Commando writer Andrew Knighton kindly brings us the intel on creating the script for “Twenty-Five Flights”, featuring art by Alberto Saichann, his latest story for the long-running British war comic, on sale now in all good newsagents and digital platform…

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD – BUY THE COMIC AND READ IT FIRST!

• Read our guide to the latest Commando releases here

Welcome on board – and please strap in. Flying can be a dangerous business, especially when you’re flying a bomber through the skies above World War Two. And that’s where we’re heading today, as I try to offer some insight into my latest issue of Commando – “Twenty-Five Flights”.

Writing About the Bombing War

A few years ago, a friend told me that he’d been working on a TV show called Masters of the Air, all about the American Eighth Air Force’s bombing campaign in World War Two. He knew that I’d written comic scripts for Commando, and he thought that this might make good inspiration for another one.

Boy, was he ever right.

If you’re reading this, then you’re probably aware of Masters of the Air, which came out on Apple TV+ earlier this year. A companion to the perfectly decent The Pacific and the absolutely stunning Band of Brothers, it was going to bring the experience of American bomber crews to life. Band of Brothers is one of my all-time favourite shows, one of the best depictions of military history on screen, so I would have been psyched for this regardless. Knowing that the show was coming, and that someone I knew was involved, it was even more exciting. And of course, I wanted to write a Commando exploring the same theme.

Looking for inspiration, I read the eponymous history book by Donald L. Miller that large parts of the show are based on. I also re-read Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, another book about American bomber crews. Miller’s book provided masses of great inspiration. Catch-22, not so much. It was as fantastic as I remembered it being, but the story’s comedic style and anti-war message is so wildly different from Commando, there was almost no inspiration to be taken there.

I’d written a previous Commando story about a British bomber crew, The Flight of the Lanky Lou (issue 5409). That one had focused on the conflicts within a crew, so I knew I needed something different this time, something to increase the stakes and create tension. This can be difficult when you’re following a bomber crew, because of the distance between them and their targets, as well as the people trying to take them down.

But there was an important detail in both Miller and Heller’s books that helped me – flight limits. Members of bomber crews were allowed to go home once they survived a certain number of flights, but the work was so dangerous that most of them never made it. How would it feel to be on your final flight, to know that you would soon be out of the war, while also knowing that almost everyone died before they hit that point?

So the story became about twenty-five flights. Could the crew reach that magic number, or would they go down in flames?

Details…

If you’ve not read the comic yet, now’s the time to bookmark this feature for later. I’m about to get into spoiler territory, as I explore some of the details.

Think of this as a commentary track, for a comic instead of a film. I’m not going to go into every page, but there are some details that might add to our appreciation of the story, and give some insight into the thinking behind one of these scripts…

Page Three

Welcome to the High Guard. This is the first Commando comic I’ve written that included the plane in its character descriptions at the start. The plane was so important that I thought we needed it.

Why High Guard? Because of the friend who first told me about Masters of the Air. We know each other through the Empire live roleplay game, where we met playing in a nation called Highguard. We are deep in the weeds of obscure nerd references here.

Page Four

Say hello to Captain Stephen Churchett, named after that friend I just mentioned.

A lot of my friends have been name checked in the pages of Commando over the years. One of the joys of writing is the chance to put people you love through terrible things and have them enjoy it.

As mentioned above, the business with twenty-five flights is real. The number of flights, and how it changed, is also a big factor in Catch-22, one of the few ideas from the book that fits in here. There’s a horrible logic to these targets, counting off human survival one flight at a time, a target that should give hope but in Catch-22 ends up being a source of despair.

Page Five

Boyle talking about stats and their chances of survival is partly a nod to C3P0 in Star Wars, a film that drew heavily on World War Two. But it’s also a way to emphasise the danger they’re going to be in.

Lots of statistics are available on the bombing campaigns, which is useful for research. Unfortunately, a lot of those stats are unreliable. The people running the bombing campaigns had an exaggerated idea of how successful bombing was, and this led to institutional bias and motivated reporting. The Allies thought that their efforts were hindering the German military far more than they were.

One of the great tragedies of this part of the war is that the crews went through hell, and inflicted hell on other people, based on a theory of bombing strategy that was developed before such bombing was even possible, and that never lived up to its own hype. As the war progressed, this strategy evolved into area bombing meant to break enemy morale as much as German industry, even though the Blitz showed that this was a questionable approach at best. It’s a hotly debated issue, but I tend to agree with the historians who think it would have been more effective to put that effort into other tools, such as tactical bombing in support of ground forces or focused strategic strikes.

Page Nine

Here we have the Norden bomb site, a critical piece of equipment. Strategic bombing was never hugely accurate, but the Norden made it far better than it would otherwise have been. It was a piece of technology so important to the cause that air crews had strict instruction to keep it out of German hands.

Page 12

American airmen and their bases lived surrounded by rural British communities, and for several years they absolutely transformed them. I grew up in Norfolk, one of the regions touched by this. It was perfect territory for the bomber bases, with vast expanses of flat farmland facing east towards the North Sea and Germany.

Page 13

Some things are hard to convey through images, and that’s where the words become most important, like references here to the cold and the crew’s feelings towards the plane.

Page 14

Churchett’s relationship with the Talbots is based on real events discussed in Miller’s book, where local families adopted airmen as their own and provided some of the comforts of home they were missing. Relations could be very friendly.

Unfortunately, it didn’t always go that way. Other locals resented the intrusion of thousands of outsiders who were allowed things they themselves missed thanks to wartime restrictions. And if someone’s first experience of Americans was with drunk young men blowing off steam after a difficult flight, that could put them off the rest.

Page 20

Airmen heading into London on leave was a big thing. If you were a young man stuck in sleepy rural Norfolk, you’d want something more lively once in a while – trust me, I grew up with that feeling. Some London bars made a living almost entirely by serving American servicemen.

