One day in June 1942, East Midlands villagers shaded their eyes and gazed into the sky to behold strange, huge new aircraft descending in procession onto their airfields. These proved to be crewed by strange and often huge, spectacularly healthy new Americans. English people, accustomed to the decayed and often absent teeth of their own countrymen, were especially impressed by those of the newcomers.
The RAF’s airmen had become the most glamorous and admired component of Britain’s war effort, but these transatlantic “flyboys” were something else again. They were so cool and sure and rich, with their Jeeps and candy, their gum and swanky uniforms. They had come, some of them were rash enough to tell their hosts after a few drinks in the musty pubs of Northamptonshire and Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, to win the war. And, golly gosh, some of them really believed this.
Those aircrew, many of whom were soon dead, formed the spearhead of what eventually became the USAAF’s Eighth Air Force. One of their bomb groups, the “Bloody Hundredth”, which arrived in what became known as “the Fields of Little America” in 1943, is the subject of Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’s new nine-part TV series, Masters of the Air, a flying counterpart of their earlier triumphant Band of Brothers, which depicted Easy Company of the US 101st Airborne Division, and the eagerly awaited follow-up to The Pacific, the same team’s drama about the US Marine Corps campaign in the Pacific theater of war.
It looks terrific, as it should with a rumored budget of $300 million. No special effect has been spared. No nuance of life and death aboard those B-17 Flying Fortresses is omitted. A stellar cast includes a fresh-from-Elvis Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan (Bafta-nominated for Saltburn) and the new Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa.
How true is the series to the reality? As close as you can get, 80 years on: there have never been more vivid sequences of combat in the air. All the horrors are there, including the October 1943 raid on Münster in which the 100th lost 11 of its 12 aircraft dispatched. The films face squarely the loss of morale that followed, as an average B-17 crew completed only 11 missions of a tour of 25.
I can niggle about the complete absence of the RAF from the story, a familiar criticism of Spielberg war films, but I guess we can only redress it by discovering our own Spielberg. I squirmed a bit at aircrew expressing alarm at briefing about bombing close to civilian targets — “there’ll be a lot of people in that cathedral on a Sunday”. In my experience they were far too busy worrying about their own survival to give much of a damn about who or what was underneath their bombs.
It looks terrific, as it should with a rumored budget of $300 million. No special effect has been spared.
This is the story of the real US Eighth Air Force; of the real 100th Bomb Group, which flew out of Thorpe Abbotts, near Diss in Norfolk.
They were committed to join a campaign against Germany that RAF Bomber Command had already been waging for three years. Since the spring of 1942 British planners had acknowledged their failure to do much damage to Germany through night “precision” attack. They had instead adopted “area bombing” — striking whole industrial conurbations in hopes that, beyond destroying some factories, they could shatter the morale of the workforce, of the German people, as their homes and cities were destroyed wholesale about their ears.
The Americans adopted a completely different strategy. Their Fortresses and Liberators, much more heavily gunned and armored than the British planes, attacked in daylight, flying in huge, tight formations that were thought capable of defending themselves against fighter attack. They sought to bomb precision industrial targets using the Norden bombsight, one of their country’s proudest technical innovations. One of their generals asserted solemnly: “We must never allow history to convict us of throwing American air power at the man in the street.” “Hap” Arnold, chief of the USAAF, said: “This is the dawning of a day of wrath.”
They started out attacking short-range targets in France. Losses were bearably low, but not much damage was inflicted on the German war effort. The Norden sight was terrific amid the clear skies of California or Colorado but was baffled by overcast Europe. For the rest of the war amid cloud cover the Fortresses bombed blind from 25,000ft, using radar to grope for aiming points. By 1945, for those on the ground, the consequences were pretty much the same: of being area-bombed at night by the RAF or blind-bombed in daylight by the USAAF.
Moreover, when the Americans began striking deep into Germany — which is what the screen story of the 100th Bomb Group is about — their casualties soared. It proved a myth that the Fortresses and their gunners could protect themselves against enemy fighters. The Thorpe Abbotts group earned its “Bloody Hundredth” nickname through the especially ghastly losses it suffered.
