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Gale Cleven:
Hit? You? Got a fluid leak on the port wing.

Co-pilot:
I think the column may be jamming on something. Left rudder pedal feels loose and I've only got right rudder.

Gale Cleven:
Compensate.

Co-pilot:
I can't. Help me. I think we may be done. Start responding.

Gale Cleven:
We can manage it. Will you straddle the rudder trim?

Co-pilot:
It's too much. We need to bail out. Engine three is on fire too. Pilots and crew, get ready to bail.

Gale Cleven:
You son of a bitch. We are going to sit here and take it. You hear me? We're going to take it. Lead pilots and crew, we're going to stick with our mission as long as we can fly.

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome back to the Masters of the Air podcast from the National WWII Museum. In today's podcast, we speak with one of the stars of Masters of the Air, Callum Turner, who plays Major John Egan. How you doing, Callum?

Callum Turner:
I'm good, Kirk. Nice to see you.

Kirk Saduski:
The key to our whole series as we've been talking about now from the beginning, the key to the series is the relationship between John Egan and Gale Cleven. Tell us about the relationship between you and Austin Butler. What developed through production when you guys met? You didn't know each other before.

Callum Turner:
No, we didn't, no.

Kirk Saduski:
Tell us about that.

Callum Turner:
You mean on a personal level?

Kirk Saduski:
On a personal level, without getting too personal. Within the context-

Callum Turner:
I'll keep it light.

Kirk Saduski:
Within the context of Cleven.

Callum Turner:
The thing about Austin is that he's just the most incredible actor, actually, and I had so much respect for him going in. I'd seen him in Once Upon a Time and had heard all about Elvis. I got his number, sent him a message, and three days later he sent me one back. Then we just didn't stop really. We just connected immediately. There was this passion from both of us to do these guys justice and this story justice that we connected with immediately.
We hung out all the time. I remember one of the first days we went over Hyde Park. I don't know what the game is called, but you throw the ball. It was like a version of baseball, and it's a very competitive game. Someone pitches it, someone hits it, and then three of you try and get it. I don't know what that game is called. It's this specific game. He knows the name. We just bonded immediately and were open to each other. I think that passion and that determination to do these guys justice was really the immediate thing that connected us.
Then as we went along, we just were so open to each other. As a scene partner, he's the most generous one I've ever had. We supported each other for 10 months. The camera would be on him, and then the camera would be on me. There were a lot of days when I just went in and I wanted to make him laugh because that was John Egan. Trying to get a smile out of him or trying to get a smile out of Cleven was always a fun game for me to be playing. Along with all the other guys, I would say too, there is a real brotherhood between everyone in the cast as it was in real life. We also assumed these positions of the majors.

Kirk Saduski:
It's interesting what you said. Well, yes, we'll get into that now, the leadership. But one of the hallmarks of the series, and a lot of people comment on the authenticity and costumes and production design and etc., but maybe the most authentic thing about the series-

Callum Turner:
Is my mustache.

Kirk Saduski:
Absolutely, dude, that was fabulous.

Callum Turner:
I knew you were going to say that.

Kirk Saduski:
You wore that mustache like Errol Flynn. No, what I was going to say is the authenticity of the brotherhood. That's the point. Expand on that a little bit.

Callum Turner:
That's the most important thing. That's what this show is about. It's about these guys going up into the air and supporting each other as a team to do something unprecedented, to win a war, to save our futures and provide a space for us to live freely. Doing anything like that, you create a bond. I've spoken to so many soldiers over the years who say that these people are like family. As soon as you leave your base, that's your family. Life always imitates art. When you're 10 months into a job, 11 months into a job, you just get that for free.
Then on a personal note, what John Egan's character was like was this drinking, dancing, singing, incredible high-energy, high-octane human being. I really wanted to expand on those ideas because of what they were doing, because cared. That resonated with me because I've always played team sports, and I've always cared passionately. When I play football, I hate losing. I just tried to put that into this. Because when you're playing on a football team or a soccer team, sorry, you're all trying to win the game. That's what these boys were doing on levels that were excruciatingly horrific.

Kirk Saduski:
Don Miller in the book, Masters of the Air, talks about Cleven and Egan being the heart and soul of the 100th Bomb Group and really the spiritual leaders. Although Egan was executive officer for a while, they weren't really in command, but in a way they were in command. I remember on set there was something similar with you and Austin that there was just this thing where you guys were the leaders. Once again, art mirroring life and life mirroring art.

