Wait, who’re these guys?
It’s been a long series about a long war, but Masters of the Air’s penultimate installment offers the most puzzling collection of storytelling choices this show has yet given us. We get a little hit of how 72 continuous hours of increasingly amphetamine-addled course-plotting sessions in the run-up to D-Day affected our faithful narratin’ navigator Harry Crosby, reminiscent of how Fight Club depicted its schizophrenic narrator’s chronic insomnia, then we leap ahead another two months to August 1944. But before we get to that, we’re introduced in bombing raid res to an entirely new cast of characters over “the outskirts of Rome, Italy,” per one of those erratically deployed title cards.
The 1995 made-for-HBO film The Tuskegee Airmen has a strong reputation. The 2012 theatrical release Red Tails does not, despite a cast that includes Terrence Howard, David Oyelowo, a pre-Hamilton Leslie Odom Jr., and a pre-Creed Michael B. Jordan. In any event, the Tuskegee Airmen certainly warrant a fancy $250 million-ish streaming miniseries of their own. What they do not deserve is to be shoehorned as an afterthought into the eighth episode of a nine-episode series ostensibly based on a celebrated history text — Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air, lest you forget — that mentions the Tuskegee Airmen on exactly one of its 670 pages. It’s like that episode of The Book of Boba Fett that was actually an episode of The Mandalorian; only the book, in this case, is a real book. And the characters were real people whose descendants are still around to recognize what a slight this lip-service-bordering-on-tokensim is.
Since Croz’s voice-over introduces the Tuskegees in the pre-title of the episode, one might infer that this is an element drawn from the real-life Crosby’s memorandum, A Wing and a Prayer. Nope! The real Crosby doesn’t mention them, either, probably because the 332nd Fighter Group, the Tuskegee, was on a different base in a different country from the one where he was stationed.
As near as I can tell, the Tuskegee material here comes from oral histories given by several of those pilots and from Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman and POW — the 2005 memoir from one of this episode’s new faces, Second Lieutenant Alexander Jefferson, who was 100 years old at the time of his death in 2022! (Technically, the face belongs to actor Branden Cook.) Jefferson was one of the “Red Tails” who found himself interred at Stalag Luft III in August 1944, ten months after Buck, Bucky, Crank, and some of the other airmen we’ve been following since Chapter One got there.
I get that bringing the Tuskegees into the story with their arrival at the POW camp would present its own problems. But whoever it was at Amblin, Playtone, or Apple who decided to throw the venerated all-Black fighter squadron — one that operated out of Ramitelli Air Field in Italy, more than a thousand miles away from the England-based 100th Bomb Group whose high-mortality adventures we’ve been following up till now — a few hackneyed-as-hell scenes in the next-to-last episode would strike a blow for representation has judgment so questionable I don’t even want to express my rebuke as a joke.
Truthfully, the Tuskegee scenes in the first half of this episode aren’t any clumsier than many we’ve sat through centered on the 100th Bomb Group. But the Bloody Hundred guys have had time to overcome their flattened presentation — and the fact that every scenario we have seen them in has been dramatized not only in dozens of World War II movies but in hundreds more made by guys who, like George Lucas, grew up watching World War II movies — through sheer exposure. To quote something Second Lieutenant Richard Macon (Josiah Cross) says in this episode fully out of context, “It’s all mathematics.” Writer John Orloff and the others he called in for help try to do for the Red Tails in about 15 aggregate minutes of television what they’ve done for the Bloody Hundred in roughly six hours. This would be bad even if the get-to-know-the-Red Tails scenes were exceptionally good. They’re serviceable.
This episode, and the prior one, was directed by Dee Rees, whose filmography includes the excellent 2017 race-in-WWII drama Mudbound. She shares teleplay credit on this installment with Orloff, the regular writer and an executive producer on the series, and Joel Anderson Thompson. Story credit goes to Orloff, Thompson, and, surprisingly, British comedian Morwenna Banks. Clearly, Orloff recognized he needed help, but none of the people he brought in could airlift him out of the corner he’d written himself into. Besides introducing a new cast of characters, he has to cover D-Day too!
