What is Masters of the Air based on? The real unit behind it earned a nickname nobody wanted
What is Masters of the Air based on? The true story of the 100th Bomb Group, Donald L. Miller's book, and how the real "Bloody Hundredth" earned its grim WWII nickname.
Yes, the Austin Butler flyboy show is a true story — and the real version is worse than anything Apple TV+ was allowed to put on screen. Masters of the Air adapts Donald L. Miller's 2006 book Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, with Spielberg, Hanks and Goetzman completing the trilogy they started with Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Butler plays Major Gale "Buck" Cleven, Callum Turner is John "Bucky" Egan, and the unit they all belonged to was the 100th Bombardment Group of the Eighth Air Force — known to everyone as the "Bloody Hundredth."
Nobody hangs that name on you for having a good time.
How you earn a nickname like that
The men were warned from day one. The group's first commander, Colonel Darr H. Alkire, told his pilots during training there'd be nothing glamorous about the job:
"You're going to be baby-killers and women-killers."
He wasn't exaggerating about the grim part. The 100th's very first combat mission — Bremen, June 25, 1943 — cost three planes and 30 men. And the darkly weird thing is, the 100th wasn't even the hardest-hit group in the Eighth Air Force overall. The nickname stuck because their losses came in catastrophic bursts:
- Over Münster, 13 B-17s from the 100th went out. One came back — piloted by new arrival Robert Rosenthal.
- Of 306 missions flown across the war, just eight accounted for nearly half of the group's total losses.
- Final tally: roughly 229 planes lost, 757 men killed or missing, 923 taken prisoner.
The bleakest artifact might be a phone call. In October 1943, navigator Harry Crosby rang his base in code to ask whether his friends had made it home, and got the answer broken plainly:
The Hundredth never actually went away
If you want the real faces, Apple released a companion documentary, The Bloody Hundredth, narrated by Tom Hanks and featuring the actual airmen the show portrays. And the unit itself still exists: since 1992 it has flown as the 100th Air Refueling Wing out of RAF Mildenhall in England — back on the same soil the Bloody Hundredth flew from, minus the flak.