Movies in History Masters of the Air

Emblem of the "Bloody 100th"

I watched this when it first came out, started my review over a year ago, and failed to post and complete it.

Masters of the Air is the epic portrayal of "The Bloody 100th", the United States Army Air Force's 100th Bomb Group, during World War Two.  Produced by Tom Hanks, it joins Band of Brothers and The Pacific as a multi part mini series with ambitious aspirations.  If we add Hank's Saving Private Ryan and Greyhound, for which a sequel is now being filmed, it's part of an impressive body of work which has actually covered a large portion of American participation in World War Two to some degree. 

It doesn't disappoint.

Perhaps simply because Band of Brothers is so well done, and because The Pacific disappoints a bit, early reviews of this film are careful to praise it but to say it isn't as good as Band Of Brothers.  It is.  The topic is just different.

Taking the 100th from deployment to Europe and following individual airmen through the war, some into POW camps, others to their deaths, and others through to the end, it's a masterful portrayal of the air war over Europe.  An added element, although some what minor (understandably) is the inclusion of pilots from the 332nd Fighter Group, who were African American pilots.  While the inclusion of their story could have been awkward, it works in well and is tied together through POW sequences.

Relying extremely heavily on CGI, the film portrays massive air actions wonderfully, and more effectively than any movie since Twelve O'clock High (which has a prop reference in the final episode).  I would not say that its impossible to tell the flight scenes are CGI, but they are excellently done.

The film spares none of the horrors of the war.  Airmen are introduced and violently killed, just as occurred in the war.  Red Army soldiers, who appear in the last episode, simply shoot Germans attempting to surrender with their being no varnishing about it occurring.  One major character cheats on his wife during the film without seeming to have any remorse.  

Material details are excellent.  Historically, its' very well done.  The characters are for the most part real with probably only one slight fictionalization and a dramatized portrayal of the liberation of a POW camp which no doubt did not occur in the close combat fashion portrayed.

As a bonus, as discussed on the American Heritage Center's website, the story features two Wyomingites, both from this county.

Thursday, February 25, 1943. Around the clock bombing.

The Western Allies commenced "round the clock bombing" of the Third Reich.

A few things about this are worth noting.

It was essentially a massive upgrading of another theater, this one the skies over Germany, in which the Soviet Union, which lacked a heavy strategic bomber capacity, and which was not strategically placed to join in it, was absent.  The Soviets were of course also absent from the Battle of the Atlantic.

While it can't be expected that they would be in either, the fact that the Western Allies carried on these significant efforts benefited the USSR as well as the Western Allies, something that Soviet and now Russian recollections of the war choose to forget.

Also controversial is the extent to which the raids were actually effective.  German production went up during the war, so the question is whether strategic bombing depressed it from being higher, or simply disrupted it in other ways. The latter certainly occurred, but to what extent the former did is an open question.

The 15th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Latvian), came into existence.  The unit was made up of Latvian volunteers, and conscripts, who harbored the naive hope that serving the Germans would lead to post-war Latvian independence.

While naive, and inexcusably associated with the SS, this is an example of the "war within a war" nature of the Second World War.  The Baltic States, along with Ukraine and Poland, would particularly be associated with various armed efforts against the Soviets, some of which were completely independent of association with the Germans, while some, outside of Poland, were.  Many of the partisan type movements, which this obviously was not, carried on fighting for some time after the war.

Of note, Latvian resistance to the Soviet Union remained fairly strong up until 1949 and remained a factor the Soviets had to consider into the early 50s.  The last violent acts by Latvian resistance forces occurred in the 1980s and the last Forest Brother, Jānis Pīnups, who had deserted from the Red Army during World War Two when wounded and left for dead, came in from hiding in 1995.

Regarding the Baltic States and the SS, during the war Estonia also contributed volunteers to "foreign legion" SS units, that being the 20th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Estonian)   The Latvians would contribute a second one, that being the 19th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (2nd Latvian). Because the units contained conscripts, the US regarded them as not complicate in the criminal nature of the SS after the war.

Wednesday June 24, 1942. Eisenhower takes command.

Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in London to assume command of the European Theater of Operations United States of America, replacing James E. Chaney.

In fact, Eisenhower had only recently returned to the United States on a fact finding mission, along with Hap Arnold, on the United Kingdom in which he expressed a lack of confidence in Chaney.  He was assigned to replace Chaney and sent right back to the UK.

Eisenhower's star was on the rise at the time, and would be throughout the rest of his life, taking him to the White House.  He was the last U.S. Army general officer to become President.  Notably, an Army career was mostly an educational choice for him, rather than the expression of a military vocation.

Chaney would fade into obscurity.  Having been promoted to Major General in 1940, he was an observer of the Battle of Britain and would return to become commanding general of the First Air Force, and then become a training officer in the United States.  Late in the war he was in command of Army forces for the mostly Navy action at Iwo Jima, and he had a senior role in the Western Base Command at the end of the war.  He retired in 1947.  He, as well as his wife, died in 1967.

The Afrika Korps entered Egypt.