Hacker Cinema
Battle of Britain
1969 · Film · 132 min
Directed by Guy Hamilton
In 1940, the Royal Air Force fights a desperate battle against the might of the Luftwaffe for control of the skies over Britain, thus preventing an attempted Nazi invasion.
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11 comments on Hacker News
None of the history classes in grade/high school I attended advanced after 1900.
However, I knew a lot about WW2 because my dad (and relatives) was heavily involved in it, and also became a historian when he left the AF. He had a mountain of history books, mostly about aviation and WW2. I read some of them, and watched movies like "The Blue Max" and "The Battle of Britain", the "World At War" series, and so on. There are also endless WW2 documentaries on TV.
My neighbor was a paratrooper who lost his leg, my dad's best friend was a P-51 pilot who had his face burned off in combat. WW2 vets were everywhere. They're all dead now, and WW2 is ancient history.
The amusing thing is that those angled panels with lots of blinking lights that show up in so many movies are not the computer itself, or even its control or maintenance panels. Those are the modems for talking to remote sites.
They're available for rental from Woody's Props in North Hollywood.[1]
Some of the battle consoles and computer consoles with big round screens can be seen at the Computer Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Here's what seems to be the best description of what SAGE actually did.[2]
For comparison, here's a rarely seen WWII film: "Secrets of the Filter Room".[2] This shows a WWII manual tracking center, with dozens of people with headsets frantically updating a map of what's going on, while others in a balcony look at the map and make tactical decisions. Such centers appear in other movies, such as "Battle of Britain", but usually in simplified form. This one explains in detail how the room worked. You can see how they've hit the limits of what could be done with human map updating. There's no more room for more people around the map table, and they're already in each other's way.
The basic constraint of WWII air defense - fighters could not stay up for very long. Spitfires had fuel for maybe 20 minutes once they found the enemy. They had to be launched when the enemy was in range, and guided to the enemy by ground control, or they'd be forced to land to refuel without ever finding the enemy, accomplishing nothing. Thus these insanely complex manual ground control systems. Air Marshall Dowdling came up with the system. Winning the Battle of Britain required both the heroes in the air and the system on the ground.
SAGE was the first mechanization of all that.
[1] https://woodysprops.com/item.php?uid=122&page=4
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06drBN8nlWg
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGwUn07EHmg
Battle of Britain isn't the best from a narrative perspective, but damn is it a fun watch anyway.
My other favorite air war movies I've made it to so far are Twelve O'Clock High with its beautiful flying fortresses (they belly landed one of them! For the movie! For real!), extremely well-integrated war footage, and clear action (compare to the muddled, ugly mess that is The Dambusters); and Wings—how, how on Earth did they get such good aerial photography that early? And the miniature work isn't bad, either.
I've somehow heard of neither of your first two mentions, but will be checking them both out soon.
I like aviation movies. Consider:
1. The Blue Max
2. Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines
The special effects in them were - they built flying replicas of the airplanes used in the films! Can you imagine that happening today?
Two great and very special movies. Both made in the 1960s.
A special mention for Battle of Britain - they didn't build replicas, but dredged up the last remaining flying Me-109s and Spits and, well, seeing and hearing them fly is glorious.
When we lived in Deutschland in the 70s, my Dad would joke that the "D" sticker on German cars meant "Drag racing" as the Germans drove with their foot on the floor. He would putt putt along the autobahn at an agonizingly slow pace.
I asked him why he didn't enjoy driving fast. He replied that he'd firewalled Mustangs and SabreJets on the deck, and driving fast on the autobahn was boring in comparison.
If you vote for me for Governor of the state, I'll get some autobahns here in the US!
P.S. If you ever watch "The Battle of Britain" movie, in the first combat scene you'll see an Me109 flying balls-to-the-wall at about 10 feet off the ground. Incredibly fun, and incredibly dangerous. No model work with that shot.
P.P.S sometimes you'd see jets hedge-hopping over the countryside. I asked why didn't the citizens complain about that, he said they understood why the pilots had to train that way.
All of the "red leader" stuff is directly lifted from another film - the Battle of Britain (1969) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064072/. Watch the dogfight sequence and see if it doesn't remind you of Star Wars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk5gMaCq8GE
Very much off on this tangent. One of my favourite pieces of trivia in movies concerns the 1969 film Battle of Britain where Kesselring, a German field marshall, almost ironically gives Goring a Nazi salute following their defeat. This detail lead to strong disagreement. From wikipedia: "During filming, Galland, who was acting as a German technical advisor, took exception to a scene where Kesselring is shown giving the Nazi salute, rather than the standard military salute. Journalist Leonard Mosley witnessed Galland spoiling the shooting and having to be escorted off the set. Galland subsequently threatened to withdraw from the production, warning "dire consequences for the film if the scene stayed in."
