The Rear Gunner

During WWII, various studios made short films for the US military--both to be shown to the American public and to soldiers serving on the front. And, in many of them, various Hollywood actors who were in the service starred in these pictures. Here, Burgess Meredith, Ronald Reagan, Dane Clark and Tom Neal all contribute to making this film for the war effort.

Meredith plays Pee Wee Williams, a private who hates working on the ground crew for the US Army Air Corps and eventually he gets a chance to to to gunnery school, as he wants to be a gunner on one of the bombers. Now it's never said in the film, but this was one of the most dangerous assignments during the war, as tons of bomber crews were killed...and had Pee Wee been thinking only of his life, he would have stayed working with the ground crew! But the film is supposed to encourage patriotism and sacrifice, so Pee Wee is eager and excels during his time in gunnery school and eventually joins the crew of a B-24 bomber.

While many propaganda shorts are high on patriotism and terrible on realism, this one actually is very well made and lacks the over the top jingoism you might expect. My only complaints are minor...such as the use of grainy stock footage late in the story and the relative easy the gunners seemed to have in knocking own Japanese fighter planes. Otherwise, it holds up well when seen today.

By the way, most of the 'Japanese' fighter planes in the film were actually American A-6 Texans, a slow plane used to train pilots.