 to think Tech on Jay Fidel, which is the movies we can learn from series, where we review movies with the idea of trying to learn from them. And the title of this episode is, Why Do We Like Masters of the Air? I was just playing on Apple TV so much. It's a great air war series. And for this discussion we have, I'm not sure to say judge or captain. He's a retired judge, chief judge of Second Circuit, Jack Lear federal. He's also a Navy reserve captain. Welcome to the show, Jack Lear. Hi Jay, glad to be here. I thought of you while I watched this, you know, it was really a fabulous series. And I wonder if you could sort of introduce the depth and scope of the series to us so we can find out what we can learn from it. I'll be happy to. I have some notes here I can refer to. Masters of the Air is, one of the reasons I like it a lot is it's a true story. And it's based on a book written by a man named Donald Miller. I'm working my way through it right now. And it's just chock full of all kinds of information and history and background. But basically it's about the strategic air campaign by the United States Army Air Force conducted from England against Germany during World War II. And that was conducted by what was called the Eighth Air Force. There was a 15th Air Force, which was down in North Africa later in Italy, which attacked from the south. But the Eighth Air Force was located in England in East Anglia, which is in the northeast of northeast of London. And there were a whole bunch of bases there. And they were staffed by Americans who came from the United States. They flew over there in B-17s and also B-24s. Those were the first heavy bombers, I think maybe almost any place, but certainly in America. The heavy bombers, the first one was a B-17 and then the B-24 came along. And they were long range. At the time they were developed, people thought that fighters would be obsolete because they thought bombers were so fast and they had so many guns. B-17s had 10, 50 caliber machine guns on it. And the thinkers at the time thought that if they flew close enough that no fighter, any fighter who came close would get blown out of the air. Now then it didn't work out in real life. But and they go into that in the series. Now the series is nine episodes where the fifth episode is on Friday. So I watched the first four. Number three is the Regensburg raid, which I'll mention, which got some great flying in it. I saw an interview with the people who made it, including Tom Hanks. And he really emphasizes authenticity, is the way he puts it. And he did the Band of Brothers and he did the Pacific. So if you get a scent, if you like those, you're going to like this one. And anyway, the 8th Air Force got over to England on June 8, 1942, which was pretty soon after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Just to give you some perspective, the Battle of Midway was on June 4, 1942. So these folks were over there very early on. Now they didn't have very many bombers at the time. That was a problem. And they weren't able to fly their first missions until June of 43. 43 was the worst period because they didn't have fighter cover that could take, could escort the bombers all the way to their targets in Belgium and France and Germany. They started out bombing the, excuse me, the U-boat pens along the French coast. And then they went further in. And the idea behind strategic bombing, this was developed by Billy Mitchell, the general in the 30s. You may remember the court marshal of Billy Mitchell. He was court marshal because he came up with this idea that battleships and these other war machines were going to be obsolete because the bombers would win wars. And that was his thesis. And there were other thinkers at the time that believed in that. And that was the reason we, you know, that idea sold. And so we invested in these bombers. We went to have very many of them at the start. And then we built thousands of them, B-24s and B-17s during the war. Once we cranked up the assembly lines and we, you know, used a good old American ingenuity. The idea of strategic bombing was to destroy the ability of the Germans to make war. There was two views on it. One was the British view, which was espoused by the head of the British, or the RAF bomber command. That was bomber Harris, a famous guy. And he believed, they tried flying during the daylight to bomb German targets, but they were shredded by the German fighters in the flak. So they switched over to night bombing. And they believed they couldn't, because they were inaccurate, they decided to bomb large metropolitan areas. And the idea was to kill the workers who worked in the factories and to destroy their housing so that there would be lots of refugees and basically terror bombing. The US view was we could use strategic bombing. We could bomb specific war-making industries. And the reason we could do that is because we had the Northern bomb site, which was a bomb site developed in America. And it was pretty good. It was very accurate when it was tested in the clear skies over Nevada in a non-mortem situation. The problem with it is, as it turned out, it wasn't very useful. It was useful, but it wasn't as accurate as people had hoped because of the bad weather in Europe. But nevertheless, our view was it was not moral to do area bombing when we could do specific bombing of ball bearing factories and fighter plane factories and tank factories and things like that. So that was the American view of strategic bombing. And we were going to