Masters of the Air: Part Eight
March 7, 2024 8:01 PM - Season 1, Episode 8 - Subscribe
Crosby prepares for D-Day. The POWs wonder how the Allied Landing will affect their fate. Tuskegee pilots attack targets in Southern France.
Cros pulls a couple of all-nighters in preparation for D-Day and sleeps through all the fuss, probably saving a lot of production money. Captain (allegedly formerly Subaltern) Westgate infiltrates Paris and dumps Crosby. German air power has retreated from France completely but the anti-aircraft guns still work, shooting down Tuskegee planes near Toulon that probably didn’t have enough gas to make it home to Italy anyway.
Meanwhile in Luft Stalag III, our heroes and Bucky hope for rescue by the Soviets but prepare to go to war with their new SS captors. The race issue gets addressed obliquely as the captured Tuskegee airmen get integrated with the other captives.
Cros pulls a couple of all-nighters in preparation for D-Day and sleeps through all the fuss, probably saving a lot of production money. Captain (allegedly formerly Subaltern) Westgate infiltrates Paris and dumps Crosby. German air power has retreated from France completely but the anti-aircraft guns still work, shooting down Tuskegee planes near Toulon that probably didn’t have enough gas to make it home to Italy anyway.
Meanwhile in Luft Stalag III, our heroes and Bucky hope for rescue by the Soviets but prepare to go to war with their new SS captors. The race issue gets addressed obliquely as the captured Tuskegee airmen get integrated with the other captives.
How did the Nazi interrogation officers have such specific information about random POWs/airmen? The one who interrogated Bucky knew he knew Buck (who likely only gave name, rank and serial number), and the one who questioned Macon knew that his father earned $17/hr.
posted by cocoagirl at 12:53 PM on March 8
posted by cocoagirl at 12:53 PM on March 8
The interrogator is supposed to be based on a real person. It sounds like not everyone just gave name, rank, and serial number, but they must have had agents in the US providing data. On the other hand, he could be bluffing - did you know exactly how much your father made?
posted by cardboard at 1:21 PM on March 8
posted by cardboard at 1:21 PM on March 8
From Donald Miller's book:
It was the interrogators’ immense amount of information about American Air Force operations that was their most effective tool in extracting information. In intelligence briefings back in England, airmen had been warned about what to expect, but the “apparent omniscience” of their captors unnerved more than a few of them. “[My interrogator] actually inquired about my mother’s health in Terre Haute and asked how my kid sister was doing in high school,” recalled one flier.
Many POWs assumed that the Germans had spies on every American airbase in England. There is no evidence, however, that their agents had penetrated a single air station. They didn’t have to. Most of the information was gathered from Allied sources by Dulag Luft’s efficient staff, who scrutinized American magazines and newspapers brought in from neutral Portugal, including Stars and Stripes, a rich source of hometown information about airmen. Additional information, including logbooks, briefing notes, and airmen’s personal diaries, was gathered from clothing and other personal belongings found in the charred wreckage of bombers. These documents often contained highly secret data about flight patterns, the effectiveness of German defenses, and targets marked for future bombing. An officer in the American Air Force’s Counter Intelligence Corps noted at the time that “it was not uncommon for large German manufacturers to ask the Luftwaffe if their factories were on the list, and if so, when they could expect to be bombed.” German linguists also monitored Allied airmen’s wireless communications. According to Hanns Scharff, the interrogators at Dulag Luft had at their disposal a copious file in which “nearly every single word spoken in the air from plane to plane or from base to plane or vice-versa was carefully noted.” As Air Force counter intelligence experts noted in their own secret files, “nothing in the way of documents, written or printed, was too insignificant to merit close scrutiny” by the intelligence staff at Dulag Luft.
