In the last few years, I've seen lots of WWII footage on places like the "Wings" channel.
But there is one film I'll never forget. Around 1978, I was an airman on alert at Hahn AFB Germany, taking care of F-4E's with nukes hanging on them, waiting on the Russians to send up the balloon. We would regularly check out military films to watch during the long hours of waiting for the Klaxon to go off, and one of our favorite 16mm films was produced during WWII as a testament to how "our fighting men" were doing in the sky over Europe in 1944.
I was just an F-4 crew chief, but one of the pilots saw something I missed in the film. It was gun-camera film showing an attack on a cargo boat on an inland canal, probably in the Netherlands.
A P-47 was giving the whole 8x50cals to the barge, when it exploded in a huge fireball. The film narrator didn't say a thing, but the pilot I watched this with noticed that there was another P-47 in the footage, who had obviously led the attack on the barge. As the barge blew up, the '47 was caught in the blast, and obviously a wing departed the airframe. Much to low for the pilot to bail out.
An American pilot died, right on film. But the narrator was just interested in one thing. Another barge couldn't bring ammunition to Nazi troops. That's it. An American died, but the important part was, the job got done.
Don't ask the current crop of Democrats to understand that kind of sentiment.