Educational Media Reviews Online

In 1942, Luke Field’s Class of 42J finished training and received their wings, earning commissions as 2nd Lieutenants and an assignment as P-38 fighter pilots in World War II. Six months after that occasion, through a series of training mishaps, accidents, and combat defeats, all but two were dead. In 2003, Frederick (Kohn) Arnold, the last surviving member of the fourteen, gathered the family members of those who had died and held a memorial service in St. Louis, MO. Between Two Worlds documents that process, as well as Arnold’s own struggle with his war experiences and post-traumatic stress disorder.

As a documentary, the film achieves its stated goal, of memorializing those twelve men, well. There are moments, particularly in the beginning of the film when the “idea” of the memorial is being discussed, where the footage comes across as forced or contrived. The biographical storyline of the pilots is balanced by historical background information on the P-38, aspects of the air war in the Mediterranean, and Arnold’s experiences, both as a Jewish pilot and as a veteran after the war. Modern interview and documentary footage with Arnold and his family is mixed with archival footage and images and documents from Arnold’s own collection. The final scene, with the gathering of the families of the memorialized, reveals the significance of the film and of Arnold’s ability to share his experience – at once allowing families to gain a glimpse of what may have been for their loved one, while at the same time seeming to provide a measure of closure with respect and dignity. The end result is a well-done documentary whose significance, in many ways, hinges on one man’s memory and experience to inspire its most emotional moments.

Unfortunately, while the documentary itself is powerful and moving, and in many ways emblematic of why projects such as the Veterans History Project through the Library of Congress are significant to the understanding of our national past, the integrity of the primary subject of the film, Frederic (Kohn) Arnold, has been called into question by scholars and veterans for fraudulent claims in terms of his own actions during the war. Specifically, Arnold’s work Doorknob Five Two, used in the documentary through a series of stylized readings to describe his war experiences, was originally published as a biography (and is still catalogued as such by many libraries) in 1984. In a 1998 article in Air Classics Magazine by Robin Hanson, a number of the events described in the work were shown as either fraudulent or being the actions of other individuals; the work is now marketed by Arnold as an autobiographical novel. With that memory and experience challenged as fraudulent, the basis, the very soul, of the film is, to some degree, undermined, and to this reviewer, no longer appropriate as educational media. For this reason, this film is not recommended for educational purposes.

Awards
• 2005 Best Short Documentary Award from the Garden State Film Festival