“Action is character,” the adage goes. It’s sometimes attributed to screenwriting guru Syd Field, who probably got it from F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In any case, Masters of the Air’s third chapter is comparatively short on character-establishing dialogue scenes and long on aerial action, devoting its entire run time to a dramatization of the Eighth Air Force’s raid on two targets, both deeper into Germany than they had previously dared venture.
For anyone who was already having trouble telling apart this show’s parade of dashing 24-to-48-year-old Brits and Irishmen playing Yanks, you’re just going to have to embrace the chaos. I’ve watched this episode four times (!) and reread the relevant sections of Donald L. Miller’s eponymous history book at least twice, a course of study that has given me a solid handle on what happens in this installment while still leaving me unclear in many places to whom it is happening. Take a dozen-plus characters, only a handful of whom we’ve spent more than a few minutes with, hide their faces behind oxygen masks, and you get what you get. Given that the show has intermittently seen fit to provide a title card establishing the date of this or that event, it’s puzzling that nowhere does this episode tell us the single day it takes place: August 17, 1943.
The episode opens in the briefing room, where James Murray’s immaculately mustached Colonel Neil “Chick” Harding lays it out: Today’s adventure will be a “maximum effort” raid by three task forces totaling more than 600 airplanes — “the largest air armada in the history of mankind!” he crows, probably because he knows the flyers of the Bloody Hundredth will need all the confidence they can get. The plan is for the three task forces to cross the English Channel en masse and then split up. One task force — the one our boys are in — will attack a Messerschmitt fighter factory in Regensburg. The second and third will bomb a facility in Schweinfurt that makes ball bearings, an item no 1940s war machine could do without.
The hope is that splitting the armada in two will divide and confuse the Luftwaffe squadrons scrambled to intercept them. These Nazi pilots will expect the Americans to turn around and follow the same course back to England after releasing their bombs, giving the Luftwaffe a second chance to swat them from the sky after refilling their tanks and reloading their guns. But today, the Americans will deny them that opportunity, instead flying all the way to Algeria to join the Twelfth Air Force for a few days of rest and recovery before their return to Thorpe Abbotts. For the aircrews that survive the trip, this will mean 11 to 13 hours of flying time, pushing the operational range of their B-17s to their outer limits.
The 100th’s contribution to the attack comprises three squadrons totaling 21 forts. Only 11 will make it to Africa because the ambitious plan — dependent, we’re told several times in that briefing, on clockwork coordination among the three task forces — devolved into a near-total clusterfuck due to differing responses by the three task forces to the dense English fog on the morning of the raid. Visibility over the targets in Germany was perfect, but there was justifiable fear that any number of American aircraft could be lost to midair collisions before they had ascended above the cloud layer.
The second and third task forces waited for the skies over East Anglia to clear before taking off. This put them hours behind the first one, whom hard-charging General Curtis LeMay, who personally led the raid, ordered to launch before the fog had cleared. (We’ve yet to see LeMay in the show, though the general’s overall displeasure with the 100th’s lack of discipline is mentioned at least once per episode.) So what was intended as a coordinated assault overwhelming the Nazi defenses instead became a calamity, with the first task force taking the full brunt of the Nazi counterattack.
In that briefing, Harding mentions that Major John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner) will be assigned to Captain Charles “Crank” Cruikshank’s bomber as a “reserve command pilot.” He hesitates before speaking that phrase because he’s just invented it. Austin Butler’s Major Gale “Buck” Cleven asks reserve command pilot Bucky what the hell a reserve command pilot is, but he already knows the answer: Bucky has bent the rules to keep himself in the action again.
A chaplain is leading a group of pilots in prayer when an aide in a jeep rolls up to tell them the fog has delayed the launch. This means extra time for already anxious crews to grow more so. Aboard navigator (and occasional narrator, albeit not in this episode) Harry Crosby’s ship, the crew struggles with an existential riddle posed by the pilot: You’re traveling through purgatory (way to steady our nerves, chief!), and you come to a fork in the road. One path goes to hell, the other to Valhalla. In front of each path is a goblin, one a truth teller and the other a liar. What question can you ask the two goblins to determine your proper course?
I appreciated that while the mission these men are waiting to fly does indeed involve a fork in the sky over Nazi-occupied Europe, the relevance of the rest of it remains like the damp English air around them: opaque and confounding.
On another plane, Alice From Dallas, a babyfaced gunner explains to two impatient others why they must wait to take off: Even an obstacle as ordinary as a cow in the runway could “accordion” the thin aluminum skin of their perhaps misnamed Flying Fortress, a war machine as vulnerable on the ground as it was formidable in the air.
On still another, Bucky reclines with a copy of Damon Runyon’s 1932 short story collection Guys and Dolls, which would become a Broadway musical seven years later. We’d had no indication Bucky was a reader before this! The crew asks him what he said to Harding to be allowed to fly along with so many high-ranking officers. “I wasn’t going to miss this one” is all Bucky gives up.
Finally, there’s a foreboding moment of reflection between Buck and Barry Keoghan’s guileless Lieutenant Curtis Biddick, wherein Curt says he feels like this mission could really make a difference.
The order comes down from LeMay. The first task group isn’t waiting for the other two. It’s go-time. “We’re sending them straight into hell — alone,” Harding laments.
After the title sequence, we’re treated to the first of many impressive panoramas of the three squadrons of the 100th flying through fields of flak and clouds over Belgium. They can’t help but notice that the other two task forces are nowhere in sight. One pilot remarks that the Germans “aren’t trying too hard with this flak,” a sign that enemy fighters are inbound. Those Me-109s arrive right on schedule, damaging Buck’s fort. Seeing that his best friend has been hit, Bucky gives himself his second (informal) battlefield demotion of the series, from reserve command pilot to reserve command nose gunner.
