Earlier this month, I previewed all nine episodes of the highly anticipated Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air, which debuts its first two episodes on January 26 and subsequent episodes every Friday through March 15, 2024. Based on Donald L. Miller’s book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany and adapted for TV by John Orloff (Band of Brothers), the series will be of great interest to WWII buffs and anyone else who appreciates good, old-fashioned Hollywood storytelling in the Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg vein.
If there was any question that the lines between TV and cinema have all but disappeared, Master of the Air resolves the remaining doubt. The Hanks and Spielberg–produced WWII miniseries is epic in every sense—the sort of cinematic marvel one wishes could be seen on IMAX screens (like Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer) rather than on smartphones.
The show’s aerial combat scenes are as compellingly choreographed and harrowingly realistic as anything else I’ve seen on a screen. If recent films like Top Gun: Maverick and Devotion set a high bar for aviation battle cinematography, Masters exceeds it and then some.
The show’s aerial combat scenes are as compellingly choreographed and harrowingly realistic as anything else I’ve seen on a screen.
Masters is one of the most expensive TV series ever produced. Apple’s $250 million investment pays off in the immersive effect on viewers. Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan puts us right there on the bloody Normandy beaches on D-Day. Band of Brothers and The Pacific confront us with the brutal realities of WWII from the vantage point of the Army’s Easy Company and the 1st Marine Division. Now Masters puts us in the cockpit for the fierce fighting at 25,000 feet.
I’s not just an impressive technical feat and action spectacle for spectacle’s sake. It’s a valuable chronicle of history and a riveting character drama—one that feels refreshingly old-fashioned in its uncomplicated celebration of sacrificial valor, camaraderie, patriotic duty, and Allied partnership to halt the advance of Nazi evil and pay the costly bill of liberation.
Power of Collective Effort
The series is largely set in the air bases of East Anglia, England, from 1942 to 1945. From here more than 350,000 American members of the Eighth Air Force partnered with their Royal Air Force counterparts to fight the Germans in the sky. Masters mostly focuses on the U.S.’s 100th Bomb Group, which came to be called the “Bloody 100th” for its reputation of incurring heavy casualties in relentless battles with the German Luftwaffe.
Within the 100th, the show follows a few men in particular: good friends and squadron commanders John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner) and Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler), as well as B-17 navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) and Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal (Nate Mann), a Jewish American pilot whose resolve to defeat the Nazis takes on a personal meaning.
Those characters and a few others are prominent in the series, but the overall emphasis is on the collective effort. We meet not only the more “glamorous” pilot characters donning aviator glasses and bomber jackets but also the 19-year-old ground crew member who has never flown in a plane, everyday British citizens who befriend American airmen, French resistance members who help downed pilots escape capture, and everyone in between—men and women from all parts of the Allied nations, all social classes, and all types of backgrounds. The Tuskegee Airmen even make an appearance in the series’ latter episodes, underscoring the unifying potential of the war effort at a time of ongoing racial segregation.
In an age of navel-gazing narcissism and “look at me” performance, Masters shows the beauty of heroes who don’t sing their own praises or toot their own horns but simply play their part in the larger goal of stopping an evil regime. Aside from a few Oscar nominees (Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan, the latter adopting a peculiar take on an American accent), there are no “stars” to speak of in the series. The viewing experience is less about rooting for this or that character as much as for the larger cause, even as we’re powerfully confronted with the devastating toll on individual lives.
Beauty of Sacrificial Duty
Like any other good war narrative, Masters celebrates the heroism of those who pay the ultimate price to save lives and preserve freedom. For teenagers today who can’t fathom a circumstance where they’d volunteer to give up their lives for a national war effort, this story provides powerful pictures of living (and giving) your life for something bigger than self-expression and fulfillment.
This story provides powerful pictures of living (and giving) your life for something bigger than your self-expression and fulfillment.
The series captures well the particularly high-risk nature of bomber crews flying into enemy territory (in daylight) to drop precision bombs on strategic targets. Each episode tends to focus on one mission, and in each mission, not every character comes back alive. The brave pilots, navigators, and bombardiers who climbed into planes again and again (most “tours” required 25 total missions) knew their odds of survival weren’t great. Yet they stepped into the planes anyway. They knew their roles were crucial to the overall strategy.
Until the Allied ground invasion in the final months of the war, the Anglo-American bombing campaign was the only Allied military action that took the fight inside Germany’s borders. Though costly in terms of lives (some 26,000 members of the Eighth Air Force were killed), the achievement of air supremacy over Europe was pivotal in paving the way for a successful ground invasion.
Countless others (at least 28,000) in the Eighth Air Force became POWs in German prison camps, enduring many months (in some cases, years) of frigid weather, starvation, and squalor. I wasn’t expecting Masters to spend so much time on the POW experience, but I’m glad it did. This is a harrowing part of many war veterans’ stories, yet it’s rarely depicted on screen.
Moral Ambiguity
Christian viewers might be disappointed in some aspects of Masters of the Air. F-bombs are about as common as the incendiary bombs dropped throughout the series, which is probably justified in the name of realism but still (in my view) a bit excessive. A few episodes show protagonists engaging in premarital or extramarital sex, with one brief scene of partial nudity (needless and unfortunate). The war violence is graphic and frequent, but more or less on par with similar movies and shows in the genre (see Band of Brothers).
Religion is rarely visible in the show, aside from the occasional chaplain leading a prebattle prayer or individual airmen praying as they contemplate what could be their last minutes of life. Elsewhere in the series, characters ponder the absence of God in light of the war’s immense suffering. In a memorable scene set in a recently liberated concentration camp, an elderly Holocaust survivor tells Rosenthal, “If God exists, he has forgotten me.”
But even if faith isn’t front and center in the show, morality often is.
“To live, one must make choices,” one character says near the end of the show. Throughout the series, soldiers are often forced to make quick decisions with life-or-death consequences for themselves and others. The moral quandaries they often face arise in the tension between the natural (self-preservation) and the spiritual (higher purpose beyond bare survival). It’s hard enough to face this quandary on the ground; it’s quite another to face it when your plane is spinning out of control in the sky. But some of the most stirring moments in the series follow these pivotal moments and their aftermaths.
Who We Are
The moral gravity of surviving war takes a toll. One main character observes a darkening of his soul due to the constant killing and trauma around him. In conversation with a friend, he quotes Nietzsche: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” The friend responds by agreeing that fighting the Nazi monsters “has made [them] do some tough things.” But he adds, “We had to. There’s no other way.”
These more introspective moments are rare but welcome. I wish Orloff and the writers had made more space for them. In one of his final voiceovers, Crosby (the story’s narrator), sums up WWII in this way: “On occasion, the world must confront itself—answer what we are with who we are.”
The “what” of the world is on vivid display in Masters, and it’s a scary picture. Fuzzier is the “who” that ultimately, graciously, puts a stop to the madness. Is it the collaborative resolve and moral consensus of the Allied nations? The grit, integrity, and tactical prowess of a few key leaders and heroes? What defines the “who” of WWII’s winners in contrast to the “who” of those on the losing side?
Masters doesn’t answer the question so much as prompts the audience to think about it: Who were we in 1945 that we could unite in opposition to an evil clearly named? And whoever we were, can we be that again?
