APRIL 4, 2024 – Okay, okay. Today I was determined as ever to write a political screed. I was all fired up after having digested a Times column about RFK, Jr. (Talk about setting your hair on fire!) Yet, two sentences in and I realized my opinion was of no greater worth than my description of a carnival barker hawking the latest and greatest snake oil. Me vs. a (well-oiled) snake oil salesman? Ha! Nolo contendere.
But again, if I’m not going to set my own hair on fire in a public display of political indignation, what, then, am I going to feature in today’s post? Hmm. How about . . . the movies?
Having been bombarded with ads for Apple TV’s Masters of the Air, my cheapskate tendencies, curiosity, and long-standing awe of the Flying Fortress—Boeing’s supreme success—led me to sign up for Apple TV’s free trial subscription so I could binge-watch the show.
My top line and bottom line recommendation: the nine-part series is worth watching, provided that you share my fascination for B-17s. That’s a critical proviso. You’ll get your fill of take-offs, landings, bomber formations, flights through ack-ack, tailspins, engine failures, prop-feathering, mid-air explosions, and crash-landings. The amazing thing about these Boeing aircraft is that they could lose engines, wings, tails, landing gear, large chunks of fuselage yet remain airborne through thick and thin, smoke and flame, and return to base. The losses were still staggering: only 36% of the some 12,000 American airmen who participated survived their missions.
What I found most impressive about the whole production was what I learned at the very end: the main characters portrayed real-life people! One of the principal heroes was Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal from Brooklyn, New York, a lawyer, no less, who wound up as a prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials after the war. In the one-hour documentary also available on Apple TV, “Rosie” appears in old age—an eminently lucky and likable guy. After completing his 25 missions, he’d been eligible to make his way home to spend the rest of the war working the “War Bond Tour.” Instead, he chose to continue flying missions. Yet in defiance of the odds, he flew another 27 missions.
When his plane was shot down over the German-Soviet front, he parachuted onto ground right on the line of fire. By the skin of his teeth he survived the clash of forces and was shunted to Moscow, Tehran, and eventually back to England. After that harrowing rendezvous with near death, “Cat ’o Nine Lives” would’ve been an appropriate name of his successor “Fort,” as the B-17s were called.
Even if you’re not fascinated by aviation, B-17s, the unimaginable grit of people caught up in what was the most destructive conflict in the history of civilization, Masters of the Air is a graphic example of a grand dichotomy: the utter nonsense of war combined with the mind-boggling courage and complex organizational skill and marshalling of resources that were dedicated to the defeat of abject, wholesale, unqualified evil: the Nazi regime.
The strategic bombing campaign conducted by British and American forces in Europe was a mind-twisting operation. Given the then current state of technology, fast developing though it was (e.g. radar; the Norden bombsight; aeronautical engineering; navigation equipment; meteorological forecasting) but crude by today’s standards, the wonder is that it all worked as effectively as it did and on such a massive scale.
One scene attempts to explain what has always mystified me about WW II strategic bombing. That is, how in the world were hundreds of lumbering aircraft assembled in tight flying formation? (The quasi-answer: they took off from multiple airfields, circled around, “collecting” squadrons that stacked themselves at various altitudes.) I have yet to see or seek a detailed depiction of how exactly this major element of strategic bombing was executed—particularly at night.[1]
As a popcorn-eating viewer of staged aviation warfare, I had sufficient imagination to know with certainty that had I been mixed up with the real thing, I would’ve been scared out of my air suit (protecting against 50-below (F) temperatures while I breathed bottled oxygen at high altitude). An actual veteran WW II airman would laugh at me[2]; no, not laugh, but shake his head, and say, “But you have no idea what it was like. It was 100 times worse than you could imagine.”
The “worse” multiplier applied if you had to bail out of a plane over enemy controlled territory as the aircraft careened toward earth. Once you defied the gravitational forces at play and were free of the falling, spinning plane, you landed in the proverbial briar patch—much as my own violin teacher, a tail-gunner aboard a “Fort” did; or the father of a neighbor of ours. The former made his way out of the patch to safety; the latter wound up in a German Stalag—as did a couple of the leading characters of Masters of the Air.
The end of the war was perhaps the most dangerous for POWs. While Major “Rosie” Rosenthal is making his way back to England, his two compatriots—pilots Major Gale Cleven and Major John Egan—are among British and American POWs being marched from one untenable place to another, as Allied forces are pressing in. If you’d found yourself among the prisoners, you’d have wondered why you’d been forsaken by the Lord Almighty. Somehow Cleven and Egan survived.
The series struck me as authentic except for POWs in winter. The failure of filmmakers to depict winter as winter seems to be a universal problem across the industry. A blizzard rages—snow swirls, winds howl, temperatures plunge–but no one is wearing gloves or mittens or even rags wrapped around their hands. Miraculously, no one seems to be experiencing frostbite. That simply isn’t how winter works. To someone’s credit, however, a brief scene in Masters of the Air features a gunner who removed his gloves at 36,000 to work on a jammed weapon suffered severe frostbit. But if you blink, you’ll miss the scene.
If you like B-17s and want to pay homage to the Greatest Generation, Masters of the Air is a streaming series for you. As you reflect on the experience, you’ll find yourself wondering, “How did they summon such courage and determination?”
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] One thing the series imparts is that the Americans ran day-time precision-bombing raids over Germany, which were far more dangerous, given the presence of German fighter intercepts of the bombers. The British crews flew night-time missions, free of the fighters. These night-time raids, however, were not precision-based; they simply dropped their bombs over urban centers, lighting them on fire and causing high civilian casualties with questionable strategic gain (i.e. hits on war plants).
[2] A few still live. The youngest WW II veteran turns 97 this year.
