Ep 67 – Masters of the Air – The Spielberg-Hanks WWII Saga (Part One) - Rosie the Reviewer: a WW2 movies and shows podcast

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(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosie the reviewer.
This week we are starting to cover the TV show Masters of the
Air, which came out in 2024. It's available on Apple TV.

(00:24):
We're going to cover the first 3episodes today.
Masters of the Air was created by John Sheban and John Orloff.
It's based on the 2007 non fiction book Masters of the Air,
America's Bomber boys who foughtthe air war against Nazi Germany
by Donald Miller, as well as several memoirs including A Wing
and a Prayer. The bloody 100th Bomb Group of

(00:44):
the US Eighth Air Force in action over Europe in World War
2, which came out in 1993 by Harry Crosby and Red Tail
captured Red Tail Free Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airmen and POW,
which came out in 2005 by Alexander Jefferson and Lewis H
Carlson. It's considered a companion to
Band of Brothers, which came outin 2001 and The Pacific, which

(01:04):
came out in 2010. It's part of the whole HBO War
Hanks Spielberg juggernaut and it follows the American Airmen
of the bloody 100th Bomb Group throughout about World War 2.
And we are lucky enough to have our usual SAS Rogue Heroes
correspondent George on with us today.
So welcome, George. Thanks for having me to talk
about not the SAS. We'll find out if George knows

(01:27):
about other topics. Spoiler alert.
Probably not. Yes.
All right. What did you guys think of this
TV show, Mark? I like Masses of Fear.
When it first came out, I watched it immediately.
I was very excited for it. But for me, this is one of the
shows that needed to grow on me,so when I first watched it, I
wasn't too sure about it. Now it's one of those that I

(01:50):
intend to regularly go back to, so it's up there with the other
two. I like the acting.
It's a little bit more Hollywoodthan Better Brothers in the
Pacific, but I like it. I like the storytelling, even
though it's a difficult topic tocover because so many people die
and we lose so many characters and figures after an episode.

(02:13):
But I think it's better watched as a whole.
And then it is a suffered episode, so it's an interesting
one, definitely. I don't know if I have a
favorite out of the three anymore.
I just like all of them, so I'm excited to cover it.
How about you, George? Yeah, I mean, I was waiting for
Masters for a good long while before it came out.

(02:35):
Obviously, we were all sort of all tend to like, what is the
next project? Oh, it's been announced and then
we're all waiting for months forany scraps of information.
And I really enjoyed it, to be honest.
I could see though where there are sort of some disjointed
parts that I think I still wish were a little bit more joined
up. I feel like it doesn't have
quite the cohesiveness of the other two.

(02:55):
And I'm going to say this now before Sam shout to me, I really
like Austin Butler. I've been an Austin Butler fan
since 2016. It was really nice to see him do
something like this. I have not seen actually quite a
few of his really big films likeElvis and Dune, but he was
fantastic in this. So I really enjoyed that.
And also for me, it's a really odd experience because where I

(03:19):
am in the country is quite closeto a lot of air bases.
I know the landscapes and the areas in England that they were
around, and so I've always grownup with this history in the back
of my head. Bury St.
Edmunds, something that is a place that they've mentioned
quite a lot in the books and things, is somewhere I've spent
a lot of time just visiting. So it's a very interesting

(03:41):
experience to have something that close in such an American
production, if that makes sense.It doesn't quite hit the heights
of the Pacific for me, but I do think it's a beautiful
production. Yeah, this morning George was
like, I'm going to talk about Austin Butler.
And I was like, blocked. I don't really have beef with
Austin Butler. I just find that when the show

(04:02):
first came out, particularly if you want to just look at any
content about Masters of the Air, you had to wade through so
much Austin Butler shit, and I just got over it.
I'm like, sorry, but I'm sick ofyou.
I'm sure you're very nice. People are expecting him to be
bad though, and he's quite good before like he's too Hollywood,

(04:22):
he can't do it, but he's quite good.
Yeah, to come back very quickly before we start to the
disjointedness of the episode, Iquite agree.
Message was originally meant to be an 11 episode run and it's
ended up being 9. So there's a cut, a lot of
storylines and shorten and a little bit.

(04:42):
Yeah. So that might be one of the
reasons. And also because it it's a show
made in the specific era of streaming.
It's a different diesel together, I think.
So it's interesting to compare them to Banner Brothers in the
Pacific, but it's a very different kind of show.
I will say to me it's the weakest of the three.

(05:03):
I watched I think the first 3 episodes when they were airing
and then I sort of put it down and didn't come back to it for
six months. And I do enjoy it now.
I've seen it a couple of times and there are definitely certain
subplots that interest me quite a lot.
We're going to talk about some lady spies later a little bit
and the Tuskegee Airmen and I think all that stuff is really
neat. I do think that topic wise,

(05:26):
Hanks and Spielberg are still coming back to this pre 911
World War 2 nostalgia shtick that they were doing with Band
of Brothers. And I think at the time, you
could get away with doing a sortof like almost found family
ensemble piece about a bunch of guys without really looking at
any broader topics thematically.And then to come back 25 years

(05:47):
later and do the same thing in adifferent context, I don't know
if it 100% necessarily works, especially because the idea of
strategic bombing was super contentious because now we know
we'll talk about this a little bit later, that there wasn't
really any such thing as strategic bombing.
They weren't that good at hitting their targets.
And in a lot of cases, it was carpet bombing, and there was a

(06:08):
lot of arguing over whether or not that's ethical and to not
really touch on that or to only touch on it really lightly and
veer away from that and still focus primarily on the
characters. I thought that made it weaker
than it could have been. I would have liked to see that
tackled a bit more. Even the themes around the
Tuskegee Airmen, we don't reallysee too much about that.

(06:29):
One of them just says something about how America's the better
country of all the other countries.
And I'm like, I don't necessarily think that was true
for a lot of black people livingin America at that time.
So yeah, they had the opportunity to touch on some
themes and actually say something about them, and they
didn't do that. So that's kind of why I think
it's the weakest of the three. But all said, it's a very, very

(06:51):
nice looking show. It's pretty well acted.
Even if you're not super into World War 2, I think you could
watch it and get something out of it.
So. I think it's really interesting
because I think you're absolutely right about the mood
that it evokes in the sort of found family esque.
I don't want to use the word glorification, but that kind of
wholesomeness almost the band tries to reach for and to put

(07:12):
the Pacific right in the middle of that was what 20/10/2011 that
came out. So we had gone from a really
heightened pro war stance into, I think around that time much
more of cynicism to really interrogating.
And I feel like the cultural mood is now shifting back into
more of that sort of pro war stance in some areas.

