walked out when the guy said 'polesti'.

i was willing to suspend my disbelief in this film for quite a while. an hour at least.

i was willing to ignore the fact that nobody died, on screen, at all, despite dozens of air battles. this contradicts virtually anything you could ever find written, at all, about world war ii air combat. a good book is "Yeager", in which he describes the emotions that squads go through when people die - and a lot of people die. people die in training. people die on the trip over to europe. people die taking off. people die landing. oh, and people even die in combat. then they die after jumping out of the plane.

i was willing to overlook all this. it was just a movie, right? its like top gun. its got a love interest. its got humor. its got dudes battling it out and overcoming their personal issues etc etc etc.

i was willing to overlook this bizarre idea that somehow civilian transports were off target. actually, a lot of europe was a 'free fire' zone. you shot anything that moved. that was your mission. the nazis did not advertise the fact that they were shipping military equipment in trains or trucks. and besides, the war theory of the allies was to demoralize the civilian population - part of the purpose of the mass bomber raids, like the raid on Dresden.

Yeager talks about this in his book. he flat out basically says that the free fire missions would probably be considered a war crime, if we had lost the war.

i was willing to overlook this too. after all. it was a .. almost a kids movie. it was like GI Joe. it was like anything else, right? rah rah bam bam shoot em up, cry when your buddy gets burned, etc. (of course, again, nobody dies, we never see anyone die on screen, we never see a severed hand, a head being blown to pieces, eyeballs strewn on the landscape, hands, arms, legs, people with their guts hanging out, people drowning in their own blood)



Then there is the scene where the men are accepted into the white officers club. the white officer says 'oh yeah, you guys escorted us on the run to polesti'.


Polesti.


polesti.




-----



First of all, it was called Ploesti.

Second of all, almost nobody came back from Ploesti.

Third of all, there was no fighter escort to Ploesti.

Fourth of all, most military analysts think Ploesti was a mistake.

Ploesti was a low level bomb run, a hair brain scheme, to go deep into Axis territory, Romania to be exact, and blow up some oil production facilities so that the Nazis would have a harder time getting gasoline &c. It was mostly a horrific failure. Hundreds of pilots and bomber crews died on that mission. Dozens of planes were shot down. Dozens of planes were lost. They didn't 'made it back to base all beat up'. They didn't have long, meaningful conversations with their squad leader about the picture of Jesus in their cockpit. They just died. Their guts splattered all over Romanian fields. The people on the ground who died were not, mostly, soldiers, they were people who work in oil refineries. Romanians and others who probably couldn't care less about Hitler or Nazism, they just did what they had to do to survive. They died too. No dramatic moments of heroism, no shaking their fists at the wily Americans. Just death. Instantaneous, or in a ball of fire, thrashing around, feeling the air sucked from their lungs as their flesh is incinerated from their body.


And the people who made this movie... I


i guess.. well.


i guess none of this was ...

important.

to them.