You’ve seen the fact-based drama. Do you really need to watch the accompanying documentary as well? Sometimes it’s the other way round, and there’s a documentary that makes a scripted drama on the same subject redundant. Either way, the drama/doc double-up is here to stay, because it makes sense for TV channels to hedge their bets. In the increasingly cash-strapped world of British telly, it can save money: get the same production company to make both shows, and two programmes can share one team of researchers.
Counting pennies is probably not, however, the motivation behind The Bloody Hundredth, an hour-long documentary made for Apple TV+ by companies belonging to Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. This is the factual version of Masters of the Air, the same team’s lavish nine-part drama about the 100th Bomb Group, a gang of daring US airmen who helped to win the second world war.
With Hanks narrating and Spielberg drawing on his own historical expertise to appear as a contributor, The Bloody Hundredth is a high-quality production, but it’s like a DVD extra, a whip of cream on the top of the sumptuous Masters pie. It assumes you’ve already seen Masters of the Air. You should indeed watch the drama first, because while the documentary is a perfectly decent summary of the same story, it can’t muster the same romance or spectacle.
If you have seen Masters of the Air, The Bloody Hundredth chiefly acts as a way of confirming that yes, all of that did happen. Stationed in Norfolk for the last two years of the war, the 100th carried out bombing raids on key infrastructure in occupied Europe and Germany itself, taking massive casualties as the Nazis’ air defences fired back. The men really did gather in a briefing room, gasping and muttering as another mission, even riskier than the previous one, was handed down by their commanders. Pilots who made it home did find new recruits already settled into the barracks, ready to replace those who had been lost. The raids were so harrowing that shellshocked men actually were regularly packed off to a country house near Oxford for afternoon tea and croquet, to soften what was politely called “combat fatigue”. Names were largely unchanged: the team really was led by two maverick aces who became best friends and had spookily similar nicknames, “Buck” and “Bucky”. Rosenthal, Crosby and numerous other Masters characters were real people.
Alongside its talking-head historians, Spielberg among them, The Bloody Hundredth boasts an impressive amount of contemporary film footage, demonstrating that Masters of the Air looks exactly right too. There is the airfield at Thorpe Abbotts, with mechanics and commanding officers nervously looking out across flat green fields, hoping their boys will reappear on the horizon. Here is the officers’ bar, with its industrial-tinged speakeasy chic. We are up in the air as well, peering through the famed Norden bombsight at exploding German factories miles below us, or flinching as another shrapnel-packed anti-aircraft shell explodes nearby in a puff of black smoke.
Sometimes it’s distractingly unclear exactly what we’re watching: as we hear about a particular Luftwaffe attack or a specific member of the Bloody Hundredth being shot down, surely the pictures we’re seeing can’t be of those events exactly? Or can they? The programme is also, more understandably, a little coy about when its star interviewees, the veterans of the 100th Bomb Group, sat in front of the camera to pass on their recollections.
Next year will bring the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s defeat. The second world war as a happening within living memory – the period in which if we want to know about it, we can directly ask people who were there – is very nearly over. Of the main characters in Masters of the Air, Gale “Buck” Cleven and John “Bucky” Egan died in 2006 and 1961 respectively; Harry Crosby passed away in 2010, while Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal died in 2007. Crosby and Rosenthal feature here in what are evidently interviews from some years ago – Rosenthal’s dates back to 1997. Buck and the long-gone Bucky only appear in wartime stills. Luminous as they are in those photographs, there’s a sad piquancy in realising that the heroes of the 100th Bomb Group are slipping from our grasp.
Masters of the Air has done a superb job of keeping them alive and, at around nine times longer than The Bloody Hundredth, it fares better than this sometimes rushed documentary at marshalling a narrative that morphs from flying-ace drama to behind-enemy-lines thriller to tense prisoner-of-war saga. In this instance, what really happened has the twists and the grand sweep of epic fiction; actors with sets and scripts are better placed to keep telling the story.
• The Bloody Hundredth is on Apple TV+
