Masters of Hot Air?

February 28th, 2024  My favourite TV series is the brilliant Hanks/Spielberg 2001 "Band of Brothers".  It tells the story of Easy Company of the magnificent US Army 101st Airborne Division.  It is a very human story of ordinary Americans doing extraordinary things in war to defeat Nazism and liberate Western Europe between 1943 and 1944.  We Brits do not figure much in it, but then it is a story of brave, young Americans and fair enough.  Still, Tom Hanks does appear briefly as a British paratrooper. You can then imagine my disappointment watching the new Hanks/Spielberg "Masters of the Air".  It is still a story of brave, young and terrified Americans (even though many of the actors are strangely British) carrying out their duty in B-17 Flying Fortresses or Forts as they were known by their crews, and paying for it with their lives and liberty.  

Unlike "Band of Brothers" the new series is brash and too often inaccurate and treats their RAF allies with contempt.  They present the RAF as a bunch of arrogant aristocratic 'toffs'.  There were a few such in Bomber Command's aircrew, but the massive majority were ordinary Aussies, Brits, Canucks, Czechs, Kiwis, Poles and from a host of other nationalities and from a host of ordinary backgrounds. They were also all volunteers and they all paid a terrible price either with their lives or with their minds or both.  Many felt conflicted about the area bombing of German cities and people but this was Total War. If you asked my grandmother who was bombed out by the Nazis in Plymouth and Sheffield what see thought about the RAF striking back she would have echoed the words of Air Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris:  "The Germans have sowed the wind, they will now reap the whirlwind".  

What saddens me about the latest Hanks/Spielberg World War Two epic is what it says about contemporary, angry America. An America that needs to tell itself that it is alone and that all of its friends and allies are useless and untrustworthy.  That is simply not the case.  The experience of my family in World War Two and my many American, German and other friends, is why I am a committed Atlanticist, why I am a committed European, why I am honoured to call Luftwaffe officers my friends, and why I will always defend freedom from those who threaten it -physically if called upon. 

So, as an antidote to "Masters of the Air" let me share with you another movie, "Lancaster".  It captures in thirteen minutes what  my forebear in the RAF went through and what "Masters" fails to capture in several hours Enjoy, as my American friends would say. 

https://youtu.be/sSXiny5mEpg 

Just for the record, the USAAF 8th Air Force lost 26,000 aircrew during the campaign, whilst RAF Bomber Command and the Royal Canadian Air Force lost 55,000 of 126,000 aircrew.  Whose counting?  I am, because I honour every single bloody one of them American, British and the rest. 

Julian Lindley-French