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PETE HARRIS
WAR IS HECK: Currently contaminating the late-night airwaves hereabouts are a couple of rerun series that, barring the bonfire treatment, should be locked away in the vault and have the key thrown away. Rat Patrol is the series in which four characters go tootling around the North African desert in two machine-gunequipped Jeeps, constantly besting numerically superior German forces. Funny thing about these characters -no matter what type of firearm they lay their hands on, Allied or German, pistol, submachinegun or heavy automatic weapons, stationary or in a vehicle careening around the backlot, they are instant dead shots, The dumb Krauts, of course, couldn't hit the side of a pyramid, and always come out on the losing end of any encounter with the Rat Patrol, If four guys in a couple of unarmored Jeeps could do all that, it makes you wonder why the Germans bothered going into North Africa in the first place,
Black Sheep Squadron (originally called Baa Baa Black Sheep) is worse than Rat Patrol because it purports to be based on fact, with Robert Conrad playing a real-life air ace from the Second World War -Greg (Pappy) Boyington, Apart from that, and the presence of some beautifully restored F4U Corsair aircraft, absolutely nothing about the series is authentic, even though it uses real dates and newsreel footage in an effort to recreate a semi-documentary flavor, It would take an entire book to catalogue the errors, exaggerations and misinterpretations rampant in the series, from the long haircuts on supposedly hotshot Marine fighter pilots (two of whom are played by actors built along the lines of Fatty Arbuckle) to the presence in almost every show of at least one delectable looking starlet type, usually with long flowing hair, trying in vain to portray a nurse or some other type of servicewoman.
It could be argued, I suppose, that Black Sheep Squadron is no more exaggerated than the aviation pulp stories we used to read in the 1940s, That's true -some of those stories even outdid Black Sheep Squadron in wild heroics -but, unlike today, the real war was always there to jar us back to reality. One look at the daily casualty lists, with the snapshots of those always smiling faces, was guaranteed to put everything back into perspective. That's the problem with tripe like Rat Patrol and Black Sheep Squadron running op TV today -there's no counter-balancing dash of cold water in the face to remind you that it really wasn't like that at all. Despite the impression gained from all the comic book, pulp magazine, radio and movie heroics, the war was a bloody nightmare that never seemed to end. I can still read back copies of Dare-Devil Aces, watch Flying Tigers with John Wayne, listen to an old recording of Hop Harrigan and read the comic-book exploits of The Invisible Commando and Capt. Red Thortan, and still get the same enjoyment I did back then, the first time around. But they belong in a different dimension, just as they did in the 1940s. Because even then, I knew better, mainly because of those never-ending casualty lists, day in and day out.