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Eau de MacGowan posted:i also don't get the reading that buck is hyper comepetent, he seems to be scared and fronting more than anything He says it in the scene. He didn't want to sit out the rest of the war in a pow camp if there was a way for him to make it to Africa.
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Feb 5, 2024 20:27
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George H.W. oval office posted:Has anyone read the source material book this is based on? The show just feels so disjointed and quick. Just catching up in this thread and wanted to reply to this. Apologies for those that may have responded, I haven't watched Ep 3 yet so I stopped reading the thread once the responses to that episode came in and won't be able to catch up til i watch eps 3 and 4 back to back this weekend. Anyways, yeah, I've listened to the audio book. I think it's good and is very interesting, especially if you have no knowledge of the bombing campaign in Europe. There are some harrowing stories in it that are chock full of interesting/horrifying detail, some of which are most definitely going to be in the series I'm sure. While I enjoyed it, I also thought it was quite disjointed jumping between various subjects, especially as it went on. It's a long read/listen (the audio book is like 25 hours or so) and I got kind of fatigued by the end. Given how the book could be a bit all over the place, I will not be surprised if the series winds up like that. I'm really look forward to it as plays on though. The air war is one of my favorite subjects within WW2. Speaking of WW2 books, since some of you in here may be watching the show and wanting some good WW2 reading material- as someone who has read/listened to A LOT of WW2 stuff, I can easily say the best I've ever read would be Ian W. Toll's "The Pacific War" trilogy of books. The first is Pacific Crucible, 1941-42 (takes place from Pearl Harbor to Battle of Midway). The second is The Conquering Tide 1942-44 (Guadalcanal through Battle of the Philippine Sea. The final one, which came out in 2020 I think, is Twilight of the Gods 1944-1945. This is late 1944 through the surrender of Japan. I've listened to them on audiobook, and also purchased the trilogy in book form and re-read after listening to all of them because it's that good- in particular the first two books. Given the length of each, that's a high compliment. The way the complicated narratives of events/campaigns, key characters, politics, and technical info is woven to tell a cohesive, page turner of a story on the Pacific War (with other elements of WW2 discussed as well, when pertinent) is some kind of achievement. I would LOVE if Toll eventually turned his attention to the European Theater and tackled that in a similar manner, though it took a decade for the entirety of Pacific Trilogy to be released and I can only imagine the research that went into beforehand, so I'm sure that would be a daunting project. Anyways, yeah. Pacific Trilogy is amazing.
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Feb 5, 2024 21:46
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Cojawfee posted:He says it in the scene. He didn't want to sit out the rest of the war in a pow camp if there was a way for him to make it to Africa. They'd have a pretty good chance of being picked up by allied shipping in the med during late 43. But why risk a water landing when you are still flying. Stegosnaurlax fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Feb 5, 2024 |
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Feb 5, 2024 23:20
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Well this show just entirely justified it's budget as far as I'm concerned 
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Feb 6, 2024 02:27
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Sole Hunk Survivor Policy.
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Feb 6, 2024 02:31
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Mabel Thompson has already lost 3 of her hunk sons, so we need to go find the fourth and bring him home.
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Feb 6, 2024 02:34
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Cojawfee posted:Mabel Thompson has already lost 3 of her hunk sons, so we need to go find the fourth and bring him home. They don't teach that at Oxford 
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Feb 6, 2024 02:41
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M_Gargantua posted:Yeah the sudden explosion was too Hollywood. It didn't make sense since there was no foreshadowing of it, as all the foreshadowing was the "we're about to smash into the earth and you need to get out of the plane" It kinda undercuts the moment. The point is they had to make difficult and heart wrenching choices in high stress environments. When the fort blows up they're kinda subverting it because in hindsight bailing out was the only correct choice - if he had stayed one second longer he would have been dead too. Basically I think the director flinched at making him look bad and blew up the fort to absolve him.
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Feb 6, 2024 03:40
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joepinetree posted:The Austin Butler thing wouldn't have bothered me if we didn't have like 4 versions of him being the only competent and dedicated one in his plane Speaking of repetition, I thought the second episode was really bad about using voiceover to underline the differences between US and UK bombing approaches. They have that scene with the fight, whose conflict is largely premised on this tension, and then have Anthony Boyle summarize the conflict again immediately after it's all over. I thought that was really lame.
