OK, here’s the plan. 376 B-17 Flying Fortresses, laden with bombs bound for military targets deep within Germany, will fly with support from 240 fighters. This dual target, three-pronged “max effort” approach – a year before, the US Army Air Forces could only muster 12 forts per daylight raid – will spread the Luftwaffe defenses and allow more bombers to fly through German anti-aircraft flak and fighter cover. With perfect precision, this huge amount of Allied air power will link up over the English Channel, proceed across Belgium, reach their IP, drop their bombs, and bug out for home. But for some of the Eighth Air Force – namely, the ones we care about, like Buck Cleven, Bucky Egan, Curt Biddick, and their flight crews – that exit will be circuitous. They’ll fly southwest from Germany, across the Italian Alps, and over the Mediterranean Sea to safety in Allied-controlled Algeria. What could possibly go wrong?

The foreboding feeling in Masters Of The Air Episode 3 starts with fog. With their departure on pause, crews lounge beneath planes in the pea soup. Buck tosses a ball to Meatball the dog, Bucky reads a dime store novel, navigator Harry “Cros” Crosby considers a riddle posed by bombardier James Douglass, and a squeaky nose gunner with the right proper nickname “Babyface” gripes about the wait to Sgt. William Quinn (Kai Alexander). Then Biddick emerges from the gloom. (The look and feel of this sequence is fantastic, even if it does portend doom. It’s weirdly surreal.) “I feel like this could be a big one,” Curt says to Bucky with his trademark sidelong wit. “I think we could do some real damage.” And they exchange “See you in Algeria” farewells. Fog or not, the forts are soon ordered to go. So much for perfect precision. And we get Colonel Hardin with some war movie dialogue boilerplate. “We’re sending ‘em straight into hell. Alone.” 

Well, hell is for heroes. Hours later, but still hours from their target, the 100th is flying apart from the planned armada, and backup is nonexistent. Luftwaffe fighters,10 o’clock low! More fighters, 11 o’clock high! Fighters, 13 o’clock sideways! Fighters, 17 o’clock, right inside your cockpit. Messerschmitts are everywhere, US planes (and crewmen) are getting shot up right and left, and pretty soon the air wing’s entire second element is destroyed. Within the large and difficult to distinguish cast of Masters of the Air, Austin Butler’s Buck has always been discernable from his fellow pilots because of his pastel blue checked flight scarf. But somehow Butler also gets Gale Cleven’s preternatural sense of calm into his eyes, making his character visible beyond his bulky rubber oxygen mask and leather skull cap. And what Buck sees is a brutal symphony of midair destruction. 

Here, Masters unfurls one of its most stunning special effects shots yet. In panorama, Buck surveys a scene where tracer rounds zip, debris falls free, parachutes drift on desperate gossamer through clouds of flak and burning B-17s spinning lazily in flat circles, and German Bf 109s dart between it all. It’s hellish in its majesty, and not everybody makes it out. Their plane is wingless and on fire, Babyface is stuck in the nose, and Quinn has to leave him behind. Curt Biddick’s crew also bails out of their disabled fort, but for a co-pilot who’s shot in the neck. When Biddick tries to level off and crash land in a clearing, they clip the trees, and the aircraft is consumed in a ball of flame. Is this the last we’ve seen of Biddick, and Barry Keoghan’s weird little face?

In Flanders, Belgium, Sgt. Quinn walks carefully down a dirt road. He’s just been blown out of his B-17, but seems unharmed from the bailout, other than being scared, unarmed, and behind enemy lines. A quintessential European farm appears, with two women working at a trough, as if this wasn’t a war zone. But everyone knows it is, which leads to their first question for the disheveled and soot-covered airman: “German?” When Quinn clarifies that he’s American, the farm family contacts the Résistance belge, and the group’s leader lays it out. Surrender to the Germans, and he immediately becomes a prisoner of war. But try to escape back to England, which this guy says he can help him with, and Quinn will be hunted as a spy and executed. It would seem like he owes it to poor little Babyface to not get captured. 

Back in the air, one guy who isn’t bailing out is Buck. Spending the rest of the war in a stalag isn’t his style. Besides, he’s gotta eventually make it back home to Marge (Isabel May), who we met for like two seconds back in Masters of the Air Episode 1. “We’re gonna take it, boys,” he tells his crew as bullets lance through the bomber’s aluminum skin. “We’re gonna stick with our mission as long as we can fly.” B-17s became famous for the punishment the planes could take, and as Buck’s aircraft drops its bombs on target and turns toward North Africa, he’s flying with a shredded wing, damaged electrical systems, and various more medium-sized ailments. Over the Mediterranean, with just 600 gallons of gas to make it to Algeria, they toss everything of weight into the sea. Even their prized Norden bombsight. “The Krauts won’t find it in the water.”

11 out of 21 planes have found their way to safety. Cros sweeps spent .50-caliber casings off his reams of navi maps. He’s located the airstrip cut from a vast expanse of desert terrain, and Buck “feathers” his engines. “We’re a glider now,” his co-pilot says, and they coast to a stop where Bucky and his irrepressible good nature awaits. They made it! And their bombs did destroy the target. But if they weren’t already the “Bloody Hundredth,” this ambitious mission, with its disastrous losses in men and materiel, was definitely their christening.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.