I am a man of little power and less influence. I do not delude myself that my scribblings can alter the fate of nations or the choices of sleep-deprived screenwriters. But I do have eyes. I can’t not notice that after eight weeks of me raging at the sea about how Masters of the Air writer/executive producer John Orloff (joined again here by co-writer Joel Anderson Thompson) has been so stingy about putting datelines in his series compacting two years of the most destructive war in human history into 8.5 hours of television, this supersize 80-minute concluding episode is just lousy with title cards.
Dates! Locations! Distances, even!
It’s all so explicit and didactic! The dads of these United States join all the childless dads like me in thanking you, General Orloff, for your service.
As Masters of the Air’s world-shaking finale arrives, “Rosie” Rosenthal, now a major and now in his second combat tour, is leading a bombing raid over Berlin. Narratin’ navigator Harry Crosby tells us it’s “early 1945” — unnecessarily, as a glorious title card has already given us the more specific timestamp of February 3, 1945 — and the skies have been cleansed of the Luftwaffe. “We were truly the masters of the air,” says Croz, to coin a phrase.
But even with the German air force vanquished, Allied bombers were still vulnerable to flak, as we see in this episode’s harrowing pre-title sequence, which dramatizes Rosie’s shoot-down. (In real life, he’d been shot down once already, in September 1944, and returned to combat. This is the guy who volunteered for a second tour after completing his initial 25 missions and who went to Nuremberg after the war to prosecute Nazis for crimes against humanity. Fictional Brooklynite Captain Steve Rogers had nothing on real-life Brookynite Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal.)
In terms of tension and production value, this sequence is as adroitly executed as any in the series. After his fort takes two ghastly hits in the space of a minute, Rosie fights to keep the disintegrating airplane aloft long enough to make it across Germany into Soviet-controlled Poland. “We’re not going down in Berlin!” he seethes.
With his able-bodied crew evacuated Rosie delays his own para-jump by trying to help his unconscious tail gunner escape. By the time he’s confirmed that the gunner is dead, the bomber is in a spin, centrifugal forces working against Rosie as he muscles himself out of the nose hatch.
He appears to break his right arm upon landing — the same one he broke the prior time he was shot down! — as he learns when he attempts to draw his service pistol from its shoulder holster on the left side of his chest, which proves impossible. Hiding in a bomb crater, he watches Russian troops shoot a couple of Nazi soldiers trying to surrender. As the Russians reach him, he spends a few panicked seconds identifying himself — “Amerikanski! Coca-Cola! Roosevelt! Stalin!” — before they lower their rifles and drag him to safety.
This is exciting stuff, and all of it is straight out of Donald L. Miller’s book.
After the title sequence, we’re back in Stalag Luft III, where the order the internees have been dreading has finally come: They’re marching in the worst blizzard to hit Germany in decades. Major John “Bucky” Egan and Lieutenant Colonel Albert “Bub” Clark order the men to dress in the warmest clothes they have and take only food that won’t spoil. Buck and Bucky sidebar and agree that to try to flee the column would be suicide.
Back at Thorpe Abbotts, Crosby receives word that Rosie’s crew has been shot down. So he’s already in a state of high dudgeon when an airman comes to him to say his crew is supposed to be wheels up in five minutes, and the equipment hut is locked.
After kicking the door of the hut open and grabbing chutes for that crew, Croz goes straight to the mess hall to find the man responsible for this life-threatening fuckup, an officer we’ve not seen before named Clouter. “I guess you’ve never flown over Germany without a parachute,” Croz says. When the guy gives him a smirking response, Croz pushes his face into his plate of eggs.
The real-life Harry Crosby recounted a scenario like this (without naming the officer responsible) in his 1993 memoir A Wing and a Prayer, but here it feels like the payoff to a subplot that’s been set up by precisely nothing. This show frequently feels like key scenes have been excized. That rumored four-hour Apple TV+ cut of Napoleon has yet to materialize, but maybe we’ll get a Masters of the Air (10-Hour Version) somewhere down the line.
The former internees at Stalag Luft III have marched through the night and into the following day, the freezing wind uniting the POWs and their escorts in misery. The show dramatizes this in part by having Solomon, a POW whose Judaism the show has called out twice, help a collapsed SS goon to his feet.
