Old Reviews: Flying Aces and Bomber Missions

I love aviation art. It's a nice blend of environmental art with an injection of man-made objects. Some people don't like it; I've heard artist Dru Blair got hate mail for his aviation paintings. No accounting for taste, or tact, apparently. 

Many years ago I ran across a Friedman/Fairfax booth at a trade show and the people there were kind enough to send me some spec copies of aviation art books they were producing and I reviewed them for Combatsim.com. I thought I did a good job identifying some shortcomings of the books but on GoodReads.com some people found even more to bash, despite loving the art. 

I still own these books and have added several others of this type to my library.  

Flying Aces and Bomber Missions

by Bernard Dy

Article Type: Book Review
Article Date: May 31, 2002


Flying Aces by James H. Kitchens and Bernard C. Nalty
Bomber Missions by G.E. Patrick Murray

'Flying Aces' by James H. Kitchens and Bernard C. Nalty

Words and pictures can each deliver a message, but they aren't mutually exclusive. Text can pack detail into short spaces and spark the intellect; art can bring color and verisimilitude to the imagination. Each has strengths in speaking to a viewer or reader and it's no secret that they can be used together in synergy. The two work together nicely in the Friedman/Fairfax line of military art books.

The volumes in question are a series of art collections, compiling highlights from the work of contemporary military artists. Each oversized book brims with more than a hundred pages of art and text and each follows a particular theme of war. The two observed for this article are Flying Aces by James H. Kitchens and Bernard Nalty, and Bomber Missions by G.E. Patrick Murray. The authors begin each book with a short introduction to their topic, and each page brings gorgeous pictures of artwork accompanied by a short passage describing the scene or contextually relevant matter.

'Bomber Missions' by G.E. Patrick Murray

The stars of each book are easily the marvelous color reproductions of artwork from some of the best in the aviation art business. There are the brilliant works of masters Robert Taylor and Nicolas Trudgian, the unmistakable crisp images from Stan Stokes, and the endearing human ambiance in the paintings of James Dietz. Here too are the fine creations of Gil Cohen, Keith Ferris, Nixon Galloway, William S. Phillips, and more.

The unsung strength of these paintings is not that they're as lovely as they are, but that they even exist. Through them viewers can visit historical sites and witness scenes cameras did not capture.

The artists do as much research as some historians do, and many of these paintings and their captions introduce readers to lesser known squadrons, heroes, and missions. Robert Bailey's Arctic Encounter shows a German aerial raid on English ships. Robert Taylor's Operation Chastise depicts an equally rare image of Avro Lancasters in a dam-busting role. Stan Stokes gives us an uncommon look at the Consolidated B-36 Dominator, the successor to the B-24, in his painting The Hobo Queens. Stokes also comes through for the underdogs several times in the Flying Aces book. In Buffalo Ace, he illustrates the plucky Finn and ace Eino I. Juuttilainen doing his best with the Brewster F2A Buffalo. Stokes also paints a pretty Macchi in his Italian Air Stallion, which honors pilot Adriano Visconti.

It often feels like Stokes weighs in more heavily than the other artists, but complaining about this is like whining that a chocolate chip cookie has too many chocolate chips. And Stokes and the rest do not forego the famous aviators either. Chuck Yeager, Gabby Gabreski, Joe Foss, Adolf Galland, and Gregory Boyington are all here. Between both books, the reader gets exposure to a wide sweep of WWII. There's the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Marines scraping by at Guadalcanal, Rodeos flying over the English Channel, and German jets clawing at bomber formations in the final defense.

Robert Bailey's 'Arctic Encounter'

There are representatives from all the world's air forces, though clearly Bomber Missions could be called "Strategic" Bomber Missions given its bias toward heavy bombers. Where Flying Aces is more cosmopolitan in listing aces from various countries, Bomber Missions skews heavily to the American and English participation in skies over Europe. The Pacific Theater gets less representation, and the US Navy's stalwart SBD Dauntless is completely without mention. Friedman/Fairfax, however, has another art book about the carrier war, and I'm betting it compensates for the omission; just to be sure, COMBATSIM.COM will take a look at it in a future article.