(07:35):
So I find it very interesting tolook at the three of them as
almost like period pieces, not of the periods they're
depicting, but of the time that they are made.
Yeah, 100%. I'll do one more closing
argument in favor of the show, and that's for a show that
spends a lot of the time in fakeplanes with Nathan.

(07:55):
They do pretty well, so I'm pretty impressed with that part
of it. I thought it might be really
boring to see people on planes all the time, that they make it
really exciting, so that's a plus for me.
Yeah, I also think they spend a lot of time in the air doing
shit that you really can't do with practical effects.
There is going to be a lot of CGI, right?
And I don't think the CGI is toobad.

(08:15):
No, I agree it's pretty good. I mean, we don't have a bunch of
B seventeens to throw our actorsinto.
That's just not a thing. What did they only spend on this
show? Like $100 billion?
Like what's a few more? Build some B17.
Let's get into the episodes. In Episode 1, we meet John Bucky

(08:44):
Egan, played by Callum Turner and Dale Buck Clevon, and they
run out of nicknames in the Eighth Air Force, played by
Aston Butler. And these are our two main, I
almost want to say main characters, but it's really an
Assam of peace. And we meet them the night
before Egan ships out and he'll be our executive for the £100

(09:04):
group in the Eighth Air Force. And we meet them in a bar and
Clevon and Egan are very clearlymade and Cliven is talking to
his girlfriend Marge, played by Isabel May.
It's a small role, but I still wanted to mention it for a
second. And he's like, I'm going to
write to you when he ships out in 2-3 weeks.

(09:25):
Egan refers to Cliven that he'llbe flying missions with the 389.
And Cloven is shocked by this because he wasn't supposed to be
flying any missions. And he says, don't you die on me
before I get there? I think this is a great scene.
I think this is a fantastic plastic way to introduce these
two characters. Who, you're right, they are two

(09:45):
central characters of four central characters.
We realistically get, even though it is an ensemble piece,
we're really following these four guys.
And Even so, not necessarily reflective of physically the
real Buck and Bucky. I think we get their dynamics
down really well. You've got Clevon, who's this
wholesome blonde, clean cut guy who doesn't like to dance, and

(10:09):
he's very soft with his lovely, beautiful blonde girlfriend.
And you get Egan, who is dancingwith one of my just friends he's
met that day. He's going out there getting all
the adventure. That dynamic I really love.
I will just read a really fantastic description of John
Egan. It doesn't match Callum Turner
physically but vibes wise he nailed this.

(10:32):
Major Egan was short and skinny as a stick, barely 140 lbs with
thick black hair coming into a pompadour, black eyes and a
pencil thin mustache. His trademarks were a white
fleece line, flying jacket and an idiomatic manner of speaking,
a street whale style borrowed from writer Damon Runyon, which
is a very particular kind of NewYork style, which if I recall

(10:53):
correctly, Johnny could have never been to New York.
He just totally affected this accent.
And they do nod to this later onin the series.
I think it's in episode 3 where he's seen reading Guys and
Dolls, which is the collection of short stories by Damon
Runyon. My favorite thing is that he's
from like whatever the opposite of New York is, which is like a
fucking backwater in Wisconsin. Exactly.

(11:14):
It's so great. So after this nice, pleasant bar
scene, we cut to John Egan in the thick of it.
He's on his 1st combat mission Ithink, over at Wilhelm Schwab in
Germany on May 21st, 1943, and he immediately has to help a
severely wounded crewmate. And I think it eats into his
bravado a little bit. Initially.
Beforehand, he's like, oh, what's it going to be like?

(11:36):
And then after he's like holy fucking shit, how am I supposed
to tell everyone what that was like?
They also show him being a really smart pilot because one
of the engines is on fire and hehas to put that out by having
his car pilot dies and feathering the propellers and
all that kind of stuff. So they immediately show him
being a leader in the air. It's quite a smart way to set up

(11:58):
this first air scene. It's pretty exciting.
You're like what the fuck is going on?
Yeah, it's nice to get some combat early on.
You know, we got introduced to some characters and we kind of
know their faces, and now we getwhat you come to a war show for.
Exactly. And after this we go straight
into the intro of the show. And I have some feelings about

(12:21):
this because when I first saw itand when I first listened to the
intro music, I didn't like it. And now it's one of my all time
fates. So it's moved up there really
quickly. I think my favorite is still
always going to be the Pacific, but I think after that it's this
one and then it's banned. So I don't know why I didn't
like it in the beginning. I thought it wasn't catchy

(12:44):
enough or something. That was exactly what I was
going to ask you is what didn't you like about it?
I still skip it because I'm a hater, but it has grown on me a
little bit. I like it better than I did
initially. Yeah, I really like it.
I like Blake Neely. I think he's a fantastic
composer who really understands the vibes of what he's trying to
evoke. Whether or not I always agree
with the choices of those vibes is a different question, but I

(13:06):
think he really hit it with soul.
And I do remember crying the first time I watched the intro
because I released it. I think it's a teaser, didn't
they? And I did sob my way through it.
I don't know who any of these people are, but I'm crying.
For those who don't know, Blake Neely also made the theme for
the Pacific and the soundtrack for the Pacific.
They're vastly different kind ofsoundtracks, which I kind of

(13:29):
love. I do want to one day talk to
Blake Neely, ask them what makesa good book or two soundtrack,
because I'm sure there's things to watch out for.
But. I was listening to a podcast
with Blake Neely and he said a couple of really interesting
things. One, to make the comparison that
you've just talked about with the Pacific is that he said he

(13:50):
would describe the Pacific themeas more of an elegy, and this
theme is more of a celebration. And I find that a really
fascinating way of looking at these basically a theme for two
different collections of men. And I don't know quite how I
feel about that, to be honest. I'm sitting in my feelings.
What does that invoke to you? Is it playing favourites?

