‘Masters of the Air’ Recap: Episode 2

The sophomore chapter of Masters of the Air opens in media res: The Bomber Boys are being debriefed — “Interrogation” was the foreboding name for this ritual — after their disastrous first mission, the aborted bombing run over the Nazi submarine pen at Bremen. Army nurses offer them shots of whiskey as they drag themselves into the barracks. A flight surgeon brings Buck (Austin Butler) to see the badly injured ball turret gunner from his “fort” — that’s a B-17 Flying Fortress — telling the gunner he’s going to show the Major his purple backside.

In having the flight surgeon tell Buck what happened, showrunner John Orloff cleanly encapsulates one of the harrowing details from Miller’s book: Locked into their ball turrets over enemy territory for hours on end, gunners “urinated in their clothing, freezing their back, buttocks, and thighs so badly muscles sloughed and bones were exposed.” The doc also mentions that the blood-spitting Colonel Hughlin burst an ulcer and is on his way to London for treatment. The 100th can expect a new boss.

Callum Turner’s Bucky, who in his deskbound role of air executive did not accompany his brothers on that raid, is mourning his 30 freshly departed comrades in his own way: He’s hammered. Claiming he feels nothing, he goads Curt (Barry Keoghan) into hitting him, anticipating the ‘90s malaise of Fight Club by half a century. The New Yorker’s solid right hand seems to snap Bucky out of his grief at least enough for him to be able to report to Colonel Huglin’s replacement. He’s still drunk,a fact the new C.O. — the extravagantly mustached Colonel Chic Harding (played by James Murray, who is, yes, English) — remarks upon but seems inclined to forgive. Bucky eyes the typewritten letter his new boss has on his desk, perceiving its significance.

Joining his ever-sober best pal Buck at breakfast, Bucky happily reports he’s been relieved of his post as air executive. The guy tapped to replace him, seated at the next table, isn’t any happier to be given the desk job than Bucky was. Bucky tells Buck he realized that Buck wrote to their new boss earlier that morning in support of Bucky’s request that he be demoted to squadron commander, the role that suits him best. His last request as executive was that he be allowed to write letters notifying the families of the airmen who perished in the failed Bremen raid. Buck volunteers to help with this somber chore.

Voiceover narration from Crosby (Anthony Boyle) identifies ground crew chief Ken Lemmons (Raf Law), who was only 19 when he arrived at Thorpe Abbots. Lemmons is promising a pair of moppets from East Anglia, the community around RAF Thorpe Abbots, that he’ll be using fire to clean oil from the landing strip tomorrow and asking these two urchins if they’d like to join the pyro party. They get more of a show than Lemmons promised them when a bomber crashes over his shoulder.

It was a new crew from the 349th squadron on a practice mission, we’re told. The new Air Exec gives the grim stats: The 100th Bomb Group, a.k.a. the Bloody Hundredth, is now down six airplanes and 66 airmen.

That night at the pub, Buck and Bucky get into it with some RAF crewmen. This scene dramatizes a key distinction between American and English forces at this stage in the war. Three years after the Battle of Britain, the English did not concern themselves with “precision bombing” — an absurd term, as Masters of the Air author Donald L. Miller points out — or avoiding civilian casualties. They improved their odds of surviving flak by bombing at night. “It doesn’t matter what we hit as long as it’s German,” one of the Brits explains. “Bombing during the day is suicide.”

The Brits know these Americans have just lost comrades, but they’ve been losing comrades for years. They don’t back down when they see the Yanks taking their generalities about bombardment strategy personally.

The scene is funny because the British pilots are dripping with stiff-upper-lip superciliousness, peppering their sentences with “old boy.” Their demeanor is meant to clash with that of the corn-fed Americans, except with the exception of Buck (who, again, is played by The King himself), all the American airmen present are played by Brits or Irishmen, too. One of the Brits suggests “a bit of sport” — and who wouldn’t want to clean the clock of anyone who proposed a fistfight that way? Cool-headed Buck, surprisingly, is the first to volunteer as tribute, but Curt, who has already punched one of his friends that day, begs his senior officer to let him take the fight. Out in the street, while the opponents circle one another, Bucky asks Buck why boxing is the only sport that interests him. “A test of manhood,” his laconic friend drawls in his Elvis voice. “I don’t lose any sleep over whether the pinstripes beat the polka dots.” Hear, hear.

Curt dodges the Brit’s awkward blow and drops him with a counterpunch. “See, you can hit the target at night!” he gloats.

It’s at this point that Major Crosby pipes up with the clunkiest narration we’ve heard yet, explaining to us, unnecessarily, that what we’ve just seen was a debate over the merits of American “precision” bombing and British “strategic” bombing, wherein any non-military targets destroyed or civilians killed were seen as acceptable losses if they sped the Germans to surrender. Some among the Allies even thought this approach might make ordinary Germans rebel against Hitler’s regime.

