Tonight's movie was "Above And Beyond" (1952) starring Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker. I bought the dvd from Amazon several months ago and had been holding on to it, partially because it is two hours long and I prefer 90 to 100 minute movies on average worknights, so that I also have a few minutes to read or draw. Longer movies I usually save for my nights off. Also, this movie was about a specific and difficult subject, and I wanted to give it my total focus.
So tonight I decided to forego any reading or drawing and finally watch it, in part because I was all out of Library movies, but even more because the date of August 7th seemed appropriate.
"Above And Beyond" is the story of Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, from which the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan on the morning of August 6, 1945. The second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki on August 9.
The story follows Col. Tibbetts as he leads bombing raids over North Africa, and is then chosen out of a select group of pilots for a special mission that he is at first told little about. He is sent back home to America to test a new airplane, the B-29. The tests take the better part of a year because the plane has a lot of defects. It also needs to be reconfigured for the upcoming top secret mission. Back home in the States, Tibbets begins to stress out because he can't tell his wife anything about his project. She in turn demands answers, because he is testing a dangerous airplane that has failed again and again, and killed several crews in the process. He has to deal with maximum security at his airbase. Neither he nor his crew is allowed to utter a single word about what they are up to, and Tibbets even has to act as a spy against his own crew members, to see if they have loose lips.
A great deal of the script deals with this aspect : the secrecy of the project, the strain it puts on Tibbets' marriage (almost to the point of divorce), and the heavy psychological burden that is placed on Tibbets himself, for, as the pilot and team leader, he is the only crew member that knows what is going to happen. Only he has been told of an atomic bomb and what it will do.
The whole movie plays this scenario out, and the various stresses reach a breaking point.
Then it is time for the mission to actually take place. Col. Tibbets and his crew follow orders.
The last ten minutes of the film depict the dropping of the bomb, it's midair explosion at 1600 feet, and the mushroom cloud that immediately resulted. The Enola Gay banks sharply to avoid the shockwave. Then we see what the crew sees - the city has been flattened, and is on fire.
Fire is everywhere, and strange localised electrical flashes are seen in pockets of the fires. These flashes look like small lightning bolts, striking what was left of a block of houses and then fading.
In the movie, it appears that actual stock footage was used, and though it is only shown in brief snippets, it is shocking because you can see how an atomic weapon tears open the atmosphere and releases the tremendous amount of electromagnetic energy within. And that is only the aftereffect.
Col.Tibbets' marriage is given a happy ending in the movie, though just barely, and he is portrayed as having suffered severe psychological damage, though as a professional Air Force man he always keeps his composure. Robert Taylor does an outstanding job of portraying these complexities. He is one of my favorite actors from the studio era, and though he had a "movie star" persona, he could really act.
He nails the role of Paul Tibbets, a man who in real life had a burden to carry that may have driven him to be defensive in his old age, from what I read on Google.
The whole world knows now that nuclear weapons can never be used again, and we know that because of the two times they were used by the United States. We know the terrible result.
But I am not sure we can sit in out armchairs in the present time and make moral denouncements against the men who decided to use those weapons at that time and in those sets of circumstances.
The argument boils down to: "Dropping the bomb(s) ended the war, prevented an invasion of Japan and saved perhaps a million American and Japanese lives".
And the other side says : "But the bomb was dropped on civilians, and it killed 80,000 immediately, and many thousands more due to radiation poisoning. It was pure evil".
The other side also has political and logistical reasons why the war against Japan would have been brought to an end without the bomb, but they are the reasons of hindsight, from people who were not alive at that time.
So, we can ask who is right? Which side is right about Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Should the bombs have been dropped, or not.
I don't believe anyone can say.
Both sides are right, and both sides are wrong.
It is probably a fact that had the bombs not been dropped, that a ground invasion of Japan would have taken place, and Japan wasn't like Germany. Their soldiers were indoctrinated to an even greater degree to fight until the end and never surrender. So it is safe to say that if the bombs had not been dropped, that many thousands or millions would have died during the course of an invasion. It is worth noting that in the course of WW2, over only six years, more than 60 million people were killed.
Think about that for a minute. Over 60 Million in six years.
So this is the insanity the bomb droppers were trying to stop.
Was it wrong to drop an atomic bomb on a civilian city?
That question is asked of Tibbets at the end of the movie. He turns it around on the questioner.
"What do you think"?, he asks.
There are no easy answers, then, except the answers that seem easy and automatic.
What do you do when faced with insane regimes like Germany and Japan?
You could go even further and ask, "what do you do with the Wall Street finaciers and American bankers and Yale Skull and Bonesers who helped create the situation in the first place"?
But then you'd be getting away from the story of Paul Tibbets, the guy who was called upon to put out the fire of WW2, by the most horrific means imaginable. He did his job and cleaned up what others started, and though he defended his actions and lived to be 92 years old, from what the movie shows it appears to have ruined his life, which would seem only natural.
Two Big Thumbs Up for "Above And Beyond", and for the husband and wife portrayals by Robert Taylor and Eleanor Parker. They nail the unimaginable stress that would have been brought down on them by the Hiroshima bombing and the secrecy that led up to it. ////
That's all for tonight. See you in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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