I just saw the Masters of the air tv series…although interesting it ended up being a bit “too American” for my personal taste…worth watching, but could have been much better with so many resources…“Memphis Belle” is a far better product in the same theme…
My question is more about the AIRCRAFT scenes historical accuracy.
Planes move strangely…fighters seem too fast, combat too hectic…and there seem to be far too many aircraft on the screen at the same time on several scenes…mainly fighters…
Hell i could not distinguish 109s from 190s…not to mention JU88s that were mentioned…
A scene where P51s go head to head with german fighters seems particularly exaggerated…
Also…rockets annoyed me personally as i could never use them…too many occurrences in the series (i thought they were rare) and they seem to always hit!
Not directly WT related…but thought interesting to ask if any thoughts on any of this…?
Yes…but fury made a better attempt at being realistic…i know the Tiger scene is a bit “inaccurate”…but i understand they need “closer than real” ranges to be “interesting”…
Funny how the movie i recall as accurate in terms of tanks battles is actually a fictional comedy (Kelly’s Heroes)
Masters of the Air puts a couple of years of events into a short series - whereas “Band of Brothers” covers only a few months - the difference is a much more disjointed effort that really doesn’t convey the same sense of realism IMO.
If i recall correctly…Battle of the Bulge had the americans “forcing” germans to waste fuel in a very strange manner…some movies from those times were also odd.
I liked Memphis Belle a lot…and many parts of Saving Private Ryan are very good…not to mention the recent Band of Brothers or Pacific…same apparent idea…
(NOTE…BoB and Pacific seemed very realistic to me…battle scenes, atmosphere, even the blunders…)
In “Masters” they look as they went back into “Full American Heroes” mode…and this went into the air battles themselves…
Some other examples would be Pearl Harbor or Midway…
The scene with the p-51s and 109s going head to head was one of the worst scenes of the show, but in general the air combat scenes were decent.
The JU88 was in fact a bf110 - the show intentionally misidentified it as this was very common if you look at combat reports of the time.
I’m not entirely convinced on the frequency and range of the rocket attacks. Most instances I’ve read about tended to be me210 and ju88(ironic after the previous paragraph lol ) lobbing rockets into the bomber formation from outside the range of .50 cals. This was oct/nov 43, before any longer range p-38 or p-51 escorts.
The combat scenes on the Regensburg mission are almost a scene by scene reproduction of the article by Beirne Lay Jr (who wrote 12 o clock high screenplay) “I saw Regensburg Destroyed”. He flew as an observer on Picadilly Lily. Well worth a read ( google it).
As far as the individual stories are concerned, many of them are told accurately, though some are adjusted slightly to fit a lot of storytelling compressed into 9 short episodes. Most notably what happened to Biddick/Snyder was quite different, and Bubbles Payne was killed some months after the show depicts. There are also a lot of tiny details that tell of true events. Eg when Bucky tells the young lady to be careful cos Capt Dye just recovered from the clap, in real life Dyes crew got stranded in Iceland because he was hospitalised from gonorrhea!
That said it still honours the men who flew I think and any changes were done without jingoism and exaggeration.
The lack of chin turrets is an obvious mistake, but was a decision that was made due to the production running out of money due to covid. An entire episode was canned too.
As for Memphis Belle, as much as I love the film, there is absolutely nothing about it that is even remotely historically accurate.
There are some quite detailed analysis on yt regarding realism and accuracy of “Masters of the Air” - i recommend to watch some of them.
They describe a lot of flaws and “economic” decisions regarding their CGI efforts which reduced the accuracy even further; most obvious was the absence of B-17 G models (with chin turrets) which were not implemented.
Imho the series just follows the usual Hollywood narrative - so if you are able to ignore “the message” and focus on air combat scenes the series offers some decent entertainment, but ignores the imho totally useless waste of lives of airmen above Europe.
But - compared to “Red Tails” the series looks like a documentary 😂
Memphis Belle had a different quality as they at least tried to deal with the difficulties to beat the statistical odds to die in a highly dangerous environment - but failed to deliver too.
Imho it is extremely hard to display (even to imagine) the psychological pressure on those young men which were mostly fully aware of that their survival was determined by random factors and statistical chances and none of their own actions could improve their chances to survive.
Err…why? The air combat looked more “real” to me…what am i missing?
(apart from the novelization…just asking about air combat…)
EDIT:
Somewhere on the web i found this about MB “Some of the combat sequences and the portrayal of enemy attacks are heightened for entertainment purposes”…
If this is so for MB…then in MoA we get “heightened” on steroids…as we have 4x more fighters at 2x the speed…
I’m pretty sure an aircraft of that name existed, and it was a B-17, and there is still an aircraft with that name and it is a B-17 too … maybe even the same one :)