fictitious. No B-17 reinforcements reached the Philippines; the survivors of those already based there retreated to Australia less than two weeks after the war began. The major bombing mission depicted at the film's climax most closely resembles the Battle of the Coral Sea five months later. Miniature shooting for its battle scenes was filmed in May and June 1942, concurrent but probably coincidental with Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway. Anti-Japanese propaganda in the film included scenes in which the aircrew is forced to land on Maui Island and are shot at by "local Japanese". There is a later assertion by the Hickam Field commander that local vegetable trucks from Honolulu knocked the tails off parked P-40 fighters as the attack began. Also, Lieutenant Rader claims that a Japanese civilian blocked the road in front of his car, as he hurried to the airfield, and then shot at him with a shotgun. As detailed in Walter Lord's book Day of Infamy, later investigations proved that no Japanese-American was involved in any kind of fifth column sabotage during the Pearl Harbor attack. In Air Force, a tail gun is installed on the Mary-Ann. The Flying Fortress used in the film played the part of a 1940 Boeing B-17C; no early B-17s, series "A" through "D", were fitted with a tail-mounted machine gun at the factory. That feature was not officially added until Boeing rolled out its heavily redesigned B-17E series. In the film, however, a member of the Mary-Anns aircrew makes a improvised field modification, removing the tail cone and creating a manned, single machine gun position. In real life, some aircrews did install a broomstick painted black in the clear tail cone to discourage attacks from the rear. As detailed in Herbert S. Brownstein's Flying Fortress volume The Swoose: Odyssey of a B-17, a few B-17D aircrews field-installed a remotely controlled (via a pullcord) .30 caliber machine gun in their tails. Reception Critical acclaim followed the film's premiere. Air Force echoed some of the emotional issues that underlay the American public's psyche at the time, including distrust of Japanese Americans. In naming it one of the "Ten Best Films of 1943", Bosley Crowther of The New York Times characterized the film as "... continuously fascinating, frequently thrilling and occasionally exalting ...". When seen in a modern perspective, the emotional aspects of the film seem out of proportion, and although