This film shows numerous types and models of World War One aircraft in operation. It opens showing Allied airplanes preparing for a maximum air campaign in the battle of Saint Mihiel. View from inside a hanger as its flap opens and men push a Sopwith Camel airplane out onto airfield. Map of St Mihiel. American planes warm up on flight line in predawn, with flares burning at wingtips. Huge numbers of allied airplanes are marshaled on airfields throughout the theater of operations and begin taking off. Among them is a French Morane-Saulnier low wing monoplane. German fliers are seen loading small hand held bombs into the cockpit of their Albatross aircraft. Soldiers in combat on ground in "no man's land" during the battle of St. Mihiel. They take refuge in large shell and bomb craters and try to advance running between them.. Germans fliers dropping bombs, by hand, from airplane. Numerous Allied and German airplanes in aerial dogfights. American planes over clouds. American Observation balloon attacked in sky. Balloon in flames, and trailing black smoke as it falls to the ground. French flag flies at an airfield, where a nosed-over airplane sits, by a hangar, as airplanes fly overhead. Aircraft taxiing about in close quarters at airfield. Large formations of American airplanes flying overhead in a grand formation, following the Armistice, November 11, 1918 Then the film shifts dramatically from World War One to the post-WWII year of 1947. It illustrates the dramatic advances in warplanes since WWI by showing U.S. B-36 bombers and straight-wing F-84 Thunderjet fighters is formation.
Opening scene shows crowds of Parisians surrounding tanks of Free French General Philippe Leclerc's 2nd Armored Division and elements of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division enter Paris, on August 25, 1944, during World War 2. General Charles de Gaulle is seen with French officials in the crowd. A Free French soldier speaks to a tank driver and points to the source of some lingering German resistance gunfire. The crowds drop to the ground as gunfire erupts. A French tank fires its gun at a building harboring the German resistance elements. Some persons take shelter behind jeeps. People scramble for shelter in the courtyard of the Notre Dame cathedral. Smoke rising from targeted buildings. People lying down en masse on the ground as gunfire continues.
U.S. and French troops parade in liberated Cherbourg on Bastille Day. The troops and civilians gathered in a city square. Men, women and children watch. Soldiers and civilians hold flags. The US, French Navy and French Forces of the Interior (FFI) march alongside. The band plays. People watch from their homes. General Charles De Gaulle present at the celebration. 'Vive De Gaulle' on a banner. The square is renamed 'Place General De Gaulle.' Soldiers and policemen salute. Children hold flowers. People sing and dance in the square. Musicians play their instruments. (World War II period).
Allied troops soon after D-Day landings at Normandy in World War 2. View of Cherbourg town destroyed by the Germans. A soldier near a wall. The destroyed docks. A soldier on a destroyed inland bridge. French women and a man welcome the Allied troops with bouquets on a destroyed bridge. Hundreds of German officers and soldiers taken prisoners marched on the street. A wounded prisoner in a wheel barrow.
Allied troops in Cherbourg after the Normandy Landings on D-Day in World War 2. A former German Headquarters in the town. A portrait of the German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. A U.S. soldier and MP (Military Police) point towards the portrait. The soldiers use it as a pin board, throwing darts at it.
Ruins in the French town of Chaumont-Porcien, in the Ardennes region, during World War II. Damaged buildings in the town. View of "Le Poilu victorieux de Chaumont-Porcien": A World War 1 statue of a French soldier in the Place de la Mairie. (The statue is a rendition of the Monument to the dead by Eugène Bénet, designed in 1920 in memory of French soldiers who died in World War I. It depicts a French soldier or "Poilu" with rifle in left hand, holding aloft a laurel wreath or olive branch with his right hand.) A small circular fenced cemetery beside the monument is shown, containing crosses and German helmets of recent German soldiers deaths. German Army vehicles advance into town, passing horse drawn carriages lined up on a street.
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