do it in the daylight so we could use the Northern bomb site to accurately destroy those targets. So the British would bomb at night and the Americans would bomb during the day. And this is the story of those bombers in the 8th Air Force. Now, this particular group that's emphasized in the movie is called the Bloody Hundredth. It was a hundredth bombardment group, which was one of a number of them. And it was located at a place called Thorpe's Abbot. It was first mission June 25, 1943. It was referred to as the Bloody Hundredth. Not because it lost more than anybody else, but it had several missions that it went on where they had huge losses. And so it got that nickname. And I guess Airmen didn't want to be assigned to that particular group. Let's see. The story kind of evolves around two personalities. One is Captain John Egan. And another is Gail Cleveland called Buck, I guess is his nickname. Before I go further, one other factor which is really interesting. The 8th Air Force during World War II, all these bombers that are bombing Germany, which I've described, they lost 26,000 young men killed. That's 30% more than the United States Marine Corps lost in all of World War II, which is a pretty amazing figure. So that was it. It was effective, but it was very costly effort. And those were all young men 18, 19, 20, maybe 25, the oldest. One person whose name comes up in, I think it's episode five, who I want to describe as named Rosie Rosenthal became a pilot of the Hundredth. And he's a very interesting guy. You can see an interview of him on YouTube. He was a young man who went to law school just from an ordinary family in New York. And he was working as a young lawyer when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And he said he went right down and he signed up in the Air Corps, became a B-17 pilot. He arrived pretty early on over there. In those days, when they first arrived, the crews had to fly 25 missions in order to be sent home. And then they would do training and things like that. But the survival rate for 25 missions in 1943 was very low. In fact, it was like zero. Their casualties were that bad because they didn't have that fighter cover, which I mentioned. But Rosenthal, not only did he fly 25, he flew 25 more. He re-upped, and then he flew two more after that. So he flew a total of 52 missions from the time he went over there until the end of World War II. And at the end, he was trained to fly B-29s against Japan. And then he got out of the military. He went back to his law firm, but he didn't feel like he had sort of wrapped up his experience with the war or done enough. So he volunteered as a lawyer to go to the Nuremberg Tribunal that prosecuted all the Nazi war criminals. The main one is that he worked as a prosecutor on the Nuremberg War Tribunal. He met his wife on the boat over, and this had an interesting story about that. But he was quite a guy. And he's a very soft-spoken, unversusposing guy. A great interview. But anyway, that's the kind of person who was involved in this. And we can be proud of those people. Okay, that's about most of what I wrote down. Oh, a couple of the things. The B-17, they thought it would outrun the fighters, but actually it only cruised at 170 miles an hour, which is pretty slow. And in the beginning, the Spitfires would escort for a while, but they had to turn back. Then the P-47s could go a little further than P-38s. Finally, the Americans got the P-51 Mustangs. And those planes could fly all the way to Berlin with the bombers. And initially, they used them to protect the bombers, so they would stick with the bombers and fly over them back and forth. And then about halfway through, Jimmy Doolittle of the Doolittle Raiders, the guy who bombed Tokyo, he was made the commander. And he changed the approach. He said, fighters are there to destroy the Luftwaffe, because they wanted to destroy the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe before D-Day, because they wanted air superiority. So he said, go ahead of the bombers and strafe the airfields. And when the fighters come up, destroy as many as you can. And when you're on your way back, do the same thing. And that worked. Although the bomber boys kind of felt like they were bait sometimes to bring the fighters up. But it worked. It destroyed most of the German Air Force. So on D-Day, there was like two German fighter planes that came across the beaches. And that was it. So all of that air power actually worked. Although there are people who debate whether it was effective or not. But I don't see how you can conclude that it was not effective. It was super costly. But that's war. Any questions? One thing I noticed was that this was the first effort to actually attack the Germans in Germany in Europe. It was long before D-Day. It was long before we had any force into Europe. And it was the longest running game in the war. Because these guys kept on doing it for several years before the war was over. One of the reasons Stalin was anxious for us to create a second front because he was losing millions of people on the Eastern Front. And we were able to demonstrate some effort through the use of the bomber force. The other thing that struck me is that these planes, the ones that did get back, and as you said, a lot of them never got back. And there were roughly 10 crew members for each plane. And they lost an enormous number of people because they lost an enormous number of crew members. And we hear stories about how some of them parachuted out. But a