Victory Through Air Power

The film
The popular film maker Walt Disney read the book and felt that its message was so important that he personally financed the animated production of "Victory Through Air Power." The film was primarily created to express Seversky’s theories to government officials and the public. Movie critic Richard Schickel says that Disney "pushed the film out in a hurry, even setting aside his distrust of limited animation under the impulses of urgency." (The only obvious use of limited animation, however, is in diagrammatic illustrations of Seversky's talking points. These illustrations often feature continuous flowing streams of iconic aircraft, forming bridges or shields, or war material moving continuously along assembly lines.) It was not until 1945 Disney was able to pay off his 1.2 million dollar war film deficit.

On July 11, 1943 the New York Times devoted a half page, "Victory from the Air," to a feature consisting of pictures of scenes from the film with short captions. This was possibly the first time that such skilled use of visual description had been placed at the service of an abstract political argument.

It is one thing to hear someone say that against modern bombers, "bristling with armament… small single-seater fighters will find themselves helpless, for their guns are not maneuverable&mdash;they are fixed and can only fire forward." It is quite another to have this accompanied by vivid animations of swastika-tailed fighters jockeying for position and being shot down by beam-like animated blasts of fire from a bomber whose guns are "always in firing position."

One of the counter-arguments to air-power advocacy was the vastly inferior firepower of aircraft compared with, say, battleships. Seversky implicitly counters this by predicting the appearance of, or advocating the development of a number of advanced weapons that would make air-based weaponry as effective as land- or sea-based weaponry. His depiction how bombs could be used to destroy dams was either prophetic or well-informed. In general, Seversky asserts that bombs carried by aircraft will increase rapidly in size and destructive power. One diagram shows a man standing next to a 2000-pound bomb; they are about equally tall. As the narrator talks, the field of view widens to show 4000, 6000, 8000, and 10000-pound bombs, each taller than the last, ultimately dwarfing the human. (If Seversky had any inkling of the possibility of nuclear weapons, he did not reveal it).

Schickel quotes film critic James Agee as hoping that Major de Seversky and Walt Disney know what they are talking about, for I suspect that an awful lot of people who see Victory Through Air Power are going to think they do… I had the feeling I was sold something under pretty high pressure, which I don't enjoy, and I am staggered at the ease with which such self-confidence, on matters of such importance, can be blared all over the nation, without cross-questioning.

The closing sequence of the film contains some technically impressive animation sequences of airmen scrambling their intercontinental bombers from an Alaskan airfield. They take off under a darkened sky in pouring rain; their landing gear splashes through puddles. A Tlingit totem pole that is (somehow) in the foreground seems to resemble an American eagle. A map shows the destination to be Japan, airmen are seen using navigational instruments, the streets of a city pass beneath the bomb bay doors, and bombs are dropped. There are scenes of dramatic explosions destroying industrial buildings and machines, but, as James Agee commented, no human beings are shown, even in close views of the interiors of levelled factories. The scene then fades into images of the globe of the world with an eagle repeatedly plunging its talons into an octopus, whose body centered on Japan and whose tentacles reach out across nearby territory. After a struggle, the sky clears, the music softens, and the light of a beautiful sunrise shows us a dead octopus and an eagle soaring gracefully. The eagle lands on top of a mast bearing a forty-eight-star American flag, waving realistically in the wind as the movie ends.

In addition to "Victory Through Air Power," Disney created “Donald Gets Drafted,” “Der Fuehrer's Face,” and various training videos for the military.