Austin Butler as Major Gale “Buck” Cleven in Masters of the Air, S1 E1. Courtesy Apple TV+.
Masters of the Air. Dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga, Dee Rees, Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, Tim Van Patten. Prod. Gary Goetzman, Tom Hanks, and Steven Spielberg. Amblin Television and Apple Studios, 2024. Streaming.
Telling the story of the World War II-era United States Eighth Air Force—the focus of the new Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air—presents several intimidating creative challenges. The “Mighty Eighth” was a huge military organization which, at its peak, occupied around sixty airfields in England.[1] Its airmen fought across vast distances, with some bombing missions taking them over Europe to North Africa or Russia. These missions, involving freezing temperatures and recurrent mortal danger, exacted an immense physical and psychological toll on aircrew. Indeed, by the conflict’s end, twenty-six thousand American airmen in Europe had been killed. Even for those who survived there was a price to pay: a lifetime remembering lost friends and, for some, the persistent question as to whether what they had done—bomb cities—was morally “right.”[2]
In the face of these challenges Masters of the Air—written by John Orloff with Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks as executive producers—tells the story of the American “bomber boys” with skill and care, though there are some notable omissions. The narrative is ambitious, often lingering on the sheer spectacle of global war but without ever losing sight of its human dimensions. As such, the series is a worthy successor to Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010), one which offers a thoughtful re-telling of America’s “Good War” myth (albeit with less confidence than its predecessors).
From England to the Eastern Front
Masters of the Air is based on the book of the same name by historian Donald L. Miller.[3] At its center is the One Hundredth Bomb Group which flew out of Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, England. Known as the “Bloody One Hundredth,” the Group arrived in the European theater in July 1943 and remained there until December 1945. Focused on several of the Group’s leading officers—including Major Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler), Major John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner), Major Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal (Nate Mann), and Major Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle)—the series follows the One Hundredth’s war from training in the United States, to arrival in England, to flying deadly missions over Germany, and, for some, escape and evasion through Europe or internment in prison camps near the eastern front.
The series’ attention to historical detail is, on the whole, impressive. The original layout of the One Hundredth’s base was carefully recreated for filming, making clear the extent to which such wartime installations made a profound impact on the rural English landscape. In one episode, for instance, a herd of cattle are corralled through the base; in another, members of the Women’s Land Army (an agricultural labor force) gather the harvest on fields adjacent to the runways. Such scenes mark airfields as liminal spaces, existing somewhere between war and peace and reveal the series’ creative debt to William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle, which likewise opens with shots of a rural village occupied by a “battlefront” of B-17 bombers.[4]
The battle scenes are similarly well done. Where previous productions examining the American bombing campaign were often limited by what contemporary special effects would allow, Masters of the Air takes full advantage of modern CGI. The results are visually arresting, and the series skillfully captures the American commitment to daylight “precision” bombing as well as the indiscriminate violence of wartime air combat.[5] The series also does not shy away from the psychological aftermath of such encounters, with one episode centered on a so-called “flak farm,” a place of rest and recovery used to alleviate combat fatigue.
Notably, Masters of the Air also gives time to the consequences of the Allied bombing campaign in Germany, a subject memorably examined in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969) but which has often been avoided in film.[6] In one episode, for instance, key characters ponder the moral quandary at the heart of the bombing war: the impact on civilians. In another, a group of downed airmen suffer the violent retribution meted out by enraged German civilians made homeless by Allied bombs.
The series’ treatment of such issues is entirely fitting given that the conduct of the Allied bombing campaign drew contemporary comment, especially after the infamous Dresden raid of February 1945, which caused a firestorm to sweep through the city, killing tens of thousands. Indeed, while General Ira Eaker, commander of the Eighth Air Force from 1942–1943, was always adamant that “We should never allow the history of this war to convict us of throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street,” other contemporaries were more circumspect. [7] In his poem Eighth Air Force, for example, the poet Randall Jarrell, a wartime member of the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF), went so far as to label the bomber boys “murderers” who must “wash their hands, in blood, as best they can” (significantly, the poem is in fact sympathetic to them, finding in their conduct “no fault…just man”).[8]
Anthony Boyle as Lt. Harry Crosby in Masters of the Air, S1 E7. Courtesy Apple TV+.
Masters of the Air carefully queries Eaker’s pronouncement, and it does so without ever slipping into an homage to German victimhood. In fact, in its final stages the series rightly confronts the full horror of the industrialized program of murder perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a program in which, as W. G. Sebald so powerfully asserted, German civilians were themselves complicit.[9] The overall result is a story which centers the human experience of war, a narrative framing with important consequences.
One consequence is that Masters of the Air avoids some of the pitfalls encountered by the only previous attempt to tell this story on American television: the Fox Television/QM Productions series 12 O’Clock High, which ran on ABC from 1964–1967. Inspired by the success of the 1949 film of the same name and based on a post-war book by two air war veterans, ABC’s 12 O’Clock High tells the story of the fictional 918th Bomb Group flying out of the equally fictional Archbury airfield in England.[10] Although initially well received, the series ultimately ran out of steam as the writers confronted what aircrews had discovered first-hand: that flying bombing missions through enemy flak and fighters becomes rather repetitive (and for aircrew, lethal). It was cancelled mid-way through season three.[11]
By following the wartime trajectories of a small number of named officers, Masters of the Air avoids this problem of repetition, ensuring that the series does justice to the attritional brutality of air combat without exhausting the audience’s powers of endurance. At the same time though, other aspects of the American air war are marginalized.
