Air Force (film)

On December 6, 1941, at Hamilton Field, near San Francisco, the crew of the Mary-Ann, a United States Army Air Corps B-17D bomber are ordered to fly across the Pacific to Hawaii.

Master Sergeant Robbie White, the crew chief, is a long-time veteran of the Army Air Corps, whose son Danny is an officer and pursuit (fighter) pilot. The navigator, Lieutenant Monk Hauser Jr., is the son of a hero of the World War I Lafayette Escadrille. The pilot is Michael "Irish" Quincannon Sr., the co-pilot is Bill Williams, and the bombardier is Tom McMartin. Sergeant Joe Winocki is a disgruntled gunner who, as an aviation cadet in 1938, washed out of flight school after he caused a mid-air collision in which another cadet was killed. Quincannon was the flight instructor who requested a board of inquiry into the accident.

With the United States still neutral, the Mary-Ann and eight other B-17s fly, fully equipped except for ammunition, to Hickam Field. They arrive on December 7, 1941, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.[Note 2] In its aftermath, the tired crew is ordered, with little rest, to fly first to Wake Island, and then to Clark Field in the Philippines, both also under heavy Japanese attack. En route, the crew listens to President Franklin D. Roosevelt ask Congress for a declaration of war. They take along two passengers: fighter pilot Lieutenant Thomas "Tex" Rader and a small dog, "Tripoli", the Marines' mascot on Wake Island.

When they land at Clark Field, White learns that his son was killed while trying to lead his squadron into the air during the first attack. Soon after, Quincannon volunteers his bomber (the only one available) to attack a Japanese invasion fleet, but the Mary-Ann is swarmed by enemy fighters and forced to abort after losing two engines. The fatally wounded Quincannon orders his men to bail out, then blacks out. Winocki remains aboard and pilots the Mary-Ann to a successful belly landing when he is unable to lower the landing gear.

Having told a dying Quincannon that the Mary-Ann is ready to fly, the crew works feverishly through the night to repair their bomber, scavenging parts from other, damaged B-17s, as the Japanese Army closes in. Chester, the assistant radio operator, volunteers to fly as gunner in a two-seat observation plane. They are caught in an enemy air raid. Chester bails out after the pilot is killed, but is shot while descending helplessly, then strafed to death on the ground. Winocki and White shoot down the fighter with machine guns. When the pilot stumbles from the burning wreckage, Winocki shoots him. The exhausted aircrew barely manages to finish the repairs just before the airfield is overrun. With help from Marines and Army soldiers, the Mary-Ann takes off under fire.

As they head to Australia, with Rader as the reluctant pilot and the wounded Williams as co-pilot, they spot a large Japanese naval invasion task force directly below. The crew radios the enemy's position and circles until reinforcements arrive; the Mary-Ann then leads the attack that devastates the Japanese fleet (the missions portrayed in these Coral Sea sequences mirror real-life events).[3]

Later in the war, a bombing attack on Tokyo is finally announced to a roomful of bomber crews, among them several familiar faces from the Mary-Ann, including Rader, now a B-17 pilot. As the bombers take off, President Roosevelt offers inspiring words in a voice-over, as the air armada heads towards the rising sun.

Boeing B-17D Mary-Ann as seen in the film.

Director Howard Hawks credited the concept of the film to Lieutenant General Henry H. Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, based on the experiences of a flight of B-17s that left Hamilton Field, California, on the night of December 6, 1941, and literally flew into the war the next morning at Pearl Harbor. Executive producer Jack Warner was adamant that the film be ready for release by December 7, 1942, the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. To that end, miniatures for battle sequences were filmed in May and June 1942, before completion of the script and storyline.[3]

Although pre-production work had already been done, the official start of the production on May 18, 1942, was tied to the War Department approving the script.[3] Development of the film was concurrent with scriptwriting by Dudley Nichols, with some characters based on Air Corps personnel Hawks met while traveling to Washington, D.C., to confer with Arnold and the War Department Motion Picture Board of Review.[3] Nichols's script, submitted June 15, was 207 pages long (twice that of a normal feature-length film), had its initial 55 pages devoted to "character development," and was not finished.[4]

Principal photography, consisting of aerial shots and exteriors, took place at Hendricks Army Airfield, Florida. For water scenes and shooting miniatures shots, MacDill Field, Florida, Randolph Field, Texas, and Santa Monica Bay, California, were used.[5] Shooting began June 18, 1942, using a rented mock-up of a B-17 interior, in which the 10 principal characters performed for a month. The company then moved by train to Drew Army Airfield, Florida, at the end of July to spend the next month shooting aerial sequences coordinated by Paul Mantz, chief pilot and aerial technical coordinator[Note 3] for the production.[6] Drew was selected because of fears that use of aircraft marked as Japanese might cause panic on the West Coast.[7]