(14:10):
Is it saying the Hour, Super heroic and the Pacific is all?
Yeah, see, I wonder if again it's like that, more heroic,
wholesome. So I keep coming back to this
word, but that's the word. I feel like it is much more than
the Pacific, which is quite dirty and grimy, and it really
sort of gets into the pain and the grimness in a way that I

(14:32):
feel like neither band nor masters really does.
Yeah, I also think in the Pacific, it's perhaps easier to
make it clear how futile a lot of things seem, you know, when
they're taking over these littlehunks of rock in the Pacific
where nothing grows and no one would live there, or maybe like
12 people live there or whatever.

(14:53):
And it's really just like so many people are dying here, and
for what? And I think that you get that
message quite clearly in the Pacific, that it's just an
unimaginable bloodshed. In Masters of the Air, it's a
totally different kind of warfare.
They're not in any trenches. They're up in the air in these
nice, clean uniforms. And that's kind of what I said
at the beginning, where I reallydon't think they leaned in hard

(15:16):
enough to, Yeah, they fought this war that was extremely
bloody on both sides, the air war.
And then I don't know truly how much it accomplished and what it
was for in some ways if you lookat the ultimate results, but.
It's difficult, isn't it? In some sense I find it more
horrifying than the war on the ground because it's such a damn

(15:36):
ball every time they get into one of these plans.
It's a definitely different beast though.
You're right, that's a differentway of thinking about the war
too, because there's no hand to hand come that they don't even
barely see their enemy except the fighter plans.
It's such a distorted kind of warfare.
Yeah, you're really separated from the killing in a way that
you wouldn't be traditionally. We get a voice over by a

(15:59):
navigator, Lieutenant Harry Crosby, played by Anthony Boyle.
And I'll just say I think his voice is delightful in this.
A+ choice for a narrator. He lets us know that the 100th
is sent to England in the springof 1943.
And we catch up with Clevin heading to Greenland and AB17
Flying Fortress called Alice from Dallas.
They have to stop in Greenland because they have to refuel on

(16:19):
the way. And he's with copilot Roy
Clayter, played by Sawyer Spielberg.
Yes, that's Spielberg. Also on this sport are Charles K
Bailey, played by Bailey Brook and William Quinn, played by
Kyle Alexander, who have been onthe pod before.
So go check out our episode about airmen who have been shot
down the freedom line. Yeah, so it's a little gusty on
the landing, but yeah, they makeit.

(16:41):
We get introduced in this littleinterior bar scene to a bunch of
different characters. I'll just run through them
quickly because they'll probablysurface again later.
Everett Blakely, played by DavidShields.
Benny DeMarco, played by Adam Long.
James Douglas, played by Elliot Warren, Howard Hambone Hamilton,
played by Jordan Coulson. Charles Crank Crickshanks,
played by Matt Gavin and Joseph Bubbles Pain, played by Louis

(17:02):
Greater X Yeah, we get introduced to all of these guys,
which is really nice because I find this show does suffer a
little less from all these whiteguys look the same.
Especially as well, they're all wearing masks all of the time.
We really need to figure out whoon earth we are looking at any
moment. And I will introduce my pet
theory that Masters chose actorswith interesting eyes, because

(17:22):
if you look at them, they all have really beautiful,
distinctive eyes. I don't know if it was like the
color mixing or what, but everyone's eyes are like bam,
especially when they're in the sky.
Like blue eyes are like holy fuck blue and like brown eyes
are really like big and clear. And I'm like, man, I wish my
eyes look like that all the time.
You should be honest, feel bad production.

(17:42):
I'm sure they can make your eyeslook like that.
That's what I need, put me honest feel.
After we get introduced to them,we go for a little bit and we go
to East Anglia on June 8th, 1943and we meet up with Egan again
and he wins. It's a darts that he's playing.
I don't remember well. He's not playing darts so much

(18:04):
as he's doing something extremely foolish and someone
else is playing darts. Good part, but he rains a bike
out of it which he is safe work lovin.
And he does this because they are at through road to airfield,
which is a big as airfield, so there's a lot of backing around
to do. Yeah, so on the way from

(18:25):
Greenland to East Anglia, Crosbyaccidentally navigates his Fort
to occupied France, which is a bad idea.
And so he's got this, like, terrible air sickness.
He's throwing up. He's sick as a dog.
And he accidentally directs him over occupied France.
And by the time they get back towhere they're supposed to land,
they're low on fuel and their landing gear won't come down, so

(18:46):
they have to make a belly landing.
It's extremely dramatic. I really enjoy that scene.
I've actually watched it a bunch, like independently of
watching the rest of the episode.
And what I find super interesting is that this story
gets told by Donald Miller and Masters of the Air.
But if you read Crosby's memoir,he doesn't really talk about it.
It's like a one line mention. And he's pretty good at being

(19:10):
self deprecating in the rest of his memoir.
And he'll own up when he makes mistakes.
I wonder if this one bothered him even 50 years later, if he
really still felt a little bit guilty over this one.
I mean, navigating into France by accident is a bit of a big
one. Yeah, for sure.
John Brady as a pilot, his planewas known as Brady's crash wagon

(19:32):
because he had a couple of bumpylandings.
They had crash landed in the mountains of Wyoming the year
before during training. And Crosby said about Brady and
his memoir. By now we liked him very much.
We owed him. If it hadn't been for him, we
would have all been killed either in the mountains of
Wyoming or on the 1st runway we saw in England.
That's great. This scene has the greatest line
delivery I think Ben Radcliffe has ever given it in his life.

(19:55):
The son of A That's France line and won't even try and do it
because he does it perfectly. And that's a really beautiful
moment where he's being incredibly competent and he's
working this whole thing out. And then as a split second
before they come down, he just looks like a little tiny scared
boy. Oh my God, The acting is really
good. Yeah.
I don't know if I said John Brady's played by Ben Radcliffe

(20:16):
and he does a great job. And then a couple minutes later
when they're on the ground, he'sjust so calm and chill.
And he says, my other favorite line delivery of this scene,
which is you're a navigator, Crosby.
You should be able to, I don't know, find England.
And he just hits those DS so hard.
It's very funny. This show, for me, whenever you

(20:36):
watch it again, you'll find another character to focus on,
and they're also good and somebody's one of those.
Egan goes to the 100 CEO ColonelHauglund, because he doesn't
want to be exec anymore, becausehe wants to be up in the air and
flying. He's a flying and at this point
we noticed that Huglin, who doesn't want him to no longer be

(20:59):
our exec and he is an ulcer. And I kind of put this in a note
and George was like, I love how you make it sound like Egan is
the one that gave him the ulcer.Egan's probably is the one who
gave him the ulcer. Actually, that's really bad.
In the later scene, this ulcer actually burst and Hergland is
sent to London for treatment andwe got a different CEO. 100 goes

(21:22):
through a CEO's pretty quickly. Yeah, and some significantly
distinct leadership styles, one might say.
Yep. Yeah.
So the first mission is the Bremen U boat pens in Germany,
and Kleven is flying with CurtisSpiddick, played by Barry
Kyogan. And the weather sucks.

