Builders,
Here is a companion piece to Thought for the Day: “12 O’clock High”. The Best Years of our Lives is a 1946 movie, an unflinching look at the lives of three men returning home from WWII. It was widely hailed as a masterpiece, winning 9 Academy Awards, but today 70 years later, it is gone from the national awareness.
.
If you have never seen it, I highly recommend it. It really isn’t just a WWII film, the messages in it are timeless. The craft work of the film, the direction, the shooting and sound stand up decades later. Many people consider it Dana Andrews finest performance, but the film is captured by Harold Russell who had never acted before. He was a WWII veteran who lost his hands in an explosives accident. In the film he offers a brutally honest look at a disabled veteran returning to his home, family and fiancée, now a young man without hands. It is very difficult to watch.
.
.
Opening scene of the film, where the three men are flying home in a B-17, to an uneasy welcome in the town they left. It turns out that it hasn’t changed at all, but the men are changed and can not find an easy path ‘home’.
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scXCe1i_hJQ
.
Above is a YouTube link to the best remembered part of the film. Dana Andrews, who has returned to find his marriage gone, his job meaningless, and outspoken civilians who mock his service, wanders out into an aircraft graveyard and questions why everything has happened. He walks past hundreds of B-17s and P-39s being scrapped. Sitting in the nose of a B-17 he dissolves into a flashback of being under attack on a bombing run. Listen to how effectively the sound track supports the somber film.
.
————————————
.
Your Aviation Connection: At Oshkosh, our booth is just 100 yards from the Warbird area. We are so busy during the day that I hardly leave the booth, but it stays light very late in the summer months in Wisconsin, and long after the crowds fade away I often walk over to the warbird area and quietly look at the planes. I find it a better setting to consider the struggles their crews faced, both in combat and coming home.
.
—————————————————-
.
If you have the emotional fortitude, read the chapter “Speaking of Courage” in Tim O’Brien’s 1990 book The Things They Carried. Norman, the central character in the chapter, a young Vietnam vet returning to his small Midwestern town is destroyed by his inability to find anyone to listen to a bitter truth he knows. In some of his other writings O’Brien explains the genesis of the chapter, and how post war stories are a different set of experiences. It is the same relationship 12 O’clock high has to The best years of our lives.
.
-ww.
.