Former professor of history Donald Miller’s book, “Masters of the Air,” is soaring to new heights with its Apple TV+ adaptation of the same name which will premiere today.
“Masters of the Air” follows the victories and losses of the 100th Bomb Group of the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. Aside from intense aerial dogfights and combat missions, the series centers around the friendship and partnership between Maj. Gale Cleven, played by Austin Butler, and Maj. John Egan, played by Callum Turner.
“We had talked about the idea that you can’t have warfare without love, as strange as that sounds, without comradeship,” Miller said. “They understand one another, they’re part of the same zeitgeist, they communicate well with one another and this trust is a lot of trust. You can’t fly these four-engine monitors without trust.”
One of the most crucial themes portrayed on-screen is the cost of bombing in World War II.
“We wanted to get away from the idea that people might have in their mind that bombing was abstract and push-button warfare, where you climb up to four miles high,” Miller said. “We wanted to get at the tremendous incredible cost that it took to run this bomber campaign, the cost in human lives.”
The adaptation is executive-produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks – who visited Lafayette on Miller’s invitation in 2016 – and Gary Goetzman.
Spielberg and Hanks “knew the kind of books that I wrote,” Miller said. “Getting that emotional click … is so important if you’re going to work long-term on a project, and I knew temperamentally that we could work together because they were both super nice guys.”
Although the production team was set, “Masters of the Air” hit a few roadblocks. Production on the limited series was severely halted by the COVID-19 pandemic and Spielberg’s decision to switch the production from HBO to Apple.
“For a number of reasons, [Spielberg] was displeased,” Miller said. “He had problems with the way that HBO seemed to be going away from big budget, multi-series projects and a lot of the people that we worked with … so he brought it to Apple along with most of his other productions.”
James Onorevole ‘17, a former EXCEL scholar of Miller’s, helped work on the television adaptation of “Masters of the Air.”
The executive producers “needed to get ideas for specific storylines that they were going to track throughout the script, and also help with identifying locations for shooting,” Onorevole said. “That was where our research came in. We were doing a lot. [Miller] would just give us very broad assignments of going through these resources and coming back with interesting people.”
Miller found that the most crucial message one can take away from the TV adaptation of “Masters of the Air” is the importance of discipline.
“The 100th bomb group was a wild and reckless outfit, and that made them somewhat attractive cinematically,” Miller said. “Yet, over time they became one of the most effective. That’s why they took a lot of casualties and became known as the ‘Bloody Hundredth,’ because of poor discipline … so it took a while for that to get through, to get the guys to believe that they had a better chance of survival by not avoiding the flak.”
Onorevole looks back fondly on his time helping Miller with the development of “Masters of the Air” and is excited to see the finished show.
“I don’t think it’s any surprise that he had such a successful career and that he has been able to find success in a field that has so much competition,” Onorevole said of Miller. “There are a lot of great historians out there but Dr. Miller definitely rises to the top among them.”
