Heavy Artillery

I remembered that there was at least one real incident of German civilians killing downed airmen, all quite late in the war, but yeah... as I said above, it feels to much to me like "and this is why it was okay to bomb them."

It gave me that sense, too, especially in combination with Egan hunted for his life by the first German strangers he stumbles on in the cold open: any sympathy the viewer may feel for the civilians shell-shocked in their still-burning city is shown by their violence to be a mistake. It really did almost knock me out of the episode, which would have been a shame because of the strength of the other two threads, but. Meh.

[edit] Aside from how it makes me feel my sympathies are being directed, it's also just kind of nightmare overkill. For all Egan knows given the slaughter he went down in, he's the sole survivor, alone in a countryside where strangers are shoot-on-sight. It's tense and disorienting and fraught with bad discoveries. He doesn't need to have anything worse happen to him on his way to a prisoner-of-war camp than what happened to him in real life, as it happened to a lot of fliers in real life. (I'm thinking of a line from Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1963): "We were sent to Canada and I came back a navigator. I had a most inglorious war. Having cost the country a packet to train I went out on my first raid, got shot down, and went straight into the bag. It took me two years to get away.") And if the horror of officially sanctioned scapegoat murder is meant to run in parallel with his brush with genocide at the depot—a microcosm of how a community turns into a licensed mob—that's really distasteful and I hope it isn't. It occurred to me with Egan jolting on the dead-cart, getting away into the woods. I understand it really happened to a couple of Americans in 1944, but at the time when I was watching it, it felt a lot like survivor imagery and I felt very weird about it.