New series on World War II airmen stirs personal memories

During World War II, nearly 2 million young men enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces, many to become “flyboys.” There was panache and glory in being a flyer. Many of these daring young men became “bomber boys” on the heavy bombers, the B-24 Liberator or the B-17 Flying Fortress. They would experience moments of absolute terror, and their missions into occupied Europe would have been more accurately called “suicide” missions.

The new series “Masters of the Air,” on Apple TV+, makes that apparent in the premiere as crew members of the 100th Bomb Group face German fighters, flak, frostbite from the extreme heights, terrifying wounds and early forms of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder.

The odds of returning to the States after the required 25 missions were astonishingly low, hovering at the height of air war in 1943 around 25%. Of the original members of the 100th featured in the series, only 14% flew 25 missions. As a point of reference, during the war more airmen were killed than Marines. You learn early on watching the series that survival was a crapshoot, a roll of the dice, and although these men underwent extensive training (up to a year) and were extremely brave, a piece of flak cutting through the nearly paper-thin fuselage didn’t care. The American air warfare strategy required the bombers to fly right through the flak while holding formation. There were no fancy maneuvers. You just gutted it out and prayed flak wouldn’t tear into the plane.

The nine-part series is based on a 2006 book of the same title by historian Donald L. Miller that’s been reissued for the series. It is a great companion, and I’m reading it in conjunction with watching the series. The dramatization of the events that the book describes, along with some of the major characters like Buck and Bucky, are pitch perfect and mirror what crewmen from those bombers told their children.

I’m one of those kids. Although my father, a bombardier/navigator on a B-17 in 1944 (his first mission was on D-Day) spoke little about his wartime experiences, he left behind a handwritten log of his bombing missions.

His perfect printing details the time, date and mission, along with results or lack thereof, but it is punctuated with details of flak, planes shot from the sky and wounded airmen.

The new series “Masters of the Air,” on Apple TV+, is based on a 2006 book of the same title by historian Donald L. Miller.

In one post, he details his experience losing two engines and writes, “Came back alone and really sweating it.” I now know after watching the series and reading the book that means the plane was a sitting duck.

The new series, produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, puts you right in the cockpit and the belly of Fortress planes as they are attacked by German fighters and flak-producing anti-aircraft guns on the coast of France and in Germany on missions that lasted up to eight hours.

The premiere shows a navigator coughing up his hearty breakfast in a paper bag, which my dad told me was common — except at higher altitudes, when flyers threw up in their oxygen masks the entire time.

The 10 crewmen on each plane also had to fight frostbite in order to hold on to their blazing guns. A Fortress looked like a bristling pincushion with guns sticking out from each side, the tail, the bottom, the top and the nose.

The book goes into much more detail than the series about the strategy of the bombing campaigns, like why the Brits flew at night and the Americans by day and how the Brits’ strategy included bombing civilians while Americans focused on military or industrial targets.

I can say for certain that Fortresses sometimes  dropped bombs on cities and German troops. My dad’s log indicated that.

In his book, Miller writes, “Those frontal assaults by German fighter planes put the fear of God in you,” quoting the pilot of the famous Memphis Belle, Robert Morgan

“It was bad in the cockpit, but the bombardier and the navigator were sitting in a big bay window open to the sky with nothing but a peashooter to defend themselves,” Morgan said.

The series’ cinematography shows you exactly what that would feel like.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had conversations with other children of big-bomber crewmen, including one who went on a guided tour with Miller of a former airbase in England. Locals also gave her a tour of the base where her father was stationed.

On her tour was an astronaut, Nancy Jan Davis, whose father was a pilot on a B-17 and became a prisoner of war.

Resources on the air war in Europe abound on the web. Other good books on the air war include “One Last Look,” by Philip Kaplan and Rex Alan Smith, and “Luck of the Draw,” by Frank Murphy. To really get into the moment, watch the movies “Twelve O’Clock High,” “I Wanted Wings” or “Memphis Belle.”

I reached out to the author of “Masters of the Air,” and he emailed me back that we would have to talk later, stating, “I am overwhelmed.”