Why is Masters of the Air so anti-British? The show that mocks the RAF is packed with British actors playing Americans

The RAF appears in only a handful of scenes, and they're the ones British viewers remember. The series tells its story strictly from inside an American bomb group, and the British it meets mostly show up as a punchline or a foil.

Masters of the Air, the Apple TV+ follow-up to Band of Brothers and The Pacific from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, premiered on January 26, 2024, and ran nine episodes through March 15. Based on historian Donald L. Miller's book, it follows the US Eighth Air Force's 100th Bomb Group, the "Bloody Hundredth," which flew B-17s out of Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk.

What the show actually shows

The complaints center on a few early scenes:

• The pub — American and RAF flyers trade barbs over pints, and Lt. Curtis Biddick (Barry Keoghan) gets into a fight with RAF men. Miller has said the writers took the fight from Biddick's real history, in which he knocked a man out with a single punch.
• The "philosophies" argument — a moustachioed RAF officer tells the Americans that bombing during the day is suicide. The line sets up the series' central debate between the RAF's night bombing and the American daylight raids.
• What's missing — the RAF's own bomber campaign, which by 1943 had been fighting for years, stays almost entirely offscreen.

Critics noticed. One review syndicated by AOL described the RAF scenes as "a cartoon of anti-Englishness." The historian Luke Truxal, reviewing each episode for the military history site Balloons to Drones, flagged an anti-British bias in the series. British viewers in user reviews and on forums were blunter, with complaints that the RAF was played as buffoons while the Americans won the air war alone.

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Is there a historical basis?

Partly. The disagreement over day and night bombing was real. The RAF bombed at night, the Americans committed to daylight precision raids, and the cost of the American approach is the subject of the whole series.

The pub rivalry is harder to justify as a pattern. Miller himself pointed out that the two air forces rarely crossed paths. The British flew at night, the Americans by day, and their bases sat on opposite sides of Norwich.

"For the most part, they don't meet that much," Miller told Time Out.

The casting irony

The show that rubbed British viewers the wrong way was made in Britain, largely by British actors. Callum Turner, who plays Major John "Bucky" Egan, is from London. Anthony Boyle, who plays navigator Harry Crosby, is from Belfast. Raff Law, son of Jude Law, plays Sgt. Ken Lemmons, and Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa plays Tuskegee airman Robert Daniels. Keoghan is Irish.

Primetimer noted that "most of the command officers are English actors," as are most of the rank and file.

The Hollywood Reporter's review went further, praising the cast while noting how many British actors were doing varying versions of an American accent. The production built a £5 million replica of the Thorpe Abbotts base at Newland Park in Buckinghamshire, shot the airfield scenes at Dalton Barracks in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, with two full-size B-17 replicas, and worked out of Bovingdon Airfield Studios in Hertfordshire.

The British contribution to Masters of the Air was enormous, as long as it stayed in American uniform.

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