Callum Turner:
Well, the 100th, they were called the Bloody 100th, and they were called the Bloody 100th because they lost so many men. Also, they were so disorganized, LeMay wanted to get rid of them. He wanted to disband them and put the men into other groups. In the midst of all of that, there were these two men that cared so deeply and passionately about keeping their brothers alive that that kind of spearheaded getting them back into line and changing their fates.
Life does imitate art, man. Austin and I were 30 and 31 when we did this, and we were probably the older ones out of all of the cast. When you have 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds running around on a movie set for the first time, they don't understand what it's like. I imagine that would've been the same in the camps. There were moments definitely where, especially because it was in the middle of COVID, there was a lot of pressure to not get COVID actually. Sometimes some of the boys would take risks or misbehave or not show up. So we let them know that wasn't what we were doing here. Because again, as I said at the beginning, Austin and I cared. We really, really, really cared about this, and no one was to step out of line.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the things a lot of people have noticed about your performance is that, as you said, Egan, he liked to drink and run around and make jokes. He was a character out of Damon Runyon, which we could talk about. But what was interesting is that's who Egan is on the ground.

Callum Turner:
Yes.

Kirk Saduski:
In the air... To me, that's so obvious in your performance. Talk about that dichotomy between Egan on the ground and Egan in the air.

Callum Turner:
One of the earliest bits of research that I had discovered was that they say whatever your personality is it goes times 10. So if you're Egan, you drink more, you dance more, you sing more, you go out more because that's how you find solace in the trauma. If you're Cleven, you go into your shell more because that's who he was. He was a quiet man and thoughtful and pensive. So that was the thing that was just such an exciting contrast for me because it meant that I could go further than I would've before to try and find that.
Ultimately, what you're dealing with is grief. You're dealing with PTSD. You're dealing with losing people that you, seven hours before, were friends with on the ground. You could see and you could feel them. I think that's what is so extraordinary about this show is that that's what we're watching, the development of this PTSD in real time. As the show goes on, you just get to see how... It's just the most traumatic thing in the world. Unprecedented warfare, 77% of these men went down or were killed, and nowhere saw anything like it on the ground or in sea or even up until now. That, to your point, is what's so interesting. They come home. They go into this extreme situation, and then they come home.

Kirk Saduski:
How do you come home and have a normal life after that?

Callum Turner:
I don't think you can. But they come home to the base, and then they know they're going back up where they might die. It breaks my heart what these guys had to go through. It really does. And I'm so grateful to them for that.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the themes of the series from the start was going to be to address, if not answer, the question, how did they keep getting back in those planes? After all of this, Callum, how would you answer that? How did John Egan, Gale Cleven, Harry Crosby, etc., how did they keep getting back in the...? After Regensburg, how do you get back into a B-17?

Callum Turner:
I don't know. I don't know. They did what they had to do. Egan and Cleven joined up before Pearl Harbor, so they had something inherent inside of their soul that decided that they were going to go and fight and they were going to go and save the world. Lots of people joined up after Pearl Harbor. But they had something inside of them. I don't know. I don't know how they would do that. What was interesting for me as an actor was I played this game with the plane. I'd always be the last person to get into the plane, and I'd build this friction between me and the plane because I knew that there's no way that that's an easy thing to do, to get into that thing and go up. It's just like a ticking time bomb. You're playing Russian roulette every time you go up there. Yeah, it's just an extraordinary achievement of-

Kirk Saduski:
All you can do, all we can do is try to hint at... Of course, every man had their own individual... whatever they had to do and whatever internal process. This is what, obviously, the actor brings to us. But we can only infer how Crosby, how Rosie, how Egan got back into those planes. Was there any scene that you played that had a particular impact on you in any episode?

Callum Turner:
I mean, lots, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, I'll bet.

Callum Turner:
Episode 4, for me, just in its entirety is an interesting... It just develops in a really fascinating way because that's when Egan's starting to lose his mind. Up until that point, like you said, they had to do what they had to do, and they had to lead. This is just an unraveling of his mind and of his soul. The things that he's doing and how he's doing it is really starting to crumble his insides. He's drinking a lot and he takes the pass to go to London to try and escape it. Then by being in London, it's even worse. I guess to your other question about getting in the plane, it's because they had an enemy.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, they had enemy-

Callum Turner:
It's because they were fighting against someone and they had to save... They saved the world. They really did.

Kirk Saduski:
They truly did. They had an enemy, but they also had a brother or brothers. They had nine other brothers. We've read, and I'm sure you... So often, they kept getting back in the plane because Gale did, and Gale would get back in the plane because John did, etc., etc. Why do you think Cleven and Egan became...? As we show in the show and as you and Austin portrayed, they were pretty different. You even say that in the first scene.

Callum Turner:
In the first scene, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
"Why are we friends?" Why do you think they were friends?

Callum Turner:
Because they connected, one, because they were fighting the fight, and they joined up early. Two, because they were pretty damn good at what they did. These are two of the best pilots around until Rosie comes, and he has the reputation as being one of the best pilots, too. I think there's just a deep, profound level of respect for one another. They know that they are both going to be vital to the war effort and that they're both incredibly important to that. That brotherhood is truly a special thing. Cleven, up until he died, talked about Egan, and they just loved each other. Sometimes you make friends, and they were friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for life. Those two were best friends for life.

