Dating to August of 1945, this Army Air Forces newsreel is one of the very last in a series made during WWII. The film begins at :30 with footage of some of the first helicopters to ever enter a combat zone. These are R-4 choppers which were sent to China via C-47 Skytrain and assembled in the field. The Sikorsky R-4 was a two-seat helicopter designed by Igor Sikorsky with a single, three-bladed main rotor and powered by a radial engine. The R-4 was the world’s first large-scale mass-produced helicopter and the first helicopter used by the United States Army Air Forces, United States Navy, and United States Coast Guard and the United Kingdom′s Royal Air Force and Royal Navy.
On 22–23 April 1944, U.S. Army Lieutenant Carter Harman of the 1st Air Commando Group conducted the first combat rescue by helicopter using a YR-4B in the China-Burma-India theater. Despite the high altitude, humidity, and capacity for only a single passenger, Harman rescued a downed liaison aircraft pilot and his three British soldier passengers, two at a time.
At 1:58, B-29s are seen undergoing conversion in the field into transport aircraft, which can carry 39 troops inside in bomb bays and interior pressure hull.
At 3:19, the destruction of Nurnberg / Nuremberg is seen, after raided by Allied aircraft. The camera’s unblinking eye reveals mile after mile of destroyed buildings and a virtual wasteland.
At 5:40, a Japanese bomb-carrying balloon is seen being shot down by an American fighter aircraft. At 7:00, a balloon is seen intact as it was found on the ground. The entire assembly is seen in the following segment, including the battery that powered the unit at 7:40. A fire balloon or Fu-Go was a weapon launched by Japan during World War II. A hydrogen balloon with a load varying from a 15 kg (33 lb) antipersonnel bomb to one 12-kilogram (26 lb) incendiary bomb and four 5 kg (11 lb) incendiary devices attached, it was designed as a cheap weapon intended to make use of the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean and drop bombs on American and Canadian cities, forests, and farmland. The Japanese fire balloon was the first ever weapon possessing intercontinental range (the second being the Convair B-36 Peacemaker and the third being the R-7 ICBM). The Japanese balloon strikes on North America were at that time the longest ranged attacks ever conducted in the history of warfare, a record which was not broken until the 1982 Operation Black Buck raids during the Falkland Islands War. The balloons were ineffective as weapons but were used in one of the few attacks on North America during World War II. In February and March 1945, P-40 fighter pilots from 133 Squadron, Royal Canadian Air Force operating out of RCAF Patricia Bay (Victoria, British Columbia), intercepted and destroyed two fire balloons, On February 21, Pilot Officer E. E. Maxwell While shot down a balloon, which landed on Sumas Mountain, in Washington State. On March 10, Pilot Officer J. O. Patten destroyed a balloon near Saltspring Island, British Columbia. On March 10, 1945, one of the last paper balloons descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project’s production facility at the Hanford Site. This balloon caused a short circuit in the power lines supplying electricity for the nuclear reactor cooling pumps, but backup safety devices restored power almost immediately. Two paper balloons were recovered in a single day in Modoc National Forest, east of Mount Shasta. Near Medford, Oregon, a balloon bomb exploded in towering flames. The Navy found balloons in the ocean. Balloon envelopes and apparatūs were found in Montana and Arizona, and inside Canada in Saskatchewan, in the Northwest Territories, and in the Yukon Territory. Eventually, an Army fighter managed to push one of the balloons around in the air and force it to ground intact, where it was examined and filmed. Japanese propaganda broadcasts announced great fires and an American public in panic, declaring casualties in the thousands.
The film ends with a segment about the Atomic Bomb at 8:00. Test footage is seen from Alamogordo and the Trinity Test site.
We encourage viewers to add comments and, especially, to provide additional information about our videos by adding a comment! See something interesting? Tell people what it is and what they can see by writing something for example like: “01:00:12:00 — President Roosevelt is seen meeting with Winston Churchill at the Quebec Conference.”
This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
