"We came from every corner of the country with a common purpose. To bring the war to Hitler's doorstep."
— Major Harry Crosby
Masters of the Air is a 2024 American war drama miniseries set during World War II. Executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, it is a Spiritual Successor to Band of Brothers and The Pacific.
This series follows the exploits of the men serving as part of the 100th Bombardment Group, Eighth Air Force of the US Army Air Forces as they participate in the Allied Bombing campaign to cripple German military and civilian industries in the European theater of the war.
The main cast includes Austin Butler as Major Gale Cleven, Callum Turner as Major John Egan, Anthony Boyle as Lt. Harry Crosby, Barry Keoghan as Lt. Curtis Biddick, Nikolai Kinski as Colonel Harold Huglin, Stephen Campbell Moore as Major Marvin "Red" Bowman, Sawyer Spielberg as Lt. Roy Frank Claytor, Isabel May as Marjorie "Marge" Spencer and James Murray as Colonel Neil “Chick” Harding.
The series premiered on Apple TV+, beginning January 26th, 2024.
Since Masters of the Air is mostly based on historical and personal recollections of these airmen, almost all of the tropes below are automatically an example of Truth in Television.
Previews: Teaser Trailer
Official Trailer
Masters of the Air provides examples of:
- 13 Is Unlucky: 13 B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 100th Bomb Group fly into Munster to raid the city's railway yards and station. Only one bomber makes it back intact, the rest having been shot down by fighters and flak.
- Abandon Ship: Whenever a bomber is too heavily damaged to continue flying, is about to crash, or is at risk of exploding, the crew of said bomber are often forced to bail out half the time. During Episode 3, in fact, this trope is said word-for-word by several crews as they frantically exit their stricken planes.
- Aborted Arc:
- We follow Sergeants Quinn and Bailey from Alice from Dallas who parachuted into occupied Belgium and connect with the Resistance. After a few scenes of them preparing to make their journey to Allied territory, we don't see them again until an episode or two later, when they're shown arriving back at base safely before getting tickets home.
- Anti-Air: German flak fire, particularly from the 88mm Flak 36 gun, is a regular danger to the crews. Shrapnel from flak will tear through an aircraft and maim or kill any crew members in its path.
- Anyone Can Die: Being set during the largest conflict in human history, not to mention in a unit with some of the highest casualty and attrition rates, it's an inevitability that several men aren't going to make it back home alive before the war ends.
- Artistic License – History: While the show tries to be historically accurate it still takes dramatic license with a number of facts and events.
- Kurt Biddick was from Wisconsin and not New York
- Ken Lemmons really did risk his life to keep working on a malfunctioning engine while the plane was taxing toward takeoff. However, it was not Buck Cleven's plane.
- Crosby was on leave during the Munster raid and received the news of the outcome by phone. This was omitted presumably because it would be too similar to a scene from the previous episode.
- The show depicts Capt. Joseph "Bubbles" Payne as having died during the Munster raid, but he was actually not recorded as participating in this mission, and instead died on a later mission the following April.
- There was an incident where a group of German civilians lynched and killed a group of American POWs being marched through town by German soldiers, but John "Bucky" Egan was not present for it, and indeed the real life incident happened about a year later than depicted in the show. It was actually Gale Cleven who was almost lynched after being captured.
- A minor detail, but in episode 7 Major Simoleit baldly states that 50 of the escaped prisoners from the North Compound were executed. While this is indeed what happened, in order to both avoid making it obvious it was outright murder and to escape reprisals against German prisoners in Allied hands, the official line was that the prisoners were shot while trying to escape again. Given the number of Gestapo killers that clung to this fiction in the war crimes trials concerning the fate of the murdered airmen, it's incredibly unlikely Simoleit would go against the party line so openly.
