More than a decade after it was first rumored as the basis for another prestige-TV look back at the Good War from the same Spielberg-Hanks Military Nostalgia Complex that brought you Band of Brothers and The Pacific, Donald L. Miller’s 2007 Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany has at last come to your Apple TVs. Read along as we meet the suspiciously handsome flying men of the 100th Bombardment Group (Heavy), a detachment of the Eighth Army Force that arrived in England in the summer of 1943.
The unit would become known as the “The Bloody Hundredth†for the devastating losses it sustained throughout its deployment. So prepare yourselves to watch many charming and charismatic actors be killed off over the course of nine episodes.
I think Ridley Scott’s 2002 adaptation of Mark Bowden’s nonfiction book Black Hawk Down was the first time I noticed that in 21st-century dramatizations of real events involving real American soldiers, those Americans tended to be played by Brits, Scots, Irishmen, or Australians. Masters of the Air carries on the puzzling casting trend: Its top three “characters,†at least in this premiere episode, are based on and named for real veterans of the war.
As Major Gale “Buck†Cleven, Austin Butler counts as at least three Americans for having played Elvis. Just behind him as Major John “Bucky†Egan and Major Harry Crosby, respectively, are Englishman Callum Turner and Irishman Anthony Boyle. (Boyle provides sparse but clarifying narration throughout, probably because the real Crosby lived to publish a memoir of his experience in the Bloody Hundredth called A Wing and a Prayer in 1993 and didn’t die until 2010.)
The Irishman doing the most comical “I came heah from New Yahk to kill gnat-zeesâ€Â accent is Barry Keoghan. Masters of the Air’s COVID-delayed production began nearly three years ago, meaning Keoghan likely shot his part prior to his memorable semen-laced-bathwater-drinking turn in Saltburn. He plays Lieutenant Curtis Biddick, who doesn’t get much time in Miller’s book.
Co-executive producer and writer John Orloff seems uniquely qualified to spin Miller’s deeply researched, small-print doorstop into nine hours of stirring onscreen aerial derring-do, having been a writer on Band of Brothers and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole.
The episode opens quietly, with Butler and Turner’s Buck and Bucky, respectively, in an officers club in their dress uniforms, entertaining a pair of lady companions. Bucky is dancing with a woman to whom Buck’s steady girl, Marge, has only just introduced him. A couple of unnamed officers doing shots at the bar express their envy that Bucky will be the first among them to ship out to England. (We don’t know where we are, but I infer we’re at the 100th’s home field in Kearney, Nebraska.) Marge tells Bucky’s new friend how it is that these two inseparable pals came by the easily confused nicknames Buck and Bucky.
This scene establishes their dynamic: Though they’re both overflowing with confidence, the soft-spoken, teetotaling Buck is of the unshowy variety, while the hard-drinking, free-flirting Bucky prefers to be the life of the party. This makes Bucky an odd fit for the job that has him shipping out to England ahead of the others: air executive of the 100th. When Buck points out to Bucky that that’s a desk job, Bucky tells his friend that he’s arranged to fly with the 389th bomb group as an observation pilot until his brothers in the 100th arrive a few weeks later. “Someone’s gotta taste a little combat and tell you what it’s really like up there,†Bucky grins.
What It’s Really Like Up There could be the mission statement for the show.
Just that quickly, director Cary Joji Fukunaga, who’s been keeping a low profile in the last couple of years after allegations of abusing his power that are entirely unrelated to the fact he killed James Bond, cuts from this warm, inviting bar to the flaming husk of a B-24, where Bucky, in the co-pilot seat, is issuing instructions — orders, you’d call them, were he not a mere observer in this crew — to dive into a cloud bank to extinguish a fire in one of the bomber’s four engines.
It’s May 21, 1943, our first title card tells us, and Luftwaffe fighters over Wilhelmshaven, Germany, are menacing the 389th bomb group. The tail gunner of this ship’s crew is also its navigator, which becomes a problem when the pilot calls for an escape heading, and the gunner-navigator replies that he’s been hit in an exchange with one of the fighters. Bucky crawls down out of the cockpit to treat the gunner’s chest wound and consult the map so his pilot can bring the crew home. He might be a party boy, but his executive presence while urging that wounded gunner to keep his eyes open is persuasive. You believe a bomber crew (ten men aboard the B-17s flown by the 100th) or a bomb group (350 men) would follow him with their lives on the line.
“Are you wondering what to tell your guys?†the B-24 pilot asks Bucky once they’re safely back on the ground. “Don’t say anything. They’ll figure it out. We all do.â€
After a stirring title sequence, our first narration comes in, though we don’t yet know that navigator Harry Crosby is the person speaking to us. “Most of us had never traveled far from home, let alone flown in an airplane,†he says. “We came from every corner of the country with a common purpose: to bring the war to Hitler’s doorstep.†It’s a good line, and it sets up the contrast between these newly minted American airmen and their English allies, who, at this point, have already had Der Fuhrer on their doorstep for nearly four years.
The 100th bomb group is flying from the U.S. to RAF Thorpe Abbotts in East Anglia, England, which will be its home for the next two years, with a rest-and-refueling stop at Bluie West One Airfield in South Greenland. Winds are high as the group approaches its Greenland way station, and the landings are dicey. The crews need the drinks they enjoy at Bluie West’s base bar afterward.
Crosby’s narration introduces us to some of the other principals as the camera glides past them in a long tracking shot through the bar, Goodfellas-style. The sergeant minding the bar tells Buck that his friend Bucky tore the place up a few weeks prior, and we cut to East Anglia, where Bucky is wreaking genial havoc in a different pub. But he wins a bet, securing both a kiss from a woman at the bar and a pair of bicycles — useful at Thorpe Abbotts, we learn, given the long distances between your bunk and the canteen — for himself and his pal. Bucky cheerfully bellows “Blue Skies,†his signature song, while steering his bike with one hand and towing Buck’s with the other through the English rain and mud back to base.