The narration continues with some exposition we actually do need, explaining that the U.S. Army Air Force had at least a plausible chance of hitting its targets from the high altitudes that daylight bombing required thanks to the advent of the Norden Bombsight, the second most-closely-guarded secret of the war after the Atomic Bomb.

Colonel Hardin, the man who was smart enough to demote Bucky and make him command pilot of the 100th’s next mission instead, briefs the Bomb Group, telling them their next mission will be to bomb a Nazi submarine base in Norway. Bucky’s navigator, Sergeant Joseph “Bubbles” Payne  (Louis Greatorex, an Englishman, naturally), is too sick to fly, so the job of guiding the lead plane on the raid falls to our narrator, Crosby — the guy who accidentally took his crew to France instead of England in the last episode. Just as Bucky insisted that Buck take his two-dollar bill on the prior mission for luck, Bubbles gives Crosby his lucky snowglobe.

Despite his weak stomach, Crosby manages to lead the formation group to their target. The bombardier aboard his fort, peering down through his bombsight, borrows another airman’s helmet and sits on it to protect his genitals — a minimally reassuring and even more minimally effective defense against the 88mm and 105mm shells flying up from thousands of feet below. The crew accomplishes its mission, releasing their bombs over the target, and begins to turn for home. But Curt’s fort, call sign Red Meat Three, has lost two of its four engines and can’t keep up with the others. Luckily for Curt and his crew, the command pilot on this mission is his pal Bucky, who orders his own squadron, going by the call sign Zoot Suit, to slow down so as not to leave the wounded bomber behind and unprotected.

That means Crosby needs to determine a new heading to bring the group home at a slower speed. Spreading out his map, Crosby watches discolored splotches fall from his helmet and panics, believing he must have suffered a head wound. Then he remembers he’d spent the first several hours of the mission vomiting into that helmet. War is Hell, and Hell is gross.

Shaking it off, Crosby gives Bucky a new return course, reasoning that if Curt has to ditch his ship, at least he’ll have a chance to do it over Scotland instead of over the frigid North Sea. The pokey group has just about made Scotland when Curt’s fort loses a third engine. His crash landing at Fraserburgh destroys a farmhouse but gets his crew on the ground alive.

Back at Thorpe Abbots, Crosby is telling Bubbles about the helmet-puke incident. Bucky stops by to congratulate the navigator on his quick thinking and says he needs “a real nickname,” rejecting the idea that Major Crosby go by Bing as “just lazy.” No one suggests Upchuck Chuck or Pukey Harry.

That evening at the officers’ club, a military band lights into “Blue Skies,” Bucky’s signature song. They might’ve omitted it had they known he’d take it as an invitation to sing. As the party continues, one James Douglas bets two fellow airmen he can get a comely brunette nurse to laugh within a minute of speaking to her. He wins the bet via a dad joke about the difference between a Zippo and a hippo. Curt gets through to the bar by phone from Scotland, thanking Buck and Bucky for ordering the entire formation to slow down to escort his wounded plane to safety. Colonel Hardin and the new air executive corner Crosby and insist that, on the basis of his heroic service today, he accept a promotion to group navigator.

The dance party becomes an indoor bicycle race, random but celebratory. The race has become a pile-up when the air raid sirens go off, and everyone is ordered into the shelters. Bucky and Buck watch the bombs and antiaircraft fire light up the nighttime sky over nearby RAF Norwich. Violent conflict looks beautiful from a safe distance. Buck reflects that “those RAF pricks” were right — daylight missions are suicide. He and Bucky renew their vows to lead their men through them regardless. Boys is the word they use. Bucky is an elder statesman of 27, after all. And Buck is twenty-four.

• This reported $250 million production is necessarily reliant on digital technology for its painterly scenes of B-17s in formation, as these aircraft can no longer be sourced in the quantities such scenes require. The 1969 film Battle of Britain, made back when plenty of WW2 aircraft remained in circulation, is boring as hell but features plenty of non-CGI WW2 airplanes in flight, if that’s your thing. Plus a Murderer’s Row of British screen icons — Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Trevor Howard, Robert Shaw, Ian McShane, and on and on — when they were young and hot, if that’s your thing.

• Though few B-17s remain airworthy eighty years after the events dramatized in Masters of the Air, I actually flew in one once, for about half an hour at low altitude over Central Texas. Poking my dumb skull through the open top of the fuselage like a dog sticking its head out of a car window, I had so much fun that I temporarily stopped obsessing over the fact that this particular airplane, nicknamed Nine-oh-Nine, was more than twice as old as I was. Two-and-a-half years later, that B-17 crashed in Connecticut, killing seven people, including one on the ground.