These are war stories about men who see the bomb before they see the choice. Satoshi Kon animates the interior collapse of soldiers who understand, perfectly, what they're being asked to do. The Luftwaffe pilot doesn't wrestle with duty versus conscience because the show never lets that stay simple; the woman in the cargo hold isn't a plot device, she's the moment his country stops mattering. It costs something to watch, the animation can stumble between episodes, the runtime refuses to coddle you, but what you get is three separate acts of moral suffocation rendered in frames that don't look away.

Three wartime stories make up this three-episode action drama OVA. In the first, a Luftwaffe pilot escorts a bomber carrying Germany's last chance at winning the war: the first atomic bomb. He is torn between his obligation to his homeland, which means protecting the plane, and his obligation to humanity, which means letting enemy Spitfires bring it down. The choice is harder because his beloved is also aboard. In the second, Japan has introduced a rocket-powered flying bomb steered by a human pilot. Young Ensign Nogami rides a bomber carrying one of these weapons and waits for his turn to die as a suicide pilot, on a date already fixed: August 6, 1945. In the third, two soldiers try to reach an air base to keep a promise, even though the realities of war may already have made it pointless.