The largest invasion in history is told in the before and after. With 200 bombing routes to plan, Croz refuses orders to get some sleep, pushing himself until he passes out. Croz doesn’t wake up until a couple of days after D-Day, when Rosie, who is sitting by his bunk when he finally wakes up, tells him what he missed. The big shot of Rosie’s Fort, Rosie’s Riveters, soaring in formation with dozens of other airplanes and boats on the Normandy coast, comes as part of a flashback, with Rosie telling Croz what a triumph the invasion was. “There wasn’t a single Luftwaffe fighter in the air,” Rosie rhapsodizes. ”The skies were ours. All from routes you plotted, Harry!” Evidently, the fact Croz was high as fuck on uppers did not impair his work.
And then suddenly it is, per another title card, “Two months after D-Day.” The Tuskegees are now being sent to attack targets in Toulon, France. Conducting the briefing is Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (Jeremy MacKinnon), whom we met in a prior scene, where he lamented to Captain Erwin B. Lawrence (Tomisin Ajani) that the pilots on their command were being denied promotions they had earned because, in 1944, the U.S. Army Air Force was, would you believe, a racist organization. In the briefing, the colonel lets Macon monologue about drag and fuel coefficients and whatnot before acknowledging that even with drop tanks, the fighters probably won’t have enough fuel to return to Italy. His line about how the fake IDs they’re being issued could help them “blend in with the local population” earns derisive laughter from the group.
The colonel is right about the institutional racism, obviously. Miller’s sole mention of Tuskegee Airmen is in the context of a larger discussion about race relations among American crews in wartime England. The Eighth Air Force, of which the Bloody Hundred was a part, was not merely segregated but racially repressive, allowing Black service members to fill support roles only as ordnance handlers, engineers, and drivers, but not to be trained for higher-skilled jobs such as mechanics, air traffic controllers, or weathermen. Nor were Black airmen allowed to serve on bomber crews. Miller reports that this was in large part because General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who ran the newly created U.S. Army Air Force, feared that the prospect of “Negro officers serving over enlisted white men” would create what he called “an impossible social problem.” He created the all-Black fighter unit that became known informally as the Tuskegee Airmen under duress. This was racist and wrong, but it was fact.
The nicest thing you can say about Masters of the Air’s attempt to redress this injustice with 80 years’ hindsight is that it’s clumsy. The writers wanted to dramatize what happened once a group of Red Tails found themselves behind the wire at Stalag Luft III, ten months into Buck and Bucky’s imprisonment there, relying on extant historical sources.
But first they have to get the Red Tails there. The Toulon-raid sequence includes one of the most laughable moments of the series, wherein a pilot who has just told Macon he’s engaged to be married is shot down while one of his comrades yells Noooooo! This is another of the flight sequences where the fact everyone is wearing a helmet and an oxygen mask makes it difficult to tell who’s who, but the Noooooo!-mourned pilot seems to be Second Lieutenant Shelby Westbrook, who survived the war.
Macon suffers a severe neck injury while bailing out of his own P-51. Captured by Nazis, he finds himself in the company of Jefferson and another Red Tail, Second Lieutenant Robert H. Daniels Jr. (Ncuti Gatwa, now Doctor Who himself!). There’s a fun echo of Bucky’s interrogation in Chapter Six as a Nazi officer tries the same good-cop routine on Jefferson and Macon that Bucky got, demonstrating to Jefferson, in particular, that he already knows a lot about him: How little his father earned at an air-brake factory, for example. Jefferson and Macon answer as Bucky did, giving only their name, rank, and serial number. The interrogator continues to show off, claiming to have been to Paradise Valley, a jazz club in Jefferson’s native Detroit, then asks why Black residents of Los Angeles are concentrated in Watts as a windup to the real question: Why these men are fighting for a country that treats them so unjustly.