- The 100th deployed to Europe and flew some of its most famous missions in the B-17F variant, but, as the war went on, it transitioned to the newer, more heavily-armed B-17G variant, which famously had a chin-mounted gun turret remotely piloted by the bombardier in a station behind the glass nose. It had been intended to accurately model the G in the show both as a physical prop and virtually, but, amidst the COVID pandemic, adding the G model would have stretched the special effects budget too far, so it was omitted.note
- Attack Its Weak Point: A favorite tactics of Luftwaffe fighter pilots is to target the most vulnerable section of the B-17: the cockpit and nose section, which has the least number of defensive machine guns, on top of the glass nose, the pilots, and the aircraft's controls being there. These head-on attacks end up decimating several bombers, resulting in the total losses of both the planes and their crews over enemy territory. The Germans would also target the lower elements of a formation as they were less protected by the overlapping fields of fires of the bombers.
- Bait-and-Switch: We are shown the end of a raid with base personnel counting the aircrafts as they are approaching. Things get hopeful as the count gets higher and higher and it finally reaches 16. We then find out that the 100th had 31 planes on that mission and lost 15 crews.
- Bittersweet Ending: The series ends with Nazi Germany defeated and the surviving airmen going home. However, millions of people died in the war including thousands of American airmen. The survivors have to spend the rest of their lives dealing with the trauma of what they experienced during the war.
- Bluff the Imposter: When interrogating downed airmen to confirm their identities as Americans and to root out any German spies posing as Americans, the Belgian Resistance attempt this with their opening question: "What team did Babe Ruth play for before the Dodgers?" A real American would point out that Ruth never played for the Dodgers.
- Breaking Old Trends: Unlike Band of Brothers and The Pacific, this series forgoes using
a cast of almost all unknown actors and instead features many actors who are already well-known. - Breather Episode:
- Part Four mostly focuses on Bucky enjoying a two-day pass in London with the 100th's latest mission taking place in the background, and ends with Bucky finding out that Buck was shot down off-screen while he was on leave.
- Part Six functions in part as one, with two of its three main plot threads featuring Crosby and Rosenthal both taking time away from the front for some R & R in the aftermath of the Munster Raid. Downplayed, though, in that the C plot follows Major Egan's efforts to survive and escape after being shot down in the middle of Germany, with him ultimately being captured, nearly beaten to death, and shipped to a German POW camp.
- Butt-Monkey:
- Inside a B-17, the belly ball turret gunner is unarguably the worst job. Locked inside a small plexiglass sphere completely exposed to enemy flak and bullets. And, as poor Babyface learns in Part Three, if the hatch jams and no one is left inside the plane to help you get out, you're simply trapped waiting to die when the plane explodes or crashes.
- In the bomber formations, the trailing element AKA the "Tail End Charlie" position is the one that typically takes the highest casualties from flak or enemy interceptors.
- The Chains of Commanding:
- The senior officers have to deal with the fact that they are sending hundreds of young men on missions where many of them will die. It is even worse for the officers who have to stay on the ground and cannot join their men in the danger.
- Colonel Huglin is so stressed out that he develops a bleeding ulcer and is taken out of action when it burst after a bad mission
- Major Egan volunteers to write the letters to the families of thirty dead airmen. This would be the Commanding Officer's job but the CO is brand new and the letters should be written by someone who knew the dead men.
- We see multiple instances of Col Harding in the control tower waiting for the bombers to return. He seems to die a bit inside everytime he is informed of a missing plane.
- When Harry Crosby is promoted to group navigator, he becomes responsible for plotting the routes for the missions. Every time a crew fails to return he asks himself if he plotted a bad route and sent his friends to their deaths.
- Chummy Commies: Downplayed. The Soviets, as depicted in Episode 9, are shown to be absolutely merciless towards the Germans, executing any who surrender or retreat, and almost end up shooting Rosenthal, presumably mistaking him for a Luftwaffe pilot. Once Rosie identifies himself as American to them, however, they bring him back to their rear lines, treat his injuries, and help him get back to England via the next flight to Moscow and Tehran.
- *Click* Hello: A shotgun-wielding German civilian announces his presence to Bucky by cocking his shotgun off-camera.
- Coming in Hot: A regular occurrence. A B-17 with malfunctioning landing gear has to make a belly landing. Another B-17 makes an emergency landing in a field, crashes through a picket fence and narrowly avoids hitting a farmhouse.