(21:42):
They're having a bad time. We got introduced to all the
shitty things they have to deal with.
Most of the damage to planes wascaused by Flack.
I think I saw a thing where it was like 80 to 85%.
So yeah, it was shitty dealing with fighter planes and it was
shitty dealing with all kinds ofother stuff.
But really, the Flack was the real trouble when you were up
flying in the air. So they're dealing with Flack
and frostbite and fighter planes.

(22:03):
And once they get over the placewhere they're supposed to drop
the bombs, they can't see it because the weather's so shitty.
So they end up flying back to England without dropping any
bombs. But they still lost airmen.
And it just feels like like, whydid we do that?
Like what was the? And I just wanted to quickly
mention the music here because the music for the takeoff scene

(22:24):
is so great. And in general, I really like
the takeoff scene because they take you through the pre takeoff
checks in the plan and you really get to see everything in
the plan and see the attention to detail they've got in the
show. So I really appreciated that.
And that is where the episode ends on this mission.

(22:44):
And as we had just seen Egan at a loss of how to explain to
anyone how that went, we sort ofget the mirror image scene of
that when Clevin is like, well, why didn't you tell me?
And he's like, what was I going to tell you?
You've seen it now. We pick up right where we left

(23:06):
half in Episode 1. For Episode 2, we open and saw
Private during the interrogation, and it shows you
how chaotic the interrogations are because it's really
difficult to pay attention when you're flying a plane and being
shot at what's going on to the other forts around you.
So I really like how they did that.
Can you explain what interrogation is?

(23:28):
The interrogation is when they all get back from A they're not
allowed to talk about the mission until they've been
debriefed and they've individually given their stories
because they have to match up what has happened in the air to
make sure that all of that's as correct as possible.
So they don't check each other before and kind of change their

(23:49):
stories. I think it's meant to create not
only an image of the losses, butalso of the successes.
So it's but mostly these are just really sad scenes because
it's a lot about how many parachutes did you see?
And many times they didn't see any.
So a lot of these people just went down or disappeared into a
cloud bank. I was reading about how this

(24:10):
information often got passed on to the grave registration unit,
which we've talked about before.And they would basically use the
time, like if someone were to say, I saw this plane go down at
10:15, they'd be like, all right, it was probably roughly
in this area. And then that's how they would
kind of triangulate where the body should be.
And that's how they were able tofind people and repatriate them.

(24:31):
That's pretty cool. I think the first record is a
navigator's luck and then I try and put it together from all the
other testimonies. These seasons make me really
sad. Yeah, so John Egan, he goes out
drinking with Curtis Bittock andhe's up on the wing of a plane
and he's obviously not having a good time.
He's talking about how he's not feeling anything, and he makes

(24:51):
Kurt punch him in the face so that he can feel something.
And I did enjoy this portrayal because I find there's elements,
I think later in the series where some of the things that he
does can come off as selfish. And I liked seeing how deeply
impacted that super hyper masculine happy go lucky dude
was by the things that had happened.

(25:13):
And yeah, And your little note here, George, sorry to steal it
from you, but yeah, he would write letters to all of the guys
as families who had been lost. And these were not form letters.
He was writing these heartfelt letters home to the families of
these guys that he had known. So I think that he was a person
who contained multitudes. And I really likes the inclusion
of this scene. I also think that Derek Yogan is

(25:36):
really in his element. Play Curtis Badek.
One of the things when you read that Derek Yogan is going to be
in it, you think he's going to be in the whole show.
He's going to be because he's Derek Yogan.
And spoiler alert, he doesn't like it for all.
No, I do recall a lot of people being angry when he got killed
off. And it's like, well,
unfortunately that's history, so.

(25:59):
With Hagelin, Heaven is also burst on the mission.
We get a new CEO, Colonel Tick Harden, and he's the one that
tells Egan that he's no longer our executive.
Officially, it's a demotion, butI don't think he feels like it's
a demotion. So when he gets back afterwards
to Cloven at breakfast in the muscle, it turns out that Cloven

(26:24):
had actually talked to Harding before Egan got there and put in
a word for him. And Jack Kid, played by Edward
Ashley, has been promoted to AZAC, but he's not very happy
about it. The One Hundredths had a
reputation for being shitheads before they ever got over to
England. So when they were in the States,

(26:45):
they were quite well known for like, a pilot would just take
his plane and like go and stop off and visit his girlfriend.
You know, it just really was notvery disciplined.
And I think there was this sensethat there can be a disconnect
between how disciplined you are on the ground and in training
versus once you're up in the airflying missions.
But that's not really how it is,right?
It's like if you want to be disciplined up in the air, you

(27:06):
want these tight flying formations and you want people
to know what they're doing, thenyou have to have this discipline
on the ground. And so the 100th has a bit of a
reputation. It's called the bloody 100th.
And they were known for being a bit hard luck as a unit.
And I do think initially there was this very flyboy sense of
devil may care that permeated the unit.

