Requiem for the Greatest Generation
Requiem for the Greatest Generation
Lessons in liberal patriotism from "Masters of the Air."
It should come as no surprise that Masters of the Air offers a visceral portrait of the American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany during World War II that’s equal parts thrilling, terrifying, and stirring. After all, the nine-part limited series (now streaming in full on Apple TV+) has a distinguished pedigree: it's produced by actor Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg, the team responsible for the now-classic 2001 miniseries Band of Brothers and its 2010 companion The Pacific. Like its predecessors, Masters of the Air dwells first and foremost on the pilots, air crew, and ground personnel who fought the war against fascism from the skies—their courage and heroism, flaws and foibles, but above all their basic humanity.
But Masters of the Air comes out at a very different moment than Band of Brothers or The Pacific, one when the last embers of the Greatest Generation have died out and the cause for which they fought—freedom in the world—seems in peril once again, at home as well as abroad. The makers of Band of Brothers could interview a considerable number of living members of the 101st Airborne’s Easy Company, while The Pacific could still count on a decent number of surviving veterans of the Marine Corps’ island-hopping campaign against Japan. Virtually all the protagonists of Masters of the Air, however, have passed away at some point since the turn of the millennium; the show’s companion documentary, the Hanks-narrated The Bloody Hundredth, relies largely on archival interviews with its late subjects.1
At its best, that generation embodied a sort of liberal patriotism that’s become unfashionable in recent decades and remains so today. Spielberg himself puts it clearly in The Bloody Hundredth: “There was a clear and present danger to global democracy because of the Nazis. So patriotism was something that the Greatest Generation, my father’s generation, took very, very seriously.” Masters of the Air stands as a requiem for that generation, one that neither flinches from the grim and brutal realities of war nor shies away from sordid American social realities of the day like racial segregation.
The series follows the pilots, aircrews, and ground personnel of the 100th Bomb Group as they flew B-17s against Nazi Germany and suffered horrendous casualties. It’s a show that’s as much about what happens on the ground—planning missions and recuperating from them, plotting escapes from prisoner-of-war camps, and evading capture with the help of local resistance forces—as in the air. But the show’s aerial combat sequences are indeed harrowing, depicting in no uncertain terms the extraordinary courage required to fly into the razor-sharp teeth of Nazi air defenses during the darkest days of the Allied bombing campaign in 1943.
Above all, though, Masters of the Air shows what liberal patriotism means in both practice and substance.
Midway through the series, two of the 100th Bomb Group’s pilots—Gale “Buck” Cleven (portrayed by Austin Butler of Elvis and Dune: Part Two fame) and John “Bucky Egan (played by Callum Turner)—find themselves show down and imprisoned in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. After British POWs make a partially successful escape attempt, the new camp commandant demands the ranking American officer identify the Jews held among the POWs—to which the American officer replies, “There only Americans in Stalag Luft III… Only Americans.”
Then there’s the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the legendary unit of black fighter pilots also known as the Red Tails. “A group of men thousands of miles away from home who finally feel like Americans,” as one of the unit’s officers describes them. When captured Tuskegee Airmen arrive in the camp, they’re greeted by an American bomber pilot who informs them they’d “saved our asses so many times, I tell you what.” They’re quickly brought in on the plan formulated by Cleven, Egan, and others to escape the camp and head toward the rapidly-advancing Allied armies.
But perhaps the scene that best encapsulates the ethos of the Greatest Generation as shown in Masters of the Air occurs when downed and injured Tuskegee pilot Richard Macon (actor Josiah Cross) is first interrogated by a German officer familiar with the United States. When asked why he fights for a country that treats its black citizens so poorly—a supremely ironic query coming from an officer fighting on behalf of a country fighting to exterminate Jews and enslave the rest of the world—Macon responds:
Do you know any other country that’s better? I know what my country’s shortcomings are. And I know it’s trying hard to become what it says it’s supposed to be. And when I get back, I’m gonna help ‘em do that a lot faster.
