Aerial Gunner

Rating:
Summary: Not really a B-25 at all...
Review: ---
...per the earlier review, but more properly a Lockheed Hudson light bomber (rated an attack plane by the USAAF as either the A-28 or the A-29), which was converted to a combat aircraft from a fast civilian airliner to British specifications before the war. Several hundred of these were taken expediently from Lend-Lease manufacture into USAAF and USN inventory after Pearl Harbor, and the Hudson is listed as having achieved the USAAF's first antisubmarine warfare (ASW) kill in the Atlantic after the formal opening of hostilities.

Interestingly, the bomber in the movie is depicted as having a tail gunner's position (it did not) and as having a single waist gunner (ditto). Hudson aircraft taken into the US inventory commonly had the big British Boulton-Paul dual .303 MG waist turret removed, to be replaced with a simple single-weapon .50 caliber dorsal firing station (like the one depicted in the movie as being manned by the radio operator). The previous reviewer's confusion is therefore somewhat understandable. Hopefully, enemy viewers of the movie also drew false impressions about the Hudson, and didn't as readily seek to exploit the aircraft's posterior and ventral vulnerabilities.

As for the film itself, the most interesting part was the depiction of aerial gunnery training, which definitely did include shooting skeet in order to give the trainees better preparatory conditioning for deflection shooting.
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Rating:
Summary: Aerial Gunner
Review: Although dated by today's standards ("Holy Christopher!"), the movie gives an accurate account of aerial gunnery training in WWII. For the first hour (of the 90 minute film), all aspects of gunnery training are portrayed. I fully enjoyed the epic, even though the characters end up in a B-25 Mitchell. (I'm partial to B-24 Liberators!) Well worth the watch!!