The Great Air Race - John Lancaster

In 1919, in an effort to excite the public with the potential of air travel (and procure a larger budget for the Army Air Service and therefore, more power and prestige for himself), Billy Mitchell got permission to sponsor the first transcontinental air race in the United States.

Lancaster starts with the state of the air industry in the U.S. at the close of World War I (not great), covers the early efforts of the Postal Service in setting up air delivery of mail between New York and Chicago. Most of the book, as you'd hope given the title, is about the air race itself. The thing is set up in a whirlwind, with the route being planned, and then Mitchell and his superiors trying to get airfields set up in the towns they've marked as control stops (where the pilots must land and stay at least 30 minutes.) In some cases, especially west of the Mississippi River, this requires marshaling the local Boy Scout troop to help clear and mark off some convenient field, while throwing together tents and fuel depots.

That's the part I find most interesting, all the details Lancaster provides about just how challenging this was for the pilots. The airfields were often literal fields, and in one case, a treacherous salt flat. The planes were mostly fighters, designed for short stints, not covering thousands of miles in a few days. The planes are vulnerable to both rain and fire. There weren't any radar towers or radio communication. The instruments on-board might be limited to a compass (not always working) and an altimeter. Most of the pilots were using Rand McNally state maps to navigate because there wasn't anything standardized for much of the country. Lots of flying by feel and intuition, which is apparently really dangerous once you're in a cloud or fogbank.

Oh yeah, parachutes aren't a thing, either. There's a dire couple of paragraphs about the debate among pilots in wartime if it was better to jump from your burning plane or stick with it and see if you could get the fire under control (which a couple of pilots manage during the race.)

Lancaster focuses on a handful of pilots, from both the groups flying from New York to San Francisco and those going the opposite direction (although the race was hastily changed into a round trip flight eventually.) It's an eclectic group, as this predates any sort of broad training program. So you have career military men like Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, but also preachers (like eventual winner Belvin Maynard), mechanics-turned-pilots and everything in between.

Lancaster shifts frequently between them, even within chapters, as a way of comparing their progress. One pilot may make it out of St. Paul to Omaha ahead of a thunderstorm, while his nearest competitor is waylaid by a snapped strut or leaky radiator. There's a lot of turning back due to weather or mechanical issues, and several deaths, which the press seizes on as a question of whether this race is worth all this.

Lancaster, I think would land in the negative, while appreciating the feat the pilots accomplished. It hardly convinces people that air travel is safe, and given how few of the pilots actually managed the round trip, let alone in the three weeks allotted, it's not clear how much better it really is than a train unless everything goes right. Though it may have helped the Postal Service in convincing some of those small towns to maintain and improve those fields so they could get regular mail delivery by air.

'Early in the race, a DH-4 that landed near Stillwell, Indiana, in the midst of a rainstorm was set upon by hogs with a taste for aircraft linen. They gnawed two holes in the rudder before they could be driven away.'

Saturday Splash Page #35

 

"Crash Position," in White Lily #5, by Preston Poulter (writer), Jake Bilbao (artist), Kumar? (inker), Alonso Espinoza (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer)

The story of World War II Soviet ace Lilya Litvak and her friend/at least for one night love interest Katya Budanova, from their days as flight instructors for the male pilots, through their being assigned to combat units, their triumphs and losses.

Both Lilya and Katya are in an unpleasant circumstance. Lilya's a Polish Jew, so while she's got zero love for the Nazis, life in the USSR isn't exactly a bed of roses, either. Katya's Ukrainian, so again, someone who might not have a lot of love for Stalin or the Soviets. But, of course, they have to play at being loyal citizens, even when their superiors insult, degrade or generally act like they should be grateful living under Soviet rule.

Lilya is the main character, as even much of the time spent on Katya is focused on her attraction to Lilya. It's Katya who gives Lilya the white lily that becomes her call sign. And for the most part, Lilya is the one who drives the story. She's the one who mocks the male pilots they're training for being cowards or throwing up at the sight of Nazi planes, who out-flies her flight instructor when they're given the chance to fly real combat aircraft. Lilya is the one shot down over Stalingard and has to make it back to the base (though Poulter glosses over the particulars of that).

Katya is mostly carried along in Lilya's wake. Not that she isn't a good pilot herself, but the story doesn't give the impression Katya was excited at the prospect of fighting on the front lines, so much as she was good enough to get the opportunity and it would keep her close to Lilya. A lot of her page time is devoted to worrying about Lilya, or being disappointed that Lilya is attracted to the male captain that commands their squadron.

The first two issues were drawn by Lovalle Davis, who unfortunately passed away shortly after finishing the second issue. Jake Bilbao had been working on covers for the series, and took over interior duties as well. Both artists took an unusual approach during the air combat scenes. They essentially drew from the bottom of the page to the top. It allowed for more a widescreen feel, I guess, but you had to turn the book on its side. They also tended to intersperse smaller panels through the page, and often drew those in the shape of the plane's canopy or crosshairs. That was a nice touch, because it let them give a sense of the scale of the battle, just how many planes were up there at once, but made sure the reader didn't lose track of the main characters.

The mini-series could easily have been six issues, considering issue 5 is nearly 40 pages itself, but it fits with the overall arc of the story. When Lilya experienced a loss and considered ending it all, she was able to go forward out of desire to keep fighting Nazis. Once she's gone, Katya is basically playing out the string.

Saturday Splash Page #33

 

"Into the Storm," in Wild Blue Yonder #4, by Mike Raicht (story/writer), Austin Harrison (story), Zach Howard (story/artist), Nelson Daniel (colorist), Jolyon Yates (ink assists), Thompson Knox (letterer)

I think I saw the hardcover of this listed in Previews and without knowing much of anything about it, decided I had to buy it. A dystopian future story with an emphasis on air battles instead of car convoys and forever trains. Road Warrior in the sky? Sign me up.

So, an Earth scarred by radiation and pollution. A few people are able to survive in airships, what's left of everyone else toils away on the surface, hoping they'll get a chance to live in the clouds. There's one airship everyone is after, The Dawn. Solar-powered, so it doesn't have to worry about fuel like everyone else. Raicht lays all this out in the first few pages, as well as that the greatest threat to the Dawn and her crew is the "Judge", commander of a fleet of ships.

The two main characters are Cola, a hotshot pilot who flies that orange plane in the lower right, and Tug, a miner she recruits as a "gun". "Guns" are people who use very-limited fuel jetpacks to land on enemy craft and wreck stuff up close. Not a great survival rate, hence the vacancy that got Tug the job.

A lot of the story deals with the differences in perspective at different levels. Cola's mother is the Dawn's commander. She and Cola butt heads, or more accurately, Olivia yells at Cola for not following orders. Frankly, her threats to ground Cola seem like a bluff when she's yelling about them being down a plane. You're going to put yourself at even greater disadvantage? But the point is supposed to be Olivia is thinking of a big picture, of trying to keep the Dawn airborne, while Cola is more focused on the dogfight she's in, or on protecting her gun or her friends.

Likewise, the story spends time with the Judge and his crew. Why he takes the approach he does, what he hopes to accomplish. He's contrasted with a young doctor on his ship, Dr. Stephens, who struggles to understand a man who in one breath, punches a pilot in the stomach with a broken glass for disobeying orders, and in the next tells her to make sure the pilot doesn't die because they already lost three pilots today. All lives, including his ultimately, are worth burning up for this goal.

It's a little funny they're fighting over the Dawn, because honestly, it doesn't look like much. Howard and Daniel take the approach towards the airship and technology in general that suggests improvisation, or maybe practicality is the word in this world. Kind of like the Nostromo in Alien, the Dawn isn't built for comfort. It's a lot of hard edges and halls lined with dirty pipes. Reminds me of the interior of a battleship or aircraft carrier (on purpose, no doubt). I like the designs for the planes - bit of a mixture of WW2 prop fighter and more recent jet attack planes - but again, they're well-worn. The paint's chipped off in places, it's basically a matter of keeping the functional. No time or resources to waste on "pretty".

