to believe that the military had such a callous disregard for bomber airmen suffering from the severe stress being helpless sitting in a metal tube while big guns are shooting at them. As Searching for Halifax NP711 points out, if a bomber airman showed signs of stress or confessed to anyone his fears about flying operations, he would be labeled a coward and humiliated in front of his colleagues and probably would never fly again. The film says there was a 50 percent casualty rate among bomber air crews. No wonder so many men were petrified to fly. The is really a portrait of a single air crew and serves as a proxy for all RCAF and RAF air crews during World War 2. It's a personal story and it's effective because it's personal. But it's also damning of medical officers who ignored a real mental health crisis right under their noses.

This new addition to the World War II documentary genre gives a more personal view of the crew of a Royal Canadian Air Force Halifax bomber, which crashed into a mountain during World War II. The crew was killed and this film ends up being very personal. Startling as it may seem today, a tail-gunner's life expectancy was only 6 weeks. How these men could fly under those terrible conditions is beyond me. I liked the fact that the story was more about the crew than the bomber, and how a German research team began recovery of the wreckage -- long though lost in the mountains of western Germany -- in 2018, finished in 2022, and erected a memorial to the fallen men.

I am a huge World War II buff and have seen it all. War documentaries stick with a formula. Grainy B&W films, Check. Old war veterans in easy chairs under soft lighting. Check. Talking heads. Check. Swing/Big band music. Check. Radio chatter. Check. Bombs and guns sound. Check.

It is rare to deviate from the formula. Searching for halifax np711 checks some of those boxes with a couple of exceptions. There is only one old veteran (from the losing side) interviewed. No soft lighting. No historians to speak of. The interviews have a TV news feel, looking like they were done on the fly. Unpolished. It works.

The biggest deviation from the old formula is the soundtrack. This movie doesn't use 40's music. No Benny Goodman or glen Miller. No nostalgia. It has a contemporary music soundtrack. Maybe soft rock. This anachronistic approach to films is relatively new to films. Steven Soderbergh or Sofia Coppola anyone? The music in this movie is not to my tastes, but I must give it credit for trying something different from the old tried and true we usually see in war documentaries. And anyone with a keen ear will recognize the faithful hussar at the end, which was famously used for the coda in the Paths of Glory.

My grandparents came to the US from West Germany after the war and my great-grandfather was a maintenance man in the Luftwaffe. This documentary at least gives a voice to the Germans with an interview of the German flak soldier who was forced to skip school as a teenager and man a flak gun. At the end there is an officer in the German military who expresses his admiration for a new Germany. This was a touching story about a Canadian and British bomber air crew, but the fact that the people who made this movie gave time to Germans is well appreciated. As documentaries go, I would rank it comparable any World War 2 documentaries out there.

It's disappointing to see a pretty good documentary on this bomber air crew fall into the common narrative that somehow the political right is at fault for the world's ills by condemning our former president and the recent events in Russia and Ukraine. As if they are the only ones a threat to democracy. Fortunately, that is near the end of the film, so the story of this singular Canadian crew and their tragic end is pretty straight forward without histrionics or too much sentiment (there is some). I understand the connection the director was trying to make between WW2 and the events of today, butI am not convinced that a documentary on lost airmen is the place to do it.