Masters Of The Air review: A brutal, beautiful World War II miniseries
Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan lead Apple TV+'s powerful drama
TV Reviews John
Are you the sort of person who saluted the screen when the fleet of little boats arrived at Dunkirk beach in Christopher Nolan’s much-lauded war film? Did you choke back a sob when Sgt. Warren “Skip” Muck and Pfc. Alex Penkala were killed instantly (and together) by an artillery barrage in Band Of Brothers? And do the endings to Saving Private Ryan and Blackadder Goes Forth live rent-free in your head forever more? Then you need to watch Masters Of The Air, which premieres January 26 on Apple TV+. Need to. Because this brutal and beautiful show was absolutely made for you.
With an eye-watering production budget of $200 million to $250 million, and with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg (the creators of Band Of Brothers) as EPs, this World War II miniseries ticks a lot of boxes—particularly in terms of production value and special effects. It feels, at times, like an immersive experience. The cast, too, is quite frankly ridiculous: Academy Award darlings Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan lead the charge, flanked by the likes of Callum Turner, Ncuti “The Doctor” Gatwa, Raff Law, Sawyer Spielberg, Ben Radcliffe, Nate Mann, and others. And the fact it’s based on the real first-hand accounts of the real soldiers involved in the 100th Bomb Group? That just adds an extra layer of realism and gravitas to events that viewers will appreciate and eventually curse as they wipe the tears away from their sodden cheeks. (Top Gun this ain’t.)
But, of course, we’re getting ahead of ourselves: Let’s talk plot. The 10-part series opens with all of the high romance, adventure, and dashing men in uniform that many fictional accounts sell us of war. Music plays lazily in the background as a group of pilots-in-training down shots and enviously eyeball Major John “Bucky” Egan, the guy who seemingly has all the luck. Not only is he dancing with some pretty young thing, but he’s being shipped off the very next morning.
“He’ll be a stone’s throw away from the Krauts while the rest of us will still be flying practice missions over Nebraska,” they lament bitterly. Still, as Bucky’s BFF—one Major Gale “Buck” Cleven—points out during a hushed conversation of his own, their time will come quickly enough. Hell, he’s being shipped out himself in two or three weeks. He’s even pre-written his first letter to the girl he’s promised to write, just so he’s not caught short (or presumably without a pen and paper). War, for these young men, is the next chapter in their great adventure—or it is, at least, when the lights are glowing warmly, the drink is flowing, and songs are being chosen for slow goodbye dances. For just a moment, the spell is almost broken when Bucky suggests to his pal that he might be killed before they’re reunited, but Buck laughs off the comment.
And then, just like that, everything changes. The cosseting coziness of the bar is replaced with the cold white light of a sky in wartime. The dreamy music, too, gives way to the frenzied sound of bullets tearing through metal planes and all-too-fragile human bodies. Bucky, flying on the observation mission he was so excited to volunteer for, holds a mortally injured man in his arms in that claustrophobic space—and, when he lands, he’s advised not to tell his friends about the reality of combat conducted at 25,000 feet in the air. “They’ll figure it out,” he’s told by a pale-faced pilot. “We all do.”
It’s just eight minutes of a single episode, sure, but this powerful narrative arc sets the tone for this tale of brotherhood, courage, loss, and shattered hopes. Each episode is framed perfectly; just as the first opens with the men’s naive dreams of war, so the second opens with them coming to terms with the cold hard truth. Friendships are formed, while others crumble. Still-walking men are offered coffee and alcohol by medical staff; the wounded are … well, they are offered the best of intentions. And all of this serves as an all too timely reminder that war is brutal, frightening, and deadly. That people don’t go down in blazes of glory—that they are killed in terrifying, often inhumane conditions.
Of course, there’s no denying that Masters Of The Air does offer up some visually stunning depictions of airborne battle. That it, too, leans heavily into the schmaltzy side of war in its opening credits (quite easily the more unpalatable thing about the series). Still, though, it does incredible work in offering the real-life bomber boys a voice at last. In allowing itself to get personal, to delve deep into their lives away from their aircraft, to explore their individual traumas, and to explore who they really were and where they came from, the series ensures that they don’t become collateral damage in yet another expensive screen project that glorifies military action.
Many will praise the series for offering up an ambitious spectacle, but we honestly believe that its success lies in its refusal to shy away from the humanity of war. Which is all to say: Watch this show.
Masters Of The Air premieres January 26 on Apple TV+
138 Comments
How did HBO let this one go? Even though I don’t think he was in charge then, let’s go ahead and blame Zaslav for it. Band of Brothers is still a semi-annual rewatch in our household. Never re-watched the Pacific again after its original airing but it sucks to be missing this one. This new nobody has avatars thing sucks.
I rewatch BoB every time it’s on (except I often skip The Breaking Point because it’s just too fucking hard to watch). I’ve rewatched some of The Pacific, but it’s too bloody and harrowing throughout to really want to sit down and see again. I’m looking forward to this one, though it sounds stressful. Also I need to get Apple TV.I thought the avatars thing was just a glitch on my end. Is this permanent?
