Masters of the Air real history: the true story of the ‘Bloody Hundredth’

Masters of the Air is based on the true story told by historian Donald L Miller in his 2006 book Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine.

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The reputation of the Bloody Hundredth amongst the rest of the Eighth Air Force was the stuff of legend, and men who belonged to the unit were admired in one moment and pitied in the next.

It wasn’t that their losses were particularly egregious compared to other bomb groups. But when they did lose, they lost big, with just a handful of missions accounting for a disproportionate percentage of their casualties through the war.

Harrison Salisbury, a journalist for the New York Times, said “that to hold a card to the Eighth Air Force is to hold a ticket to your own funeral,” Miller told us in an exclusive interview on the HistoryExtra podcast. “Seventy-seven per cent of men who flew for the Eighth Air Force were casualties by the end of the war. Suicide missions, that’s what they were.”

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The Eighth Air Force lost more than 26,000 men during the Second World War, compared to 19,000 among the US Marine Corps during the entire Pacific campaign.

Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman reprise their roles as executive producers for Masters of the Air, while actors Austin Butler and Callum Turner star as two of the Hundredth’s most lively characters: best friends Gale Cleven and John Egan – known as Buck and Bucky respectively (which surprisingly is not as annoying on screen as you might think).

The ensemble cast also includes Barry Keoghan, recently seen – in totality – in class-warfare thriller Saltburn, and Doctor Who superstar Ncuti Gatwa.

Is Masters of the Air a true story?

Masters of the Air is very much a true story, based on the real-life exploits of the Bloody Hundredth, a group of American bomber crews deployed to England in 1943 . All the lynchpin moments were based on real, harrowing events.

The story largely draws from Donald L Miller’s 2006 book Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine, though his account is broader than what is covered in the TV show, telling the storyof the entire US Eighth Air Force in the Second World War.

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When did the 100th Bomb Group arrive in Britain?

The 100th Bomb Group and their 35 B-17 Flying Fortresses arrived in England in May 1943 and were stationed at Thorpe Abbotts in East Anglia, some 90 miles from London. They were among the 350,000 American airmen deployed to the region in wake of victory in the North African theatre, and the January 1943 Casablanca Conference, at which the Allies agreed that the only outcome to the war they would accept was the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers.

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By the time they arrived in Britain, the Hundredth had already had an inauspicious start. Their training in the United States was disjointed, and the crews were unruly and overconfident as a result. The full extent of their ill-discipline came out during a training exercise prior to being deployed in England: they were due to fly from Nebraska to California, but a number of the crews went AWOL en route.

“They were hellraisers,” Miller told us. “A lot of the guys just went to their hometowns to see their girlfriends. One of them went up to Milwaukee and dropped the wrench out of the plane.” The tool almost hit someone on the ground, Miller explains, and could have caused serious injury.

Their embarrassed commander, Colonel Darr Alkire, was replaced, and the entire unit was sent for remedial training. “There was talk of not sending them to England at all,” says Miller, “but the need was desperate.”

Becoming the Bloody Hundredth

The 100th Bomb Group earned the name ‘Bloody Hundredth’ simply because it suffered a string of significant losses in just a handful of fraught and furious missions.

It began with the Hundredth’s very first combat mission to Bremen in Germany on 25 June 1943; 17 B-17 aircraft left Thorpe Abbotts, each crewed by 10 men – a pilot, co-pilot, bombardier, navigator, radio operator and five gunners. At this early stage in the campaign, the Eighth Air Force favoured the precision bombing of targets with military or economic value; that day it was Bremen’s U-boat pens.

They flew in daylight. A risky endeavour, you might think, and you’d be right. The RAF had already abandoned daytime raids, replacing precision with indiscriminate night-time bombing runs.

“The RAF called it area bombing; a less-elegant term for it would be slaughter bombing,” Miller says. But at night, there was less flak (anti-aircraft fire) and less chance of interception by German fighter aircraft.

Three B-17s – 30 men – failed to return from Bremen. The loss of so many comrades so early proved sobering.

“Flying in daytime was perilous business,” says Miller. “Your chances of surviving in the first year of operations was about one in three. And when you got to 15 missions, statistically you were a dead man.” The men of the Eighth Air Force weren’t eligible to be sent home until they had competed 25 missions, a bar that was later raised to 30.

Greater losses were to come on 17 August 1943, during a ‘maximum effort’ mission involving the bulk of available B-17s in England to bomb two targets: a Messerschmitt aircraft factory in Regensburg and a ball-bearing plant in Schweinfurt. The Hundredth committed 21 B-17s, all bound for Regensburg, flying in ‘Purple Heart Corner’ – the lowest spot in the formation of a B-17 combat wing, and the one that was most vulnerable to German fighter attacks.