lot of them didn't parachute out. They went down with the aircraft and they were killed. Here's a factoid on that. A group, like the 100th bomb group, had about 48 planes depending upon the situation. During the war, they lost 229 planes. Through the maps, 10 per plane. And they would be hurt in all kinds of ways. I remember one scene where the gunner was in a pod that was breached by flak and it was open to the air. And they were flying at 25,000 feet and it's really cold at 25,000 feet. And he continued to shoot his gun, but he was sitting on a piece of steel which got cold. And we got back. He had frostbite in his rear, in his backside. Because he was sitting on a piece of steel that was so cold. There's so many ways you could be killed. So many ways you could be injured. And I don't know if we've ever seen a movie or a series like this where you saw the way they operated within the plane. You saw the way they operated in the machine gun turrets. You saw them being exposed to all that flak. I haven't seen anything like that. I've seen a lot of war movies we all have, but not like that. And I thought, go ahead. Tom Hanks said that he was asked how many B-17s did you use in the movie? He said none. There are very few of them left in the world now. I think there are a few that go to air shows, but they built a couple of models that they said they could even taxi with. And then they built one for interiors that said they had to make it larger than the actual B-17 because it's so small in order to do the filming. And the other thing is, as you mentioned, it got very cold. And that's because the B-17s were not pressurized. We don't even think about that today. Can you imagine flying in a Boeing 737 at 25,000 or 30,000 feet and the windows are open? That's basically what they were doing. In the beginning, they didn't have electrified suits, which they got later, but apparently they were not very reliable. So frostbite was a big issue, which I hadn't known before. Yeah. What fascinated me, well, with two things. One is that we thought these planes either came back whole or didn't come back. But in fact, a lot of them came back in pieces. And you saw in this movie how the flak would tear away parts of the plane and they would live back with all the fuselage missing and all these control surfaces essentially destroyed. And somehow they would get back. And when they landed, it was up to the ground crew to patch it back up and to make it airworthy again. But some of those shots and some of those planes, with the skin torn off and pieces missing, that was new. They said you could take a screwdriver and punch it through the skin. But the B-17s had the reputation of being the most reliable, more reliable than the B-24s. I'm not sure what the truth was there, but the B-17s apparently were maybe over-engineers, since they were the first four-engine bomber. But they took tremendous beating. Their pictures of them flying back with half the tail missing, big chunks out of the wing. It's amazing. And what struck me, and I begin with the notion that Tom Hanks is a major patriot. I've seen interviews of him. And he cares deeply about this and the greatest generation. And so for Spielberg, remember Spielberg and Schindler's List and so many other movies, the two of them are great patriots. And they've made other movies like this. And what I would like to review with you is Greyhound, which is the story of an American destroyer, captain of whom, of which was Tom Hanks again. And this was a statement of the greatest generation. And these guys are trying to tell us something. They're trying to introduce us to the greatest generation. They're trying to let us see what the challenges were, the risks, and how these guys stood up in the face of lethal fire and lethal threats. And the Greyhound is another example of that. But in the case of Masters of the Sky, these guys, every time they went up, including that guy, Rosenthal, they were not very likely to come back. The probabilities, the risks were way against them. And a lot of them died. And so you wondered why they did that. Why didn't they run kicking and screaming back home? Why didn't they try hard to get out of the service when they knew that it was so dangerous? And while you watch the series, you have to examine that. You have to look at what really motivated these guys to stay there and do it day after day after day and see their buddies kill. And why was that? I mean, it's never answered except in the implication. But to me, they did it because of pure unadulterated patriotism. They were working for the free world. They were working for the country. They were working for families back home. They were, in fact, and you see them as the greatest generation. You agree, Shackley? Yeah, Rosenthal says that straight out, he just says he joined because what was going on was wrong and it had to be stopped. And I mean, he didn't know about the Holocaust at the time, but he just felt that the aggression that was going on and the destruction and the harm to humans was unacceptable. And he was willing to go on a state 52 missions. That's incredible. Took that risk. I mean, he's a dead man walking. The other thing I'll just mention that Miller brings down in his book, as he said, they would come back from these missions and they would lose maybe nine fortresses, 90 people, and they would go in and they wouldn't not have any funerals. They would just go in to the place that they were staying. And other people would come in and take the gear out and