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome back, my good friend, Don Miller. Good to see and talk to you again.

Donald Miller:
It is, Kirk. [?] another one.

Kirk Saduski:
We streamed Episode 3, the Regensburg mission episode. Regensburg-Schweinfurt mission, I want you to tell us a little bit about that. That was pretty complex strategically and tactically. This was really a turning point in a way. I know the last time we spoke that just beginning of the combined bomber offensive was a turning point, but this was also a turning point in a way. Explain to us how the Regensburg-Schweinfurt effort signaled something new with the 8th Air Force.

Donald Miller:
This is exactly one year after the 8th Air Force mounted its first mission to Rouen. They can now put a sizable force in the air. They're going to bomb, in this case... Since they don't have escorts, they have to have some way of protecting the bombers so that they can execute the mission. They used a diversionary tactic in this case. Two bomb groups, two bomb divisions were going to fly. One division, this is Curtis LeMay's division, which included the 100th, they will fly to a city, first of all, deep inside Germany. This is the deepest penetration mission the 8th has undertaken in the war. They're also going to hit, it's almost a fetish at the time, ball bearings, and nothing can run industrially without ball bearings. This is their target of the moment.

Neil Harding:
We will be in the first task force targeting the Messerschmitt 109 engine assembly plant in Regensburg. Second and third task forces will hit the ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt. No war machine moves without ball bearings. If we succeed, we knock German production offline for months, and there's no telling how many lives we could save.

Donald Miller:
The ball bearing factories were in town close to Regensburg called Schweinfurt, and that's going to be the major target. The Regensburg mission is an aircraft production facility that included the production of some embryonic German jets. They didn't know that at the time. So it's a dual mission. It's very complex.
This is a breakthrough. They start to use group navigators. LeMay found that rather than training every bombardier and every navigator, he would have a group bombardier and a group navigator, and they would be in the lead plane. The bombers that followed would have not bombardiers, but toggliers, they were called. They simply bombed on a signal from the lead bombers. As soon as the lead bombers dropped smoke bombs and then real bombs, they would hit the switch and drop their bombs. The idea being that these guys could be highly trained and the bombing will be more accurate than it's been, so it's going to be more massive and more accurate. So we feel that we're now entering a new phase of the bomber war where we can start taking out the industrial infrastructure that supports the German war economy and allows the invasion to take place, if you can curtail fighter production.
The day that they take off, it's misty. There's a lot of cloud cover over the bases in England. The first bombers in were going to be LeMay's bombers, and they were going to draw the Luftwaffe to them so that they'll get hammered, allowing the other bombers to effectively bomb the Schweinfurt mission. The roughest part of the mission for that group would be returning from Schweinfurt without escorts and right through the chief fighter zone in Germany. A lot of the fighters, it was believed, will be diverted to the Regensburg mission. That mission is going to bomb and then head to North Africa all the way down the spine of the Alps and all the way down through Italy to North Africa. So that's the theory.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, there's a couple of things I want to follow up on because I want to talk the weather that morning and why the first wing took off and the second two didn't.

Donald Miller:
LeMay had been working... LeMay's the best bomber commander in the 8th Air Force, and his crews were probably the best trained. He's the guy who invented the lead navigator idea. They had been trained to take off and land in the goo, in the mist. He was even thinking of training them for night missions. So he had a lot more confidence in his crews. As they're waiting on the tarmac, these two groups are communicating with each other, and the high command has to make a decision to wait for the weather to clear, it's getting late in the morning and they're not going to be able to bomb at night, or to send just one group down, send the LeMay group down, or just roll the dice, cut through the bad weather, and send both groups down. The second in command, a guy named Anderson, makes that decision, Frederick Anderson. He decides that he's going to release the Regensburg bombers. So they're well over an hour-

Kirk Saduski:
When you say release, you mean send?

Donald Miller:
Send, yeah. They use that term release. They'd send them to the target. So they go down, and they take staggering casualties on the way down. They thought they would. The men started to see what they thought were burning haystacks, and they were actually B-17s that were knocked out of the sky. They actually conducted a mission that was pretty successful in terms of accuracy. The bombardiers got a good using that togglier system. They got a good read on the target and did some pretty serious damage to the fighter facilities. Schweinfurt not as much. The Schweinfurt guys really took a hammering on the way back.

Kirk Saduski:
Because the entire strategy has been thrown off kilter now.

Donald Miller:
Exactly.