- Communications Officer: Each B-17 has a Radio Operator, whose job is to receive and relay voice communications to and from other aircraft and the ground.
- Cool Plane:
- The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, the main aircraft used by the 100th Bombardment Group. On the fighter side of things, there's the P-51 Mustang, decorated in the distinctive red-tailed paintjob of the Tuskegee Airmen, and the P-47 Thunderbolt, shown protecting the 100th early in Episode 5.
- On the German Luftwaffe's side, we have numerous day and heavy fighter types, which include the Messerschmitt Bf 109 "Gustav" series, the Focke Wulf Fw 190A, the Messerschmitt Bf 110 Zestorer, and the Junkers Ju 88.
- Death from Above: The miniseries is about heavy bomber pilots, the kind that brought much destruction upon Germany.
- Desk Jockey: Egan began the series as one having been assigned as the Executive Officer of the 100th Bomb Group. Crosby gets promoted to one in Part Five. After surviving the second Bremmen raid, he was given a rank up to Captain and promoted to Group Navigator, aka, the head navigator of the 100th Bomb Group.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance:
- The series does not shy away from the fact that at the time the US Armed Forces were segregated, with black servicemen being placed in their own units separate from whites, such as the famous all black fighter pilots of the Tuskegee Airmen. It also does not shy away from the treatment of these segregated units, showing that many of them were given old obsolete equipment and many of the men were often denied promotion simply due to their race.
- The Allied strategic bombing campaign relied on tactics that, by the sensibilities of modern audiences, would be considered inhumane, and as the show progresses, civilian attitudes towards this on both sides are explored, contrasting with the attitudes taken by the military crews.
- Due to the Dead: In his role as navigator, Crosby makes sure to keep track of the time and location every time a bomber is shot down for the aircraft's mission log. He gets really upset because in the heat of battle he missed one. (More specifically, Lt. Biddick’s bomber).
- Dramatic Gun Cock: A staple of the genre.
- We see aerial gunners racking the bolts on their machine guns as they prepare to defend their bombers from German fighters.
- In one battle, the bombardier tries this only to realize the handle has broken off after the bomber took a hit. He's able to improvise a temporary fix and get his gun back into action after a few seconds.
- Dwindling Party: The 100th started with 35 aircrews. Roughly 3.5 months later, only 12 of the original aircrews are still flying, and most of those will be lost before they reach their 25th mission.
- Failed a Spot Check:
- Crosby fails to realize that their plane is off course and rather than approaching England, they are approaching France. They almost fly straight into a wall of flak.
- A group of escaped POWs are starving and utterly exhausted. As they are resting, they fail to spot a group of German Child Soldiers sneaking up on them. They overwhelm the kids but one American is killed in the fight.
- Faux Affably Evil: We see several Nazi interrogators who all affect a friendly demeanor in an attempt to woo captured Allied soldiers into talking. Even still, they can't help but show their true face with the occasional smirk or smug remark.
- Fragile Speedster: Both the German Bf 109 and the American P-51 Mustang are seen instantly plummeting to the earth the moment they're hit by enemy fire, in contrast to the Flying Fortresses, which often get chunks blown off of them and remain flying. Justified, due to both fighters being lightly armored on top of using inline engines, which causes them to be vulnerable to even the smallest amount of shrapnel.
- Free-Range Children: A number of young kids are seen hanging around the base, watching the planes, befriending the airmen and playing games. Their presence is tolerated by the senior officers and encouraged by some of the junior staff. A number of the kids are amputees.
- Fighter-Launching Sequence: Almost Once an Episode, the 100th's B-17s are showing taking off from their airfield, ready to head to and bomb targets in Nazi Germany and its occupied territories.
- From Bad to Worse:
- The Schweinfurt-Regensburg Raid depicted in Episode 3. First, the weather prevents bomber groups from taking off simultaneously, then the delayed sorties force the 100th to venture alone, which in turn allows the German Flak and fighters to pick each squadron off without difficulty. The end result? The 100th ends up losing almost half of their planes during this mission alone.
- The October 8, 1943 Bremen raid devastates the 100th due to the loses sustained, including Buck Cleven. However, two days later they fly the even worse Munster raid. Only a single plane returns from the mission.