That mission, the Hundredth lost nine crews, with Cleven’s B-17 barely limping to safety. Hit by six shells, the electrics were fried, the engine was on fire, and several crewmen injured – one had had his legs sheared off above the knees. Cleven’s co-pilot was adamant that they should sound the alarm to bail out. In the TV show we hear Cleven remonstrate with him: “You son of a bitch, you sit there and take it.” The real-life Cleven, Miller notes in this book, said exactly the same.

“I carried two rosaries, two good luck medals, and a $2 bill off of which I had chewed a corner for each of my missions,” Egan later wrote, in explanation of how he’d survived. “I also wore my sweater backwards and my good luck jacket.”

Cleven was recommended for the Medal of Honor, the United States Armed Forces' highest military decoration. He didn’t get it, but was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He didn’t collect it.

The Bloody Hundredth’s ‘Black Week’ of October 1943

What really cemented the name Bloody Hundredth was the ‘Black Week’ of 8-14 October 1943, during which the Eighth Air Force fielded more than 1,000 bombers in a series of raids over Germany.

A return raid on Bremen on 8 October cost the Eighth 30 bombers, including that flown by Cleven. His loss was keenly felt amongst the Hundredth.

“Cleven, the impervious, the invincible, was gone,” navigator Harry Crosby (another of the major characters to appear in Masters of the Air) wrote in his 1993 memoir. “If he couldn’t make it, who could?”

Two days later, the Hundredth raided Munster. This time the target was the city centre; there was not an economic or military target in sight. The rationale was that by targeting the homes of railway workers, they were disrupting Germany’s railways – but to others it was seen as something of a revenge mission.

The Hundredth committed 18 B-17s. Five aborted over the sea, leaving 13 to reach continental Europe. Only one made it back, the remaining 12 shot down in as many minutes – including Egan’s.

Yet there was little unusual about the losses experienced by the Bloody Hundredth, with Imperial War Museum curator Hattie Hearn noting that the unit was not “statistically noteworthy”.

“They won numerous awards, but other groups won more. They didn’t fly the most missions, drop the most bombs, or even suffer the most casualties.”

Following the devastation of the Munster mission, the pilot of the sole B-17 to return – a newcomer called Robert ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal – headed straight to the operations officer at Thorpe Abbotts and exclaimed, “Are they all that tough?”

Rosie, rounding off the quartet of main characters in Masters of the Air, would in fact tough it out. He became a leadership figure for the Hundredth in the void left by Cleven and Egan, and flew 52 missions before the war was out – even though he was shot down twice himself.

Buck and Bucky: who were the real Gale Cleven and John Egan?

Debonair, dashing and exuding Hollywood swagger, Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven (played by Austin Butler) and John ‘Bucky’ Egan (Callum Turner, who recently starred in The Boys in the Boat) were the emotional heart of the Bloody Hundredth.

Though they were bosom buddies even before they arrived in England – they met during training, which is when Bucky christened his new best friend ‘Buck’ – they could not have been more different.

“Cleven was big, strong, powerfully built guy,” says Miller. “Came from oil country in the Northwest. His father was an alcoholic, he had a haunted childhood and pretty much raised himself to be self-sufficient. Didn't drink, didn't smoke, had a girlfriend, was loyal to her, didn't hit the pubs.

“He's hanging around with his opposite, John Egan. John is from a little town in Wisconsin, although he'd never know it because he spoke like he was from Fifth Avenue in New York. He loved New York, he loved the Yankees, he loved the nightlife, he loved the big plays. He was in the pubs every night, chasing a pint, chasing a girl.

“But they were inseparable during the war, because they were both great leaders, and they were both great fighters.” Egan, in particular, was so close to the men of the unit that he personally took on the responsibility of writing letters to the families of the crewmen who perished.

Cleven and Egan were shot down within two days of each other during the Eighth Air Force’s Black Week, but both were able to bail out and parachute safely to terra firma.

Egan was swiftly captured and handed over to the Luftwaffe. Several weeks later, after a 300-mile ride across Germany in a cramped and fetid boxcar that had once carried livestock and bore all the aromas to prove it, he was deposited in Stalag Luft III – the same internment camp that witnessed the Great Escape.

He found Cleven already there waiting for him. Buck greeted him with a grin: “What the hell took you so long?”

• Read more | Who were the real John Egan and the real Gale Cleven?

What was it like inside a B-17 Flying Fortress?

The men of the Bloody Hundredth flew B-17 Flying Fortresses, lovingly known as ‘Forts’. Once assigned, each 10-man crew went to war in the same B-17 – unless it was undergoing repairs – which they gave names like Rosie’s Riveters and Alice From Dallas.

But as formidable as the B-17s had the potential to be, and as hulking as they appeared up close, flying inside a Fort did not offer as much protection as its name suggests.

“The attacks are simultaneous, you're getting hit from all sides, and you're inside a plexiglass and aluminium tube,” says Miller. Neither of these materials were particularly resistant to shell fire.