(27:27):
And it was work hard, play hard,not so much of A focus on
training and discipline. And I, I think that in some ways
hurt them. And I know I'm not the only
person to have said that. And as they proceeded through
the war, and they did change commanding officers, not just at
the highest level, but further down through the ranks as they
unfortunately lost majors and another commanding officers,

(27:49):
they did tighten up and that didend up cutting down on their
losses. You do see that reflected in the
series as well. Bubbles references test pilot
when he's talking about Kleven and Egan, he's talking about
like this stylish kind of fly boy glossiness that they got to
them. They they're quite charismatic
leaders of men and not necessarily sort of putting them

(28:11):
in the same league as then somebody like Rosie who comes
along later. We'll talk about him in the next
episodes, who is much quieter with his leadership.
And you see that shift from thatsort of movie star Fly Boy Ness
to, I don't want to say dignified, but a quiet
competency. Crosby mentions it too, because
Egan and Kleven shot down withina couple days of each other,

(28:32):
which we'll talk about in a future episode.
But once they were gone, I mean,Crosby notes it, he's like,
first of all, the loss of the two of them rocked the base
because everyone looked up to them so much and they were
really setting the tone at the top kind of thing.
And once they were gone, there was this vacuum for people to
kind of step in, like Rosie, whowere perhaps a little less showy

(28:53):
and flashy and a little more focused on the nuts and bolts
kind of stuff. I also wonder if Rosie is more
like that because the 100 had suffered so many losses at that
point too so they knew oh shit we really can't mess around.
We have to be serious about thisbecause we are losing so many
men. So we're progressing through
time. It's July 1943.

(29:13):
We get to know the ground crew, notably Ken Lemons, played by
RAF Law. He's such a little cutie with
his little curly hair. And we see him interact with
some British kids who live near the air base, which is also very
cute. And then in the midst of this
cute scene, they see a plane crash during a training mission
and you just see the look on these two kids faces and you're
like, oh, that's a really effective way to show how fucked

(29:35):
up that is. I think that happened a lot,
right? They lost a lot of planes and
just straight accidents, which is absolutely horrifying to
think about the guys that come all this way and then they
didn't actually get to go or they did.
And there's one incident where aguy had completed 25 missions
and was coming home and at the last minutes he crashed.

(29:57):
And so he just never got to go. You have one enemy and Mr.
Germans, but the other enemies are on blood.
That's why I also like that we had an emphasis on the ground
crew in this episode, even just to give us a little bit flavour
of all of the work that they were doing to try and keep these
birds in the air. Because Can you imagine, you are
the engineer, you are the mechanic, you are watching these

(30:17):
guys go out mission after mission and some of them don't
come back. And so do you sit there and you
think, could I have done something differently to have
made the plane come back? And that must have taken a such
a huge toll. And I did want to know that Ken
Lemons was 19 years old. That's a baby.

(30:37):
That's a tiny little baby. Oh, absolutely.
I agree. And I think it's hard for us to
imagine now. But really this sort of air war
that they were fighting, they didn't really have the
technology to do it, but before the early 1940s and then by the
end of World War 2 was already becoming obsolete.
And so there's this window of time where they have this super
new technology. They don't really have great

(30:59):
strategies yet, but it takes some time to figure out that
they have to fly in formation. It takes some time to figure out
that they need fighter escorts. It takes some time to figure out
all these different things that make it safer.
And then, of course, the technology is the same, right?
It's like they're trying to get all these bombers up in the air
and there's all these moving parts and it's pretty new
technology. And so there's a lot of
glitches. Things fall apart.

(31:20):
They don't work the way they're supposed to.
And when that happens, unfortunately, what are you
going to do about it, right? You're 20,000 feet up in the
air. Right.
And we'll talk about the reason why they're doing this.
But as well, if you remember theground crew often working at
night to be doing this, they would set up like little
barracks out on the hard stands.They weren't going back to the
central hubs. They were out there.
They slept out there that they, I think would even eat out

(31:42):
there. And then doing all this
maintenance work, so much maintenance work by torchlight
in, you know, Britain was under blackout conditions.
So they couldn't have lights to see.
And if they needed it, they would have to construct
makeshift shelters out of tarpaulins and things to try and
fix these planes. It's horrific conditions that
they're working under all hours of the night.

(32:03):
The hundreds are having a reallyof time.
It's kind of illustrated in the show because they've not been in
the world that long and they're already low on planes and
they've lost 66 airmen already out of the original 350 men that
started out. So losses are very great.
Yeah, these B seventeens have a combat crew of 10, so every time

(32:28):
you see one of these planes go down and nobody make it out,
that's 10 guys who just went outand didn't come back.
Split second just. Yeah, we get a little bar scene
with the Brits and the Americans, which sort of gives
us an idea of how differently the Brits and the Americans
approached the air war at the time.
The Brits were predominantly bombing at night because they

(32:50):
had started out bombing during the day and discovered that's a
good way to get your ass shot out of the sky.
So they started bombing at night.
And of course when you bomb at night, you don't really have a
lot of precision. So they were pretty much just
carpet bombing German cities. And the Americans were trying to
do more precision bombing, whichis a misnomer in some ways.
But so the 8th Air Force had first begun combat operations in

(33:12):
August of 1942, which is a year before.
And when they came over, they had this piece of equipment
called the Norden Bombsight, which cost $1.1 billion to make.
And just to give you an impression, that's not that much
less expensive than the atomic bomb.
And it'd been developed by Navy scientists in the early 30s and
tested in the American West. And the problem is when you test

(33:33):
a piece of technology in perfectconditions, you don't always get
the impression of what it's going to be like when you are
perhaps higher than you should be in the air because you're
trying to avoid flak and you're trying to avoid fighter planes.
And the weather is garbage because it's fucking Europe in
whatever season it is. And so they had these high hopes
for improving the accuracy of bombings.

(33:53):
But studies have revealed that as few as 5% of 8 Air Force
bombs fell within 1000 feet of the target.
And the average error for £500 bombs dropped in Europe was a
whopping 1673 feet. So, so they were doing their
best, I suppose, or they thoughtthey were doing their best, but
ultimately, even bombing during the daytime, they weren't
necessarily always hitting theirtargets.
So that's kind of where we're at.

(34:14):
We're in this bar scene and we're getting these British
airmen talking about if you guysflew at night, then few of your
guys be getting killed. And the Americans are like,
well, let's have a fight about it.
Yeah, it's been a kind of test on the fight that Mark Barry
Kier going has to be a boxer andthis show and he runs obviously
because the Americans have to run into an American show.

