Bella It's an honest an informative documentary. Rather than telling people want they want to hear, this documentary does an excellent job of showing people what it was like for the pilots as they try to cut off food, supplies, and reinforcements to the German forces. The documentary shows great images of what is happening along with a narration to give you more information about what they are doing and why they are doing it. The narrator explains some of the thoughts ans feelings that the pilots have and what expectations people have of them. Overall, it's a solid non-propaganda documentary of the war.

Robert J. Maxwell It's a pretty brutal picture of the pilots of the P-47s that flew out of Corsica on ground attack missions to the Italian mainland. There are reasons why it shouldn't have been shown at home. American boys injured, crashing and dying; barns and auxiliary buildings blown up just in case they might be harboring something inimical to our interests. I don't know if it would have been stifled or not. John Huston had all sorts of problems with his "Battle of San Pietro" because it showed American dead being folded into mattress covers.That it WAS, in fact, made during the war is reflected in the sometimes bitter commentary, suggesting that the Italians and Germans deserved everything they got. There are some "good Germans" on Corsica, followed by a shot of a dilapidated graveyard.It's all color footage. We follow the young men around as they get out of bed and prepare themselves for another mission. The narration, by Lloyd Bridges, explains what's going on in a clipped, hypermasculine way. "Time for the briefing. Don't know what mission it is. Don't always care." The maps and associated graphics are simple enough for a child to understand.The missions involved bombing, rocket launching, and strafing, and the P-47 appears to have been built for it. It was a huge, powerful, fast single-engine, single-seat fighter that could carry an enormous load of ordinance and could take a punishing amount of damage. It carried eight .50 caliber machine guns, and we see a good deal of strafing from the gun cameras. A line of spurts tracks a target and envelopes it in dust. A shot, not shown here, that I've seen only once, has a hapless French farmer on a cart galloping his horse down a country road. Cart, farmer, and horse disappear in the cloud. And what carries much of the impact is not the farmer being killed, because we've seen humans shot and killed so often we've been desensitized. It's the horse, the poor innocent horse.There is another documentary about a pilot, Quentin Annenson, who flew P-47s in the European theater. Annenson narrates the film himself in his quiet Minnesota accent. It's longer, more personal, more detailed, and utterly gripping.

oscar-35 *Spoiler/plot- 1947, A film showing the operations of a fighter/bomber air wing group flying from Sardinia to Italy to support the Italian Allied campaign.*Special Stars- Director: John Sturges. Narrator: Robert Lowery. Pilot's voice: Lloyd Bridges *Theme- Airpower is crucial in operations.*Trivia/location/goofs- Filmed in Sardinia. Look for the best film representations of Christmas holidays celebrated in the rear areas by troops of the WW2 period.*Emotion- An enjoyable documentary made up of live action combat or newsreel footage. It gives you the tone and feel of the times for WW2 fighter pilots. However, there are the unpleasant shots of injured Americans with some blatant racist language. But it is extremely educational and does what a narrative simulated war film can do.

Michael_Elliott Thunderbolt (1947) *** (out of 4) WW2 documentary directed by John Sturges and William Wyler with an added introduction from James Stewart. The documentary covers the P-47 Thunderbolt pilots whose mission was to knock out all the train tracks and bridges throughout Corsica, Italy so that the German's couldn't get any supplies. Sturges and Wyler put twelve different cameras on the planes so there's a lot of terrific ariel footage of the bombings, which is quite impressive. I don't think the documentary plays out too well today because we see things getting bombed even though the pilots aren't sure if it's the Germans or perhaps civilians. There's also some footage of what the pilots do when they're not working but the documentary ends on a downnote as some of the men in the crew never made it back home. The film's biggest problem is the narration, which is so slow that it can't keep up with all the action going on in the movie. Lloyd Bridges provides the voice of one of the pilots.