This is an exciting series of programs consisting of an overall narration, newsreel footage, descriptions of combat by the pilots, and striking graphics of airplanes in flight and in combat.
No viewer can feel anything other than awe at the risks these pilots in their rugged but clumsy F4Fs were willing to take.
But the series has its weaknesses, and they're important ones. First, the narration sounds straight out of a chauvinistic World War II flag waver. "DeBlanc, eager for a fight, pulls up into the waiting Zeros." Eager for a fight or not, the American pilots always win. The narration gives the Japanese airmen no credit, but sometimes the old men who flew the Wildcats do. Aerial combat is portrayed as if it were a college football game, with "our side" and "their side" two distinct entities with nothing in common. It comes as something of a shock to hear a now-ancient Marine ace describe his killing of a Japanese rear gunner who was spraying the Wildcat with 7.7 mm. bullets. "I saw his face as he was tugging at his gun. And when I hit him he slumped down. I see that same face, night after night." It's not the football game that the writers seem to think it is.
It's a tiresome and overused gimmick, too, for the graphics to have an airplane zoom spinner-first directly into the camera. It soon loses its shock value and becomes irritating and distracting.
Finally, how come -- in the half dozen episodes I've seen so far -- there are no winners except Americans and Israelis? Were German pilots so lacking in skills? And whatever happened to the RAF? Not to mention the Australians, Japanese, Russians, and even the Finns who flew obsolete Brewster Buffaloes and managed to fend off the Russian air force? I find war documentaries fascinating. It's like rubber necking at a highway accident. And the dynamics of dogfights have been necessarily neglected because they're never accurately caught on film. These digitalized engagements are fresh and new. But I resent being talked down to and propagandized. And I suspect its influence on our collective attitudes towards war is pernicious. If it's so easy, if we always win, if one of our guys can take on ten of theirs -- well, let's do it again. We can't lose.