His brothers in the 100th are having a tougher time reaching their destination. A B-17 commanded by a Captain John Brady (Ben Radcliffe, another Brit) has become separated from the formation due to dense cloud cover and an electrical problem the crew is trying to diagnose. Also, this “fort,†as the crews refer to their B-17 Flying Fortresses, has as its navigator our man Crosby. Poor Crosby is puking his guts out, which is how he accidentally directs Captain Brady not to friendly England, but to occupied France. The crew discovers the error when the sky before them lights up with flak — anti-aircraft fire.
At Thorpe Abbotts, the citizenry of East Anglia marvels at the site of B-17s touching down. It’s a reunion of Buck and Bucky. The men and aircraft of the 100th have made it to England before much of their equipment has — Bucky tells Buck he’s had to borrow parachutes and altitude masks from the Brits. When Buck says that’s a problem for the air exec, Bucky says the guy should be fired. He really does not want this job.
Captain Brady’s ship finally finds its way to Thorpe Abbotts, where that electrical problem turns out to have rendered one of the bombers’ landing gear inoperative. Brady brings the aircraft down into a belly landing, the crew fleeing the ship until the risk of explosion has passed. It’s here that we get our glimpse at yet another handsome Englishman, Raff Law, son of Jude, as Sergeant Ken Lemmons. (Lemmons was a ground crew chief commanding 15 men tasked with keeping the Hundredth’s bombers airworthy.)
Air exec Bucky is relieved to find the crew unharmed. “There are two kinds of pilots,†he tells Captain Brady. “Those who’ve had a wheels-up landing, and those who will.†He asks Captain Brady how he lost the group, and Brady mentions the electrical failure but not his airsick and disoriented navigator. Brady tells a grateful Crosby that he wasn’t covering for him and that if he can’t keep his breakfast down, he’d better find another crew.
The 100th’s C.O., Colonel Harold Huglin (Nikolai Kinski, son of Klaus!), dresses down Bucky for not enforcing stricter discipline as air exec. Bucky asks to be relieved of that job and made a squadron commander again. We’ve seen Starfleet’s captain James T. Kirk in this position once or twice. Exhibiting the Spartan discipline he expects his unit to maintain, Huglin, who has been sipping milk throughout this scene, waits until he’s dismissed Bucky to spit up blood all over his desk.
The next scene is, Crosby tells us, the Last Supper — the predawn of a mission day, aircrews got a generous breakfast, far better than their usual rations. Colonel Huglin briefs the 100th on their first mission: to attack the German submarine pens at Bremen. These U-boats have been sinking dozens of Allied ships each month, preventing supplies and equipment from England. The aircrews can expect 88-mm. and 105-mm. anti-aircraft guns to try to shoot them down en route to Bremen. After the briefing, a chaplain stops by the 100th quarters to remind them that he’s available. Bucky insists that Buck take his “lucky deuce,†the two-dollar bill to which he attributes having survived the two missions he’s flown, which is two more than Buck has under his belt.
In his book, Miller describes what happens next — the short jeep drive from the quarters to the flight line — as the most frightening part of the mission to many pilots. Most of them look terrified here, but Buck projects confidence. “Let’s rack ’em up and knock ’em down†is a bowling metaphor, I guess? It sounds like the kind of thing you want the leader of your squadron to say.
More Crosby narration explains the B-17 carried a dozen machine guns, and the defensive strategy of the bomb group was to fly in tight formations, denying Luftwaffe interceptors the chance to pick them off individually (in theory).
As Buck’s ship reaches 10,000 feet, he orders the crew to check in. Their belly-turret gunner is secured in “the hole,†a plexiglass bubble protruding from the bottom of the airplane. Having a pair of .50 caliber guns at your command doesn’t leave the gunner assigned to this position any less confined or exposed. The clouds are thick enough that Buck orders a flair launched to help the other ships in the group find him. The B-17s have drifted dangerously close to one another. Another one loses an engine, preventing it from keeping pace with the others, and is forced to turn back. It’s a forceful illustration of a Miller returns to frequently: The environment above 10,000 in a 1943 airplane was at least as dangerous to aircrews as the Nazis trying to kill them.
The soup hasn’t cleared at all by the time the anti-aircraft gunners open up. The command pilot makes the call to scrub the mission. “I am not dropping bombs if we can’t see the damn target,†he says, describing what was, again, a philosophical difference between the newly arrived Americans and the Brits who’d been enduring Luftwaffe bombing raids for the better part of four years. As the flak clears, the crews realize that enemy fighters are inbound.
The horror of what shells designed to be fired by airplanes at other airplanes do when they strike a human body is briefly but disgustingly represented in the mêlée that follows, wherein three B-17s go down in flames. This sequence introduces another deadly menace chronicled in Miller’s book: frostbite. A gunner makes the thoughtless mistake of removing his gloves to try to clear a jam. As he touches those metal cannons at 50 degrees below zero, his hands effectively turn to stone.
As three fewer planes and 30 fewer airmen land at Thorpe Abbotts than took off that morning, the losses register on the faces of the ground crews. Colonel Huglin steps out of his ship, spits up more blood, and collapses.
The episode ends as it began, with Bucky and Buck in quiet conference. Buck asks why his friend didn’t warn him what he was about to experience. “I didn’t know what to say,†Bucky tells him. “You’ve seen it now.â€
“I don’t know what I saw,†Buck says.