- The March 6, 1944 Berlin raid turns out to be even worse then the Regensburg, Bremen or Munster raids. Soon after, the surviving crews find out that their tour of duty is being extended to 28 missions.
- Frontline General: Most of the senior officers are pilots or navigators and are expected to fly missions with their men if their other duties permit it.
- Good Is Not Nice: The Belgian Resistance may be willing to aid downed Allied airmen and get them to safety at the risk of their own and their families' lives, but this does not mean they are going to be pleasant about it. They end up coldly gunning down a suspected German agent as well as call out Quinn and Bailey on their potentially stupid actions, among other things.
- Guy in Back: The B-17 has several of these, with the vast majority being gunners manning the bomber's defensive armament. In addition to these men, there's also the radioman, The Navigator, and the bombardier.
- He Knows Too Much: A rare non-lethal, friendly example. Quinn and Bailey, after managing to escape back to England after being shot down, are sent home, as Crosby narrates that anyone who has been shot down before knows too much about the resistance movements that helped them escape, so they are sent home to avoid being shot down again, and being forced to give up this information to the enemy.
- Hero of Another Story:
- We see the missions flown from the perspective of the 100th Bombardment Group. However, the raids would usually consist of multiple bomb groups going after the same target. Among those mentioned are the 95th and 390th Bombardment Groups, which shared in the worst drubbings the 100the experienced.
- The American pilots have an argument with some British pilots about the merits of daylight vs night bombing. While night time bombing was technically safer, the RAF crews were still subject to most of the same dangers and took thousands of casualties.
- During the Schweinfurt–Regensburg raid, the 100th is part of one of three bomber divisions and are tasked with attacking Regensburg. We see that part of the mission but the Schweinfurt part of the raid is only mentioned in passing. The other two bomber divisions took off late and faced even more German opposition than the 100th.
- We get a brief view of a Belgian Resistance network that assists downed airmen to evade capture and get back to England. The network was a huge organization that helped thousands of airmen and its members bravely faced daily danger of capture, torture and death.
- Episode 7 has the mass escape from the Northern compound of Stalag Luft III - aka the events that inspired The Great Escape - play out in the background. Afterwards, the American officers are called to Major Simoleit's office to be informed of the grim aftermath, with 50 escapees confirmed executed.
- We finally find out what Subaltern (now Captain) Westgate is up to when she's not with Crosby in Episode 8 — she's working with the SOE, gathering intelligence and serving as a liaison with the Resistance in Nazi-occupied Europe.
- High-Altitude Battle: Any scene where the B-17s are intercepted by Luftwaffe day and heavy fighters becomes this, with the B-17s forced into a battle of survival against surprise attacks, ambushes, and increasingly large waves of enemy aircraft.
- High Turnover Rate: Nearly every mission results in losses, with the Schweinfurt-Regensburg and Munster raids standing out as particularly brutal. In the first, nearly half of the 100th's planes are lost, while the latter leaves only one bomber crew returning home.
- I Call It "Vera": The bombers are all christened by their crews. One crew we meet early on argue over whether to name their plane "Alice from Dallas" or "Alice, Our Palace," after a crewman's girl back home.
- Imposter Forgot One Detail: Belgian Resistance members interrogate downed airmen to determine if they are really Americans or German agents trying to infiltrate the resistance network. They ask trivia questions that an American should know and look for any discrepancies in the stories. One of the men fails the test and is executed. A blink-and-you'll-miss-it shot had previously revealed that he wrote the day's date in the European style (Day, Month, Year) rather than the American style (Month, Day, Year).
- Improbable Age: Ken Lemmons heads a bomber repair crew at the age of 19.
- Jerkass Has a Point: In episode 2 one of the RAF men the boys meets extols the virtues of how the RAF conducts its own bombing war - under cover of night, and with area bombing removing the need for the daylight targeting the Americans need for the Norden bombsight. He's needlessly callous about the American losses and (inevitably) provokes a fight, but after seeing a German night raid, a morose Cleven admits he's right, and that daylight bombing is suicide in its current form.