Likewise, the characters themselves are scuffed up and dirty. Granted, it's movie dirty. The day-old stubble doesn't look like a mess and the clothes might be dirty but they still fit and make people look cool, but you can see the years on some of them. This life, whether stuck down in toxic air mining, or up on a solar-powered airship everyone wants, is a constant fight to survive, and it burns them out.

Locked Away from the Sun

Humans are very good at making something that should be special, mundane. He supposed that could be considered a gift. To master something once undreamt of, to the extent it becomes tedious.

He wasn't a frequent flier. Not out of fear of being in the air. That was the high (heh) point. The problem was everything else involved in the process. But here was, in an airport again. Standing in line, again. First the line to get a boarding pass. Then the security check. The line to board the plane. The line to get off the plane. Repeat.

Maybe it was natural for that to be the most common pastime. Airports were built for endless lines. Long hallways lined with gates filled with uncomfortable chairs, overpriced restaurants and gift shops (he walked past a store and wondered who would decide an airport was a good place to buy shoes). Moving walkways laid out in parallel lines. The runways, all straight lines that intersect at specific points. Go here, turn here and only here.

Of course, nature can only be constrained so long, and humans are part of nature, for all some might insist otherwise. Like paving a river channel to lock water into a set path. The water will still swirl and eddy, find its own current. Sooner or later, it will burst free, and at any moment, that was the people inside the airport. Rushing here, there. Cutting in front of or weaving around each other. Chasing children distracted by something shiny. Walking into each other because they're too busy talking on their phones to pay attention to the person who stopped dead in the middle of the hall.

Sound rebounds at him from a dozen different angles. People on their phones two feet away, giving him a complete rundown of the adoption laws in the state alongside their family dysfunction. Reminders on the PA everyone should still be wearing masks, as he walks past a dozen people who aren't to every one that is. An attendant at the gate, in her best Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny accent, reminding the passengers to put their bags in the overhead bins so everyone can board quickly. It's the third time in the last five minutes she's done that, so it must not be very effective. 

No matter which gate it is, it sounds like it's right beside him, making him think it's an announcement about his flight. On the way out his flight was delayed, then bounced from one gate to another, then to a third in a different terminal. Then he was bounced from the flight (for reasons that were not fully explained, gods keeping fire from mortals for, what, because they can) to a later flight in the first terminal. He can't take anything for granted in this labyrinth.

But it's not about his flight, not this time. He tries to blur it, reduce it to a drone and focus on his book while he waits, waits, waits. Just like he reduces all the people to light-and-dark shapes to navigate around while he gets from The Line At Point A to The Line At Point B.

The plane is here, at least. The pilot is not. Caught in traffic, they say. A different maze, but the same design, ultimately. He arrives, they dutifully board the metal tube. The open sky is just above, but the line of planes waiting their turn stretches to the end of the runway. It's like a joke, the path up just to the right, but out of reach. They wait, wait, wait, and then roll past the runway. Storms on the path. Not enough fuel to detour. Back to the gate. To refuel, they say. Another trick, a dead end in the labyrinth. The flight is canceled.

Off to the appointed desk to be re-booked. More standing in line. He reflects Odysseus, Hercules, Theseus, all those guys had it easy. At least a Minotaur is something concrete to fight. Time, or bureaucracy, which is just weaponized time, drag out the proceedings and hope your enemy keels over before you do, is a more difficult foe. He can't stab the lady at the computer, who surely does not enjoy people yelling at her about things beyond her control. But the practiced politeness as she explains there are no connecting flights, so his earliest opportunity is to sit in this airport another 23 hours, still burns like salt. There will be no hotel or food vouchers, because the flight was canceled due to weather.

Caveat Emptor is a polite way of saying, "Fuck you, buddy."

He walks away from the desk, new ticket in hand, feeling unutterably weary. 23 hours of listening to regular reminders not to leave bags unattended or they'll be searched and destroyed. He's rather fond of his shirts, can't have that. Also, don't accept packages from other people. Who would even do that, as he trudges aimlessly down a concourse? Just accept a box from some random person who walks up and asks you to hold it? Sure, it works for Bugs Bunny and Cleavon Little, but are there really that many Elmer Fudds and Mongos around?

Assuming, of course, that flight arrives on time. All around, the attendants are announcing delayed flights, which then become canceled flights. Always very apologetic, but always boiling down to the same thing: You're stuck here. The heavens are denied you. He suspects that if he stayed long enough, he'd get to watch the disintegration of civilization in miniature. He ran out of water a long time ago. Drinks are a minimum 4 bucks anywhere around here. Immortan Joe would fit right in. Sooner or later people would start killing one another to have enough money for a sandwich. On cue, he walks past the "diner" listing a $15 bowl of chili for an appetizer. There's no picture, but he'd bet the bowl is the size of a tea cup.

He ponders how it'll happen, if the breakdown occurs. Knives and guns are supposedly not allowed, but humans are creative. Life finds a way, as some putz who wore all-black clothing to a tropical island once noted. Batter someone with oversized carry-on luggage. Garrote them with a phone charging cord in the darkened alcove next to the drinking fountains (which they aren't supposed to use. He does anyway. Dehydration will kill him faster than COVID.) Turn some overpriced perfume and a lighter into a flamethrower, maybe. Can you bring lighters inside airports? He doesn't smoke, and hadn't anticipated the need to make fire, so he hadn't considered that when he packed.

He doesn't like to step outside his plans, but he's going to have to if he wants to escape without going mad. Find another airline, get a ticket. Cancel the other one. If there is a hell and he ends up there, he doesn't need a 23-hour dress rehearsal for the experience. Success, a flight was delayed, but that means it leaves in 2 hours. If it leaves. Take the gamble. Why not?

Through another security line. Every airport seems to have different rules about what to do with luggage. Put it in the same bin as everything else. Don't put it in a bin at all. This one says put the luggage in its own bin. They pat down one leg from the knee down. The right. He thought the left was the sinister leg.

To the gate. More waiting. The flight moves one gate down. Why? Who knows. He thinks of an ant, that sees a giant shadow that sometimes destroys its home and sometimes passes by. Does the ant grasp the reason why? The plane is there, the pilot is there, but still delays. Bureaucracy, or something with computers. Tickets not letting some people board. He'd like to slam the doors and tell the pilot to get them airborne, but he knows those people want to get where they're going, too. His internal civilization hasn't entirely disintegrated. He'd like a drink, but he'd settle for being in the air.

It's long past dark when they take off. Which means no view of the deep blue, almost violet, sky that's visible when the plane gets above the clouds in the daylight. He loves that. It's like sneaking into a special club, or getting a glimpse of something he's not meant to. This flight's not without its pleasures. The moon's a thin, waxing crescent to the south that he feels he hasn't seen in years. The stars don't look any brighter through the window, but they do seem closer. The cities are just clusters of lights below. He doesn't know which is which, nor does he care, and soon enough they're hidden beneath clouds.

The clouds turn to thunderheads. It's the first time he's seen lightning from above, bursting beneath them, briefly lighting up those dark shadows. Later still, less than forty minutes from the destination, they fly past a cloud shaped like a fat mushroom, the cap rising higher than them. Its interior is lit constantly by flicker strobes of lightning. There must be thunder, but he can't hear it over the roar of the engines. Does it sound different here, where it can't rebound off the ground and the buildings around him? Between the silence, the darkness, and the frequency of the lightning, he's watching a silent, black-and-white movie of Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Some intrepid astronomer in that giant bullet from the Jules Verne story. Missed hitting the Moon in the eye and ended up in the depths of the Solar System. Sending photos or reels of footage back through some ridiculous pneumatic tube system.