Kirk Saduski:
The Schweinfurt, there were several hours right behind the first wing. The Schweinfurt wings were several hours behind the Regensburg wing.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, it was a little further away, and they waited till the weather cleared just a bit, just a bit, but it was still rough. The guys didn't think they were going to be able to fly, but they made it to the target.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, you said that they make it to the target, and we're going to talk a lot more about this. You mentioned North Africa. Instead of turning around and going back to Thorpe Abbott or going back to England, I should say, why were they sent to North Africa?

Donald Miller:
The idea was maybe in the future you can run raids like this where you take fewer casualties by peeling off and going over Italian airspace. Then they can load up again in North Africa, the 12th Air Force is down there, and fly back to England, but, it's called a shuttle mission, on the way back on the shuttle part of it, you bomb another target. They started to run these shuttle missions fairly regularly by 1944. They go into Eastern Europe and run them. Actually, they ran a few out of Russia in a place called Poltava. So that's the theory.
Now, the bombing was actually pretty effective. But in the ball bearing factories, the roofs caved in and they didn't destroy the machines, the actual machines that the operators used to produce ball bearings, and they got that plant up and running pretty fast. But it scared the hell out of the Germans. It was a bombing raid that we thought we were successful, and the Germans thought that they had really taken a hammering on this thing. Speer reported to Hitler that if they run these kinds of raids in the future and they run two or three of them, they stay in the chance, in a month or two, of knocking us out of the war. Speer mocks the Americans in his autobiography for not following up one raid after the other after the other. He said it was a repetition that eventually later in the war kills off German industry. It was a battle between destruction and reconstruction, and the Germans for the longest time in the bomber war win that. They reconstruct railroad tracks and everything very quickly. For a number of reasons we'll get into in later podcasts, they weren't able to do that anymore.
But Speer was wrong to critique the 8th Air Force because they couldn't run back to back-to-back missions because they took such a hammering, and they didn't have enough of a force structure to really do a follow-up raid. The next big raid they will be able to do was in September, and that was back to Schweinfurt. So it shows you, when the Air force finally takes a cold-eyed look at this, they begin to see how difficult without escorts it's going to be to knock out these plants because you can't knock out a plant in one raid, one cataclysmic raid. You got to keep hitting them.

Kirk Saduski:
You mentioned-

Donald Miller:
Bad news for the crews.

Kirk Saduski:
You mentioned the effect that weather played on the success or failure of the Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission, but weather was always a factor. Talk about that. Tell us about that. I remember in the book, for instance, in the late fall or maybe early winter of '43, there were almost no missions because the weather was so horrendous over England. Talk about the impact or tell us about the impact of the weather.

Donald Miller:
Well, there's weather systems all over Europe that affect you. For example, in England there's usually low-lying cloud cover and mist and rain. It's island weather and it's capricious. So taking off's a problem. You can have, on the other hand, a very clear day in England and what looks like a clear day over the target, but Germany has a lot of the same kind of weather. It's almost perpetual cloud cover for most of the winter. So you get to the target and you find that the target's socked in. Then you got to, if you can do this, go to an alternative target.
Then you got another problem. How's the weather on the way back, particularly over England, and how do you find your base? Because there's over 40 of these bases like a checkerboard all across the East Anglican countryside, and it's very difficult to find your base. I talked to Ron Batley at Thorpe Abbotts, and he said here that at one time in one raid there were over a hundred B-17s on a runway. They're just landing anywhere they could find just a glimmer of an opening through the clouds. So weather is huge.
Now, to you and me, it's a beautiful day, the sun's out and things like that, but that's a bad day for the bomber boys because they can be seen. They can be seen. They prefer to bomb through cloud cover, and they develop instruments that allowed them, they thought, to bomb more accurately than you would think through cloud cover. The airmen had an interesting word for it. They called it women and children bombing because of its inaccuracy. All you could do is shoot a beam from a cathode tube instrument of the plane. You shot the beam down to the ground and the beam could pick up the difference between light and dark, water and land. That was it. That's how inaccurate that was. That was called H2X. That was an aiming instrument. The British had instruments, too, that would take them actually to the target. They'd follow these beams to the target. Then there were bombing beams as well. This is the idea of the bomber war being constantly experimental. In fact, the British, by the end of the war, are bombing more successfully at night, more accurately than the Americans are bombing in the day.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the other problems that weather posed is just literally taking off. I know in our first episode that we saw last week, on that first mission to Bremen, Cleven almost runs into another plane. Tell us about how that worked. Tell us what they-

Donald Miller:
Well, the cloud cover is so thick. I had a bombardier on one of my tours, I do these tours of the bomber bases, and he was on tour, and I was trying to explain how the takeoff occurred. Somebody from the back of the bus said, "That's not quite right." I go, "Well, who the hell is this?" Well, he flew 34 missions as a bomber, and he explained exactly how it was done.
They would spiral up. Spiraling up to try to get through this miles and miles of mist could take you up to two hours just to hit the clear air above the clouds, and you popped out of the clouds like a trout popping out of a stream. There it is all of a sudden. Then you saw this multicolored plane up there. That was the Goat that's going to take you to the target. You assembled around that multicolored plane into groups, and the assembly took place for hours. A lot of planes, especially from takeoff to the point where you pop out of the clouds, yeah, it takes two hours, but you're flying blind. You can't see anything. All you can do is listen to the engines of the planes behind you, and an awful lot of bombers crashed into one another taking off.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, you never think of... It was dangerous, even just trying to form up, just getting in the air.

