Random thought upon the release of "Masters of the Air." (Which I haven't seen, I don't have Apple TV+.)
I was an Air Force brat. My best friend in junior high school was another Air Force brat. We'd both grown up on Air Force bases around Air Force people, and we both assumed that when we grew up, our careers would be in the Air Force too. (His was, mine wasn't.)
His dad had a board game that had been published by Avalon Hill in 1983, called "B-17: Queen of the Skies." It was a simulation of flying bombing missions over Europe in World War II. Being little Air Force nerds, we both played the heck out of that game.
It was a pretty typical wargame of its era, which means there was a lot of rolling dice and looking up results in printed tables. You started the game by rolling up a crew, with unique members for every station (pilot, bombardier, navigator, gunners, etc.). Then you could carry that crew from game to game, with members earning medals or being wounded or even killed depending on how the dice fell.
And a thing I discovered as we played the heck out of that game is that the crew you rolled up never made it out the other end of a 25 mission tour of duty alive. Never.
If you were lucky the attrition would be slow and partial; you'd lose a guy, and his place would be taken in the next mission. Then you'd lose another guy. And then another. By the end of 25 missions maybe half your original crew was still there. That was the lucky outcome.
The unlucky outcome was some catastrophic failure that killed the whole crew before they could even leave their seats. And there were so many catastrophic failures lurking in those results tables. Fuel fire. Engine explosion. Dead-on hit by flak, or shell, or rocket. So many.
The game wasn't making this stuff up. Only around 25% of U.S. bomber crewmen in 1943 completed their tour of duty. The rest were killed, wounded sufficiently to be taken off flight service, or captured. Everyone assumed they were going to get got; the only question was when, and how badly.
This was a story I knew well from history. But it took a game to teach me that those pages had been written in blood.