What would it be like if they were struck by the lightning? Could this plane make the descent through the storm? He enjoys the view, but wants to be home. Certainly it could. The fastest way to the ground is straight down. He might be a little sleep-deprived, he concludes as they land and taxi to a gate that seems miles away. Wait to disembark, impatience a woodpecker hammering away inside his skull with every person that can't manage to get their bag out of the overhead compartment. You got it up there, how hard is it to get down? It's not a Chinese finger trap, there's no trick.

Off the plane, out the doors, more waiting. Shuttle arrives. Why does the driver go past the doors for people arriving at the airport after the ones for people leaving? Another mystery. Back to the lot and the car. Still there, no flats. The water he left behind is lukewarm, but he drinks it down as he hits the road. It's the middle of the night and traffic is light. There's no more waiting on others, their rules or their screw-ups, he's in control. Let cars pass if they want, he'll pass when he needs to. Time is only a weapon now in that he needs to finish this drive before sleep wins out. As far as weapons go, that's a knife made of foam.

He's out of the maze, until the next time he needs into the air.

What I Bought 7/6/2021 - Part 2

Somewhere along the line in May, the fourth issue of White Lily came out and I missed it. I only figured that out when the fifth and final issue came out at the end of June, so I'm just going to review both today.

White Lily #4 and 5, by Preston Poulter (writer), Jake Bilbao (penciler), Kumar (inker?), Alonso Espinoza (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - I know it takes some work to heat up engines in a Russian winter, but this seems excessive.

These last two issues cover a lot of ground. Lilya's fiance, Captain Alexi, is shot down over Stalingrad. Unlike Lilya, he doesn't survive. She goes into a depression, reaching the point where she tries to light her fighter on fire while she's inside it. She decides to focus on killing the enemy instead. Death will find her on its own soon enough. Once the Nazis surrender at Stalingrad, Lilya and Katya are sent to be flight instructors. Katya's happy to be out of the line of fire (and have more chances to woo Lilya), but Lilya misses combat. 

The two of them do have one night of passion, but Lilya gets her wish and is assigned to a frontline squadron at Kursk. Katya, loyal friend/pining lover, goes against her instincts and follows. They're starting from square one almost in having to prove to the commander that women can be successful combat pilots (even though both of them are aces already), but they pull off their first mission, which had killed the last four teams that tried it. Eventually though, Lilya's time is up, when she runs afoul of two Nazi aces at once. Katya has a depressing visit home for leave to try and deal with her grief, and returns to the front. As she puts it, she would 'rather fight the Nazis than her mother. At least fighting them would serve some purpose.' She finds the two aces and kills one, but the other gets her. It's unclear if she at least managed to shoot him down. I think they may have partially collided, but we don't see his plane go spinning off into the horizon, so I don't know.

There's a lot in there I didn't cover. The last two issues are almost 65 pages combined. They could have made this a six-issue mini-series and I wouldn't have batted an eye. Lilya being a harsh training instructor. A sequence after Stalingrad where all their male wingmen start treating them like just sexual objects again. Which is a depressing recurring thing. They get some respect when the heat is on, but as soon as things start looking up, they're dismissed again. A bit during Kursk where Lilya and their Captain share Polish and Russian folktales. Katya doesn't get to share one from Lithuania until it's too late for Lilya to hear it.

The section where Lilya falls into depression after Alexi's death, Bilbao uses mostly smaller panels in rows, to show the progression of time. For example, three panels showing a steadily increasing pile of cigarette butts beside her bed. There's also a bit where the speech balloons of anyone speaking around her are just filled with squiggles to show she's not registering what's being said.

I think Poulter should have held off on the dialogue in Katya's death scene. The last few panels, as she's reaching for a blood-stained white lily she placed in her cockpit are kind of marred by all the "GHEH gheh gahuuuuuuuuh" sound effects for death gurgles. I think the fact we saw her take several rounds to the chest four pages earlier and the way she slumps over in the last panel would tell us she was on her last legs well enough. Bilbao's art could convey what needed to be well enough on its own.

Bilbao also manages to shift his art style a bit for the folktale parts, especially for the Captain's one panel story about the bird trying to touch the sun, and Katya's about the girl whose evil stepmother makes her ask the Baba Yaga for the secret of fire. The latter especially, he mimics the sort of medieval storybook picture feel for most of it. Not so much the very end, when the girl has become fire herself and returns for revenge, but Katya's also clearly thinking of Lilya throughout, and especially at that point, so it fits. Reality intrudes on the fantasy.

I really enjoyed this whole mini-series.

What I Bought 5/1/2021 - Part 2

I'd hoped to have more comics to discuss in this round, but I couldn't find a copy of the first issue of You Promised Me Darkness, and the first issue of Jenny Zero, which was originally supposed to be out two weeks ago, is only just out today. So one book is what you get.

White Lily #2, by Preston Poulter (writer), Lovalle Davis (penciler), Walden Wong and Diana Greenhalgh (inkers), Alonso Espinoza (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - German bombers are like potato chips, shoot down one and you're hungry for another.

Lilya goes from winning her first dogfight to getting the instructor she beat to take her to bed. Lady who knows what she wants and gets it. It leaves her friend Katya pining, and one of the other pilots, Raisa, jealous. That goes on for six months, and then they're sent to Stalingrad, because most of the air units there are dead. Lilya shoots down a plane in their first real battle, and she Katya, and two other pilots are transferred to the same squadron as Alexi, the instructor she beat. Who Lilya's been keeping up a long-distance relationship with. No time for her to focus on that, because they're really going to get mixed up in the madness of Stalingrad very soon.

Davis continues to use the sideways page approach for the air combat scenes. I think it works better in this issue, because now Lilya's mixed up in huge dogfights with dozens or hundreds of other planes, so it allows for him to simultaneously show the scale of the fight, but have room to focus on smaller details within it. 

It becomes like a vertical double-page splash, where the backdrop is all the other planes flitting around, with Lilya or someone else occasionally in the midground. Then Davis intersperses smaller panels throughout that zoom in on a particular bit of action, or show the perspective from that fighter's cockpit (and he draws some of those panels in the shape of the cockpit glass).

There's also a page where Raisa makes a snide comment about Lilya constantly receiving letters from Alexi, where Davis spends six panels on Lilya pulling out papers, rolling the letter up in them, lighting it, and taking a puff. Then at the bottom of the page, she blows the smoke in Raisa's face. I like the deliberate step-by-step approach there, showing how far she's going for this brief, but satisfying bit of spite.

The bad news is, at the end of the issue there's a note from Poulter that Davis passed away not long after his finished this issue. Which is sad for a lot of reasons, obviously, beyond him not getting to finish this series. That's a low note to finish a review on, but it feels odd to go on discussing the differences in Wong and Greenhalgh's inking styles after that.

What I Bought 3/2/2021 - Part 1

I originally hoped to have these comics in time for this to go up Monday, but that didn't happen. Mail service difficulties of some sort, I guess. We'll get to a pair of Marvel comics on Friday, but for today we've got one mini-series that's wrapping up, and another that's just starting.

Kaiju Score #4, by James Patrick (writer), Rem Broo (artist), Dave Sharpe (letterer) - Don't look at me, Pierson, I'm glad you're dead.

The kaiju fight is on, but Marco figures there's still a chance to crack the safe because Mujara will lose quickly. And for a minute, he's right, and Michelle cracks the safe. At which point Pierson knifes Marco, laughs at his request to let Michelle live, and then dies in an extremely satisfying manner when the monster fight starts back up. Because Mujara didn't get the memo she couldn't win.