If there’s any single character who best embodies the “why we fight” spirit at the heart of Masters of the Air, however, it’s B-17 pilot Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal (actor Nate Mann). A New Yorker and jazz aficionado, Rosenthal is taken off flight duty after a particularly brutal mission and sent to convalesce at a repurposed English country estate nicknamed “the Flak House.” He’s reluctant to go for some rest and relaxation (“Jews from Brooklyn don’t ride horses,” he informs his crew), preferring to stay in his established flying rhythm. Up late one night early in his stay, he explains to the facility’s supervising doctor why he wants to get back in the fight despite the losses and inhumanity involved:
But you see people being persecuted, subjugated, you have to do something, right? They can’t fight for themselves, can they? So what do we do?... You don’t go talking about it, you don’t go crying about it. You get back in the seat and finish the damn job.
Rosenthal later put his money where his mouth was, volunteering for a second tour of combat duty after completing the required 25 missions—and after the Army Air Forces brass raised the number of required missions to 30 and adopts a more aggressive strategy using bombers as bait for new P-51 fighters. As he tells his commanding officer when making the request, “No, sir. I can’t go home—not yet, not until the job is done. One way or another.” Rosenthal would go on to serve as a prosecutorial assistant at the Nuremburg trials after the war, interrogating high-ranking Nazi criminals like Hermann Goering and Wilhelm Keitel.
It's hardly surprising that Masters of the Air resonates and echoes so strongly in the present moment. So few members of the Greatest Generation now survive, and those who do still live have surpassed or are approaching their centenaries. What’s more, the cause for which that generation fought and in many ways embodied now seems in increasing peril, both at home and abroad. The show harkens back to the values of liberal patriotism and internationalism that that generation learned the hard way—and that we today seem in danger of forgetting.
Most troublingly, the United States has seen a resurgence of belligerent conservative isolationism under the execrable “America First” banner once carried by Charles Lindbergh and now held aloft by former president Donald Trump and his acolytes. They’ve managed to stall vital American military aid to Ukraine in Congress at a time it’s desperately needed by Kyiv, stabbing Ukraine in the back. Various voices on both right and left have likewise searched for some new and creative way to blame the war in Ukraine and indeed most (if not all) of the world’s ills on the United States.
That’s a far cry from the reasoning of a British servicewoman as she attempts to reassure navigator Harry Crosby, played by actor Anthony Boyle, that he’s not responsible for a friend’s death:
Your friend was on that plane for one reason and one reason only—because Adolf Hitler and his gang of thugs decided they should rule the world. That’s it, that’s the only reason anyone dies in this war.
At a time of recrudescent antisemitism at home and around the world, moreover, Masters of the Air reminds us just where that can lead. After getting shot down and captured, Egan and his fellow POWs are loaded on a train to their camp and witness a different train packed with desperate civilians headed for Auschwitz or another extermination camp. Rosenthal himself gets shot-down on a late-war mission over Berlin but is picked up by Soviet troops; on his way back to England, he encounters one of those camps and a Holocaust survivor forced to bury his own family by the Nazis. When Rosenthal asks where he’ll go now, the forlorn survivor suggests “Palestina” before telling him “Not even the earth that covers our bones will remember us.”
Masters of the Air remains clear-eyed about the brutal realities of war and the shortcomings of American society in the 1940s. But that makes the liberal patriotism it puts forward all the more compelling; with a world-weary attitude and despite-it-all spirit, it’s a reflective and not reflexive patriotism. It’s a patriotism that knows that what America says it’s supposed to be matters both at home and abroad, one that understands that if America doesn’t stand up to the world’s thugs and bullies and fights for those who can’t fight themselves, no one else will. A patriotism that sees the world clearly and stays involved no matter how grim things may look or exhausted it may get.
Masters of the Air reminds us what liberal patriotism is in both spirit and practice—and what we stand to lose if we forget lessons the Greatest Generation learned the hardest way possible.