Get the latest gossip
Masters of the Air Recap: When Harry Met Landra
Bucky comes eye-to-eye with the enemy while Croz and Rosie get off base.
Daring pilot Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, whose fort was the only one of the 17 the 100th Bomb Group sent to attack the railroad marshaling yard over Münster to make it home, is shipped off with his crew to “the flak shak,” a term used for any one of several cushy R&R facilities that offered traumatized bomber boys a chance to gather themselves in an explosion-free pastoral environment before being sent back into the fray. At a party that night at Oxford, Croz and Sandra watch a woman with a guitar perform Woody Guthrie’s “Tear the Fascists Down,” which becomes an elegiac montage as Rosie soaks himself in a tub — hot water was a rare luxury at Thorpe Abbots, but not at Coombe House — and Bucky sits stuffed in a filthy boxcar full of POWs. This leads into another anecdote straight out of Miller’s book, wherein a crewman aboard a damaged bomber of which the pilot and copilot are both dead, radios the tower of a friendly airfield requesting landing instructions, and the reply he gets is a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
Or read this on VULTURE