[jim]

I am sure you are correct, after years of suffering most Germans turned a blind eye to the nasty side of the Nazis. Things were going great and the German people had their self respect back. I doubt that any of them knew what Hitler had in mind for the future. WW1 started because the Germans wanted an empire of their own. The Archdukes death was just the excuse to start the whole thing. ( I know its more complex than that but for the sake of space we can take that as read). The decision to expand the German borders was taken in about 1905 and the arms race re Battleships was the first step in the plan..................... With regard to terrorists ,the only way to beat them is to remove their support in the communities they come from. Hearts and minds as they say. How you win over hearts and minds of people who see us as the devils spawn I do not know. Yes I agree that we need to hit them from the head down but these murdering b.gg.rs have a lot of support within their own countrys. How do we instill western values in people that have lived a certain way for hundreds of years and have no experience of the world outside? These people hold the view that you are one of them or you are the enemy and must be wiped out. The British in days of empire would every so often round up a few and shoot them! It was easier then.This kept the situation stable and on the whole the people got on with their lives. Now however anyone who is seen not to support the fanatics cause is shot. Times change. We can no longer send a gunboat and sort it out. To get in amongst them you must have support in the community and that we do not have anymore. IMHO the Iraq conflict which was caused by bad intelligence information or more to the point bad guesswork has done enormous damage to hopes of peace in that area and has proved to be a gift to the terrorists. The one thing we will all agree upon is that is has been a disaster but hindsight is a wonderfull thing. Is there a solution or are the population in general so against the west and so tied up in tribal conflict that there is no solution? Should we cut and run? I worry about the aftermath of the Iraq conflict, will the US draw back into itself again as after Vietnam. Just how many deaths can public opinion stand in America. Over 3000 lives lost and for what? I do not envy the western governments predicament on this issue. The world is a dangerous place and we must stay armed. Sadly this applies to the home front as well as abroad. But without doubt jaw jaw is better than war war. I do not believe there is an answer and I see only further conflict in the future. I pray that I am wrong........

Originally Posted by Aircrafty

Jim, initially I suspect there were many Germans that believed the Nazi Crap. They were just regular people trying to get out of the post WWI situation they were placed in. And of course we know that the global horrors of WWI started over a random terrorist act. Let's hope another terrorist act doesn't throw us into WWIII.

Terrorist and guerila type activity can't be defeated with conventional methods without making a mountain out of a molehill. To be effective and economical with equipment AND lives, you have to get amongst them to take out each group from the head guy downwards.

Ooops Methinks we are somewhat of topic!!!! "Thinks",,,, I like the movie Blue Max.

[SKUNKY]

Okay,still off topic but what the hell......'Stangdriver, why is Shoo Shoo Shoo(yes, that's 3 Shoos) Baby painted in OD over gray camo in the AF Museum when it was never painted as such in its career?.I believe she was always in bare aluminum..Whatchu guys covering up over there?....huh?...huh?....

[MoMo]

Yes, Jim,

I think that you strayed a bit far from the immediate touchstones of " Sophie Scholl" and the " Memphis Belle", but, what the hell! It's good to get a rant in, now and then, to add ginger to the ongoing discussions.

No-one has vented their spleen recently on Guy Gibson's woof-woof or the much despised and thoroughly hated " Revisionist Historians" so I guess that we've laid that one to rest until " The Dam Busters" appears in its new form.

I want to make a pitch for Universal's series " THE CENTURY OF
WARFARE " ( 2003 ) which I picked up at a DVD cut-out store which I frequent.

This was a N.M.P. presentation which was narrated by Robert Powell. I saw a few episodes when it was televised here.

When I saw it in the store, then saw the price which had been discounted to £13.00 ( $25.00 ), I jumped on it!

Twenty-six one hour episodes on eight DVDs for £13.00! I couldn't believe my luck. That's a cost to me of 50 pence an hour. I couldn't lose, I thought.

I can say that the purchase was well worth it. Well researched and well supported by great footage, much of it obscure.

This series tends to focus on the hardware and how it was developed and deployed in battle. Pure history in illustrated form. No interviews to slow down the unfolding of the narrative.

Robert Powell's voice does not grate and his delivery tends towards the neutral, letting the narrative and footage deliver the historical perspective.

Lots of focus on the ground war developments of the 20th Century, as well as the air war and the naval race. The last DVD even has a whole programme devoted to key battles and tactics as well as strategy.

I enjoyed this more than La Larry Olivier's narration which dramatises " The World at War", the classic, some say definative, 26 part series on WW2.