Donald Miller:
They lost over 10,000 guys to accidents in England in training accidents. They were training all the time trying to get this down. They had a beam, Splasher Six it was called. That was the newspaper of the 100th Bomb Group. It was a radar beam. They'd try to fly around Splasher Six and stay on that beam and guide them up into the sky. But again, deadly dangerous, deadly dangerous flying.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, speaking of deadly dangerous, I think our intention in production was to really begin, as it was true in life, to let the Regensburg mission start to expose the audience to how horrific it really was, the experience of being in a B-17 on a bombing mission, particularly when it was that deep into Germany.
So Regensburg, as you were saying, Don, really because it was so deep into Germany, this was a foreshadowing of what was coming. That was our intention in terms of the show is to now you're going to start seeing what this is. Before we saw Bremen, and that was rough, but that was an aborted mission in Episode 1, and Episode 2 was [?] time. Again, it was rough, but it's really mainly about finding the target. Now with the Regensburg episode, this is about the experience. This was about what it is, what it was, I should say, to be on a B-17, to be in any of those positions where you're helpless, as you had said previously, and yet, you still have to follow your mission. How horrendous.

Donald Miller:
[?] that.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, how horrendous. Give us in that Don Miller manner, tell us what it was like to be in a B-17.

Donald Miller:
Well, the plane's shaking like hell for one thing, and it smells inside: oil, piss, you name it, sweat. Then all of a sudden, you reach Hanover, Germany, which is on the German border with Belgium, and there are the fighters, the little friends, as they were called, peel off and say, "Good luck boys. You're going in bareback on this mission." It's hours to the target going in and coming out, and you're in the heart of the German industrial system near the Ruhr Valley. That's the heart of the fighter zones where they've built these massive airfields around production facilities, like Schweinfurt and Regensburg.
Now these planes come in, and they're coming in a different way. Adolf Galland, who was head of the German Fighter Command, started to change tactics. In the beginning, he said his boys, his fliers were afraid of the Boeings, that's what he called them, the B-17s. They would go after the tail. But in climbing to get to the tail, they'd often allow the gunners on the 17s pretty good lines of fire as they were coming in. He said, "What we've got to do is be more accurate, and we've got to terrify the gunners in such a way that their nerves are going to be shot."
So what they would do is they would approach the bomber, they'd send a Staffel, a group of German fighters, there may be 12, to the right of the plane to the bomber and 12 to the left. They'd fly past them but out of the range of their Browning machine guns on the bomber so they are no danger getting hit, but they're out there. It's like they're waving at them: "Here we are." Then they go way out, like five miles, and they'd loop back.
The closing speeds are tremendous. The B-17 might be flying at 240 miles an hour, and the German planes are flying almost at 400 miles an hour. That's a closing speed of a jet. So if you're sitting in a room and you see a fly on the wall or a bug and you clap three times, he's there, he's on you. That's how much time you had to prepare to aim and to hit. They'd fly on echelon in a line. They're not going to hit the rear, obviously. They're going to hit the front. That's where everything essential is. The wings are filled with gas. That's where you kept the gas in the plane. You got the bombardier, the pilot, and things like that. People often ask me, "Well, what's the most dangerous position on the plane?" It had to be the tail gunner all alone back there on his bicycle seat with his two machine guns or the ball turret underneath the plane. Well, it was, by far, way, way, more than anyone else, the pilots, the pilots, beheadings and horrible accidents inside the cockpit, pilot/co-pilot.

Kirk Saduski:
Speaking of pilot/co-pilot, there's a very famous... Major Cleven was made famous, nationally famous on the Regensburg mission.

Donald Miller:
He was.

Kirk Saduski:
Tell us that story about the... Tell us who Beirne Lay was, the article he wrote in the Saturday Evening Post, and what it told us about Cleven.

Donald Miller:
Beirne Lay was one of the founders of the 8th Air Force, seven men apparently and no planes just before when they were formed at Savannah in January of '42. So Lay's a higher up in the Air Force, but he also flew. He flew missions. He wanted to fly on this mission, and he flew from Thorpe Abbotts. They moved him in such a way as they got him out of the way. He was tail end charlie and probably was in initially one of the most dangerous positions in the formation.
So he's an observer, and he's watching this aerial battle, this fighter fight taking place. He has an eye on Cleven's plane which is in front of him and just below him, a clear view. Like bees to honey, the Germans would always pick a plane that was partially hit or crippled. Cleven got really banged up badly and started to drop. He lost altitude and he lost speed. They're ganging up and they're going to hit him. The pilot hit the bailout button, hit the bailout bell, in this case, the signal for everybody either go out the bombay door or out the back door. Cleven wasn't going to allow that to happen.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, explain that Cleven is the squadron commander, so he's in charge of the squadron so he can overrule.