Seriously, Broo draws this one silent panel of a bloody smear on the wall and one of Pierson's hands stuck to it, and it was just, really good. Patrick had done a good job making Pierson an entirely unlikable (if perceptive) dick, and Broo helped that along with the obnoxious man-bun and all the sneering faces, and then they gift us with a lovely send-off. Actually, I wish Broo made that panel bigger.

So that's good. Monster fight over, backstabbing asshole dead, safe opened, everything's roses. Except for the little matter of water displacement when the beaten monster retreats to the sea. But Marco comes up with a way to protect the loot and not die. So yes, everything's good. Except for him not feeling as satisfied as he expected. But there's always another job.

I'm guessing Marco's feeling unfulfilled because he's finally completed his dream. He actually pulled off one of his ludicrous heists. But without that to drive him, he's left adrift. You'd think he could appreciate his success a little more, but humans are weird like that. As for Michelle, Marco was apparently right that she wasn't going to leave this life as she said, and she seems to have gotten a taste for more high end jobs. She's gone from being like the little sister on her crew, to setting up jobs and hiring talent. The ability to self-motivate is a valuable one.

One thing I am intensely grateful for is that this actually told a complete story, and didn't set it up as one of those things where the heist has repercussions that cause problems. You know, where Marco and Michelle have now pissed off some other powerful person by stealing his paintings, and must pull off another monster-related job to settle things. There was something I'd read in one of the solicits that made me think that was going to happen, and I was just dreading it.

But, it didn't. So, hooray!

White Lily #1, by Preston Poulter (writer), Jack Nolan (breakdowns), Lovalle Davis (penciler), Walden Wong and Diana Greenhalgh (inkers), Alonso Espinosa (colorist), Taylor Esposito (letterer) - They look so happy! Yeah, that's not gonna last.

Lilya Litvak is a Polish Jew in the Soviet Union, who, when the story begins four months after the Nazis invaded, is a flight instructor. Katya Budanova is also a flight instructor, and possibly Lilya's girlfriend. I mean, she offers her a flower (the white lily) to work into the fur collar of her flight jacket, that means something, right? 

They spend their days taking young (male) pilots up in biplanes trying to teach them how to fly. They're both drafted into a new, all-women fighter squadron, although their instructor doesn't seem to think much of training women, and tells them they're really just going to be delivering planes to the front, and that they should dive and flee if they encounter Nazis. 

Well yeah, a Yak-1 against an Me-109 is a huge mismatch. You had to get to like the Yak-7 before it was worth a shit. Anyway, Lilya shows what she can do, and although her Captain (the proverbial old battleaxe of a woman) is pissed, her instructor is impressed.

Poulter works a bit about Lilya's turmoil over her heritage into the story. The Soviet Union has not really been kind to Poles, or Jews. We see in a flashback (as she and Katya recite the Citizens' Pledge) they hung her father right in front of her when she was a child. Her mother is very disappointed in her for helping the Soviets. But I think Lilya figures at least the Soviets are giving her a chance to fight a different group of people who would kill her simply for existing, which is more than the Nazis would do if she were under their control. There may turn out to be more to it than that, but after one issue, I think she just really wants to be able to hit back for once.

It's interesting that while we see Lilya lose her father in her flashback, Katya's is her as a young girl being excited about seeing a plane fly overhead and getting the pilot to wave back to her. Also that her mother didn't approve (and still doesn't, since she doesn't think fighting is work for women.) So Katya might be driven more by her love of flying, and maybe the opportunity to be herself more.

One stylistic thing either Nolan or Davis does (Nolan isn't listed in the credits on the inside cover, but is listed in a small credits box on the 3rd page/title page) during flying scenes, they flip the page on its side, as in the example above. That's how it looks in the comic, like that sideways Spider-Man comic Todd MacFarlane did. 

It's like a widescreen movie, probably to offer more space, the illusion of the open air the pilots are in. The pages are nice; I like that they use the cockpits or gun-sights as panel boundaries. But it's a little awkward when you turn a page, and then you have to turn the comic to keep reading, then turn it back a couple of pages later. Maybe they could have just run that across the top half of two pages, then used the bottom half for either another widescreen panel, or smaller ones if it was time to go back to a more conventional layout.

I'm curious to watch the colors in this as the story advances, because the first issue everything is surprisingly bright and clear and clean looking. But Lilya and Katya haven't been involved in the fighting yet. It's still early days, and I wonder if Espinosa will muddy things up as thing progress. I know Lilya's going to be in action near Stalingrad by issue 3, that's going to be a very different experience from avoiding a single scout plane while on a training run.

The Princess and the Pilot

A mercenary is chosen to fly the princess of the nation he's currently fighting for, to a warship of the nation whose prince she's marrying. A lot of people aren't happy about it, because even though he's a native, he's of mixed ethnicity, with half coming from the nation his home country (and the prince's home country) are currently fighting (and being beaten by). This puts him at the lowest social class. 

As a child, not do other kids pick on him, even adults insult and hit him. As a pilot, he's called a "sewer rat" to his face because of it, including by the officer who gives him the mission. It's at least heavily implied that he would not have been able to enlist, but then he catches shit for being a mercenary. When he explains he learned to fly by watching the pilots while he worked as a custodian at the airfield as a child, the guy sneers that he learned by stealing with his eyes, like a rat. Motherfucker, how do you expect someone to learn to fly? With their nose?

Charles is advised to only give "yes" or "no" responses to the princess, but that goes out the window almost immediately. They're flying through enemy territory, so Juana's got to watch their rear and (eventually) act as gunner. The attempt to give their flight cover with a massive daylight attack fails miserably due to poor communication security, so they're hounded and surrounded repeatedly.

The film has a mixed aesthetic for its machinery. They big ships are like Helicarriers, in that they can float on the sea, but spend most of their time in the air. Their homing missiles look like torpedoes. The single-engine aircraft resemble World War 2 designs - the enemy ace at the end is flying what looks like and I think is called a "Shiden", which was a Japanese fighter from very late in the war - but apparently run off a hydrogen fuel cell. Fine with me, that particular look is right up my alley, but it seemed an interesting choice.

The scenes of flight combat and evasion are pretty exciting and entertaining. Definitely my favorite part of the movie. Distinct lack of people telling Charles he's a piece of garbage during those scenes. The princess doesn't share the views of many of her people, which means the two characters can have pleasant conversation, which is nice. Makes the audience want those crazy kids to pull through. I'm not sure about having Juana and Charles having a previous connection, but I feel like the character arcs are erratic.

I think Juana has a decent arc about standing up for herself, rather than sort of gliding through life, letting people direct and position her, telling her it's for the good of their family/nation/war effort. She gets to actually do things to help her and Charles stay alive, and say what she thinks and feels without being criticized on how she does it. Charles, I'm less sure on. He gets her there, but is it because of his feelings for her, which he knows can't be returned, or because he believes that she really is that important? I guess by giving away his money for completing the mission he shows it wasn't just a job for him, and he can believe in his country, even if it's spent his entire life telling him he sucks.

Fire In the Sky - Eric M. Bergerud

Fire in the Sky focuses specifically on the air war in the South Pacific from early 1942 until around the end of 1943. Bergerud explains that he focused in on that stretch because it was a period of time when the Allies and Japanese forces were on roughly equal footing in both numbers and technology to start. He figures there's more to investigate there as being keys to victory than in subsequent years when the numerical and technological edge held by the Allies grew enormously.

Bergerud focuses strictly on the aviation side of things in this volume (he's done an earlier volume on the ground campaign), and he goes into greater detail on almost all aspects of it than I can recall in any other book I've read on WWII aviation. Basically all those other books will mention many Japanese warplanes lacked self-sealing fuel tanks and that this made it easier for them to be set ablaze from relatively few bullets. This is the first book I remember that bothers to explain how self-sealing fuel tanks work.

