Masters of the Air

I had been waiting patiently – perhaps nearly a decade – for the production of Masters of the Air to finally make the television screen. 

It finally happened eight weeks ago when AppleTV+ aired all nine hour-long episodes, based on the 2006 book of the same name by Donald Miller, a professor of history at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. The final installment came this past week, depicting the end of air war in Europe.

Masters was the third prong of the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks produced World War II trilogy. The first was the exceptional Band of Brothers, which came out in 2001 and detailed the exploits of Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne. The miniseries was television at its best.

 Taking advantage of BoB's success, The Pacific was released in 2010. The 10-part series was also successful, although arguably not on the same level as Band of Brothers.

Then came Masters of the Air.

On the whole, I enjoyed the series, although I have a few nits to pick.

The United States Army Air Force had two primary heavy bomber types in World War II: the B-17 and the B-24. Thousands upon thousands of B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators were built during the war, but only a handful remain today and even fewer are airworthy. Consequently, the miniseries depends heavily on computer graphic imaging – CGI – to depict the massive 1,000-plane bomber formations that darkened the skies over Europe and the horrific missions flying through anti-aircraft fire (flak) and German fighter planes.

There seems to be a bit of overproduction when movies use CGI, almost to the point of overkill. The skies are vast and wide open, able to accommodate all manner of aircraft at once. The skies in Masters appear to be unrealistically crowded. I don't know. Maybe they were. I wasn't there. I base my assumption on actual combat footage that I've seen and there appears to be plenty of spacing between aircraft.

But if the object here is to show the absolute brutality of the bomber campaign and the toll it takes on human beings, I guess CGI is the way to go. That's where the miniseries succeeded, I think. The unimaginable horror.

The series also pulls away from too much aerial combat and occasionally drifts away to prisoner of war camps, rest and relaxation centers, and even a romantic dalliance shared by navigator Harry Crosby (who wrote his own book about his experience titled "A Wing and a Prayer"). It seemed a distraction.

What I was hoping to see were more tidbits from Miller's book. Like, for example:

1) Technical Sergeant Arizona T. Harris, who was a top turret gunner on the B-17 Sons of Fury. Harris died on Jan. 3, 1943 when his plane was shot down and ditched in the Bay of Biscay. One eyewitness account reads: "...two guns were still blazing, Harris' twin .50s. As sheets of white water rolled over the wings and the plane began to drop  out of sight, the top turret guns were still spitting flame as fast as the feeding arms would pull the shells into the guns. Arizona Harris was trying to protect the pilot and co-pilot, who were in the water and under fire from (German) FW-190s. Harris must have felt the winter water fill his turret and climb to where it cut off his breath, yet he kept firing until the sea swallowed the hot muzzles of his guns."

Unbelievable.

2) Maynard "Snuffy" Smith received the Congressional Medal of Honor when he was filling in for another man as the ball turret gunner. Smith had never flown in the turret before this mission, which was his first. On the way back from a bomb run over St. Nazaire, his plane was hit by flak and then attacked by FW-190s. Then a fire broke out near the rear of the ship, with ammunition exploding. Then another fire broke out in the radio room in front of him.

Now out of the turret, Smith got a fire extinguisher and doused the flames in the radio room. As he was doing this, he saw his wounded tail gunner crawling toward him. Smith broke out a morphine vial and applied it to the crewman despite the cold wind, fire and the crewman's heavy clothing.

Smith turned back to the fire and when the extinguisher was empty, he urinated on the fire and then tried to smother it with his hands and feet until his boots began to smolder. All this while under fighter attack.  Smith then manned a waist gun to shoot back at the German.

All this was witnessed by the crew of an accompanying bomber.

Smith, usually a total screw-up on base, almost missed his own award ceremony because he was doing KP duty for coming in late after a pass.

Why wasn't this in Masters?

3) Incredibly, on the same mission as Harris, ball turret gunner Alan Magee was blown out of his B-17, Snap, Crackle Pop, without a parachute at 22,000 feet. He fell four miles before crashing into a glass roof of the St. Nazaire railroad station. He survived but suffered lung and kidney damage, several broken bones and nearly severed his right arm. He ended up as a prisoner of war.

There are other stories to tell. My friend, Lee Jessup, interviewed his father, Dalma, who was a tail gunner on a B-17 and flew an incredible 40 missions for the 15th Air Force. His plane was down by an FW-190 and Dalma had to bail out, the first time he ever used a parachute. Lee said his father never flew again after that experience.

And Lexington's Bill Mitchell, now deceased, flew 30 missions in a B-24 as a group lead bombardier, including a perilous mission over Kassel. Mitchell invited me to his house shortly after I had written a newspaper story about my flight in a B-24 that had come to Lexington. Mitchell showed me a box that he opened that was full of jagged metal pieces. "That's shrapnel from flak," he told me. Then he pulled out another box. 

It was his Distinguished Flying Cross.

I kind of wish the Masters of the Air miniseries included stories like these.