the personal belongings of those who didn't return. And that would be it. And then other people would come in and other planes and that's just the way it was. There was no recognition really of the people that were lost in a formal way. I didn't realize that. Oh, you're compared with an infantry experience where you lose your buddy. You're very close to your buddy. You have gone through, you know, life and death with your buddy and now you lose them and it affects you badly. And these guys all knew each other. They were in a circle community in those airfields and they knew all of the players. And when you lost another bomber crew, you felt it. And how do you handle that when you're losing dozens and dozens of dozens of them every single day? You can imagine the stress and you can imagine, you know, how they were burying their grief every day because they had to go out the next day. But I wanted to ask you some questions. So they went for the U-boat pens and they had a couple of tries on that. It didn't work the first time. They never made that mission. Do you remember one or two episodes? But later they got better at it. And every day, you would see the commander telling them where they were supposed to go, giving them a map and a red line about this is where we're going to fly and this is how we're going to come back and these are the obstacles and so forth. But there was one day, and Shackly, I must say that I did not understand what was going on. There was one day when he dropped the map down in front of them and he said, incidentally, this is different because you are going to fly to Africa. And it was a diversionary maneuver, I think. And the Nazis were going to chase you for a while and then you're going to be out of range and then you're going to go to Africa, which is a very long way for a flying fortress to go in those days. And it wasn't easy to get to Africa. What was going on? What was the strategy? Well, the plan was there were three groups, as I understand it. And the first group was the hundreds and they were going to go to Regensburg and then they were going to go on down to Africa and they were supposed to drive. At that point, at that time, we didn't have P-51 so there was lots of German fighters. And the fighters would come up and then when they'd get over the target, then there would be the anti-aircraft that they'd have to deal with. And then when they got through the anti-aircraft, then the fighters could come back. But there was two other groups that were supposed to go pretty quickly. And the idea was that it would spread the fighter defense thin because there would be a diversionary attack at the same time. So the Germans wouldn't know which one would be able to concentrate their effort. But what happened is the following two groups weren't able to take off on time because of weather. And so the hundreds was out there and all of the German fighters concentrated on them. And so they had huge losses and then they turned south instead of coming back to England just as well because they had to go through all those fighters again. And they flew over the Alps and all the way to North Africa. I don't know how many actually made it, but it's pretty dramatic in the episode four. It's a good episode to watch. Yeah, it was a failed strategy in the sense that the timing was bad. They were supposed to be out of harm's way, but they weren't. And they were right in the middle of it. Yeah. Another thing that comes up is the, when they would, they, in due little, I guess it was, no, it was Curtis LeMay who came up with this. Curtis LeMay who later became chief of the Air Force. Remember that? Yeah. And he's the guy who conducted the fire bombing in the Japanese cities with the B-29s later. But he used to go on the missions to see how it was running. And he, he changed their approach. Instead of each bomber using the northern bomb site to site the target themselves, he could see that they were getting, they're all over the place. So he said, no, we're going to have a lead bomber and lead bombardier and a lead navigator. You just follow him. And when you see the lead bomber drop their bombs, you drop your bombs. And also, he changed the procedure so that when they got close to the, to the target, about the time the fighters would, would, would leave and the plaque would start, the bombardier would take over the control of the airplane, I guess, through the northern bomb site. And they'd have to fly straight and level over the target to make the bombing effective, which made them super targets. And so the, the plaque ate them up, which were these 88 millimeter high velocity cannons that the Germans had, which were, were pretty amazing cannons. And they were all, they were, I guess, maybe not initially, but later on they were, they were radar directed. So the radar would direct the firing of the, of the, of the plaque. And I guess they could move, if the bombers moved a little bit, there was enough elapsed time from the time the cannon fired until the, the charge got up and exploded. And so there was possible to do a little bit of avoidance, but not much. I never understood why they flew in these very tight formations, because if they had all these gunners and all the turrets shooting at the fighters, wouldn't they be shooting at each other? You know, they've never explicitly, I haven't seen anything, anybody explicitly address that, but it seems like it's true because they flew in these box, they call them boxes for planes. And now the idea was to cover each