War Movies

Hi ho, pilgram!

The image that I have of John Wayne sitting in a P-47, is around Christmas season in Australia during a USO tour. He is laughing with Lt. Col. Neel Kearby of V Fighter Command of the 5th Air Force. Kearby had 20 some confirmed kills. As soon as I can, I will post the image here for all to see. It would be nice for all the board members to view images of Wayne that are hard to come by. The image is in the book, "Republic's P-47 Thunderbolt", by Warren M. Bodie.

As for " The Flying Tigers", my son and I need to watch the movie again before any comments on it.

Sorry about not commenting on "Flying Tigers". My son was busy for a couple of weeks getting ready for college. He's gone now, living on campus.

We did review "Operation Pacific" and found that in one scene where the Thunderfish was being straiffed was really a picture of a Japanese I Boat. OOPS!

The wood mockups of the P 40s were decent in Flying Tigers. Its not a pad picture though. As for TORA TORA TORA, in one scene where the P 40 is trying to get off the ground and is destroyed, then crashes into the parked aircraft, it is a mockup with a four cylinder car engine. It was made just to have enough power to run it down the airfeild to its doom. The scene was filmed at several different angles and used in the movie. The scene was also used in the VERY BAD MOVIE, Midway (That movie could have been a lot better!).

I had recently watched "They Were Expendable", and would like to comment that the PT Boats were right on. Those were the early versions with sub type torpedos and launchers. Later they used aircraft type torpedos that were just dropped over the side.
The only thing I can recall wrong is that no MTB ever sank a Mogami type crusier, let alone any type of warship. One Division of PT Boats went against an Imperial Destroyer Division and were wiped out. I knew a guy that served on MTBs and he said they had a bad habit of breaking in half going over heavy waves. He said he served on the plywood made MTB.

Anyway, heres a pic for ya of JW in uniform!

Can you guess what picture its from?? Maybe Robbie knows.

I think they even used the same combat footage for Chuck Heston's crash scene in "Midway" which was already seen in "Wings of Eagles", when a crippled Wayne watches the planes come in. They were really cheap on "Midway" - for the credits they even used a shot from the 1944 Van Johnson movie "30 Seconds over Tokyo" - and made it look like it was real newsreel material. Well, but then it had a lot of stars in it - so maybe there just wasn't enough dough left for the action scenes.

The Jet that crashed in the scene was either a Grumman Cougar or Banshee. I believe that difference between the two is one has a swept back jet wing, the other has straight wings. Watch the movie Bridges of Toko-Ri and you'll see one of the aircraft I'm taking about.

The scene with Doolittles Raid, with the B 25 taking off from the carrier are real war footage taken aboard the USS Hornet. They credited the "Thirty Second over Tokyo" because its was used in that movie.

Monique, you get two points for being right. Smart Girl!

My only problem with Midway was too much romance (didn't do much for the movie), not enough about what happened at the Battle of Midway. But that's just me. <_< When My father and I saw the film, he commented that it was rushed together to make the Navy look good after the movie Tora Tora Tora came out.

My information about 30 seconds Over Tokyo is that when it was made - 1944! - the material was still not greenlighted to be used (remember, the Japanese had taken many of the Raiders prisoners, and the American public was quite upset about executions), and quite cleverly, Mervin LeRoy was going for a "newsreel-look" in these scenes. But that's just what I read somewhere.
But interesting enough, our old friend John Ford was aboard that ship - for the OSS - and when his Navy friends heard he just won the Oscar for How Green Was My Valley when they were at sea, they had a special flag made for him - with an Oscar on it. The flag was up when Doolittle started that day.

Thanks for the correction BrianB, my book of fighter jets is missing so I couldn't be sure.

The thing is, there are a lot of films taken aboard US Carriers that show various fighter jets crashing. I've seen Tomcats, Hornets, F 111, Intruders, Crusaders, and even Harriers plowing into the decks. Why couldn't they use one of them for the scene?? There is a lot of footage of Tomcats accidents that Hollywood could use, and the public knows about it. One wonders!

The weirdest that I've seen is when a guy was too close to a Harrier and got sucked up in the intakes. It flamed out the engines, but didn't cause and explosion. Belive it or not, the guy lived through it as he was interviewed about the incident. Talk about luck!

Last year, I was with my son's Boy Scout troup and we spent the night on the U.S.S. Hornet. It is now a museum docked in Alameda, California, at the old Naval Air Station. They had many of these different jets on display and we had the opportunity to view them and go all around the ship, looking in all the nooks and crannies. One of the more interesting things was the concurrent videos that they showed on the hangar deck, of different aircraft carrier activities. Probably the most interesting one was of carrier take-offs and landings that resulted in crashes. There must have been 50 or 60 of them, from WWII to the present. If any of you are visiting in the San Francisco Bay area, and have an interest in Naval flight, I would highly recommend visiting the U.S.S. Hornet.

Chester