A case in point is the airmen’s ration cards. Every American flier in the European Theater received exactly the same kind of card, and there was nothing on the card to indicate where he was stationed. But investigators at Dulag Luft were able to identify an airman’s bomb group by the way his card was canceled. At Thorpe Abbotts, for example, the clerks on duty in the PX marked the cards with a heavy black pencil. The PX counter was made of rough board. All the cards canceled there carried the impression of its distinctive pattern in the black pencil markings. The Air Force’s Counter Intelligence Corps estimated that 80 percent of the information obtained by Dulag Luft was supplied by captured documents and monitored radio traffic, with the remainder coming from POW interrogations.
posted by elgilito at 5:38 PM on March 8 [11 favorites]
It was the interrogators’ immense amount of information about American Air Force operations that was their most effective tool in extracting information. In intelligence briefings back in England, airmen had been warned about what to expect, but the “apparent omniscience” of their captors unnerved more than a few of them. “[My interrogator] actually inquired about my mother’s health in Terre Haute and asked how my kid sister was doing in high school,” recalled one flier.
Many POWs assumed that the Germans had spies on every American airbase in England. There is no evidence, however, that their agents had penetrated a single air station. They didn’t have to. Most of the information was gathered from Allied sources by Dulag Luft’s efficient staff, who scrutinized American magazines and newspapers brought in from neutral Portugal, including Stars and Stripes, a rich source of hometown information about airmen. Additional information, including logbooks, briefing notes, and airmen’s personal diaries, was gathered from clothing and other personal belongings found in the charred wreckage of bombers. These documents often contained highly secret data about flight patterns, the effectiveness of German defenses, and targets marked for future bombing. An officer in the American Air Force’s Counter Intelligence Corps noted at the time that “it was not uncommon for large German manufacturers to ask the Luftwaffe if their factories were on the list, and if so, when they could expect to be bombed.” German linguists also monitored Allied airmen’s wireless communications. According to Hanns Scharff, the interrogators at Dulag Luft had at their disposal a copious file in which “nearly every single word spoken in the air from plane to plane or from base to plane or vice-versa was carefully noted.” As Air Force counter intelligence experts noted in their own secret files, “nothing in the way of documents, written or printed, was too insignificant to merit close scrutiny” by the intelligence staff at Dulag Luft.
A case in point is the airmen’s ration cards. Every American flier in the European Theater received exactly the same kind of card, and there was nothing on the card to indicate where he was stationed. But investigators at Dulag Luft were able to identify an airman’s bomb group by the way his card was canceled. At Thorpe Abbotts, for example, the clerks on duty in the PX marked the cards with a heavy black pencil. The PX counter was made of rough board. All the cards canceled there carried the impression of its distinctive pattern in the black pencil markings. The Air Force’s Counter Intelligence Corps estimated that 80 percent of the information obtained by Dulag Luft was supplied by captured documents and monitored radio traffic, with the remainder coming from POW interrogations.
posted by elgilito at 5:38 PM on March 8 [11 favorites]
Thanks, elgilito, that's fascinating and thorough. That's an amazing amount of material and information garnered from documents and radio chatter. I did wonder if the interrogator was bluffing about Macon Sr.'s wage, too, but in my experience, if you're financially oppressed, with fewer job options, and the real possibility you'll follow in a parent's footsteps, people tend to be more frank about wages. So I thought Macon could well have known by the age of 20 what his dad's hourly wage was. And if the interrogator got it wrong, it would have tainted everything the interrogator said afterwards.
posted by cocoagirl at 8:39 AM on March 9
posted by cocoagirl at 8:39 AM on March 9
Since this is a Harry Crosby episode, you may be interested in this 30 minute interview with the real Harry Crosby, conducted in 1993. He would have been in his early 70s then if my math is correct. If this has been posted before, my apologies.
posted by seasparrow at 12:38 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]
posted by seasparrow at 12:38 PM on March 9 [1 favorite]
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Poor Lady Astor's D-Day Dodgers, forgotten so quickly.
posted by Molesome at 5:20 AM on March 8