Masters (and servants) of the air
• Was inclusion of the Red Tails expedient, tokenism or clumsily gratuitous?
Making sense of Masters of the Air, the TV blockbuster from Apple, can be tricky. Most of it is about Americans flying Boeing bombers over Nazi Germany. Then, just as the nine-episode series is about to end, another group of American pilots joins the story in episode eight to clutter the skies and the script.
At that point, a gripping story with solid credentials, amazing special effects and a starstudded cast tends to come apart a bit, like one of those bombers limping back to base on a wing and a prayer. A generous opinion is that, at a late stage, someone realised the story needed to be more representative.
Donald L Miller, a history professor at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, agrees that African-Americans should be part of the story. This “set off a bomb in a script meeting”, says Miller, whose book inspired the series and on which it is largely based, and who sat in on those meetings.
Today World War 2 movies can no longer perpetuate the myth that white men won it. More than 2-million Indian soldiers one of the biggest Commonwealth contingents fought on the side of the allies in Africa, Europe and Asia; West African soldiers were vital in the Ethiopian campaign against fascist Italy, and in Burma against imperial Japan; black soldiers from France’s colonies and even from SA (albeit as labourers) did more than their bit.
But how to turn a war saga into one where not only white men were the heroes? Enter the Tuskegee Airmen.
The difficulty was that the all-black Tuskegees and the allwhite bomber air force never fought side by side, as implied in the series. Indeed, they fought at opposite ends of Europe. With a cinematic sleight of hand, the producers, creators and writers of Masters give credit where it’s due. And the cards they play are the Boeing B17 Flying Fortress, a four-engine giant of a plane, the North American P-51 Mustang, a leap forward in flying technology, and an infamous prisoner of war (POW) camp.
Masters begins in 1943 when the 100th bomber group of the US Army Air Force’s 8th air force arrives in England. It creates a stir in some sleepy parts of the countryside where the bombers have set up bases. The planes are many and huge, the aircrews gregarious and glamorous. “Air force guys liked to dress up,” says Miller.
After three years of believing they were alone in fighting Nazi Germany, locals embraced the newcomers.
It’s all fun at the fair and the 100th begins its mission confidently, its big B17s bristling with machine guns all round and flying in tight formations for protection. But the US planes fly in daylight (unlike the RAF, which does the night shift) because the military planners believe the Norden bomb sight, one of the great US inventions of the war, will give the Americans an advantage in precision bombing. It turns out the Norden is in the dark when it’s in clouds.
Flights of the 100th are massacred. During a single week in October 1943, the US 8th air force loses 148 aircraft and 1,500 men. In the 100th, 11 of 12 aircraft sent out are shot down. No wonder the group becomes known as the “Bloody Hundredth”.
The main mission of the 8th air force is to destroy the pens of the U-boats, which were then still a danger in the Atlantic, and factories that build the Luftwaffe’s planes. The aircraft factories are deep in the Reich and the U-boat pens are impenetrable to the B17s’ bombs. The series captures the danger of these bombings with brilliant computer-generated imagery and subtly conveys the attrition rate (empty barrack-room beds on return missions). The 8th air force lost 26,000 in the war (out of 225,000), more than even the US Marine Corps (24,511).
Having started the war confidently, the B17s became easy prey for heavy anti-aircraft flak and interceptions by German fighters. The solution was always obvious: the bombers needed fighter cover, but the allies had no fighters with the range to accompany them to targets often a 2,000km round trip away. By the end of 1943, the Mustangs arrived, with their drop tanks and long range that could compete with the enemy, even at heights of 4,600m.
And in 2021, the Mustangs were a solution, and a problem, for the script writers of Masters. As Miller’s book describes it, the Mustangs made life a little easier for the 100th it created another problem for the TV series: the Mustangs of the Tuskegee Airmen were based in Italy, 1,400m away as the fighter flies. Miller, who touches briefly on the Tuskegee airmen in his book Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War against Nazi Germany, but he writes extensively about them in his The Story of World War II.
The script writers were lucky to have him in the room. His knowledge could bring two sets of US combatants together in a POW camp: the notorious Stalag Luft III, the same place from which Steve McQueen and a star-studded cast broke out in The Great Escape, a 1963 movie that made a killing at the box office. On a $4m budget, it grossed $11.7m (about $41m today). Masters had a reported budget of between $250m and $300m.
The Tuskegee pilots who were shot down and survived make a poignant entry to the POW camp where they are welcomed, if not with open arms then in mutual solidarity. “Hey, look, it’s the Red Tails!” one of the POWs shouts. (The Tuskegees were nicknamed for the colour of their planes’ tailwings.)
“Welcome to paradise,” Maj Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austen Butler, and the most recent Elvis incarnation) tells them. They are included in escape plans, but by the final episode, they begin to fade away while the triumphant pilots and crews of the 100th are reunited with their B17s for the flight home.
There is much unexplored irony in the ending, not least that the Nazi camp had been integrated, unlike US military institutions. When the camp is liberated by Gen George Patton’s Third Army, the black aircrews go home to segregation and Jim Crow laws that will last another 20 years.
The jury is still out on whether the inclusion of the Red Tails in Masters was expedient, tokenism or clumsily gratuitous, but there was clear racism in the US Army Air Force, if not in the entire military establishment. The air force commander at the time, Gen Henry “Hap” Arnold, feared the prospect of “negro officers serving over enlisted white men” would create what he called “an impossible social problem”.
One of the Tuskegee airmen, Lt Alexander Jefferson (played by Brandon Cook in Masters) wrote a book about his wartime experiences, Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW. He recounts that the Nazi officers did not treat him and his fellow African-Americans differently from the white POWs. Yet when he got back to the US, “I walked down the gang plank wearing an army air corps officer’s uniform towards a white US army sergeant on the dock, who informed us ‘whites to the right, n ***** to the left’”.
Battles had been won far away; now new battles loomed at home.