MASTERS OF THE AIR: Part Eight and Nine

Part Eight and Nine of MASTERS OF THE AIR bring the Apple TV+ series to a rousing conclusion as Captain Crosby coordinates navigation for bombing runs during the 72-hour leadup to the D-Day invasion, Majors Cleven and Egan try to escape when the Germans send the POWs on a forced march deeper into Germany, and Major Rosenthal’s plane is shot down near Berlin. MASTERS OF THE AIR , but it has strong foul language, Crosby takes stimulants to stay awake to navigate bombing runs for 72 straight hours, and the last episode has a rose-colored view of the Russian Army, which raped and pillaged its way across Eastern Europe and Germany during World War II.

In Part Eight, Captain Crosby plans the navigation for 200 missions for the three days before D-Day, the invasion of Europe, on June 6, 1944. However, the doctor gives Crosby amphetamines so he can stay awake for 72 straight hours. Eventually, he passes out and sleeps through the actual invasion and has to hear about it from Major Rosenthal.

Meanwhile, three black Tuskegee airmen are shot down while attacking some German positions in French Riviera. They are transferred to Stalag Luft III, where they meet Major Cleven, who is involved in preparations for a possible breakout, because the Red Army is approaching the camp. The prisoners grow concerned that the Germans might decide to execute them before they evacuate the camp, just like they did the 50 POWs who led the famous Great Escape. Major Cleven asks Alexander Jefferson, one of the Tuskegee airmen to help draw maps for the prisoners in case they have to escape.

Part Nine of MASTERS OF THE AIR, the last episode, starts with the exciting story of Major Rosenthal’s plane being shot down on Feb. 3, 1945 over Berlin. He gets picked up by the Red Army and witnesses the horrors of the Holocaust at a small death camp in Poland.

Meanwhile, Major Cleven, Major Egan, the Tuskegee airmen, and other POWs at Stalag III are forced to march more than 50 miles in freezing temperatures. They are then taken by train to Nuremberg and then interned at Stalag XIII. With the Allies closing in on Nuremberg and Berlin, the men wonder whether the Germans will try to kill them or march them somewhere else.

Part Eight of MASTERS OF THE AIR is rather slow and uninvolving. According to the movie, by the time of D-Day, the Allied air forces had pretty much established mastery of the air over Europe, with the Luftwaffe fighter planes virtually eliminated as a threat. That doesn’t make for much of an exciting, suspenseful episode.

Part Nine of MASTERS OF THE AIR is the total opposite of Part Eight, from the very beginning when Major Rosenthal’s plane experiences tough going over Berlin in February 1945. After that rousing beginning, the episode shifts to the tense situation at Stalag Luft III, where the POWs are on tenterhooks after learning that the SS are taking over the POW camps because of the Great Escape, as depicted in the famous 1963 movie by the same name. As the Allies close in on German forces, the POWs are afraid that the National Socialists aka the Nazis will just execute the POWs in cold blood, like they did the 50 top officers involved in the Great Escape. Their fear increases when they realize they’re being transferred to a POW camp outside of Nuremberg, which was the center of some of the biggest Nazi rallies before the war.

Thus, Part Nine is one of the most exciting episodes in MASTERS OF THE AIR. It also has a strong Pro-American, patriotic tone, especially toward the end. In addition, it shows how badly Hitler’s National Socialist Party damaged Germany, as a modern industrialized nation.

That said, Part Eight and Nine of MASTERS OF THE AIR each have several strong, unnecessary obscenities and profanities. In addition, Part Nine presents a too positive view of Stalin’s Red Army, which pillaged and raped its way throughout Eastern Europe and Germany as it invaded. It’s estimated, for example, that up to two million women were raped by Stalin’s army. Also, about 5,000 to 7,000 American POWs in Poland and Eastern Germany were taken by the Soviets and sent back to Russia or Siberia, in violation of their treaty agreement with President Roosevelt and the United States. Rape was also a problem with some of the U.S., British and French troops invading Nazi Germany and its occupied territories.