Robert Taylor's 'Operation Chastise'

Although buyers will likely purchase these items for the art, so much so that they might even skip the text, it's encouraging to see some nuggets in the written portions. The captions do a fine job of sharing interesting trivia about the war and the paintings. Judicious use of photos adds to the presentation, and Flying Aces does well including black and white portraits of aces with related paintings. The Flying Aces text, however, sometimes meanders away from the art and leaves a plate without description. Text in Bomber Missions more consistently educates readers about specific events related to the pictures.

Stan Stokes' 'Buffalo Ace'

Both books have some signs of sloppiness in the writing. With the limited space, the lack of detail is excusable, but errors are embarrassing. In Bomber Missions, page 95's caption for one of the few photos in the book says the still shot is of a bomber crew, six officers and four crewmen. It appears there are four officers, actually, standing and wearing brimmed officer caps, while the six men kneeling in front are likely the enlisted, wearing their cloth overseas caps sans any officer markings. In Flying Aces, text on page 93 accompanies a Roy Grinnell painting of David McCampbell's F6F Hellcat. It claims McCampbell branded his steed "Mitzi" but Grinnell clearly painted "The Minsi" on the side of the fuselage. Grinnell is correct.

The worst offense the books commit is perhaps the most unavoidable one. Nearly all the paintings stretch across the gutter of the book, leaving ugly interruptions in these beautiful pictures. Printing the paintings large enough to capture the detail perhaps required this. Restricting the paintings to a single page, as the creators do with some of the illustrations, certainly preserves the wholeness of the art, but at a loss of impact. But making the pages or book any larger would make it unwieldy; it's already oversized.

David McCampbell poses in his F6F Hellcat called 'MINSI'

Except for the minor complaints, these are fine additions to any aviation book collection. They'll cost you a fraction of the money and space it takes to own these paintings, and are nice reads to boot. The art contained within is simply fabulous and never gets old with repeated viewing. These are excellent books for aviation fans, artists, and history lovers.


Relevance to Combat Simulations
These art books don't teach a lot of tactics, but offer something most texts don't in the form of graphical inspiration. Flip through enough paintings of the beautiful WWII warbirds in action, and you'll be primed for another spin in European Air War, Combat Flight Simulator 2, or IL-2 Sturmovik.

Both books are available via Amazon.com and the Military Book Club and are published by Friedman/Fairfax. Bomber Missions (2001) ISBN 1-58663-081-4, and Flying Aces (2000) ISBN 1-56799-815-1.

Image Sources

• Robert Bailey website
  
• Stan Stokes
  
• Robert Taylor
  
• Captain David McCampbell website

Old reviews: We Were Soldiers

Here's another of my Combatsim.com reviews. I'd not fully read the book, We Were Soldiers Once...And Young by Hal Moore and Joe Galloway, but was aware of it and knew enough about it to take a stab at the review. The movie was all right, I don't think it was turned into a grotesque hero-shot movie like so many Bruckheimer atrocities (although Black Hawk Down was good), and it tried to retain touch points to the book. I like that I was able to find out more about Rick Rescorla and tie his sacrifice on 911 to the article. The reference to the Quiz Show film was interesting. I got digs in on Pearl Harbor too, for which I make no apologies.    

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We Were Soldiers

by Bernard Dy

Article Type: Movie Review
Article Date: April 05, 2002


Innocence Lost
Assuming there is such a thing, when did America lose its collective innocence? Filmmaker and actor Robert Redford theorized that America lost it in the 50’s. His film, Quiz Show, tells the story of how that powerful medium, television, captured viewers with a ruse and broke them when the truth came out. The theory is interesting, but an equally if not more compelling argument is that American national innocence is still lost in Vietnam, that far away place whose grounds soaked up American blood, ideologies, and broken promises, and where misconceptions and mysteries still live.