Yeah me too about the avatars. No Avatar: The Last Kinjabender.
Seem to be broken for everyone , a bug or part of the continuing enshittification?.. I dont know.
Apple TV+ is really killing it in the content department. So many great shows.
That’s what I am seeing. I found out that Disney+ is about to be included with my cable subscription so since I won’t be paying for that anymore I might shift that part of the budget to an Apple TV subscription.
Worth it.
Just of the series I’ve seen, here’s what I can recommend:
Genre:
Monarch
Invasion
Foundation
Silo
Hello Tomorrow!
Severence
Comedy:
Ted Lasso
Shrinking
Mythic Quest
Trying
Drama:
Morning Show
For All Mankind
Truth be Told
Home Before Dark
And there’s still more I want to watch. That’s like a solid year of shows for a non-binger like me.
I’m not a binger either so it’s hard to justify paying for streaming services that I won’t sit and watch for long periods, but I will go ahead and do it because I feel like I’m missing out.
I thought the avatars thing was just a glitch on my end.Someone mentioned in another article that G/O is negotiating with the Onion union and don’t want pro-union avatars, and I think that’s entirely plausible. Spanfeller is just that type of asshole.
Is this permanent?Hopefully not.
Nice to know they can make adjustments to the interface when they want to and have just chosen not to make actual improvements. lol
Yeah I have the same thing, I love to revisit BoB, but the Pacific was just one and done for me, and I don’t know why. Maybe the cast? I don’t find the actors in The Pacific nearly as compelling. And perhaps the miniseries is harmed by the fact that the Pacific theater was such a different beast. BoB was in a theater where there was a specific goal, and they achieved it, and there is finality, but in the Pacific, yeah there was a goal, but it all winds up being kind of pointless, because the goal was to build toward an invasion of Japan, and that never happened, so from a story perspective, it lacks that same sense of resolution. They just kind of drift home.
For BoB, the reason why it works and the Pacific doesn’t kind of goes back to the origin story. It got written largely because Ambrose somewhat randomly stumbled on a company reunion in town that year, realized it was at almost every big event in the ETO that mattered in American popular culture so a book would sell, and then the cherry on top was that once he contacted Winters, he learned that the latter had already done most of his work for him in already compiling an extremely detailed history. This was the backbone of the rather sloppy book but more importantly when Hanks got the rights, Winters gave him the original history. HBO then did what Ambrose didn’t – they sent out a slew of researchers to interview pretty much all the surviving members, confirm the details of Winters’ binders as best they could, and add a massive amount of depth to the story when they’d catch stuff Winters didn’t know about. It still got stuff wrong, but the result was a very clean story arc that is incredibly deep and compelling.The Pacific didn’t have that. It takes three or four memoirs and tries to adapt them into a linked narrative that isn’t particularly cohesive, especially since unlike BoB it also does a standard Hollywood rewrite of them. Then you add that since it’s the Marine-only story of that theater, it leaves out an incredible amount that ties things together. On top of that, there’s yet another problem in that most of the events were largely obscure even at the time to the American public; it does a reasonable job with what it’s got, but precisely why they were going island hopping to these specific places isn’t something the show communicates well at all.The show’s best rewatchable moments are when it concentrates on characters rather than plot; the Leckie psychiatry visit, the Sledge registration at college. The rest you only need to see once, since it’s one long, ugly slog with a lot of misery and death, which was indeed much of the Marine experience of the war.We’ll see about MotA; the book surprised me with how biting the analysis is after a slow start.
Wow, you nailed it, great take! This makes a lot of sense. I had read a number of the books that were later used as the basis for The Pacific, and yeah it’s a real issue they way they joined those texts, full of characters that don’t really connect with one another. Leckie is off fighting for one part of the war, and Sledge for another, and Basilone kind of comes and goes, and there is no real connective tissue.
The fact that both shows emphasised different aspects of war probably also made a difference.
BoB was about literally that. A group of men and their path to Germany. The Pacific seemed less about the War itself and more about the damage done both physically and even more so mentally on those who fought it.
BoB is perhaps more rewatchable, but I enjoyed The Pacific for what it was.
Ambrose in general was a pretty sloppy writer who has been shown to have committed cases of plagiarism in at least six of his books and in his doctoral dissertation. And he’s made some glaring factual errors in some of them apparently because he misread his sources. Still, I get why he was popular — he wrote well and made what he was writing about seem exciting.
For me Pacific was a letdown b/c of the cast. My grandfather fought at Guadalcanal so I was super pumped for the series and ultimately left flat.
You’re right, the characters aren’t as compelling or likable. I found myself saying “Oh would you stfu” half the time Remi Malik spoke and I didn’t find Leckie very likeable. That show’s also a reminder that a lot of those battles were a waste of human life. Neither Peleliu nor Iwo were ultimately even necessary, although I suppose they didn’t know that at the time.
It was hurt because its three separate books awkwardly jammed together. Basalone never meets Sledge and so forth which makes it feel a tad more disconnected then Band of Brothers. It’s still a grand series but trying to do three storylines instead of just adapting With the Old Breed was a bad call.
