How Do You Know What To Shoot?: On William Wyler and John Sturges’s “Thunderbolt”

YOU’LL WANT to know how it’s made.

Likely it wasn’t the first war film moviegoers had seen. Delays in production held up the final edits of Thunderbolt until 1947, 75 years ago, which was awkward. The directors, William Wyler and John Sturges, filmed it during the Italian campaign of 1944 as a propaganda film. The idea was to support the Allied war effort in World War II, and in 1947 World War II was unquestionably over. A colder war had just begun, and it required its own specific, more timely propaganda. So the movie needs to justify its existence another way.

Yes, Wyler and Sturges acknowledge, You’ve seen the war… but you haven’t seen how we made the war.

That explains the first scene. Thunderbolt is about a squad of P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, but before we learn even that much, something needs to be cleared up. A pilot sits in the open cockpit of his one-man plane, the bulbous glass canopy shunted back. This movie was filmed in real combat, the narrator announces, his voice a deep, deep bass. The camera pushes in. These are the cameras that filmed it, the camera shows, housed in the very planes that did the fighting.

Two cameras are mounted in the cockpit. “Behind the pilot,” the narrator explains, “shooting [shooting!] forward and back.” That’s just the beginning. The plane, it turns out, is loaded with cameras. One hangs under the wing, placed there to catch the moment that the bomb (also under the wing) is released. Another sits inside the wing itself, “timed,” in the narrator’s words, “with the gun.” (As long we’re timing them, we mustn’t forget that cameras shoot in frames per second and guns in bullets per minute.) There’s a camera pointed down from the wheel well, to film the plane pulling away from the airstrip, and another looking up from the instrument panel, so that the audience can see the pilot’s face as he sees what the cameras see.



Here, in a single frame, lies the heart of the matter: a war machine that also takes pictures. Whether or not they realized it, Wyler and Sturgis made a movie that captured the important and little-remarked-upon fact that the most violent war in history was, among other things, a way of seeing, a way of knowing. This method of knowing, this way of seeing, has a name. We can call it: the epistemology of destruction.

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Already there’s a delightful weirdness, a sense of meta-vertigo. Evidently, Wyler and Sturges felt that in order for the audience to know how the Allies made the war, they also needed to know how they, the directors, made the movie. Production is the theme here, as it was the theme of the war itself. “The war will be won by industrial production,” said Stalin, correctly, and movies are the quintessential art form of industrial society, the Gesamtkunstwerk of the detailed division of labor and heavy capitalization and machine-chemical action. Filmmaking is electrified, centralized, and mechanized. The world’s most expensive paint set, I believe Orson Welles called it.

Waging total war bears a certain kinship to making movies. Neither could happen without the technical apparatus of modernity. Like movies, total wars are produced. And just like with movies, the people who produced the Second World War didn’t know precisely what they were making as they made it. It’s only at dusk that Minerva’s owl takes flight, and only after nightfall that the filmmakers sit down to watch the rushes. (For example, after filming Thunderbolt, Wyler and Sturges discovered that a vast amount of the footage they shot was unusable. The cameras installed in the planes malfunctioned. The timers didn’t go off, or the preset exposures were wrong.) It was a big thing, the war, and no one could take in the whole thing with a single sweep of the eyes. But maybe, thought some, it could be seen from the air?

A movie about making war became a movie about making movies. The question of how you bomb an enemy into defeat collapsed into the equally important question of how you make a movie about bombing an enemy into defeat. For Wyler and Sturges, these became the same question: how do you know what to shoot?

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The sequence fades to black. When the lights come back up, they’re on none other than Jimmy Stewart, ever the avatar of American Goodness.



He sits in an overstuffed leather chair, reading aloud a telegram from Carl Spaatz, one of the architects of the Allied strategic bombing campaign in Europe and the chief of staff of the just-founded United States Air Force. Ventriloquized by the star of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Spaatz speaks of the higher purpose of the Allies in the war, the cause of freedom. This is a ritual of rightness, presided over by the world’s most famous common man and decent guy.

