When HBO debuted Band of Brothers in 2001, it was an event — prestige television’s answer to the question, “What if Saving Private Ryan were 10 hours long and based on the experiences of real people?”
Executive-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg and based on a bestselling book by Stephen Ambrose, the miniseries followed the men of Easy Company, 101st Airborne, from their paratrooper training in Georgia to their taking of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest. Two days after the show’s premiere, which drew 10 million viewers, the 9/11 attacks occurred, perhaps injecting the show’s themes of patriotism and sacrifice with new gravity. The Pacific, which followed in 2010 and applied a similar conceit to the Pacific theater, was even grittier and darker, to the point of being a bit polarizing.
Masters of the Air, a new companion series to Band of Brothers and The Pacific about the experiences of American airmen in World War II, can sometimes feel like a catalog of harrowing ways to die. Enemy flak or machine-cannon rounds might punch through the walls of your B-17 Flying Fortress. The bomber, struck by a rocket or crippled by a fuel fire, might explode. You might get trapped in the ball turret of a nose-diving plane or strangled by your parachute while trying to jump through a hatch. You might be shot in cold blood as you float in the sky or lynched in hot blood by a civilian mob on the ground. You might get strafed by friendly fire. You might ride out most of the war at a prisoner-of-war camp and then be killed while trying to escape.
The show itself almost died before seeing action. Stalled by a shuffle from HBO, which reportedly decided the project was too expensive, to Apple TV+ and by production delays due to COVID, this third installment has been a long time coming. Based on a book by the historian Donald L. Miller and focused on the experiences of American bomber crews in Europe, Masters of the Air has most of the same strengths (and occasionally weaknesses) of the earlier shows. Fans of those will probably be pleased with this one.
The series opens with airmen of the 100th Bomb Group heading, by way of Greenland, to Britain. They’ve been tasked to “take the war to Hitler’s doorstep,” as the show’s occasional narrator, the flight navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle), explains. In contrast to the Royal Air Force, which bombs Europe by night (safer for its crews, more indiscriminate), the U.S. Army Air Forces do more daring daytime raids, using their fiercely protected Norden bombsight to conduct relatively precise attacks on military and industrial targets from heavily armed long-range bombers deep over enemy territory.
It is a terrifying and deadly undertaking: flying tight formations of bombers, usually without fighter escorts, into cloudy skies thick with flak and Luftwaffe fighters. The hotshots of the 100th include the taciturn Maj. Gale Cleven (Austin Butler, of Elvis), the hard-partying, volatile Maj. John Egan (Callum Turner), a gung-ho lieutenant, Curtis Biddick (the ubiquitous Barry Keoghan), and the heroic Maj. Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal (Nate Mann). Rosenthal is regarded with awe after an early, disastrous run when his limping bomber is the only one of an armada of 13 to return. Later, he orders his crew to bail when their bomber catches fire over Berlin. He’s the last to jump, shortly before the plane explodes only a thousand feet over the ground.
These incidents — which, it’s worth remembering, actually happened — are vividly presented. Despite Band of Brothers’s considerable production values, its aerial scenes had a slightly pokey feeling. In Masters of the Air, which benefits from more up-to-date special effects, as well as the skilled staging of directors such as Cary Fukunaga, the action feels all too real.
Between missions, the men recuperate at their air base in rural England. They drink heavily, get in fights with each other and with their British opposite numbers, and flirt with female officers and nurses (Emma Canning, Ella Rubin). When they begin to show signs of nervous collapse, they’re sent on R&R trips to London and Oxford. Their presence in Britain isn’t without friction. When an Englishman accuses the American military of overrunning his country with rowdy and “oversexed” Americans, you sense that he’s speaking for many. (Perhaps this man had his psychic revenge: A huge share of the show’s American characters are played by British or Irish actors, as the Guardian has noted.)
As was the case with Band of Brothers and The Pacific, Masters of the Air has a dizzying number of characters, and it can be difficult to keep track. The show does its best to define each, as well as to broaden out the story from the slightly claustrophobic locale of the air base. The men’s day-to-day lives consist of the most agonizing kind of repetition: They’re all counting down to their 25th mission, which is when they’re allowed to retire from active combat and go home, but many won’t make it.
The first several episodes of the series can feel a bit plotless — mission after mission, sortie after sortie, a brutal monotony. It comes as almost a relief when several characters are shot down over enemy territory. Some link up with the Belgian and French resistance, and others are captured and taken to POW camps. The experience of captive Allied airmen has been fairly well trod in films such as The Great Escape and the wonderful Stalag 17, but a scene in Masters of the Air that sees POWs eating a stray cat is a pointed reminder of their privation.
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The series also takes on urgency and direction as the Allied ground invasion of Europe looms. Several “Red Tail” fighter pilots of the Tuskegee Airmen, including Lt. Robert Daniels (Ncuti Gatwa) and Lt. Alexander Jefferson (Branden Cook), are introduced awkwardly late in the series, but their storyline proves one of the show’s more interesting and illuminating: As the black pilots are assigned their survival kits, they’re told with seeming seriousness that if shot down over enemy territory, they should try to “blend in” with the locals. Similarly, Crosby, the navigator, develops a relationship with a mysterious female British officer (Bel Powley) whose role in the war turns out to be more important than he initially understands.
In watching Masters of the Air, one is struck, as with the earlier series, by the sense of death hanging over everything and by the epic scale. The men call their planes “ships,” and when you see their vessels crossing the sky in vast armadas, you understand why. You also can’t help but notice, again and again, the airmen’s youth: These are majors and captains and lieutenants barely out of their teenage years, entrusted with a weight of responsibility that is terrifying to fathom.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.