Invasion USA (1952) - History lesson for millennials

No not the terrible one where Chuck Norris slaughters various people of other races. This is an early Cold War low budget propaganda movie and not afraid to admit that's what it is.

First I've got to explain the attitude toward nuclear weapons in this movie. In some ways it's very accurate. This is before the hydrogen bomb, so the weapons are really not powerful enough to destroy an entire city. Even Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were especially vulnerable to nuclear attack, were not completely destroyed.

What it does get wrong is vastly overestimating how many bombs existed at the time. America had hundreds, the Soviets had maybe dozens. The highest levels of government really didn't know much more than that they had surprised us by developing their own bomb so fast so they might surprise us by building them faster too. You can't blame Hollywood for getting this wrong. It was only really when we started getting satellite coverage in the early 1960s that it became clear how much weaker the Russians were.

The genius of the movie is that half of it is public domain stock footage from the US government, mostly from WW2 and the Korean War. Which btw was going on when this was made. Stalin was invading random countries and just generally being an unpredictable butthole so there was a legitimate fear of him making yet another miscalculation. He'd already been part of the duo that started WW2 and appeared to have learned nothing from that.

One thing that makes using American stock footage convenient is that the Soviet bomber force was made up of the Tu-4 Bull, a shamelessly reverse engineered B-29. It didn't have the range to hit the continental US except on a one-way mission and I have a hard time believing many could pull that off without an engine fire or something. The US had much more advanced planes like the B-47 and many bases in countries close to the USSR.

Notice that they show antiaircraft guns defending American cities. Yes, this was still going on. The Nike Ajax wasn't deployed until 1954, so until then flak was considered better than nothing.

I do have to call them out for one thing that's ludicrous: The huge numbers of paratroopers invading America. You look at WW2, paratroopers were sometimes dropped behind the lines but only when ground troops were close enough to bail them out in a couple days. And the Soviets never did develop a serious airlift or sealift capability to project power at a global scale during the whole Cold War. (No, fighting a low intensity war with a minority of the population of Angola doesn't count.)

Anyway it's a fun movie and very revealing about this period when people were gradually shifting from a Ww2 mindset to a Cold War mindset. Reminds me of pre-boomers I knew who actually took foreign threats seriously because Pearl Harbor was still vividly remembered.