A heads up for our UK members. BBC1 21.00-22.30. Brothers Colin and Ewan McGregor follow up their documentary The Battle of Britain with a film exploring Bomber Command, a rarely-told story from the Second World War. The film focuses primarily on the men who fought and died in the skies above occupied Europe, with numerous examples of individual heroism and extraordinary collective spirit, and Colin learns to fly the key aircraft of the campaign: the Lancaster bomber. But this is also the story of a controversy that has lasted almost 70 years. The programme covers six years of wartime operations, and traces the obstacles and challenges that were overcome as the RAF developed and deployed the awesome fighting force that was Bomber Command. BBC One - Bomber Boys
Just watched the program and thought it was pretty good. It included lots of archive footage and interviews with surviving Lancaster crews. The documentary also showed the devastation caused by the allied bombings on German cities such as Dresden and Hamburg and included interviews with civilians who were on the ground when the bombs began to fall.
.....but also a VERY pronounced bit of BBC/"luvvie" handwringing over Dresden etc. They did make the point on several occasions that war was war...but it didn't outweigh the BBC's standard left-of-centre moralising And no harm to Ewan's brother Colin....but he's a boring bugger!
It was OK for a prime-time 'popular' documentary. The present-day photography of the BBMF Lanc and Dakota, and also the Air Atlantique DC-2, was stunning. It was also a good effort to get 'talking heads' from all sides of the Bomber War ( including Rolf Ebhardt of NJG1 ). A little irritating that no mention was made of the Halifax & Stirling ( you'd honestly have thought that the Lancaster was the only aircraft in service ) and in fact very few Lancasters flew to Cologne in 1942. Oh - and they described the Tallboy while showing us Grand Slam, but that's just me being anorak-y. As always, the comments and anecdotes from the veterans were great to hear, and made you realise that programmes such as this will be very different when they have all faded away.
enjoyed it myself - to be fair the 'sub-text' was 'how to fly the Lanc'. The Dresden casualty figures were sensible and while 'area bombing' was explored with the usual 'hand-wringing' there was no mention of it winning the other (Pacific) War (Hiroshima, Nagasaki). Hamburg was nothing compared to the Tokyo fire-bombing (with napalm) during March 1945. Instead they tacked Afghanistan on to the end - what for ? ...
