[COLUMN] In Masters of the Air, War Becomes a Dehumanizing and Mechanical Horror | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

In the fourth episode of Masters of the Air, Colonel Chic Harding (James Murray) considers the argument that his servicemen in the 100th Bomb Group might be traumatized by their experiences.

“War is war,” he muses. “The longer you go at it, the more it screws a man up. It’s been that way since the first caveman son of a bitch picked up a club and went after the other.” Major Marvin Bowman (Stephen Campbell Moore) interjects, “Aerial combat like this hasn’t been around since the cavemen, sir.” Harding considers this insight. “Of course not, Red,” he acknowledges. “Every war has its novelties.” Masters of the Air is about those novelties.

Masters of the Air is the third in a trilogy of miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks looking at the Second World War. While Band of Brothers followed the war in Europe and The Pacific focused on the island-hopping towards Japan, Masters of the Air is about the industrialization of conflict during the Second World War, the technological innovations that allowed both sides to render destruction on a previously unimaginable scale.

“Powerful enemies must be out-fought and out-produced,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in the wake of Pearl Harbor. “We must out-produce them overwhelmingly, so that there can be no question of our ability to provide a crushing superiority of equipment in any theatre of the world war.” During the country’s four years of combat, American industrial production, already the most advanced in the world, doubled.

It wasn’t just production, it was innovation. “Aircraft and weapons development advanced exponentially during World War II — major advancements included jet engines, guided bombs, air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, cruise missiles, radar, and operational helicopters,” according to Jeff Dufford, the curator of the National Museum of the United States Air Force. These technological innovations made warfare much more efficient and effective.

This increased the destructive capacity of these armed forces. The United Nations estimates that some 60 million people died during the Second World War, almost four times the 16 million people estimated to have died during the First World War. Entire cities were reduced to rubble in “thousand bomber raids.” Masters of the Air is about this facet of the war, about the pilots and the officers who manned those machines, who planned and orchestrated those raids.

There’s a recurring sense in the show that the human body is incompatible with these technologies. “They have got to remember where they are,” Doctor Wendell Stover (John Hopkins) warns Major John Egan (Callum Turner). “It is 25,000 feet and fifty below zero. Piss freezes against their skin. These sorts of casualties are unnecessary losses to the group.” He adds that Colonel Harold Huglin (Nikolai Kinski), the group’s commanding officer, “burst an ulcer when he landed.”

Throughout Masters of the Air, characters become trapped within the metal architecture of their bombers. Some, like Lieutenant Curtis Biddick (Barry Keoghan) go down with their aircraft. Other crewmembers find themselves unable to escape in these panicked few moments, ending up snagged on broken metal or trapped on open hatches. These planes are new and relatively untested. They are also temperamental, which is a horrific thought to contemplate at those altitudes.

On his first run, Major Gale Cleven (Austin Butler) laments he “didn’t drop a single bomb.” Biddick has to manually pump to start the engine. The leader of the “Red Meat” squadron has to turn around halfway to the target due to a “technical malfunction.” When the crew complain about waiting for the fog to clear before take-off, Sergeant William Hinton (Oaklee Pendergast) explains the plane “isn’t a Buick, … she’s a tin can. If we go head-to-head with a cow, she’d accordion with us in it.”

Then again, when dealing with this level of industrial scale, it’s very easy to lose sight of the human element. The people who operate these machines are ultimately expendable. At one point, Lieutenant Colonel Bennett (Corin Silva) explains to Major Robert Rosenthal (Nate Mann) that the Allied strategy is to shoot down every Luftwaffe jet. “But to shoot them down, we have to get them in the air, with bombers as the bait. Our bombers. So that’s the strategy, so that’s the mission: bait.”

It's a cold way to think about war, as a series of competing industrial interests with human beings as fuel for the engine. Early during the war, the campaign focuses on factories and submarine pens, with a clear objective of denying the enemy the opportunity to industrialize to the same extent. “Ain’t no war machine moves without ball bearings,” Harding assures his men. However, as the war drags on, it becomes clear that enemy infrastructure does not exist in isolation.

