The Cold Blue

Low&Slow

Ancora imparo
Coming to select theatres May 23, 2019.

Erik Nelson’s film takes an inside look at the daily life of men of the Eighth Air Force, who flew deadly missions during World War II, featuring newly restored 4K footage shot by filmmaker William Wyler in 1943 along with narration from some of the last surviving B-17 pilots.

Catch the metro Detroit premiere of ‘The Cold Blue’ at the Freep Film Festival 2019: https://freepfilmfestival.com/the-cold-the-cold-blue

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Coming to select theatres May 23, 2019.

Erik Nelson’s film takes an inside look at the daily life of men of the Eighth Air Force, who flew deadly missions during World War II, featuring newly restored 4K footage shot by filmmaker William Wyler in 1943 along with narration from some of the last surviving B-17 pilots.

Catch the metro Detroit premiere of ‘The Cold Blue’ at the Freep Film Festival 2019: https://freepfilmfestival.com/the-cold-the-cold-blue

For more Detroit and Michigan news, sports and entertainment, follow the Detroit Free Press on:

Facebook — Detroit Free Press
Twitter — https://bit.ly/2JeixbW
Instagram — Detroit Free Press (@detroitfreepress) • Instagram photos and videos
Online — Detroit Free Press - Breaking news, sports, business, entertainment

Oddest thing I ever did was officiate at the wedding of my mom and an old high school classmate of hers, Gene Tigges, late in life.

Long dead (the both of them), Gene was a B17 pilot during World War II. He spoke to me sometimes, decades after the reality, of the fact that “precision bombing” really wasn’t, and of knowing he had helped to kill many people in the general area of legitimate military targets. The bombs fell where they fell, and there was a need to drop them.

He brought back dead crewmen and broken airplanes, but lived to enjoy a long, full life. He carried guilt, though, at surviving. Broke his back once landing a B17 that likely couldn’t fly (but did), and never complained about the pain he carried for decades. Like my dad (a combat engineer), Gene stepped-up and made a difference when it was necessary to do so.

I may be one of the last who remembers Gene and what he did long, long ago. Comrades-in-arms and classmates are dead; his peers are gone.

It was my privilege though, for a while, to share his life and be trusted with his heart.
 
Here is a great interview with Erik Nelson. ‘Cold Blue’ brings death-defying world of World War II B-17 bomber crews to life

Why was it important for you to tell this story?

"These are the last of the best. In some ways I made it for them. We screened the film to the 8th Air Force reunion in Dayton last year, and I wanted them to see that their story is still being told, and I want to tell the story in a way that this really would impact young 20-year-olds today.

These guys were 19, 20, and 21, and they’re flying B-17s on these ridiculously complicated, hazardous missions. The idea that they’d be in these planes for 10 hours, round-trip, in temperatures equaling Mount Everest, with this sort of crude technology to drop bombs, and they’d head back and wake up and do it all over again ... people just can’t imagine now. War has become much more sanitized."



I am really looking forward to seeing this film. Thanks for posting about it. I have always had an interest in the Flying Fortress, the Liberator, the Mitchell, the Superfortress and their crews and missions.

Around 135,000 men flew in combat in the 8th Air Force. The total American Air Force losses worldwide during World War II was 27,694 aircraft, including 8,314 heavy bombers, 1,623 medium and light bombers, and 8,481 fighters were destroyed in combat. During WW2, 26 B-17 bomber groups served in Britain and 6 groups served in Italy. The average age of any of the various bomber crews, was only 22 years old.

The B-17's had a 10 man crew. Prior to 1944, a crewman's tour of duty was set at 25 missions. As a measure of the hazards they would encounter, it's estimated that the average crewman had only a one in four chance of actually completing his tour of duty.


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Hopefully this is a precursor to HBO finally releasing the long rumored Masters Of The Air book adaptation by Hanks and Spielberg.
If you haven't read the book, I just checked on Ebay and there are several for sale. It's an incredible story and very well written. You won't be able to put it down.

Masters of the Air in Books | eBay


"Delivering a Band of Brothers in the skies, Miller deftly mixes the strategic with the personal, offering revealing and unforgettable stories about Americas bomber boys who fought in the air war against the Nazis. 20 photos and maps. Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes readers on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people.Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind.

Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller's Air Force band, which toured U.S. air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943, an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps.

The American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise. The British flew under the cover of night while American bombers attacked by day, a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal. Masters of the Airis a story, as well, of life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the country their bombs destroyed.

Drawn from recent interviews, oral histories, and American, British, German, and other archives, Masters of the Air is an authoritative, deeply moving account of the world's first and only bomber war."
 
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Oddest thing I ever did was officiate at the wedding of my mom and an old high school classmate of hers, Gene Tigges, late in life.

Long dead (the both of them), Gene was a B17 pilot during World War II. He spoke to me sometimes, decades after the reality, of the fact that “precision bombing” really wasn’t, and of knowing he had helped to kill many people in the general area of legitimate military targets. The bombs fell where they fell, and there was a need to drop them.

"Half a Wing, Three Engines, and a Prayer" though dry, really opened my eyes as to how fledgeling strategic bombing really was. I was amazed by how many missions failed to even assemble the formation let alone make it to the Target and how many were not counted against a crewmember's tour because they couldn't find the Target or didn't drop for some reason.



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Very good. The footage was so clear that I had to keep reminding myself that we were seeing the real deal and not re-enactors. It also reminded me a lot of that awesome Apollo 11 documentary that was in theaters for a while recently.
 
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