Two other forts from Buck’s squadron are knocked out of the fight. Aboard Alice From Dallas, the pilot gives the order to abandon ship; that same gunner we earlier heard declaiming the bovine menace stuffs a presumably sensitive document into his mouth and chews it up as he readies his parachute. The most baby-faced of the three gunners — the one the others have been calling “Babyface” — is trapped in the ball turret of the bomber, its release mechanism jammed. The document chewer spends a heartbreaking half-minute or so trying to free him before accepting that he can’t. “I’m sorry, Babyface,” he says, jumping from the flaming airplane.
Buck’s ship, trailing fuel and slowed by battle damage, tries to ascend and join the 418th squadron for protection from the swarm of fighters. His tail gunner reports that the other ships from the 350th are already gone. (If you’re trying to keep straight whose squadron is whose, again, embrace the chaos is my best advice.) We’re told at Thorpe Abbotts that “every Luftwaffe base in Belgium has been scrambled,” with the Regensburg force still three hours away from its target.
Curt orders the crew of his own wounded plane to bail out but refuses to jump himself, convinced he can crash-land in Belgium and save his co-pilot, who has been shot in the neck and won’t survive a parachute jump. Keoghan’s terror while he attempts to keep the flaming aircraft level is fully convincing, as the cocky lieutenant is at last outmatched by circumstance. The plane hits the ground nose-first and explodes. A noble end for Biddick and a wrap for Keoghan.
At Thorpe Abbotts, Colonel Harding receives word that the other two task forces have finally crossed the Channel, five hours behind schedule. Back over Belgium, we’re treated to another expensive-looking panorama of the battle in the sky: burning airplanes, wafting parachutes, flak and explosions everywhere. One crewman, sans chute, plummets through the void until he slams into the starboard wing of Buck’s B-17. (That’s the right side.)
Buck’s ship is falling apart, trailing fuel and airplane parts. His co-pilot starts to give the order to bail, but Buck countermands him: “You son of a bitch! We are gonna sit here and take it!” The line is straight out of Miller’s nonfiction book.
The Messerschmitts finally break off the attack to refuel, just as Buck and his comrades have reached their target. The ball-turret gunner of Buck’s ship confirms that “the factory … is gone!” They’ve accomplished their mission, but reaching Africa in a disintegrating airplane is another question. His tail gunner counts the parachutes coming out of another fort that has just called it. Realizing that, with their fuel leak, their only chance of getting across the Mediterranean is to cut weight, Buck orders his crew to throw out all their guns and ammo — along with their top-secret bombsight. When the bomber protests, Buck tells him, “We’re over water. The Krauts won’t get it.”
On the ground in Belgium, the gunner who couldn’t save Baby wanders onto the farm of some civilians, who give him a meal. French Resistance fighters take him into custody, and their leader gives the kid the facts: If he turns himself in to the Germans, they’ll put him in a POW camp and afford him humane treatment as the Geneva Convention dictates. But if he accepts their aid in making an escape, he’ll be executed as a spy if he gets caught. We cut away before the kid makes his choice.
The sun is setting over Algeria as the surviving forts spot land. The pilot who posed the riddle asks Crosby to confirm that this is their intended destination. Crosby tells him the answer to that riddle is heading 184, “as sure as I can read and count.”
His fort lands safely, as does Bucky’s. Buck’s ship loses its last engine as he brings it in for a feathered — i.e., unpowered — landing. The fiery destruction of Curt’s fort earlier in this episode might have foreshadowed doom, but Buck once again proves his mettle, ordering his shaky co-pilot not to drop the landing gear until they’re a mere 100 feet off the deck so the plane doesn’t slow too much to land successfully.
Back on the ground in Teleghma, Algeria, there’s a hint of the exorbitant cost of this mission. Buck and Bucky watch two gunners drag their dead radio operator from their ship, both his legs blown off. Bucky tells a shaken Buck that their pal Curt is “probably sipping on a bottle of schnapps right about now.” A third consecutive episode closes with Bucky assuring Buck of their survival.
Flak-Bait
• There’s no hint of this in the episode, but the Eighth Air Force’s second-in-command, General Ira C. Eaker, adamantly opposed the dual-target raid and unsuccessfully tried to persuade his bosses in Washington that the Eighth was in no shape to pull off a mission of such complexity and that, if it went ahead, the casualties would be monstrous. His objections were dismissed, and the result was a total of 60 American bombers and 600 airmen lost — the most disastrous operation of the American air war up to that point. And while a later raid on the same ball-bearing plant in Schweinfurt would succeed in dealing a meaningful blow to Hitler’s war-fighting capacity, the Nazis recovered from this one much more quickly than the men who planned the mission had hoped.
• In the briefing scene, Curt asks why the red line representing the fliers’ intended course extends as far south as Africa. “That’s a characteristically astute question, Curt,” a major replies, eliciting laughter from the room, at which Curt bristles. I initially misheard this line as “That’s a characteristically stupid question, Curt,” dragging affectionate sarcasm over the line into open hostility.
• Buck would become semi-famous in his own time, after Lieutenant Colonel Beirne Lay Jr., who would later co-write the novel Twelve O’Clock High! (which was, in turn, adapted into one of the best films about the air war), wrote a Saturday Evening Post story describing Buck’s heroic actions during the raid on Regensburg. Lay also recommended him for the Medal of Honor. Years later, Cleven remarked, “I didn’t get it, and I didn’t deserve it.”
