
What the 1949 film Twelve O’Clock High still tells us about air combat - gadders
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/twelve-oclock-high-180970369/
======
wazoox
Reminds me this passage of "The name above the title", Frank Capra's
autobiography (a great book everyone should read):

 _I was coming downstairs from Admiral "Bull" Halsey's office. I would have to
pass right by Admiral Nimitz. Was he waiting for me? Would be renege on the
all-important Special Film Coverage directive I had written for him, and he
had signed? Had MacArthur nixed the order to integrate all combat photography?
Had the Air Force? The Marines?_

 _I hesitated, then saluted, and walked by him._

 _" Oh, Capra! Can you spare a moment?"_

 _I went limp. "Of course, Admiral."_

 _Behind his desk, his back to me he faced a window that looked out over our
sunken warships. "Sit down, please," he said, huskily. "I apologize for
calling you in here. It"s just this --this --goddam sonofabitch of a _war _!
"._ _His hands clasped and unclasped behind him as he rocked slowly back and
forth on his heels. Then, out of the depths of an overwhelming hurt, he cried
out: "They cheered me... Three thousand of them... Eighteen-year-olds... Legs
gone, faces gone... They cheered me... I sent them there .... They cheered
me...."._

 _Then he turned, sat heavily on his chair, and with tears streaming down his
face, he beat the table with both fists: "GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! GODDAM
SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! What am I going to write to their parents? What can
anybody write to their parents?..." He grabbed his wet face in both his hands.
He was sobbing now. A father weeping for all the sons in the world. "Eighteen-
year-olds... kids... boys... three thousand of them... They cheered me... I
sent them there... they cheered me... GODDAM SONOFABITCH OF A WAR! goddam
sonofa--" His handkerchief was out now. Not once had he looked at me,
directly._

 _I sat as if transfixed. Tears had started down my cheeks. The white-thatched
adminral blew his nose, composed himself, then looking at me with a shy little
smile, he said pleasantly: "Thank you, Capra, Thank you."_

 _He had wanted to share his great pain with another human being -- someone
that was not Navy. I rose to my feet, try to mumble something. I couldn 't. So
I smiled back and walked out. I had witnessed something rare. Something
awesome -- the inside of a tormented human soul._

~~~
harrumph
>Had the Air Force?

There was no Air Force in WW2. This is probably an editing error, Capra or
biographer likely referring to the USAAF (Army Air Force).

Pedantry Officer concludes report.

~~~
maire
The USAAF split into a separate military service after the war, but it was
still considered a separate unit within the army during the war.

My father was in the Army Air Force during WWII - and he always said he was in
the Army Air Force and not the Army. They were also nick named the Air Corps
during the war.

------
rkachowski
I've read the article, but I can't seem to answer the question "what does the
film still tell us about air combat?". It seems to be more of a history of the
movie's production and the people involved.

~~~
hw_penfold
Well, the air combat of that period represents an odd microcosm of behaviors
never to be repeated again, by another human civilization. Even if we wanted
to fight another war the same way, it wouldn't make sense to even try it.

The trajectory of technology, and the circumstances leading to the qualities
of the arms race and adaptive conflict within the period, means it was it's
own little golden era of truly curious nightmares.

Riding a piston engine, in an uncompressed cabin, all the way to the
stratosphere, all with the intent of using optical telescopes in good weather,
so that you can drop kilotons of dumb bombs blessed with prayers that might
guide them to a decisive target nestled among civilians?

To learn from that is to arrive at the understanding that the pace of
technology must be permitted to trend with a civilization's capacity for its
rational utilization.

Moving the progressive sequential improvement of technology at speeds faster
than the sophistication of those that might benefit from it can produce a
malignancy that backfires, to the harm of all those it could possibly (or even
impossibly, in a hypothetical sense) touch.

------
g051051
When I was in the Navy, they showed us that film as part of leadership
training. Our instructors said the portrayal of discipline, leadership, and
the burdens of command was perfect. Except for the very end, which they felt
was a bad Hollywood ending.

~~~
slededit
Naturally they wouldn't want it seem like it was OK for commanders to "lose
it".

~~~
g051051
It wasn't that he "lost it", just they way he did.

~~~
slededit
Ah the style of the time was heavy dramatics. A holdover from the stage where
you needed exaggerated expression to make up for the distance of the audience.

Still I didn’t find it nearly as bad as other examples from that era. “A
Street Car Named Desire” for example takes it to another level.

------
jloughry
_Twelve O 'Clock High_ is a masterclass on running a software project. The
higher-ups can see that something is wrong with the team; it's not performing
as well as it ought to. The outsider comes in, figures out what the problems
are, and fixes them. Not an easy fix, not a quick one, and it takes an awful
toll on several people. But the team ends up working well again.

I show this movie to everyone I can. It's full of lessons.

~~~
Animats
No, it's not. Pushing people that hard to finish some ad-supported web site /
delivery service is not appropriate. Are you prepared to pay lifetime PTSD
benefits?

Which is why we need unions.

