‘Masters of the Air’ Episode 7 Recap: Let’s Go To Berlin

Is cursive handwriting still taught in elementary schools? It should be, but for anyone needing a quick tutorial, Masters of the Air has your back. We’ve seen air crews penning letters to their sweethearts, peered over Harry Crosby’s shoulder as he perused the letter of condolence his buddy wrote his wife, back when everyone thought the navigator had bought it, and in part seven of Masters, we see the POWs at Stalag-Luft III light up when mail call brings letters from home. Gale Cleven even shares with John Egan how he proposed to Marge in a letter right before he got shot down. She said yes, and that’s cool – Marge seemed really great in the fleeting scene featuring Isabel May playing her, way back in Episode 1 – but now Buck and Bucky just have to beat nearly insurmountable odds in order to bust out of war jail. They’ve got designs on a great escape, but first let’s get back to Cros. Does his wife Jean, whose letter so lovingly referred to Crosby as her “Bing,” know about her husband’s increased extracurricular activity with Subaltern Sandra Wesgate? 

“We all needed to distract ourselves,” Crosby says in his voiceover. Distract themselves from casualties mounting, new crews getting younger and younger, and morale at Thorpe Abbotts nose diving like a burning B-17. And so he called Sandra once. Twice. A third time. And when he again asks her what she does, she only asks him what they’ll be doing in twenty minutes. Which – OK, we know there’s a war on, and Anthony Boyle and Bel Powley have chemistry for days, but what they’re doing looks a whole lot like adultery. Still, desperate, dangerous times. Everybody in this thing could be dead in the next instant. Letters from home can have the opposite effect of highlighting the radical, incommunicable inversion of normal that is the wartime experience.  

Major Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal is sitting on 24 missions completed, and whatever the Hundredth’s rookie pilots think, his success and survival has nothing to do with luck. Rosie’s the best pilot anyone’s ever seen. There are only 15 airworthy forts for his 25th mission, but he’s got a job to do. “Let’s go to Berlin, boys,” and this time around, the bombers enjoy the first break in the odds they’ve had since daytime missions began. The P-51 Mustang has come online, and the powerful, fast long-range fighter is fully capable of escorting the B-17s all the way to Germany’s capital and back. The fighters push past the bombers to engage the Luftwaffe in some frenetic air-to-air action, the forts’ bombs hit their factory target, and Rosenthal arrives back in England to cheers from the ground crews. It’s time to buzz the control tower, and Rosie brings it in low and fast in celebration of completing his 25th mission. 

In 1944, the advent of P-51s as valuable escort fighters isn’t the only shift in USAAF tactics. With total destruction of the German air threat vital to the Allies’ upcoming ground invasion of mainland Europe, the brass has upped the ticket home tally from 25 missions to 30. Rosie is as good a person as he is a pilot, and he volunteers to re-up. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he went home, thereby instigating a tragic cycle of rookie pilots and crews getting blown out of the sky and replaced. “I can’t go home. Not until the job’s done. One way or another.” And a new lieutenant colonel, Bennett, played by a very good Corin Silva, understands where he’s coming from. He signs the papers and makes Rosenthal the new commanding officer of the 350th squadron.  

It’s not just unique cursive handwriting that makes a letter personal. It’s the entire tactile experience of its reception. When Bucky receives Marge’s correspondence at the camp, he inhales its aroma, and perhaps the blush of perfume she left on the page. (Callum Turner, as Egan, with the spot-on impersonation of Austin Butler as Cleven: “Marrrggge.”) And while they continue to suck down an awful, soupy gruel made from turnips and mystery meat – one guy yakking it up is met only with calls of “Use the bucket!” – Bucky also gets to work on fabricating a crystal radio, a concept right out of the back pages of Boys’ Life. They’re grounded. Stuck in this stalag. But they’re not out of the fight. And with Buck as his parts scavenger, Cleven fashions a simple receiver out of some wire and graphite, bringing some hope to the fellas by picking up broadcasts from the BBC. It’s an interesting little touch to Masters of the Air, in the same way the series has highlighted letters and writing throughout, because these analog forms data delivery were so crucial to so many layers of the war effort  

During that brutally cold March in 1944, 80 Brits managed to escape Stalag-Luft III through an ingenious network of tunnels they’d constructed on their side of the vast prison compound. (This was the real-life incident upon which The Great Escape was based.) But while the tunnels were dug thirty feet down to avoid German seismographs, many escapees were soon recaptured, contributing to Cleven and Egan’s frustrations over their own theoretical escape. Worse, the stalag’s new commandant says administration might be transferred from the Luftwaffe’s operation to the brutal and feared SS, which would basically mean they’re fucked. “So what do you think the odds are now?” Buck asks his future best man. And Turner again does that cocky half-grin that’s never very far from Bucky’s mug. “Of us making it home alive? Long. Very, very long.” Now’s probably a good time to inhale Marge’s letter again.     

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.