Nightmare Fuel / Masters of the Air

Nightmare Fuel in Masters of the Air, because War Is Hell and Anyone Can Die.

Per Wiki policy, spoilers are unmarked.

Part One

• The 100th's first encounter with flak has the formation being surrounded by bursts of black smoke as the planes get perforated by shards of fast-moving shrapnel. A Ball Turret gunner, sitting in his plexiglass ball, is helpless to do anything but pray as he watches the shells burst all around him, with one shard of shrapnel bursting through the plexiglass right in front of him and missing his head by inches.
• The 100th's first mission is brutally humbling, with three bombers being shot down in rapid succession. In the third bomber, we see pilot and copilot both get riddled with bullets, before the fuel tanks catch fire and the entire plane is engulfed in flames. To make it worse, they couldn't even hit the target because of cloud cover.

Part Two

• A lighthearted scene of Lemmons having fun talking with some local kids is abruptly interrupted by a Fortress falling out of the sky and crashing into a fireball behind him. We learn that it was a training flight where a pilot simply made a mistake, banking too hard in a turn and not being able to recover in time.
• Although it works out in the end, Curt's emergency landing very nearly results in disaster more than once, as the plane, unable to maintain altitude, first nearly crashes into a cliff face and then barely misses crashing into someone's house, instead taking out their entire garden and fence.

Part Three

• The Sinking Ship Scenario that Quinn and Babyface find themselves in. Babyface can't get out of his ball turret because the hatch is stuck. Quinn tries to get him out, but can't, and has to abandon his crewmate to save himself.
• During the War Is Hell montage, Buck watches as an airman attempting to bail out of a stricken bomber has the misfortune to get hit by Buck's plane, a very real danger of bailing out in the middle of a formation.

Part Four

• Quinn and Bailey are reunited in a Resistance safehouse, where Bailey introduces Quinn to Bob, an airman from the 306th. Shortly after, the Resistance members takes them one by one into a back room and interrogate them, quizzing them about their names, their missions, English geography, baseball, and the American National Anthem, even making them sing it. After the test, Quinn and Bailey talk about how they thought they were in trouble because they didn't know all of the answers, and then one of the Resistance fighters shoots Bob in the face, having concluded he was a German infiltrator.
  • Quinn and Bailey's plot emphasizes the amount of danger they and their allies are in if they can't maintain the ruse of being European civilians, or if they reveal anything about the people helping them. This is further complicated by the fact that they can't understand any of the local languages, leading to a problem when a train conductor asks them for their ticket and they can't understand him, leading to Quinn panicking and trying to bolt. Thankfully, their handlers are able to explain it as a misunderstanding, claiming that the two men are deaf.
• The war is clearly taking its toll on the men of the 100th. Of thirty-five crews who arrived together from Greenland, only a dozen of them remain. Colonel Harding is clearly showing the signs of stress as he quickly (and drunkenly) pivots from giving his men a motivating speech dismissing concerns that some of them might be getting "Flak-Happy" to angrily wanting to know who was responsible for the party decorations which accidentally depicted a bomber in a nose-dive, to a tense discussion where he and Bucky accuse each other of being "Flak-Happy" before Harding laughs it off and suggests they try to pick up some women.
• Buck's plane has an engine that won't start, but Lemmons is sure he can fix it while they're taxiing to the runway. Cue a scene of Lemmons precariously hanging off of the landing gear strut while working on the engine, at risk of falling and being crushed by the wheel. In the end, Lemmons succeeds and hops down to the ground to be picked up by the other mechanics.

