Documentaries


*Their stories are the journey of a lifetime*

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They weren’t formally recognized, received no military benefits – many Americans don’t even know that they exist – and yet today, women’s place in this country might be very different if Vi Cowden, and the 1,073 other women like her, hadn’t been willing to do the job they did. And they did it because their country needed them.

It is a story of triumph and inspiration over adversity. She and her fellow Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) were crucial to the war effort during World War II.
Vi was among the first women in the United States to fly military planes.

She ferried fighter planes (including her favorite, the P-51 Mustang) from the factories to the air bases where they were desperately needed. She flew enough trips with the WASP to have circumnavigated the globe 55 times.

In this documentary she tells her story from humble beginnings in a sod house in the Black Hills of South Dakota where she learned to fly biplanes, to flying fighter planes for the Army Air Corps in 1943 & ’44. Flying 19 different types of aircraft, she has been an inspiration to many, including one male fighter pilot afraid to fly the P-47 Thunderbolt,
until he saw her take-off in one.
On March 10th, 2010, Vi and the other surviving WASP received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor that
Congress can bestow.

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READ THE LETTERS
Ken Burns	Leon Panetta	Congressman Dingell

IN TIMES OF WAR: RAY PARKER

RAY PARKER was working at the Los Angeles Examiner when suddenly all of the teletype machine bells started madly ringing. It was December 7th, 1941 and the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. The brutal assault marked the beginning of World War II for the United States, it also marked a new beginning for 18-year-old Ray . The day after the attack he joined the Air Force and became a navigator on a B-24 Liberator Bomber. He was part of the allied effort of relentless bombings that brought Germany and Italy to their knees. On his 10th mission his plane was shot down behind enemy lines. Ray survived the parachute fall only to be quickly captured by the Germans. Interned at a Prison camp, he was approached by the American commanding officer and asked to secretly edit the underground newspaper for the 9,000 captured soldiers there. Using information received via a hidden radio, his paper spread hope through reports of the D-Day invasion and the Allies march on Germany until he was caught by his captors
only one month before the war ended.
This Documentary Short takes Lt. Parker back to that time as he recounts his tales of battle and imprisonment. It is important to remember that Ray’s story is just one incredible account out of over 16 million American’s who helped combat these forces of evil.
They fought and sacrificed for our liberty.

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LETTERS TO DEFIANCE

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During WWII Corporal Francis Seibert of Defiance, Ohio was stationed in Amarillo, Texas as an Air Force instructor training men on the instrument systems of the B-17 and B-29 bombers. This being his first time away from home, he wrote to his family almost daily. To make his letters “more exciting” he began to illustrate the envelopes with cartoons.
His mother saved all 614 of these letters and envelopes.
This documentary takes the 82-year-old Seibert through a historic journey as he revisits those letters 60 years later. The letters cover topics as diverse as Mother’s Day; his first Christmas away from home; first learning of the D-Day invasion; and his impressions of the dropping of the first Atomic Bomb. For a young man of only twenty-one, Corporal Seibert had extraordinary vision of what the future of the Atomic Bomb would mean to the world. In his letter he already saw the full significance of what such a devastating weapon would have on life from then on. He knew that it would very likely turn out to be instrumental in ending the war and saving
thousands of lives, but it scared him.
Through all these letters the underlying message is how important family is. How we take for granted what we have until it is taken away from us, and how often it takes a tragic situation to express how we really feel. The most rewarding part of making this film was to take this journey with Corporal Seibert.

Click above to see an interview with Francis Seibert

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