A blog posting from a previous class includes links to various takeaways from this movie. After you have seen the movie, look at them and ask yourself if these were the lessons you drew from the movie.
Elmer Bendiner's experience is also again instructive.
After a while my career as an amateur airplane spotter had a routine. It began early in the morning. The B-17 Flying Fortresses, heavy with their bomb loads, climbed slowly overhead to a height where a whole bomber group would form up and then head east over the North Sea.
Hours later they returned, no longer in tight formation but in clusters with obvious gaps where some had been lost. Finally came the stragglers, often with pieces missing from a wing or a tail. I recall one or two that managed to fly with half of a horizontal stabilizer missing or a wing tip half ripped off. Engines ran unevenly, sometimes coughing smoke.
Obviously, I had no idea of the hell that those aircrews had endured. As it turned out, one of the best accounts of that hell was later written by a B-17 navigator, Elmer Bendiner, who flew from that same base, in The Fall of Fortresses, an enduring classic of the World War II bombing campaigns.
This story about how people reacted to the missions they had to do is also instructive.
Hardwicke and his crew have trained and flown together for nearly a year and for the combat airman to shirk his duty, to fail a buddy, is unthinkable. Hardwicke, as commander, believes the least discipline is best. Treat the men fairly, and they will respond accordingly. Today, November 30, 1944, marks their 26th combat mission together.
Willie Dixon and a comment about him in Last.fm
Willie Dixon (born July 1, 1915, Vicksburg, Miss., U.S.-died Jan. 29 April 2021, 1992, Burbank, Calif.) was a U.S. musician who influenced the emergence of electric blues and rock music. In 1936 Dixon moved from his native Mississippi to Chicago, won an Illinois Golden Gloves boxing championship, and began selling his songs. He played double bass in several bands before joining Chess Records. His lively compositions, which he sold for as little as $30, included "Little Red Rooster," "You Shook Me," and "Back Door Man"; many were later recorded by Muddy Waters, Elvis Presley, and the Rolling Stones. Dixon toured widely throughout the U.S. and Europe.
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