Tim Kerr-Thomson Anyone who is an aviation enthusiast will love this movie purely for the footage of the aircraft. However, those same people will hate the movie for the interminable number of factual errors. To people who are not enthusiasts they will not be noticed and make no difference to their opinion of the film. The storyline is very basic and lacks any depth. It really is just good guys vs bad with the obvious outcome. Neither do any of the characters have any depth. They are all over the top "gung ho" types, incessant jokes and smart comments. A little bit of this is OK, but an hour and a half is too much. Despite a well known cast they do nothing to improve the situation. No character shows any signs of stress or trepidation that we know veterans suffer. It seems that this would be a sign of weakness. For the time this movie was made it is understandable as the allies were still celebrating their victory. If you enjoy WW2 propaganda movies or films to do with aviation you will enjoy this movie. However, if you are looking for a good story this is not the film.

Robert J. Maxwell Briskly directed by Raoul Walsh, another of Hollywood's one-eyed Irishmen, this is the story of Edmund O'Brien as a cheerful lone-wolf ex-Flying Tiger who joins a squadron of P-47s in England. Their mission: Escort B-17s on raids over Nazi-held Europe. O'Brien is the kind of pilot who is interested in result and breaks all the rules.Then, according to the usual formula, he's asked to take over the squadron. He does so reluctantly. It means he must crack down on his men and see that all the standing orders are obeyed. This disappoints the men.But not for long. It's not that kind of movie. The conflicts, and there are several, are not lingered over. In this world, men speak their minds in public places and "get it off their chests." O'Brien not only has the men following the rules he himself has always disregarded, he influences the desk-bound generals running the program so that they modernize the fighter squadron's tactics -- drop those external fuel tanks when engaging enemy fighters, and send some planes ahead of the bomber swarm to harass German fighters on their own airstrips before they can get in the air. Ground attack is more dangerous but it works. The men rack up scores of enemy kills. The lines of swastikas painted on each fuselage grows, then a second line begins.It hardly breaks new ground. Robert Stack is one of the pilots. He's completed not one tour but two, and then volunteers for a third, even though he's newly married. O'Brien allows him one more mission before he's transferred to a desk. Every perceptive viewer will know immediately that Stack is doomed.The comedy -- or rather the attempt at comedy -- is provided by Tom D'Andrea, a master sergeant who connives to get leave and return cats to their owners, who are all beautiful young English babes. The device isn't funny but D'Andrea's characterization is so reasonable that it's effective.Finally, D Day arrives, the big push, and the pilots can't wait to get at those Germans. Somewhere in his voluminous works, Stephen Ambrose characterizes the French citizens of Normandy as sullen, as contrasted with the sunny disposition of the residents of southern France, Ambrose treats it as a regional difference in temperament. What he doesn't seem to realize, and what this film illustrates, is that we demolished the northern coast of France and killed innumerable French citizens in the process. Whole towns disappeared under a torrent of Allied bombs. We see gun-camera footage of P-47s shooting up everything on the ground, from flak towers to locomotives. What is always left out of these sequences is one in which a French farmer in a small cart is trotting his single horse at top speed down a dirt road and cart, driver, and animal explode in a roiling cloud of .50 caliber dust. We don't object to seeing people die but animals are a different story. Somewhere in the ether a documentary is floating around, shown on PBS about twenty years ago, called "Fighter Pilot," narrated by Ken Aaronson of Minnesota, who flew P-47s on ground missions. If you can find it, it will give you a realistic picture of what life was like for the pilots we see having such a good time in this movie.Walsh rushes them through their hours of relaxation. They're always shouting, laughing, insulting, cuffing each other, gambling, drinking. And they do it all vivacissimo. There's hardly a moment's pause in the speech or the action. The dialog is straight out of a World War II flag waver like John Wayne's "Flying Tigers." "Hold it, Fritzie, I got something for you." "Compliments of Lieutenant Ross." "I've been workin' on the railroad." "Hitler, you'll get a bang out of this." "No dice, Hardin. Tell Helen I was thinking of her." The German pilots, in contrast, are all angry, hunch over their controls, and curse furiously, "Ach! Du lieber Scheisskerln!" or whatever.The Germans fly late-model P-51s painted gray with big swastikas. The Americans fly their huge P-47s, bright aluminum with vividly colored cowlings. RAF pilots used to joke about the "jugs" that they were so big that, under fire, a pilot could leave the cockpit and run around inside the fuselage to escape the enemy bullets. They were huge. But they were powerful too and heavily armed.The combat footage is all from gun cameras and newsreels. At the time of the movie's release, this footage was still a novelty. Currently, CGIs are more effective, but that doesn't detract from the excitement generated by the scenes in the air. Once you get past the cartoon quality of the story itself, you may enjoy it. It's pretty colorful and undemanding stuff.

