A good bit of the screen-time in Episode 6 of "Masters of the Air" is spent with Rosie Rosenthal and his crew at a "flak house" in southern England. Like the hero in my novel "Courage to be Counted" (Jack Nielsen), Captain Rosenthal is not at all happy about being taken out of action. He too doesn't recognize how much he needs a psychological and physical respite from the horrors of war. 

Owners of large country estates in Britain offered their properties to serve as rest-and-recuperation homes, dubbed "flak houses" by the airmen. While the estate staff (cooks, laundry, grounds maintenance) were British, Red Cross Girls were in charge of creating and running the daily recreation opportunities. The women we saw riding bicycles with a group of men as Rosie and his crew arrived at Coombe House were likely American Red Cross Girls -- at the flak houses they frequently wore civilian attire as the goal was to help the men put the war out of their mind. 

The real Coombe House is located on a 50-acre estate at Shaftesbury in the Dorset countryside. It was a hotel when it was converted to USAAF Station 523 and open as a recuperation facility for USAAF officers in September 1943. In late 1945, it converted to a Catholic independent day and boarding school for girls, St. Mary's School, and operated as such until it closed due to financial difficulties in June 2020. 

In his chronicle "Flak Houses Then and Now: The Story of American Rest Homes in England during WWII," Edward Hohman notes that fliers who spent time at Coombe House recall the bar was situated below the grand ballroom and that the men wrote their names and bomb group number on the walls and ceiling. Unfortunately, unlike The Eagle, a historic bar in Cambridge which still sports similar grafitti as pictured here (photo from own visit to The Eagle as part of the National WW2 Museum's "Masters of the Air" tour led by Dr. Miller), the room was redecorated at some point during its time as a girls school. Hohman also notes that Coombe House was one of the flak houses where 8th Air Force psychiatric consultants studied the results of the flak house program. ​

​In the “what’s next on MASTERS OF THE AIR,” we got a brief glimpse of a crew of Red Cross Girls serving from a Clubmobile.
 
The Clubmobiles provided entertainment, cheer, and treats to men in the field (and later at the front lines). They were frat house, Elk’s Lodge, corner drugstore soda counter, and Mom’s living room all rolled into one. And the servicemen loved them – they loved the Red Cross Girls, even when the women abandoned the snappy, feminine, formal uniforms with skirts and blazers in favor of the ARC’s official battledress uniform -- more practical woolen trousers with matching jackets and topped with Army field jackets and GI boots. Each week, the soldiers looked forward to the day when the ARC Clubmobile service would roll around to their unit in the field.

Though the screen time of the Red Cross Girls was brief in Episode 2, several things about the dance hall scene struck me as worthy of discussion. Red Cross Girls worked grueling hours that often began at dawn and were then expected to plan and/or attend all evening social events on base. At a dance such as the one in Episode 2, the women would have been dancing non-stop and wouldn't have had even a moment to gather among themselves. The dances were also often hosted in the base's Red Cross Club (sometimes called the AeroClub). This dance seems to have been hosted at the officer's club, so the Red Cross Girls would have been invited guests (most of the women you see dancing with the servicemen in this scene would be local village women, along with a mix of Red Cross Girls and base nurses). 

When Rosie Rosenthal gestures to a group of Red Cross Girls and says he plans to go chat up one of them, Captain Murphy asks him if he's got his eye on General Spaatz's daughter or the other one. General Carl "Tooey" Spaatz did have a daughter who served as a Red Cross Girl in the European Theater, Katherine "Tatty" Spaatz. She served in England and then crossed the Channel with her Clubmobile Crew after D-Day.