“Master of the Air” is a great series in just about every way. The story has been told before but not as well and not lately. I can remember my Dad taking me to see “12 O’clock High” when I was a kid in the late '40s.
One of the most amazing things to me is how good the computer generated video is. And you know there’s a very large amount of it because, according to Wikipedia, there’s only 6 airworthy B-17s presently extant (a lot more in restoration or service status) so you know that most of those aerial scenes and a lot of the ground scenes (like the long line taxiing to take off) are computer generated simulations. But boy does it look real!! Don’t miss this movie!!
PS: I don’t see that anyone has mentioned “Greyhound”, the Tom Hanks movie about 1 day in the Battle of the Atlantic. Of course the focus is on the DD escort, not the convoy merchantmen, but one gets the idea that the slow, mostly unarmed ships are not having fun!
PPS: Check out the Wikipedia entry on the WW2 Naval Armed Guards for some insight into merchant ships in combat. Note the entry about them cross-training the merchant crews in manning the 3" to 5" guns, and the story about the SS Stephen Hopkins and the distinguished action of her crew.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Armed_Guard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Stephen_Hopkins
According to Wikipedia, there’s a surprising number of surviving B-17s, but only 6 listed as airworthy, So not only the crashes, but even a lot of the ground sequences and all the aerial sequences showing the formations clearly had to be CG. I would bet that they only had one intact, flyable B-17 for Masters of the Air. Two at most. Pretty good CG work IMHO.
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Just a historical note, not an argument: The USPHS Marine Hospital System was created to serve the somewhat unique needs (especially in the 18th & 19th C.s) of the merchant mariner in a time when hospitals generally were scarce, often remote from ports, and generally often to be avoided! Like all government institutions, it experienced “mission creep” to the point that, when I served as a USPHS physician in the late 1960s, pretty much ANYONE with a active “Z Card” (which included a lot of fishermen and oil workers) was eligible along with the Coast Guard (we were their “medical corps” and held daily sick call for the local cutters and base) and anyone with active service military ID (including dependents) as a secondary resource (no military hospital in our area). If you include our busy Outpatient Clinic and the hospital, no more than 50–60% of our clientele were merchant mariners.
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