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Feb 6, 2024 03:42
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Open Source Idiom posted:Speaking of repetition, I thought the second episode was really bad about using voiceover to underline the differences between US and UK bombing approaches. They have that scene with the fight, whose conflict is largely premised on this tension, and then have Anthony Boyle summarize the conflict again immediately after it's all over. I thought that was really lame. They didn't really go into the reasons why beyond it's suicide. The british had a lot of bomber types, the war office threw any design with wings past the prototype stage. But only had two bombers that could reach 20 thousand feet, and they weren't exactly fast or particulary durable.
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Feb 6, 2024 04:43
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The voiceover narration really doesn't help the show and the third episode proved it by not having a voiceover. It turns out that when you write your script in a way that explains things to the audience as they happen you don't actually need someone listing off a dozen names you'll forget, or talking about a Norden bombsight or going into detail about a mechanic crew chief who isn't even the focus character of the episode.
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Feb 6, 2024 04:54
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I do think it's funny that they act like the bomb sight is this super amazing device when it really wasn't. Yeah it lets you drop bombs on the target, but it wasn't as accurate as they acted like it was, which is why they were still pretty much carpet bombing. It could account for the plane's speed, and the wind at altitude, and the side slip and all that, but it couldn't account for any winds between the plane and the ground. They were still dropping dumb bombs from tens of thousands of feet and had to hope that some of the bombs dropped in the formation landed on the actual target. It got the job done, but Norden advertised it like it could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel.
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Feb 6, 2024 05:26
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That's actually another thing with the bombing scenes. There doesn't seem to be any lead time between the bomb bays opening and the explosions on the ground 20,000 feet below.
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Feb 6, 2024 05:31
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Cojawfee posted:I do think it's funny that they act like the bomb sight is this super amazing device when it really wasn't. Yeah it lets you drop bombs on the target, but it wasn't as accurate as they acted like it was, which is why they were still pretty much carpet bombing. It could account for the plane's speed, and the wind at altitude, and the side slip and all that, but it couldn't account for any winds between the plane and the ground. They were still dropping dumb bombs from tens of thousands of feet and had to hope that some of the bombs dropped in the formation landed on the actual target. It got the job done, but Norden advertised it like it could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel. The germans already had the plans for the Norden and recovered sights from bomber crashes, they just never used it for various reasons. But it was more accurate than theirs. it was g-14 classified for most of the war
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Feb 6, 2024 05:33
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Owling Howl posted:Basically I think the director flinched at making him look bad and blew up the fort to absolve him. That'd be on the writer, but yeah, that was dumb. Show the guy jumping out, then follow the plane to the ground. You really shouldn't be telling the story of the Bloody 100th if you flinch at stuff like that.
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Feb 6, 2024 05:44
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Being a combat videographer in a b17 sounds absolutely horrifying. Like at least kinda in ground combat you can duck and hide somewhat
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Feb 6, 2024 05:48
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I will give Curtiss LeMay endless amounts of poo poo for a lot of things, but he flew the lead bomber on a lot of missions, and he deserves credit for (almost only) that.
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Feb 6, 2024 06:11
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George H.W. oval office posted:Being a combat videographer in a b17 sounds absolutely horrifying. Like at least kinda in ground combat you can duck and hide somewhat If you watch the combat cameraman news reel from Operation Tidal Wave that was basically ground combat they were so low. It makes it sound like a feat of absolute success. When it was a clusterfuck of epic proportions with 50+ bombers lost, and achieved the opposite effect desired with them increasing the fuel production because they rebuilt the refineries better.
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Feb 6, 2024 06:14
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Arc Hammer posted:That's actually another thing with the bombing scenes. There doesn't seem to be any lead time between the bomb bays opening and the explosions on the ground 20,000 feet below. The action has focused on the trailing elements of the strike, so they're arriving over the target as the lead elements' bombs are hitting.
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Feb 6, 2024 07:42
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I’m re-watching Generation Kill, it’s interesting that all these military shows have in common is that the leaders are all either incompetent or don’t care how many soldiers die to accomplish a mission, and there is no real way to complain about a bad leader. Also, the military chain of command is incredibly confusing.