Gibson (left) and Elliott look remarkably similar to the characters they play.

The book We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, certainly seems to subscribe to the concept of the Vietnam conflict as a rite of passage. Even the title is poignant with remembrance. The book is about the time when America and its military were still confident from their past successes, when Korea was a minor aberration, and when its soldiers hailed the staples of God, family, and country. It chronicles the battle of the Ia Drang Valley in November of 1965 where the American Army’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, led by Lt. Col Harold G. Moore, clashed with the North Vietnamese troops led by Lt. General Nguyen Huu An. Director Randall Wallace and actor Mel Gibson have translated the story to the big screen with the abbreviated title, We Were Soldiers.

I admit I had concerns before watching the film. Gibson was a driving force behind two pictures, Braveheart and The Patriot that were about an idealistic hero leading an outnumbered band of warriors. Gibson looked to be on a familiar path. Reinforcing this thought is the use of Randall Wallace, who left military enthusiasts less enthused with his rendition of Pearl Harbor. Gibson and Wallace did well with Braveheart, but given the paths since taken, worries that We Were Soldiers would be another spiritual remake of Braveheart have some merit. The incredibly sappy trailers, filled with the kinds of quotes Rambo would utter, bolstered preconceptions. The final product, despite flaws, is fortunately better than the trailer would indicate.

We Were Soldiers looks at a time in the American Army's early material involvement in Vietnam. The battle is reportedly the first major battle of the conflict. As such, it was part of the introduction of new concepts to the battlefield, the most notable being the use of helicopter cavalry. The source book for the movie is also rare in some senses, as it's one of the few to highlight the times American troops engaged in a "set piece" battle of conventional troops. It also shows that the troops involved were not always the jaded ones commonly paraded in Hollywood's perception. The public has the misconception the Vietnam conflict was all about booby traps, guerillas, and drugged-out soldiers. Although it's accepted that the war was a defeat from political, social, and economic standpoint, there are arguments it was a military success. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the Americans held ground and achieved success in military terms, but at great expense, and were unwilling to keep bleeding as much as the Vietnamese, who fought for the heavier and more easily adopted stakes of defending a homeland.

We Were Soldiers ponders only briefly the philosophy of victory versus defeat. The bulk of the movie is more like Black Hawk Down, retelling the events of a battle. It this regard it is a less effective movie, because clearly there are several gaps in realism more serious than the ones Black Hawk Down makes. By Wallace's own admission, the picture only follows the book partially, condensing it to cover primarily the first half. There was additional action after the initial American troops were lifted out, omitted in the film except for parts of the conclusion. There are also several nits to pick: In the movie, Gibson, as Moore, refers to the M-16 as a "pretty good" rifle. The M-16 as we know it currently is indeed a capable weapon, but it flubbed miserably at its debut in Vietnam. Moore's leading non-commissioned officer, Sergeant Major Basil Plumley, balks at using one, which makes sense, though I don't recall such an argument made in the book. What's silly is that instead of doing something in character for a crusty old sergeant, like sticking with the M-14 rifle, Plumley chooses the Colt .45 semi-automatic pistol…for the entire battle.

Major Plumley (Sam Elliott) on the left eschews the M-16 rifle for his .45 Colt pistol.

