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major-mads · 5 months

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Thorpe Abbotts Airbase

Places of Interest in Masters of the Air

Masterlist

The Thorpe Abbotts Airbase/Airfield is located just outside of the village of Thorpe Abbots in Norfolk, England. It was specifically built for the 100th Bomb Group when they came to join the war effort. Flyers with the 100th were set to start arriving in June of 1943, so the engineers and builders had to even out the ground, lay miles and miles of concrete, and build the intricate roads and buildings of the base very quickly.

Many locals did not support the building of the base because it encroached on their farmlands. While the British were happy the Americans were joining the fight, there were definite feelings of animosity towards the 'yanks' (as they call Americans), but most of those faded when the Brits met the airmen who occupied the base.

Donald Miller: Masters of the Air, pgs. 1-2

"Thorpe Abbotts, an American bomber base some ninety miles north of London and a short stroll from the Norfolk hamlet that gave it its name. Station # 139, as it was officially designated, with its 3,500 fliers and support personnel, was built on a nobleman's estate lands, and the crews flew to war over furrowed fields worked by Sir Rupert Mann's tenant farmers, who lived nearby in crumbling stone cottages heated by open hearths. Thorpe Abbotts is in East Anglia, a history-haunted region of ancient farms, curving rivers, and low flat marshland. It stretches northward from the spires of Cambridge, to the high-sitting cathedral town of Norwich, and eastward to Great Yarmouth, an industrial port on the black waters of the North Sea. With its drainage ditches, wooden windmills, and sweeping fens, this low-lying slice of England brings to mind nearby Holland, just across the water. It is a haunch of land that sticks out into the sea, pointed, in the war years, like a raised hatchet at the enemy. And its drained fields made good airbases from which to strike deep into the German Reich. A century or so behind London in its pace and personality, it had been transformed by the war into one of the great battlefronts of the world, a war front unlike any other in history (Miller, 2007, pgs. 1-2)."

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message or comment if you want to be added to the tag list! <3

#thorpe abbotts #gale cleven #john egan #masters of the air #gale buck cleven #major buck cleven #major john egan #rosie rosenthal #1940s #8th air force #mota #road to masters of the air #about masters of the air #hbo war #thorpe abbotts air base #100th bombardment group #100th bomb group #bloody hundredth #bloody hundredth bomb group

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basilone · 2 months

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#masters of the air #mota #motaedit #mastersoftheairedit #mota spoilers #masters of the air spoilers #gale cleven #john egan #basilcreations #twobucksedit #I feel so insane about them I can't put it in words #so making gifsets is how I cope

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rcbertleckie · 1 month

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AUSTIN BUTLER as GALE 'BUCK' CLEVEN MASTERS OF THE AIR · part two

#masters of the air #mota #motaedit #hbowaredit #hbo war #edits #tvedit #hbowardaily #ronsparky #violaobanion #olympain #userstaud #userbells #tuseririna #gale cleven #austin butler #but guys would u believe me if i said #im totally normal about this smile

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cinnamonrollsledge · 3 months

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Masters of the Air + Text Posts & Headlines Screencaps from @itstheheebiejeebies

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k-wame · 2 months

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yall

#them playing footsie at the end OMFG #the entire 8min of this is like a couple trying hard not to think about the amazing sex they had just b4 this & getting back to it after #🗣️📢ayo austin have some couth! nah he down bad lmao #austin butler #callum turner #masters of the air #gale cleven #john egan #homoeroticism #affection #hbo war #masters of air press #cosmopolitan uk #beautiful men

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sluttyhenley · 2 months

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an irish airman foresees his death - w.b. yeats // genesis - valzhyna mort // future home of the living god - louise erdrich // bloodsport - yves olade // summer - safia elhillo // born to run - bruce springsteen // girls that never die - safia elhillo // blue rotunda - louise gluck // brothers in arms - dire straits // accident report in the tall tall weeds - ada limón

MASTERS OF THE AIR (2024) insp, insp, insp

#motaedit #mota #masters of the air #appletvedit #appletvgifs #hbowardaily #hbowaredit #tvedit #tvgifs #john bucky egan #gale buck cleven #callum turner #austin butler #userbells #*#i started thinking about hbo war and #i can't help it i love the way men love #and haven't been normal since

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aramblingjay · 12 days

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Don't count on it.

#masters of the air #mota #motaedit #clegan #gale cleven #john egan #tuseririna #simizone #ronsparky #userbells #my gif #i promise i'm so normal about them #so normal i redownloaded photoshop for this

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meyerlansky · 17 days

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JOHN "BUCKY" EGAN in MASTERS OF THE AIR, PART ONE ↳ are they all like that?

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coldarena · 2 months

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hbo war themes BOB: we're all in this together : ) TP: you are born alone and you die alone MOTA: at least I have my bestie : )

#like fr that one unhinged motherfucker u have. thats the theme of the show #if bob is about brotherhood and comradery and pacific is about loneliness then masters of the air is about having one unhinged bestie #do not ask me for the 8 page manifesto on the pacific being about the myth of war #hbo war #band of brothers #masters of the air #the pacific

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major-mads · 5 months

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Dulag Luft

Places of Interest in Masters of the Air

Masterlist

When captured by the Germans, Allied airmen would be sent to Dulag Luft, the interrogation and transit POW camp for the Luftwaffe that was just northeast of the city of Frankfurt. This is the camp where Cleven and Egan were held in solitary confinement for weeks before being transported right outside Sagan to Stalag Luft III.