Goodness frames the movie, and, after we’ve been out on a bombing run and back, goodness will be absolutely critical in making it all make sense. With Jimmy Stewart center-frame, not for one instant might you guess that there was anything at all controversial about what the Allies did from the air. For example, you might never guess that, during the Second World War, the Allies committed themselves to a way of knowing the world that required the deaths of hundreds of thousands of noncombatants. Or that they then filmed that way of knowing. Or that this is that film. The paper Jimmy Stewart holds in his hands and from which he reads was folded in half at some point. In his pocket, I imagine.

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The next shot is of Italy in ruins. “To the Italian man in the street,” says the narrator, “or what’s left of the street …” Wait, you might ask yourself, as I did on my sixth or seventh viewing of Thunderbolt. Again? Another introduction? By my count, this is the movie’s third. There was the one about the planes and the cameras, and then the other with Jimmy Stewart about being good. Hasn’t the movie started already?

I don’t fault Wyler and Sturges for this proliferation of introductions. Obviously, they were capable filmmakers. Just watch Roman Holiday or The Great Escape, both of which begin where they should: at the beginning. No, all this extra framing is, rather, an unavoidable consequence of Thunderbolt’s subject. A propaganda movie cannot allow for too much, or really any, ambiguity in its message, and ambiguity haunts the Allied bombing project. It’s going to take a lot of explaining to make a movie about dropping bombs on people inoffensive. Just look at the next shot: an incinerated corpse with leather for flesh and burned-out eyes reclining on a heap of rubble.

All this is the fulfillment of a promise, the narrator tells us. The promise of the fascists. Yes, I think. Yes. But also, of indiscriminate aerial bombardment. It remains unclear to me whether stopping fascists necessitated targeting civilians from the air, although this is precisely the point the movie hopes to glide past, at 400 miles an hour, 10,000 feet in the air.

For indeed, the next shot is from the air. Mountains and rivers roll by like widgets on an assembly line. These mountains blocked the advance of American troops, the narrator says, and much American blood has mingled with the waters of Italy. Natural barriers. From the high gear of goodness, we’ve downshifted to necessity. Kantian metaphysics holds out for the possibility that what is necessary might not be good, but the movie has no time for such subtleties. Necessity will become goodness.

This was the problem: in early 1944, the Allied advance up the Italian Peninsula was stalled in different arrangements of pain. The Gustav Line held in the Apennines, while at Anzio 100,000 Allied soldiers fought with their backs to the sea. This, says the narrator, was why “we” laid ruin to so much of Italy. “This is what we did to the face of Italy,” he says to explain aerial shot after aerial shot of blasted train yards, and smiling vineyards pocked with moon craters, and ancient towns now bone-dead in the sun. “There’s a story behind why we did it, and how we did it,” he says. The story, it turns out, is a day in the life of a squadron. The Aristotelian framing of a story told in a single day has already been sort of ruined by the three expositions, but that’s beside the point.

When dawn breaks on this day, it is in Corsica, and “you” are introduced to the plucky young soldiers who fly the P-47s. (Throughout this story the narrator will refer to “you” as one of the members of the 65th Fighter Squadron of the 57th Fighter Group, which makes the movie feel just a little like a theme park ride, a death-defying adventure that is also perfectly safe.) You pilots start the day like Boy Scouts on their annual camping trip, rousing themselves from their tents, brushing their teeth, scrubbing their faces. Everyone is healthy and shirtless. (Except for a few shots of beleaguered civilians in bombed-out towns, precisely zero women appear in this movie.) The image lingers on the boys washing their half-naked bodies under makeshift showers. They carefully part their hair, their smooth skin shimmering in the heat and their shoulders silhouetted against the crazy blue sky of the Mediterranean.

This theme of washing — to which we shall return — brackets the movie’s depiction of the bombing mission. They are ritual ablutions that are absolutely critical for Thunderbolt and, also, for the epistemology of destruction. We’re going to learn something in this movie, something unpleasant. So, no matter what happens, the movie tells us at the beginning, no matter what we come to know, we must never forget that these are good people.

