As with “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific,” the third World War II saga produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, Apple TV+ “Masters of the Air,”continues to leave out Asian Americans in the narrative of World War II. In this case, the inclusion of Asian Americans could have broadened our understanding of World War II, particularly in the Pacific or tied the two theaters of war together.

The blurb for “Masters of the Air” is:

Based on Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name, and scripted by John Orloff, “Masters of the Air” follows the men of the 100th Bomb Group (the “Bloody Hundredth”) as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with the frigid conditions, lack of oxygen, and sheer terror of combat conducted at 25,000 feet in the air. Portraying the psychological and emotional price paid by these young men as they helped destroy the horror of Hitler’s Third Reich, is at the heart of “Masters of the Air.” Some were shot down and captured, some were wounded or killed. And some were lucky enough to make it home. Regardless of individual fate, a toll was exacted on them all.

It isn’t that race has been entirely left out of the three miniseries. The HBO series “Band of Brothers” showed diversity as Jewish and variations White (Italian, German, Jewish), just as “Oppenheimer” did, but “The Pacific” was in the Pacific Islands and East Asia making its lack of representation of East Asian Americans, where they were pivotal as spies and translators, particularly egregious. You might think that Asian Americans weren’t essential in the Air Force, particularly after “Masters of the Air.”

The Story

The “Masters of the Air” gives us brash White US pilots of the 100th Bomb Group, but in later episodes includes Tuskegee Airmen of the 99th Fighter Squadron (“Part Eight”).

The Army Air Force activated the 100th Bombardment Group on 1 June 1942. On 1 November 1942, the cadre was stationed in Walla Walla Army Air Base in Washington state. There is received its first four aircrews along with four B-17Fs from the Boeing factory in Seattle. The 100th was then relocated to Utah (Wendover Field) where additional personnel was added and had further training. Aircraft and aircrews then relocated to Iowa (Sioux City Army Air Base). The aircrews then went to Kearney Army Airfield in Nebraska, rejoining the ground echelon. In May, the 100th left for England. Their first combat mission was on 25 June 1943.

The miniseries picks up in the spring of 1943 in a bar as USAAF majors Gale Cleven (Austin Butler) and John Egan (Callum Turner) are deployed to England. The four squadrons of B-17s are sent on their first mission from RAF base Thorpe Abbots for a daytime bombing of military targets in Bremen, Germany. Due to heavy cloud cover, they are unable to confirm their targets and the mission is aborted, but three B-17s and thirdly men are lost.

“Part Two” includes combat battle losses, an altercation with RAF members and the witnessing of an air raid on Norwich. “Part Three” depicts the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission (the destruction of aircraft manufacturers in Germany) and the 100th then traveling to meet the Twelfth Air Force in North Africa. More squadron members die, and one, Sergeant Quinn (Kai Alexander),  lands in Belgium and meets with Resistance members. Quinn will escape via German-occupied Paris (“Part Four”) into Spain, returning to England in “Part Seven”).

“Part Four” begins in October 1943 with additional B-17 crew members, including Lt. Robert Rosenthal (Nate Mann).

In “Part Five,” the 100th suffers heavy casualties in their second mission to Bremen. During a bombing raid on Münster, all but Rosenthal’s B-17 are shot down. Egan parachutes down into Germany and, in “Part Six,” it taken prisoner and attacked by civilians. He is interrogated at Dulag Luft and then taken to Stalag Luft III. After a large group of British POWs escape (as depicted in the Americanized 1963 film “The Great Escape” starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough), the Americans are threatened with punishment should there be further escape attempts.

“Part Seven” the 100th loses 15 B-17s and 150 men in a mission over Berlin. The men also confront a changing point system from 25 to 28.

In “Part Eight,” Captain Crosby (Anthony Boyle) plans more missions in France for Operation Overlord. During Operation Dragoon, the Tuskegee Airmen of the 99th are downed and second lieutenants Richard Macon (Josiah Cross), Robert Daniels (Ncuti Gatwa) and Alexander Jefferson (Branden Cook) are taken to Stalag Luft II. The three airmen are invited to join escape plans.

In “Part Nine,” here is where we get the title: “By the first few weeks of 1945, we were closing in one the Third Reich from all sides…In the sky the 8th airfare flew uncontested. We were the true masters of the air.”