At the end of August, Hawks returned to Hollywood and engaged William Faulkner to rewrite two scenes, including the death of the Mary-Ann's pilot. By then, the film, scheduled to be completed by September 17, was three weeks behind schedule and only half completed. Production featured a celebrated clash between producer Hall Wallis and Hawks over the latter's constant changing of dialogue as scenes were shot. Hawks was briefly replaced on October 4 by Vincent Sherman, but returned from "illness" on October 10 to take back primary direction. Sherman remained as second-unit director to assist with completion of the picture, which wrapped on October 26, 1942, failing to shoot 43 pages of script and 33 days over schedule, too late to meet its December 7 release date.[3][8]

Wallis wrote that AAF Captains Sam P. Triffy and Hewett T. Wheless were technical advisors to the film, and that Triffy in particular made significant contributions to the storyline, dialogue, and sets.[9] "Shorty" Wheless had previously been a B-17 aircraft commander in the Philippines with the 19th Bomb Group and had been one of the survivors evacuated to Australia in December 1941. He was at Randolph Field, Texas, in the process of appearing as himself in the Academy Award-winning short film Beyond the Line of Duty when he assisted on Air Force.[Note 4]

The basic premise of Air Force, that a flight of B-17s flying to reinforce the defense of the Philippines flies into the attack on Pearl Harbor, reflects actual events. From that point on, however, all of the incidents are fictitious. No B-17 reinforcements reached the Philippines; the survivors of those already based there retreated to Australia less than two weeks after the war began. The major bombing mission depicted at the film's climax most closely resembles the Battle of the Coral Sea five months later. Miniature shooting for its battle scenes was filmed in May and June 1942, concurrent but probably coincidental with Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway.

Anti-Japanese propaganda in the film included scenes in which the crew is forced to land on Maui Island and is shot at by "local Japanese," and the assertion by the Hickam Field commander that vegetable trucks knocked off the tails of parked P-40 fighters as the attack began. Also, Lieutenant Rader claims a Japanese blocked the road in front of him, as he hurried to the airfield, and then shot at him with a shotgun. As detailed in Walter Lord's book Day of Infamy, later investigations proved no Japanese-American was involved in any sabotage during the Pearl Harbor attack.

There are several scenes in Air Force showing a tail gun being installed on the Mary-Ann. The bomber in the film played the part of a Boeing B-17D; no early B-17s, series A to D, were fitted with machine guns in the tail. Tail machine guns were not added by Boeing until the company rolled out their redesigned B-17E model. However, in the film, the crew of the Mary-Ann are shown making a field modification to their bomber's rear fuselage: They remove the tail cone and leave the tail wheel extended in flight to allow for the installation of a single, improvised machine gun position, "a stinger in our tail" as one crewman calls it. Some air crews did install a broomstick painted black in that clear plastic tail cone to help ward off enemy fighter attacks from the rear. As detailed in the book Swoose, a few B-17 crews installed a remotely-controlled (via a cord) .30 caliber machine gun.

Critical acclaim followed the film's premiere as Air Force echoed some of the emotional issues that underlay the American public psyche at the time, including distrust of Japanese Americans. In naming it one of the "Ten Best Films of 1943", Bosley Crowther of The New York Times characterized the film as "... continuously fascinating, frequently thrilling and occasionally exalting ...".[12] When seen in a modern perspective, the emotional aspects of the film seem out of proportion, and although it has been wrongly dismissed as a piece of wartime propaganda, it still represents a classic war film that can be considered a historical document.[13] When initially released, Air Force was one of the top three films in commercial revenue in 1943.

Later reviews of Air Force noted that this was a prime example of Howard Hawks's abilities; "Air Force is a model of fresh, energetic, studio-era filmmaking".[14]

Air Force placed third (behind The Ox-Bow Incident and Watch on the Rhine) as the best film of 1943 selected by the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures.

Air Force editor George Amy won the 1944 Academy Award for Best Film Editing, defeating his counterparts on Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Five Graves to Cairo, and The Song of Bernadette.

Dudley Nichols was nominated for Best Writing, Original Screenplay; Hans F. Koenekamp, Rex Wimpy, and Nathan Levinson for Best Effects, Special Effects; and Elmer Dyer, James Wong Howe and Charles A. Marshall for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White.[15]

Air Force was presented on Lux Radio Theatre July 12, 1943. The adaptation starred Harry Carey and George Raft.[16]

An Air Force plot detail is loosely referenced in the film Pulp Fiction (1994) during Christopher Walken’s monologue playing Captain Koons. Koons recounts the story of boxer Butch Coolidge’s grandfather’s watch: Butch’s grandfather, facing certain death at the hands of the Japanese at the WWII battle of Wake Island, gives his watch to a gunner on an Air Force bomber by the name of Winocki.[17]

• Air Force at IMDb 
• Air Force at AllMovie
• Air Force at the TCM Movie Database
• Air Force at the American Film Institute Catalog
• Air Force at Rotten Tomatoes
• Air Force at Box Office Mojo