It’s unfortunate that World War II, the grandest global military conflict in human history, is often seen through the eyes of staged/rigid propaganda footage and inarticulate camera angles. In a lot of ways, it hardly touches the surface of doing it justice (maybe why the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan rocked moviegoing audiences everywhere when it came out in 1998) Surprisingly, the following video is nothing like that. It’s rather the opposite, which is why it’s so eye-opening and revealing — it’s from a lens attached to a gun on a United States Army Air Force plane while it zigged and zagged through the sky shooting down German fighters over Nazi-occupied France.

Somehow, the film is as clear as a Bell Helicopter.