Again and again through 1943 and into 1944, ever larger formations of bombers flew forth over Germany with boundless courage; it took shocking casualties for few successes. Over Regensburg on August 17, 1943, the 100th lost 9 of 21 Fortresses dispatched — 43 percent. Overall that day 62 US aircraft were shot down, with the loss of 239 officers and 362 enlisted men.
Among the weirdest stories of the notorious Regensburg-Schweinfurt raid was that of a plane whose pilot was awarded a Silver Star for staying at the controls after it was badly hit, to enable his crew to bail out. In reality, it emerged much later amid the postwar fury of the men aboard, the pilot and his own brother who — amazingly — was flying as a gunner, had been first to jump in panic, the former saying to his sibling, “Let’s get out!” They left the co-pilot to perform the heroics that saved better men’s lives.
My mother was in those days woman’s editor of the magazine Picture Post. She was asked to take a team of female colleagues and models to throw a Christmas party in a local stately home for some of the American bomber men, who had been having a notably bad time. She never forgot the experience. The party began with laughter, cheer and jitterbugging, but many rum punches later some of those young men sobbed and laid bare their terror to the girls.
Until the last phase of the war only about a quarter of all US aircrew completed a 25-sortie tour of operations. I have met many wartime bomber veterans who found the strain especially great of taking off from peaceful rural England after a night in the pub among placid local country folk, fighting through German skies, then returning to Constable’s landscapes — a hellish switchback that had to be repeated again and again before the survivors were allowed to go home. Most soldiers and sailors experienced a more even tenor of fear, discomfort and stress.
Many flyers found it worse to fly into combat in daylight, where they witnessed at close quarters the slaughter of their comrades, than to attack at night, as did the RAF’s Lancasters, whose crews were at least spared close-ups of some of the horrors.
Many rum punches later some of those young men sobbed and laid bare their terror to the girls.
Lieutenant Owen Roane of the 100th one day saw the plane of his roommate, Henry Shortland, go down in flames, taking with it £300 (approximately $780) that Shortland had won at craps the previous night. Then Lieutenant Curtis Burdick’s plane was badly hit, so that the co-pilot, Dick Snyder, struggled out through a hole in the cockpit side onto a wing. Roane said: “It was a dreadful thing to see him standing in the flames, but you often did see dreadful things.”
Snyder pulled the rip cord of his parachute, which promptly snagged the tailfin of the descending fiery Fortress. German fighter pilots and Americans alike watched in horror as the plane spun into the ground, the hapless airman still swinging from its tail. There were many moments as terrible as that in the course of the Fortresses’ war.
An American navigator wrote of fighter attacks: “The impersonal quality of the menace was eerie. It was as if I was in battle with beautiful birds of prey … I saw death long before I saw pain.” As a neighboring aircraft went down there was “a yellow flare on the outboard engine nearest me. The great silver ship banked sharply and turned its belly to the sun, which paled the yellow flames. There were no screams. The plane lost speed, slipped back and spiralled gently down.”
Not all were heroes. One squadron’s operations officer was notorious for covering his eyes with his hands when he glimpsed enemy aircraft heading toward him. Some senior officers picked only the easy missions for their own operational flights.
One of many drolleries of the campaign is that it was eventually won not by the bombers but instead by fighters. Early in 1944 American long-range Mustangs began to accompany the Fortresses over Germany. Those planes and their brilliant pilots almost literally shot the Luftwaffe out of the sky. In the space of a few months the German air force was devastated by the armadas of Mustangs.
In the last months of the war the Fortresses were at last able to bomb Germany, and to devastate its industries and especially synthetic oil plants, with an accuracy and freedom undreamed of in 1943. More than 1,000 bombers and 800 fighters routinely executed a single mission. Losses fell dramatically, though flying over the Reich was never a safe activity.
In 1945 the Fortresses and their crews went home, having made a long-lasting social impact on primitive rural England, as well as devastating Hitler’s empire alongside RAF Bomber Command. I question whether the title of Spielberg’s series, Masters of the Air, is right, except ironically. Most of them became, instead, victims of the air. But some of those kids — and kids they were, of course — certainly thought themselves pretty special, as they played a life-or-death game with some of the most deadly toys of war that had then been invented.
Masters of the Air is streaming now on Apple TV+
Sir Max Hastings is the author of several works of history, a columnist at The Times of London, and a former editor at The Telegraph