‘Masters of the Air’ Episode 6 Recap: Tear The Fascists Down

For a minute, it was fun to concoct daring escape and evasion scenarios for Bucky Egan. Downed in Westphalia, Germany, deep behind enemy lines, he steals a horse from a farm, or an old truck. There is danger, and a chase. But maybe a sympathetic old grandma points the way to an abandoned airfield. Bucky flies a biplane or something back to England and lives to bomb another day, his hero pilot reputation burnished with the latest crop of new aircrews. While no less heroic, the reality of Egan’s experience is more in line with the hardened edge Masters of the Air has developed, a reality where veteran and rookie bombers alike are chewed up like the urban landscapes of wartime Europe. Sold out by some farm kids and their goat – “Amerikaner! Amerikaner!” – Egan wades deeper into the marshy reeds of Westphalia in order to evade probing shotgun barrels. But soon, the jig is up. With his capture, Egan will instead go deeper into the grinding machinery of war. In there, hero stuff can get crushed in a vice. But there are bright spots. For all of the pilots and crews in Masters of the Air, between the disappearing and the dying, there is sometimes a third thing. Take that, fascists. 

While Bucky sees the inside of a German prison train, Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal’s been ordered into a rest & relaxation holding pattern at one of the USAAF’s “flak houses,” and let’s just say that on the grounds of a commandeered English estate, there’s so much room for activities. Croquet, for example. Water costume wearing, and joyous boat splashing. Or riding with hounds. All trifles which make Rosie wince. (“Jews from Brooklyn do not ride horses.”) The horrors of the Münich run were what sent him here. But isn’t the horror of the experience in general what has sent all of them into this bizarro wartime reality? They joined the fight, because somebody had to help the weak and the persecuted. So, Rosie thinks, let’s fight. After showing another flak house guest what freedom sounds like – cueing up Duke Ellington’s “I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart” on the turntable – Rosenthal declares his fitness for battle with another music example. Nobody’s gonna stop legendary jazz drummer Gene Krupa in the middle of a solo. So why put a restraining bolt on a talented pilot trained to drop bombs?

While Egan, with a few other downed airmen, are pushed by their guards through the ruins of a bombed out German city – “Terror flyers!” cry wild-eyed civilians, who in a particularly dark scene attack the Americans with knives and brain them with shovels – Harry “Cros” Crosby is having his own post-Münich adventure at Oxford, representing the Hundredth at a stuffy Allied conference. And here’s where Bel Powley makes the best entrance yet into the lengthy cast list of Masters of the Air. As Subaltern Alessandra “Sandra” Wesgate, Crosby’s Oxford roommate by chance, Powley delivers a jolt of energy into a series that gets lost telling all its sad war movie stories. 

Over whiskeys, Wesgate spills some wartime tea for Crosby. Stop sad sacking around, blaming the Münich disaster on his decisions as lead navigator. Why was anyone even flying in a B-17 over Germany? “Because Hitler and his gang of thugs decided they should rule the world. That’s it.” This whole sequence, dropped alongside Egan’s increasingly dire POW experience, demands that Powley and Anthony Boyle as Cros burst the mercury in the chemistry meter, and the actors deliver. Like Egan and Paulina cheating death and living life for one more night, or Rosie humming Artie Shaw tunes over the radio for the crew of his fortress as the face certain death in the sky over Münich, Wesgate and Crosby’s Oxford vignette enlivens Masters of the Air and focuses it again on the powers of good pushing back the powers of evil. Crashing an underground party with a mixed crowd, lots of booze, and maybe a few copies of the Daily Worker,  Sandra and Cros catch the set of a folk singer who performs “Tear the Fascists Down.” There’s a great and bloody fight, around this world tonight… 

Woody Guthrie dubbed his acoustic guitar a machine to kill fascists. But back on the job, Rosie and the other B-17 pilots have machines that do that, too.   

Throughout Episode 6 of Masters of the Air, as he was shuttled from one horrible place to the next, narrowly avoided being buried in an unmarked grave, was interrogated by a gloating German officer who threatened to toss him into the clutches of the Gestapo, and witnessed the ghastly reality of Germany sending people to slaughter by boxcar load, Bucky Egan kept the safety on his cockiness. Stuffed into another holding cell, he checked his situation with a look of “Well, I’m currently losing. How do I turn this around?” The fight against fascism does not falter just because you’re on another prison train, and anyway, what he was seeing on this POW trip only further inflamed his desire to fight. And then he sees the best reason alive to keep the pressure on.

During the Second World War, each branch of the German military was responsible for prisoners of war from its opposing force, meaning Egan was greeting other pilots and airmen when he entered the gates of Luftwaffe-controlled Stalag-Luft III in October 1943. And Major Gale “Buck” Cleven tips his cap to Bucky. “What took you so long?” Reunited, and it feels so good, even if they’re currently contained in a vast prisoner-of-war facility. However! This stalag is the same facility Steve McQueen and the boys broke out of in The Great Escape. They’re already heroes. But to keep tearing the fascists down, at least Egan and Cleven have a little war movie precedent on their side. They’ll just have to be sure not to build a tunnel backwards into television history and emerge in the Hogan’s Heroes timeline.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.