Another magnificent title card tells us this column of frozen, hungry humanity is on the “Road to Muskau — 48 Miles Southwest of Stalg Luft III” when the Germans order them to make way for a retreating mechanized infantry unit. A fresh-faced Aryan go-getter is up on his tippy-toes Heil Hitler-ing his defeated comrades, but none of them return his salute or even look at him.
When the POW parade finally reaches a “Maskau, Germany Forced Labor Brick Factory” — as conveyed in a TITLE CARD, baby, booyah! — the men jockey for space by its fire. They’re permitted a few hours’ rest before they’re marched to a train station and packed into cattle cars. Through the slats, Solomon sees the signs for Nuremberg. From the depot, they’re marched to Stalag XIII. One of its inmates calls out to Buck. His name is George Neithammer, and Buck introduces him to Bucky as “the only guy I’ve ever met who knows more about baseball than you do.” George tells Bucky he’s a Cubs man. “They’re always next year,” Bucky consoles him.
In Poland, on the “Road to Poznan” — thank you, title card! — Rosie is enjoying the hospitality of his Russian allies, riding in a jeep while most of the group is on foot. A senior officer hands him a handkerchief, which an English-speaking lieutenant tells Rosie is “for the smell.” As the unit stops to allow a damaged wagon to make repairs, Rosie wanders into the burned-out walled facility adjoining the road. From the sign above the gate, we see it’s Zabikowo Camp.
This is Rosie’s — and the show’s — first look at one of the sites of Nazi genocide. Withered corpses lie in the courtyard; one hung from a noose, another tied to a post. There probably isn’t any way to overplay the horror of this revelation, but as Rosie, Nate Mann does an admirable job of showing us a man fighting not to crack up in the face of such existential cruelty. Inside one building, he runs his fingers over a Hebrew inscription someone has carved into the wall: “The Judge of Life will judge for life,” a translation reads.
The English-speaking lieutenant approaches Rosie delicately. “Our comrades found even bigger camps than this,” he says. “They were built for killing people. Many people at a time. Poles, Russians. Mostly Jews.”
At a nearby “Russian Air Base” (when I say “Title!”, you say “Card!”) Rosie confers with an elderly refugee through a young Jewish woman, who translates for the Yiddish-speaking man. The Nazis made him bury his fellow villagers, including his wife, his daughter, and his grandchildren, the man says. Rosie asks where he will go. “Palestine,” the man says. “Go with God,” Rosie says to him in Yiddish. The woman translates the old man’s reply: “He says that if God exists, He has forgotten him. Not even the earth that covers our bones will remember us.”
At Stalag XIII, another title card says it’s April 2, 1945, two months since the POWs were marched from Stalag Luft III. Bubs reports that their captors are preparing to move them yet again, fleeing the Allied advance. During that night’s torch-lit march, Buck, Bucky, and George agree once they cross the Danube, escape will be impossible. Bucky proposes the three of them break away with another POW, Geroge Aring. So that’s a Buck, a Bucky, and two Georges. Evidently names were rationed during World War II along with everything else.
Just then, an American P-51 swoops down to strafe the column. In the darkness, the pilot has mistaken these thousands of dislocated POWs for German infantry. We don’t get a sense of how many POWs are killed in this friendly-fire attack, but it’s enough to send an enraged Bucky railing at the SS officer in charge. Buck cools his friend out by telling him, “I’m in.” They’ll sneak away at the first opportunity.
As the column reaches a village, Bubs announces they’ve done their 20 klicks for the night. He mentions to Buck that Alex’s map — the prior episode having established that in addition to being a skilled draughtsman, Lieutenant Jefferson is also a stealth cartographer — shows a forest nearby in which escapees could hide. With the group in confusion, as the weary men look for vacant roofs to sleep under, the four seize their moment. The two Georges slip off and vault over a wall, followed by Buck. A guard spots Bucky as he tries to go, forcing Bucky to grab the guard’s rifle to prevent him from shooting Buck. It’s a sign of how diminished the SS jailers are that Bubs is able to dissuade them, for the second time tonight, from executing Bucky on the spot.
Dawn breaks as the three escapees take cover from a passing infantry column, and this one is also in retreat. After the jeeps have gone by, they’re trailed by a pale horse, its hide stained with its former rider’s blood. You could call the foreshadowing heavy-handed in light of the fact that George Neithammer gets snuck up on and bayonetted in the back by a Nazi soldier mere seconds of screen time later, but I won’t. It’s a mournful pause where the episode needs one.