“Do you know any country that’s better?” Macon asks him. The U.S. “is trying hard to become what it says it’s supposed to be,” Macon says. “And when I get back, I’m going to help them do that a lot faster.”
As Jefferson, Macon, and Daniels are marched into Stalag Luft III, they’re greeted like celebrities. “Hey, look, it’s the Red Tails!” one piece of ADR-ed crowd dialogue says.
Stalag Luft III, unlike the USAAF or its barracks, is integrated. When Jefferson and Macon arrive at the barracks where Buck, Bucky, and Crank are staying, the other white airmen — whose faces convey their alarm at the racially mixed accommodations — look to Buck. “Gentlemen, welcome to paradise,” he says.
Escape plans among the white and Black airmen develop separately until Buck appeals to Jefferson, who introduces himself as “Alex,” to join forces. He’s impressed by a close-to-scale map of the surrounding territory Alex has drawn by hand and tucked inside his copy of Somerset Maughn’s The Moon and Sixpence. (“It’s about an artist who risks everything to pursue his passion,” Alex tells him.)
When Alex asks Buck why he didn’t object to the newly arrived Black fighter pilots sharing his barracks, Buck says, “At least I knew you weren’t spies.” The real-life Jefferson would reflect that he experienced less racism as a POW than he did at home in the U.S.
There’s also an attempt to resolve the story of Sandra Westgate, Croz’s lover in the British intelligence services. (Again, this character gets a slightly different name from her real-life analog, whose name was Landra Wingate.) We see her stand Croz up for a planned London rendezvous before he’s due to return to the U.S. (and Jean, his wife) for a month of mandatory R&R, and get a montage of her in various disguises — a peasant woman, a well-dressed socialite — spying on Nazis in occupied France. We also learn, when a desperate Crosby makes another unsuccessful attempt to contact her via the mysterious phone number she gave him, that whatever cloak-and-dagger business Sandra has been up to since their prior encounter has earned her a promotion to captain.
The biggest chunk of the episode is spent in the prison camp, where Bucky, Buck, and the others try to game out how to survive their captors’ realization they’re now losing a two-front war, with the Soviet Army closing in from the East and the Allied Expeditionary Force on the other side. Bucky, in particular, has grown despondent and surly after months of confinement, picking fights with his fellow captors and refusing to lend a hand when they try to pull tree stumps out of the soil for firewood. He snaps right out of his funk once he learns that a rescue, or a chance at escape, could be imminent. Also, life at Stalag Luft III is about to get a lot worse, with the S.S. taking over the half-dozen prison camps previously run by the (relatively) deferential Luftwaffe.
The guy who seems to be the highest-ranking American there — Lieutenant Colonel Albert “Bub” Clark, whom I was able to identify only because I recognized the actor playing him, Sam Hazeldine, as the undercover MI5 agent who got beheaded in the first season of Slow Horses — points out there are three likely eventualities for the thousands of prisoners at Stalag Luft III: mass execution, a forced march deeper into Germany, or hand-to-hand combat with their captors using whatever makeshift weapons they can come up with. After many listless months on a lousy diet, he recognizes that the two most preferable of those three options will require the men to get themselves in shape. He, Buck, and Bucky agree to formalize their physically arduous shifts on the “stump remover” they’ve been using to collect firewood for cooking. An inventive solution, as their jail guards would surely notice a mass outbreak of jogging or calisthenics. Also, the stump remover vaguely resembles the Wheel of Pain that famously earned Conan the Barbarian his seven-time Mr. Olympia–winning physique. And Jefferson includes a sketch of it that he made in his memoir!
The episode does end on an uncharacteristically elegant note. Buck, listening to a news report on the verboten crystal radio set he’s rigged up, says the Russians have marched into Germany. Alex asks him how close they are when one of those newly installed S.S. guards bursts into the room. Evil-eyeing its occupants but finding nothing amiss, he orders, “Lights out.”
In the darkness, Buck replies to his comrade: “They’re close. Really, really close.”
Chris Klimek , 2024-03-08 20:15:56
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