And Basalone felt like such a cypher. Almost the point of being propagandistic, the way he seeks combat, wins medals, ultimately dies in battle. And Leckie was miscast. I never bought James Badge Dale as a marine, he was too nebeshy. I dare say, even Joseph Mazello I didn’t really get into as Eugene Sledge. BoB has such phenomenal casting, and I felt like Pacific lacked that same attention to character embodiment. They all blended together. The only real standouts in terms of casting, was Rami Malek as Shelton, and Gary Sweet as Gunny Haney. I dare say you could’ve made a hell of a series around Haney’s story, of a Marine who was the epitome of the Old Breed, one of those rare few who saw combat in both World Wars, as well as serving in some nasty places in the 30s. Make it about him and how he brings up the New Breed.
Yeah the characteization is sometimes a bit iffy. Basalones story is almost hard to believe yet it happened, but also that’s not really standard for any marine. MOH stories are always like that for obvious reasons. The writers wanted to depict large swaths of the Pacific but ultimately narrowing the focus would have been better. You didn’t need Guadalcanal or Iwa Jima.
Yeah I have the same thing, I love to revisit BoB, but the Pacific was just one and done for me, and I don’t know why. Maybe the cast? I don’t find the actors in The Pacific nearly as compelling. I think its a combo of cast and writing. I just can’t connect with the characters of The Pacific the same way I did with BoB. In BoB, they made you care about every single one of those guys. In The Pacific, it just felt like a generic war tale from a character stand point. I don’t think a I felt a deep connection to a single person from that show. It’s still a fine series, but there’s a clear separation between the two
I think it’s because you don’t follow a single cohesive arc in The Pacific, plus a lot of the is Leckie in hospital. But the Yanks got to see Bill Hunter! Zoe Carides! And Gary Sweet’s arse! And the rest of Gary Sweet!
the Pacific was just one and done for me, and I don’t know why.
For me, it was mainly because it followed individuals instead of a unit. Also, I think that the first episode of Band of Brothers, where we follow them through their training, was a big part of bonding viewers with the characters/cast. The Pacific lacked that.
And perhaps the miniseries is harmed by the fact that the Pacific theater was such a different beast.
…
in the Pacific, yeah there was a goal, but it all winds up being kind of pointless
Seconded.
I loved both series. I would highly recommend the books both are based off of. The books for the pacific highlight more of the racial animosity that fueled the pacific war more than the European war.
I just finished the Pacific book yesterday. It was really great but I liked Band of Brothers better – I think it offered a more straightforward narrative, not that always matters with history books. But it was easier for me to follow.
I agree.
The Pacific is very good, but a little monotonous. There’s a lot of “slogging through mud again, but on a different island.” The battles seem almost repetitive and Band of Brothers never suffered from that problem.
Yes it is not as good.
Portrayals of fighting in the Pacific remind me a lot of WWI trench warfare, just brutal and disgusting with a lot of close contact. Plus the Japanese weren’t above straight murdering prisoners of war if they became a hassle. There’s an excellent movie from the mid-2000’s called The Great Raid that was about a prisoner rescue mission, driven by the fact the Japanese were about to retreat from an island and were almost certainly going to kill the American POWs they had locked up there on their way out.
That is a great movie for sure.
A friend of mine used to interview WWII vets as a serious hobby and founded an outfit called Witness to War that has now filmed nearly 10,000 combat vet interviews. Some were of guys involved in that raid, so we got to go with him to the Great Raid premiere.
Yuuup:
To be fair, “slogging through mud again, but on a different island” is pretty much what the Pacific theater was.
No Avatar: The Way of Spanfeller
Sure. I’m just saying that makes for less good television.
Yup, I’d absolutely watch this if it was on HBO/Max like the previous two Spielberg/Hanks-produced WWII miniseries, but I’m not paying for AppleTV+ just for one thing.
I dunno, from what I’ve heard/seen, it might be worth a month of Apple.
There’s a three month free trial through Best Buy for new and returning subscribers! I’ve used it like 3 times now to keep Apple TV+
I just went on the Best Buy site and did that – awesome, thanks for the tip!
KINJA blows
Today the slogan “it’s not TV, it’s HBO” feels like it can only be said with bitter irony. For me, over the past year Apple has definitively wrestled the crown away from HBO (sorry, “MAX”) as the destination for quality content. I can only think of perhaps two shows in the current HBO roster I’d count as “must see programming”; True Detective (which is hit-or-miss and has years between seasons) and The Last of Us. With shows like Succession, Barry, and Insecure in the rearview and even legacy content like Raised by Wolves and Westworld I was hoping to get around to watching disappearing, there’s not much left. Hoping for another dynamite mini-series like Chernobyl is like waiting for lightening to strike twice. Scavengers Reign feels like the exact kind of beautiful weird project Zaslav is too stupid to give a second season to. I’ve been part of an HBO household literally my entire 43-year-old life and at this point I’m hanging by a thread.