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Feb 6, 2024 14:22
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Oasx posted:I’m re-watching Generation Kill, it’s interesting that all these military shows have in common is that the leaders are all either incompetent or don’t care how many soldiers die to accomplish a mission, and there is no real way to complain about a bad leader. In my limited personal experience (OIF I) good leaders were really loving good and hypercompetent in their MOS (especially warrant officers), but bad ones were comically bad and absolutely crushed morale. This was true from squad leaders all the way up to battalion COs. But that said, leadership skill probably falls along a bell curve. Most leaders are just average folks who get things right most of the time, and people don't tend to write books or make movies about them.
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Feb 6, 2024 15:11
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Episode 3 of show was excellent. More like that and I'll be happy. I just wish the episodes were all exactly 60 minutes instead of doing that thing that streaming services started doing of just sort of making GBS threads out TV shows with bullshit inconsistent episode lengths. I want to spent an hour watching bombers over Europe with grandpa, dammit! Not 45 minutes. Because I only had that one 45 minute episode on Sunday I started looking around for other related media to bring over to his place, and found a rip of the 2018 total restoration of the 1944 Memphis Belle documentary on rutracker. They sourced the director's original 16mm film repository, rescanned every frame of 90 hours of film at 4k resolution, removed all of the camera shake, all of the scratches on the film, and basically made it look like it was filmed yesterday. It's insane. Probably some of the best WWII colour footage you'll ever see. I also sourced Bah Bah Black Sheep in high def and we watched the first half of the pilot (lol) episode. I mistakenly thought it was only going to be 30 mins long, but it's not, it's two hours long, so we watched half of it before 10pm came around and it was time to leave. That's a drat good show too. Find the 2018 restoration of this and you'll be completely amazed at how night and day they are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNWb18kpCCI George H.W. oval office posted:Aces of the Pacific was my air sim of choice growing up. That midi soundtrack is still in my head to this day. Hell yeah. I played the everloving gently caress out AotP as a kid. And MS Combat Flight Sim. But then Jane's WWII Fighters came out and that game just blew everything before it out of the water with its 3D Voodoo texture smoothing. I wasted so much time playing combat flight sims as a kid that I blame them for having to flip the Y-Axis on every game controller I've picked up in the last 25 years. Edit: According to the article linked above, the Memphis Belle aircraft herself was restored and unveiled in 2018, and the full 4k restoration of the 1944 documentary was a side-project of a side-project of that, it wasn't even second-fiddle to the aircraft unveiling, but rather third-fiddle. Something called The Cold Blue, which I've found a trailer for and features additional footage from the same director's lost reel trove was more important than that. I haven't seen it yet but if it's anything like the 1944 restoration, it ought to be insane. Trailer linked below with three comparison shots to the above linked film. It will blow your mind. The Cold Blue seems available on HBO but I can't find anything on where to watch the Memphis Belle restoration, so I have to assume it was a limited production thing that maybe only sold briefly at the display museum. https://vimeo.com/261525256 XYZAB fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 01:35
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George H.W. oval office posted:Being a combat videographer in a b17 sounds absolutely horrifying. Like at least kinda in ground combat you can duck and hide somewhat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmwm4VPW7RY
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Feb 7, 2024 02:10
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Stegosnaurlax posted:They didn't really go into the reasons why beyond it's suicide. The british had a lot of bomber types, the war office threw any design with wings past the prototype stage. But only had two bombers that could reach 20 thousand feet, and they weren't exactly fast or particulary durable. Turns out it's suicide no matter what you're in if you don't have fighter escort all the way in, though. Pretty sure the RAF would be doing the same thing if they had B-17s. The Lancaster also carried a rather larger bomb load (at the expense of defensive armament, which as we have just been seeing in this series only gets you so far) - about twice that of a B17. They were the backup option for carrying nukes to Japan if the B-29 hadn't panned out for that reason. Edit: also in the show's defence, they don't say the Norden bombsight is super amazing tech, just that the USAAF thinks it is. Which is absolutely true, they wouldn't even share it with the RAF. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Feb 7, 2024 |
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Feb 7, 2024 16:09
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Oh I remember that one being pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz1rTZE9xgE I forgot that Netflix also had a recent WW2 in color docuseries with John Boyega. Still need to check it out.
