Anthony Boyle is describing the sensation of sitting inside a cramped B-17 bomber flying over hostile, Nazi-occupied territory and spying a trigger-happy enemy fighter approaching fast. “You could see it small in the distance,” he says. “Then bigger and bigger and bigger – until it was right on top of you. And then the plane would shake when you were getting hit with bullets. You were really thrown about.”
Boyle is not a war veteran, though. He’s an actor talking about the experience of making Masters of the Air, possibly the most staggeringly epic and eye-wateringly expensive war series ever made (it’s rumoured to have cost $250 million). Watching the aerial action sequences, with scores of planes shooting, diving and exploding all over the sky, it is impossible to distinguish what’s computer generated and what’s real – and the actors often felt the same way.
These nerve-shredding scenes were filmed in what’s known as “a volume” – a giant, horseshoe-shaped bank of LED screens on to which CGI images are projected in real time behind the actors. “We were put into these replica B-17s built on supports that went 50ft up in the air,” Boyle explains. “Traditionally, you look at a green screen and act to a green tennis ball or whatever.” Here, however, the actors could look out of the window and see incoming enemy fighters, just like the viewer does. And the planes would tilt and jolt in response to the action. “It was like Alton Towers,” says Boyle. “We didn’t really have to act.”
The second world war is hardly fresh territory when it comes to film and television, especially for Britain. But Masters of the Air finds a new story to tell and new ways to tell it. Produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, and based on the book by Donald Miller, the Apple series caps off a wartime trilogy that began over two decades ago with Band of Brothers and continued with The Pacific. Like its predecessors, the story is based on real characters and events: it focuses on The Bloody Hundredth, the 100th Bomb Group of the US Eighth Air Force, which came to East Anglia in 1943 and helped tip the balance of the war, flattening key German targets and paving the way for D-Day.
While the Brits mostly conducted night-time raids, the Americans went for riskier, but more accurate, daytime bombing missions, chiefly using the 10-man B-17 bomber nicknamed “the flying fortress”. As Miller writes: “The history of the American air war against Germany is the story of an experiment: the testing of a new idea of warfare.” The casualty rate was astonishing: 77% of the Eighth Air Force were either killed, injured or captured.
“It’s crazy to think of going up in those tin cans,” says Boyle. “Because they were thin, you weren’t insulated – you could get frostbite. You’re battling weather, you’re battling the Nazis, you’re battling air sickness, the flak. To see your friend’s head blown off and to go, ‘I’m going to do this again. I’m gonna get back up there the next day’ — I don’t think we’ll ever understand what that’s like.”
Just as Band of Brothers introduced a host of young male actors, Masters of the Air seems destined to launch a few new careers, not least 29-year-old Boyle’s. The characters are chiefly Americans, but the cast includes many British and Irish actors, including Callum Turner, Barry Keoghan, Ncuti Gatwa, Nate Mann and Raff (son of Jude) Law.
Boyle, who also narrates, is from Belfast (not many roles are written for people from there, he says, so Northern Irish actors learn accents pretty quickly). He plays Major Harry Crosby, a navigator who gets off to a bad start on account of his air sickness — the last thing you need in a high-speed, high-stakes dogfight is to put on a helmet full of vomit. “Everyone else felt like they were in Band of Brothers,” he says, “and Harry Crosby, it felt like he was in an Adam Sandler movie.”
Law’s character, Sergeant Ken Lemmons, was part of the ground crew, the team who kept the tin cans flying. He was just 19 when he came to Britain. “They were staying up night and day building the planes, then watching these guys not return and taking a lot of guilt from that.”
Executing such a series sounds like a military operation in itself: over 300 speaking parts, a crew of over 1,200, with costumes, sets, props, dialogue coaches and hundreds of technicians. As well as the eye-popping effects, however, there was plenty of old-school technique. They built two replica B-17s, a German prisoner of war camp, and a full-scale copy of the entire Thorpe Abbotts air force base in Oxfordshire. Shooting there lasted nearly a year. “You saw the seasons change,” Law says. “You really felt immersed. People weren’t on their phones once the uniforms were on and they were in character and accent. There were so many things happening. You’d see drills going on, while half a mile away on the other side of the hardstand, you’ve got people playing baseball.”
Before shooting began, there was also a two-week “boot camp”, to get the actors into fighting shape. It was led by Dale Dye, a Vietnam vet and longtime advisor on military films and shows including Platoon, Band of Brothers and The Pacific. He ran a tight ship, says Law: “The first day, someone walked in and didn’t take their hat off: he had to do a bunch of press-ups. No one ever did that ever again.”
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Then there was the marching Dye put them through. “We don’t march in the show,” says Boyle. “And on day one, we spent an hour marching! I was going, ‘What are we doing here?’ I couldn’t be bothered. On day two, we were doing it again. Then on day three, we stopped shuffling, and this noise happened: a synched rhythm. We were moving as one! It was this thing Dye was trying to get into our heads: ‘crew glue’.”
The final impetus was a pep talk from their symbolic commander in chief, Tom Hanks, who gave Boyle some advice over a whisky. “He said never to bleed into sentimentality – to honour these men’s stories and play every moment as fresh as possible. If you lean into sentimentality, it often rings untrue, because these men didn’t behave like that. They weren’t walking around going, ‘God, we’re heroes.’ They were just lads.”
Masters of the Air has its fair share of heroism, myth-making and hard-boiled dialogue: “First time in the sawmill boys – let’s rack ’em up and knock ’em down!” But it doesn’t shy away from the shocking casualty rates and the enormity of the sacrifice. As the campaign dragged on, the real-life Sergeant Lemmons spoke of not wanting to get to know new arrivals on a personal level, says Law, “because it humanised them. And he knew that these guys might not be coming back after the first mission.”
These young men didn’t really know what to expect – and information about how dangerous the bombing raids were was kept from them, not just by their superiors but also by their fellow airmen, who simply didn’t know how to break it to them. “It’s interesting to think about something similar happening now,” says Boyle. “These guys just dropped everything. They didn’t think twice. It was just, ‘This is what we’ve got to do.’”
Beyond conveying the sheer spectacle and cataclysmic drama of war, perhaps there’s another reason why stories like this are still being told and retold: the sense of moral clarity is crystal clear. Tales of simplistic good versus evil are not exactly in fashion in modern drama, but at a time when the spectre of fascism looms once again, and neo-Nazis are openly organising in the US and Europe, perhaps we need reminding of this history. Steven Spielberg recently said: “I think it’s really important that we create a library where young people can understand what it took to keep our country free. That’s why I keep going back to this subject.”
Boyle agrees: “So much modern film and TV exists in the grey areas. But with this, you go, ‘We’re the good guys. They’re the bad guys.’ It’s a simple parable. You can follow it and it feels good. These are the sort of stories that are needed now.”