other. But those, but if you, if you see how fast those fighters came through, I mean, you know, the, the speed fighters going 300 miles an hour and the bombers going 170 miles an hour. And the ability to sight and hit something must have been almost impossible. But the other thing that's interesting is that, you know, later on, I talked about this, but the Germans developed the ME-262, the first operational jet fighter. And that fighter eventually was used against the bombers. And it had four 30 millimeter cannons in the nose. Can you imagine what that would do to a, to a B-17? It's just incredible. And me standing for Messerschmitt. Right. Yeah. They were pretty advanced in their fighter engineering for sure. And, and yes, at the end of the war, they did have jets, didn't they? But that takes me to something I was going to ask you about. You know, this was all a, as you said, we, we had, we had to get our act together and, and we had to get our assembly lines working. But the, you know, the technology might have been over-engineered in some ways and other ways. It was all kind of experimental. And wars tend to improve technology. We learned from the technology experiences we've had in the wars. And after the war, the U.S. had jet fighters. And after the war, the U.S. developed an Air Force, perhaps under Curtis LeMay. You know, that was second to none. We understood air power. We understood air superiority. And we learned that here in, you know, in this movie. But it struck me that a lot of the gear that they were using was so different than what we had today. And it was, it was an engineering learning experience. The oxygen, you know, the windows, the turrets, the machine guns, all of that was like less than perfected. The skin of the plane, as you said, you could put a screwdriver through it. It was like the Model A for it. Easy to repair, kept on going. But it was old technology. And that's what we had here. And these guys were subjected to technology that would not necessarily protect them. They didn't have the kinds of things that our military aircraft have today. Not by far. They didn't have good radio communications. They didn't have systems. They didn't even have their communications between the members of the crew. That's so good. The control of the aircraft was not so good. So I think the movie brings that out, doesn't it? And you get the feeling that there was a lot of technology that we didn't have then. And now we take for granted. Well, just a few years before this happened, airplanes were made out of fabric, you know, and they had biplanes. I mean, that was only a few years before World War II started. And B-17 came into existence. I mean, a metal-skinned aircraft was very new in the 1930s. I think the spirit of St. Louis was metal-skinned. But it was one of the very first. And so, yeah, all these technologies are very new. Now we're going on to drones. You know, that's an interesting thing is, you know, instead of spending, what, $300 million on an F-35, I have a feeling that that era is going to end pretty soon. And we're going to be using something else. It's probably going to be drones of one sort or another. Yeah. And drones or missiles way cheaper than fighter planes can take out an aircraft carrier. I've seen a number of YouTube videos on that exact point. And so we have to figure out how to deal with those drones and relatively inexpensive missiles. And we haven't quite done that yet. So it's changing under us, you know, what's happening in the Middle East is teaching us so much about air superiority. It's different. In fact, ocean superiority. You could have an attack on a multi-trillion dollar aircraft carrier, and you wouldn't necessarily be able to stop it. We do not rule the seas in the way we used to, especially with the Chinese who have developed the Navy that has more ships than we do. So, you know, it's that whole thing about you have to keep your eye on the ball. And I really wonder, Shackley, maybe not in the course of the time span covered by masters of the sky. But during the war, there had to be somebody back home working on new technology and improving the, what'd you say, the B-17, maybe into the B-24, maybe into the B-29. We were changing the technology. We were learning from every experience to make it better. Isn't that why they had multiple models? Yeah. Well, the B-29 came along very shortly after that, and it had remotely controlled gun turrets. Somebody could sit inside and direct all the guns, all the 50-caliber guns at one time, and it was pressurized. So they didn't have to worry about the cold, and they could fly it in a B-29. It could fly over 30,000 feet. It wasn't effective at that height than over Japan, apparently, but the other. And I think that it was actually more expensive program or second to the atomic bomb program. It was a huge program because they knew that they needed, that the B-17s and the B-24s weren't going to do it, that they would have to have the long range of bombers, at least in the beginning, to defeat Japan. Although Curtis LeMay's idea was didn't need to drop the atomic bombs because at the end of the air war in Europe, he would bring all those bombers from Europe over to the Pacific and use them to bomb Japan. And he thought he could end the war that way, but would have been less destructive? I don't know. Well, you know, I don't remember, but my sense of it is that the Japanese did not specialize in bombers. They had fighter planes, but they didn't necessarily have bombers. So we probably