Having just finished watching Apple TV's nine-part series, Masters of the Air, I can heartily recommend it to anyone who would enjoy a deeply moving portrayal of the American aviators who flew B-17 Flying Fortress bombers into Europe from bases in England during World War II.
It's based on a book with the same name about the 100th Bomb Group. At the conclusion of the final episode, some of the main characters are shown along with photos of the real-life aviators, plus a description of where life took them after the war ended.
I found that highly emotional.
Partly because while I barely knew anything about my father, John Hines, as my mother and he divorced when I was too young to remember him, and I only was able to spend one hour with him in my entire life, a newspaper clipping my mother saved of her post-war engagement notice said that he served in the Navy for three years and "was overseas two years as instructor with the 17th Marine Regiment, engineers, attached to the First Marine Division."
That Wikipedia link says that the First Marine Division saw heavy fighting in the Pacific. I have no idea what experiences my father had, but watching Masters of the Air, I felt that even though he was a Marine, not an aviator, and a jerk, I had to give him a mental salute for the sacrifices he and everyone else who served in the Armed Forces during World War II endured.
Over and over, while watching this series, I'd think, "No matter how badly my day is going, it's a hell of a lot better than being in a Flying Fortress flying into Germany before the allies had air superiority." Because in many respects those were suicide missions. Sometimes half or more of the planes were shot down.
Yet the crews were eager to keep flying, notwithstanding the extreme danger they faced, because it was so important for them to obey their orders and do their part in defeating Nazi Germany.
Masters of the Air starts off sort of slowly. The first few episodes are devoted to getting to know the characters, two of whom are rather confusingly named "Buck" and "Bucky." After that, the bombing missions are realistic and tense. It takes amazing courage to keep flying through flak, antiaircraft fire, and fighter attacks in a lumbering Flying Fortress that has to be kept on a steady course during a bombing run.
Obviously it isn't giving anything away to say that Masters of the Air has a happy ending. The allies win the war! To see the B-17s used to drop food via parachutes at the very end of the war to desperately hungry people in the Netherlands echoed the air drops the United State is doing in Gaza now.
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