A Significant Omission
Like all branches of the World War II military, the USAAF was racially segregated. This policy structured everything from recruitment and training to hospital blood transfusions. It restricted the vast majority of African Americans to non-combat roles, and it subjected all of the more than one million who served in the military to the daily indignities of officially sanctioned discrimination. As historian Matthew Delmont has shown, African Americans fought a dual battle for racial justice at home and abroad; military segregation was only ended by presidential order in 1948.[12]
Ncuti Gatwa as Lt. Robert H. Daniels in Masters of the Air, S1 E8. Courtesy Apple TV+.
One group of African Americans at the forefront of this fight were the Tuskegee Airmen who feature in Masters of the Air in the form of Second Lieutenants Alexander Jefferson (Branden Cook), Richard D. Macon (Josiah Cross) and Robert H. Daniels (Ncuti Gatwa). The series rightly acknowledges the injustices they faced as well as showing their courage in combat as fighter pilots. But this framing also sidesteps what might have been a more probing exploration of wartime military segregation.
A noticeable absence from the story, for instance, are the one hundred-thirty thousand African Americans posted to wartime England.[13] Around twelve thousand of these were based in and around the American airfields in eastern England, many as members of the Eighth Air Force Combat Support Wing, the organization created in 1943 and made responsible for service and supply.[14] Aside from a fleeting glimpse at the very end of Masters of the Air, these men are absent. As such, the series misses the opportunity to break genuinely new ground in how the story of the Mighty Eighth is told. This is disappointing, not least because Miller’s history does in fact carefully examine the wartime presence of “Jim Crow” in England.[15]
A Good War?
There are other omissions. The extent to which the strategic bombing campaign was an Allied endeavor (also involving Britain’s Royal Air Force) gets rather short shrift, and the distinctions in doctrine between American “precision” bombing and British “area” bombing are over-simplified. The series also gives relatively little space to exploring the close bonds formed between American airmen and local English communities, a bond powerfully recalled in the many memorials and museums that can now be found among the old bases.[16] In places, too, air war experts may be frustrated with some of the fine details around specific operations.
Overall, though, and despite its flaws, Masters of the Air delivers an engaging human story of the conflict, which sensitively handles the profound challenges encountered by the American bomber boys. To this extent, the series probes some of the limits imposed by the dominant cultural paradigm through which America’s war has often been depicted: the “Good War.” As Elizabeth Samet has explained, this reductive reading of the conflict—which asserts both the rightness and righteousness of American conduct—has long possessed a powerful hold on the American imagination, and whilst its underlying assumptions are clearly apparent in Masters of the Air, the series also usefully complicates our view of those eulogized as the “Greatest Generation.”[17] A still braver narrative, however, might have more persistently tested this paradigm, not least by diversifying the cast of characters from the very beginning in order to deliver a genuinely new story of the Eighth AF at war.
Dr. Sam Edwards is Reader (Assoc. Prof) in Modern Political History at Loughborough University, UK. He has published widely on war, memory, and transatlantic relations, including a monograph—Allies in Memory: World War II and the Politics of Transatlantic Commemoration (Cambridge, 2015)—which was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fulbright Scholar, Sam has a long running interest in the memorialization—and depiction in popular culture—of the U.S. 8th Air Force. Outside of academia he is a Trustee of Sulgrave Manor (ancestral home of George Washington) and a Governor of The American Library, Norwich (a memorial to the World War II Second Air Division, U.S. 8th Air Force).
[1] Roger Freeman, The Mighty Eighth: A History of the Units, Men and Machines of the US 8th Air Force (1986), 286–94.
[2] See Sam Edwards, “Was it a Good War? Film, Memoir, and the Memory of the American Strategic Bombing Campaign,” Revue française d’études américaines, 177 (2023–2024), 67–84.
[3] Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine (2024).
[4] The Memphis Belle, directed by William Wyler (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1944).
[5] See Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (2002).
[6] Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (1969). Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Germany and saw firsthand the aftermath of an Allied bombing raid.
[7] Quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command (1979), 339.
[8] Randall Jerrell, “Eighth Air Force,” The Complete Poems (1981). Available at https://poets.org/poem/eighth-air-force.
[9] W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (2003).
[10] Beirne Lay, Jr. and Sy Bartlett, 12 O’Clock High (1948; 1980).
[11] Sam Edwards, “12 O’Clock High and the Image of American Air Power, 1946–1967” in Anna Froula and Stacy Takacs, American Militarism on the Small Screen (2016), 46–62.
[12] Matthew Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad (2022).
[13] David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–45 (2000), 220–21. See also Graham Smith, When Jim Crow met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain (1987).
[14] Reynolds, Rich Relations, 321.
[15] Miller, Masters of the Air, 227–32.
[16] See Sam Edwards, Allies in Memory: World War II and the Politics of Transatlantic Commemoration, c.1941–2001 (2015).
[17] Elizabeth Samet, Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness (2021). Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (1998).