- La Résistance: Belgian Resistance members show up in Episode 3 and 4, assisting downed American airmen by helping them evade capture by the Germans as well as escape to neutral or Allied territories by any means necessary.
- Macross Missile Massacre: Some German fighters, as shown in Episode 3, are armed with 21cm rocket launchers, which they often fire en masse at bomber formations from relatively safe distances. These rockets can easily punch through even the heaviest of bombers, causing potentially devastating damage.
- Mid-Season Upgrade: Not for the 100th, who fly B-17 Flying Fortresses throughout the war, but the fighter squadrons certainly receive better aircraft as the war drags on.note
- The 8th Air Force's fighter squadrons are shown switching from the P-47 Thunderbolt (used in Part 5 during the raid on Munster), to the much longer-range P-51 Mustang (shown escorting the 100th in Part 7 over Berlin). While the former is a match for the German Luftwaffe's single and twin-engine fighters, it lacks the range to fly deep in to Germany, something the Germans know and exploit by simply waiting in ambush near the bombing targets. The P-51, by contrast, has more than enough range to escort the B-17 formations all the way into Germany and back, while also having similarly good high-altitude performance as the Thunderbolt.
- The 332nd Fighter Group are first shown in Episode 8 flying the capable, but increasingly obsolete, P-40 Warhawk, which lacks the high-altitude capabilities and range of later generation American fighters. Fortunately for them, they receive P-51 Mustangs not long afterward, which they use just in time for them to perform both fighter escort duty over Germany and fighter-bomber missions over Southern France.
- More Dakka: The B-17 has a total of twelve Browning .50 caliber machine guns for its defensive armament. While impressive on paper and very much capable of shooting down any Luftwaffe fighter that strays too close, the bombers are still very much vulnerable to attack and getting shot down.
- Moving the Goalposts: The Eighth Air Force has a rule that any bomber crew that successfully completes 25 combat missions will be allowed to return home, something that is difficult but still possible. The first example was Glenn Dye's crew in Part Four, followed by Rosenthal and his crew, who finished their 25th mission in Part Seven. However, things soon changed with the announcement immediately following Rosenthal's success that the goal has now been altered to 30 combat missions instead of 25. As you can imagine, this greatly upsets everyone, especially considering the high casualty rate of the 100th bomb group in particular, with many now saying that the goal is completely impossible and that the brass wants them to die. note
- The Navigator: Each B-17 has a navigator tasked with getting bombers to the target and back home, with the lead formation's navigator often tasked with leading the entire bomb group both to and from the target. Of particular note is Crosby, a rookie navigator forced to become the lead navigator after his peer Bubbles falls ill.
- Never Trust a Trailer: One scene of Bucky standing on the wing of a bomber and howling is paired with inspiring music. In context, he's drunk and screaming out his frustration over the deaths of his friends, and the fact that he can't feel any grief over it.
- New Meat:
- When the flight crews first arrive in England few of the men have any combat experience. Egan is treated as a veteran because he flew two missions as an observer. A big deal is made of the fact that no training or anything a veteran can say will prepare you for the experience of flying a bomber over occupied Europe until you have flown an actual mission yourself.
- Four months into their tour, the survivors are grizzled veterans who dread learning the names of replacements because they are so likely to die on the next mission.
- When the original batch of pilots arrive, they are mostly pre-war pilots with years of experience. When a new batch of pilots arrive in September 1943, they had nine months of training and never flew before enlisting.
- Nose Art: Each bomber is christened with a name, with (in)appropriate artwork to match. Rosie's Riveters also has a message stenciled on one of the hatches, notionally for the benefit of any German pilot unlucky enough to find itself in a fight with the crew: "Jerry, if you're close enough to read this, start prayin'."
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome:
- The 100th flew 306 combat missions during World War 2. The series only shows a tiny snapshot of this.
- We do not see Blakely and his crew return from the Bremen raid but are instead told about their harrowing journey back and how they managed to survive through great amount of skill and luck.
- We see Quinn and Bailey survive being shot down and beginning their journey back to freedom through occupied Europe. They spend months evading the Germans and working their way toward neutral Spain but we are only told of that once they make it back to England.