sol1218 ***SPOILERS*** Rip roaring war movie about the US Army Air Force in action over Nazi occupied Europe from the fall of 1943 up until the D-Day invasion on June 6,1944. It's during that period of time the fly boys naturalized the dreaded German Luftwaffe making it possible for the D-Day invasion to be successfully pulled off. With almost no German combat planes available to stop the invasion force from landing on the beaches of Normandy France countless thousands of allied casualties were prevented from occurring! Thus making the dangerous cross channel invasion a smashing success. But it was a heavy price that the US Air Force paid in achieving that: The lost of over 1,700 combat planes, shot down and damaged beyond repair, and almost 8,000 airmen killed wounded and captured.The movie centers around top USAAF Ace Maj. Ed Hardin, Edmound O'Brien, a former member of the legendary Flying Tiger who's going it alone tactics, in breaking formation to go after enemy planes, ended up costing his wing man's life. Threatened with a court martial for disobeying orders Hardin instead is put in command of his fighter squadron hoping that it would straighten him out. As expected Hardin, now a colonel, become the very company man that he resented when he was just a run of the mill combat pilot. In fact he becomes even more hard nosed then the hard nosed and by the books leader of the squadron Col.Bill Brickly, John Rodney,that he replaced!Great war footage taken by actual combat gunnery film cameras in both the European and Pacific theaters of war with the US Army Air Force fighter pilots blasting the enemy planes ships tanks and even locomotives sky high in vivid and deadly, not living, color. We also get to see Col.Hardin doing his thing as squadron leader in not only shooting Germen Me-109's out of the sky but getting his men, who really didn't need it, motivated to do the very same thing. The one mistake that Col. Hardin did that almost made him lose it, in telling his commanding officer off, was letting his good friend Capt. Stu Hamilton, Robert Stack, go on just one last mission after he come back from the states happily married to his childhood sweetheart Ann. In knowing that Stu wasn't exactly the same person that he was, brave gong-ho and suicidal, before he was married Stu with a German Me-109 on his tail thought of Ann for just a split second instead of thinking in how to get out of the German fighter's gun site! That's all it took to have Capt.Stu Hamilton end up being a dead instead of live US fighter pilot!Besides the great action scenes in the movie we also have some nice comic relief with the womanizing US Army air Force supply Sgt. Dolan, Tom D'Andrea, who uses a black cat,that spooks the airmen, that he himself snuck onto the air base as an excuse to get to the nearest town, by finding the cat a home, so he can keep up his fooling around with the local English female population! That's until his photo is printed in the local papers, with Sgt. Dolan's approval, and all the women that he promised to marry and later deserted storm the air base, shotgun & pitchfork in hand, gunning for him!P.S The film "Fighter Squadron" is also the first film to feature Jack Larson as US Army Air Force pilot Let. "Shorty" Kirk who was to later become Jimmy Olsen cub reporter in the TV hit series "The Advantures of Superman". And last but not least the film also introduced to the movie going public future Hollywood leading man the tall dark and raggedly handsome Rock Hudson as one of the member of Col. Hardin's fighter squadron. Hudson was so green in his acting ability at the time that it took some 38 takes for him to say the only line of dialog he had in the movie! "All that says he doesn't"!

WarnersBrother I just want to add this to all the excellent technical comment by others, because I am surprised that no one else has said this: "Fighter Squadron" is the third filming of the plot for "The Dawn Patrol", which Warner's made in 1930 and again in 1938 (both are excellent, by the way). The setting basically switches from WWI to WW2, and some changes are made to accommodate the postwar audience. I THINK this was recycled for a Korean war title as well, but can't recall the name, so don't quote me.A personal note: I, too am a former Air Force pilot from the '70s/'80s (F4E, then F-15), and this movie was one of the ones that made me want to fly when I saw it on TV as a kid, along with the great lost "I Wanted Wings".So the heck with the technical details, once I hear that Max Steiner score, I'm ready to settle down for a great popcorn movie!