Flyboys - Argh!!!!

Underground
1

Anyone see the trailers for the film 'Flyboys', about the Escadrille Lafayette.

I'd always wanted a modern film about the Escadrille to get made but once again, Hollywood has ass-raped my dreams. Just watching the trailer, I was appalled by the historical inaccuracies:

1) The Escadrille pilots are shown flying Nieuport 17's in 1917. In the time period portrayed in the film, the Escadrille had changed over to the SPAD VII.

2) The Germans are shown flying blood red Fokker Dr. I's. The Fokker Dr. I was not that common of an air-craft - it was not extensively used. Blood red Fokkers were mainly flown by Richthofen's Jasta, which mainly flew up in the North against the British.

3) Zeppelins are shown flying in a daylight raid, escorted by Fokkers. Zeppelins mainly operated at night due to their horrible vulnerability to aircraft.

4) Okay - there's a black man flying in the Escadrille. Black americans flew for the French but they did not fly in the Escadrille. I believe the only contact they had with a black american was one of their trainers - a black american sergeant in the French army who some of them referred to as "nigger" in their memoirs.

2

"I'd always wanted a modern film about the Escadrille to get made"

me too.

3

4) While not exactly the same thing, there was a black pilot in the Lafayette Flying Corps, which was the enlarged American volunteer corps.

4

Expecting historical accuracy in movies is a good way to doom yourself to a lifetime of disappointment.

5

jbapk - yes, I know there was a black pilot in the LFC - that's the pilot who is portrayed in the film. For some reason, they felt the need to squish his story and the story of the Lafeyette Escadrille into one putrescent crazy ass anti-gravity dogfight ID4-like mess.

LRC - I don't expect exact historical accuracy in films...but at least give it a good go instead of doing things on a whim because the producers figure the audience will get confused if the Germans aren't all flying blood-red Dr. I's and the American volunteers aren't all wearing the same generic uniform.

6

The movie website actually has a Reel vs Real section where they mention those changes and a few others. That's actually kind of refreshing since lots of producers, directors and stars of "historical" movies seem very reluctant to mention any changes they've made from real history, and take much greater liberties with the story than seems to be the case with this movie.

They've rearranged stories and combined stories, and made it easier to tell the "good guys" from the "bad guys", but it looks like they did a decent job of staying true to the spirit of the story. Hopefully I won't be wrong about that.

It would have been nice though to see other planes mixing it up in the air. Albatrosses and Halberstadts and SPADs, etc.

Oh well I can always break out The Blue Max for some WWI dogfighting...

7

This is from a Yahoo group I belong to.

Last Friday a movie about the WW I Lafayette Escadrille came out,
called "FLYBOYS", I felt that I should notify every Muscogee I can
that the Black American called Eugene Skinner in the movie, in real
life was named Eugene Bullard, he was part CREEK from one of the
Creek towns along the Chattahoochee making him a "lower Creek". He
was raised in Columbus, Georgia.

I have written a short, 20+ pages paper on his life, not quite
complete. I was hoping to write an article for the newspaper, if
there is any interest. I still need some editing.

Eugene Bullard was a French hero in both world wars. He was awarded
the Croix de Guerre for heroism, for brave fighting as an infantry
man at Verdun. The Croix de Guerre is the highest award for bravery
the French have.

The wounds suffered at Verdun would keep him out of the infantry so
he joined the Lafayette Flying Corp. and fought for France in the
sky. Making him the first African-American, and probably the first
Muscogee fighter pilot.

In brief he ran away from home in Columbus, Georgia at age 11,
worked with gypsies, raced horses in Kentucky, stowed away on a
freighter to get to Europe, became a professional boxer, then joined
the French Foreign Legion, became a hero and then became the first
black pilot. After the war was he married the daughter of a
duchess, ran nightclubs and rubbed elbows with Charlie Chaplin,
Louise Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Hemmingway and many others. In
the late 1930's at the very beginning of WW II he became a member
of the "French Underground" but when fighting reached Orleans,
France he was put in charge of a machine gun squad and held the
Germans back until mortar fire wounded him again and his officer
told him to get out of France if the Germans got a hold of him and
found out who he was he would been executed. He escaped threw Spain
and came back to the USA in 1940.

In 1953 Eugene was asked to be one of three French heroes to have
the honor of together re-lighting the internal flame under the Arch-
de-Triumph.

Later in 1959 he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor.

Mr. Bullard died of cancer in 1961.

He had a tremendous life and he was Muscogee (Creek).

8

"Yet he was refused entry to the American army after the war because he was black."

in what country was a civil war fought to end slavery, squatdog? and in what country again were civil rights made law?

flyboys sounds like the perfect flick for you:

There are only two things wrong with Flyboys, directed by Tony Bill and written by Phil Sears, Blake T. Evans and David S. Ward. It doesn't give you any sense of the period, which is the First World War in Europe as experienced by the American fliers of the Lafayette Escadrille, and it doesn't give you any sense of actually being in battle. Other than that, it's a lot of fun.