How did HBO let this one go?$$$$$I watched a short video on YouTube that tried to guess about the economics. Despite the high production costs for Band of Brothers, HBO made a killing later on DVD sales and licensing it to other networks. They did not get much back from The Pacific. Part of it was that The Pacific just didn’t resonate with viewers the same way Band of Brothers did so you don’t see marathons of it on the History Channel on Memorial Day. The other part is that by the time The Pacific came out DVD sales were dropping for everything.
I think the Pacific theater is just more foreign to most Americans. We know where Britain, France, Germany and Russia are. They’re in the U.S. news constantly. Many Americans have been there. Meanwhile the location of Guadalcanal is a mystery. The islands that we were hopping all look alike and we never got to any climactic events like an invasion of Japan (thank god). I personally didn’t know until recently that nearly as many American soldiers served in the Pacific as in Europe.
Funny enough, to the extent that my family has military connections, they’re all to Asia/the Pacific. My dad had an uncle who fought in the battle of Luzon and an aunt whose first husband died fighting the Japanese. My grandfathers and another of my dad’s uncles fought in the Korean War, and several members of my family were stationed in Japan during the 50’s and 60’s. Maybe it’s partially because I’m from California, and certainly because I’m from more of a navy family, but I always knew more people whose military experience was focused on Asia than Europe. My grandfather’s cousin did fight in Europe, and was one of the Americans who met up with the Soviets at the Elbe River. I kind of wanted to ask him about the experience, but he was a really terrible person who did some messed up, sleazy things over the years, so I never did. He died about a year ago at the age of 95, so I guess I won’t be getting that chance.
Racism played a big part – Europeans looked and shared a lot of their culture with America.It’s easier to feel a connection for a guy call Levi who looks like you and shares that name with the nice Mr. Levi you knew from the down the road.It’s not as easy to feel a connection with a guy called Xiao who, to your eyes, looks like that guy called Watanabe you had locked up in the internment camp down the road.Asia only got $5.9 billion in aid and only for a select few countries, compared to the Marshall Plan’s $13.3 billion.
I worked at HBO during the production of The Pacific, and got to read all of the scripts shortly before they started filming. One centered on an American pilot who’d been shot down and was a prisoner of war at Iwo Jima while it was being assaulted, and was told from both the pilot’s and his Japanese captors’ point of view. (In a sort of callback/reversal of a moment in BoB, his chief captor was an American-born Japanese soldier). It wound up being cut from production – most likely because it was so tonally different than all the other eps and featured completely different characters that you never saw again – but at least on paper it had some of the strongest writing of the series. I was always sad that we never got to see it on the screen. I’m happy that now we get to see something bigger and (presumably) even better.
There is an excellent video on YouTube detailing how it didn’t make nearly as much money with home media sales as Band of Brothers. The Pacific cost more to produce and ended up being barely profitable. I understand why HBO was apprehensive about another WWII series with an even higher budget.
The nostalgia element makes sense but the pricepoint is intense. Even before Zaslav, streamers were beginning to pivot toward profitability. Maybe they worried it wouldn’t be as sticky as BoB.
HBO lost a ton of money producing The Pacific.
HBO lost a ton of money producing The Pacific.
I think part of the reason for that is it came too long after Band of Brothers, which means that many people didn’t connect the two. Band of Brothers came out in 2001, The Pacific in 2010. That’s a long time between a series and it’s follow-up/sequel. If The Pacific had come out 2002-4, more people might have watched it.
That said, I think the bigger reason is that The Pacific was just nowhere near as good as Band of Brothers was. Personally, I felt zero connection to the main characters in The Pacific, whereas with Band of Brothers I felt like I knew them, a big reason being that we watched them go through training.
I think its because the Pacific was a costly financial failure and Zaslav is even more of a penny pincher. There loss.
I think what we all wanted to know, that this article (and all others) failed to address: is MotA more like BoB? Or another Pacific?
I’m not quite sure why The Pacific was such an ambitious failure, whereas BoB is addictively compelling, but I think it comes down to the strength of each character, and how easy it is to identify with them on a personal level (and thereby transport us into asking: if we are so like them, could we ourselves have done what those men did? I identify with Malarkey in a way that I just never did with Sledge, let alone PFC Shelton).
Understanding why The Pacific didn’t work as well as BoB is the first step, and I’m cautiously optimistic that Apple figured it out for MotA—but we’ll find out in about 2 days.
I couldn’t rewatch the Pacific. It’s more visceral and harrowing. At least to me.
With the arrival of this show I’m again wondering about the depth of interest in tales of WWII fighting. While I understand that the stories of battles and brotherhood will always be interesting, it seems like WWII has an exceptional level of interest. It’s not more current that the conflicts in Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan. I don’t think that WWII was more dramatic or traumatic to the participants than later conflicts. Is it because the US was victorious, where the other conflicts were much less decisive?