Part Five

• There is a point-of-view shot of a Belly Gunner as he climbs into his turret, making it clear that as he steps down into the turret, he is looking through a sheet of plexiglass at the ground far below.
• The Munster raid starts badly and gets progressively worse. Eagan has to bail out right before the target and on the way back the survivors are hit by waves of enemy fighters. Rosenthal's plane is getting shot up but he is holding on. Suddenly he realizes that his is the only bomber left in the sky. All the other planes from the 100th have been shot down and he has to get back to England on his own.
  • Hambone, with his leg injured, struggles frantically to get a hatch open so he can bail out. Once he does get it open, he jumps and gets snagged on the door, hanging from the stricken plane but unable to get free. Another crewman tries to get him free but can't reach him, and the only option of freeing him is to pull the emergency release on the door's hinge, with the crewman, still attached to the door, falling towards an ambiguous fate.
  • After Bucky's plane goes down, another bomber moves forward into the lead position, and is struck by a rocket, bursting into flames and drifting out of control, narrowly missing Royal Flush before smashing into another bomber on the far side.
  • The scene where the crew of Royal Flush realize they're all alone is eerie, with bits and pieces of other bombers slowly falling all around them, with the scene depicted in eerie silence.
  • We see that the nightmare fuel isn't all on the American side, as one quick shot shows a German pilot bailing from his plane, with his parachute trailing but not showing signs of fully deploying. Another shot shows a frightened German pilot making eye-contact with Rosenthal as their two plans pass close-by, just before the German plane is riddled with bullets from Rosenthal's belly gunner.

Part Six

• Bucky is Trapped Behind Enemy Lines, having to scavenge for food while hiding in the German countryside with only a pistol to protect himself. When he stumbles across some German kids outside of their house, he lowers his gun, gives them a "shush" gesture, and tries to sneak away only for the oldest child to immediately call for help because an enemy soldier is outside their house with a gun. The scene immediately switches to the family's perspective, as the father ushers the children inside and tells them to call the police while he and another man go out into the tall grass to find Bucky, who is, in fact, an enemy soldier who is trapped behind enemy lines, likely desperate, and armed with a gun.
• Bucky is cornered and handed over to the authorities. He and a group of other American POWs don't make it far before falling victim to an angry lynch mob, with the downed airmen being shot, stabbed, and beaten. Bucky only narrowly survives because he is mistaken for dead, and escapes again only to be captured yet again.
• Bucky makes it to the relative safety of confinement in a Germany military facility where an interrogator politely takes down his report of the lynch mob, reviews an extensive file of Bucky's history and friendship with Buck Cleven, and threatens to hand Bucky over to the Gestapo to be shot as a spy unless he can provide some correlating information about his unit and their operations. Bucky refuses, calling the interrogator's bluff, and finally is sent to a POW camp.

Part Seven

• When an alarm is sounded at the POW camp, all of the airmen have to be accounted for by the guards, calling their names as they mark them present. One airman is stopped short when called out by a guard's implied threat:
  Guard: Solomon. That's a Jewish name, yes?
• The prisoners in the camp have to deal with the fact that, despite what the The Laws and Customs of War say about treatment of prisoners, they are at the mercy of their captors and how they choose to interpret those laws.

Part Eight

Part Nine

• The POWs are put on a forced march to keep them away from the Red Army troops advancing from the east. They are forced to travel only with what they can carry, are marching through brutal winter weather that proves tough even on the German soldiers, and the torches used to light the way also end up drawing the attention of Allied aircraft, resulting in the prisoners being strafed by an American fighter plane.
• Rosie bails out over No Man's Land and is nearly shot by Soviet troops mistaking him for a German soldier.
• As Buck, George, and Bill hide by the side of the road, a small German convoy drives past, retreating from the advancing Allies. Following behind is a white horse with no rider, evidently wandering this way long enough that the harness is chafing badly enough to draw blood. Buck stares as he sees that the war won't even spare animals from suffering.
• With the end of the war near, the Germans continue to fight out of desperation. Even children are fighting, and George is surprised and killed by a pair of them.
• Similarly, after Buck and Bill make their way to an American occupied village at night, they are confronted by American troops pointing their guns at them and ready to shoot. Even when they inform them they're airmen, the troops don't let their guard down until they are ordered to by their officer on the radio.
• A pair of Soviet officers give Rosie a ride back from the front. When they get stuck in a traffic jam due to a broken down wagon, Rosie gets out to walk around a bit, and discovers that they're stopped next to an abandoned prison camp full of the dead prisoners, some of whom were clearly tortured and all of them starved before they were killed. He soon realizes to his horror that the executed prisoners were Jewish, and one of the Soviet officers explains that they've found several camps like this as they advanced into Germany.
  Rosie: There's m- there's more of them?