As for the period, though the film is supposed to be based on real people and real experiences, the American fliers and their French leader, Captain Thenault (Jean Reno), don't come across as young men of the early 20th century but of the early 21st.

We can tell early on that the film means to flatter our prejudices, rather than to persuade us out of them. When the father of the spoiled rich boy, Lowry, refers to the war as a "noble conflict" and tells him that it is "time to do something worthy of your name" he couldn't have proclaimed his villainy more clearly if he had uttered a racial slur.

In general, none of these characters has the experiences or attitudes that would mark them out as being of their era except for Jensen, who takes pride in his family"s military tradition and sees himself as a "knight of the air." Rawlings looks at him with the pitying scorn of our time, not his own. "What?" asks Jensen. "We are. We're like knights."

The lack of appeal to the others of Jensen's self-mythologization as a knight is only one of several indications that the film has imported anachronistic post-war attitudes. Another is the character of Cassidy, the legendary ace who has outlived all his friends and who says to Rawlings in world-weary tones, "I was a lot like you: full of idealism, maybe even a sense of honor. But I realized that this war isn't going to be won by anyone."

So then, asks Rawlings, why fight?

"So I can see that as many of you as possible survive this useless war... You've got to find your own meaning in this war. I would be real disappointed if more of our guys died in vain than the Germans."

Even if it were not impossible that someone could have said this in 1916, it was so much more common for people to say things like it ten or 15 years later that it cannot but strike us as the facile recourse to hindsight that it is.

Such fashionable disillusionment with noble-sounding ideals of honor and chivalry and patriotism has of course become a commonplace since then, but as applied to the events of 1914-1918 themselves it looks out of place.

It's easy to forget that we are looking at those events through the spectacles of the very different world of almost a century later.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10443

9

The French abolished slavery once and for all in 1848, also well in advance of the American Civil War.

Did anyone notice that the black guy in "Flyboys" said that his "daddy" was a slave? Pretty unlikely, chronologically speaking. Grandaddy, sure. Daddy, probably not.

creekwarrior2, any chance of that paper on Eugene Bullard being made available? It sounds really interesting.

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"Also, blacks were SEGREGATED from the white population in America up until the 1960's."

not true. there were some jim crow states until the 1960s. but they don't make up america. public accomodation lawsuits resolved the issue in some northern states in the 1850s.

"Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. This act gave all slaves in the British Empire their freedom."

28 years, actually. well after most slaves were freed in the northern states.

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yet the fact remains that slavery wasn't outlawed in the british empire until 1833 ... at which time the british navy quite admirably swept the trade from the seas.

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Can't mention the abolishiment of the Atlantic slave trade without throwing some kudo's the Evangelical Methodist way. It was the incessant pleading of the EM that changed the Empires policy.

Other factoids regarding slavery:

First American colony to have slavery Mass.

First American colony to try and ban slavery, Virginia.

The year the New Englanders stopped trafficing in black Ivory, 1885.

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"First American colony to have slavery Mass."

source? I think maryland beat it. I assume you mean english colony in north america - excluding the islands, the french, and the spanish?

"First American colony to try and ban slavery, Virginia."

they certainly didn't try very hard, did they? maybe a few virginians opposed slavery, but I assume they were burnt out and shipped north.

"The year the New Englanders stopped trafficing in black Ivory, 1885."

it had been a crime for 50 years by then. why just new englanders? do you mean americans? I find this hard to believe. liverpool was the headquarters of the atlantic slave trade.

I know the role New englanders played in the slave trade, pretty dark era of history for all americans. but boston was the headquarters of the american emancipation movement; find it hard to accept that slavers worked out of there 20 years after the civil war!

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Got to run joe, but, NE shipping interest were still running slaves to Brazil til 1885, when Brazil outlawed slavery (without a resulting catastropic "Civil War" either).

15

I liked the part where the Nieuport 17 kept up with the Dr I in a straight climb. It amused me.

It was a fun movie, though.

16

No. Slavery is an indigenous tradition in Africa; what the Europeans did was to tap into existing slave trade networks, which led to an enormous expansion of slave raiding in Africa, which in turn decimated the skill base within the economy and strengthened the warrior classes. You can also make an argument that African slavery was different from later Western varieties because the underlying premise in the economy was different: in Europe, wealth was based on ownership of resources (land); in Africa, where land was plentiful, wealth was based on ownership of labor (slavery). In fact, technically all government officials in most African countries were slaves. But no, the Europeans didn't start African slavery. In fact, they didn't even begin the export of slaves from Africa. That started centuries earlier with Arab slave traders, who brought large numbers of Africans across the Sahara desert to slave markets on the Mediterranean coast.

For a good discussion of the start of the Atlantic slave trade, see Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World.