MovieChat Forums > Battle Hymn (1957) Discussion > What kind of weird Yak -9s was this movi...

What kind of weird Yak -9s was this movie using?

posted 11 years ago by jeffyoung1
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Okay, even being something of a military history fan, I have to cut this movie a little slack. It's not like it was easy to come by surplus World War II Soviet fighter airplanes.

The Russian commies suppled North Korea with surplus, WWII Yakovlev-9 fighter airplanes and Ilyushin I-10 Stormovik ground attack aircraft. The Yak-9's outward silhouette and outline roughly resembles that of a British Spitfire fighter plane from the same time period. It certainly doesn't resemble the radial-engine A-10 advanced training air planes used by the United States of the same time period. It would have been better off if Hollywood could have obtained a few surplus British Hurricane fighters and dressed them up as Yaks.

The Soviet Yak-9 and the Yak-3 proved to be formidable fighter aircraft, capable of 400 mph plus speeds, and specialized in low-to-mid level altitude operations where they outperformed the German Bf-109G and even the vaunted Fw-190. The armament of, typically, two, 12.7mm heavy machine guns and one 20mm/23mm cannon was sufficient against any Axis fighter. Experienced Soviet fighter pilots could have put up a serious fight against American P-51Ds in the first three months of the Korean War, but the Yak-9s were manned by North Korean pilots who were gravely inexperienced. Not enough of the quality of their training is known to judge them on that aspect. But the gross inexperience of the North Korean pilots was their undoing against experienced American aviators flying the still hot shot P-51D fighter plane. Also the North Korean military air force was miniscule. Numbers were not on their side. Within three months of the onset of war, the North Korean air force was all but destroyed.

[–] lezardormeurgeant 11 years ago

Hollywood until Spielberg("Saving Private Ryan")was not known for efforts at accuracy in depicting WW2 German military hardware.

The top abomination was the much vaunted 1965"The Battle Of The Bulge".
Even if we leave aside the historical inaccuracies, there's still something at least that could be done to give M47 Patton tanks a token of resemblance with the German Royal Tiger tanks by the use of plywood around the turrets.
Or they could have used the easier to disguise M 26 Pershing tank instead.
But no, they had to leave the Pattons as they were.
And for the American tanks in the movie, they substituted the M 24 Chaffee for the main battle tank M5 Sherman and called it the "Sherman" !
I didn't know Shermans were that rare in 1965 !

Another stupidity was the use of M 48 tanks in the 1967 "Tobruk", M 24s would do since they were "veterans" of war movies as German tanks !

However I was pleasantly surprised by the Tiger tanks in "Kelly's Heroes"(1970), I could have sworn they were authentic until I look more closely at their wheels.

They could have done the same thing for the supposed-to-be German tanks in the
costly flop "Force 10 From Navarone", although there were whole German units equipped with captured T34 tanks in WW2.

Air war movies however look much more authentic.
I am thinking of the superlative "The Hunters"(1958).
The choice of F 84F Thunderstreaks to "play" Mig 15s was very good since under certain angles they look alike.

I still wonder how they did for the attack scenes in "The Bridges Of Toko-Ri"(1954), I saw the movie for the 1st time in 1957 and I still remain much impressed by their authentic look.

Concur with you about the Hurricane as "eligible" for a Yak 3/9 role.

On another note, it seemed that in 1950 the brass didn't think of the P 47 Thunderbolts and the British Typhoons for tankbusting which was the top priority at the time in Korea, although they were available in the Far East.
If anything they were better designed for the job than the less sturdy
P 51s.

[–] moonpuppy_ver1-1 9 years ago

Sorry, greatest abomination was in the movie "Fighter Squadron" with Edmond O'Brien. Great shots of P-47s most likely on lone from a ANG unit but to use P-51s as stand ins for FW 190s?

[–] MadTom 9 years ago

Sorry, greatest abomination was in the movie "Fighter Squadron" with Edmond O'Brien. Great shots of P-47s most likely on lone from a ANG unit but to use P-51s as stand ins for FW 190s?

As I said in my review of that movie, that was the equivalent of filming the movie To Hell and Back, in which Audie Murphy, the most decorated American soldier of World War II, played himself, but instead having Audie Murphy played by Neville Brand, another decorated WWII veteran-turned-actor and a hero in his own right, but an older, larger and homelier man, and then making the real Audie Murphy play a German.

To answer the question in the original thread title, the nomenclature of the Yak-9 stunt double was the North American T-28 Trojan (from the same manufacturer as the P-51); in reality any armament carried by the T-28 was carried in pods on wing pylons (as was used in Vietnam), and the blazing gun barrels in the wing leading edges of the "Yaks" in the movie were actually closeup shots of P-51 wings.