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Whenever George Lucas talks about the origins of Star Wars in interviews, he point outs it had a wide variety of influences. Lawrence of Arabia, The Hidden Fortress, and Metropolis were all favorites of the young maverick director, as were the Flash Gordon serials that ran on Saturday mornings; their alien worlds and spaceships inspired him to tell exciting stories set in outer space.
Yet every bit as influential were air combat sequences pulled from World War II movies.
In Lucas’ view, space battles might have appeared on the silver screen before, but they were slow, plodding affairs. None of them managed to capture the speed, fluidity, and chaos of the dogfights featured in movies such as The Battle of Britain and Reach for the Sky.
In fact, when an early rough cut of A New Hope (Watch now on Disney+) was assembled, very few special effects shots were complete and ready to be included. This problem was solved by splicing in footage of RAF and Luftwaffe fighter planes, swooping, diving, and trying to shoot one another down — albeit with lasers and sound effects added.
Plus, a rag-tag band of fighter pilots, outnumbered by a fanatical enemy determined to wipe out all resistance, stamp out freedom, and impose their own brand of tyranny? This pretty much sums up the plot of A New Hope, but it also describes the situation in the summer of 1940.
A keen student of history, George Lucas was not beyond borrowing liberally from the real world when it came to creating his galaxy far, far away. And there are many parallels between Britain’s most desperate hour and the climactic Imperial attack on the Rebel base on Yavin IV in Episode IV.
Things were looking pretty bleak for the British Isles in early 1940. The Nazi war machine was marching uncontested across all of Europe, conquering nation after nation in a matter of months — sometimes weeks. All that remained were small cells of resistance fighters, valiant rebels (without a capital “R”) who operated from secret bases, and did their best to strike back at their Nazi overlords however they possibly could.
By the time summer arrived, Britain stood alone. All that had saved her from invasion so far was a narrow stretch of water separating her shores from France — and the British Royal Air Force. Were it not for the English Channel, German Stormtroopers would already have landed on the beaches along the south coast.
But the Nazis were coming sooner or later. It was inevitable. Just one final detail remained: They had to wrest control of the skies from the RAF.
The skill, tenacity, and daring of the British fighter pilots was already the stuff of legend. There is a popular misconception that the flyers of Fighter Command were all “officers and gentlemen,” upper class and aristocratic, but the truth is very different. Most of them were in fact Sergeant Pilots, non-commissioned officers who came from hard-working backgrounds.
It’s easy to see the genesis of Luke Skywalker, Wedge Antilles, Biggs Darklighter, and the other Rogue Squadron pilots in those bold young men, many of whom came from farms and villages rather than grand estates and manor houses.
The first two thirds of A New Hope establish the Empire as a force for widespread evil, hell bent on galactic domination. Its main weapon for doing so comes in the form of the Imperial Navy, whose Star Destroyers and all-powerful Death Star are capable of wiping out entire civilizations. Imperial officers stride about wearing pressed gray uniforms, peaked caps, and polished jackboots. A Swastika armband wouldn’t look remotely out of place. TIE Fighter pilots are clad entirely in black, with gleaming full-face helmets.
The Imperial military personnel are neat, efficient, and crisp. Contrast this with the utilitarian dress of the Rebel X-Wing pilots. Orange coveralls with flight harnesses dangling loosely about the hips; scuffed, dirty helmets; and a laconic, devil-may-care attitude that would be at home on a Spitfire or Hurricane pilot lounging in a deck chair next to his aircraft, just waiting to be scrambled. Fully aware they were fighting for their country’s freedom, the exhausted RAF fighter pilots sortied again and again in the face of overwhelming odds, pushing the limits of endurance. Many paid for their bravery with their lives. Tired pilots often become dead pilots.
Due to a shortage of pilots, there were far too few veterans among their ranks. Many fighter pilots came straight out of basic training to the front line. As the X-Wings and Y-Wings scramble to defend Yavin IV against the Death Star at the end of A New Hope, the Rebel squadrons are also down quite a few pilots and fighters thanks to the aftermath of the battle of Scarif, as seen in Rogue One (Watch now on Disney+). For the Rebels, as for the RAF, this was a real David and Goliath situation, but the cost of failure was just too high to bear thinking about.
The RAF pilots had to contend with massive formations of German bombers, each armed with machine guns for defense, and escorted by high-performance Messerschmitt fighters. Flying through a mass of aircraft like that was their equivalent of making the Death Star trench run — enemy fighters behind, and a wall of machine gun fire on all sides. Every bomber that got through would drop its bomb load on a friendly city or base.
By the time the Battle of Britain was over, more than 500 British pilots had been killed. There was no Millennium Falcon flying in to save them at the last minute, and it would take nearly five more years for the Nazi empire to finally be defeated — but for now, an island in the Atlantic which was basically a rebel base, had been saved from destruction by a small band of dedicated pilots.
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Winston Churchill was, of course, referring to the men and women of Fighter Command, but they could have been applied just as easily to the pilots of Rogue Squadron after the Battle of Yavin.
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