WW2 series 'Masters of the Air' sabotages own mission

Something goes very wrong in the seventh and eighth episodes of "Masters of the Air," Apple TV+'s otherwise excellent new series about the Eighth Air Force's legendary 100th Bomb Group. While the show does return to form for episode nine's series finale, by then it has taken on too much damage to complete its mission successfully.

"The Bloody Hundredth" — so-called because of the heavy losses it sustained from 1942 to 1945 while flying B-17s out of an English airbase at Thorpe Abbotts — seemed to attract an unusually colorful and close-knit array of personalities. "Masters of the Air" assembles a fine cast more than up to the task of portraying them, putting a human face on the Allies' crucial strategic bombing campaign over Europe.

"Masters of the Air" is the final act in a long mass-cultural farewell to the generation of Americans who fought the Second World War.

Until those penultimate two episodes, which largely abandon this central story for a disjoined admixture of prison drama, spy thriller, and man-against-himself narratives which will conclude (we presume) only because the war does.

Why, for example, does "Masters of the Air" suddenly turn our attention to navigator — and our narrator — Harry Crosby's affair with dull British secret agent Sandra? Yes, such narrative meandering arguably serves to humanize our protagonists, making their heroic deeds all the more impressive. The problem is that the series devotes so much time to these subplots that it often neglects to depict main action at all.

Instead of showing us the devastating missions that hollow out the 100th, "Masters of the Air" tells us about it via expository dialogue and — even worse — expository voiceover. Unforgivably, even D-Day gets short shrift. Our characters face a nightmarish pace of two hundred air missions over the first three days of the invasion; cut to one character telling another about it in a 60-second exchange back at the base.

It is impossible to discern whether this was a choice dictated by writers or a choice dictated by an exhausted effects budget. If the latter, one wonders at the planning that left the production unable to show the central moment of the war in the West.

This is all the more frustrating given the scrupulous accuracy with which "Masters the Air" portrays what it does choose to include. Those who know their history will note the early episodes' portrayal of friction between RAF and USAAF personnel with interest.

This viewer expected that the opening episodes’ portrayal of friction between RAF and USAAF personnel was to set up a storyline about the RAF's real-life refusal to provide Spitfires as long-range escorts for the ravaged B-17 fleet.

Certainly a rich conflict to explore, as it prompted General Ira Eaker’s failed experiment with the YB-40 gunship, which in turn led to the American drop-tank development that transformed the bombing effort into something other than an extended bid at airman suicide.

But no: late in the series, the P-51s simply appear, and we don’t quite know them as anything other than a deus ex machina. (We do, however, get the most-improbable P-51 bailout of all time here, testament to an exhausted effects budget: viewers will know it at once.)

Even when they do stay focused on the air war, these two episodes attempt to cram in too much with the abrupt insertion of a Tuskegee-airman subplot. This shoehorning of aerial fighters into a story about bombers could have been done in an interesting fashion; for example, as a way of illuminating the aforementioned fighter-escort drama.

Instead, it just comes across as a standard Hollywood diversity nod, tossing us characters who we don’t really know and therefore don’t sufficiently care about.

The presence of Tuskegee airmen at the German prison camp Stalag Luft III, where much of the series culminates, is historically accurate, and it could've been used in a dramatically compelling way — again, see the discarded fighter-escort drama. Why the series chooses to include them as an afterthought is a mystery. These airmen deserve either their own show or a substantial role in this one, and they get neither.

Astonishingly, the Tuskegee subplot is then leveraged into a questionable set piece in which a Nazi interrogator is used to deliver the left-liberal antiracist critique of America, which then prompts the captured American sitting before him to deliver a stirring Double-V campaign speech.

In actual fact, the Tuskegee airmen at Stalag Luft III were all integrated into the camp’s general population. An organic arrival shorn of the narrative throat-clearing would have worked better as storytelling and history alike.

It's hardly unprecedented for a television or movie adaptation of a historical narrative to leave parts out. So, why complain about two subpar episodes out of nine? To answer, we must understand "Masters of the Air" in its proper context: as the final act in a long mass-cultural farewell to the generation of Americans who fought the Second World War.

This farewell spans four decades, from 1998's "Saving Private Ryan" (when that generation was in its sixties and seventies) through 2001's "Band of Brothers" and 2010's "The Pacific" to its conclusion in 2024, when those few veterans who remain are in their nineties or beyond.

These works are valedictories. Their purpose is not to tell a story wherever it may go, but to inspire humility and awe in the generations who live in comfort because of their forbears' suffering, sacrifice, and courage.

This is what it was like.

This is how they took Brecourt Manor.

This is how they crossed the airfield at Peleliu.

This is how they flew from England to Regensburg to Africa and fought all the way.

Your grandfathers were giants. Deserve them.

Popular history is as much instruction for tomorrow as it is remembrance of yesterday. "Masters of the Air" returns to itself in its final episode, but it is too little, too late.

Stories like that of the Bloody 100th are sacred tales in America's rapidly fading civic liturgy, and we rightly expect the reverence due them: not by distorting them for sensationalistic entertainment, but by respecting their power to enshrine the suffering, sacrifice, and heroism they depict.