The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944) - Documentary (41 minutes)
This film is a war documentary produced by one of the "Hollywood Colonels," William Wyler, who joined the Air Force Film unit and recorded the sights and sounds of the last mission of a B-17 bomber known as the Memphis Belle, named after the girlfriend of the pilot.
A narrator told the story of the 10 crewmen as examples of simple average American boys doing a tough job.
The men and plane were filmed during the bombing raid on the submarine plens in Wilhelmshafen, Germany, "just one mission of just one plane and one crew in one squadron in one group of one wing of one Air Force out of fifteen United States Army Air Forces." It used handheld 16mm and 35mm cameras inside the plane to give the perspective of the crew. Wyler in fact combined footage from several missions to represent this last 25th mission of the plane, a mission that was actually a milk run with no casualties and no difficult landing. He also used film shot by the 8th AAF Combat Camera Unit.
Wyler wanted to film a flak burst but never was able to get one:
"I could never get one explosion because how the hell do you know where one's going to explode? Once the cloud is there it's too late. All that flak so close to us, and I could never get the explosion."
From October 1943 to March 1944, Wyler edited in the U.S. the 20,000 feet of film he shot in Europe, producing a 42-minute color film that was considered beautiful and dramatic.
https://ia700400.us.archive.org/5/it...1944.gif?cnt=0
Director: William Wyler
Producer: First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Corps
Production Company: Paramount Pictures
Sponsor: - Audio/Visual: sound, color
Creative Commons license: Public Domain
Note: To the best of our ability, we have tested playing these old movies on Apple computers running OSX, as well as Windows based PC's running Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari and Google Chrome. We've also tested playing them from Apple iPhones and iPads.
However, with so many different combinations of computers and Internet browsers available, plus the huge variation in optional add-on plugins a user can enable on his personal web browser, there's bound to be members who have difficulty playing some of the video content provided on our site.
Most movies start playing in about 5 seconds or less, but at some times of the day there may be heavy video server traffic, so it's important that once you click the PLAY button for any movie, you give it at least 15 to 20 seconds to see if it will actually start. So, please be patient before you jump to the conclusion there's a problem.
If you are having problems playing any of the movies, check the very bottom of the video player box. If you see an optional Menu List of items that are additional titles for the movie, then try clicking on those other entries, which will force the video player to stream alternatively formatted video files from the server. In many cases, these differently formatted video files will solve you issue and play properly on your computer.
If there's no list of other video files to choose from, or none of the options work, then we'd ask you try a different Internet browser to see if the issue is only related to the web browser you use. If you still have the same problem with other web browsers, then please send an email to badger@milsurps.com indicating which movie you are trying to watch, what type of computer you have and its operating system, plus what Internet browser you're attempting to use. We apologize for the inconvenience and we'll try to help you out if we can.