Donald Miller:
He is in charge of the mission. Yeah, he's the commander. A lot of the commanders flew in what they called the second seat or the co-pilot seat. So his decision is the ultimate decision. You're not going to overrule him. I'm not going to name the name of the... I think it's unfair to name the name of the pilot, but he thought the plane was taking too much damage and wouldn't survive to the bomb run, so he hits the bell. People begin to prepare to jump out of the planes. By the way, just an aside, nobody had ever jumped out of a plane before. Nobody had ever been trained. Nobody had ever been taught how to do it. They were taught how to pull the ripcord. That's their first experience with a parachute.
Anyway, Cleven grabs him by the arm, it's a little unclear because it comes through in different stories and Gale's told it to me in different ways, but basically he says, "To hell with this, we're sticking to the bomber. We're not bailing out. We're going to bomb the target, and we're going to return to England." Lay hears this over the radio system. There's two radios on a plane. Because they were in trouble, they were radioing back as to whether they're going to turn around and go back to England or not. There's this little throat mic where you can talk to the crew. Lay could hear what was going on inside the plane. He's almost like in the plane.
So when the mission's over, he calls his friends at the Saturday Evening Post, and he writes an article about the raid, talking about all the kinds of things that made it a breakthrough kind of raid, but mostly talking about Cleven. Cleven should have had won an air medal for this. He supposedly did, but he never picked it up. He said, "Hell, what I needed was an aspirin, not a medal." But this is the legend now of... He already had a legendary reputation as an exquisitely skilled pilot and a command pilot, and now there's this. His reputation is compounded, and he becomes a national hero.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, the Saturday Evening Post, let's remind people, was--

Donald Miller:
It's read by everybody.

Kirk Saduski:
As a personal aside, I know that that story... The story is called, "I saw Regensburg Bombed" by Beirne Lay. It was republished many years ago by the American Library in a compendium called-

Donald Miller:
That's right, it was.

Kirk Saduski:
... Reporting World War II. I know that that story, when Tom Hanks read that story, that's the initial story that got him interested in portraying the war in the air. Now, this was many years ago. I think it was between Band of Brothers and The Pacific. But it was that story that told Tom that there is something really dramatic here, and it isn't a push-button war. The other thing, of course, is Beirne Lay is really known for is that he wrote the novel Twelve O'Clock High-

Donald Miller:
Twelve O'Clock High.

Kirk Saduski:
... and then co-wrote the screenplay of Twelve O'Clock High, which I think you agree with me, is easily the best movie-

Donald Miller:
Oh, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
... about not just the 8th Air Force, until now, of course, but it might be the best movie about World War II I've ever seen, and there's precious little combat.

Donald Miller:
Very little.

Kirk Saduski:
In fact, most of the combat footage, if not all of it, was actually stock War Department footage. It was such a great movie starring Gregory Peck, who just defined the role of Colonel Armstrong, or Savage, I'm sorry, the character name was Frank Savage. It was based on Armstrong. The psychological turmoil that these men were in. It is almost very little physical combat. It's all the psychological and emotional combat the men had with themselves.

Donald Miller:
Well, there are stories about guys that did get back in the plane after a horrendous raid and cracked again immediately. I interviewed a guy named Sherman Small at the Savannah Museum, the 8th Air Force Museum, and it was a riveting interview. He was in the tail of the 17. The Germans had a practice later in the war of flying Kamikaze missions where they would crash into the American bombers. There's a spot in the spine of the bomber where if you'd hit it straight on, you can cut the bomber in half. It's right near the rear stabilizer or tail of the plane, so the plane's split in two.
He's in the back compartment as a tail gunner, and he can't get out. He has a parachute, but he can't even punch himself out. Now, that's a thin-skinned plane, too. It's only aluminum. That's why flak was so dangerous. A guy with a screwdriver and a hard punch can knock the screwdriver right through the thing. But he couldn't get out. He dropped from 22,000 to 23,000 feet, and lived, and lived. They sent him up later in the week on another mission.
When he went up, we interviewed him and I said, "Well, what happened?" he said, "I don't know exactly what happened. I can tell you the long-term result." He said, "As soon as we got over Holland," he said, "I felt the tail kind of swaying, and I thought it was going to break off. That's the last thing I remember." For a year and a half, he was taken off the plane like a frozen Wisconsin log, put into the base hospital. They couldn't handle it there. They gave him sodium pentothal, sodium amytal, and they sent him to the major hospital at Oxford. They couldn't handle him there. They shipped him back to Don Carlos Hospital in Florida. He was in a coma for that long a period of time and recovered and became a very successful businessman and a whole human being again. But can you imagine experiencing that?