had an advantage over them. Yeah, the Japanese and the Germans and the Russians never developed strategic bombers. The British and the Americans did, and the British built pretty good ones, the one they called, I forgot the name of it, but it had force fit by our engines in it, so it carried a lot of bombs. It was very, very effective. So the whole thing here is, aside from the fact that it's a statement of patriotism, the special patriotism of the greatest generation, which touched me deeply, and I'm sure which Spielberg and Tom Hanks had in mind. Aside from that, technology wins war, and you have to be quick. You have to learn from every technology and make it better. And air superiority, which certainly has changed from those days till now, is still in place, but the equipment in the air is different. I'm not sure how I feel about the Navy and the oceans. There's probably a lot of changes in technology there too, and we should explore that with the Greyhound movie. But all in all, what do you take away from this? What do you take away from this series? Why was it so good for you? Well, I forget. Victor Davis Hansen, I think, says that once a democracy is aroused, it's unbeatable because of the dynamics that's inherent in the culture and the economic system. And I think that World War II proved that. I mean, we were building a B-24 bomber every day or every hour. It was just amazing. Thousands of them were being built, and we were training hundreds and thousands of pilots. That's one of the things that the Germans and the Japanese, is they couldn't train new pilots. They didn't have the oil eventually. They just didn't have the system to do it, whereas we put it in place very fast. I mean, there wasn't eight there, of course, in 1941. They created it. And then suddenly, at the end of the war, they were sending out 1,000 bombers to bomb Germany and 1,000 fighters to escort them. I mean, incredible. Well, I think you've touched on a very important point. The whole country came together to do this. It was Rosie de Riveter and thousands and tens of thousands just like her. And it was a national community that got behind this. And everyone was in favor of that kind of response. You want to arouse a democracy. We are the democracy, and we are aroused. And I also, now go ahead. I was going to say England did the same thing. I mean, even England turned out a huge number of bombers and fighters, and they didn't have the numbers, the people that we had. But they mobilized their entire society. It's interesting that Germans, Hitler never mobilized women into the military. There were some nurses and some auxiliaries, I guess, but he never mobilized them like Rosie de Riveter, like you were saying. And I don't think the Japanese did either, whereas we did. And the British certainly did. Yeah. That was different. It was different. You know, levels of misogyny come to mind, cultural misogyny, if you will. The other thing is, this movie does, of course, show you how they lived. And one of the reviews I saw in the movies, it made clear that slogging in the mud was not nearly as good as being a pilot, a bomber pilot. Chances of survival were actually better in the infantry, but your quality of life wasn't so good. These guys went to the Oak Club, you know, like, you know, every night they had parties and they had local women supporting them. And the base was filled with English people who were helping, right down to the children, helping them and standing by and caring about them, right down to the dogs in that town and that community. And so, again, as you said, the British really supported this effort. Of course, they were, as a country, they were at greater risk than we were, so they really cared because you had those bus bombs going into London at the same time, so forth. Go ahead. I'll tell you a funny story about the relationship between the British and the Americans during the war. My former father-in-law was a British Army officer, he was in the Signals, and he landed on D-Day plus three and then was with the British Army all the way through into Germany. And he said the only time he was really scared was a drunken GI, stuck a 45 pistol in his face and wanted something from him. Well, you know, they did cover that point in one scene, I recall, where there was this not-so-friendly, friendly competition between the American pilots and the British pilots, and you thought it was going to be a real slugfest, but it wasn't because at the end of the day, they cared about each other and they were on the same team. But, you know, we've seen and heard about that for a long time about how there was this rivalry going on. It was a small point in the movie, but it was something that covered, and that leaves me to say that the whole interaction between the pilots and the local community and the British Air Force was in there, it was in the movie, it was handled. And so, you know, somebody who wrote this up did a lot of research, Spielberg and his friends, or Tom Hanks and his friends, they looked at every single detail. And for that, it made the movie special, it made the movie beyond any movie you've seen about this part of the war. Do you agree? Yes, and I recommend the book as well. The book is a very good read, easy read, and it has lots of great detail in it. He blends this whole story together really nicely. Yeah, but the book isn't entirely true, right? Yeah, parts of it are true, parts of it are true, but not all of it. Well, I think it's mostly true, as far as I can see. Yeah. A