This is a really cool write-up. Another thing that might be of interest was the performance of the aircraft. There's a guy in Texas with 6 non-flying 109s, a couple P-51s, and some other stuff for sale as a lot. He's a former stunt pilot, flew in the movie 'Battle of Britain' and several others.
In his words, the 109 handled much better at the limit than the P-51. The P-51 could dive and go very fast, but with poor control. In his opinion the 109 was the superior aircraft.
Not sure if it relates at all to the prop discussion, but maybe in the grand scheme of engineering? Those warbirds are fascinating pieces of hardware to me.
I went to a college of liberal arts and sciences. There was a big load of required humanities courses, but the college had a relatively good physics department and a terrific math department. And math and physics were my interests: So, I majored in math and had nearly a major in physics.
For the humanities, they claimed to teach about people, but at the time I couldn't see that they were doing at all well at that, and later I concluded that actually the humanities are not at all good about teaching about people, e.g., get as much that is wrong as right and, really, darned little good insight, but that parts of clinical psychology could teach some important and reasonably credible lessons about people.
I really liked music, and the record collection in the library was terrific, but I never took a course in music -- later started violin and made some okay progress eventually.
But for the humanities courses I took, i.e., was force fed, I came to hate as nonsense, misleading about people, and otherwise a waste of time.
E.g., history: I wanted to learn some about history, but the history course was absurd, from some pompous, pretentious text with no overview and otherwise nearly impenetrable. And the darned course took so much time before year 1 that it never got to the 20th or even the 19th centuries. Bummer. Finally I learned some about history from some books and some relatively serious TV documentaries, e.g., Victory at Sea, The Battle of Britain. The courses? Bummers.
In the history courses, I wanted to learn why, that is, the causes or at least the candidate causes -- metals, domesticated animals, open ocean sailing, relatively productive crops, etc., but the courses essentially ignored all concepts of causes. Bummer.
Overall, IMHO, the humanities are suffering from lack of good methodology. In particular, their results are open to a lot of individual interpretation and definite maybes, and it's tough to have the work be cumulative in any very useful sense.
That's really awesome!
Although the nitpicker in me has to point out that the film is heavily edited to fit the dialogue (there's a shot at about 3'25" where you can see them bombing a paper cross pinned to the cliff which is taken from earlier in the film when 633 squadron are training in the Scottish highlands).
I remember reading somewhere that many of the dog fights in Star Wars were copied from the film The Battle Of Britain, but then that, 633 Squadron and many other classic British war movies were made by people who actually fought in the war. If you want a film to look realistic, and you weren't there yourself, copying from films made by those who were is probably the next best thing.
In
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2267731
I argue that the article is just politics.
Still, education is important.
Since we are on 'Hacker News' (HN), there is some considerable irony in this article:
In computing now, the workers in information technology commonly need to understand subjects such as:
algorithms, programming languages, frameworks, development environments, user interface design and development, programming for application installation, operating system administration, networking and network administration, relational database and its administration, code repositories, application instrumentation, system monitoring, many utilities and applications, software as a service, the Cloud, the social graphs and interest graphs on the Internet, how to start a company, how to raise venture capital, how to manage software development, etc.
The content of these subjects changes significantly each 12 months.
To keep up, workers need their own 'computer center' and educational resources and mostly just must teach themselves, that is, without teachers. In particular, formal courses are nearly useless because the teachers are rarely up to date on this material.
This pattern has been rock solid for nearly all parts of the US computer industry going way back to punched cards.
Net, the readers of HN overwhelmingly learn independently and are self-taught using their own time, money, and effort.
So, claims by the formal education community in K-12 and college that their classroom instruction is crucial for education is an ironic, ROFL at HN.
But HN readers are not the only ones: (1) An auto mechanic has to keep up with the new systems on the new cars. (2) Workers in construction of houses and small commercial buildings have to keep up with new materials, construction techniques, and regulations. (3) Recently chefs in high end restaurants had to learn about 'molecular gastronomy', 'tasting menus', and intricate 'wine parings'. (4) CPAs and tax lawyers need to keep up on the tax law changes.
Workers in a huge fraction of the US economy have to keep up in their fields, independently, via self-teaching, and most of this work uses their time, effort, and money.