Though individually protected by 12 machines guns, the B-17’s real strength came in numbers, through a formation known as the ‘combat box’.

The idea was to keep the bombers close together – almost wingtip to wingtip was the ideal – so tight that the German fighters couldn’t get between their arcs of fire. If the box was broken, then without a friendly fighter escort the Forts became vulnerable to being picked off.

“One of the reasons the Hundredth took those losses was there were large gaps in their flight formations, and the Germans penetrated those gaps,” says Miller. “They went right into the formations. These were close in combat operations, as close in as an infantry battle.”

How accurate is Masters of the Air?

You might be forgiven for thinking that it was much safer dropping bombs from high above rather than fighting on the ground, but the reality was that in mid-air there is nowhere to hide – especially in the light of day – and Masters of the Air goes to great lengths to depict those hard truths.

“There's this sense that you're in a cage,” says Miller of the B-17, adding that Spielberg built three Flying Fortresses for the filming of Masters of the Air – and that the third had to be built with a wider interior so the cameraman could get inside. “You can't get out. You're trapped. Whatever happens to you happens to you. And there's not much you can do about it. You can't run.”

Pilots were prohibited from taking evasive action from flak – they had to fly straight through it. But it was not just anti-aircraft fire and German fighters that crews had to fear. Nothing could really prepare them for the experience of fighting at 25,000 feet, in below-freezing temperatures of -50°F, where the air was so thin you had to breathe supplemental oxygen. The elements were every bit as dangerous as the enemy, and if you were injured, there was no medic to call.

Men lost hands, feet, noses, and buttocks to the biting cold. “They weren't warned about the dangers of frostbite,” says Miller. “Guns would jam, and the guys, in the fury of combat, would pull off their gloves and with their bare hands, to try to clear the jam. And of course, your flesh sticks to the metal of the guns, and you just pull raw flesh away.”

Likewise, oxygen deprivation was a present risk that claimed lives.

“There was a something like a ping-pong ball inside the hose [of the breathing apparatus] that you could see, that bounced up and down. And you knew then that you're getting oxygen,” says Miller.

“But sometimes you don't have the opportunity in combat, under attack, to look down. Your oxygen might be closed off. Closed off by what? By freezing. Especially if you vomited into the mask – your vomit would freeze and clog the air passages. In 30-45 seconds, you pass out. And in a minute and a half, you'd be dead.”

There’s an exchange at the end of episode one that distils this horror in the face of the unknown. Cleven has just returned from his first mission; Egan, who came to England ahead of the rest of the Hundredth, has already flown twice.

“You’ve been up. Two missions. You didn’t tell me it was like that,” an ashen Cleven admonishes his friend. Egan’s face is still: “I didn’t know what to say.”

How did the bomber boys help win WW2?

Ultimately, the air war in WW2 was not won by any single strike against a key target, but by the pernicious bite of attrition – and because the B-17s were used as bait.

“You don't knock an oil facility out in a day or a week,” says Miller. “You knock it out in 23 or 24 missions.” Victory became very much a case of the Eighth Air Force being able to replace its losses before the Luftwaffe could replace theirs. It was a case, Miller says, of German industry being “defeated by a thousand cuts”.

• Read more | The making and breaking of the Luftwaffe

The other factor was the development of the P-51 Mustang – a fighter that Miller describes as “almost as fast as a jet” and a “technological impossibility” until the moment it was developed. It prompted a change in tactics from General James Doolittle, who took over command of the Eighth Air Force in the months before D-Day.

“He saw a plaque on the fighter commander's wall that said the first duty of a fighter pilot is to protect the bombers,” says Miller. “[Doolittle said] that ain't true, the first duty of a fighter pilot is to go after and kill the Luftwaffe. And that's what they did. When they saw the Germans coming up, they left the bombers, the bait, and they went after the Germans.”

They proved incredibly successful, and by the time it came to the invasion of Normandy they were masters in the air.

How did the men of the Bloody Hundredth keep on flying?

“How in the hell did they get back in those planes?”

This is a question Miller asks aloud during our conversation, as we discuss the myriad threats and perils of the air war, acknowledging that combat fatigue – the euphemistic term for what we would today describe as post-traumatic stress disorder – was rife amongst bomber crews.

“I think a lot of it had to do with shame, the fear of not flying, the fear of letting down your comrades,” he offers in explanation.

“They're flying for country, but they're also flying to get home. The only way to get home was to continue to kill and get to 25 and get released from the operation.”

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Masters of the Air is available to stream on Apple TV+ from 26 January, with new episodes airing weekly until 15 March.

What happened to John Egan and Gale Cleven while they were imprisoned at Stalag Luft III? How likely were you to avoid capture if you were shot down? Find out in the full interview with Donald L Miller on HistoryExtra podcast.