Masters of the Air’s seventh chapter leaps ahead several months to March 1944. Buck and Bucky have been sharing barracks at Stalag Luft III, a Luftwaffe-run POW camp explicitly for captured airmen. As Harry Crosby’s narration informs us, the place was bitterly cold and the root-vegetable diet monotonous, but it was run more or less in accordance with the Geneva Convention: The captured Allied airmen interned there slept in bunks, were allowed to attend to personal hygiene, and were even given limited access to books, music, and recreation.
As the episode opens, captured bombardier “Hambone” Hamilton is luring a stray cat out from under the barracks to add some protein to the prisoner’s diet of potatoes and turnips. At supper that evening, a guy who’d evidently been trying to convince himself the meat on offer was rabbit begins to retch at the realization that it’s not. “Use the bucket,” Bucky tells him wearily. No one bothers to look up from the table. (I initially thought the men were eating a stew made from a rodent that the cat had sourced for them, but the hard cut from Hambone cradling the kitty to mealtime seems to imply it’s the cat they’re all eating — fulfilling the series-long dream of wisecracking NBC sitcom extraterrestrial ALF, who would find himself trapped on Earth some four decades after the Allies won the war.)
The men have rigged up a clandestine radio receiver, which Buck uses to listen to a BBC news report. Nothing he learns offers any hope they’ll be going home any time soon: In Italy, Axis troops have pushed back the Brits at Monte Cassino; Allied troops are pinned down on the beaches at Anzio. Buck briefs a POW colonel, who tells him to pass the grim news to the other internees. “We want expectations to be realistic.”
Their listening session is interrupted as everyone is ordered into the frigid night while the guards conduct a surprise search of the barracks. Buck’s jury-rigged radio, concealed inside the leg of a table, is found and confiscated.
After the title sequence, we’re back at Thorpe Abbots. In the last episode, Captain Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal had only just been sent to the flak shack for a mandatory rest period after flying his first (calamitous) three missions in three days. Now we find him on the cusp of his 25th, the magic number after which aircrews were rotated home to the States. Navigatin’ narrator Crosby explains that by early ’44, the bomber boys knew that an Allied invasion of Europe was coming and that softening up the Reich enough to allow that invasion to succeed meant a relentless tempo of bombing missions and ever-growing casualties. The life expectancy of the replacement crews arriving at Thorpe Abbotts that spring was so short that seasoned crews were reluctant even to introduce themselves to the new arrivals.
But Rosie was exceptional in many ways, including in the warmth and informality with which he regarded his comrades. “He wasn’t much of a soldier,” wrote the real Harry Crosby of the real Rosie Rosenthal in Crosby’s memoir, A Wing and a Prayer. “Instead of returning a salute, he smiled and waved.” Crosby’s glowing assessment of Rosie’s contributions to the unit concludes, “Bucky Cleven and Bucky Egan gave the 100th its personality. Bob Rosenthal helped us want to win the war.”
True to the real Crosby’s report, we see the fictionalized Rosie making a point of introducing himself to a newly arrived crew and making sure they all feel as welcome as possible given the circumstances. After the losses of the prior fall, the Bloody Hundredth’s reputation as a high-mortality outfit was well known by this point.
Befitting this show’s pattern, a subplot given major screen time in Chapter 4 is wrapped up in just a few seconds of Chapter 7 as we see downed gunners Quinn and Bailey bicycling triumphantly across the tarmac at Thorpe Abbotts in their dress uniforms. Croz’s narration tells us the French Underground managed to smuggle these two airmen out of enemy territory intact and that per USAAF policy, they cannot now return to combat duty in Europe for fear of revealing what they’d learned of the resistance network in the event they were captured again. So “the lucky bastards got a ticket home,” Croz tells us.
At the officers club, Croz — no longer narrating from the distant future but still suffering through the gnarly present of 1944 — is asking Rosie, who has only a single mission remaining on his tour, what flight-instructor posting he’ll request upon his return to the States. (Because this is not a war movie, and because Rosie’s fate is a matter of historical record, this conversation does not foreshadow his death.) When the red mission light flashes on, Croz, who’s in a position to know things now that he’s been promoted to Operations, tells Rosie he can relax — his crew will be sitting this one out. Rosie, who’d railed hard against the tranquil vibe and abundant creature comforts of the flak shak last episode, doesn’t like this.
