Jonathan Baron
New member
Much of this is lifted from the documentary, Thunderbolt, but the rest is also exciting. :!:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=2ad_1192434292
Jonathan
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=2ad_1192434292
Jonathan
And Now, Once Again, for Something Completely Different
- Thread starter Jonathan Baron
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Jonathan Baron
New member
Did you find yourself pulling back on an imaginary joystick during some of those strafing runs, Alain? :wink:
Alain1
New member
Well you know what?
Eveytime I see those image, I put myself in the cockpit but also in the people on the ground's place, whatever is the reason they get that rain of iron on the head. so I always have mixed feeling about this. But sure are spectacular images. How many rounds between tracer again? was it 5?
Eveytime I see those image, I put myself in the cockpit but also in the people on the ground's place, whatever is the reason they get that rain of iron on the head. so I always have mixed feeling about this. But sure are spectacular images. How many rounds between tracer again? was it 5?
Jonathan Baron
New member
I had mixed feelings posting that link. There is a savage thrill...even beauty in that footage.
Indeed, there is ugliness in that footage, Alain. In the documentary, Thunderbolt, there is a soundtrack and a running commentary throughout. They'd strafe lots of farms because barns were used to store munitions in some areas...though I doubt any farmer was asked permission.
The narrator comments that they're strafing generally peaceful farms, but concludes, "No friend of mine."
War.
Jonathan
Indeed, there is ugliness in that footage, Alain. In the documentary, Thunderbolt, there is a soundtrack and a running commentary throughout. They'd strafe lots of farms because barns were used to store munitions in some areas...though I doubt any farmer was asked permission.
The narrator comments that they're strafing generally peaceful farms, but concludes, "No friend of mine."
War.
Jonathan
So many pilots I know are always a little sad when they think about airplanes being used for war. I know I do. War takes something as beautiful as flight and somehow perverts its wholesomeness. Even so, there are just wars, and if any war were just, it was the '41-'45 war (from an allied point of view).
War has also funded most advancements in aviation...pity.
CDR Mike Goldschmidt, USNR (Ret.)
War has also funded most advancements in aviation...pity.
CDR Mike Goldschmidt, USNR (Ret.)
redskyaviation
New member
Without that war we would be speaking german from the slave camp.
Jonathan Baron
New member
I don't believe the point was whether the war was worth fighting.
I posted this earlier in the Books Worth Reading topic, but it bears repeating in this context. From Pierre Closterman's The Big Show:
Walter Nowotny was dead. Our adversary in Normandy and in the German skies had died two days before in the hospital at Osnabruck as a result of burns. The Luftwaffe, whose hero he was, would not long survive his death, which was as it were the turning point of the aerial war. That evening in the mess his name was often on our lips. We spoke of him without hatred and without rancour. Each one of us recalled his memories of him, with respect, almost with affection. It was the first time I had heard this note in a conversation in the R.A.F., and it was also the first time I heard, openly expressed, that curious solidarity among fighter pilots which is above all tragedies and all prejudices.
This war had witnessed appalling massacres, towns crushed by bombs, the butchery of Oradour, the ruins of Hamburg. We ourselves had been sickened when our shells exploded in a peaceful village street, mowing down women and children round the German tank we were attacking. In comparison our tussels with Nowotny and his Messerschmitts were something clean, above the fighting on the ground, in the mud and the blood, in the deafening din of the crawling, stinking tanks.