- We get to experience D-Day from the perspective of Harry Crosby who collapses from exhaustion, sleeps for days and missed one of the momentous events of the war. He is told about it afterwards.
- One-Steve Limit: Defied and commented on. The two leads, Gale Cleven and John Egan, are nicknamed Buck and Bucky respectively. An RAF pilot they encounter can only ask in bewilderment if Americans only have one nickname to go around.
- Out of the Frying Pan: Quite a few examples.
- Getting out of enemy flak guns' range may be a temporary relief, but that in turn just signals the start of being intercepted by German fighters.
- Successfully bailing out of your burning or crashing aircraft over enemy or enemy-occupied territory will inevitably have the surviving aircrew either become Prisoners-of-War, Trapped Behind Enemy Lines, or executed by angry German soldiers or civilians. Should any fortunate airmen come across La Résistance in the occupied territories, there's still the chance of getting executed by either the Germans or the Resistance themselves (the latter on the off-chance you're Mistaken for Spies or performing a Lethally Stupid action).
- POW Camp: This series features the infamous Stalag Luft III Prisoner of War camp under the initial control of the Luftwaffe that housed POWs from the Allied Air Forces. After getting shot down in Part Five and going through hell in Part Six, Egan is transported here, where he is reunited with other survivors from the 100th, including Cleven who was shot down in Part Four. Part Eight also features three black POWs from the Tuskegee Airmen who are shot down, interrogated, and then transported to the camp. Unsurprisingly for the time period, most of the white prisoners don't take kindly to their arrival, although some of them show approval and respect having fought alongside the "Red Tails" beforehand.
- Reliably Unreliable Guns: A tail gunner's machine gun jams just as German fighters attack from the rear. Desperate, he uses his bare hands to unjam it. Due to the extreme cold his hands freeze to the metal and he has to rip the skin from his fingers to get his hands free.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated:
- During the heat of battle, a plane might be mistakenly recorded as destroyed when it was just damaged and had to fall out of formation and try to make it to England on its own. The aircrew would then land at the first available friendly airbase and news might not always get back to base that they are safe. When they get back to base, they might find that their possessions have been packed up and their quarters assigned to new personnel. Even worse, letters might have already been sent to the missing men's families.
- More somberly, when a plane does go down, other members of the formation have no way to tell their ultimate fate. Counting 'chutes is used as a crude measure to estimate whether anyone survived the initial crash, but their fate after that could be anything from linking up with a local Resistance movement and successfully escaping, to being captured and interred in a prisoner of war camp to wait out the war's end, to being lynched by an angry mob and buried in an unmarked grave.
- Ret Irony:
- Glenn Dye is flying his 25th mission which will enable him to go home. The people back at the base anxiously wait to see if he will return from this final mission. They have a celebratory party ready and if he does not return they can convert it into a wake. He makes it.
- Gale Cleven is on his 22th mission when he is shot down.
- Dave Miner is on his 25th mission but his plane is shot down and he is killed.
- Subverted with Robert Rosenthal. His 25th mission goes relatively well but instead of going home, he decides to sign up for another tour of duty. He would be shot down twice subsequently but survived and evaded capture both times.
- Sacrificial Lion: Curtis Biddick is presented as the third lead of the series but dies in the third episode to establish how anyone can die.
- Separated by a Common Language: Crosby fumbles with the British pronunciation of "subaltern."
- Sitting Duck: While far from being an easy target thanks to their armor plating and defensive armament, B-17 Flying Fortresses are shown to be vulnerable to both Flak and Luftwaffe fighters during their bombing runs to the target (where they have to fly straight), when they've sustained damage to their engines and have slowed down, and, most especially, when caught flying in loose formation or alone.
- Soldiers at the Rear: The show takes care to highlight the efforts of the maintenance crews, mission planners, cooks, and other support personnel at the base that do all of the things necessary to make sure the aircrews can execute their missions, and their anxious waiting during each mission to see how many of their crews make it back from their missions. One such character ends up wracked with guilt when a mission he helped plan results in the loss of all but a single plane and the death of his best friend.
