There’s a new series about WWII on Apple, Masters of The Air, about the “Bloody Hundredth” & the B-17 Flying Fortress. Amazing war scenes. Beautiful stuff. It’s made by Spielberg & Tom Hanks, who have been at it for 25 years. I reviewed the new show for my friends at the Acton Institute:
Tom Hanks was the moral conscience of America in the ’90s, so far as Hollywood was concerned, & audiences largely concurred, because he’s like a new Jimmy Stewart: he exudes moral integrity and childlike innocence.
Hanks later started making patriotic movies instead of liberal-cause movie. He starred in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998. After that astonishing success, they produced the Band of Brothers miniseries together in 2001, which became the defining memory of WWII for a generation. Hanks even wrote the teleplay for its first episode & directed the fifth. Then, at the end of that more patriotic decade, in 2010, they produced a companion series, The Pacific, a much-needed reminder of the major effort America made on the seas in WWII. It was also an opportunity for everyone to read one of the amazing accounts of the island campaigns, Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed.
Now they’ve produced a third war series, Masters of the Air, for Apple Studios. The creator is John Orloff, one of the writers on Band of Brothers. We finally get to see warfare in the skies, as we follow the pilots of the 100th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force, based in England, flying the B17 Flying Fortress (this was back when Boeing was a symbol of national pride). These men ran daylight bombing campaigns in Germany & other parts of Europe from June 25, 1943, until April 20, 1945, & they were called the Bloody Hundredth because of the horrible casualty ratio. After the war, they dropped food & transported war prisoners back to their homes.
Let me recommend this as a companion essay, on Band of Brothers:
The most beloved, almost revered TV series in America is the HBO production Band of Brothers, the true story of the soldiers & officers of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division from the creation of the regiment in 1942, through D-Day, and all the way to V-J Day. This was an elegy for the time when America became a national democracy & a world power, when morality was crowned by victory in war, when men could be proud of their different ethnicities & assert all-American loyalty at the same time. Viewers, critics, & veterans all loved the series, pop culture’s best case for “The Greatest Generation.”
Band of Brothers was made by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, & historian Stephen Ambrose, the trio behind Saving Private Ryan, the great success of 1998. A curious movie, it got every detail right, to present the war as those men experienced it who stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day—but made up an entirely fictional story, replacing the grand story of Eisenhower’s Crusade with one squad’s quixotic quest to rescue a single paratrooper. This nonsense, punctured by violence, is finally dispelled when Private Ryan says his fellow soldiers are his brothers. He needs no saving.
Band of Brothers embraces the American love of the military & the ambiguity of imperial democracy. The men are sent into terrible danger like so many Davids, but American industrial-technological might is the Goliath eventually dominating the war & the world in an attempt to make excellence & equality come together. In this vision of a dignified political liberalism, authorities, institutions, & leadership are treated with respect even as the focus is on a small number of men who only became famous because of the series—& were never important in public life. Yet this noble effort premiered two days before 9/11 & became another presage of the contradictions that would tear American politics apart.