MovieChat Forums > Bombardier (1943) Discussion > This movie anticipated the strategic bom...

This movie anticipated the strategic bombing raids on mainland Japan...

posted 13 years ago by Eric-1226
2 replies | jump to latest

..by more than a year. I was surprised to see the movie was made still so early in the war - not that long, really, after the
Doolittle raid. If I understand correctly, U.S. Army Air Forces didn't start mass bombing attacks on mainland Japan until late summer, 1944. By then, they were using B-29 bombers, not the B-17's depicted in this film. But the movie accurately depicted - well in advance of the actual events - the use of an island base from which to launch a multi-bomber attack on mainland Japan. (Bombers also flew from bases in mainland China.)

Once the bomber bases got well established, Japan was ravaged for months on end with successive waves of allied bomber attacks that wreaked havoc on cities and armament factories across Japan. The atomic bombs in late summer '45 were pretty much the coup de grace.

Anyway, this movie was sort of a taste of things to come. That little blurb at the end, about 100,000 bombardiers joining the battle, wasn't too far off the mark.

"Definition of an airplane: Thousands of spare parts flying in close formation."

[–] walkerus 8 years ago

In spite of the security precautions, the entire Norden system had been passed to the Germans before the war started. Herman W. Lang, a German spy, had been employed by the Carl L. Norden Company. During a visit to Germany in 1938, Lang conferred with German military authorities and reconstructed plans of the confidential materials from memory. In 1941, Lang, along with the 32 other German agents of the Duquesne Spy Ring, was arrested by the FBI and convicted in the largest espionage prosecution in U.S. history. He received a sentence of 18 years in prison on espionage charges and a two-year concurrent sentence under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

[–] microneus 8 years ago

Cool info, thanks.