~~~
jloughry
You're right. Those people weren't working on a software project; they were in
a fight for their lives—literally—with an enemy they just barely won against.
It's not the same thing at all. But it is worth watching for the depiction of
how hard humans can work, together, for a common objective when the ONLY thing
that matters is getting through. I can't think of a single major character not
damaged, broken, or killed by the end of the movie. I guess it resonated
because that's the only kind of environment I've ever worked in. Yay,
Lockheed.

------
magicbuzz
I haven’t seem the film, but I will try to find it.

It’s good that some historical remnant - the control tower -remains. In NE
Australia, there were a huge number of airfields that many hundreds of B-25s
and other aircraft flew out from on missions to distant Pacific islands and
back again. There is almost nothing remaining of that history as landing
strips became roads or crops were grown over them.

~~~
m0nty
It's rare that these airfields have survived in the UK. Beaulieu Heath was an
important airfield in WW2, but now it's almost invisible from the ground.
Google Maps shows its layout quite clearly still:

[https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8056961,-1.5015827,1429m/dat...](https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8056961,-1.5015827,1429m/data=!3m1!1e3)

Worse perhaps is we're graudally losing that sense of history, of courage and
sacrifice. I wouldn't want to be jingoistic about it, but I think people are
unaware of what the wartime generations went through.

~~~
jabl
> Worse perhaps is we're graudally losing that sense of history, of courage
> and sacrifice. I wouldn't want to be jingoistic about it, but I think people
> are unaware of what the wartime generations went through.

While it pains me as a ww2 buff to say this, I do think that as a society we
have a bit of an unhealthy obsession with WW2.

And, it's not like it ever made sense to turn East Anglia into some kind of
WW2 air war museum. After the war, people wanted their farmlands back, and
wanted to continue their lives, and they had every right to do that.

------
programd
Anybody interested in an excellent history of the WW II European bombing
campaigns should pick up “Bomber Command” by Max Hastings. I covers everything
from technology, to strategy, to ethics, and more. Top notch history book.

[https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-
Classi...](https://www.amazon.com/Bomber-Command-Zenith-Military-
Classics/dp/0760345201)

~~~
ggm
Hastings is somewhat partisan on this. I recommend reading him but read others
too. Like Solly Zuckerman 'from apes to warlords' or the recent books on
P.M.S. Blackett and the birth of Operations Research

------
cafard
I saw a copy of the novel at a used book sale this month, and was interested
to find that one of the authors was Beirne Lay, Jr., whose piece on the
Regensburg raid appears in a Library of America volume on reporting WW II. I'm
not sure why I didn't put down my 50 cents when I saw it--the next day it was
gone.

------
incomplete
ww2 buff here... whilst relatively accurate, this movie in no way explains why
and how the daylight (and night) bombing campaigns over germany almost failed.
i would strongly recommend watching this talk by steven blank @ the computer
history museum: "the secret history of the silicon valley".

the talk even OPENS with clips from 12 o'clock high! :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)

TL;DR: it was radar.

~~~
Balgair
Hey, as an WW2 buff, do you where I can get a list of ALL the bomber nicknames
(Picadilly Lilly, Memphis Belle, etc)? I'm trying to train a neural net on
them for generation of new 'authentic' nicknames.

------
pjc50
It's a nice meditative film review, and a piece of history; but what does it
actually tell us about air combat? It tells us that WW2 strategic bombing
suffered appalling losses, and that this left the survivors with what we would
now call PTSD. Also the lesson of _Catch-22_.

~~~
drmpeg
Excellent video describing why losses were so high.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo)

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I think that video over emphasizes technical side of things and under-
emphasizes that everyone was flying by the seat of their pants. Literally
nobody on earth had experience in strategic bombing, it didn't even exist
until then. The tactics had to be figured out as they went along.

~~~
jarvist
Contemporary accounts suggest that it was an almost intentional ignorance.
People were addicted to the idea that heavy-bombers were strategically useful
in Europe (when they just flattened civilian parts of cities, all the
manufacturing was hardened); and that valiant gunners were doing something
useful for their comrades (when data showed that stripping out the turrets +
guns + gunners, and flying higher and faster would decrease losses).

Freeman Dyson complains that operational-research was intentionally nobbled in
bomber-command, even after great successes had been shown in the navy +
coastal command:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBBI8Wnrfk&index=38&list=PL...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLBBI8Wnrfk&index=38&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN)

~~~
ansible
And the technology just wasn't up to snuff either.

The Norden bombsight was a technological marvel. An analog computer to figure
out when to drop bombs based on speed, height, wind direction, etc. It worked
fine in optimal conditions. But during wartime it wasn't that accurate in
practice.

~~~
coredog64
I would argue that the primary value of the Norden was as propaganda. The
Allies could pretend they were executing surgical bomb strikes rather than
just indiscriminately bombing.

