The Cold Blue

Stunning original footage with a thoughtful narrative and truly moving recollections from the few remaining veterans.. .Those ignorant enough to condemn the bombing of the third reich as a "war crime" should be sat in a chair and advised to watch this film... This campaign ,as terrible as it was ,put a stop to the V1 rockets the V2 rockets and the gas chambers .Without doubt it saved Europe at a huge cost to the young men of The USAF and RAF and should be properly remembered in exactly this way..

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.

The amount of painstaking effort put into restoring this film is evident. Seeing these very old images in colour adds another dimension to it. My only beef; why do filmmakers still insist on using the Stuka sound effect? The original footage has no audio so sound effects are added. The Stuka sound effect (like the rifle bullet ricochet sound) is one of the most over-used sound effects in film history. I wish they hadn't used it in this film and gone for a more realistic approach. Otherwise, I quite enjoyed this film.

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

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.