- Sole Survivor: In Episode 5, of the 13 B-17s that ventured into German airspace over Munster, only Rosenthal and his crew make it back to England in one piece, the rest having been shot down by German flak or fighters.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: The USAAF and Britain's RAF Bomber Command are on the same side of the war and share the same overall objective, but both have distinctly-different doctrines and approaches to fighting. This combined with some good old-fashioned Culture Clash leads to members of both services trading jabs whenever they meet, sometimes literally.
- Thousand-Yard Stare:
- Cleven has a particularly intense one after his Fortress barely makes it to Algeria in the aftermath of the Regensburg raid, coupled with learning almost half their group was shot down on this one mission.
- Come the end of episode 5, Rosenthal's entire crew sport one after what they endured on the Münster raid, being the only one of 17 Fortresses to make it back.
- Token Minority: The famous all-black Tuskegee Airmen feature in this series but play a minor role overall, as they don't appear until Part Eight. During that part, three of them get shot down while attacking German targets in Southern France as part of Operation: Dragoon and are made Prisoners of War. After being interrogated, they are then sent to the Stalag Luft III Pow camp, where they are the only black airmen in the entire facility. Many of the white prisoners show clear disdain and disapproval towards the arrival of the black POWs, while others are more appreciative and respectful having fought alongside the "Red Tails" beforehand.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: Bucky's attitude massively shifts in episode 5 with the loss of Buck, when his cavalier dismissal of inadvertently hitting Münster's civilian population if their accuracy is off appalls some of his fellow airmen. One perceptively notes that it wasn't the people of Münster that shot down Buck.
- Trapped Behind Enemy Lines:
- Any US aircrew who ends up bailing out over enemy or enemy-occupied territory ends up like this by default. Their options, as one Belgian Resistance member tells Sgt. Quinn, are to either surrender to German forces and spend the rest of the war in a prison camp, or, attempt to make it back to friendly or neutral territory at the risk of being executed as a spy or saboteur.
- Airmen who end up bailing out over Germany have it even worse, as they run the risk of being lynched by angry civilians.
- Unfriendly Fire: An Allied fighter plane strafes a line of Allied POWs because the pilot is unable to distinguish them from enemy soldiers at night.
- Villain Decay: The first time we follow bombers into flak, they're terrified by the volume. We see flak carve through planes and rip airmen apart. After the first few episodes, however, the menace of flak is greatly diminished. By the last episode, airmen are flying through heavy flak without incurring any damage, feeling completely at ease because there are no enemy fighters to worry about.
- War Comes Home: Invoked. The 100th Bomb Group, and by extension the rest of the Eighth Air Force's bomber wings, are tasked with taking the European War to Germany itself, by relentlessly bombing their cities by day. By Episode Seven, they've started hitting Berlin itself.
- War Crime Subverts Heroism: One airman objects to orders that will likely result in him bombing a church while it's in session and killing dozens of civilians. His comrades make a half-hearted attempt at justifying such ruthless tactics but ultimately tell him to just shut up about it.
- War Is Hell:
- The show makes no attempt to pretend that aerial warfare is romantic, with bombers being showered in shrapnel from Anti-Air batteries, shot apart by fast-moving fighter planes, and at least one case of a plane on a training flight falling out of the air and crashing in a fireball because of pilot error. Even a moment of levity at their home base is interrupted by a German air raid.
- One character states that war being hell is essentially why he joined up. He saw what the people in Europe were suffering through, and had to do what he could to put a stop to it.
- What Happened to the Mouse?:
- Sandra Westgate is last seen on an espionage mission in occupied France. Crosby eventually manages to arrange a date with her, but she's not there, and only a note claiming that she was called away remains for him. We don't find out whether she survived the war or what became of her.
- The 100th has a number of commanding officers throughout the war. We are never told what happened to them once they are replaced. note
- You Are in Command Now:
- When the lead bomber is shot down or has to fall out of formation, the next plane in line takes over as formation leader and leads the bombers to their target.
- When Col. Harding is indisposed, Lt. Col. Bennett takes over as acting commander of the 100th.
