IIRC it had to do with a Triangle of missions to keep hitting different targets. Great in theory, poor in execution, as often happens.
The original thinking was Take off from UK, hit Germany, land in North Africa.
Take Off from North Africa, hit Plojesti (or therearound), land in Russia.
Take off from Russia, hit Germany again (or whatever necessary) and land in UK again.
There is quite in uproar over how one American finds himself in Flemish Belgium and is greeted by farm girls speaking French, with French accents no less.
US audience: They jump over europe and meet europeans, speaking europeanâŠ! Whatâs the problem? 
I have no problem with it of course. Who doesnât want their worldview confirmed by Hollywood, the only source that matters. But apparently the pitch forks in Flanders Fields are out for Tom Hanksâ head.
Are there others�
That guy who shot the D-day landings on a beach in Ireland! So much for accuracy, huh?
Disclaimer
Troll is trying to be funny.
Ok. Didnât know this.
Maybe there will be some kind of explanation in ep. 4 then�
Well, itâs not like they had a lot of options, most of Europe still being occupied in Aug of â43. In retrospect, the RTB would have been murder, now that the hornetâs nest had been poked. I can imagine planners were trying to not have a repeat of the earlier raids as well as keep the Luftwaffe guessing as to egress routes. It seems to be a damned if they did and damned if they didnât scenario.
Wikipedia quoting Masters of the Air author Don, Miller:
Donald Miller states: âLeMayâs force was expected to take the brunt of the German counteroffensive, allowing the Schweinfurt armada to proceed to the target with only light resistance. With LeMay escaping over the Alps, the Schweinfurt force would be left to face the full fury of the Luftwaffe on its return to England. The plan was brutally simple: LeMay would fight his way in and Williams would fight his way out.â
And where were the escorts during all this? I know range was limited until the P-51 came alongâŠand there was that hullabaloo about the Jugs being denied drop tanksâŠbut werenât they escorting the bombers at least to the edges of Belgium in '43? I donât recall any nod to the escorts at all so far in these three episodes. Though I could have been cooking or something and missed the scene.
There were a number of reasons, including lack of fighter escort range and weather over England at departure. Timing was critical for the plan to work. Since one group was delayed, the German fighters had time to land, rearm, and refuel between groups.
I think I need to read and watch on this, to get the most out of the storyâŠ
This is the tough part- the US Bomber Air command trusted the B-17 to be⊠well⊠flying fortresses that could perform strategic bombing on their own, relying on their machine guns for defense even during daytime bombing.
It took the massing of casualties of the Schweinfurt raids (especially the second in October 1943) to finally make the big brass realize they couldnât go on losing almost a quarter of the bomber raid every mission.
The RAF was more cautiously bombing at night albeit with less precision and therefore with lower resultsâŠ
So yeah, effective fighter escort started around the end of 1943
As a side note this book will tell you all you need to understand why the US air Force did what they did.
https://www.amazon.com/Men-Who-Killed-Luftwaffe-Against/dp/0811706591
Brilliant, if not outright masterfulâŠ
This video discusses the Schweinfurt - Regensburg raid in detail as it relates to Master of the Air E3 and in particular, the accuracy of the B-17Fâs gunnery depiction.
That just popped up on my feed too. The 14-round-per-second rate of fire document caught my interest, as did the upper/ball turret K3 sights.
I hate to be a hater. But in this case, once again, I am. I donât particularly care for the characters. Which is just as well because they die quickly. Some of the holes in the CGI physics leave me screaming âWhat!?â (Looking at you sideways smoking B-17). Maybe reading the book(s) helps one realize what the creators have managed to capture. But for me, largely ignorant of the intricacies of the European air war, it is inspiring more doubt than illumination.
I didnât particularly enjoy Part Four from a directing/story-telling perspective. I like the resistance arc, and the focus on the home-front in England, but they wasted too much screen time on Egar getting laid when they could have better used that screen time to transition things more smoothly. The time compression is throwing me off a little, as is the random, short narrations that suddenly get wedged in. The narration wasnât even useful and could have been better replaced by a quick briefing scene or short dialogue between characters as they walked out of their huts.
It feels like whoever cut the scenes together has ADHD.
This ^^^
Also, if American war films and their utter fascination with baseball as an interrogation tool reflects reality, I would have had a bullet in my brain at the bar.
Ha. I think that it was a number of things, like when he was asked to write the date. Similar to the bar scene in Inglorious Bastards, when the Brit gave away his nationality by not knowing that a raised thumb means 1 in Germany. Or probably more accurately, that Germans count the thumb as the first digit instead of the index finger.
Yeah I was really lost on that whole segment, like why they were writing the info down. I get the questioning part, just not the bit about writing it down. Iâd also like to know what the tell was for the infiltrator. They totally skipped over that.
I need to watch it again, but my memory is that when he was asked to write the date at the top of the page, he wrote it as day/month/year instead of month/day/year. But ironically, and I donât know how long itâs been this way, the US military writes the date as Europeans do, day/month/year, similar to using 24 hour time.
But one would think that any well trained spy would have all of these customs in the bag. I mean within my first few hours in Germany, I was schooled on the thumb thing by a bartender in Hamburg. What necessities must one learn to survive while traveling? Where is the toilet, one beer please, how old is your daughter?
Pffft. Amateur 