Briefing the group on the planned raid on Munster, Bowman makes the stakes clear, “Your aiming point and mean point of impact is the railroad marshaling yards. The target is just east of the city center.” He clarifies, “Intelligence reports that most of the housing in the adjacent neighborhoods are railroad workers. So if they’re hit, then we’ll be hitting the men who keep the German railroads running.” These human beings are just resources feeding the war machine.

It can be deeply dehumanizing. Major Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) is a navigator who suffers from airsickness. He guides his squadron from the back of the plane, using charts and math. He is eventually promoted past the point of needing to actually be on the plane at all, coordinating these bombing efforts from the group. Reviewing a bombing plan from the brass, he notes that they have the planes flying “the same route. Exactly like yesterday. They don’t care if they kill us all, do they?”

The pilots themselves can feel detached from the carnage that they cause, which causes existential anxiety. Crosby can plan these raids in bunkers, but he is never confronted by the consequences. Egan and Cleven drop the bombs from their planes, but they are also at a remove. Through the clouds, it’s impossible to discern the people who will be killed by the explosion. It’s an impersonal form of warfare, quite different from the horrors depicted in Band of Brothers or The Pacific.

“Never been on the business end of a bomb before,” Egan confesses on his trip to London during the Blitz. “I’ve dropped a lot of those things, probably done a lot of killing. Hell of a job.” The next day, he passes the site of a German bombing, watching a family pull their child from the wreckage. During the raid on Munster, Egan is forced to bail out. He lands in enemy territory and is captured. Marched through the ruins of Germany, he witnesses the devastation caused by the bombs that he dropped.

The Allied bombing campaigns remain a source of controversy to this day. The bombing of Hamburg specifically targeted civilians. There is an ongoing debate about whether the bombing of Dresden should be considered a war crime. In the Pacific theatre, the firebombing of Tokyo is estimated to have killed 100,000 people in under three hours. Masters of the Air is understandably reluctant to approach these questions directly, but they haunt the miniseries.

Shortly after dismissing complaints that these technological innovations have made his men “flack-happy”, Harding makes a proposal. “You know how we could end this whole thing tonight?” he asks, rhetorically. “We fill up one of our Fords with as many five-hundred-pounders as she can hold, we bomb the hell out of Hitler’s little hidey-hole.” Of course, the culmination of this industrialization during the Second World War would be the biggest bomb ever dropped.

At one point, Rosenthal is sent for psychiatric assessment. “This war,” his psychiatrist laments. “Human beings were not meant to behave this way.” The episode juxtaposes a sequence of bombs being wheeled out to the planes with Egan and other Allied captives being loaded into a German train to be ferried to a prisoner of war camp. From that train, Egan and his fellow prisoners watch another train go by, ferrying its passengers to a concentration camp.

The Holocaust was its own grotesque form of industrialized slaughter. “Never before in history had people been killed on an assembly-line basis,” explained historian Raul Hilberg of the atrocity. The Holocaust lurks at the edges of Masters of the Air. After he is stranded behind enemy lines, Rosenthal wanders through the ruins of an abandoned camp, informed by his Russian translator that “they were built for killing people – many people – at a time.”

Band of Brothers and The Pacific placed the audience on the front lines of combat, as soldiers from both sides fired at targets they could see. Masters of the Air pulls back to consider the scale of the carnage. “You know, all this killing we do?” Crosby asks Rosenthal in the final episode of the series. “Day-in, day-out. It does something to a guy, makes him different – not in a good way. You know, Rosie, sometimes I wake up, I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror.”

There is something timely in this. Masters of the Air was produced during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the largest land war in Europe since the end of the Second World War. It will stream in the midst of the ongoing conflict in Gaza that has seen the highest daily death toll of any major 21st century war. While the Second World War was fought using pioneering aerial technology, these modern wars bring their own innovations: drones, artificial intelligence, and cyberwarfare divisions.

Most of the world watches footage from these conflicts at a remove, on the evening news or social media. Masters of the Air captures that sense of numbness, the fear that these mechanical forces only serve to dull empathy. There’s little room for any humanity inside the bellies of these cold metal beasts.