If you see it cheap on the web, give it a go, I'm sure that you would like it. Be careful though, there are a lot of cowboys out there offering pirate versions of T.V. series. Be sure that the one which you bid for is the one with the Polish Spit, " Donald Duck", RFD on the box art!

You may even be lucky enough to pick it up for a song at your DVD cut-out/discount store!

Happy Viewing,

MoMo

[mustangdriver]

Originally Posted by SKUNKY

Okay,still off topic but what the hell......'Stangdriver, why is Shoo Shoo Shoo(yes, that's 3 Shoos) Baby painted in OD over gray camo in the AF Museum when it was never painted as such in its career?.I believe she was always in bare aluminum..Whatchu guys covering up over there?....huh?...huh?....

The repairs needed to restore her and the state of the aluminium was not that great. I was decided to put her in the O.D> over gray even though she finished her tour in silver. She did wear O.D. at one time. She is an early G model. So at that time, they were still painting the bombers.

[SKUNKY]

Thanks, 'Stang.....My very first diecast aircraft was a 1/96th scale Franklin Mint 'Baby' back in the early '90s....I paid a fortune for it too...I still have it and it still looks pretty nice....but not $195.00 worth of nice!

[mustangdriver]

Yeah, I hear you. I am trying to get my hands on one to no avail.

[MoMo]

Dambusters on their way:
( Does anyone recognise Robert Shaw, on the left? You may recall him from " From Russia With Love, fighting Sean on the train. Also from " The Battle of Britain" and " Custer of the West".






Meanwhile I picked up this interesting artcle about the first German comedy about Hitler!

Can this be true? The Germans can now laugh about the war?

BERLIN, Jan. 10 — Perhaps it was inevitable that the first German-made film comedy about Hitler would get a mixed reception in Germany — a country still haunted, six decades after the fall of the Third Reich, by the mystery of how this strange madman once held it in thrall.


Helge Schneider, a German comedian and actor, in “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” by Dani Levy, a Jewish filmmaker.