George Aring and Buck come to Neithammer’s aid too late, overpowering his killer and the two Nazis with him. Buck disarms one of them, but seeing that this Nazi is barely more than a child, he refuses to shoot. He and Aring then discover the firearms they’ve taken from these Nazis are unloaded anyway.
Rosie is hailed as a hero on his return to Thorpe Abbotts. Over drinks, he regales Croz with the details of his aerial relay back from Moscow, including a stretch on Winston Churchill’s personal aircraft. Croz shares the news that his wife, Jean, is pregnant. Croz is anxious he may be unsuited for fatherhood because of all the killing they’ve done. Rosie reassures his friend their violence has been righteous. He doesn’t reveal what he learned of the Nazis’ depravity in Poland. He just says, “They got it comin’. Trust me.”
American infantrymen pick up Buck and Aring, and Buck returns to Thorpe Abbotts after 16 months in captivity, getting a warm welcome from Rosie, Croz, and Sergeant Lemmons. Back in ‘43, he and Buck had lamented that aircrews were being killed so fast no one would remember them if they went missing.
This scene introduces us to Operation Chowhound, a relief mission to airdrop food to starving Dutch civilians. Even after all of Buck’s time out of the cockpit, Rosie asks him to fly along on this errand of mercy. A truce has been negotiated, but no one is sure the Germans will honor it.
At Stalag VII, another P-51 attacks. It’s daylight, and the pilot must know he’s attacking a prison camp, so he must be pretty confident about his ability to shoot only the guard towers. The POWs take cover but cheer after the Mustang has completed its run — prompting the machine gunners in the towers to open fire upon them.
This is the spark for the POWs to rise up and take the camp. Bucky runs from tent to tent, trying to find an American flag. It’s Jefferson who finds one and hands it to him. Bucky scales the command shed and rips down the swastika, replacing it with Old Glory, to cheers and tears. Miller reports that someone did this, but not who. If Orloff and Co. were flexing their artistic license here, they could just as easily have had Jefferson raise that flag. We do get a brief shot of Jefferson drawing a sketch of the liberated camp, which is cool because his real-life memoir, Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free, included a number of the drawings he made as a POW. But it’s not enough. The number of words Jefferson speaks in this episode barely breaks double digits.
The final 20 minutes of Masters of the Air shift forcefully into valedictory mode as Rosie, Buck, Croz, and even Lemmons — the crew chief who has, he says, never actually flown in an airplane — form a supercrew to for that food-drop. The Germans hold their fire, and someone has landscaped a tulip field to spell a message legible from the air: MANY THANKS, YANKS. (I added the comma. That’s probably tough to do with garden shears.)
The message-in-flowers really happened, and the food drops, but the all-star super crew appears to be a dramatic invention — a fine and honorable one that brings the series a pleasing sense of closure. As this mercy flight returns to Thorpe Abbotts, Buck recognizes the voice issuing landing instructions from the tower as that of his friend Bucky, returned from Moosburg.
The next scene is a montage of everyone at Thorpe Abbotts listening to Churchill announce that Germany has surrendered and the war in Europe is over. As the celebration at Thorpe Abbotts continues into the night, even teetotaler Buck allows himself a pull from Bucky’s flask.
“At first, it felt unreal, impossible, imaginable,” Croz narrates. “And then, inevitable. We were going home.” The dewy montage of the 100th Bomb Group saying their good-byes to the locals is as stirring as it ought to be. Did Buck and Bucky really fly out of England together as pilot and copilot aboard the same B-17? It doesn’t matter. Austin Butler’s grin as he taxis down the runway with his best pal is our reward for a lot of what didn’t work over the course of the series. He looks a century younger here than he did as a POW.
Over a mournful string arrangement of the series’s theme, we get the expected photographs and paragraphs of text detailing the fates of Harry “Croz” Crosby, Alexander Jefferson, Richard Macon, Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, Gale “Buck” Cleven, and John “Bucky” Egan. For all they risked, each of these men lived into old age — again, Jefferson was 100 years old when he passed away in 2022! — with the exception of Egan, who was just 45 when he died of a heart attack in 1961. I hope this show, imperfect a tribute though it is, expands their notoriety.
Now give us a Red Tails series, Apple.
