“Masters of the Air” is an overarching, sometimes over-reaching portrayal of America’s part in the Air War in Europe from the same production team that told the historical World War II stories “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”

Like those series, “Air” focuses on a couple of groups of real-life pilots — survivors and victims of the war — and goes to painstaking detail to recreate the horror these men faced, especially in the early months of daylight “precision” bombing carried out by American B-17s which were too vulnerable, it turned out, to be named “Flying Fortresses.”

Over a third of these big-for-their-day bombers put into action were lost in combat. From the start, crews had to serve a minimum of 25 combat missions in order to earn the right to go home. And very few did.

The everyday horrors included sudden death or wounding by anti-aircraft shrapnel or air-to-air rockets, planes and bodies riddled by fighter-plane bullets, air-to-air collisions and mortally wounded aircraft tumbling and disintegrating out of the sky, not often in the graceful, smoke-trailing arcs of “Did you see any (para) chutes?” most often depicted in the movies.

The men of the 100th Bomb Group, “The Bloody Hundredth,” flying out of England, saw friends and comrades killed in front of them almost every time they flew. They’d wait on the ground, scanning the skies for stragglers that might not make it back. And then, they’d have to climb back in their tough but vulnerable Boeing bombers and face the terror again.

Some 70,000 were killed or wounded in this service. The best American museum to these warriors and their work might be The Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum just south of Savannah, Georgia on I-95. I highly recommend it.

The series is built around a handful of characters — friends  Maj. Gale ‘Buck’ Cleven, given a Clark Gablesque swagger by Austin Butler (“Elvis”), and the loyal and headstrong Major John “Bucky” Egan, played by Callum Turner of “The Boys and the Boat,” Fantastic Beasts” and in the headlines these days for dating pop starlet Dua Lipa.

“Masters of the Air” is “overarching” in the ways it synthesizes many movies about the war in its episodic stories, the action depicted, theaters of combat and consequences and stakes of the war discussed.

It’s got “Memphis Belle” and “Twelve O’Clock High” elements, “Stalag 17” in the P.O.W. experience, “The Holocaust” is touched on and “Red Tails” — Black pilots serving in World War II — are celebrated.

There’s also a hint of war service romance between the Yanks and the local ladies, with Bel Powley playing the uniformed Every Servicewoman, the very embodiment of British pluck.

“Don’t you sleep?”

“After we’ve WON!”

We follow the first 1942 air crews to shuttle their bombers from America to Greenland and then to Britain, with airsick-every-time-he-goes-up navigator Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) almost directing his crew straight into occupied France.

We take off and head into the unknown with them as they fly their first missions and first experience flak and fighters, which pass by in a blur rarely depicted in WWII air combat films. A 250 miles per hour bomber was little match for 400 mph+ fighters.

Missions go right, and men die. Missions go very wrong, and more men die. Unlike “Band of Brothers,” there’s no in-our-ranks villain here. Over-complicated missions and blunders in command aren’t laid at the feet of the kutzes in charge. There’s a bit of debate between Brits and Yanks over the costly, idealistic American daytime “military targets only” approach, and the British nighttime “proximity” bombing, which later research suggests was what came closest to speeding the end of the war.

B-17s didn’t dent German ball bearing, airplane or tank production. B-24s did little to slow fuel refining. But flattening entire cities in gigantic night raids drove the German government close to collapse, as that created tidal waves of refugees, the record refects.

“Masters of the Air” is more inclusive than the “Brothers'” team’s earlier World War II efforts, partly because it can be. The classism inherent in telling the stories of often-college-educated pilots, not quite mimicking Britain’s historical “officer class” heirarchy, is tempered by showing working class pilots and the very young sergeant (Rafferty Law) who ran the ground grew putting even shot-to-pieces/crash-landed B-17s back in the air.

And you can’t really tell the “Air War in Europe” story without showing us fighter pilots whose primary job it was to escort the bombers and protect them from German fighters. If you’re doing that, why not make the pilots the famed Tuskegee Airmen, which allows the series to introduce Black pilots, to bring up racism, show the discipline a Black commander (Tomisin Ajani) insists upon, even follow Tuskegee-trained pilots into the POW camps with their fellow airmen.

But as we see German civilians and teen recruits in a bombed city — people who shrugged off their Luftwaffe’s terror raids on the rest of Europe — furiously attack and murder U.S. Army Air Corps P.O.W.s, as we follow downed airmen attempting escape and then attempting to survive German camps-emptying Death Marches as the war winds down, one does get a sense of the series’ overreach.

You can’t get too attached to any character, as some die, some disappear into camps and others get lost in the shuffle. I’ve seen it all, and the series begins tentatively, builds up to a middle-episodes sag, and finishes well.

Only Butler’s performance is tinged with “We’re staying here and taking it” bravado. Like a few more recent World War II films, actors sometimes seem to base their performances on how actors of the war era portrayed heroes.

But there’s precious little of the pithy “It’s a war. We’re here to drop bombs” cliches. The models, digital effects, full-sized mockups and perhaps a real plane or two are edited fairly seamlessly to create realistic aircraft, air missions and visceral aerial combat.

“Masters of the Air” could have used a little more of “Catch-22’s” (the movie, not the TV series) cynicism and fatalism, because that was written by a real air war survivor, not historians interviewing survivors and digging through diaries.

It’s still a solid, sometimes moving, sometimes outstanding effort, another World War feather in the cap of the producers — Spielberg and Hanks among them — and creators of “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” And it makes a great single-sitting or two historical overview of the nature of that part of the war, far easier than watching every single earlier movie this sweeping story pays homage to or borrows from.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, smoking, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Austin Butler, Callum Turner, Barry Keoghan, Anthony Boyle, Bel Powley, Ncuti Gatwa, Nate Mann, Emma Canning and Branden Cook

Credits: Created by John Orloff, based on the book by Donald L. Miller. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: Nine episodes @49 minutes to 1:17 each.