The movie shows the planes at night when they are aware of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The pilot says they are 20 minutes to landing. Actually the attack begun at 06:00 am! Such an error is incredible in a movie which is done with such details. Curious too that apparently no one mentioned this here.
shareNo.
You're wrong.
The attack started at precisely 7:48AM. That's been documented countless times.
Secondly: they originally arrived in daylight, and then changed course to the emergency landing field, where they had some gear damage upon landing and had to repair it. When it was fixed, they then flew into Pearl, at at THAT time it was night.
So, no one had mentioned it because your chronology is wrong.
..Joe
actually he is right ... if attack is at 748AM and it is light in Hawaii ... then it is light all points east. When they got news in the film of the attack it was dark.
Movie with such detail??? Please explain the surprise attack at the end of the movie. There was never such an engagement! This film was filled with propaganda BS ... which is fine when you consider it's purpose
shareI think you will continue to be disappointed by every movie made during the war or withing a couple of decades after the war by any of the allies. Since we crushed the Axis states, you will have difficulty finding movies of the type that you apparently want. I recommend that you simply avoid any movie filmed by an American or British studio between 1942 and approximately 1970.
However, you can easily find many movies that are historically inaccurate and contain outright lies about America that have been made more recently. We are awash in pseudo-documentaries that tell the kinds of stories you may like.
By the way, I was taught that propaganda means information that is selected and conveyed in a way to tell a story from a particular point-of-view. It may include factual information, partially factual information, or deliberately inaccurate information ranging from slight distortions to flat out inventions of the author(s). It seems to me that all movies, including documentaries, qualify as propaganda.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
You sound like a smart guy ... I like that! Yes those films (42-70) are often hard to handle ... I am looking for a telling of the war in world wide terms.
Pseudo-documentaries that you may like ... not sure what you mean here. I am not a fan of most 1940/50/60 WW2 movies. Cinema technology and the intellectual assessment of WW2 has changed greatly since then. My question is how do we look at WW2 from a 2015 perspective? How can we avoid something like this forevermore?
WW2 was a continuation of the Great War. In spite of the massive loss of life in that one, it was not enough for the European powers to understand and accept that the 19th Century and colonialism was dead and it was time to move on. Mussolini in Italy and the military expansionists in Japan wanted to expand. They were late comers to colonialism and wanted their piece of the pie. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis wanted to get theirs back after having been screwed over in the Paris peace talks of 1919. At the same time, Stalin could not control his paranoia and megalomania while Great Britain and France wanted to hold on to what they had. The United States had returned to isolationism.
Japan aggressively expanded into China throughout the 1930s. As Germany recovered from the depression, the Nazis and Hitler used duplicitous diplomacy to expand. The Nazis, Fascists, and Communists used the Spanish Civil War to train the military in an operational war. Then the Nazis in Germany and the Communists in the Soviet Union split the short lived independent Poland between them, kicking off a generalized European war. Shortly after that, Japan responded to United States economic embargo by staging a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
The western democracies were and continue to be less than perfect. However, there were several seriously evil, anti-democratic nations in the world in 1939. They were: the Empire of Japan, the Soviet Empire, Germany, and Italy. There were other wannabes, but none of them were strong enough to take seriously. In fact, Italy fits into that category and would not have amounted to anything had Mussolini not hitched his wagon to Adolf.
If you haven't figured that out by now, then you probably cannot and never will. If the "new view" of WW2 is anything like your posts have hinted at, you need to flush it from your head and start reading history over again from scratch.
Yes, I'm fairly intelligent. I was trained and operated as an intelligence collector and analyst for a few decades. First I was cryptologic linguist. I learned a foreign language and broke their codes. Then I earned a degree in nuclear engineering and did intelligence work on nuclear weapons. Along with that I expanded into chemical and biological weapons. Since I had learned a lot about physics, I applied it to analyzing electronic warfare, lasers, and what has come to be called cyber warfare. History is a hobby for me.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
That is a very well written capsule of WW2. You are smart ... but not smart enough to understand you don't know much about me.
My point is that we ... in 2015 ... when trying to understand WW2 ... need to be weary of a 1943 film that's sole purpose was to solicit buy in (in the form of selling war bonds and recruits). More so we need to be weary of a film that is 100% American perspective. Finally we need to understand where these films play lose with the facts.
As for this "new view" you are so critical of ... may I remind you that when this film was released we did not know what Auschwitz was. History is written by facts ... facts often trickle in ... which causes history to be rewritten.
And yes I do prefer movies that are not made with ancient technology. Hollywood has come a long way in the last 75 years ... thanks God.
I am smart enough to know that the word you want to use in the first sentence of your second paragraph is not "weary." Weary means to make tired or to become tired. If you want the sentence to make sense in the context of which you are writing, then you wanted to write "wary." Wary means to exercise caution, to be careful.
Anyone who would use "Air Force" or any dramatic movie as a reference for historical facts is a fool. That does not make the movie "propaganda" in the same sense as "Triumph of the Will." There were documentaries produced and directed by John Ford and Frank Capra. They would not be be reliable first sources for history of the war, either. They were documentaries, but they were also sponsored by the United States War Department. John Ford was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Nave and assigned to make movies. I think Frank Capra had the status of continuing to work for the studios, but I'm not sure about that.
Back in the day, before we became complete prisoners of the internet, many of us read thick compilations of writings that were called "books." These objects continue to be printed in hard copy as well as electronic form. Those written by scholars and that contain full notes serve as the preferred secondary sources for studying history. If you are a serious professional historian, then you should learn to go to primary sources. That means that you interview survivors when possible and dig into government archives. It is time consuming and expensive in time and travel. However, (thank you internet) we all have (not exactly all, if you live in the People's Republic of China, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Socialist People's Republic of Vietnam, or Cuba, you get to see what the government allows you to see) have a lot more access to archives and original sources than previously.
Some things you will have difficulty finding. Some secrets such as ULTRA and the Venona Project were not declassified until recent decades. I think there are some things that have not been declassified yet.
Movies do have a place in history. For instance, "Air Force" can be recognized as ridiculously over the top. However, it does present in an exaggerated manner events that paralleled what was portrayed in the movie. More importantly, it was the highest grossing movie of 1943. That should tell you something about how much access the American general public had to what actually was happening in the war and to what their mindset was in supporting the war. Japan swore that we would need to kill every Japanese in order to win. Movies like this proved that Americans were absolutely willing to do so. By the Summer of 1945 General Curtis LeMay proved that we had the capability to do so. In August he was able to demonstrate that we could shorten the timeline for killing everybody in Japan precipitously.
If we took this approach more often, we would win more wars, and do it with a great savings in money and lives. We would even reduce the lives lost by the enemy by convincing them to surrender before we need to kill them.
The best diplomat I know is a fully charged phaser bank.
Thanks for the spelling lesson ... it is a convenient way to assert your superiority.
At this point I surrender ... your last response was close to 600 words and I have other things to do. Please consider that less is indeed more more on such a venue.
Good things to you dear patriot!
"I recommend that you simply avoid any movie filmed by an American or British studio between 1942 and approximately 1970."
To be safe, I'd recommend stretching the blackout period back to at least 1915, as anyone afflicted with incurable political correctness is likely to find something morally objectionable in almost anything made between then and the late 60s.