They’re clean.

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As a courtesy to the reader, I have up to now downplayed the presence of the narrator in this movie, but he’s positively everywhere. Whether the movie is flying above the clouds or trapped with a corpse under a collapsed house, there he is, laying it all out for us. This is this, he says, and that is that. He speaks in what Wes Anderson would call an “obsolete vernacular,” and its marriage of working-man-in-the-saloon bravado with aw-shucks decency — in other words, its confidence — strikes just the wrong note. Because whatever else the bombing war was, it was never certain of itself. “The brass upstairs plans the war,” says the narrator. “Don’t always know why they send you out on a mission. Don’t always care. But you know there’s a reason. A good one.”

The Angel of History perks up his ears.

No, the Angel says. If he had been in the theater in 1947 when Thunderbolt premiered, now is when he would have leaned over to the person in the next seat and whispered hotly in their ear: Actually, that’s the exact opposite of how it was. The people who planned the bombing were never quite sure what exactly they wanted done, and often they had no idea if the reason was, if not good, then at least right. And by “right,” the Angel of History means decisive.

The “brass upstairs” did not know precisely what to bomb because, rather than defeat their adversary’s military in the field, they decided early on that it would be quicker and easier simply to transport the adversary back in time. As we’ve already seen, modern war machines, like movies about them, cannot exist without a sprawling industrial apparatus. If airplanes could break that apparatus from the sky, or so it seemed to Allied strategists, then the enemy would be forced to fight an industrial war without industrial weaponry. And that was just the species of war the belligerents were long accustomed to fighting — in their colonies. Like when in 1898, a British expeditionary force armed with Maxim machine guns killed some 12,000 Sudanese soldiers at the cost of a mere 48 of their own. Winston Churchill — the very same who in July 1940 would call for “an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers” on Germany — witnessed this event. According to him, the Maxims grew so hot from easy killing that they evaporated all the water in their tanks. It was one-sided. It was monotonous slaughter. “It was,” said Churchill, “a matter of machinery.”

The purpose of strategic bombing in World War II was to reproduce this scenario in Europe, to create the same unfair advantage in a “civilized,” industrial European power that Churchill had witnessed in Africa, by reducing the adversary to the chronological status of backward possession. To put it in Churchill’s terms, to achieve this result was a matter of machinery. Who had it, and who didn’t. After the Second World War, Curtis LeMay, architect of the systematic aerial destruction of Japan’s cities, succinctly captured just this sentiment when he claimed that the United States possessed the firepower to bomb an enemy back “to the Stone Age.” If the adversary had no machines, then it was as if, for them, the Industrial Revolution had not happened. No electrical grid, no belching factories, no tennis shoes, no high-caliber artillery, no punch card–reading machines.

Who knew a time machine could be so simple? All you need are high explosives dropped from a great height, and there you have it: you’re back in time. At least, that was the basic presumption informing Operation Strangle, the actual name of the mission in which the P-47 pilots of Thunderbolt are flying.

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As the narrator explains the necessity (and, possibly, the goodness) of aerial bombing, footage of the former abbey of Monte Cassino slips by. German soldiers had taken up position in the monastery. In an attempt to break the Gustav Line, Allied bombers attacked the monastery. The results reel before the viewer. Piles of disjointed stone litter a mountain peak where once an abbey stood for a thousand years. The time machine has transported this particular mountaintop back to, I’d guess, the year 949, the last time Monte Cassino was demolished.



“Good job of bombing,” says the narrator. “Didn’t work. Our infantry didn’t advance.” Where once a single fortress had commanded the heights, now the Germans possessed hundreds of nooks from which to pour out death on the Allied soldiers below. “It was the wrong use of airpower,” the narrator explains. “Wrong because we were not taking advantage of the airplane’s greatest asset: its ability to get behind the enemy. That’s what the air planners wanted to do: get behind him.”