Rosenthal is show down over Berlin in February 1945 and joins the advancing Red Army. With the Red Army, he enters a prison camp and speaks Yiddish with one of the survivors. Cleven escapes from the POW camp and eventually finds US Army units. The other POWs are taken to Stalag VII and are liberated. Clever, Crosby, Egan and Rosenthal reunited at Thorpe Abbotts and help with operations to bring food to the Dutch until the German surrender. As you might expect, the series ends with a montage revealing the fate of the surviving main characters.

While the miniseries does lightly touch on race with the inclusion of the Tuskegee airmen, its main focus is on two White men. I did appreciate the depiction of the problems of technology and the temperatures in the air as well as showing that even heroes can suffer from airsickness, but there were questions about the CGI being too clean.

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Besides Tuskegee Airmen (Lt. Alexander Jefferson and George J. Iles, minority POWs at Stalag Luft III included German-born Jew Peter Stevens (RAF) and PP Kumaramangalam of the British Indian Army.

While the series depicts a confrontation between the RAF and the US airmen, it doesn’t depict the widely known problems when US military men, used to Jim Crow segregation are in a country that doesn’t have such laws. Further, the problems we now see in North Africa and West Asia or the Middle East, are, in some ways, connected to the drive for control of crude oil to fuel modern warfare. The miniseries takes us to North Africa, but there are no main characters who voice the concerns and problems of North Africa, a place colonized by European powers.

• A Racially Motivated Clash in England During WWII Forced the US Military to Grapple with Inequality (24 June 2021)

Asians and the Air Force

In the case of “Masters of the Air,” the lack of Asian Americans represents a missed opportunity to tie both the war in Europe and the Pacific as well as address actions in the US that somewhat mirrored what was happening in Nazi Germany.

As Justice Frank Murphy would write in his dissent to Korematsu v. United States:

I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

For Hirabayashi v. United States, Murphy wrote:

Today is the first time, so far as I am aware, that we have sustained a substantial restriction of the personal liberty of citizens of the United States based upon the accident of race or ancestry. Under the curfew order here challenged, no less than 70,000 American citizens have been placed under a special ban and deprived of their liberty because of their particular racial inheritance. In this sense, it bears a melancholy resemblance to the treatment accorded to members of the Jewish race in Germany and in other parts of Europe. The result is the creation in this country of two classes of citizens for the purposes of a critical and perilous hour — to sanction discrimination between groups of United States citizens on the basis of ancestry. In my opinion, this goes to the very brink of constitutional power.

Asian Americans were also there at the beginning of the US Air Force. According to History.com, a Chinese-born engineer, Wong Tsu, who had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology despite the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, was “integral in designing Boeing’s first successful plane, the Boeing Model C.” That model was used for airmail and eventually became Boeing’s first military plane.

Wong was only at Boeing for 10 months before leaving to start China’s first airplane factory in 1917. He became head of the Aviation Research Academy in 1945.  So Wong’s contributions to aviation spanned World War I (1914-1918) and World War II, which for China began in 1937 but in Europe in 1939. Notice that historically, the 100th began training in Washington and in a Boeing aircraft as I noted above.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration website:

Portland, Oregon-born Arthur T. Chin was one of these trainees. Going to China, for what was then the Sino-Japanese War, Chin (1913-1997) and some of his classmates joined the Canton Air Corps of Guangdong. In 1936, the corps would become part of the unified Chinese Army Air Corps. Chin gave up his US citizenship and enlisted in the Chinese Army Air Corps. He and his classmate, John K. Wong, were sent to Germany for advanced training with the Luftwaffe.

That’s right. Two Chinese American pilots trained in Germany before returning to fight the Japanese in China. “The Pacific” missed the opportunity to highlight the contributions of Chinese Americans and any history of US pilots during World War II should have included Chinese Americans as well.

Upon returning to China, Chin married Eva Wong. They had two sons. On 27 December 1939, Chin’s plane caught fire during a dog fight. Although Chin survived, 80 percent of his body was burned. During his recovery, he moved to a house on Liuchow Airfield but his wife died during an attack. Chin returned to the US in 1942, for additional treatment. He continued to support the US war effort by speaking out at rallies.  Recovering enough to fly again, Chin joined the Chinese National Aviation Corporation which had a contract with the US Army Air Forces to supply US forces in the China-Burma-India theater.  Chin was the first American-born ace in World War II and he was both Asian American and Latino (before Lt. Edward O’Hare).  His father, Fon Chin, was Chinese  and his mother, Eva Wong was Peruvian. 