Another gaffe in military realism comes when Gibson's character calls for an air strike on the enemy. Some critics accuse Wallace's battle scenes of ham-fisted direction, writing that they're not as well choreographed as action segments from, for example, Ridley Scott. I'm ambivalent about this assessment; Wallace's use of fast cuts from one scene to the next make it look like the aircraft are upon the scene mere seconds after calls for air support, which is rarely the real-world case. On the other hand, I can't fault Wallace for not taking time to make war look pretty; it's war, and it isn't pretty. If you want pretty combat, go watch The Matrix. The other problem with the air support is that the movie shows Moore waiting until the 7th Cavalry is in dire straits before posturing with quizzical facial expressions then muttering, "Broken Arrow" to call the air strikes. The movie is partially correct. Realistically, air support isn't a last resort, it's a resource that can be used anywhere there's a concentration of the enemy. The book notes several times that A-1 Skyraiders and armed helicopters participated in strikes throughout the battle. It also mentions the "Broken Arrow" code, but claims it wasn't to initiate the air strikes; it was a desperation signal that all available flights from all services were to assist the nearly overrun American force. Also, the declaration of "Broken Arrow" was made by not by Moore, but forward air controller Lt. Charlie Hastings, clearly a detail changed for dramatic effect.

There are other foibles in the film, such as the fact that Sergeant Major Plumley seems too invincible, never missing at any range with his .45 and running around at full height while everyone else is ducking bullets, but the film otherwise generally follows the key events in the book. This includes a look back at the families in the United States. The sappiness from the trailers doesn't materialize quite the same way you'd expect because the trailer crams the most cheesy lines of the movie into a few minutes, but the scenes from home make up for that. Most are just emotional setups. The movie spends most of its beginning showing us that the soldiers have families, complete with lots of newborns. This may indeed be the truth, but to dwell on it is to build the same sort of amateur cliché around the characters that surrounds the Goose character in Top Gun; you see their newborns and you know some of these guys are destined to be goners.

The homefront

Such scenes in We Were Soldiers, however, do have some redeeming points. A shocking revelation about how cruel the American government could be about notifying families of the deceased comes straight from the book. The film also scores for portraying the Vietnamese commander, Lt. General Nguyen Huu An, as an intelligent and contemplative leader with compassion for his men. There's also a scene where Moore writes to the family of a Vietnamese soldier whose journal is among the artifacts collected from the dead. I do not recall the journal owner from the book, but Moore did meet with An after the war. The use of the dead soldier's journal is a poor substitute for showing instead the peaceful meeting of the two leaders, but at least it's an effort to show enemies can ultimately coexist if not ally. It could have made more of an impact had the subplot of the Vietnamese journal owner been better developed.

Gibson does his usual credible job as an actor, and a solid cast joins him. Long-time Hollywood tough guy Sam Elliott gives Sergeant Major Plumley a fitting gruffness, and standing beside a similarly uniformed and helmeted Gibson, the pair looks surprisingly close to the real Hal Moore and Basil Plumley in the book photos. Barry Pepper steps in for an appearance as Joseph Galloway, the combat reporter who has to temporarily drop his camera for a rifle when the action gets too hot. Chris Klein plays a young officer, Jack Geoghegan, and symbolizes the innocence of the American soldier, and perhaps the American people, at this stage of the war. Although he's a capable actor, Greg Kinnear struck me as miscast as helicopter pilot Bruce Crandall. The uniforms and equipment in the film all appear authentic within reasonable limits and the only things I thought were missing were shorter haircuts and Dale Dye, the former Marine who's in so many war films. Viewers may wonder, with leaders as good as Moore, how could America lose in Vietnam? The answer is that there were guys like Moore on the other side, and not enough like him among the American politicians.

Berry Pepper portrays combat reporter Joseph Galloway. When the action gets too hot he drops his camera for a rifle.

Like Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers also pushes the theme of combat soldiers fighting as much for each other as for any cause. This is a valid point in most combat stories, though if Hollywood pushes it too much it will get old. With war movies being popular again, it may get old soon. In general, the film does its job depicting the battle and also serving as a counterpoint to several other Vietnam movies, even if it needs some nauseating clichés to do it. It also does a decent job with the passing innocence angle. Gibson's Moore is the hub of the film, and is like a father seeing his children grow and change. He mourns the tragedy of lost life, but the maturation of those who survive and persevere, such as the exhausted troopers that request permission to return to the front line, nearly moves him to tears.