A certain logic unfolds behind the image; a mechanism of knowing turns its gears. Only by bombing Monte Cassino could the Allies come to know that it was wrong — technically speaking, that is — to bomb Monte Cassino. Bombing mountain fortresses, the Allies discovered, did not necessarily weaken the enemy. The abbey might have traveled back in time, but the Wehrmacht still inhabited the present, along with all of the present’s modern weapons. To reduce the German army to the European equivalent of the Mahdist Sudanese, the bombers needed to deprive it of something else. Of what exactly, the brass upstairs were not sure, but they had their suspicions. They needed to bomb the life support systems of Italy, what Major General Haywood Hansell, who commanded bomber wings in both Europe and Japan, referred to more generally as the “national organic systems” of a country [italics added], or, according to the Royal Air Force’s War Manual, the “nerve centres, main arteries, heart and brain” of society. To stay with the biological metaphor, Operation Strangle targeted the vascular system of the Italian Peninsula, the infrastructure that brought sustenance to the nation’s extremities: the railroads, bridges, and roads. “Let’s weaken the entire German front by depriving it of supplies: fuel, food, ammunition, reinforcements,” the narrator says.

The movie provides a visual aid to help the audience think in these terms. In the minds of the strategists, such a campaign was to look like this (the dark parts indicate those portions of Italy controlled by the Germans; the white, what had fallen to the Allies):



Simple. Yet, a problem remained. The minds behind strategic bombing might have believed that society was an organic machine that could be broken (or, depending on your point of view, murdered). But, alas, they did not know exactly how to break it. That was because they were not entirely certain how the machine called modernity was actually put together, in other words, how exactly it worked. They needed to see it.

In an attempt to do just that, the Allies bombed targets to determine whether or not they were targets worth bombing. They tried the precision bombing of factories, which, sadly, produced no definitive results due to the impossibility of bombing anything precisely with the tools of the time. They bombed the working classes of Germany and Japan in the hopes of producing the proletarian revolution they feared would befall their own countries. When that failed, they nevertheless continued to bomb working people and their homes in the hope that the attacks would undermine a vague utility called “morale.” That yielded more ambiguous results. They bombed dams to drown the countryside in water and they bombed cities to drown ordinary people in fire.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians died. Certainly, much was learned. For example, through a careful statistical analysis of the bombing as it was happening, Allied wartime economists discovered that only two factories in the entire Reich built gearboxes for tanks, and that a mere five manufacturers produced over 70 percent of all the tires turning in the German Army. Fascinating intel, for sure. Yet even as they gained these insights at a phenomenal rate, it remained unclear if either this knowledge or the bombing itself provided the Allies any meaningful strategic advantage.

At the risk of anticipating the conclusion before the P-47s have even taken off, after Operation Strangle, the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces issued an evaluation of the campaign to see what they themselves had learned. The authors of the report found that “Military traffic was not hindered to a significant degree by these attacks,” nor was there “complete internal economic collapse.” Planes bombed roads and bridges, but in short order, the Germans rebuilt those same roads and bridges, and, despite the strangling, civilization continued to flow to the Gustav Line. All this led Sir Henry Tizard, scientific advisor to Britain’s air war, to conclude: “You can’t destroy an economy.” The bombing granted him that particular gift of sight. Still, ordinary people certainly felt the strangle. Thousands lost their homes. Unemployment shot up, and hunger held the land in its bony fist.

