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Show -. Today's "Thunder Birds" Are More Daring, Alert, Says Former Ace Some twenty-two years ago a swashbuckling youngsters named William A. Wellman flew for the French Air Force and knocked down so many German planes, in feats so daring, that he was christened chris-tened "Wild Bill." Until recently, he treasured that nickname. Now he wants to change it. He thinks "Sweet William" would be more appropriate. That's how he felt about his feats after swapping experiences with British, Brit-ish, American and Chinese flyers on location in Arizona for the shooting of 20th Century-Fox's Technicolor "Thunder Birds," Soldiers Sol-diers of the Air, which he directed. direct-ed. The film is scheduled Sunday for the Rivoli Theatre. Wellman had plenty of opportunity oppor-tunity to discover the difference between air combat, 1918, and air combat, 1942. At Falcon and Thunderbird fields, where he took Gene Tierney, Preston Foster, John Sutton and a company of nearly 200 to film the picture, the cream of American, British and Chinese youth is being trained for combat. Between the scenes Wellman swapped yarns with the instructors, instruc-tors, many of whom were war aces before being transferred to instruction work. "In my day we learned to fly by rule of the thumb," Wellman said. "We finally got machine guns but when we ran out of ammunition am-munition we still used to lean out of our cockpits and empty automatics auto-matics at each other. "Today there are more gadgets in a single plane than there were in an entire squadron of our flimsy flim-sy ships. And a single burst from the mighty armament these kids carry will cut the biggest bomber in half. "It's grim business now, with a man's life-span calculated as he steps into his plane, with the old time swashbuckling a thing of the happy-go-lucky past, with modern kids making the World War I veterans look like sissies. "If it hadn't been for "Thunder-Birds," "Thunder-Birds," I'd never known what flying fly-ing really means and I'd never have met or filmed any real flyers. fly-ers. I hope nobody ever calls me "Wild Bill" again. I'll think they're kidding." |