At the officer’s club that night, one of the new arrivals is sharing some recent history that has already become a legend about how Rosie’s fort was the only one of 13 ships to make it home from Münster five months earlier. True to legend, he gets the details wrong, naming Bremen as the target city instead of Münster and 18 as the number of planes on the raid.
Overhearing this, a familiar face that I have only now, seven episodes into a nine-episode series, discerned is one Major John B. “Jack” Kidd, played by sourpussed Brit Edward Ashley, corrects the mistaken storyteller. Jack then ascribes Rosie’s resilience to the fact he’s the best B-17 pilot he’s ever seen: “If you can fly half as good as him, you might make it to 25, too.” And if Major Kidd could give the kids a pep talk half as good as Rosie, these greenhorns might sleep a little easier. Try harder, Jack.
Back in stir, Buck and Bucky are conspiring to build a crystal radio to replace the one the guards confiscated. An air-raid siren goes off, sending everyone back inside. The sound of the anti-aircraft fire seems to be coming from the direction of Berlin, only about 100 miles northwest of the camp. The knowledge that der Führer’s backyard is getting pounded seems to raise everyone’s spirits until they hear a much closer gunshot from right outside. The guards claim that the POW they shot had wandered “outside the block,” allowing a guard dog to maul the already wounded man before finally taking him to the infirmary. Bucky, in particular, is convinced this man was shot for no reason, exacerbating tensions between the POWs and the guards.
At Thorpe Abbotts, we learn that the daylight raid on Berlin that Buck and Bucky were overhearing has become the 100th’s costliest bloodbath yet. Fifteen bombers and 150 airmen fail to return; the forts that do make it back spill out spent .50-caliber shell casings and horrifically wounded airmen as soon as they land. In the narration, Croz drops another time stamp on us, telling us it’s March 6, 1944, referred to hereafter as “Black Monday” — the deadliest day of the war for the Bloody Hundredth.
Trying to drink away their demons at the Officers’ Club, Major Shoens tells a crowd about the horrors of war he’s seen firsthand. The morbid mood infects everyone, and it is to this psychic pain that Croz, in narration again, ascribes his choice to call Subaltern Sandra Westgate again and to forget about the strictures of his marriage vows this time.
At the camp, Bucky vandalizes a phonograph to get a component Buck needs for his crystal radio, and a Red Cross mail call brings Buck a letter from his beloved Marge. Later, he tells Bucky she’s agreed to marry him and asks Bucky to be his best man. They agree on this much but not on whether they should be planning an escape. Bucky wants to do it, but Buck is convinced that waiting out the war is his best chance of making it to his own wedding alive.
Crosby has been hand-writing condolence letters to the families of the lost airmen when Jack hands him a dossier on the next mission. The brass are sending the 100th right back to Berlin along the same route where 15 of their bombers were shot down the day before. “They don’t care if they kill us all, do they?” Croz asks.
The man giving the 100th this bitter pill to swallow the next morning is an officer we’ve not seen before, a Lieutenant Colonel John Bennett, filling in for Colonel Harding. (We don’t get this detail, but, in fact, Harding had been sent to London for emergency medical treatment after the gallstones he’d been ignoring for months nearly killed him.) When a major dares to speak aloud what all the men are thinking — this is the same suicidal route on which 150 of their comrades had been shot down two days earlier — Bennett says he’ll be serving as command pilot, as he’s unwilling to order men on a mission that he wouldn’t fly himself. According to Donald L. Miller’s book, Bennett bitterly protested the order to send the 100th right back to Berlin and, losing that argument, had requested and been given permission to lead the attack personally.
In narration mode again — this is the most narration-heavy episode yet — Croz tells us that after the losses of March 6, the 100th can send only 15 bombers on the March 8 follow-up raid, shitty odds for Rosie’s final mission. But Rosie shows no sign of anxiety as he briefs his crew. “Let’s go to Berlin,” he says, smiling.