What is more surprising and revealing, perhaps, is the nature of the critiques, which have lambasted the movie but not the idea that Hitler could be the subject of a comedy.
The advance buzz about “Mein Führer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler,” which opens here Thursday, has been almost uniformly negative, with German critics and commentators proclaiming the film naïve, bizarre, vulgar and — most damning of all — not funny.
“One laughs about two and a half times during the film,” Michael Althen, a critic for the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote, comparing it unfavorably to classic Nazi satires like Charlie Chaplin’s “Great Dictator” or Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be.”
“Most of the jokes are flat, harmless or stale, and what’s particularly offensive is that Adolf Hitler, of all people, is given quite sympathetic character traits,” wrote Harald Peters in Welt am Sonntag.
Even Helge Schneider, the madcap German comedian and actor who portrays Hitler, has distanced himself from the film, saying in a radio interview here: “It didn’t thrill me. I just don’t find it funny.”
No doubt, some of the bad reaction is a matter of taste. “Mein Führer,” directed by a Jewish filmmaker, depicts Hitler in scenes that could be drawn from a movie by the Farrelly brothers — wetting his bed, playing with a toy battleship in the bath, padding around his office on all fours while barking like a dog and so on.
But the noisy national debate — over what is by all accounts a flawed film that the public has not yet seen — shows that Hitler remains an enduringly uncomfortable topic for many here.
“As soon as you mention Hitler, the entire subject of German history comes up again,” said Henryk M. Broder, a German Jewish journalist who gave “Mein Führer” a mixed review in the magazine Der Spiegel. “Like a congested toilet, everything that was flushed down comes back.”
Two years ago, Germans debated another Hitler movie, “Der Untergang” (“The Downfall”), asking if the filmmakers had broken an unwritten code by portraying Hitler as a human being, given to moments of tenderness, rather than just a monster. At issue now is whether Hitler should be a source of humor — at least in a German-made film.
“Hitler was not some poor soul; he was a fanatic and a mass murderer,” said Lea Rosh, a publicist who lobbied for the construction of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. “One must show a little respect for his victims,” said Ms. Rosh, who has not seen the film and said she had no plans to see it.
To some extent, the critical and commercial success of “The Downfall” helped settle the debate over Hitler’s suitability as a subject in favor of the filmmakers. Ms. Rosh aside, few people here argue that Hitler is not fair game for a comedy — any more than he was off limits for a melodrama about the last days of the Third Reich.
The trouble is, most critics say Germany’s first stab at a humorous Hitler does not have enough laughs.
“Mein Führer” opens in late 1944, with Hitler emotionally paralyzed, contemplating the ruin of Nazi Germany. His advisers, desperate to buck up their leader, recruit a fictional Jewish acting coach, Adolf Grünbaum, to prep the Führer for a New Year’s Day speech aimed at rallying his people.
Grünbaum, whose assignment gives him and his family a temporary reprieve from a concentration camp, makes Hitler wear a mustard-yellow tracksuit and practice exercises, which include dropping to all fours and barking in the manner of his beloved Alsatian, Blondi.
Emotionally stunted, sexually inadequate (“I can’t feel you, my Führer,” Eva Braun wails during a failed encounter), and psychologically scarred by an abusive father, Hitler ends up taking to the couch, in scenes that play like a particularly dark twist on a Woody Allen movie.
“The more grotesque you get in treating this subject, the closer you get to artists who did it better,” said Lutz Hachmeister, who recently made a documentary about Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.
Treating Hitler as a satirical subject worked for Chaplin, the critics here agree, but he was a cinematic genius. And Chaplin himself said in 1964 that he would not have been able to poke fun at the Nazi leader had he known in 1940 about the horrors of the Holocaust.
“The Producers,” a Mel Brooks musical farce about a Nazi-themed theater production, is not known to have been staged in Germany but the film version opened last spring to no particular controversy.
“Mein Führer” was written and directed by Dani Levy, known for his 2004 film, “Alles auf Zucker!” (“Go for Zucker!”) That film also plowed new ground, with a comic look at two German Jewish brothers reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Levy said he was resigned to the storm of criticism over “Mein Führer.” “This is not a consensus movie, I know that,” he said, sitting in his sparsely furnished office here. “In Germany, whenever you touch this subject, you’re immediately at the edge of good taste.”
He noted, however, that the film had played well with preview audiences around the country, and Mr. Schneider, the film’s star, said he had softened his criticism after seeing a final cut this week.
Yet even Mr. Levy had to accommodate the sensitivities of a German audience. “Mein Führer” was originally told from the point of view of Hitler, who had survived the war and was plotting his return to power. That version deeply unsettled viewers at a test screening last summer.
So Mr. Levy re-edited the film to give Grünbaum, the Jewish acting coach, and his family a bigger role. They function as a sort of moral counterweight to the banality of Hitler and his henchmen.
“It was always my intention that the movie be a tragedy and a comedy,” Mr. Levy said. One of his inspirations was “Life Is Beautiful,” Roberto Benigni’s bittersweet fable about life in a concentration camp.
Even here, though, Mr. Levy could not satisfy his critics. Mr. Broder, the journalist, who said the movie was not as bad as its reviews, nevertheless complained that the doomed nobility of Grünbaum and his family bogged down what could have been a hard-edged, unapologetic comedy about a nasty man.
But that would be a film, Mr. Broder acknowledged, for which Germans are not ready. “Germans are embarrassed by Hitler,” he said. “Here is someone you wouldn’t want to share a seat on a train with for half an hour, and yet he sat atop the German nation for 12 years.”

( from the New York Times, 7.1.2007 )

WHAT DO YOU THINK, IS THE WORLD READY FOR A COMIC HITLER?

MoMo

[MoMo]

For those of you who love flight sims, here's a site which I found offering the following sims at this link :

http://www.flightsim.datagrind.com/

As you will see, " The Dam Busters" and " The Blue Max " are both there! Happy flying!

WWI
BLUE MAX

DAWN PATROL

KNIGHTS OF THE SKY

RED BARON


WWII
1942 PACIFIC AIR WAR

ACE OF ACES

ACES OF THE PACIFIC

ACES OVER EUROPE

B17 FLYING FORTRESS

THE DAM BUSTERS

HEROES OF THE 357TH

PACIFIC STRIKE

SWOTL


MULTIPLE WARS
DOGFIGHT

EVASIVE ACTION

YEAGER'S AIR COMBAT

MoMo

[MoMo]

Here is another interesting site at Migman.

http://www.migman.com/

FUN!

MoMo

[MoMo]

Has anyone read this book?

MoMo

See larger image

Filming the Dam Busters (Hardcover)
by Richard Todd (Foreword), Jonathan Falconer (Author)

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US List Price: $34.95 CDN Equivalent: CDN$ 40.73 Price: CDN$ 25.66 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over CDN$ 39.