Bergerud talks about the planes involved, their strengths and weaknesses. He talks about pilot training, before and after pilots entered the combat theater, as well as morale and the policy for rotating pilots and ground crew off the front lines (the Navy and Marines apparently had a better established system than the Army Air Force, but the Japanese tended to just keep their best pilots flying until they were killed or severely injured). He spends time on engineering in terms of constructing an airfield and maintaining it, on radio communication, the respective search-and-rescue efforts of the two sides (or lack thereof in Japan's case), the development of tactics in fighter combar, bombing, ground attack, even resupply. Apparently prior to the war, the U.S. had no guidelines for how to airdrop supplies to ground units. Which turns out to be kind of crucial when the troops are fighting in the middle of a hellacious jungle on New Guinea and the nearest airstrip is several days trek away.

Bergerud interviewed a lot of veterans as part of his research, and their remarks, as well as transcripts from missions, diaries, or interrogations of Japanese airmen after the war are used liberally throughout. The section of air drops, for example, has a lengthy quote from a cargo plane pilot who discusses the approach they initially tried, before they figured out it was a bad idea and had to try something else.

There's a wealth of information in this book, but at times it's easy to lose track of how it relates to the actual fighting. Until the last two chapters, when it begins to detail the struggles between fighters, and then the bombing and anti-shipping campaigns, there's not much discussion of the campaign in terms of something enabling an Allied advance in one place or another. The attempt is to help lay the groundwork for why things turned out as they did. If the size of forces were not so different, and the Allies were only just starting to gain an edge in the abilities of their aircraft, then what were the key factors?

The first 400-500 pages are all about that, the mistakes and innovations that made the difference, and then for the last 150 pages, he deals with how it actually plays out. It's not a bad approach, but there were more than a few times I wondered what the hell was the point of some of what he was discussing. There's a lengthy digression into the development of the Spitfire and Me109 that I think is meant to detail the major leaps in fighter design and performance they represent, but it felt unnecessary. There's a bit of that in here, but overall the details are relevant and interesting.

'Consequently had one side or the other occupied every square inch of this huge area, it would have helped itself not one iota and done no harm to the foe. The strategic importance of the theater lay entirely in its geographic relationship to other areas. A key by itself is of no value, but what lies behind the locked doorway might be precious indeed.'

The Influence of Air Power Upon History - Walter J. Boyne

I reread Boyne's Clash of Wings last fall. That was focused on World War 2. This book, with a title based off Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783, covers the entirety of the use of air power in military or, in the case of the Berlin Airlift, diplomatic situations in human history*, up to the early 21st Century.

Although he notes it's too early to really assess whether air power is going to have any influence on history in the struggles with terrorist groups, given that they aren't confined to one border. Also, it's more difficult to try and cut off communication between leaders and soldiers, so to speak, and it may not do any good anyway. A suicide bomber can still just go out in the street and blow himself up, whether he gets word from his leader of not.

The book spends ~280 of the 400 pages just getting past World War 2, and much of that is on World War 2, or the run-up to it. Which makes sense, given the scale of the conflict, the effect air power was able to have (which was not always in line with what it had been predicted to have), and how its effects carried forward over the remainder of the century. Still, for me, it was treading a lot of familiar ground, even just from Clash of Wings. That most of the participating countries failed to understand the size of air force necessary to really achieve air superiority, the misconceived notion a country could be bombed into submission quickly and with minimal casualties on the attacking country's part, things like that.

Although Boyne mentioned that the heads of the Royal Air Force encouraged Chamberlain not to go to war over the Sudentland because they were worried about the Nazis bombing England before the RAF was able to defend it. Chamberlain was already disinclined to go to war to defend the Czechs, but that gave him another excuse. I hadn't read that anywhere I could recall.

I'm a little surprised that he didn't devote any time to the Soviets fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as a comparison with the United States' efforts in more recent years, if nothing else. Differences in approach, different limitations placed upon them by either technology or politics. Political directives come up a lot near the end of the book as Boyne discusses the Vietnam War. He strongly dislikes Robert McNamara.

The book has a certain implicit pro-military tint to it. Not a surprise, but I figured it was worth mentioning. There were sections evaluating whether they U.S. used its air power to proper effect, while I'm wondering whether the U.S. should even be involved at all. He does discuss times where one country didn't use their air power, either because the threat of it was enough, or the threat of their opposition's air power was enough to deter them. Especially if the U.S. is getting involved because they're confident their air force can do the job, whereas they might be more reluctant if they had less faith in it. In the chapter on World War 1, he talks about how, since air power's inception, people in charge have always overestimated the impact it can have for the amount of funding and support they provide. And the advocates encourage those delusions, because some support (which provides the chance to show what is possible and get more support) is better than none.

'It can be said of fighters that they are at once the least useful and most important of aircraft types. They are least useful in the sense that they (as a pure fighter) do not drop bombs nor gather information, and their dogfights, while colorful, do not gain anything for either side except the possibility of air superiority. And that one fact is the reason they are the most important type, for the obtaining of air superiority dictates the operation of other types of aircraft, including the bombers and reconnaissance types.'

Clash of Wings - Walter J. Boyne

Another book I'm revisiting for the first time in years. Clash of Wings may have been the first book I read about the air war in World War II, so I was curious to see how it held up. And it mostly does. There were even a few things Boyne brings up I'd forgotten, or ideas I didn't remember reading anywhere else.

Boyne moves in basically chronological order, shifting between theaters for each chapter. The focus shifts from the large scale of how the number of planes lost (or ships and tanks destroyed by those planes) limits one side or the other, to paragraphs about individual pilots who either had major successes in battle or came up with an innovative flying technique or mechanical adjustment (such as "Pappy" Gunn's modifications to the B-25 that made it such an effective close support/ground attack aircraft). Those parts help keep it from getting too dry, as well as serve as a reminder of how much of the air war still came down to the pilots and the mechanical crews on the ground, and not just generals and politicians, or masses of aircraft.

So much of what happened in World War II with planes was people thinking one thing would be true, and finding out they were completely off, and someone having to devise a solution on the fly. Bombers not needing escorts, how effectively bombers could reduce a city to rubble or crush a population. The one everyone underestimated was just how large your air force has to be if you expect to establish air superiority. The Germans, for example, thought after conquering Poland that the size of the air force (1,600) they used for that was enough for everything else they had planned. France, Britain, the Soviet Union, they could all be handled with the same number of planes. Although Hitler did in 1938 call for a 500% increase in aircraft production, and was completely ignored by the chief industrialists and his Air Ministry, fortunately.

For airplanes that were extremely important to one side or the other, Boyne will spend some time detailing the development of it, as well as problems that came up. So the difficulties in getting the B-29 to actually operate successfully gets focused on in the final chapter, since it was a necessary piece if they were going to actually use the atomic bomb.

The book moves from one topic to the next frequently, so it rarely gets bogged down on any one area. There are a few aspects that might get short shrift, but it hits all the major points well.

'An invasion required air superiority. The only way to get air supremacy was to defeat the German Air Force on the ground and in the air. And the only way to do that was by bombing critical targets, for the Luftwaffe declined to engage the enemy over a target it did not feel was critical.'

The Things I Base Canon On

Until a couple months ago, I never even considered that Han Solo was bullshitting with his "Kessell Run in less than 12 parsecs" line from the first Star Wars. Part of that is probably because it's Harrison Ford. I expect that of course his character can do cool shit like, make a smuggling run in a shorter distance than anyone else. Well, it sounded cooler when he said it.

And there was the time Morgan Webb on X-Play explained that the "12 parsecs" works because the Kessell region is a star cluster with intense gravity which can disrupt hyperspace travel, but the Millenium Falcon was fast enough to fly closer than most ships without that happening. Like if you can run fast enough to run across a lake as opposed to having to go around. Anyway, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable (by comic book quasi-science standards) explanation to me.