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The P-47s on Corsica finally take off from their steel mat runways. This is the moment when the movie introduces its audience to the air weapon, bristling with .50 caliber machine guns, 500-pound bombs, and several movie cameras. Here they are, the camera and the machine guns, in the same shot. The camera is the small black device covered in masking tape; the three terraced silver tubes above it are the barrels of three .50 caliber machine guns installed in one of the wings:



The P-47 itself cuts an uncanny silhouette. The nose is snub, and the body round, somehow like a child, but also like a shark. The planes swoop low over the wine-dark Tyrrhenian Sea where Odysseus once sailed, but the moment they reach the target zone over the mainland, they climb, climb, climb into the clouds. The cameras, like the pilots, gaze down on the ravines below. They’re looking for a bridge to bomb, and soon enough they find it. The planes line up in a queue. One by one, they lift their noses to the sky, bank, and dive. The cameras fitted into the planes show the bombing from every angle: from the point of view of the pilot; from the machine gun; even, for a moment, from the perspective of a bomb riding along beneath a wing. When the bomb drops, it’s released first from the head and then, hardly a moment later, the tail. There are misses and there are hits. Plumes of gray smoke rise from the Italian earth. The bridge goes up and then comes down, way down. The bombing run is complete.

In theory, this is where the movie should end.

Only the movie doesn’t end. Because it hasn’t learned anything yet.

“Still got plenty of gas,” says the narrator. “Plenty of ammo. Go on the prowl. Ease down on the deck. See what you can find.”

A lone plane swoops over a field. A flock of sheep run from it. Then, the same again, only this time frightened horses. The horses are so close I can make out the wind whipping their manes as they flee the loud machine taking pictures of them. The planes are looking for something. Railroad tracks twist like a ribbon as the plane follows them. “Not a bad way to find a train,” says the narrator. “You spot one. Kick her over. Give it a few squirts. Might kill somebody.” We — dare I say “you” — watch from over the pilot’s shoulder as he strafes a freight train. The white tails of rockets trail forward. “Let’s see what’s in those boxcars,” says the narrator. In this case, “to see” means to shoot.



The movie would have us understand that when a boxcar is shot and does not explode, it wasn’t really a target. It was just a boxcar, its true nature having been revealed the moment it was destroyed. By contrast, when a boxcar is shot and does explode, that boxcar clearly held something worth shooting. It was a target.

The planes reenact this method of “seeing” across the countryside. A plane shoots a lighthouse. One might wonder what shooting a lighthouse denies the enemy, and seeing as it does not explode, the conclusion is Probably Nothing, but already we’re shooting a radio station. The narrator then claims to see something himself. “Somebody in that field. Wonder who they are. No friends of mine.” A P-47 strafes an unidentified person in a field.



They do not explode, so we cannot be certain whether or not they were worth shooting.

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Here begins the climax of learning, and the climax of the movie. “The houses around here look kinda suspicious,” says the narrator. And, indeed, to the trained eye, the houses do look suspicious. Why is that? If the air-war was meant to win the war by sending the enemy back in time, one might plausibly argue that the destruction of enough houses could produce victory. Contemporary Europeans live in houses, no? People of the past lived in caves, in hollows, in shelters, and in the open rough. Not proper houses.

Arthur Harris, chief of Britain’s Bomber Command, notoriously promised to win the war by “dehousing” the German people. This was his way of defending the practice of “area bombing,” or the destruction of entire working-class residential districts. (By the end of 1943, the American bombing effort was, in substance, indistinguishable.) “The German economic system,” Harris asserted, “which I am instructed by my objective to destroy, includes workers, houses, and public utilities, and it is therefore meaningless to claim that the wiping out of German cities is ‘not an end in itself.’” Of course, Harris could not be certain that the elimination of houses and the ordinary people in them would actually lead to the collapse of the Third Reich. But then again, it just might. In that way, houses, all houses everywhere, looked “suspicious.”

A P-47 looses its guns on this house:



“Nothing in that one,” the narrator reports. The plane then shoots this one:



Again, nothing happens. So the plane shoots another.



Still nothing. The narrator shams disappointment. “Could be wrong,” he says.

Great is the force of truth, and a man is but what he knoweth. So, in the name of truth and knowledge, the plane’s guns and the plane’s cameras shoot one last house.



This time, the house explodes, ostensibly because it was packed to the rafters with German arms. Thus, the special epistemology of the bombing war: only by shooting an object can we see whether or not it should have been shot.

“Ah,” says the narrator in mock surprise, “what do you know?”

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What do we know? My question exactly.

