Like most people, I absolutely can't stand math. It has a huge amount of formulas and aspects needing to be memorized, and it unfortunately goes hand in hand with many daily activities. You need it when you're shopping, you need it if you're an architect, and believe it or not, you need it in a war. People like to think that guns are very dangerous because they take little skill to use, but this world war 2 era film show everyone that even something as simple as aiming is a lot of hard work. During the war, american bombers pounded nazi germany from the skies in a merciless air campaign to cripple its industries and ability to wage war. German pilots, forced to fight over their own skies, found that american bombers were extremely sturdy aircraft and difficult to bring down with anything smaller than a 30 millimeter cannon firing explosive projectiles. American bomber crews had a large amount of machine guns to operate inside their planes, leading to the b-17s being called flying fortresses. This short goes over the difficulties involved with firing at german fighter planes coming in to shoot you down. It is really complicated. The film explains that you must lead your targets so that the enemy plane will fly into your hail of bullets by the time they get there. If you wait until the plane gets close enough before you fire, you'll have already missed. The bullets also take on the forward velocity of the aircraft the gun is mounted on, meaning if the other plane is flying right at the side of yours and you shoot dead center, the bullets will fly to the left of him and miss. The film uses the analogy of a paperboy having to throw papers slightly before his bicycle reaches the front door of the target house. If you wait until you're in front of the house you're aiming at and throw, you'll hit the side of the next house. Gunners during the war also utilized what is called deflection shooting, which means taking into account the speed and angle of the approaching plane and adjusting your aim accordingly. A plane that is flying head on with yours is not tracking laterally across the sky and can thus be considered a stationary target (basically). The hardest deflection shots are at 90 degrees, which means the plane you're shooting at is perpendicular with yours and heading straight across from your position. Planes are also very flat targets if not turning towards or away from you. Lastly, the film explains how things are often different from how they appear depending on where your viewpoint is, meaning that a plane which looks like it's trying to latch onto the bomber's tail may dive underneath it instead to avoid the arc of gunfire. Overall, this short film involves some really complex concepts that are required to get used to if you wanted to successfully defend yourself in the skies over germany in ww2. It also had more humor in it than I was expecting for a war film, not to mention the cartoon character featured is voiced by Mel Blanc.
2 Reviews
Position Firing is a fascinating military training cartoon film from the days of World War II
tavm25 January 2018
Just watched this-an originally classified training cartoon film short-on YouTube. It features the voice of Mel Blanc as "Trigger Joe" who is on a plane with an attached gun with a crystal ball on it as a radar for aiming at enemy aircraft. But that other plane breaks that ball and almost kills Joe so the narrator tells him the proper way to aim his target with the visual aid meant to teach the untrained enlisted people in the audience the same thing. Good humor mixed with the serious teaching make this quite a fascinating curio for anyone interested in these kind of things. So that's a good recommendation for Position Firing.
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