Greg Kinnear as helicopter pilot Bruce Crandall

Reality Check
There’s another parallel to Black Hawk Down, one both glorious and somber. One of the soldiers from Black Hawk Down made the news by landing himself in prison. One of the We Were Soldiers participants made the news in a different way. Rick Rescorla is seen briefly in the movie taking a bugle from the Vietnamese as a war trophy. He left the Army and became a corporate security consultant for Morgan Stanley in New York. When terrorists flew an airliner into one of the World Trade Center towers the morning of September 11, 2001, Rescorla was in the adjacent WTC tower. Ignoring authorities' requests to stay put, Rescorla immediately ordered Morgan Stanley’s employees to evacuate, saving all but 6 of the 2700 who worked on the company’s floors. Even then, Rescorla refused to leave, and selflessly went to higher floors to continue helping others. You know the rest. Rick Rescorla: man, warrior, American; rest in peace.

Special thanks to COMBATSIM.COM's own Peter "Zhukov" Pawelek for identifying the site www.lzxray.com, a site dedicated to the memory of the battle.

Note: All images are from the official We Were Soldiers website.
© 2001 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

Saying Goodbye: The Boxee Box

It sold, it sold, it finally sold! I've managed to sell off my old Boxee Box media player. 

I can remember when I learned of the D-Link Boxee Box in 2010. A friend of mine showed me an article about it, and I recall immediately being impressed with the device's remote. It had a navigational button that allowed you to move a cursor or on-screen selector in the four cardinal directions, but when you flipped the remote over, it had a full QWERTY keyboard! That was awesome to me because trying to type in text on a TV is typically one of civilization's shittiest experiences, superseded only by dealing with lawyers and car salesmen. The remote sold me, I knew then that was the device I was going to buy.

And buy it I did. And it was indeed great...at first. The oddly shaped Boxee Box was a visual treat, its flat glossy face looking out from next to the TV. It had connections for HDMI and component cables, and it had an Ethernet port, WiFi, USB ports, and a flash card reader. But the remote was as advertised and really great. 

I used the Boxee to watch Netflix, and also to hook up my portable hard drive of pictures and movies and pump content to my TV. I really liked the device.

But things went downhill from there. Numerous updates came out for the Boxee Box over the next year but they served largely to reduce the device's stability. And then in 2012, the Boxee guys quit on the userbase and ceased supporting the device [webarchive.org]. They'll tell you a different story, but Boxee Box users will tell you the truth: we were abandoned. 

Hardware failures aren't uncommon, you can read on this very blog about some other examples of buyer's disappointment. But getting completely abandoned, less than two years after spending a premium price (I think it was upwards of $250), is a kick in the testicles. I mean, when you are lower on my company rankings then HP, you've really accomplished something. 

To be fair, the Boxee Box device continued to work and I still used it for a couple years. Even today I believe it can still play media files from your connected devices and unless the Netflix API changes have completely invalidated the app on the Boxee Box, it should still play Netflix. But eventually I dropped my use of it when I switched to serving content to my TV from a network attached storage device. For streaming, TVs got smarter and could do apps without needing a Boxee, and the Tivo 4K can stream anything the Boxee could in a smaller device that, as part of a Sling TV promotion, was FREE. So as disappointing as Boxee's demise was, I have recovered.

My Boxee Box went into mothballs on my unused hardware shelf. Until about a year ago when I listed it on eBay as a part of my ongoing effort to declutter. Mostly I've sold my computer and video games and a few books. But after being listed for months, someone finally decided to buy my Boxee, which I had dropped in price from about $40 down to $25, and a pretty far cry from the $200+ I paid. Creative people have found ways to jailbreak/hack the device and make it more useful, and the remote is still as cool as ever. To the guy that got it: good luck, I hope it gives you some happiness. To Boxee: goodbye and good riddance.

