Winning Your Wings

James Stewart is absolutely charming as "Wild Blue Yonder" plays and he taxis up the run-way and hops out of a B17 bomber in uniform complete with wings. He is the sole voice of this 20 minute short from 1942 about why young men should sign up for the Army Air Corps ASAP. He talks to actors portraying college students, high school students, men who didn't finish their college degrees, and an average Joe working at a gas station.

Stewart tells all of these guys that their stations in life - no college, some college, waiting to get out of college - is no bar to getting into the Army Air Corps. But he does mention that business of getting your name pulled out of a fish bowl - aka "drafted" - as a kind of added incentive to join up. One surprising fact - that in this "greatest mass mobilization in history" you could join the Air Corps and finish your degree as a reservist, then become a regular airman.

The short shows much of how America wanted to see itself in 1942 - Stewart shows a dramatization of a young man who just signed up leaving home. He says goodbye to his parents, his aunt, his sister, and "that sweet young thing" next door. Hey, did we just segue into an Andy Hardy film? Nope, the airman to be is too tall to be Mickey Rooney.

Stewart then goes into detail about the jobs that must be done on the ground and in the air to keep 'em flying. On board the plane - radio man, engineer, navigator, bombardier, photographer. He mentions that all get their wings, and all are an important part of a team. This is probably to not get the recruit's hopes up that he will be a pilot.

Stewart was a great salesman for joining up. After all, a tremendously popular actor in 1941, he quit his movie career to join the Army Air Corps himself, having to practically make himself ill eating pound cake and drinking milk so he would meet the minimum weight for enlisting. He retired as a brigadier general in 1968.

This is worth your time to see the tremendous charm of James Stewart and how his love for the Air Corps comes shining through, and as a bit of history on what the Air Corps looked like at the beginning of WWII.