War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. host, James Early. Hello, and welcome back to Key Battles of American History, and we are continuing our series

of discussions of the Apple TV Plus series, Masters of the Air.

This time we're going to be talking about Part 8.

We're almost to the end.

There's only nine parts.

So we are on Part 8, and it's a very interesting episode for a variety of reasons.

We'll, of course, get into that in detail in just a little bit.

In our last part, we saw that Egan and Cleven, two of the main characters,

probably the two main characters, who had both been shot down, and they had been put in Staling

Luf III, the famous German prisoner war camp from which the Great Escape was attempted.

They are just struggling to get by, to try to get news, to try to lift the spirits

of their men. They debate whether or not to escape, and they're just doing the best they can to

survive and to stay sane. We saw that. We saw back at Thorpe Abbots, we saw that Captain Rosie

Rosenthal has kind of become the heart and soul of the

100th Bomb Group, and he reaches the 25th mission, a 25 mission mark, and he was eligible to go home,

but he chose to stay. He signed up for another tour. And then we saw Harry Crosby basically

...