Masters of the Air (Apple TV)
In 1943 the American Air Force's 100th Bomb Group - the "Bloody Hundredth" - began combat operations over occupied Europe, undertaking daytime raids far outside of the range of any fighter escort operating at the time. Masters of the Air follows the pilots as they arrive in England and begin their deadly work - one raid over Munster saw them lose twelve out of thirteen aircraft - until the eventual Allied victory over Germany.
As you'd expect from a Hanks/Spielberg production, the show gives just enough technical detail to give the viewer a feel for the workings of a B17 bomber, and the aerial combat scenes are very well done, bringing home two things for me: just how fucking dangerous this job was, and the really awesome scale of combat in WW2. As historian Adam Tooze wrote recently: "The entire conduct of the war was based on the vast deployment of energy. The Allied armies, most notably at D-day, were swimming in oil. Never before had a war been as motorized or as dependent on hydrocarbon fuels." The men experience huge loss as every downed plane means ten fewer colleagues at base that evening, the shattering tension of alternating between bucolic East Anglia and bouts of intense danger, the terror of bailing out of a failing aircraft.
For me there was an extra layer of poignancy. My great uncle, a quiet and gentle man of whom I was very fond, spent this part of the war driving an ambulance on an RAF base. The scenes in the show of injured and dead men being pulled from planes on their return was his most visceral experience of war (aside from getting straffed in Scarborough at the start), and perhaps what led him to a breakdown in 1945. So this really made his experiences come alive for me in a new way.
As befits a middle aged man with too much time, I went on to watch...
Band of Brothers
Classic war story of American paratroopers training and then fighting the Nazis in France, the Netherlands and Germany. All the cast are good, the battle scenes suitably terrifying and this is the "good war" at its mostly heroic best. Very much well-troden ground but modern-ish production values and direction are a great reason for returning to this subject matter.
Annoyingly, as with Masters of the Air, the British are cast as rather bungling and the UK as some kind of quaint Tolkinesque shire-land, when in reality Britain was a technological powerhouse with an incredibly productive industrial economy. This is very much American mythologising, which is fine in its way, but the war was so vast and encompassed so much that the centrality the show subtly assumes feels misplaced. Still, very much worth watching.
And finally...
The Pacific
This I think is the best of the bunch, covering the stories of three different Marines as they fight the Japanese from island to island. The harsh environment of the Pacific - the heat, the rains, the crabs, the mud - is as much a character in the story as the men themselves, always threatening to overwhelm them physically and mentally. There is a lot of racism and we are left in no doubt that this is in part a race war in which both sides completely dehuamnise the enemy. The rules of war were tossed overboard long ago, it's a brutal fight to the death. I know very little about this part of WW2 and one of my initial reactions was "what the hell happened in Japanese society that made their soldiers so careless of their own lives?"
The story really picks up about halfway through when we follow Eugene Sledge, a doctor's son from Mobile, Alabama, whose book provided much of the source material for the show. He is part of the invasion of Peleliu, a tiny coral island with a much sought after airstrip. We are right in there with Sledge and his friend Snafu (great performance from Remi Malik) as they ride to shore in an amphibious craft under intense fire, are pushed out of it onto the sand and have to crawl to the treeline with death all around them. Most of the shots are very tight, but the soundscape of screams and cries - "I'm bleeding out! I'm bleeding out!" - powerfully expands the viewer's awareness out of the immediate frame. (The recent Holocaust film Zone of Interest does similar.) All along one has to think: this is his very first time in combat.
The final episode covers the men's return to America and their attempts to reintegrate into a society both grateful and ignorant. All the veterans struggle but clearly for Sledge, a sensitive young man, this was a tough task. He has almost lost his own humanity in Okinawa and now he has to put those experiences away and live again. This is familiar territory (and foreshadows later tropical conflicts) but again, it was very affecting. Strong recommend if you want to go there.
