Masters of the Air: what happened to Sandra? Crosby's memoir names the real woman — and her reason for choosing someone else
Bel Powley's subaltern has a mysterious job, a clear head about what she and Harry Crosby actually are, and no counterpart in the official record. The woman she's based on is in Crosby's own book, under her own name.
Apple TV+ gave Harry Crosby an affair, a British officer with an unexplained war job, and no explanation for where she went. The source material is less coy about all three.
Sandra Wesgate — played by Bel Powley opposite Anthony Boyle's Crosby — is a subaltern, a junior commissioned rank used for women in the British Army's Auxiliary Territorial Service. The show is deliberately vague about what she actually does, has her vanish without notice, and lets Crosby spend the rest of the series not knowing. That vagueness is not a writers' invention. It is lifted more or less intact from the book.
The woman in the book is called Landra Wingate
Crosby published A Wing and a Prayer through HarperCollins in 1993, fifty years after he arrived in England as one of the 36 original combat crews of the 100th Bomb Group. He flew 32 missions and was made group navigator of the entire 100th in November 1943. The memoir is the show's primary source for his sections, and Landra Wingate is in it under her own name.
His description of her is specific: attractive, hard-drinking, well-educated, witty, self-confident, and Scottish, with a war job he could never pin down. He guessed at covert work in occupied Europe or something in intelligence. Writers since have pointed at the Special Operations Executive, which recruited women as couriers and radio operators precisely because they attracted less attention than men.
Crosby, by his own account, never found out what she did. The show turns that into a plot thread. In the memoir it is simply a thing he didn't know.
The production changed her surname to Wesgate. The stated reason was that they "had to change her name for various reasons," which has been read as a rights or family issue — plausible enough given Crosby barely knew her.
Why it ended, in her words
The show leaves it open. The memoir does not.
At their last meeting, Wingate told Crosby she had started seeing an American at her office. His qualification, as she put it, was that he was unmarried — which made things easier than they had been with Crosby.
She chose the man without a wife in Iowa. That is the whole stated reason, and it comes from the man she turned down.
Crosby was married to Jean Evelyn Boehner, whom he wed in 1943, the year he shipped out. The series makes his guilt over Sandra a recurring beat; the memoir has him reaching the same conclusion after returning to the States, that the marriage mattered more.
What happened to both of them afterward
Wingate stayed out of public life entirely. There is no confirmed record of her postwar career, her married name, or when she died. Everything known about her comes from one chapter of one veteran's memoir, written five decades after the fact.
Crosby took a master's at the University of Iowa in 1947 and a PhD at Stanford in 1953, taught English composition and American literature, and moved to Boston University in 1958, where he chaired the Department of Rhetoric and co-wrote six college writing textbooks before retiring in 1984. Jean died in 1980. He remarried in 1982, to Mary Alice Tompkins, and died on 28 July 2010, aged 91.
For the record: the memoir came out in 1993. Crosby lived another seventeen years after publishing the account that put Landra Wingate on the record, and never added to it.
Earlier we wrote: What happens to Eva in Hell on Wheels — the show that buried half its cast wrote her a different exit