Review: Youngblood Hawke

My first exposure to the great American writer Herman Wouk was when I was in intermediate school and we read excerpts from The City Boy. It was the right introduction for the right person at the right age. I was chubby and nerdy like the book's character, Herbie Bookbinder, and suffered a lot of the same struggles (although living in California and not New York I couldn't partake of some of Bookbinder's salves, like walking a mere block to get a frappe shake). For my book report I rigged up a cheap diorama out of a shoe box that captured the scene in the book where Herbie assembles a sort of roller coaster that does down the side of a hill at his summer camp (I think...it's been a while, maybe he just found an existing one and put up the marketing around it as an attraction for a camp event). Looking back, I don't think it was the best of my attempts at dioramas, but the one hook that made it different from the other projects was that my father helped put a few battery operated LED lights on it so that it looked like a sign Bookbinder put up to showcase the ride. Keep in mind this must have been around 1979, so LED lights weren't the ubiquitous thing they are now. My father being an electrical engineer was a great boon to this particular book project.

I left that piece of Wouk in the rear view mirror and never really came back to him. I knew he was a respected writer but my only interaction with his work for years after that was when I got a copy of The City Boy. The years between high school and young adulthood were mostly filled with the writings of Harlan Ellison, Marv Wolfman, Paul Chadwick, Stephen Coonts, Barrett Tillman, Bob Hall, and yes, damn it, Tom Clancy. 

Then a couple years ago I ran across a sale at Amazon on a bunch of Wouk's work, and I figured it was time to pick up some ebooks and audiobooks of his. I finally tackled Youngblood Hawk a couple months ago, and what a ride it was. 

Wouk's writing is very good, there's no issue with his choice of vocabulary or style, though I'm not the stickler on that sort of thing that more pretentious critics are. I just want a writer to respect my time; have a decent story to tell and be competent in the telling. Bonus points are awarded if: the work manages to be both educational and entertaining, it sticks with me a bit and makes me think, and the author's not an asshole if I ever meet the person in real life. If your style can makes gods weep, if you've scoured the text ten times over to remove any instance of passive voice, if you scrutinized it ten more times to make sure you "show don't tell," and if you've taken pains to ensure at least ten percent of the characters are homosexual minorities...well maybe bonus points for that too but not at the expense of the more important items. 

Youngblood Hawke is a tremendous work. It's a massive book and between a mixture of listening to the audiobook twice a week on commutes, and reading bits of the ebook, it took me two months to finish. The story of the smart but naive young man that enters and navigates the world of New York publishing as he becomes a bestselling writer is a big non-stop sprawling tour through a tumultuous life. I've read some critics say it's one of the best books for explaining the financial side of writing, and it certainly does give the reader an eyeful of it. In fact I'm not sure this is the book for everyone. I think a lot of people today would be quite bored with Hawke, despite the presence of plenty of sex (mostly G-rated in the proceedings), tons of dialog, lengthy descriptions, and a detour to a couple court cases (one a red scare communist hearing, and the other over land rights). The book is really long, and though it's buoyed by well developed characters, intrigue, drama, and humor, I think a modern movie rendition would look nothing like Wouk's work. I can't say anything about the existing 1964 movie; I haven't seen it and don't have a particular interest in seeing it, given my poor faith in Hollywood's ability to respect the printed word, though I'll take a look if it ever crosses my path in one of the many streaming services I currently use.

Most of the reviewers on Goodreads put Hawke at four to five stars. I'm ok with that. It's a bit of a writer's fantasy, but it is interesting and educational. The writing profession, I think, doesn't hold the same allure  as it did in 1960. I know from experience how little it pays and how difficult it can be to succeed, although it's still respected and we still need writers. But prior to the invention of the damned internet and proliferation of videos as the new literature, writers were giants and their works were and still are inspiration for other media (plays, movies) and I can see how Youngblood Hawke was a glimpse into the fantasy of that life. I believe I will read more Wouk in the future.