Callum Turner (left) and Elvis star Austin Butler are part of the huge ensemble cast that feature in Masters of the Air. Image: Apple TV+
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A few years ago, at his home in Easton, Pennsylvania, professor Donald L Miller was joined for a long weekend of intensive research work on the TV adaption of his book Masters of the Air by the show’s executive producer Tom Hanks.
After a couple of days, he told his hard-driving Hollywood taskmaster – who had brought with him 440 pages of notes – that he needed to take a break. “I said, ‘Tom, I got to teach,’” Miller recalls. “I live close to my college, Lafayette College. He said, ‘I can teach.’ I said, ‘I bet you can, come on along.’”
A self-proclaimed “lay historian”, Hanks is renowned for his passion for the past, as evidenced by the multitude of acclaimed World War II epics he has been involved in the making of, including Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Greyhound. The anecdote Miller shares is revealing as to the kind of career Hanks might otherwise fancy pursuing were he not already one of the most famous actors and filmmakers.
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“We drove past the college building,” Miller continues, “Tom goes, ‘Let me out.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go park, why don’t you walk in with me?’ He said, ‘Nah.’ So he went in the building. And I don’t know exactly what happened. But I got there about four minutes later. And he was teaching the students. I said to one of my students, ‘What did he say?’ He said, ‘Oh, he came in and he said, ‘Miller’s got a hell of a hangover. He can’t teach today. I’m taking over the class.’
“Tom said they sat there stunned,” Miller continues, laughing. “They just didn’t know what to say. And then one of them, of course, grabbed for her phone, to take a picture. Tom said, ‘Let me take your picture, guys.’ We invited them all to lunch. We had lunch brought in; the students met with him for most of the afternoon. He could have been doing other things. It’s great. I mean, he’s really great.”
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Proof perfect as to why Miller knew all along that his authoritative 2007 non-fiction book about the so-called “bomber boys” of WWII – the young American airmen who came to Europe to fight with the Eighth Air Force and help beat the Nazis, at terrifying cost – was in the best of hands with Hanks. Even as its journey from page to screen grew longer and more tumultuous, dogged by rewrites, studio upheaval and the Covid-19 pandemic. When Masters of the Air finally came to screens on Apple TV+ this month, it was almost 13 years since Hanks first proposed the project to Miller, shortly after the two met while making a documentary called He Has Seen War.
Filmed on location in England and starring Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Barry Keoghan and Ncuti Gatwa as part of a huge ensemble cast, Masters of the Air is a nine-part miniseries that forms a companion to 2001’s Band of Brothers and 2010’s The Pacific – each also executive produced by Hanks with Steven Spielberg and made by Hanks’s production company Playtone. Like its companions, Masters of the Air focuses on the extraordinary true-life endeavours of an individual fighting unit: in this case the 100th Bomb Group, nicknamed the “Bloody Hundredth” for the losses it incurred in combat.
The Bloody Hundredth’s tremendous bravery and sacrifice is summed up in a single breathtaking passage from Miller’s book. “By the end of the war,” he writes, “the Eighth Air Force would have more fatal casualties – 26,000 – than the entire US Marine Corps. Seventy-seven percent of the Americans who flew against the Reich before D-Day would wind up as casualties.”
Between 1942 and 1945, great air armadas of American B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers hauled themselves into the sky often hundreds at a time, day after day, to pound Nazi war infrastructure in Europe. Their crewmen, 10 per plane, did “the most dangerous job in the war” reckons Miller.
Donald L Miller. Image: Sipa US/Alamy Live News
Slow, thinly armoured, and easy to spot in mass formations in the daytime skies (the Americans insisted on bombing by day for greater accuracy) the B-17s were often hopelessly exposed to enemy anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft. There was nowhere to hide; skill and courage could get crewmen only so far towards the required 25 missions – blind luck, faith or madness had to do the rest. It must have been nerve shredding beyond comprehension, and yet the bomber boys – all non-conscripted volunteers – served and prevailed, helping to grind the German war machine down to eventual defeat.
Where the Masters of the Air trailer suggests a show full of booming bombast, heroism, romance and other tropes typical of WWII dramas, Miller insists the finished product is much more muted, cerebral, gritty and above all things – at its executive producer’s insistence – authentic. “Hanks’s mantra to us was don’t make up anything,” says Miller, who as well as writing the source book was also brought on to the show as historical adviser. “No bullshit. Tell the fucking story. Just as it happened. There’s enough real stuff that you don’t have to exaggerate. We were interested in the psychological and emotional price paid by these young guys, most of them under the age of 24. That’s what drew us into this thing. How the hell did some of them get through it?”
The American bomber war has been relatively under-served in the pantheon of screen representations of WWII. Perhaps because of the complex morality of war making often indifferent to the killing of innocent civilians (Hamburg and Dresden remain two of the most controversial raids in American military history), or maybe because of the impracticality of filming inside poky fuselages of B-17s. Masters of the Air seeks to change that.
“We wanted to catch the mood of Das Boot,” says Miller, referring to referring to Wolfgang Petersen’s thrilling 1981 U-boat drama, widely considered an all-time classic. “Not over the top Hollywood stuff,” he says, “but war just as it is.
“Hanks kept making the point: I want a movie where men are just doing their jobs.”
Masters of the Air premieres on Apple TV+ on 26 January
A new edition of Masters of the Air: How The Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine is out now (Ebury Press £8.99).
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