Kirk Saduski:
And then being asked to do it again?

Donald Miller:
We talk about support systems and how important it was to have other crewmen in an earlier episode. But let me make this point. One place the guys would go for solace, because they're traumatized by this, the idea of flying, they could go to their priest or their minister on base, there weren't Jewish rabbis, or they could go to the local combat surgeon, Rusty Stover and-

Kirk Saduski:
Well, talk about-

Donald Miller:
... bear witness to what was going on.

Kirk Saduski:
You say combat surgeon, but in the book, and I think again, it's so... Tell us about the combat surgeon because he played many roles. He wasn't just a surgeon. It's a misleading title in a way.

Donald Miller:
Well, first of all, he wasn't a real surgeon. Most of these guys were not physicians. They were like nurses assistants today. They had plenty of psychiatrists in England, but generally these guys only flew for observation and things like that if they have a plethora of breakdowns and things like that. But he handles, at the base hospital, what we would call maybe a light wound, maybe a frostbite, something like that. What they would do is they'd wait for the Russian cure to set in, and that was the fingers would turn black and then purple. Then they'd fall off, and then you could start to work with it. They could handle things like that.
This comes through in Twelve O'Clock High. They had to handle psychiatric cases. Now, the commander, the base commander who's in charge of the whole operation, he's under pressure to get results. He can't keep losing guys to combat fatigue or get a reputation as a base where guys break down. So there's a lot of de-emphasis in Air Force records, cleansing of the records actually, and so we'll never really know how many guys actually broke down. The numbers are around 2,200, but I would say it's more like 8,000. His job was really tricky in that the guys confided in him. I've talked to combat surgeons and chaplains as well. They say, "Well, our job was to settle the guy down, get him thinking right again, get him in a condition where he's able to fly again and experience the same conditions that got him here in the first place."

Kirk Saduski:
Well, it's interesting. You and I have talked about, there's another Gregory Peck movie called Captain Newman, M.D.-

Donald Miller:
Yes.

Kirk Saduski:
... which is a wonderful movie. It's not quite of the caliber of Twelve O'Clock High, but it's about a Air Force hospital stateside, I believe, in Arizona, and that Gregory Peck character in this movie does just that all. Only, he is a real psychiatrist. They make the point and there's a particular storyline where he meets a young man who was a gunner on a B-17 and went through a traumatic experience. He's sent stateside to be cured, and he is cured only, of course, to be sent back into combat. I won't tell you what happens, but you can imagine. The dilemma that poses to the Gregory Peck character, "Why do I help cure them if I'm just going to send them back to what made them sick in the first place?" So that the dilemma that, in this case of psychiatrist, but the flight surgeons had, as you're describing,

Donald Miller:
Some of the flight surgeons toward the end of the war admit to Air Force high command that the only words that'll truly settle a guy down are, "You don't have to fly again ever, and you're on the way to recovery."

Kirk Saduski:
Is there any particular...? We purposefully set most of Episode 3 in the air. You're with the men in those B-17s for the majority of the episode. Any sequence stick out to you?

Donald Miller:
Well, again, how much crewmen have to depend on other crewmen for everything. There you really see, for want of a better term, the companionship and teamwork that's absolutely essential to run a mission. You had to be able to count on everybody. What made it really difficult, and we don't have a big deal about this, but what made it really difficult for a lot of crews was when a guy would get on the plane, maybe this is his 24th mission and he's really sick, and he's sick to the point where he's a non-functioning person on the plane. He's a cipher. Do you allow him on so he can complete his missions and go home endangering the other nine guys by protecting him? Or do you say to him, "No, Joey, you got to get yourself fixed up because you're part of a team here and we need ten not nine"? So the crews had to make that decision.

Kirk Saduski:
What's interesting in Episode 3, as we showed, Major Egan was actually not assigned, but somehow, I'm not sure it's clear exactly how he got himself assigned to that mission. We show him, and this did happen, he went down into the nose and joined the bombardier and the navigator-

Donald Miller:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
... and was acting as a gunner.

Donald Miller:
As we show, I think accurately, all the guys are mystified by that, his friends: "How'd you get on here as a passenger?" But you could pull rank like that at a small base. And the 100th was a pretty loosely run operation.

Kirk Saduski:
Why do you think he did that, though? In other words, this is when he could have avoided... By this point, he's a squadron commander. He didn't have to go up. In fact, he wasn't supposed to because that put four squadron commanders on one mission, and that was verboten.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, it was verboten.