Are you seriously confused as to why a war that killed 400,000 Americans gets more attention than ones that killed 6000 combined? World War II is the largest military conflict in history, and the world was a completely different place after it was over. Not only that, but I’d think the potential trauma of it was in fact greater for the average soldier than Iraq or Afghanistan, considering that your odds of being killed or seriously injured were much higher there. And of course the Axis powers were engaged in possibly the largest mass killing of civilians in all recorded history. So yeah, that does make it pretty fertile ground for storytelling. Do we maybe focus on it too much, to the exclusion of more recent and relevant events? Possibly, but there are some pretty solid reasons why that’s so.
Right? It’s the only war in modern history where the good and evil sides were so clear cut. Like, there was legitimate evil going on and the rest of the world joined forces to stop it. Now, it’s war, so there was bad stuff that was happening on both sides, but yeah. And it also happens to be the biggest conflict in world history. Soooo… it gets some attention.
Clearly the scale of WWII makes for more story telling opportunities, but given the dilution of time seems like it would diminish its interest to modern generations. Hell, I just saw a stat about how younger age groups think that the Holocaust was exaggerated. Somehow it still seems like WWII remains a better story to tell because it has a happier ending that Korea, Vietnam or Afghanistan, as well as better justifications for doing what we did, good and bad.
Easy…the enemy in WWII was able to be (rightfully) painted as evil in the case of Hitler, and (wrongfully) “othered” in the case of the Japanese (Though Nanking and Manchuria have a good case for calling them evil as well). Modern wars have the attendant media and personal coverage that is immediate – we SEE the dead children, we don’t just see numbers in a newspaper. Collateral damage has faces. Killing one terrorist leader at the cost of the wedding he was attending is abhorrent to many people. There is also far less clear and present danger – some goat herder in a sepia-toned poor country really cannot do much to us…and we know it. Some of us who served defending democracy by reinstalling an Emir and protecting a King saw firsthand that this is about economics far more than protecting Americans. I am not saying we should not go after terrorists – we absolutely should – but “…we the people…” now see the true costs of those actions on people who just want to get through the day like we do. Have families like we do. Go to work like we do. The mythology of WWII ignores the good people of Dresden…Tokyo…most of whom just had the misfortune of being born at the wrong place at the wrong time.
It would be interesting to see if this new show will have anything to say about the collateral civilian damage of the air campaign, or address Dresden in any way.
Maybe a little appearance by one of the few good things to come out of Indiana? That would be a cool Easter Egg, having a Vonnegut sighting but…the firebombing of tens of thousands of civilians probably isn’t the right time for fan service.
The show is focused on the flyers, so I doubt they would give any time to Army POWs on the ground. But maybe there will be soul searching about civilian damage. I think that a trailer showed conflict with a downed flyer, so it’s not entirely in the skies?
After watching the first two episodes I can say yes it does address these things. I mean the whole point of Americans doing daytime bombing as opposed to night time like the British was to cut down on civilian casualties.
These reviews read more and more like paid advertisements.
“Did you choke back a sob when Sgt. Warren “Skip” Muck and Pfc. Alex Penkala were killed instantly (and together) by an artillery barrage in Band Of Brothers?”
And, in real life. Don’t forget that.
I choked back a lot of sobs watching that. Seeing Buck Compton completely destroyed and finished was tough to watch.
The episode about Eugene the medic is the one that always got me.
He’s got MOP grips on his issue 1911?
I’m glad this is getting good reviews, because the first trailer really dampened my enthusiasm. It made it look very glossy, with all the stars giving action movie-esque poses. Absolutely loved Band of Brothers, so now I’m hopeful that this will live up to that.
It’s getting good reviews, but I was surprised by what they gave it in RogerEbert, 2/4.
Same. Because I am really not sold on Austin Butler, who strikes me as a blandly attractive actor in the Timothee Chalamet vein, but not very interesting.
I’ve actually come around on Chalamet. My first impression was of a bland prettyboy who was badly miscast in Dune, but he’s proven me wrong. Not yet there on Butler and I don’t have AppleTV+ so I’m not sure if/when I’ll see this.
He’s great in The King.
Butler’s actually one of the better ones in it, but that may be damning with faint praise. There’s a real problem with casting: everyone looks the damn samne. There’s one (1) guy who has slightly lighter hair, but no shit, everyone’s either black or brown in the ol’ tress department. Strap an oxygen mask, a headset, and uniform on ‘em, and I’m having trouble telling them apart. BOB had a wide variety of castings, from Bill Guarnere to Bull to noted rangas Winters and Malarkey. Also…it’s very poorly-written. Feels more like a Nat Geo documentary, in that most of the dialogue focuses on exposition (“66 out of original 350 men…”) with some rather clumsy dramatic stuff shoehorned in after the fact.
wow, how did they get sawyer speilberg??
He was as cheap as his non-union Mexican equivalent, Sawyer Spielbergo.
I probably will check this out, but I chuckled at, “The cast is ridiculous, featuring [long list of people I’ve never heard of].”
maybe you misunderstood what they meant by “ridiculous”.
My grandfather was in a bomber and knew some of these guys, so I’m especially interested. Sadly, he passed a while ago and hated talking about the war anyway, so I can’t get any personal insight there.