(34:37):
The portrayal of the RAF in thisis debatable.
I find that they're very harshlyportrayed to be stick in the
muds. I'm never stick up their guts.
I don't mind this as much because I'm not British, but I
can understand the British not really lacking this portrayal.
I mean. I also, you know, British

(35:00):
soldiers were making significantly less money than
the Americans. So imagine if you we will, all
these people who are your alliescome over.
So you have to begrudgingly be like, thanks for coming.
And they have tons of money. So of course, all of the local
girls, they want to hang out with the flashy Americans that
have all this money and not withyou.
So I don't think we could begrudge the Brits for being

(35:21):
perhaps a little bit less than welcoming.
Actually, I really love this because the Brits, and
realistically they're all, I think English and that we see,
they are so cartoonishly awful that I just sort of love it.
It's like they stepped out of fucking Blackadder or something.
It's hard to be offended by that.
Yeah, I think it's interesting too, because they are having

(35:43):
this conversation and the Americans don't really have a
comeback. They don't really have a great
response. And this is another opportunity
that I think they could have taken to be like, yeah, this is
where we're daytime bombing, so we can actually fucking hit
targets and not, you know, families.
But they don't touch it too closely.
I think there's a little bit of Harry Crosby voice over about
it, but daylight bombing was super dangerous.

(36:05):
It did result in the high numberof casualties.
So I have a quote from the Donald Miller book where he says
in October of 1943, fewer than one out of four Eighth Air Force
crew members could expect to complete his tour of duty, which
was 25 combat missions. 2/3 of the men could expect to die in
combat or be captured by the enemy.
So, yeah, flying daylight missions is a good way to get

(36:27):
shot, and the Americans know it.And so I guess you can't blame
them for being a little bit defensive on their end as well
during this conversation. The next mission they go on is
Trondheim, Norway, and the target they have for this are
the submarine Panther. And it's the mission on which
Bubbles gets sick. So Crosby has to step in and

(36:49):
he's very light, he's very nervous, and he also has to lead
the ring. It's trial by fire, right?
That's for him. Yeah, I love that he just shows
up and you could tell that he has just clearly sweated through
all of his under layers of clothing.
Fabulous acting job. I don't even need to see her
close to know that you've sweat through them.

(37:10):
Bubbles also gives Crosby his little snug love.
And it's for luck. And also purr.
Bubbles, he's very sick. He's not having a good time.
Don't worry, Harry's going to get up in the air and vomit a
bunch of times too while they'reup there bid it gets hit by
Flack and it really fucks up hisplane and Egan as Wing Commander
decides they're all going to stay with him.

(37:31):
Which is not a good idea strategic wise.
You don't want your formation flying as slow as the slowest
guy because it makes it easy to pick everyone off.
But they, we know that if they leave him behind, then he'll be
easy fodder for the Germans. And so that's why they do it.
And Crosby basically has to navigate them a course where he
can get them over land as quickly as possible so that when

(37:53):
Biddeck has to make his crash landing, he can do it, you know,
not over the ocean. So he has kind of a close call.
But they have a little crash landing in Fraserburgh,
Scotland, and everyone survives.And it's one of those moments
where you're like, what a relief.
That was very close. Nothing's going to happen to
this crew again. Absolutely nothing.
Yeah. In connection with this, Crosby
gets transferred to Blakely's crew full time and it's sort of

(38:15):
a promotion because Blakely's crew flies lead, which basically
the way they had decided to do it at this point was that
whoever was in the lead, it would be their navigator who was
doing the primary navigating, and everyone else would follow.
And it would be their Bombardierthat would decide when to drop
the bombs and everyone else would follow.
So you had a lot of responsibility flying in the
lead. And Harry doesn't think he's

(38:36):
earned it. In his memoir, he talks about
how he got commended for maintaining radio silence on the
flight, but it's because he forgot to radio in 'cause he was
panicking so much. And he talks about how he got
commended for radar evasion, buthe was actually flying super low
'cause he couldn't figure out where the fuck he was and he
wanted to look at landmarks. And he talks about how he got
commended for flying over Scotland instead of Norway like

(38:58):
he was supposed to, but he did that because he was more
familiar with Scotland than Norway, so he could map it
better. So anyway, through this series
of hilarious fumbles, he managesto get promoted and he also gets
recommended for his first medal,a Distinguished Flying Cross.
Incredible. Nobody's doing that like he and
Harry Crosby. So many things happened to him,
kind of. You know what though?

(39:20):
He finished his time in the Army.
He was a Lieutenant Colonel. He was a well respected group
navigator. I do think that he's putting it
on a little bit. You know, he's like, oh, I
didn't know how to do this. And it's like, bro, you probably
did. And what especially makes me
think that is because he doesn'treally talk about the initial
Brady incident. I think that one makes him feel
embarrassed and shitty. And I feel like he's able to be

(39:42):
self deprecating about this stuff because it's like he
actually did kind of know what he was doing though.
He's got a charm, which is why Ithink Anthony Boyle was such
great casting because I bet if you put them two of them in the
room together, they would have the same charm.
Yeah, exactly. Harry Crosby's memoir is great.
Like, it's one of my top five war memoirs.
He has a great sense of humor, and you can tell that, like, the

(40:04):
man fucked. You know, he did have some
charisma. So after the mission there is a
dance. At some point Egan shows off his
terrible thing. Douglas, who is one of my
favorite side characters, makes a bet and is going to make
laugh. One of the Red Cross girls named
Helen, played by Emma Cunning. And then he calls in from

(40:26):
Scotland to let everyone know he's OK.
Which is my favorite gag and I think the entire series where he
yells down the phone that the Scottish like him because he's
Irish. And then the Scottish guy is
like, you're not Irish. But of course he is in real
life. Oh my God, it's so funny.
I don't know why I just every single time I crack up so badly.
It is funny, yeah. And then we finish the episode.

(40:47):
They're having a fun little bikerace in the mess hall, but then
the air raid sirens come and spoil their fun and they're by
the air shelter and watching nearby Norwich get the shit
bombed out of it. And at this time, they're kind
of on the receiving end of the violence that they normally deal
out. I thought the bike race surely
had to be made-up, but that actually happened.

(41:10):
I'm like how? How do you do this set on the
base like that? But they did.
More importantly, how did they not kill all of their actors?
Yeah, it's just they're indoors and there's just so many of
these grown men on bikes trying to bike around these, like,
teeny tiny little hallways. I'm like, my gosh.
Also not knowing how to bike because they're Americans.