Beyond that, the spaceships have always been the part of Star Wars I was most interested in. The same thing that made me interested in World War II aviation. Speed, maneuverability, freedom. The two pieces of Star Wars related things I own are Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the N64 and The Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels. The latter was an interesting window into the various books that made up the Expanded Universe, but more relevant to this, the book said the Millennium Falcon had a 0.5 hyperdrive rating, which was the best of anything they listed. So that meant it was the fastest, which meant Solo's claim was legit.

You think I'd have read the backs of enough superhero trading cards to know not to trust such things, but here we are.

As it turns out, the script for the film outright says Obi-Wan is unimpressed by this obvious and poor attempt at bragging. It's meant to be bullshit on Han's part, him trying to impress what he thinks are a couple of rubes. Which, it fits with Solo as not being nearly as cool or as clever as he thinks he is, but it's still a letdown. The Internet: Ruining Everything You Enjoy A Little More Each Day.

I guess I could tell myself the ship can manage it, Solo just never tried it, only considered. Or he did make it, but it was sheer luck or a complete accident rather than any great skill on his part or the ship's. And being Han Solo, he naturally tries to pass off a total fluke as going exactly as planned (while Chewbacca tries his best not to have terrible flashbacks nearly dying on that run).

No Margin for Error - Dwight R. Messimer

In the mid-1920s, General Billy Mitchell was pushing for the Navy's air arm to be folded into a single, independent air arm. The Navy didn't want this, and were desperate for some public relations coup to prove how great their air service was. They settled on a nonstop flight from California to Hawaii, and then the trouble starts.

The seaplanes they plan to use aren't certain to have sufficient range, but they add some new carburetors that are supposed to improve fuel efficiency, but the project is in such a rush they don't have time to actually test the modifications to see if that's true. Or, rather, they don't take the time. But they're all sure they'll have a 20-30 knot tailwind, so that'll make up the difference, right? As long as it materializes. They can barely get the three seaplanes in the air for test flights, and find all sorts of mechanical issues.

So the flight is a pretty serious failure, with one plane never getting in the air, one having to emergency land, and the third runs out of gas over 400 miles short of its goal. And because the radio operator on the nearest observation ship was an incompetent dope, the search party is looking in entirely the wrong place. So the second half of the story is the crew on PN9-1 trying to survive while they either figure some way to communicate with the ships or else steer their seaplane to the island of Kauai.

Messimer argues the total failure, combined with the crash of the airship Shenandoah on a flight across the country at the same time, actually helped save the Navy's air service. It brings things to a head, where President Coolidge appoints a board to decide whether all aviation should be under a single independent government heading or not. The conclusion is "not", which was for the best, but it seems curious for the Navy to benefit for such a cock-up that was brought on by placing a desire for headlines above common sense and proper preperation.

Project Seven Alpha - Leland Shanle

Project Seven Alpha is story that uses the attempts by the U.S. Army air Force to keep forces in China going by flying in supplies over the Himalayas via converted DC-3 commercial airliners, flown by American Airlines pilots, operating out of Burma. That part really happened, and was critical as the Japanese forces swept down through Southeast Asia and took control of the seas and skies, meaning Burma, and later India, were the only paths in.

Shanle tries to work the story through the two top officers of the group of pilots, J.T. and Charles Henry, both of them World War I fighter pilots, both of whom struggle with the return to combat, and the danger the men under their command are facing. For Charles it's even more acute, since his son also volunteered and is normally his co-pilot. Nothing too ground-breaking there. The story even has the requisite section where the crews get some R&R and crash a stuffy Governor's Ball.

Shanle's a retired Navy aviator, and a current airline pilot, so he knows his stuff about flying, and works in a lot of technical detail about keys to flying in formation, or how to throttle the engines properly. Unfortunately, at times he overdoes it a bit and it kind of sucks the life from the narrative. One of the DC-3s is jumped by a Zero, but due to the cargo pilot's greater experience, he's able to elude the fighter until its pilot overreaches and crashes. But Shanle is busy explaining about the drag on the wing in tight, low-speed turns, and angles of approach, and it saps the scene of any suspense.

The Age of Airpower - Martin van Creveld

The Age of Airpower is a fairly thorough examination of the use of airpower from its earliest origins in combat up to the present day. He looks at the claims its proponents made, the advances made technologically, the shifts in how it was used and how they tried to use it, and most critically, the things it isn't suited for.

What van Creveld notes is that planes are fairly limited in their effectiveness and utility now. Current airplanes are so expensive not many countries can afford to have large air forces, and are reluctant to use the ones they have, because the cost if one is lost is so great. As he mentions, this is much the same attitude navies began to have towards battleships during World War 2. So you have transport aircraft that will only land and release troops where there's next to no chance of them being shot down, which neutralizes planes' ability to get to places of need quickly. There was also the fact that countries with nuclear capability designed a bunch of planes they promoted as being able to deliver nukes. Except they were never going to use those, so then you get planes built for one thing they'll never be used for. Like the F-105, a "fighter" plane that can't fight other planes, and is relegated to being a bomber, essentially.

The other side of the coin is the nature of the conflicts. Countries with nuclear capability mostly don't fight each other directly, on the chance either side decides to use nukes. So either you get air forces of countries without nukes fighting each other - Israel against Arabic countries, the Greek Civil War - or battles between countries that have air forces, and ones that don't. The thing that becomes quickly apparent is air forces can be useful, but in certain ways. Aircraft can't hold territory, because they can only remain in a given location for so long. If the opposing force resides in cities, aircraft are either neutralized (assuming they wish to avoid civilian casualties), or run the risk of lots of civilian casualties and increasing the size of the opposing force (assuming they don't).

His overall conclusions didn't really surprise me. Mostly it was things I'd either read in other books, or grasped intuitively from reading other books. However, he did highlight some things I didn't know. I hadn't ever considered the implications of nuclear weapons on airpower, or the back-and-forth between politicians and military men on who controls those weapons. And van Creveld discusses several conflicts I hadn't read much about, like the war between Italy and the Ottomans in 1911, which is the first conflict to use airplanes, and effectively illustrated their limitations even then.

'Thus the marines once again demonstrated airpower's greatest advantages - its range, speed, ability to take the opponent by surprise, and the ability to bring concentrated firepower to bear against selected opponents. However, events in Nicaragua resembled those in Libya and Palestine in the sense that the guerrillas did not take long to learn what their flying opponents could not do.'

I Wouldn't Consider It A Realistic Flight Simulator

Let’s talk about a flight combat game that isn’t historically based, SkyDrift. It’s a racing game, the sort where you can grab power-ups to help yourself or attack the other fliers. Mario Kart in the sky, or maybe Fatal Inertia except you fly close to the ground by choice. All the planes are prop planes, though they do have boosters, so there’s a certain resemblance in design to Crimson Skies. More than a couple of pusher-prop designs involved.

The game suffers a bit from lack of variety. There are only about a half-dozen different tracks, and 3 race modes: Power Race, which is the basic type, with power-ups. Speed, with no power-ups, but there are rings that boost speed if you fly through them. Survivor, which does have power-ups, but every 20 to 30 seconds whichever plane is in last place is eliminated. There are 7 levels of races (not counting the Tutorial), though Level 7 is a single race, which combines the other 3 modes into one. The game only has two planes available to start, and the others are unlocked by finishing in at least the top 3 on all races at a particular level. Except for the last plane, which requires winning an online match. I guess I won’t be getting that plane.

