Product Details

• Format: Black & White, Color, NTSC
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Bmg Video Label
• VHS Release Date: December 1, 1997
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B0000067P4
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #680,785 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

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4.0 out of 5 stars War and Peace in the Korean skies, April 27, 2001

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Rottenberg's rotten book review (nyc) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wings of the Red Star - Vol. 1: Duel Over Korea [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Most military aviation history is told from the western side, with the communist pilots, generals and fighters seen as only supporting players to highlight the moral, professional and technological edge of the west. In the "Wings of the Red Star", narrated by Sir Peter Ustinov, the tables are turned - western estimates of technology prove optimistic while the Soviet air corps. proves quite professional. Not so much an apologia for Soviet militarism, Ustinov fleshes out a story that always seemed half-told (at least until cold-war's end allowed declassification of much of the history). "Duel over Korea" is the story of the Soviets' leap into the jet age, providing the advanced MiG-15 to the communist side by the eve of the Korean war. Official history credits the MiG with being a superb copy of a WWII design advanced (but never tested) by the Luftwaffe. Using wings swept farther back than anybody thought possible, and jet engines unthinkably powerful by WWII standards, the design lapsed with the Luftwaffe. Supposedly inherited by the Russians along with countless captured German scientists, and mated to a copy of the Rolls Royce Nene engine, the MiG-15 was to sweep the skies of its western opponents. Unfortunately, history says, most of its pilots were rookies. While all nations were new to the regime of transonic flight, American pilots were for the most part WWII combat vets with a wealth of training and experience with which to shape their jet-age skills. As a result, for the loss of fewer than a hundred F-86 SabreJets, the Communists lost anywhere from 700 to 1400 MiGs. The MiG itself only surpassed its American opponents in performance on paper - but was unreliable, had controllability problems, and was too complex in its instrumentation. Peter Ustinov clarifies the myths - Most of the MiG pilots suffered from poor training. Those Russian pilots who had taken part in the combat (despite previous official denials), actually racked up 2:1 kill ratios in their favor against the Americans. Ustinov also faults (or atleast attributes this to the Russians) American opinions of the plane's mechanical reliability - thinking they were based solely on tests performed on a single MiG-15 flown to the west by a North Korean defector, a plane that was probably not representative of the type. But most of all, Ustinov shows the intense efforts of the Russians to build the plane at all - using Rolls Royce engines as a basis (the west didn't believe the Soviets capable of copying, and metric conversion couldn't have helped), and designing the world's first supsersonic windtunnel. Rather than ram through channles the acquisition of an inadequate airplane (and the MiG was hardly inadequate), the MiG's development followed a highly competitive selection process involving a similar looking design by WWII-era design bureau Lavotchkin. The MiG design bureau was not well represented in the war principally, we're told, so it could concentrate on jet technology - a decision that proved profitable with the war's end. Lavochkin's jet - distinguished from the competition by its higher placed wings - actually had superior performance, but would have proven less so in terms of maintenance, a more prudent priority that American pilots would find arguable but not clearly wrong. But most of all, the MiG is the product of a nation that had suffered horribly (much from self inflicted wounds) and had emerged triumphant from a war in which it turned the tables on enemy and ally alike. In those heady times, nothing seemed impossible for the Soviet state, and the MiG-15 was only an aluminum representation of that impossible dream.