The Real Harry Crosby

The following are reflections by labor and community activist Jeff Crosby, son of Harry Crosby, a prominent character in the Apple TV series “Masters of the Air.” The series depicts the courage of young men who risked, and often sacrificed, their lives to defeat fascism during World War II. The non-profit group Greater Lynn Senior Services (GLSS) interviewed Jeff about his father and his experience with the making of the series.

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It has been a surreal experience to watch my father played by an actor, Anthony Boyle, in the nine-part series “Masters of the Air.”  Producers Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg chose my father’s unit, the 100^th Bomb Group of the 8^th Air Force flying out of England, to tell the story of the WWII air war. The series follows their earlier production of the U.S. ground invasion of Europe, “Band of Brothers.”

My father, Harry Crosby, left the small town of Oskaloosa Iowa to eventually become the 100^th’s Group Navigator. At one point a Cadillac Escalade supplied by Apple TV picked me and my siblings up at our homes for a flight to Los Angeles for the red-carpet premier – not exactly a regular day at the office for any of us!

The famous B-17 was honored in my father’s war memoir, A Wing and A Prayer, for its ability to stay in the air (and get him back to England) despite heavy damage. He loved that plane, claiming its engines made “the music of angels.”  He crashed back in England after the Bremen raid in a shell of a Flying Fortress with wounded and dead crewmen, 1,200 holes in it and most of its systems destroyed.  

The B-17 had been sold by Boeing, and some generals, as a plane which was so heavily armed – a crew of 10 with 13 50-caliber machine guns – that it could defend itself against the Luftwaffe without fighter escorts. The early slaughter of airmen in 1943 that birthed the nickname “Bloody 100^th” proved otherwise. 

Hanks and Spielberg tell the story of the men who climbed back into B-17s after disastrous losses of their comrades. In the early stages, airmen could expect to last only a few weeks before death or capture into POW camps. The most famous hero of the 100^th, Robert Rosenthal, was shot down three times and kept returning to fly 52 missions – he was only required to finish 25. In the Muenster raid he piloted the only plane that returned…and he came back for more.  After the war he served as a prosecutor at Nuremburg.  

There are important aspects of the story not portrayed in the current show: Air Force segregation, shoot-outs between military police and black Truck Division soldiers who worked at my father’s airbase, and assaults on Black troops who dated white Englishwomen.

My parents were both active in our communities after the war and until their deaths. PTAs, elections, fair housing campaigns, opposing anti-Semitism, supporting Civil Rights, and a deep commitment to helping to end the Vietnam War by working for the successful Congressional campaign of the anti-war priest Father Drinan. Their role in defeating fascism in its most horrific form no doubt conditioned all that activity and effort.  My hope is that my dad’s story will remind us of the cost of defeating fascism when it is on the rise again, in the United States and countries around the world.  May we have the courage to get back in the plane again and again, or contribute whatever is asked of us this time around, to defeat the MAGA New Confederacy.  

I hear my parents’ words as my dad heard his father’s: “Eat what’s put in front of you.”  “Finish the job.” “Isn’t life a great invention?”  This was the discipline and optimism, perhaps, of their generation which survived the Depression and World War.  

As memory fades – and I achieve the status of an elder myself – I think of the things I would still like to ask my father and mother.  

Ask the elders.  They won’t be around forever.

The interview posted  here was made by a local non-profit, Greater Lynn Senior Services, as I began to watch the series, and it prompted my thoughts of my father and the others who defeated fascism.  

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by Jeff Crosby, labor and community activist and son of Harry Crosby