So, let's return to K-12: Basically what is needed from K-12 is at least, by age 18, to be able to (A) read with understanding materials commonly encountered, (B) write clearly, e.g., as well as on HN, and (C) know basic arithmetic, percentages, areas, and volumes.
Now we come to some simple facts: Joe gets sick and stays home from school for three weeks. His grandmother notices that he can't read so, in those three weeks, teaches him to read. Later she does the same for (B) writing and (C) basic math. This situation is common. Basically, normal kids can pick up the 3Rs with astounding speed. Just how they do it is not clear at all, and research on 'teaching techniques' is not promising but also mostly not needed.
The K-12 system should be able to get this teaching done by the eighth grade. So, to know, sure, give some tests. Simple enough.
But, K-12 does try to do more. Especially important topics include math through analytic geometry and trigonometry, biology, chemistry, physics, and history. For these subjects, sadly, the K-12 teachers rarely know enough of the material to teach it well. Even the K-12 'experts' don't: I understand calculus quite well, thank you (learned it at several levels, taught it, applied it, published peer-reviewed original research based on it), but the people who wrote the AP calculus materials did not. Sad. To learn calculus, just get any edition of the dozen or so college calculus texts famous over the last few decades, dig in, and f'get about AP calculus.
Yes, it would be good to teach some art. Sadly, apparently they don't. There may be more on how art works just in, say,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2246723
In the article the teacher said:
"I’m used to wild and crazy discussions about amazing novels."
"Amazing novels"? Eventually I had to conclude that, according to the standards of information safety and efficacy well established in the first half of the 20th century, novels are at most for light entertainment so that the set of all "amazing novels" is the empty set and not worth serious effort. She was largely wasting time; it's sad she didn't know that; but I can believe that most readers of 'The Daily Kos' take novels seriously. Those English majors dragged me through six years of their 'belle lettre' nonsense when I wanted to study much more in math and science. Bummer.
So, what K-12 does with these additional subjects is at best mixed.
So, net, our K-12 system is heavily for baby sitting. We shouldn't have to pay a lot for baby sitting.
So, what about education?
HN Style Solution: Put good materials on the Internet. So have careful, detailed text in PDF files. Have some lectures by some good people. And by some experts, have some lectures with some intuitive descriptions that explain the 'forest' so well that the 'trees' become mostly obvious.
With good materials, a good student could knock off grades 7-12 independently in maybe three weeks per grade except that foreign languages typically would extend the time. But, with good materials, can do well with a foreign language surprisingly quickly.
Then for 'more' in fuzzy topics such as art, human behavior, organizational behavior, civics, politics, just have some excellent lectures on the Internet and maybe some fora.
E.g., for a curiously good start on both music and painting, in one stroke, just spend right at 10 minutes with
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7prUFflX0_E
Likely a good start on art history is the 1969 TV series 'Civilization' by Kenneth Clark. There is also a book, but the video alone is fine.
Actually, for some good material in history, there are some starts: Some of the best material on the history of the 20th century is in some selected movies; it's not common to find better materials in print, and it is nearly impossible to find materials nearly as good in K-12 or the first two years of college.
E.g., the movie 'The Battle of Britain' is relatively good on its subject. Actual dates, numbers of planes, pilots, and bombs per day along with 'logistics' would help but are generally ignored by all of the history community.
The movie 'Midway' is relatively good on its subject, a turning point in the war in the Pacific and basically for the reasons made clear in the movie. The Charlton Heston character should be cut out. The timing, crucial, of the actual events in the battle should be made more clear. Details on times, distances, and speeds would help, yes, typically ignored by the history community. Still the movie is relatively good.
The series 'Victory at Sea' was a lot of US flag waving but still does provide a good outline of a lot of WWII.
The movie 'The Longest Day' is awash in 'entertainment values' but, still, does cover the essentials of D-Day.
The hugely long:
William L. Shirer, 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition', ISBN 0-671-72868-7, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1981.
actually is surprisingly sparse on important content.
Sadly the biographies of Eisenhower and Patton are so far from the actual details that they are not good. Bradley's biography is better (but nothing like the character Bradley in the movie 'Patton').
Net, what K-12 is teaching in history is below what is readily available just by watching some movies for a few evenings.
Net, for formal education in K-12 and the first two years of college, it's a huge waste of time, money, and effort for all concerned and can mostly be replaced by good materials (mostly not yet available but easily could be) on the Internet, thus, letting students get on with independent learning in areas of their interests and/or more advanced formal education.
People should say, "I want good education, but I'm not going to pay a lot for what's in K-12 and the first two years of college now."