Kirk Saduski:
But he did it anyway. Why do you think?

Donald Miller:
I have absolutely no idea what he's thinking by taking that risk.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, I wonder because, again, he used to refer to... He obviously knew that this was going to be he most dangerous mission to date. As you said in the previous podcast about him writing the letters to the families of the men who were missing, and he referred to them as "My boys." I know Cleven in Episode 2, he did say this. He and Egan are talking, "How are we going to do this?" when they realized how dangerous daylight bombing was. Egan says something to the effect, "How are we going to do this?" and Cleven said, "We lead our boys through it." That was their ethos. They've been together since 1940, and they've been the spiritual, if not the actual, leader of the 100th from the beginning. I think they took that leadership role so seriously. You tell me what you think. I think, Don, it was part of the magnet between the club and Egan.

Donald Miller:
I think so.

Kirk Saduski:
They recognize within each other the great leader that the other was, and not just for themselves. Egan knew he needed Cleven to lead his boys, and Cleven knew he needed Egan to lead his boys. I think that was a big part of their relationship.

Donald Miller:
Just like the combat surgeons, guys like Cleven, who didn't drink, were always in the bar with the guys available. The combat surgeons were largely there to watch for manifestations of what was called, euphemistically, combat fatigue and excessive aggressiveness, a little sexual craziness, Parkinson's-like shakes and things like that, repetition of words and things like that. To break down in combat in the Air Force, you manifested different symptoms than combat troops did on the ground. Infantrymen, for example, could start to show some symptoms. But generally it was a result of long-term stress and the longevity of combat. They had it mapped out to such an extent. They said you could get about 50,000 miles on an army truck, and you could get about 130 days of steady combat and the guy is done. I don't care what kind, whether he's a John Wayne-type character in an American Western or whatever, just a scared PFC, he will be ineffective and eventually he will break. It happens to everybody.
Churchill's surgeon, Lord Moran, served in World War I as a combat surgeon. He wrote a book called The Anatomy of Courage. I have a chapter of that title. I was very taken with the book and he said, "What is courage? That's the first question you have to ask," he said. You have it, but if you have, it's not there all the time. But usually, you bank it. The problem with courage is you have a bank account, but the minute you use it, you lose it-

Kirk Saduski:
You spend it.

Donald Miller:
... not likely to be courageous again. You only have so much, and then you can't take it anymore. He said, "And that's true of combat as well." You can be an Audie Murphy on the line and just a screaming banshee of a killer. John Hersey wrote a great novel on that called The War Lover. It wasn't much of a movie, a Steve McQueen movie, but I think it's better than Twelve O'Clock High as a novel on the 8th Air Force.

Kirk Saduski:
As a novel, but not a movie.

Donald Miller:
No, terrible movie, terrible movie.

Kirk Saduski:
But let's continue the point is that that idea that courage, you have this bank account, you have only so much courage in your bank account, and every time you make a withdrawal, you have that much less. There's no such thing as an unlimited bank account. Don, we're going to wrap it up there for this week. We are three episodes in. We have several more to go. Don, again, thank you so much for your insights, for your knowledge, your-

Donald Miller:
Oh, thank you, Kirk.

Kirk Saduski:
... the book and everything. We will see everybody next week after Episode 4.

Donald Miller:
Fantastic.

Kirk Saduski:
In the next podcast, we speak to executive producer, Gary Goetzman.

Gary Goetzman:
It's thousands of people when you're making locations, represent the 1940s, when you're building sets for this kind of magnitude of star, which is the plane. It's one of those where I think about it and I go, "Man, yeah, it was huge." We had four call sheets a day going of where people were taking care of business and rehearsals, and it was huge.

Kirk Saduski:
The final word on today's podcast belongs to one of the real flyers of the 100th Bomb Group, Robert Wolff, who flew on the Regensburg mission.

Robert Wolff:
I guess Regensburg was the first major loss. They lost nine out of 18 planes. You lost half the group. But I can remember that one. We went across the Channel and we got to the coast, and wham, we got attacked right now and it kept up for the next two hours. I can still see planes going. I saw one plane go down. Flame was coming out of every window in the cockpit, and the waste went... Everything was on fire in that plane. That memory is stuck in my head since that day. But there were planes going and coming. There was flak. There were fighters. More flak, more fighters. They would alternate. I could hear the top turret chattering away with machine gun fire. It was not the greatest... It was a great experience, but it's not one I want to ever repeat. We had similar things later on, but that one really scared the wits out of me. I knew what combat was like, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
You can hear more oral histories from the 100th Bomb Group from The National WWII Museum's online collection available on The National WWII Museum's YouTube channel. Masters of the Air is an Apple original series from executive producers Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman, now streaming on Apple TV+. Click the link in the podcast show notes to watch Masters of the Air, starring Austin Butler and Callum Turner.