Well, if we are to believe this dramatization of several actual bombing raids, we know that three out of four targets attacked appear not to have been targets at all. And because we know that the majority of the targets were not targets, we therefore also know something else: all was not quite right in the principle of the targeting.

Nonsense, the narrator of Thunderbolt tells us. Operation Strangle worked. In the spring of 1944, the Allies broke through the Gustav Line and rushed on to Rome. Of course, as we already know, the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces themselves actually concluded just the opposite. The breakthrough was not the direct result of Operation Strangle. The bombing didn’t work. Or at least, it wasn’t decisive.

This kind of official doublethink was not isolated to propaganda movies. Since World War II, the United States military has always known that these strategies never quite produce victory, but it forgets what it keeps learning, over and over again. As early as 1952, one Colonel John T. Fitzwater of the US Air Force, reflecting on the recent and devastating bombing of the Korean Peninsula, bluntly conceded the following in the Air University Quarterly Review: “The fact is,” he wrote, “we do not know as much about social and economic forces as we do about physical forces, and we have not been successful enough in applying what we do know.” And yet the very next year, President Dwight Eisenhower confidently unveiled his “New Look,” where American empire would protect itself half-price through the massive buildup of nuclear weapons aimed at the supposed vital centers of the Soviet Union and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States dropped more tons of bombs on Vietnam than it had in both the European and Pacific theaters of World War II combined, and still the bombing did not produce victory. Nor, more recently, did Predator drones with their unbroken gaze and deadly payloads safeguard American success in Afghanistan.

Each new technical breakthrough in the ability to see and then to destroy provided renewed — and mistaken — confidence that this time, at long last, the act of seeing and the act of destruction would teach the bombers how to win. And each time, both real knowledge and real success remained out of reach, dipping just beneath the horizon of the visible.

What do you know?

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After this last act of knowing — the shooting of the houses — all the drive goes out of Thunderbolt. The next cut is clumsy. Suddenly, we’re back at the airbase on Corsica. What just happened might give a viewer pause. After all, the epistemology of destruction isn’t pretty. So, before the credits roll, it’s time to reprise the theme of goodness.

And that is no coincidence, because forgetting is an essential quality of goodness. Thunderbolt ends not with a bombing raid, but with a tour of the American base on Corsica. “This American community has everything,” says the narrator. A barber, a newsstand, a beach club. The pilots play cards and joke around. While I can easily see the Achaeans pitching their tents by the sea, as these Americans have done, I cannot imagine them goofing around in just this way. The Achaeans never made any claims to goodness. The young Americans, on the other hand, cuddle their pet dogs and play with yo-yos. The music score behind them is knockoff Aaron Copland, another Appalachian Spring. It’s upbeat and folksy. The United States of America even sounds good.

Above all, the young men wash themselves. The pilots bathed at dawn, you may remember, and now that dusk threatens, the sea calls to them. When not in their airplanes, the narrator observes, the Americans seem to spend as much time as possible swimming in the Mediterranean. They bathe in it, sail through it, float on it in little yellow dinghies. These are the waters of forgetting. It’s not enough just to know. When knowing challenges goodness, “you” must also be able to cleanse yourself of knowledge.

The bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan produced so very much knowledge that, at select moments, one might prefer not to remember. Meteorologists discovered the jet stream, way up there, at those icy heights, where the B-29 cruised on the knife’s edge of the stratosphere before firebombing cities full of people. The resulting firestorms taught chemists and civil engineers a thing or two about the nature of fire; with the dropping of atomic bombs, physicians and physicists alike learned something of the deleterious effects of radiation exposure on supple human flesh. To know this much and still be good is no easy feat. It requires a daily ritual of purification, of disremembering.

When the pilots land, they make themselves clean. The Mediterranean beckons. They rush to it.

For the sea is as old as anything, but it has no memory, and bears no scars.

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Jason Resnikoff is assistant professor of contemporary history at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands. His book, Labor’s End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work, came out earlier this year.