One of a series of newsreels produced by Official Films during WWII, this film features news events of 1942. It begins with coverage of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s departure from the Philippines, Gen. Stillwell and Chiang Kai-shek in Burma, the famous Flying Tigers operating in China, an Allied convoy repelling an Axis attack, British planes bomb Paris, the British occupy Madagascar and the Battle of Midway in the Pacific.
The Flying Tigers were a mercenary flying force from the USA, active prior to Pearl Harbor, after which they were co-opted into the US armed forces. The 1st American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941–1942, nicknamed the Flying Tigers, was composed of pilots from the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC), Navy (USN), and Marine Corps (USMC), recruited under presidential authority and commanded by Claire Lee Chennault. The ground crew and headquarters staff were likewise mostly recruited from the U.S. military, along with some civilians.
The group consisted of three fighter squadrons with about 20 aircraft each. It trained in Burma before the American entry into World War II with the mission of defending China against Japanese forces. Arguably, the group was a private military contractor, and for that reason the volunteers have sometimes been called mercenaries[citation needed]. The members of the group had lucrative contracts with salaries ranging from $250 a month for a mechanic to $750 for a squadron commander, roughly three times what they had been making in the U.S. forces.
The Tigers’ shark-faced fighters remain among the most recognizable of any individual combat aircraft and combat unit of World War II, and they demonstrated innovative tactical victories when the news in the U.S. was filled with little more than stories of defeat at the hands of the Japanese forces.
Official Films was a home movie distributor founded by Leslie Winik in 1939 to produce educational shorts. Soon, after buying the Keystone Chaplin library, they found themselves in the home movie business. They obtained several dozen Van Beuren cartoons.
Official retitled the Van Beuren cartoons and changed the name of Cubby Bear to “Brownie Bear”. The human Tom and Jerry characters were renamed “Dick and Larry” to avoid confusion with the cat and mouse Tom and Jerry from MGM.
In addition to cartoons, Official also offered a number of sports films, newsreels, and specialties including a souvenir film of the 1939 New York World’s Fair (which remained available until around 1980) and “The Broadway Handicap,” a home-movie-board-game combination with a horse-racing theme.
During the 1940s, Official was acquired by Robert R. Young’s Pathe Industries; through which it obtained home movie rights to the Young-owned Producers Releasing Corporation’s westerns and B-pictures.
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. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com