You get boost by flying close to the ground, performing barrel rolls, or destroying other planes. In a pinch, you can convert a power-up to boost, though how much you get depends on what position you’re in at the time, and doesn’t take into account how close you might actually be to first. If I’m in second place, I get the same amount whether I’m a half-second behind, or a dozen seconds behind. This is a problem, because on the higher levels, one plane has a tendency to somehow get out way ahead of the pack, and there’s basically no catching up. I should be grateful the game clearly doesn’t have the same elastic AI that drove me nuts with Burnout 3, but it’s frustrating as hell doing everything I can to catch them and making no headway, while all the other planes seem intent on killing me, rather than, you know, catching up to the guy in first place.

The planes are generally nicely varied in their strengths and weaknesses. I tend to favor the ones with the best combination of maneuverability and stability. There are certain planes that handle like rocks, and others that are too loose, where it’s easy to get out of control. I need something that can make the tight turns – because I don’t seem to handle those as well as the computer – but doesn’t set me twisting out of control (the Panther seems too responsive, for example). The planes are all very bright and colorful, and most of them tend to have contrails that are different colors. No, you can’t use the contrails as a smoke screen to make rivals crash into mountains. In the Speed races, it’s possible to break the speed of sound if you get through enough rings in a row. It’s not any big deal, outside the obvious fact it means you’re going fast in a race where that’s critical, but there is a nice distortion effect around the plane when you do it. I haven’t seen any evidence the sonic boom damages other planes nearby, which is just as well. I’d probably keep getting shoved into walls and hate the game for it.

One aspect of gameplay that bears mentioning is, there’s very little penalty for crashing or being killed. You respawn in seconds, with whatever power-ups and boost you had before. There are times I blow up a plane well ahead of me, and it respawns before I could catch up and pass it. Which seems ridiculous, but I’m sure it’s saved me in a few races. SkyDrift is fun for what it is, but a little limited in options.

Edit: I did want to add a few thoughts, after playing more over the last week. There's a certain amount of fun in the strategy element of it. What power-ups to go for will vary depending on where you're at. Missiles are not much good when in first, but mines, Shockwaves, and shields are. For the times when you're trying to catch up, there's a balance between trying to grab power-ups to use to attack the leader, and grabbing ones to convert to boost to make up ground. There are some places that are better than other to place mines, times where it's better to take the longer, safer route, things like that.

Maybe it's just my luck, but the computer-controlled planes seem very good at recognizing which power-up I'm going for, and cutting in front of me at the last second so there isn't time to alter course and grab a different one. It's really irritating, but fortunately, I'm playing a game where I'm allowed to shoot at them. You can't collide with other planes, though, which is probably for the best, or the Titan would be a real problem.

No Dogs Were Harmed In My Playing Of This Game

So I had one review for Dogfight 1942 all typed up after I completed Story Mode. I was going to talk about how the controls are solid, and I like how easy landing is (because I’m not playing to practice landing). I liked that while I could give wingmen commands, it was rarely a necessity. I was going to mention I was disappointed I only got to fly one Axis plane, the Me 110, and I could do without the “Jap bastard” comments from my character and his wingmen during the missions in the Pacific. I’m just in this to fake fly planes from an era of aviation I find interesting in fake combat with other planes from that era. I’m not looking for a vicarious thrill in winning World War II single-handed in a virtual environment. Which might explain why my two favorite flight combat games were Starfox 64 and Crimson Skies, which had their own, distinct worlds and histories.

I had all that typed and ready to go, which would have resulted in a lukewarm review of the game, most likely. Then I investigated the Quick Play option, found the Dogfights, and that improved my mood significantly. All that other stuff still applies, but dogfights, that’s what I wanted out of the game. Pick a plane, pick an opposing plane, add some wingmen if I want, throw it all together and shoot each other down to my heart’s content. There’s no story, no stupid dialogue, no damn escort mission or avoid detection nonsense. Just seeing which planes are better, and in cases where I’m flying the inferior craft, see just how much I can do to overcome that. My attempt to defeat 4 P-38s with 4 Stukas (counting me), did not go well. But we got a few of them! That part of the game, at least, I’m much more kindly disposed to.

Twelve O'Clock High (1949)

I was fairly impressed with Twelve O'Clock High, if only because it actually managed to make me dislike Gregory Peck for most of its runtime. He takes over command of an American bomber squadron in England, during the early days of the U.S.'s involvement in World War 2, because the brass determine the previous commander has become too emotionally invested in his men. The result of that is he's let discipline go lax, and the performance of the squadron is suffering.

So Peck takes over, and is the sort of stock, hardass commander I always hate in movies. He tells the men to stop thinking of themselves as special, to give themselves up for dead. He criticizes the former second-in-command for laziness and cowardice, and assigns him a crew of all the worst guys in the squadron, in a plane with the words "The Leper Colony" painted on the side. When one of the bombers breaks group cohesion on a mission to hang back with a damaged plane, Peck demotes that pilot to The Leper Colony, and makes everybody change roomies so they'll stop caring about the other guys in the squadron.

So you're supposed to care about the group, but you aren't supposed to care about the people in the group. That makes a lot of fucking sense. Just care about the group as an abstract concept, to keep everyone alive. Oh wait, but you're already dead, so who cares? Might as well get drunk and crash a jeep into an embankment, then. Saves you freezing your ass off on a flight to Germany where you can catch a 20mm cannon shell in the abdomen.

Of course, as it turns out, Peck does care about the men, he just feels the tough love approach is the only way to make them the highly disciplined unit he feels they need to be to be successful. And the longer he's with them, the more he ends up like the previous commander, too emotionally invested.

The basic gist seemed to be that yeah, they were asking a lot of these men, but it had to be done. They were all that was available at the time. So you just keep sending them up until they don't come back, but you do your best to train them so they will come back. And that apparently requires stamping out any sense of them as an individual, or any sense of the other planes as individuals.

I get all that, in theory. But the approach here just seems so wrong-headed. And heck, when Peck makes his initial, "you aren't special, give yourself up for dead" speech, every single pilot applies for transfer (which is what he said they could do at the end of the speech). So Peck has his adjutant "lose" the paperwork, so he can have time to convince them to stay. Even then, he only pulls it off because all the other pilots take their lead from Lt. Bishop, who won the Medal of Honor (for flying the plane under fire while struggling with the captain, who had gone wild after taking some shrapnel to the head), and Peck basically browbeats/shames the kid into not transferring. By suggesting the young man would be shirking his duty if he transferred to another branch of the service. Which is a pretty shitty tactic from where I'm sitting.

It just seemed he could have still achieved discipline (and avoided the paperwork hijinks) if he hadn't taken the Bobby Knight approach to leadership. The "you're all pieces of crap I'm going to mold into men" bullshit. Respect the work they've done already, rather than crapping all over it.

Cathartic Video Game Levels #6

I probably ought to re-title these "Favorite Game Levels", because this one, at least, isn't really about catharsis. It's just fun.

I've been replaying Starfox 64 for the first time in a decade. Had to buy a new copy, seeing as Alex lost mine after I loaned it to him all those years ago (also Goldeneye, Mario Kart, and Resident Evil 2, which is why I don't loan things to Alex any longer). Not really back to my old level of skill yet, though I'm a heck of a lot better than whoever owned it before me. Already beat your high score by over 300 kills, WLT!

There are a lot of levels I like: The warp in Sector X, the two battles with Star Wolf, to Area 6, which is level to go for 300 kills on. But if we're talking favorite levels, it's Katina all the way.

Katina's one of the possible third levels, which you can get to through either Sector Y, or if you can manage the warp, Meteo. That warp gives me a lot of trouble, so I usually go through Sector Y. Katina is one of the arena (or all-range mode) levels, as opposed to the more rail-shooter levels (like Sector Y and Meteo). One of the Cornerian military's bases (a square-topped pyramid) is under attack, and it just so happens to be under the command of an old friend of Fox', Bill (who appears to be a mouse or some other rodent).

