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Masters of the Air Recap: Bombing at Night


A welcome demotion for Bucky Egan, an unsought promotion for Harry Crosby.

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. 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. 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.

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