The Cold Blue

Frankly, I often just listen to many docs as the background while commuting or doing chores. This movie disallows you to do that, both for the respect and empathy for guys and for the video and information load the movie is charged with. Atomizing the endevour in chapters is very useful as they get embedded into memory. Fume tales from engines warning Nazis 50 miles ahead the formation is approaching. The code of Americans flying in daylight (why? never gets explained here but you could find an explanation elsewhere) while Brits did it at night. FLAK mortal danger. Red flares on airfield approach signalling there is a wounded serviceman aboard. Frostbite as flying fortresses have not been pressurized. And ever increasing number of missions which sends you back to Catch 22. In a somewhat weird way, this two great movies - Cold Blue and Catch-22 - get intrinsically intertwined.

We owe so much to these boys plucked from farms, shops, and their homes to fight Hitler in Europe in 1942. These boys left home, some of them not yet 20 years old. Fighting cold, German fighters, and fear of not coming home at the end of a mission, they were the 8th Air Force flying daylight bombing missions against the German fatherland. Flying 5 hours there and 5 back while flying thru German fighters and flak to lay a few bombs on a target they may had hit the day before and the day before that too. Sometimes barely making it home with only part of a tail or on 3 engines to land and have their ground crews patch them up for the next mission. So proud of these teenagers and early 20's boys forced to grow up too fast and too early in a war they didn't start or want either.

In 1944, director William Wyler flew with the crew of the Memphis Belle, a B-17 crew who flew over 30 bombing missions over Nazi Germany, on their final mission. Wyler and his crew filmed the final flight and the Memphis Belle's journey home in his documentary The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. Years later, Erik Nelson took the fading 16mm film and remastered it. He traveled the country and interviewed the last survivors of the 8th Air Force who flew B-17's over Germany during World War II. I caught this film at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles last week. It was Veterans Day and the crowd was filled with an air of respect.

The film recalls a youthfulness that, more often than not, died on foreign soil. Nelson and his crew remastered the colors and converted the 16mm footage to 4K so that the the film could be viewed in 16:9 widescreen. The original documentary footage had no sound, so Nelson flew on actual B-17s to capture authentic audio. The final product spins a tale that truly captures the fear and inhumanity witnessed by B-17 veterans. The throaty turbines rumble over the air while deep flack shreds both wing and wingman. The veteran interviewees' voices ring true. There is power in their voice despite the fragility of their age. These men truly were the greatest generation. Their tales will soon be all that survives.

I've seen some reviews here that question the Allied Command tactics, and/or whether some of the bombing activities were appropriate, or not. This isn't a film about whether the war was prosecuted in the best possible manner (to be critiqued in "Monday morning quarterback" style), it's a documentary about the men who were given the extremely dangerous job of flying directly into the German defenses, to attempt to deliver ordinance payloads that would hopefully damage the German war machine to the degree that it would allow the allied forces to turn the tide of the war. It's about those men flying into what amounted to a shooting gallery, day after day, fully aware that their odds of survival were not much better than the odds from a typical coin toss, and yet, continuing to do so, over and over again, because they knew that their efforts "might be" enough to tilt the balance of war, just enough, so that the D-Day invasion, and subsequent push into German held territory, might have a chance of succeeding, and finally turning the war around.

If you want some insight into the risks that were taken, the sacrifices that were made, and see it "up close and personal", in amazing, restored color film footage, shot from these aircraft during their missions, then you really won't find anything better than this. And instead of just having a voice-over, done by some third-party narrator, this film is narrated by WW II veterans who flew missions in these aircraft, and hence, are giving first-hand accounts of their own experiences, comparable to the activities that were captured by the original filmmakers.

In summary, this is extraordinary footage, captured at great risk to the filmmakers who rode along on the missions, in order to capture it. It is an important, up close and personal, slice of US military history, the likes of which are rarely seen, and a real tribute to the sacrifice of so many brave flight crews who played an important part in the eventual Allied victory. It is well worth your viewing time.

Weather you are a history buff or not, this is worthy of watching. The odds of surviving the required 25 missions was pretty slim. The old guys in the 10 man crew were barely 21 years old. More airmen of the 8th airforce died over Europe than our Marines who fought the brutal Pacific island campaign.

This documentary will not dissapoint