At an American air base on English soil, Brigadier General K.C. Dennis (Clark Gable) commands a group of B-17 bombers that run missions over Nazi Germany. Having suffered severe losses on several recent missions and with some of the men under his command getting into scrapes with the military police, Dennis is under increasing pressure to explain his mounting casualty rates to both a cynical war correspondent (Charles Bickford) and a visiting congressman (Edward Arnold).