The sixth of Masters of the Air’s nine episodes stays on the ground, following three characters on separate odysseys in the wake of last episode’s disastrous bombing raid. Daring pilot Robert “Rosie†Rosenthal, whose fort was the only one of the 17 the 100th Bomb Group sent to attack the railroad marshaling yard over Münster to make it home, is shipped off with his crew to “the flak shak,†a term used for any one of several cushy R&R facilities that offered traumatized bomber boys a chance to gather themselves in an explosion-free pastoral environment before being sent back into the fray. (This one is Coombe House, one of those inconsistently deployed title cards tells us, and it does look nice!) Informed that horseback riding is one of the many chill-out activities available to him, Rosie declares that “Jews from Brooklyn don’t ride horses.â€
Navigatin’ narrator Harry “Croz†Crosby, meanwhile, is dispatched to Oxford University to represent the 100th at a conference. Like Rosie and his men, Croz is reeling from the loss of 120 airmen on three missions in three consecutive days — Rosie’s first three combat missions, no less.
John “Bucky†Egan isn’t haunted by the memory of the Münster mission — he’s hunted by one of its targets. He’s on the ground in Westphalia, Germany, as the episode opens, chomping on a head of lettuce he’s liberated from a farmer’s field. When some creepily symmetrical Aryan children spot him, they call for their parents — Amerikaner! — and he bolts. “Get in the house and call the police,†one of the grown-ups orders them in German. (I asked myself if most rural German households had telephones in 1943, but I was unable to find a satisfying answer.) Bucky is armed with his .45 service pistol, but, unwilling to shoot a kid and reluctant to fire on a German farmer wielding a shotgun, he gets captured anyway.
His fellows are in much friendlier circumstances. Croz is arriving by train to Balliol College, Oxford. Like Rosie at Coombe House, he seems thrown by the comfortable accommodations after months of sharing a Nissen hut with dozens of his fellow airmen. He does have a roommate, though — one Subaltern A.M. Wingate. Who could that be? The officious Brit who shows Croz to his room helps him with the pronunciation of “Subaltern†without explaining to him that the term refers to someone who’s an officer in the British Army but only just. As a member of the USAAF, Croz is in a wholly different chain of command, but as a captain, he’ll outrank his bunkmate, whoever they turn out to be.
Bucky is in one of the livestock boxcars the Nazis repurposed to shuttle captured airmen around. He’s already thinking about escape, as captured airmen were supposed to do, but the first fellow POW he tries to confer with — a flier who says he’s from the 381st — is too injured to run should they even have the opportunity. That night, their captors order them off one train and march them through a freshly bombed city we’ll later learn is Rüsselsheim. The damage is so fresh Bucky concludes the RAF “must’ve hit something for onceâ€; the Yanks don’t bomb by night, as that fistfight in chapter two between RAF and USAAF champions dramatized.
The victims of this bombing are out for blood and unconcerned that this attack was the work of British, not American, crews. They attack Bucky and his fellow POWs, and a Nazi officer scolds a lower-ranking soldier for attempting to defend them from the mob. Bucky stays conscious long enough to see that officer execute four of his fellow prisoners after allowing the townspeople to pick at them for a while. Whether he was genuinely knocked out after being hit over the head or simply playing possum in the hope of avoiding a bullet was unclear to me. Masters of the Air author Donald L. Miller writes that after the war, five German civilians, not soldiers, would be convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of a captured aircrew being marched through Rüsselsheim.
Back at Oxford, the usually unflappable Croz bristles at an imperious lecturer’s need to point out that it took more than 500 years for the Americans to come up with a founding document in the vein of the Magna Carta — an unfair charge on a number of levels. He decides to unwind by admiring himself in the mirror back in his room, shirtless but dressed in his uniform cap, quoting the 1938 drama Test Pilot: “It’s nice to have a little fire.â€
This is, of course, when Subaltern Westgate makes her entrance, that her throwing Croz for a loop. The “A,†she explains, is for Alessandra, noting that women in the British army were encouraged to disguise their gender in documents by using only their first initials. Puckishly embodied by Bel Powley, “Sandra†disarms Croz immediately, saying she’s seen plenty of men dressed in far less. “Big family, small house, few doors,†she tells him. “I can see that you’re married. Your wife has nothing to fear from me.â€
Except maybe she does? Just about everything in the Crosby third of this episode is adapted not from Miller’s book but from the real-life Harry Crosby’s memoir, A Wing and a Prayer, specifically chapter 15, “Learning About Americans From the British.†Crosby writes that his two-week trip to Oxford began on February 21, 1944, about four months after the other events with which it’s cross-cut in this episode, but we can chalk that up to justifiable compression for dramatic purposes rather than Christopher Nolan–esque timeline play.
A more curious change is that Subaltern Westgate was in real life named Wingate, and her fictionalized analogue invites Croz to call her “Sandra†here, where the real Crosby writes that the Wingate-prime was called “Landra†by her friends — a group that most certainly included Croz by the end of their time together. (You say Sandra Westgate, I say Landra Wingate.) While he’s discreet about exactly how close they got — they certainly saw more of each other after their initial meeting at Oxford — Crosby writes, “I did not tell Jean about Landra,†Jean being the woman he’d married shortly before his deployment to England in 1943, and to whom he would remain married until her death in 1980.
