Hacker Cinema
Victory Through Air Power
1943 · Film · documentary · 65 min
Directed by Jack Kinney, Clyde Geronimi, James Algar, H. C. Potter
Based on the book by Major Alexander de Seversky's about his theories of the practical uses of long range strategic bombing. Using a combination of animation humorously telling about the development of air warfare, the film shows de Seversky illustrating his ideas of how air power could win World War II for the Allies.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Wow. Seversky was the guy advocating for long-range air power in WWII. He wrote Victory Through Air Power, which inspired Disney to finance an animated film on the subject out of his own pocket. Seversky appears in person in the film to introduce some concepts. The film is just amazing. It was available as part of a Disney DVD compilation quite a few years ago (Disney in the Trenches? [edit to correct title of box set: it was "Walt Disney Treasures - On the Front Lines"]). The standalone film is on archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/VictoryThroughAirPower
Edit to add: Here's the Wikipedia page about Victory Through Air Power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power
From the page:
Filmmaker Walt Disney read the book, and felt that its message was so important that he would personally finance a partly-animated short, also called Victory Through Air Power, which was released in July 1943.[3] Disney's purpose for creating the film was to promote Seversky's theories to government officials and the public. After seeing the film, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt decided that Seversky knew what he was talking about, changing the course of the war.
Fantastic article, thanks for sharing. Also, this little bit, "... I really wanted to talk about WarGames because it’s the one movie I can think of that’s had the most direct influence on any technology policy issue." made me think of another film, which I would argue had a great effect on technology policy. The film was Disney's "Victory Through Air Power" [1]. (See, specifically, the "impact" section [2] of the Wikipedia article.)
The film is an astonishing piece of animation (which in places resembles an almost manga style), education and propaganda. I cannot recommend it highly enough and it is available at the Internet Archive [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power_(film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power_(film)#Impact
[3] https://archive.org/details/VictoryThroughAirPower
After the recent postings about various nuclear weapons, I went down a wiki-fork-bomb and came across this, the "Disney Bomb". According to TFA anecdotally this bomb and even category of bombs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_bomb) was inspired or even triggered by a propaganda movie produced by Disney studios (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Through_Air_Power_(film)).
This arms race in bomb and armor development is fascinating and terrifying at the same time. One place where this is seen very clear is in how armored vehicles (afv, tanks, etc) and their armor develops over time compared to the kind of rounds that is conventional at the time. For example, I was surprised that explosive reactive armor wasn't as efficient by itself nowadays since it's common to use very long, hard, needle-like projectiles that aren't as affected by ERA. Some tanks try to alleviate this by introducing a large void space and distance between layers in which the "needle" will tumble, losing lots of energy. See eg the turret front armor of the strv122 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stridsvagn_122). That angled thing is mostly empty air.