The Birds are out and about.

[Surpmil]

I wonder if any recordings exist of a thousand bomber raid under way? Probably the technology of the time (or this time?) couldn't do justice to it?

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[Bob Womack]

I wonder if any recordings exist of a thousand bomber raid under way? Probably the technology of the time (or this time?) couldn't do justice to it?

You are touching on my field of expertise here. I'm a professional recording engineer and a recording archivist.

The Germans had pretty well-developed tape recording going on including bias compensation to flatten the response. They were using it to record and playback radio shows and news broadcasts and their product sounded far better than ours. Right after the war, Bing Crosby sent some of his associates over to Germany to steal the m blind of the technology. They brought back German recorders and tape and formed the Ampex Corporation ,who led professional recording for the next twenty years and innovated some of the very best recording techology ever. At the time of the war, tape recorders weren't very portable, but a German radio station might have been able to stick a mic out a window. Of course, to acknowledge any Allied incursion was politically verboten. The Nazis enforced their bans with death. To top it off, the populations centers were virtually ransacked in the last months of the war.

Up until that point the Allied technology was limited to cutting lacquer disks, recording to the optical stripe of film, or wire recorders that recorded to the surface of wire that was loaded in spools. None of those were either very high-fi nor durable. I've actually got a classical album and a Bing Crosy album that were recorded to film optical stripe. They are horrendouns. The classical album actually touts its recording format because it was a step up from lacquer master disks of the time. None of these formats could record and appreciable bass.

Heck, as late as 1968, the Battle of Britain movie used fairly lo-fi magnetic recording techniques to record all those classic Spitfires, Hurricanes, and the license-built Messerschmidts and Heinkels. There's no bass on aircraft in that movie either. If youve ever been on a field when either a Rolls-Royce powered fighter or a radially-powered bomber took off or did a power pass, you'll know that it shakes your guts immericifully. Glorious. I've only heard one movie soundtrack with a really good pass of a prop plane, and that was at the end of The Great Raid. when the Lockheed Loadstar flies overhead.

The recent Midway movie made the 1200hp radial powered Dauntlesses sound like silly WWI kites, or sewing machines.

I love the final words of Harry Crosby's book, Wing and a Prayer, where he speaks of a little child in Holland being scared by the droning of a 1000 plane raid. The father comforted the child, saying, "Oh no, Honey. That is the sound of angels" who are coming to liberate them. Having been the Group Bombardier for the 100th Bomb Group and flown all their key missions, beginning to end, Crosby finishes his work with questions over the efficacy of strategic bombing but concludes, nostalgically, that he had indeed heard the "angels."

Bob

[browningautorifle]

The recent Midway movie

When it came out in '76, they used giant speakers in "Sensurround" to try and give you that sound of power. I remember them hanging in the theater here...

[Flying10uk]

I wonder if any recordings exist of a thousand bomber raid under way?

Maybe not a thousand bomber raid but there is this:

Richard Dimbleby flew a number of missions over occupied territory as a war reporter during WW2 and, in my opinion, was a very brave man.