My great uncle was a ball turret gunner in the belly of a B-17 (Sean Astin’s spot in Memphis Belle). He didn’t particularly care to discuss it either, I’m sure not least because it was pants-shittingly terrifying being exposed down there like that every time a German fighter came up from below. I finally saw one of those planes in person at a flight museum and it’s hard to believe even a smaller guy (he was 5’7″) could fit inside that turret.
My father was also a ball turret gunner and flew 35 missions when he was only 19-20 years old. He had some crazy stories and liked to say that he can’t imagine how he ever did it, but now that it’s over he’s glad he did.
I remember my grandmother asking him if he remembered how many German fighters he shot down. His answer: “I know exactly how many – zero.”Apparently the thing was hard to aim because the guns were fixed and you had to swivel the entire turret to move your line of fire, so the main job was just spraying enough bullets around to keep enemy fighters at a distance. Flying in formation helped because they watched each others’ undersides. He did the full 35 as well. Just an incredibly cool guy, ended up being a federal judge.
Yeah my grandfather flew a C-47 back and forth on D-Day plus one, and absolutely refused to talk about it beyond superficial details. Loved to talk about his time in pilot training though
The turret actually had a “computing” gunsight and during combat you were supposed to dial in the wingspan of the plane you were tracking and it determined the best firing solution. Unfortunately, it was almost impossible to use in real life, so my father just kept the dial at an average wingspan of all the German fighters he would encounter and use it that way. He didn’t think he shot down any fighters, either. Interesting enough, his gun camera footage was actually used in the film 12 O’Clock High. It’s of a B-17 on fire and guys bailing out. He took the film over Cologne in 1945.
That’s pretty amazing.
That is aggressively awesome I won’t lie. Not only did he come back alive, footage he captured is probably now stock footage for ww2 documentaries and appeared in a pretty solid film to boot!
12 O’Clock High was an awesome film and used a lot of combat footage, which added some realism not often seen when it was made. It also focused a great deal on the airmen’s relationships, much like Masters of the Air is doing now. I was shown 12 O’Clock High in a classroom setting as leadership training when I was in the Navy. We went through the entire film scene-by-scene over the course of two days—analyzing, critiquing and discussing the leadership styles the characters used and how they evolved as they dealt with the stress of combat. It was one of the best training courses I ever took.
Was your grandfather Martin Loughlin?
Being a tail gunner or a ball gunner sounds like the absolute worst fucking job on a bomber. You either sit and do nothing or panic because a round might cause the glass to shatter. Unbelievably miserable.
The one story my grandfather ever did tell was that he was hit in the arm by anti-aircraft fire, and kept the removed fragments in the same box with his Purple Heart. Since it happened in December, he called them “Hitler’s Christmas present.”
And no parachute, because you couldn’t fit one in there. There’s some fucking horror stories.
Yep. No chance of bailing out and if the plane starts tumbling you have little chance of getting out. Your also the only gun on the bottom of the aircraft so its vulnerable.
The worst one I heard was the one where the door got jammed shut on the guy…and then they had to belly land. There was a reason the British never bothered with ‘em.
The USAAF should’ve recruited more hobbits.I sincerely hope your great uncle was less of an annoying whiny dickweed than Sean “Rascal”Astin. Seriously, read his book.
My grandfather flew PBYs in the Pacific Theater. recon, search and rescue and anti submarine. He talked about his service a lot he did 30 years, but never much about his flying days.
My grandfather was a bomber navigator in the Italian theater. On his first mission, he was shot down over Montenegro, rescued by Tito’s partisans, semi-jokingly inducted into the Yugoslav Communist Party, and eventually smuggled over German lines and flown back to Italy. I always thought his story would make a hell of a screenplay…if I knew how to write a screenplay.
Remember, it’s one page = one minute of screentime, and don’t be fucking a pretentious nerd and write it in first person.
I say this with an unblemished 60 year record of staunch heterosexuality- my God Austin Butler is gorgeous. The show looks incredible but holy fuck.
I know these kinda shows are real sticklers for realism, but wouldn’t it be pretty easy to – just for the sake of clarity – change one of the two main characters’ nicknames so they weren’t both basically the same? Unless it’s a plot point that later some key piece of information is passed to the wrong Buck/y or something?
Do we think the rose-tinted “schmaltz” is chosen as an intentional counterpoint to the brutal realities? They sold the war one way at home (and as the years have passed), which does a disservice to the men and women that actually lived it.
Feels like the beginning of the recent All Quiet on the Western Front when all the German schoolboys are excited about signing up for their big wartime adventure. Oops.
I feel like it’s more of a classic throwback/tribute to a different era and style of media making.
“which does a disservice to the men and women that actually lived it”
Oh so now we’re just dismissing the trans and non-binary people who bravely served? Cool.
One of the best bits from The Pacific was Sledge back home, signing up for college, and the super-sweet southern gal asks him if they taught him anything…useful…in the Marines, and then he starts listing off the weapons he was qualified on, handling of explosives, demolitions training.“They taught me how to kill Japs. I got pretty damn good at it” and walks out.
