Masters of the Air arrives at infamous Great Escape camp

❘ Updated: 2024-03-14T16:30:30

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Masters of the Air Episode 6 finally catches up with Buck – and he’s imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, the same camp from The Great Escape.

Bucky made a prediction to Buck early in the series: when the war is over, they’d be the two men left in the sky. “Don’t count on it,” Buck said – and he was right to be wary of such hopes.

In Episode 4, he was downed during the bombing raid in Bremen and presumed to be KIA. This fuels Bucky’s wartime rage, desperate to get revenge for his best friend’s death – but that need for vengeance lands him in enemy territory after the disastrous mission to Munster.

In the latest episode, he’s dragged through Nazi Germany and eventually loaded onto a train with other POWs, even seeing a carriage full of screaming, terrified Jews being taken to a concentration camp. He’s relieved when he arrives at his destination – but not because of where he is.

Masters of the Air Episode 6 ends on the camp from The Great Escape

In the closing moments of Episode 6, Bucky reunites with Buck at Stalag Luft III, a notorious Nazi POW camp in Poland that was the inspiration behind Steve McQueen’s 1963 classic, The Great Escape.

While the story of the movie takes tremendous liberties with the actual events, Stalag Luft III was a real camp – and allied soldiers did mount an extraordinary escape effort (sorry, but there wasn’t a motorcycle jump over a barbed fence), with 76 men managing to flee the camp before their operation was discovered by the Germans. You can read the full story here.

Amazingly, Buck and Bucky’s reunion is almost exactly as it happened in real life. The 100th Bomb Group Foundation’s website reads: “Upon John’s shoot down over Munster (led the mission to avenge his friend Gale Cleven being shot down two days earlier) and arrival at Stalag Luft III, the first thing Cleven said to Egan was, ‘What the hell took you so long?’ and he replied, ‘That’s what I get for being sentimental!'”

“I have been waiting this whole time for the moment Egan sees Cleven again at Stalag Luft III and they absolutely f*cking nailed it. Even the dialog is word for word out of their account,” one Redditor wrote.

“Holy crap, Stalag Luft III was the camp where The Great Escape took place. I don’t know any of the history of the soldiers in this show, but now I’m super curious to see if they played a role in the actual escape (the characters in the film were fictional, but it was based on real events),” another commented.

Masters of the Air Episodes 1-6 are streaming on Apple TV+, which you can sign up for here. You can also check out our other coverage below: