Word: commandant
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Force's Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg was indeed confident that his airmen could reach almost anywhere with their intercontinental B-36 bombers, starting from U.S. bases. But no responsible airman claimed that the Air Force could win a war without the naval ships and planes to keep command of the seas and an army to finish the job by invasion...
Bypassing the peace delegates, Boss Mao had drafted an ultimatum, sent it south to Nanking by special messenger. Its chief demand: within four days, the Nationalist armies must be transferred to Communist command. Otherwise Red troops, strengthened in the past months by fresh conscripts and regular reinforcements from Manchuria, would strike across the Yangtze...
...Command Decision" was a good book and a better play; Hollywood has thrown in just enough stars and situations to kill most of its effectiveness. The movie follows its predecessors pretty closely, detailing an Air Force General's fight against top brass and public pressure to complete a tough bombing operation. He is then kicked upstairs out of his job with the mission incomplete; his successor must make the command decision of whether or not to continue the costly operation...
...operations rooms. Only Van Johnson, amazingly enough, who has a set-up part as the General's cynical aide, can touch the acting of the stage version. The play's wonderful single set has been augmented with shots of model B-17s plowing into picturesque English landscape; when the command decision is finally made, the surprise is less than startling...
...biggest objection to "Command Decision" as a film is the way it handles war fought on the executive level. The screen is filled with maps, charts, tables of plane losses, and movies-within-movies of the latest German jet-fighters. The Generals push their map-pins and calculate their losses with a pleasant detachment from reality, unfortunately near the conventional idea of all military command. This was not true of the play; it is not characteristic of all films. "Paisan," which showed just how good war movies could be, had a command decision too, in an episode involved with guerrilla...