lot of history in the background, the kind of stuff I was talking about earlier, I got all that from the book mostly. I think you're right, the book was largely true. The movie took liberties. Yes. Yeah. Which is just movie making, you know? You mentioned before, I began to show that there was an issue about the coloration, the color correction in the movie. What was your thought about that? It seems too colored, I guess is the way I put it. The color seemed to, I don't know, too dense, I guess would be the way I put it. The color, looking at you right now, the color is perfect, but if you look at that movie, the coloration is different than what you see right now. You don't think it was intentional? Oh, I think it was intentional. I think it creates a kind of mood, but it's definitely not like a video where it's really sharp. And I thought, well, maybe it has to do with the fact that they use a lot of CGI for the flying scenes or something. I don't know. It's worth saying. It's just like this reminds me of the movie Golda. And the movie Golda, they had all these battle scenes, but the movie didn't create the battle scenes. They got them out of an archive. And the same thing here, I think CGI or maybe an archive or even animation helped them tell the story. And as you say, they had mock-ups of the planes. And it wasn't actually taken in the air. Well, if you look at the Pacific or Band of Brothers, it's a different coloration. So all in all, wrapping around everything that you've seen, I don't think I've seen as many episodes as you have. What rating would you give this is against your own knowledge of the subject, your own experience in the service? And ultimately, your historical impressions and movie making? How would you give this on a scale of one to ten? I give it a ten. I don't think you could do it much better. My thing about the color is just kind of nitpicking. The story itself, I think, is real. And they've done a great job of creating the mood and picking up what it must have been like to do that. And that's important. I think if you liked this, it would be worth watching 12 o'clock high with Gregory Peck, which is a version of this, which used real B-17s because it was long ago. And Jimmy Stewart? Wasn't Jimmy Stewart in the Air Force? I think he was. He was a general in the Air Force. He flew 25 missions in B-24s in World War II. And he made movies about it later, and that was with real planes also. I'll tell you my reaction, and I'll tell you why. I would also give it a 10 or better, but why? It's purely political for me. What I mean is, we talk about how the youngest generation, generation that are now coming to voting age and so forth, and we'll control the ballot box in the years to come, that they don't know about civics. And perhaps more importantly, they don't know about American history. It isn't taught. And they haven't read the books we talk about. They haven't seen the movies we talk about. They haven't ideated over the guys who were in the greatest generation who were there flying in the masters of the sky, or the Navy, or the infantry. They weren't there. They don't understand. They don't understand that the government is an extension of us. We are the government. We are the military. And the military and the government is us. It's all together. And I think the average education around the country doesn't allow for that. It doesn't investigate that. So anybody who makes a movie like this, especially a very watchable, thrilling, dramatic movie and also factual, you know, is doing a great service to the country and that generation by making people aware of what it was like then. And I felt a sense of patriotism throughout the whole movie. That's what I loved about it. And I want everyone to know. Absolutely. I totally agree. It's an excellent movie. And it just brings back to you how horrible war is. I mean, millions of people. How many people died in World War II? 50 million, 60 million? Incredible. And the thing is, it reminds me that there has to be deterrence or this sort of thing just gets repeated. And it's been repeated in other places in the world a number of times since this time. And we don't seem to, perhaps by seeing movies like this, we'll remember that and we'll think about it. Yeah, but to flip side, just a touch on it is that these guys among other motivations were motivated by the atrocities. They didn't know about the camps. I agree. But they knew the Nazis were doing atrocities. And they knew there was a good side and a bad side to this war. And they were on the good side. And that motivated them to deal with the problem. And so the other side of it, and then we could spend another show doing in a domination of this, is that although war is terrible, sometimes it's necessary. And every one of those guys in those airplanes were committed because they felt it was necessary to achieve the right goal. And it's hard to deal with, especially now, with what's going on in the Middle East. But I think you could make a case for the fact that when somebody, a nation state, goes rogue, there may be no other way to stop. Yeah, well, I feel the same way about Russia attacking Ukraine. I mean, what's the difference between that and Hitler going into the Sudeten land and Czechoslovakia? And that that history. Amen. I totally agree. Well, thank you, Shackly. Captain Judge Shackly-Refetto joining us for a discussion of this great series on Netflix. Thank you so much, Shackly. Take care, J. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.