It’s too bad Austin Butler wasn’t cast as Paul Atreides in the Dune flicks. (Yes, I know he has a role in Dune 2.) Butler as Muad’dib I can believe. Timmy C. is such a girly-boy that his casting ruined the Dune flicks for me.
I wonder if Americans in WWII had more of a rose coloured glasses view of war because they didn’t experience quite the horror and casualties of WWI as other WWII allies. WWI casualty rate for Canada in WWI was about 10x that of the US so might have had more of an impact on the national psyche. On the other hand, Canada had no trouble getting enough volunteers in 1939. That might be because (like my dad and uncles) their fathers fought in WWI and so they also wanted to fight.
I have waited 13 goddamn years for this. From the moment the Pacific wrapped up, I have heard about plans for a third WW2 series about the air war. I don’t have Apples streaming service but goddamn I’ll get it just for this. The war in the air for frankly both wars is unimaginably miserable that I’d rather be on the ground. Sure it might seem more romantic, but its cramped, dizzying, and you will see action nearly every day. Honestly its a ghastly nightmare. Always wanted a big budget series to cover the air war in either conflict, and this seems to be just that.
The sheer odds of dying up there would have caused me to shit my pants in fright. Those guys had something like a 1 in 5 chance of being killed or injured each time they went up?I mean shit, imagine being up in a very large very thin skinned flying turkey being constantly raked with shit from every direction and having only so much ammo to return fire. Not too mention occupational hazards, friendly fire, bad fucking luck, etc.Sounds like a goddamn nightmare.
I did a ww1 project once about the Red Baron and Jesus Christ was the number of ways to die vast. Burned from an oil fire, falling out the plane, freezing to death from the cold air. Bleeding out from a window. Crashing into something. The canvas or a wire snaps from anything, crashing and getting pinned in no mans land. Fuck me I’d rather be in the trenches.A Sopwith Camel pilot in April 1917 had a life expectancy of 17 days. They had barely 23 hours of training. The horror!
I once got sucked into a Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about aviation pioneers, and even not counting the ones who were killed in World War I, you’d look at the little info box on their page and it would alway be like, “Died: 15 October 1921 (aged 36),” and you’d basically know how that happened.
Yeah. I was kinda impressed the big French tennis tournament, Rolland Garros, is named for a ww1 pilot. The first guy to shoot down a couple planes with deflector wedges. Got captured, escapes prison in 1918 and died in October near the wars end.So many are shockingly young. The Red Baron was 25, a few days short of 26. Oswald Bolcke was 25. Werner Voss the great rival of the Red Baron was I believe 18. Albert Ball the best Canadian pilot was only 17 when he died. All these people sound like grizzled men but they were all children.
War turns young men into old men before their time.
True. It didn’t take much to bring down a plane in those days. You could do everything right and still get killed by an ill-timed gust of wind.
Add to that the fact that the WWI fliers didn’t have parachutes. They tried to save a round in their handguns so they could shoot themselves if their planes caught fire. Failing that, they’d bailout without the parachute. Plummeting to their deaths was preferable to burning.
I had the opportunity to go inside a B-17G at the Reno Air races back in the early ‘90s. While it was classified as a heavy bomber and was a big aircraft for its time, I was stunned by how little space there was in the fuselage. I was also taken aback by the ‘40s-style “fly by wire” system—literally bundles of large bicycle-style cables ganged together and strung through the airframe from the cockpit to the control surfaces. This was a plane designed only 30 years after Orville and Wilbur first took to the air at Kitty Hawk.The plane was a later model so it survived the war with minimal damage and was still flying when I got to see it. It flew with a 10-man crew on combat missions in a space roughly the volume of a typical household hallway.
I seriously wonder if Apple+ (or someone) will rerun the 12 O’Clock High movie/series.
I loved the episodes of that series that I caught before streaming, and I’ve wondered why it wasn’t part of the WWII zeitgeist. Is it not as good as I recall?
The war in the air for frankly both wars is unimaginably miserable that I’d rather be on the ground. It’s amazing to me that the advent of air war followed the invention of the actual airplane so quickly. I think the Wright brothers first flew in 1903? And planes were being used in battle starting in 1911.Anyway – this looks great and I will definitely watch it. I’ve never seen The Pacific and suppose I should remedy that.
Yep 1903 and by the Mexican Revolution there are air fights with people shooting revolvers at each other. 1914 is a very interesting time for aircraft development, everyone is trying something. Throwing darts, bricks, rope. Revolvers. Rifleman in the back seat. Gunner in the backseat as an offensive weapon. Propeller in the back to get a gunner in the front. Protective wedges to deflect bullets. Its a lot of crazy nonsense. Hell the first confirmed air to air kill was a Russian crashing his plane into an Austrian plane.
Yeah, and some pilots would hand-toss grenades at enemy planes. While controlling the damn airplane. Which, back in WW1, could be very likely spraying oil in your face the whole flight….They improved the plane by WW2, but not by much, as regards, you know, easily dying in air battles.