As this underpopulated armada gets airborne, we get another piece of Croz narration that feels weirdly incomplete. He calls the Allies’ new trump card, the P-51 Mustang, “hands down the best fidget plane of the war. Escorted by the Mustangs for the entire mission, the odds were starting to shift in our favor.” Entire mission are the key words there: The Mustang was faster and more agile than the Luftwaffe planes it would be fighting, but its major selling point was simply that it was the first Allied fighter with enough fuel capacity to accompany American bombers all the way to their targets in Germany and home again. Before the P-51, fighters had enough gas to cover the bombers only part of the way, leaving them vulnerable to Luftwaffe interceptors once they had to turn around. (The old warbird Tom Cruise takes Jennifer Connelly for a joyride in at the end of Top Gun: Maverick is a modified P-51 — Cruise’s personal P-51, so he’s said.)
And just like Maverick, Rosie celebrates his crew’s safe return from Mission 25 by buzzing the tower at Thorpe Abbotts. All but one of the 15 ships have made it home. As Rosie lowers himself out of the cockpit, Ken Lemmons’s ground crew hoists him up on their shoulders and chants his name. But at the party that night, Jack is bringing down the festive vibe, and Rosie finally gets him to say why: The mission requirement for new aircrews is being increased to 30. Rosie and his crew are in the clear, but new crews will have to fly 30 missions, and the ones only partway through their tours — like Shoens’ crew — will have to fly 28. Shoens does not take the news well. “They want us all to fuckin’ die up there, and no one gives a shit!”
At one of their London meet-ups, Crosby tries to get Sandra — who, again, has some highly classified intelligence job she can’t talk about — to tell him where she’s been. She knows exactly how to counter this. “Do you want to know where I’ve been?” she asks, that charming accent making been sound like bean. “Or do you want to know where I’ll be in 20 minutes?” The song that plays over their subsequent tryst is a canny choice, the monogamy-sucks ballad “Prisoner of Love.”
At Stalag Luft III, the internees are awakened in the night by the alarm. We learn that at least 70 British internees, held separately from the Americans, have tunneled their way out. This is going to make life worse for the POWs still locked down. Buck and Bucky have swapped positions now: Bucky wonders if they should’ve used the commotion of the British breakout to mount their own, while Buck points out that with no one sending him letters from home, why shouldn’t he wait out the war in relative safety? He mourns that his womanizing ways have kept him from meeting his own Marge, vowing that the next woman he becomes involved with will “only know this me.”
“This you will be the one worth knowing,” Buck consoles him.
Crank summons them to the office of a German officer, Simoleit, who tells them — and their superior officer, that same captured Colonel we saw earlier — that most of the escapees who went out the prior night have been recaptured, and 50 have been executed. He refers to “this great escape attempt,” a little joke for the benefit of anyone who may know that it was this episode that inspired captured Australian pilot (and Stalag Luft III POW) Paul Brickhill’s 1950 book The Great Escape, the basis for the 1963 Steve McQueen movie — which in flexing its artistic license and catering to its star’s demands featured 100 percent more sick motocross stunts than the real jailbreak.
Simoleit warns them any further incidents like this may result in the Gestapo taking over management of the camp from the Luftwaffe and hints at what this might look like by telling the American colonel he’s been ordered to make a list of all Jewish POWs in the camp. “There are only Americans at Stalag Luft III,” the Colonel tells him.
The episode concludes with one of those Jewish Americans — the unstoppable Rosie Rosenthal — volunteering for another tour of duty, one that will comprise 30 missions this time. Newly promoted Colonel Bennett tells Rosie that before he makes this choice, he should know that the strategy of the air war is about to change: The Luftwaffe must be completely destroyed before the Allies can invade Europe, and that means using the bombers as bait to lure those assorted Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs into the air so that the new American Mustangs can wipe them out. Rosie is undeterred. He signs his re-up papers, vowing to stay “until the job is done.”
Flak Bait
• In his memoir A Wing and a Prayer, Harry Crosby writes that Rosenthal was shot down on a mission to Nuremberg and returned safely to England with the help of the French Underground, then returned to flying and was shot down and smuggled home again. As Rosie had volunteered for a second tour after completing his 25, maybe the USAAF made an exception to its rule against sending a downed flyer back into combat — though Rosie’s by all accounts sterling character doesn’t mean he’d be able to resist giving up his Resistance allies under torture were he to be captured. It sounds like a very big risk.