(41:34):
That's. So funny.
Yeah, the English brakes were different on bikes and there was
a fantastic quote, something along the lines of the number of
US airmen who came across with the English braking system is
the same number as the number ofUS airmen in England.

(42:00):
Episode 3 We open on a briefing for a bombing mission over
Germany on August 17th, 1943 andthe job they have to do is a
double strike against aircraft factories in Regensburg and a
ball bearing plant in Swanford. So it's a double header.
It's a tricky mission. The 100 are part of a huge task

(42:22):
force that will hit Regensburg first and then they will proceed
to fly on to Alteria while two other, this one for target, the
first one founded for destruction, and they're meant
to confuse the enemy. But it will be, quote UN quote,
the largest air amada ever assembled in the history of

(42:43):
mankind. I always laugh when they say
stuff like that. I'm like, of course, it's
probably the largest air Armada ever assembled.
This is the well, they were OK, they didn't have fighter planes
in World War One, but they didn't have anything on the
scale like they did on World War2.
So I'm like, yeah, man, you guysinvented airplanes like 30 years
ago. I'm not really surprised.
This is the largest air Armada. It's also such an obvious

(43:06):
inspirational cross. Clearly they're meant to help
these guys up because this mission is not without its
danger because even flying to Algeria is pretty tricky to get
there. So like, good luck.
Yeah, and it super depends on timing.
So the plan is that they're going to go up first, and then

(43:26):
they're going to be followed within like 20 minutes by the
other two groups. And the Germans are going to be
like, oh, the Americans are hitting Regensburg, so they're
going to go and get them. And then they'll see the
Americans fly towards Africa andbe like, what the fuck is
happening? And while they're looking over
there, then the other two task forces are going to hit
Schweinfurt. And it's supposed to be a whole
thing that prevents anyone groupfrom taking a huge amount of ass

(43:47):
kicking. Spoiler alert, that's not what
happens. But they kind of knew it was
going to be a clusterfuck because Crosby flying lead had
been pre briefed. So he already knew about the
mission. And so there was these two kind
of lead teams that had been briefed and one or the other was
going to have to lead. And he wonders why the other
team that had been in the top secret briefing isn't flying

(44:09):
deputy lead. And someone says to him the
pilots in the Infirmary, and Cross says, I wish I were.
It's a shame that the secret briefings kind of aren't in the
show. I would have like to see them in
the shower because they're quitefun across Pittsburgh.
Yeah, so the weather sucks because it's England, and it's
super foggy. And we see the guys, they're
waiting to go up, and they're all a little antsy.

(44:32):
And we circle back on Bailey andQuinn, who we had met in the
first episode. And we also meet William
Babyface Hinton, played by Oakley Pendergast.
And this will be relevant later in the episode.
Sad already. Just like in anticipation of
what's going to happen, I'm already sad.
I'll call the guy babyface and then expect good things.
Yeah, babyface doesn't get to survive the war.

(44:54):
There's not a chance. There is a scene, I think it's
an episode 2, where they're seenplaying craps or a different
game of cards. I don't know.
But you see this actor and he looks like he's 12, like an
actual child. Yeah, I think because we're so
used to seeing actors in their mid to late 20s or even older in

(45:15):
a lot of these war shows, I think it's sometimes hard to
remember how young they were. I used to teach and looking at
teenage boys, I'm like even whenthey're 18, I'm like, that's not
a grown man, that's a baby. What wasn't Egans treated as
quite an old man, all things considered, at the grand old age
of 27? Yeah, so the 100th version of
the task force ends up going up alone.

(45:38):
The other crews are not going upbecause of the weather.
And this obviously, Sam has already said it.
It's got disastrous consequences.
So the other two are five hours late.
The other two task forces, and instead of having backup,
they're out there all alone, andthe Germans can focus all their
attention on our guys. They're up there all alone.

(46:00):
It's really shut. Yeah, and GAIL Clevin has his
big hero moment. There's a a well known story
about him where his plane is absolutely shot to shit.
And like really any pilot with sense he probably would have
bailed out, but he decided he was not going to do that.
And his copilot was basically begging him to let them bail

(46:21):
out. And he was like, no, we're going
to sit here and take it. And this was witnessed by Baron
Lay junior of 12:00 High fame. And you can go listen to our
episode about 12:00 high. And he wrote about it and he
actually recommended him for a Medal of Honor.
Klevin received the Distinguished Service Cross
instead, but he never collected it.
He said something to the effect of metal.
I needed an aspirin. So you know, some old man humor

(46:44):
there. This mission is bad.
Curtis Bittek tries to land his damaged plane in order to save
his wounded copilot. And the acting in the scene by
Barry Kagan is amazing. My favorite part of him acting.
He's got this bravado right up until the very end.
And there's this moment he crashes and his plane dips at

(47:08):
the very end. And he says something like, oh
God, but his face is that was anacting brilliant in the sun, but
also so heartbroken. Yeah, this was also witnessed by
Baron Lay Junior, which is probably why we know essentially
what happened. But real Kurt was trapped in the
cockpit by a fire while he was keeping the plane level for the

(47:28):
rest of the crew to bail. And his copilot, Flight Officer
Richard Snyder, did attempt to jump but didn't survive.
And today, the bodies of Kurt Bittock, aerial engineer
Sergeant Lawrence Godbee and Sergeant James Baer, who's an
airman from another crew, have been repatriated.
Unfortunately, after they were buried, it wasn't possible to
separate out who is who, so theyremain buried together in St.

(47:50):
Louis, MO. There is an article by Burnley
Junior called I saw Regensburg destroyed that he wrote for the
post I believe. I don't remember but I'll link
it on the website. Yeah, it's the The Saturday
Evening Post. Exactly, and it's a very good
read. Like Burnley, Junior is a
fantastic writer. If you think could be the dying,

(48:13):
isn't that enough, We get another one.
We get the scene where Alice from Dallas is shot down, and
it's the most horrific scene ever to be portrayed on
television. For me.
When I first watched it, I don'tknow what happened to my body,
but I went into four body cells.He could not stop crying for the

(48:34):
next 10 minutes because babyfaceHinton gets stuck in his spot
for it and Quinn tries to save him, but he can't do it and he
has to make the very difficult choice of leaving him behind to
die in a plane, and it's just terrible.
I do like the scene. It's really interesting because

(48:54):
you also see Quinn, who's a navigator, eat all his mission
marks before they bill, and that's how important it was to
keep everything as they tried just eating paper.
To me, this scene was one of thegreat examples in this show of
everything that seems too over dramatic or crazy to have
actually happened did actually happen, even if it didn't

(49:16):
necessarily happen to that character.
All of these stories, a lot of them come directly from the book
Masters of the Air or from the other memoirs.
It's that quote that's like, truth is stranger than fiction
because fiction has to be possible.
This stuff just seems completelyoutrageous that it would have
actually happened, but it did. Brinley was supposed to fly with
Alice from Dallas on this mission.