It's a big mess of Fox, his team, Bill and his guys, and all of Andross' fighter craft. There's no "no friendly fire" option, so you can accidentally shoot down any of your allies. Takes a little more work with Bill or your wingmen, but it's a long fight, so it is possible. Still, the numbers aren't overwhelming, so the early stage of the level is a good chance to get into the flow, learn to distinguish the different ship outlines. Other than the base - which sits in the center - the level is a flat, featureless plain. So there's no worries about hitting any obstructions (which is a bit of a concern in the two Star Wolf battles).

After a couple of minutes, a huge, disc-shaped mothership settles over the base, and unleashes waves of fighters from 4 hatches on its underside. You can shoot the hatches when they're down and destroy them, limiting the enemies you have to contend with. But once you shoot all 4, the needle-like core of the mothership extends from below, and you have one minute to shoot it until it explodes, or else it destroys the base.

So yeah, it's basically the end of Independence Day, minus Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith defeating the aliens with laptops and cigars. But it's the level that most purely captures what I love about the game. Starfox 64 is a flight combat game, and that's all this level is. No branching paths, no enemies that always attack at a specific point as I progress through the level, no mouthy boss enemy. All the enemies are the same basic fighter design, nothing clever to do to beat them, I just have to get them in the sights long enough to blast them a couple of times.

It's a wild scrum with a hundred other enemies out there, and things will never go entirely the same each time. The last time I was playing, I was cruising, shooting down tons of enemies but mostly avoiding hitting any allies, and then, as I was turning to chase a foe, someone else crashed into me. Couldn't tell if it was friend or foe, but it didn't matter. A minute later, it happened again, and I was missing a wing. Before I could react to that, someone crashed into me from the other side, and I was missing both wings. I went from the Hyper Laser back to the single laser, and now it was more of question whether I could destroy the core in time.

And I wanted to destroy that core. Not just to accomplish the mission of protecting the base, and not just because Bill will lend a hand in Sector X if I do. Bill is Fox' friend, and I like Fox. Trying to take on his father's mantle, protect this system from Andross with his dad's old friend, an idiot toad, and a falcon who constantly undercuts and disrespects him. I don't know what Fox and Bill got up to, but you can tell they're close, and that Bill has absolute confidence that Fox will come through. Even when I accidentally shoot him, he just jokingly says, 'Try shooting the bad guys, Fox.' There's no heat to it, he trusts me. It's a little thing, but it works, it makes me not want to let down this friend of Fox.

Ace of Aces

One more movie from last week. Turner Classic was showing a bunch of 1930s war films on Friday. There was one submarine film with Walter Houston, but I never got the name of it, so we'll stick to Ace of Aces.

The film starts with Rocky Thorne, sculptor (played by Richard Dix), and Nancy Adams (Elizabeth Allan), wealthy heiress maybe, she's doing all right for herself at any rate, engaged and very much in love. Then war intrudes, as it usually does in these stories. What's somewhat different is Rocky has no interest in getting involved. He doesn't want to die, obviously, but more critically, he doesn't want to kill. Certainly not for something like nationalism, or because someone else commands him to. For this, Nancy condemns him as a coward and breaks things off. After that, Rocky can't tune out the marching and the shouting outside his studio window, and he joins a flying squadron.

A flying squadron where seemingly everyone has an animal mascot. One guy has a dog, another a pig, a third a parrot. OK, normal enough. But one guy has a monkey and Rocky brings a lion cub with him. Where the hell did he get that, and how was he able to bring it into France with him? Did he steal it from the Paris Zoo? Anyway, Rocky goes up and manages to down an enemy plane on his first sortie, after some hesitation. Back on the ground, his commander chastises him for that hesitation. At which point, a switch seems to flip in Rocky's head. He becomes obsessed with flying and more so with shooting down enemy planes. When someone loads his guns incorrectly, he chews the guy out and declares he'll load his own guns from now on. When he complains his plane is a piece of junk, he's told he's stuck with it as long as it can fly. So he goes on a mission and gets it shot up to where he can't land it without crashing, and it's beyond repair. Presto! New plane for Rocky. Soon he's the top ace on the Allied side.

But he's no longer much of a jovial sort. When one of the other pilots shoots himself, the others all rush to staunch the bleeding, Rocky sits on his cot, preparing his belts of ammo. He cares not a bit for his wingmen while in the air, only for finding and downing the enemy. He runs into Nancy while he has some time off (she's in medic corps), but doesn't care to resume their romantic relationship. He only has a couple of days off, and doesn't want to waste it on that. Physical enjoyment will be sufficient for him. Personally, I wouldn't have wanted anything to do with her, since it was her browbeating that brought him to this, but Rocky seems to love the flying and killing, so I guess he doesn't hold a grudge.

Then he shoots down a young German pilot who was simply delivering a message that one of Rocky's wingmen had survived being shot down over enemy lines. Rocky himself was returning from a solo "hunting" mission, and was wounded, and the two wind up side by side in the hospital. Which brings Rocky face-to-face with the results of his actions in the air. After that, he and Nancy start to reconnect, Rocky accepts a transfer to train new pilots, but can't help going up again when he learns some new hotshot has surpassed his kill total. Interestingly, the movie doesn't punish him for this pride by having him downed by a superior pilot. Instead, he gets in position to strike, then finds he can't do it, and while he hesitates, is noticed by the wing he's following and jumped by all five of them. He survives, though he loses a leg, and he and Nancy return to their prewar life. Except Rocky claims he can no longer sculpt. Creation is beyond him now, only destruction remains.

Ace of Aces is kind of a different war film from what I'm used. My dad had explained that the submarine film I mentioned at the top was made prior to some Code they implemented which restricted certain things from being shown (in that film, the main character was fooling around with a paralyzed pilot's wife, and he said after the Code, people who committed adultery would not been allowed to be shown profiting from it), and I assume this was as well. The cynicism makes sense, considering by 1933 we're into the Great Depression, plus the people who went through the war having some justifiably negative feelings about it. Still, most of the war films, even the other ones TCM showed that day, were about how awful it was to watch the friends you made in battle keep dying, and how hard it was for the commanders to keep sending them off, knowing many of them were going to die.

Ace of Aces doesn't worry about that at all. It looks like that's the direction it'll go early on, when he's being introduced to the other fellows in the squadron, but once Rocky settles into his hunter mindset, that fades away. Instead of war being awful for the emotional toll it exacts from the losses one experiences, it's war being awful because it makes it easy to kill without experiencing the emotional cost of that. Until he meets that rookie pilot in the hospital, Rocky never met anyone he shot down. It's like they were abstract concepts, no more real people than a computer-generated foe you or I might shoot down in a video game. And that made it easy. Rocky could throw away the hesitation he was chided for, the empathy that made him unwilling to enlist initially. Someone becoming unconcerned with the suffering of their enemy in war films isn't unusual, but it's frequently combined with the combatant being greatly concerned with preserving the lives of their comrades. This film ignored it entirely.

I'm also a little surprised he didn't die in the end. That was what I expected. He would let his pride get the best of him and it would kill him. And Nancy, who had reconnected both of them with the man he used to be, would be left to mourn, and she could live with the fact she pushed him to this.I didn't like Nancy much, and I'm not sure I was meant to. She seemed to stand-in for all the people who insisted it was proper to go fight in World War I, to defend God and Country, many of whom did not actually go off to fight and die for God and Country. She might have been sincere in her belief it was a "necessary" war, but that didn't make her telling Rocky his unwillingness to kill was actually cowardice. But he didn't die, and he and Nancy are together again. However, Rocky is still scarred, having lost that leg, and perhaps more critically (depending on how you value things), his inspiration. He can't think of anything to sculpt, or at least can't think of how to represent it. He presents it as his ability to create having been driven out by the military's necessity he destroy. It might be worse in some ways, to live knowing exactly what he's lost, but he is still alive, so he's got that going for him.