Dulag Luft interrogators were some of the best in the business, and Miller describes them in Masters of the Air as "deeply skilled specialists who preferred methods more subtle than a rubber hose (Miller, 2007, pg. 386)." Many of these interrogators had spent time in America and were fluent in English. The conversation "would begin by offering him chocolate and cigarettes and then draw him into some light banter about American baseball or movies.... [the conversation] became so congenial that many airmen were unaware that the interrogation had begun (Miller, 2007, pg. 386)."

The interrogators had thick folders on each man and their bomb group. They gathered their information from intercepted communications, Stars and Stripes newspaper articles, and anything else they could get their hands on. It unnerved some of the men that the Germans knew such specific details of themselves, their families, and their bombardment groups. The conditions were terrible, and many of the officers were subjected to solitary confinement for weeks at a time.

Miller writes about this in his book:

“Downed Allied airmen felt safer in the hands of the German military than they did with the local citizenry they had bombed. Luftwaffe police and interrogators were in official charge of captured airmen, and their tactics for extracting information were rough but rarely barbaric. After being captured, Lou Loevsky was shipped with other downed American airmen to Dulag Luft, the Luftwaffe interrogation center for Allied airmen at Oberursel, a suburb of Frankfurt am Main. At one point in his interrogation a smiling Luftwaffe major asked Roger Burwell why the men in his 381st Bomb Group at Ridgewell had not yet fixed the broken clock in their officers club. Airmen who refused to provide military or personal information were usually threatened verbally. Some were told that their families would not be informed they were alive and "safe" until they began to cooperate; men captured without identification tags were warned that they could be turned over to the Gestapo to be executed as spies. One stubbornly tight-lipped officer - married and with children - was told that if he persisted in his obstinacy, a report would go out the next day from the German radio station in Calais that the night before he was shot down he had been at the Grosvenor House in London, in room 413, with an attractive blond woman. Knowing that the information was exactly correct, the major is reported to have fainted on the spot. Prisoners were also softened up by the appalling conditions at Dulag Luft: the tomblike isolation, the starvation rations, and the mice that ran free in the dank cells, and crawled in prisoners' pockets searching for food. Sometimes the promise of a shower, a shave, and a hot meal was sufficient to loosen a man's tongue. The guards also fiendishly manipulated the temperatures in the cells, shutting off the electric wall heaters in the winter and turning them up to intolerable levels, to 130 degrees, in warmer weather. Hundreds of airmen arrived at Dulag Luft wounded and were denied medical treatment, a flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners of war. "My interrogator said he could see that I was injured and needed treatment and that my being stubborn would only delay my being sent to a hospital," Roger Burwell re-called. On the other hand, high-ranking Allied fliers believed to possess specialized military information were taken on hunting trips or invited to raucous drinking parties with German officers.

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 Portu-gal, 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. After the war, when he was hired as an interpreter by the American military, Hanns Scharff estimated that all but twenty of the more than 500 airmen he questioned disclosed operational and tactical information that proved useful to the Luftwaffe. Few of these airmen, he emphasized, did it knowingly, or through intimidation or a conscious desire to improve the conditions of their confinement. "I suppose he got something out of me," said one flier, "but to this day I haven't the least idea what it could have been." After being released from Dulag Luft, Loevsky and several dozen other airmen were taken by tram to Frankfurt, where they were herded onto cattle cars and sent deep into German-occupied territory to Stalag Luft III (Air Camp number three), near the town of Sagan, a hundred miles southeast of Berlin, one of the half-dozen main POW camps operated by the Luftwaffe hence the term "Luft," or air-for Allied airmen (Miller, 2007, pg. 387-89)."

Dulag Luft was the first stop in a sequence of camps and transportation depots that downed airmen had to go through. Hopefully, we'll get to see more of the camp in the show! We're less than a month away, guys! The wait is almost over!!

tag list: @ronald-speirs @footprintsinthesxnd @georgieluz @sweetxvanixlla @coco-bean-1218 @gloryofwinter

message or comment if you want to be added to the tag list! <3

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basilone · 2 months

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MASTERS OF THE AIR - in every episode: the sky

#masters of the air #mota #motaedit #mastersoftheairedit #basilcreations #motaiee #ep 6 has very very little air in it #but something about captivity versus open air... whew #anyway pls just let me gif 100 more aerial shots like these #flashing gif

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rcbertleckie · 3 months

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masters of the air · part six

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hogans-heroes · 11 days

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The way John looks at and listens to Gale when Gale is opening up emotionally, first about his dad and then expressing what they thought would be their last words.…we need to talk about more.

In both these scenes Gale is the one talking and Bucky is quiet, listening, a genuine hurt/sad look that we never see from Bucky, except here for Gale, so gentle and loving. Gale’s showing him a side that no one else gets to see. He’s hearing Gale’s pain and making him feel seen. It’s such a different side of Bucky, and his expressions here just reveal so much, his feelings as he’s listening. We can see him feeling Gale’s pain. That wince in the first one 💔

To quote @avonne-writes: “It really shows just how serious he can be. He listens. He’s attentive. And then, he tries to comfort Gale with gentle humour.”

I feel like that’s how he was able to reach Gale in the first place. He can be so gentle with him, which is something others couldn’t necessarily know that Gale needed.

#that furrow in his brow when Gale talks about his dad #the absolute love in the second #mota #masters of the air #buck x bucky #clegan #I’m too emotional rn

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lonesomecupid · 15 days

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