Oh, Midway is absolutely awful. Tons of mismatched stock footage. The scene you mention uses the footage of a Hellcat crash-landing on the second Yorktown’s flight deck and bouncing off the after 5" twin turret. And using reversed images of the remaining Essexes for the Japanese carriers. It’s even more disappointing, considering that Tora! Tora! Tora! was released a couple of years before, and the special effects were serious and well-planned. (Yes, Midway re-used some of TTT’s footage, too).
And the added ficitional bits make the movie even worse. I think that the actual events provide a good enough story on their own, an example of heroism, bravery, as well as some of the worse aspects of our nature, that they need no embellishment.
And I think we could have gotten by with Japanese dialogue, with subtitles.
At least Henry Fonda resembled Chester Nimitz a little bit, just as Toshiro Mifune resembled Yamamoto.
I’m not a fan of remakes, but I would like to see a serious movie about the Battle of Midway, sticking to the actual events, and making use of current technology for special effects.
But the public wants to see Alec “Angryman” Baldwin playing Jimmy Doolittle…
Well, speaking of kit inaccuracies, Aoshima has come out with a kit of the Wasp (CV-7) in 1/700, injection-molded styrene (thereby covering one of my perennial suggestions on polls for “Kit’s We’d Like to See”). The air wing includes SBDs, with folding wings. Each little Dauntless is molded as the fuselage and a center section of wings, and left and right external wing parts. Oh, and the vertical stabilizer is squared off. And this is a kit that was released a couple of months ago.
It doesn’t bother me too much, since I’ll replace the kit planes with Trumpeter’s, but still…
And speaking of errors in books, I have a copy of The Army of Frederick the Great, by Christopher Duffy, and it’s full of typos, and paste-up errors, for example, where a piece of text is just missing. I was so excited when I got the book, but in the 20 years or so since I bought it, I’ve marked it up with red pen, and there are probably still some errors lurking, that I read right past. I’ve thought about sending my copy to Professor Duffy, but I never follow up on that. If I were an author, I would be embarassed that I had caught the errors myself, but I’d also be furious with my editor and with the publisher, for such poor quality control.
The Japanese did a movie recently about Admiral Yamamoto that covers Midway somewhat (and not overly accurately compared to mainstream current knowledge of that battle) but the visual look of the battle by CGI is sweet…
in order… the sequences here focus more on Admiral Yamaguchi like in the old Toho movie about the 1st Carrier Striking Force with Toshiro Mifune
Personally I can see Bruce Willis being a good Jimmy Doolittle
I also think there’s a problem of, for want of a better term, distance in time. Here are some interesting figures.
Today almost all college undergraduates, and virtually all high school students, were born since Operation Desert Storm. To a 12-year-old, World War II has been over for 71 years.
When I was 12, in 1962, WWII had been over for 17 years. WWI had been over for 44 years. The Spanish-American War had been over for 64 years. And the country was in the midst of the Civil War centennial celebrations.
When my father was 12 years old, in 1924, WWI had been over for six years. And the Civil War had been over for 59 years.
That 71-year gap since WWII is pretty big - and getting bigger. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that so many people know so little about it. The Doolittle Raid is now more distant than the Battle of Gettysburg was to my father - or the Battle of Jutland was to me when I was a kid.
Here’s another one. In my college military history courses, I give an assignment that requires each student to interview two people who went through some important event in American military history. I made that assignment for the first time in 1984, and a few of the students interviewed WWI vets. This year they had an awful time finding WWII vets. (Thank goodness for nursing homes.) these students are the grandchildren of Viet Nam vets. Some of their parents served in Desert Storm.
Relativity. Also it’s certainly not taught at the lower grades, at least out here, it’s parceled out in " social studies" now. It is true that those who forget history…
And a perfect example is both sand boxes now…another quagmire we are stuck in just like Vietnam was back in my day. The powers to be back in DC have forgotten the lesson that should have been learned and writ large in stone about that one. And that was only 40-50 years ago.
Very true…I’d wager that not many folks in here know a fraction as much about the Revolutionary War as they do about WW II…probably for the above stated reasons…yet I hardly ever hear anyone bemoan it…
As a matter of fact, I know that a LOT of folks in here know less about WW II than some us might assume…
Well, Desert Storm was January thru March, 1991. 25 years ago! I sure hope that there are no 25 year olds in High School as students. Most College kids now should have been born during the Balkan War ops of Deliberate Force in 1995 over Bosnia and Allied Force in 1999 over Kosovo. And grown up in our current GWOT/Enduring Freedom/Iraqi Freedom/Inherent Resolve etc. of the past 15 years… Of course with only 1% of the current population serving or having served recently and no real war related hardships at home they have a far different relationship to earlier wars with draftees, rationing, far higher casualties, etc.