(49:37):
I'm kind of glad he didn't because instead he was put
unpicked and legally. Which is another plan because
Clavin suggested to Kidd and that Alice's position and the
formation was too out in the open and too dangerous.
So they put him unpicked and legally and well, Piccadilla
Lily is not in the show as some of the other planes are.

(49:57):
You can see it on the hard stands in one of the Suns they
do a little nod to. The planes that remain limp to
North Africa and Crosby's directions, they're trying to
find this airstrip in Algeria. And they're all extremely low on
fuel, as you can imagine, so they don't have a lot of margin
for error. They're jettisoning extra weight
over the Mediterranean. They're throwing everything out.

(50:19):
And by the time they get there, Buck Clevin has to make an
engine less land. They're basically just a glider
at that point. There's this sort of tense bit
where I have to wait until the very last minute to put the
landing gear down to make sure that they can actually stick the
landing. And, yeah, the mood on the
ground is pretty. Everyone is just reeling.
You know, they're in total shockabout how much of A shit show

(50:39):
that was. And in the Miller book, he says
the Regensburg mission was the most disastrous American air
operation up to that time. 60 bombers, and therefore 600 men
were lost. The targets that they were
hitting that day were protected by one of the most formidable
aerial defense systems in the world.
And of course, because it didn'tgo as planned, they left a lot

(51:00):
of guys out in the open. And so there was a, you know,
quite significant casualties. Yeah, man, just hearing about
this mission on tour, it hit so hard.
How many men? That is 600 men on one day.
It's crazy. That's the end of the episode,
by the way. I think this episode, it's one
of the hardest to watch. It's also the one I've probably

(51:20):
seen the most together with episode 5.
So what did you guys think in general of the first 3 episodes?
My closing thoughts is one of the interesting things about
Masters as ATV series is that a lot of this smaller roles are

(51:44):
filled with people who have beenaround like the British drama
circuit for either a really longtime or into quite significant
roles. And I don't know if this hits
different because I am a Britishperson, but I recognize so many
of the faces, which means that of the cruisers, so they sort of
disappear one by one. You're losing recognizable

(52:06):
faces. And I think both the series does
that where we get slight introductions to individual
characters just to know who theyare before we lose them.
But also, like, on a meta level,as an audience member, I don't
trust that anyone's going to survive, even if I don't know
the history. And I find that very unsettling.
And I think that's very effective as well.

(52:28):
And that's why it was so brilliant cast.
Barry Kogan in this role is because you know his his star is
on the rise. You don't expect Barry Kogan to
die, but that's what the historydid.
And some of that sort of lucky in hindsight because this was
filmed way back. I think he was already known.
But I think his star has risen in the last couple of years in
such a huge way. I think it's the same even for

(52:50):
Austin Butler because they filmed this right after Elvis
and Elvis was really his big mainstream break.
And thankfully we get to have him around for a little bit
longer than most characters. But so many of the people that
you see in Masters are are doingpretty well.
In case anyone was wondering, this show really made a big

(53:11):
splash in the people who have already seen and enjoyed Band of
Brothers in the Pacific community.
Yeah. However, this show is the most
criticized out of all of them. And the one difference of the
show has compared to the other two is that hardly any of the
Airmen were still alive when this was made.
There weren't that many interviews done for this show as

(53:34):
there were for them and even thePacific.
So it's a different kind of storytelling in that sense.
Really conjuring up voices from beyond the grave.
And I also think this sense of people who are not here anymore,
we're less likely to accord themflaws.
Like people die. And now that we're that one step

(53:57):
removed from them, it's like a lot easier to make them into
Saints than it might be if you had like, known them as real
people, if that makes sense. It's interesting if you go to
the air bases in East Anglia andyou talk to the people who run
the museums and volunteer and things like that, because almost
to a person, they will speak of the Americans in this very

(54:19):
reverent fashion. And they're sort of talking
about the sort of protecting their memory and protecting
their legacy. And if you think about it, what
they got were these young men who came over and stayed and
lived within their communities. As you say, they were quite
flashy. A lot of the kids at the time
would be quite awed at these Americans who came in.
And it was such a glamorous disruption in many ways.

(54:40):
And then a lot of them, they would just disappear and they
were never seen again. And then they left, but they
left all of these marks of things that where they were left
behind. And so it's like this strange
echo of reverence where they never got to see them be whole
messy people. They never got to see them be
old for whatever reason. Either that is because they died

(55:02):
or because they were all over the way in America.
You know, it's, it's a really interesting experience.
We met one of them kids who lived near the air base on the
last tour that we went on, and he said when they left, there
was a big emptiness in his life because he was 12 or 14 at the
time, very young. That's very forwards of years.

(55:25):
And he had all these American pilot friends around and airmen
around, and then they left and they were left alone.
And the village was very sad about them leaving.
It's hard to imagine, isn't it, to have these strange people
from this other country that youcan never speak to again because
you don't have the Internet. And then they're just gone.

(55:52):
So we'll be covering episodes 4 through 6 next week and then
we'll cover the last three episodes the week after.
And in the meantime, that's it for us today.
You can listen to us wherever you get your podcasts.
You can rate US five stars. You can send this episode to a
friend. You can tell George they did a
great job at being not just an SAS Rogue Heroes correspondent.
And hopefully they'll come back for many more episodes.

(56:13):
You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie the Reviewer Podcast,
or you can visit our website rosiethereviewer.com.
See you next week. Thank you for listening.

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Ep 67 – Masters of the Air – The Spielberg-Hanks WWII Saga (Part One)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep 67 – Masters of the Air – The Spielberg-Hanks WWII Saga (Part One)