Apparently during WWII, in 1943, Walt Disney made a pet project, full-length feature film entirely dedicated to advocating that the US pursue long-range strategic bombing. Essentially a two-hour argument, Victory Through Air Power was not commercially successful, but it was successful with its core audience: FDR. According to the story, it was only after a viewing of the film that FDR fully committed to long-range bombing as a strategy.
If true, how odd, that Walt Disney may have seriously influence the US military strategy in such a profound and consequential way.
2 comments:
That is seriously strange.
I actually watched the whole thing last night -- which is to say I let it play on youtube while I sat at my desk addressing christmas cards.
It's funny, because most of the tactical points they were making in cartoon-form seem so trite and obvious that they are not even worth making arguments for. It's like listening to someone make a serious and earnest and urgent case for the correlation of smoke and fire. But you have to remember that at this stage in the war, not only was victory not assured (it was 1943) but things were looking pretty bleak, and this tactic of strategic bombing was novel and untried. Most people assumed that it was going to take an invasion of germany and japan to win the wars.
Also prescient in a non-classified sort of way was an allusion to the nuclear bomb, though it's pretty clear that Walt knew nothing of it, but just had faith in the powers of science to come up with better and better weapons.
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