Crosby describes “Landra†as having all the same brave and mysterious qualities that “Sandra†has in this episode. She dares to challenge an RAF officer who huffs that the “oversexed, overpaid, and over here†Americans will ask a duchess to bed with little preamble, treatment more befitting a chambermaid or a barmaid. Sandra points out that chambermaids and barmaids are often powerless to resist their employers’ advances and that the Americans’ less class-conscious but more consensual approach to coupling is more equitable. “They’ll pretty much tup anything that moves,†she says.
At the flak shak, Rosie is not warming to the relaxed environment. He spots a member of his crew weeping on a bench overlooking a tranquil garden, and rather than try to comfort the man, he slinks away. In the middle of the night, he wanders downstairs and finds the supervising flight surgeon, a Dr. Houston from the 96th Bomb Group — the man he’s already asked to send him back to Thorpe Abbots before his mandatory five-day rest period is over — sleepless too. The man talks about the calm environs as necessary to counter the war’s fundamental inhumanity, but Rosie protests that interjecting a measure of luxury into that pattern of barbarism is like interrupting Gene Krupa in the middle of a drum solo.
On the other side of the channel, Bucky finds himself in front of a Luftwaffe interrogator named Hausmann. The guy tries the good-cop routine, plying the bloodied pilot with whiskey and smokes while acknowledging that the German cigarettes he can offer are not as good as the American Lucky Strikes Hausmann says he prefers. He even offers to tell Bucky who won the World Series, which happened after Bucky was shot down. Bucky makes a good show of divulging only his name, rank, and serial number. The officious Hausmann takes pleasure in telling Bucky he knows about all of this already, along with Bucky’s birthplace, his close friendship with Buck Cleven, and his reputation as a womanizer. He wants to know how many replacement B-17s the 100th is expecting at Thorpe Abbots, and while he wants Bucky to know he himself is “a flyer, a man of honor,†he’ll be forced to hand Bucky over to the Gestapo if he doesn’t talk. Bucky narrows his eyes and repeats his name, rank, and serial number again.
That Gestapo threat is evidently a bluff. Bucky is put on yet another train to a POW camp. At the railyard, a train full of internees bound for the death camps passes, the arms of the damned reaching through the slats of the boxcars. It’s the first glimpse Bucky has had of the full horror of the Nazi enterprise. (Most Americans were unaware of the extent of the ongoing genocide in 1943 — indeed, Crosby writes that most of what he heard of it he got from Landra, who, in life as in this show, had an undisclosed intelligence-adjacent job that meant she knew much more than Crosby did.)
At a party that night at Oxford, Croz and Sandra watch a woman with a guitar perform Woody Guthrie’s “Tear the Fascists Down,†which becomes an elegiac montage as Rosie soaks himself in a tub — hot water was a rare luxury at Thorpe Abbots, but not at Coombe House — and Bucky sits stuffed in a filthy boxcar full of POWs. As the sequence ends, the sun rises, and Croz and Sandra walk back to their quarters. Croz, ever the gentleman, tries to take his leave before Sandra reminds him they’re roommates. A messenger brings her a note requiring her immediate departure. She can’t delay even to pack her bags, and she commandeers a bicycle to go wherever the hell she’s going. All of this only deepens her mystery to Croz. She gives him her number and a kiss on the cheek, and she’s gone.
There’s an elegant moment back at Coombe House, where one of Rosie’s crewmates is telling the participants of a card game about the moment over Münster where hearing Rosie hum an Artie Shaw number over the radio offered a brief respite from the violence and terror of the mission. This leads into another anecdote straight out of Miller’s book, wherein a crewman aboard a damaged bomber of which the pilot and copilot are both dead, radios the tower of a friendly airfield requesting landing instructions, and the reply he gets is a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. We cut from this anecdote being shared by Rosie’s crew, out of uniform around a poker table, to another guy telling the same story in uniform at the Thorpe Abbots Officers Club. In voiceover, Crosby tells us these kinds of myths were a necessary motivator for these men so close to death. Completing the idea, Rosie, reunited with Rosie’s Riveters, his aircraft that was too damaged to fly the Münster mission, taps out a Krupa solo on its fuselage before pulling himself back up into the cockpit and back in the fight.
The episode ends with Bucky’s arrival at Stalag Luft III, an officers’ camp in Sagan, Germany. Another one of those maddeningly arbitrary title cards, shown in the final seconds of the episode, tells us it’s October 17, 1943 — again, four months before the historical date of Croz’s trip to Oxford. But the big news is Bucky’s reunion with Buck, the friend he’d feared dead. Watching Bucky being marched from behind the wire, Buck asks him, “What took you so long?â€
Flak Bait
• When Sandra interrupts Croz in their room, she asks him whether it was Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable he was imitating in the mirror. He says Tracy; she thought Gable. Gable was arguably the more heroic of the two stars of Test Pilot. While Tracy starred in several World War II films made during the war and, in fact, played Brigadier General Jimmy Doolittle in the 1944 film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a 41-year-old Gable actually enlisted at the height of his fame and flew five missions in Europe, earning a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal. Miller writes that Hitler was aware of the presence of an American movie star in England and that Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring offered a cash reward to any pilot who shot down a bomber with Rhett Butler on board. Other sources say Hitler was a Gable fan and offered a reward to have him delivered intact.