This is not just a B-feature with second rate actors making the best of a dreary story about bombing in bad weather and meeting with disaster, but actually a very interesting drama with many significant ingredients. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this film is the music, as this film introduced Chet Baker, and he plays the trumpet quite a lot in the beginning. John Ireland makes a good job as the "true grit" captain, and all the other actors are excellent as well. This group of fliers are stationed on Okinawa in 1952 and having a dull time, when they get the assignment of bombing a strategic bridge in North Korea, because this is the Korea war. The mission is carried out with looming complications and some unnecessary risk-taking, and there are casualties. So there is a significant tragic element as well. But it's a first class drama, although generally brushed aside and neglected as second rate, but it will hold a position on par with the two John Wayne aircraft disaster films some years earler, but it's Chet Baker and that trumpeter that you will remember.