• Arthur T. Chin
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John Wong (黄泮扬, 1910-?) who had been born in Guangdong, but was raised in Seattle from the age of six, would meet Chin in Portland. In China, Wong flew a P-26 fighter in 1937 and a Gladiator in 1938.

Louie Yim-qun (雷炎均, 1914-1999) was a Seattle-born pilot who served in the Second Sino-Japanese War and became the deputy commander of the 28th Fighter Squadron of the 5th Fighter Group in 1937. In 1942, as a major, he entered the Staff and Command College in the US and in 1945, he was sent to British India as an instructor to Allied pilots. After the Japanese surrender, he was in Japan as a member of China’s Military Commission in Japan. He would become part of the US Garrison Command in Taiwan and then part of the Chinese Air Force. He was married another pilot, Hazel Ying Lee (李月英, 1912-1944) who died in a flying accident in Montana (23 November 1944).

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None of these people were portrayed or mentioned in “The Pacific.”

Asians in the Air Force: Europe

For “Masters of the Air,” the setting is Europe and there were Asian Americans in Europe. During World War II, the US military forces only segregated the African Americans and people of Japanese descent. However, there were some exceptions. This means that the Chinese Americans were not necessarily segregated.

The Honolulu-born Wah Kau Kong (江華九; 17 January 1919-22 February 1944) was the first Chinese American fighter pilot. He joined the US Army Air Forces after the attack on Pearl Harbor, having previously worked as a research chemist for the US government. He became a P-51 fighter pilot in the 353rd Fighter Squadron of the 354th Fighter Group at the RAF Foxted. His P-51B Mustang was named “Chinaman’s chance” and “No Tickee No Washee.” His first victory (11 February 1944) on his 12th mission was mentioned in Time Magazine (28 February 1944).

The four Ong brothers served and survived World War II with Henry Ong stationed in London as part of the 837th Bomb Squadron of the 487th Bomb Group (radio operator). In 1944, his airplane crashed and he was sent to a prisoner-of-war camp.

Like Kong, the Nebraska-born Ben Kuroki (1917-2015) enlisted after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Ben and his brother Fred both enlisted. (His brothers Bill and Henry Kuroki would also later enlist). He has the distinction of being the only American of Japanese descent to serve in the United State Air Forces in combat operations in the Pacific theater, but he actually began his service in Europe. He was the subject of a 2007 PBS TV special, “Most Honorable Son,” which includes educational materials.

The miniseries “The Pacific” was first broadcast on HBO in 2010.  So the information about Kuroki was available to the producers and writers of “The Pacific” and certainly to the writers and producers of “Masters of the Air.”

Ben and Fred got basic training in Texas. Fred was with the Army engineers, but Ben initially worked as a clerk for the Eighth Air Force based in England. There he volunteered for gunnery school and became a dorsal turret gunner on a B-24 Liberator.

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• National Museum  United States Army: Ben Kuroki
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The “Masters of the Air” is about the actions of the 100th Bomb Group, a B-17 Flying Fortress unit in the Eighth Air Force during World War II. Kuroki served with 409th Bomb Squadron of the 93rd Bombardment Group in Europe in the Eighth Air Force. The 93rd was the first B-24 unit to arrive in England “and was famously greeted by King George.” He flew 30 combat missions in Europe. In the Pacific,  Kuroki would serve in the 484th Squadron, 505th Bombardment Group and the 20th US Army Air Force. He flew 28 mission in Asia.

Kuroki flew 58 combat missions. Cleven flew 22 before he was shot down and taken as a POW. Egan flew 12 combat missions. Rosenthal flew 52 combat missions and earned 16 awards. Kuroki was a gunner and not a pilot, but his story and the story of his crew would seem to be more interesting because of the time span covered, the racial component and because he participated in both the European and Pacific war theaters.

In 2024, it is disheartening to see the continued erasure of Asian and Asian Americans in American historical dramas. There are plenty of stories to be told about World War II and even World War I, but they likely would not focus on White people. “Masters of the Air” is a missed opportunity to tell interesting stories about race, prejudice and perseverance.