Dog-fights in the sky: silvery midges dancing in graceful abesques - the diaphanous tracery of milky condensation trails - Focke-Wulfs
skimming like toys in the infinite sky. We too, of course, were involved in less noble fighting: that strafing of trains in the grey dawn of winter mornings when you tried not to think of the shrieks of terror, not to see your shells smashing through wood, the windows shivering in fragments, the engine-drivers writhing in the burning jets of steam, all those human beings trapped in the coaches, panic-sticken by the roar of our engines, and the barking of the flak; all those inhuman, immoral jobs we had to do because we were soldiers and because war is war. We could rise above all this to-day by saluting a brave enemy who had just died, by saying that Nowotny belonged to us, that he was part of our world where there were no ideologies, no hatred and no frontiers. This sense of comradeship had nothing to do with patriotism, democracy, Nazism or humanity. All those chaps that evening felt this instinctively, and as for those who shrug their shoulders, they just can't know - they aren't fighter pilots. The conversation had ceased, the beer mugs were empty, the wireless was silent as it was past midnight. Bruce Cole, who was neither poet nor philosopher, let fall these words:
"Whoever first dared paint markings on a plane's wing was a swine!"
I posted this earlier in the Books Worth Reading topic, but it bears repeating in this context. From Pierre Closterman's The Big Show:
Walter Nowotny was dead. Our adversary in Normandy and in the German skies had died two days before in the hospital at Osnabruck as a result of burns. The Luftwaffe, whose hero he was, would not long survive his death, which was as it were the turning point of the aerial war. That evening in the mess his name was often on our lips. We spoke of him without hatred and without rancour. Each one of us recalled his memories of him, with respect, almost with affection. It was the first time I had heard this note in a conversation in the R.A.F., and it was also the first time I heard, openly expressed, that curious solidarity among fighter pilots which is above all tragedies and all prejudices.
This war had witnessed appalling massacres, towns crushed by bombs, the butchery of Oradour, the ruins of Hamburg. We ourselves had been sickened when our shells exploded in a peaceful village street, mowing down women and children round the German tank we were attacking. In comparison our tussels with Nowotny and his Messerschmitts were something clean, above the fighting on the ground, in the mud and the blood, in the deafening din of the crawling, stinking tanks.
Dog-fights in the sky: silvery midges dancing in graceful abesques - the diaphanous tracery of milky condensation trails - Focke-Wulfs
skimming like toys in the infinite sky. We too, of course, were involved in less noble fighting: that strafing of trains in the grey dawn of winter mornings when you tried not to think of the shrieks of terror, not to see your shells smashing through wood, the windows shivering in fragments, the engine-drivers writhing in the burning jets of steam, all those human beings trapped in the coaches, panic-sticken by the roar of our engines, and the barking of the flak; all those inhuman, immoral jobs we had to do because we were soldiers and because war is war. We could rise above all this to-day by saluting a brave enemy who had just died, by saying that Nowotny belonged to us, that he was part of our world where there were no ideologies, no hatred and no frontiers. This sense of comradeship had nothing to do with patriotism, democracy, Nazism or humanity. All those chaps that evening felt this instinctively, and as for those who shrug their shoulders, they just can't know - they aren't fighter pilots. The conversation had ceased, the beer mugs were empty, the wireless was silent as it was past midnight. Bruce Cole, who was neither poet nor philosopher, let fall these words:
"Whoever first dared paint markings on a plane's wing was a swine!"
redskyaviation
New member
Maybe not. And perhaps I am becomming too old and crochetty lately. Those Jugs are simply beautiful, no matter what they are doing.
Jonathan Baron
New member
Red - those were just clips. I think you can still get the entire feature, Thunderbolt, with an introduction by Jimmy Stewart, himself a pilot in WWII.
I'm sure we've all seen plenty of gun camera footage, and it is captivating to watch. It's not as if the pilots had a choice, or the cause wan't worthy, it's that even the combat pilots reflected occasionally on opponents they admired, the beauty of the aircraft they had to shoot down, and an underlying kinship among friend and foe transcending politics.
The most famous example is William Butler Yeats' An Irish Airman Foresees His Death:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Jonathan
I'm sure we've all seen plenty of gun camera footage, and it is captivating to watch. It's not as if the pilots had a choice, or the cause wan't worthy, it's that even the combat pilots reflected occasionally on opponents they admired, the beauty of the aircraft they had to shoot down, and an underlying kinship among friend and foe transcending politics.
The most famous example is William Butler Yeats' An Irish Airman Foresees His Death:
I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.
Jonathan