This is also where we see Spiegel heading for the synagogue. Commando comics don’t generally deal with religion, but anti-Semitism and the Holocaust were among the horrifying realities of the war and an important motivation for some of those who fought. There isn’t often space to acknowledge that in a comic script, so I grabbed the opportunity while I could.

Page 25

One of the real difficulties the bombing missions faced was that fighter planes had less fuel capacity and so a shorter range. The bombers had to complete their missions without support, which added to the danger.

Until the middle of 1944, this became a bigger problem the more successful they were and the further into Germany they went. As the machines improved and Allied forces gained airbases in mainland Europe, the fighters could offer more protection, but by then Germany was running out of planes and pilots, so there was less resistance anyway.

Page 29

It can be hard to heighten the stakes in a story about a bomber mission, because most damage to the plane is either trivial or will kill everyone. Unlike stories about the ground war, you can’t confront the crew directly with the enemy or have them run out of ammo. Knocking Spiegel out was one way around this.

Page 35

Watching other planes go down, knowing your friends were dying, was a big part of the flyers’ experience, and one that the TV show of Masters of the Air handles well. On the one hand, these crews had enormous destructive power at their fingertips; on the other hand, they were often powerless to help each other.

Page 40

There was a tension inherent to bombing runs. Holding a straight course made it possible to aim the bombs properly, but it also made you easier to hit. This is why a lot of bombs probably weren’t dropped accurately – it just wasn’t possible to do that while under fire.

Page 42

Teller’s death is based on accounts of far too many men who really lost their lives in circumstances like this, and on the guy dying in the back of Yossarian’s plane in Catch-22. It’s one of the moments where that book cuts right through the comedy to the horror of war.

Page 48

The mission’s done, but they’re still in danger, and this was the grim reality of the bomber war.

Page 51

Separating out the flak and the fighter attacks was a real part of how the German air defences operated, so that they could put more pressure on the bombers without shooting their own side. When writing a Commando script, it’s a handy way to make the action more varied, going from one problem to the next – sometimes real history is all the inspiration you need.

Page 54

As I mentioned before, creating tension is a tricky balance in a war story – you’ve got to kill someone, but you can’t kill everyone. Creating the right balance makes a story tense and satisfying, as you get the satisfaction of seeing characters survive who you really thought might not make it through.

Page 56

The cold that came at high altitude was another real problem. These planes were primitive, unwieldy machines by modern standards, flying boxes that couldn’t even protect their crew from the elements. It’s amazing to me that they flew at all, and a reflection on the character of the crews that they coped with this.

Page 61

Mancuso in the stuck turret, about to be crushed, is based on a real incident described by Miller in Masters of the Air. In that case, the ball turret gunner didn’t survive – the pilot had to land and crush him to save the rest of the crew, a horrifying decision for anyone to make.

Page 65

And at the end, when they could go home, the crew might just stick around. Psychologists studying the experiences of service personnel have found that many miss the sense of purpose when they leave the armed forces. Some respond by signing up for more, others by taking on dangerous and fulfilling jobs in the emergency services or aid work. You can leave the air force, but the air force never leaves you.

And there we have it, the end of “Twenty-Five Flights”. This is the first time I’ve written such a detailed commentary on one of my comics, so please let me know what you thought. Was it interesting? What did you like reading more about? What would you like to know about the story and the writing process that I didn’t cover? Leave a comment or contact me through my website, and hopefully it’ll give me a better idea of what to write next time.

Andrew Knighton

“Twenty-Five Flights” is available now from all good newsagents, and via various digital platforms

• Read our guide to the latest Commando releases – issue 5775 – 5778

• Commando Comics is online at commandocomics.com | DC Thomson – Subscriptions | Facebook| Twitter | YouTube | Commando Comics on AmazonUK | Commando Comics on Magzter | Pocket MagsDirect

Andrew Knighton is an author of short stories, comics, novellas, and the forthcoming novels The Executioner’s Blade (Northodox, November 2024) and Forged for Destiny (Orbit, April 2025). As a freelance writer, he’s ghostwritten over forty novels in other people’s names, as well as articles, history books, and video scripts. He lives in Yorkshire with an academic and a cat, growing vegetables and dreaming about a brighter future. 

• You can find more of his work and social media links at andrewknighton.com

Our thanks to the Commando editorial team for providing interior art for this look behind the scenes

• Masters of the Air: How The Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine
By Donald L. Miller

‘Seconds after Brady’s plane was hit, the Hundredth’s entire formation was broken up and scattered by swarms of single-engine planes, and by rockets launched by twin-engine planes that flew parallel’

Meet the Flying Fortresses of the American Eighth Air Force, Britain’s Lancaster comrades, who helped to bring down the Nazis…

Historian and World War II expert Donald Miller brings us the story of the bomber boys who brought the war to Hitler’s doorstep. Unlike ground soldiers they slept on clean beds, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of the travelling Air Force bands. But they were also an elite group of fighters who put their lives on the line in the most dangerous role of all.

Miller takes readers from the adrenaline filled battles in the sky, to the airbases across England, the German prison camps, and onto the ground to understand the devastation faced by civilians.

Drawn from interviews, oral histories, and American, British and German archives, Masters of the Air is the authoritative, deeply moving and important account of the world’s first and only bomber war.

• Commando Comics is online at commandocomics.com | DC Thomson – Subscriptions | Facebook| Twitter | YouTube | Commando Comics on AmazonUK | Commando Comics on Magzter | Pocket MagsDirect

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Categories: British Comics, Comics, Creating Comics, downthetubes Comics News, Features

Tags: Andrew Knighton, DC Thomson, Masters of the Air, War Comics, World War Two