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Feb 7, 2024 16:19
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feedmegin posted:Edit: also in the show's defence, they don't say the Norden bombsight is super amazing tech, just that the USAAF thinks it is. Which is absolutely true, they wouldn't even share it with the RAF. The RAF made up for the lack of precision by just making their bombs bigger. :V And that's not even the biggest one, the high-capacity 12,000-pounder had a filling-to-weight ratio of 80%. Pilots even developed a technique where they'd drop a 1,000-pound bomb immediately beforehand, so that the initial shockwave would detonate the larger bomb in mid-air for an airburst effect. Bloody Pom fucked around with this message at 04:47 on Feb 8, 2024 |
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Feb 8, 2024 04:44
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feedmegin posted:Turns out it's suicide no matter what you're in if you don't have fighter escort all the way in, though. Pretty sure the RAF would be doing the same thing if they had B-17s. I dunno, the Brits were notoriously fickle about American planes. They had plenty and either chose not to use them in any great numbers, or they did but palmed them off on the Africa theater, navy and coastal defence. They weren't particularly fond of the alison engines or the the american radial engines
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Feb 8, 2024 05:09
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just finished the first episode and IMO it was pretty fuckin good
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Feb 8, 2024 06:14
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You didn't complain about the CG a single time, I know you didn't really watch it.
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Feb 8, 2024 06:25
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Stegosnaurlax posted:They weren't particularly fond of the alison engines or the the american radial engines WHAT?!?!
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Feb 8, 2024 06:28
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MrMojok posted:WHAT?!?! Too busy shoving Rolls-Royce V12s into everything they possibly could, I imagine.
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Feb 8, 2024 08:24
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MrMojok posted:WHAT?!?! They wanted to shoe horn a Merlin into just about everything that came with an Allison because of performance issues, they threw all their eggs in the Bristol basket because of Roy Fedden (regardless of the fact the company was run by feckless idiots.)
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Feb 8, 2024 08:24
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In their defense, the Centaurus was a ludicrously powerful engine for the time.
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Feb 8, 2024 08:30
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Bloody Pom posted:In their defense, the Centaurus was a ludicrously powerful engine for the time. Yeah, it helped get Roy Fedden knighted, and then they loving fired him before it entered service.
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Feb 8, 2024 08:43
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Bloody Pom posted:The RAF made up for the lack of precision by just making their bombs bigger. :V They still couldn't hit the broadside of a battleship with them 
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Feb 8, 2024 11:12
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Cojawfee posted:Doing some quick wikipedia math, the B-17 had a cruising speed of ~180 mph. A BF-109 has a cruise speed of 370mph. So one coming from the front will look like it's going 550mph. One flying in from the back would look like it's going nearly 200 mph. So I could see them going by in a blur if they were trying to get through the bomber formations as fast as possible to get a few shots off without being hit themselves. The speeds here are interesting because it reminds me of reading how a Bf-109 ace (can’t remember his name) said that one of the reasons he got so many kills was that he would wait until the enemy plane filled his windscreen before he’d fire. That makes it all the more insane if he was flying that fast while doing this. Of course he was downed more than once due to debris
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Feb 8, 2024 11:41
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Dr.Radical posted:The speeds here are interesting because it reminds me of reading how a Bf-109 ace (can’t remember his name) said that one of the reasons he got so many kills was that he would wait until the enemy plane filled his windscreen before he’d fire. That makes it all the more insane if he was flying that fast while doing this. Of course he was downed more than once due to debris IIRC that probably would've been Hartmann. But he was in a somewhat different context, going up against relatively lighter planes with less defensive armament on the eastern front. As he told it he preferred ambush tactics, where he would come in from behind in a blind spot, so the relative velocity wouldn't have been quite that fast. Still a decent clip, though. This also illustrates the benefit of the B17s' defensive armament and formation. Against them, such a (relatively) slow and close approach would be near suicidal. Instead, attacking fighters are forced to make their attack runs at much greater speeds and more oblique angles, making it quite a bit less likely for them to land hits. But of course that still only goes so far, especially without escorts.
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Feb 8, 2024 18:26
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Maybe they should have written Hitler a letter to have his planes fly slower so we could get a better look at them in a TV show 80 years later.
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Feb 8, 2024 18:36
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Cojawfee posted:Maybe they should have written Hitler a letter to have his planes fly slower so we could get a better look at them in a TV show 80 years later. they did, hitler was a pro tier troll and strapped a jet engine to a plane instead
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Feb 8, 2024 21:55
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Eau de MacGowan posted:they did, hitler was a pro tier troll and strapped a jet engine to a plane instead The less said about the He 162, the better.
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Feb 8, 2024 22:34
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