Oh yeah, although metal planes could take a little more abuse. WW1 planes are just wooden barrels with engines covered in canvas and wiring. It took next to nothing to bring them down. The famous German ace Oswald Bolke died because a wingmans wheels briefly scraped his wing, causing the canvas to rip which quickly threw the entire wing off.
They were basically glorified kites with engines. There wasn’t much distance between the Wright Flyer and the Sopwith Camel.
That plane from Godzilla Minus One with the rear-mounted propeller is a real thing, though the war ended before they could be used and the filmmakers had to get a new one made from the blueprints.
Oh I am aware of the J7W1, pusher planes they were called. Actually quite common in WW1, they were slow but rather maneuveable. The most famous fight the Red Baron ever had was against British ace Lanoe Hawker who was flying one of these pusher planes. They mainly got phased out by 1917.
Purely from odds of survival, there’s no question you should should choose the ground. A stat from Masters of the Air, the book this series is based on: there were more deaths of airmen in the eighth air force (the US force flying over Europe) than in the Marine Corps during WWII.Only service with worse odds was being in a submarine.
Jesus, yeah that makes sense. I have the book just haven’t read it yet. The scary thing also is, its impossible to avoid combat. Its possible to join an army regiment that gets stuck in a really quiet sector or a ship that avoids any major battles. Being in a fighter or bomber means flying over enemy territory and you will absolutely get shot at by flak or run into other aircraft. Sure, you get to sit behind the lines and probably avoid artillery, but that only lasts so long as your on the ground.That’s really curious I never heard that about submarines. Makes sense due to heavy isolation and, well anything can sink you rather easily.
You’re on a submarine. You’re already sunk. They only call it a controlled dive because you have the option of returning to the surface if nothing breaks while you’re down below.
Which is an insane stat bc they just threw Marines into the worst possible scenarios of the whole war. Those island hopping campaigns were insane.
With an eye-watering production budget of $200 million to $250 millionIs that supposed to seem impressive? The Pacific’s budget was over $200, and that came out 14 years ago (and started production 17 years ago).
Only because it went $100 million over budget. I’d call that pretty eye-watering, too, considering that it lost HBO a ton of money and led to them dropping this show.
Just to clarify, is this a real depiction or another one of those “Americans save the world” WW2 retcons?
As real a depicition as an show ultimately made for entertainment is. Roughly on the same level as the mentioned Band of Brothers or The Pacific.Just like these, based on a non-fiction book with real accounts of real soldiers who fought in WW2.
Do we really need more media creating a fantasy out of war? Perfect time for propaganda now that enlistment numbers are down.
So is it 9 or 10 episodes? IMDB is showing it as 9 and I heard elsewhere its 9 but the article says 10?
I’m getting Apple TV for this to watch it live (Something I rarely do nowadays) but I do hope to get the Blu-Ray box set to go with my BoB and Pacific sets.
This is not what Elvis did in The Army.Please stop trying to Reboot Of Brothers. No one (or noone as most idiots commenting here seem to think is a word) is looking for this.
Shut the fuck up
Whelp, after the first two episodes, it’s…ok.Other reviews have suggested the series has a problem with characters, and I’d agree. Some of the basis of this is a very difficult writing problem to overcome that they’ve not really figured out in the first two episodes: the sheer amount of actors they’re throwing at us is an awful lot to take in, compounded by oxygen masks over their faces so we can’t really see them act, and then exacerbated by almost all of them doing the exact same thing during the action sequences. Add in that we presumably are going to be killing an awful lot of air crews off and this is a nasty equation.With this fog, it’s hard to tell so far if the leads could do better. Of the storylines so far, really only Anthony Boyle’s Harry Crosby – no spoilers, but its safe to say he’s someone who gets quoted in the book – has stuck out. Everyone else just kind of blends in the background to the point where I was briefly excited when I thought they were about to fudge history a bit by having Curtis LeMay as CO just to bring in another vivid personality, even if his crucial part that the book focuses on wasn’t that particular role (and apparently, his character isn’t in the series at all.)It’s a bit unfair to compare this to BoB and The Pacific given all this, but it is worth noting that by Episode 2 of BoB we already had established something like 15-20 characters with distinct personalities and by Episode 2 of The Pacific Guadalcanal’s done and the horror of that campaign has marked the leads. Those are very different paces for a series than what’s been shown here so far.We’ll see how this turns out.
** SPOILER **I did a little research and Harry Crosby quickly became one of the most highly decorated navigators in the Army Air Corps despite never getting over the airsickness. He went back to academia in civilian life and eventually wrote a book about his experiences in the war.
Another side of the story is the targets the allies chose and the decisions that were made to bring the axis powers to their knees. It doesn’t diminish the heroics of the young men that fought and died in the skies, but it does put a different perspective on the horrors of war and the choices that are made by those at the top. Lost History-Sins of Our Fathers (youtube.com)
I think some of the criticism aimed at The Pacific was due to the fact that it was based on two books, while Band of Brothers was based on one. Because of that, the second series focused on different men in different units who were involved in different battles. This made it harder to follow for some viewers.I think Masters of the Air will unltimately compare more favorably to the first series in that it’s also based on one book and follows a single unit for the duration of the war.