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John Egan:
So this is it?

Gale Cleven:
This is it.

John Egan:
I'll see you in a few weeks.
If I don't die first.

Gale Cleven:
Hate to break it through your, Bucky, but you are the 100ths air executive now. Not going over there to fly missions.

John Egan:
I had a conversation with the CO over at the 389th and I'm flying with those boys until guys show up.
I'll be an observation pilot.

Gale Cleven:
You son of a bitch.

John Egan:
Yeah, well, someone's going to taste a little combat, tell you what it's really like up there.

Gale Cleven:
Don't you die on me before I get over there.

John Egan:
Don't count on it.

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome to Making Masters of the Air, a podcast from the National World War II Museum, an Apple original series from executive producer Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman. The series follows the 100th Bomb Group as they conduct perilous bombing raids over Nazi Germany and grapple with frigid conditions, lack of oxygen, and the psychological terror of combat at 25,000 feet. Now streaming on Apple TV+. The series stars Academy Award nominee Austin Butler and Callum Turner. I'm your host and one of the producers of the series, Kirk Saduski. I'm joined by Don Miller, the author of the book Masters of the Air, and my co-host for this podcast series. In each podcast episode, we explore the historical context of the 100th Bomb Group. Fittingly, we start today with one of the executive producers of Masters of the Air, two time Oscar winner, seven time Emmy winner, and the man who has been referred to as America's storyteller, Tom Hanks.

Tom Hanks:
That's right, that's right. Let me put it that way.

Kirk Saduski:
Well-

Tom Hanks:
I've been water-skiing between behind Don for quite some time now, so continue along.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's talk about that very phenomenon, Tom, because obviously you two guys have such an... Why World War II? You've both devoted a big part of your respective careers to portraying World War II. Why World War II?

Tom Hanks:
You want to go first, Don, because I'd like to throw it to you in all honesty.

Donald Miller:
All right.

Tom Hanks:
Go ahead, go ahead.

Donald Miller:
Well, I grew up in inside World War II. The neighborhood I grew up in, I was born in 1944, so I didn't know what was going on and things, but the war continued. The veterans continued to march to the cemeteries and shoot their guns and guys gathered at the VFW clubs and the stories flew and guys had trouble finding jobs and the talk was of the war and things like that. My dad was president of Catholic War Veterans, so it was in the bones.
Everybody that worked in the steel mill or coal mine, and it was a wonderful life in a lot of ways because the guys congealed. They really got along together. There was no such thing as a distinction between an infantryman, a marine, and a flyer or a Navy guy. In fact, I remember my uncle, my dad was in the Air Force and they'd jag him once in a while about flying up there, pushing buttons and killing people and sleeping in nice beds. And my uncle who served with the Big Red One and landed on Omaha Beach in the second wave and the only one to survive in his Higgins boat.
He wasn't a great friend of my father, but he'd spring to his defense. He said, "I wouldn't want to be up there. I wouldn't want to be in a steel tube." The thing that bothered him was cover. Where do you get cover? He said, "As I understand it comes on so suddenly and you have no fore warning. We could plan things. And we had doctrine." The army had doctrines, ways of fighting. These guys didn't have any doctrine. They were all new. Everything was new. They were fighting something that was entirely experimental. And even their leaders were like that. So they were making it up as they went along, and they were so damn young.
I'm not a great historian of warfare, but I can't imagine a war anytime in history where so much authority was placed on people so young to get to the target, to bomb the target, to get back and with so little training, no foxholes, the whole idea, no medics. For me, that would've been the big terror, just getting wounded and having somebody shove a morphine needle in you and put you on a cold floor of the plane and hope you live or die.

Kirk Saduski:
I realize you're both sons of World War II veterans. Tom, what's-

Tom Hanks:
My dad hated the Navy and had nothing good to say about the Navy. He was a machinist mate. He went to hydraulic school in Pocatello, Idaho, which was a big town compared to Willows, California is where he came from. But my dad was one of these guys who had never been outside of maybe a trip down to Treasure Island for the World's Fair when he was a kid, had never been outside of Northern California, never really been outside this small farm town. And next thing, I got photographs of him and my Uncle Ernie underneath the palm tree in their Navy whites somewhere in Hawaii. And my uncle has the biggest smile on his face like, "Can you believe here we are in paradise?" My dad has this hangdog look on his face because he hated the Navy in every way.
But I was born in '56, Don. And so that by the time I became a conscious human being, I realized that every teacher that I had, all the parents of the friends talked about their life in three different acts, that was before the war. You have to understand, kid, that was before the war or that was right after the war, and I had money in my pocket and I was back. Or the big question of the great stasis of their life, that was during the war and your books and all the conversations that we've had, Don, is it seems to me that you focus on that same concept of mind. Everybody signed up. I want to say everybody, not everybody, some people repaired shoes and stole money, sold their Jeeps for cheap. But if you were a cognizant human being, you signed up for the duration of the war. The only way you got out early is if you were wounded or worse.
So that concept of all these... I remember watching the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, and everybody who seemed older just was looking at them and said, "When I was these kids' age, I was killing Japanese on an island somewhere, or I was making sure enough axle grease got delivered to North Africa in time, or I was in the second wave of Omaha Beach." It is a unique position in time of which the entire globe was wondering when this was going to end. And it started in 1939, actually it started in '36 by all intents and purposes and did not end until enough of the enemy had been wiped out in the wake of an eye in 1945.
And that period of time was one of just a huge question mark for everybody. Even if you were a 3-year-old kid, even if you were born in 1942, in 1945, you had no idea if your daddy was going to be coming home from the war. And it is that stasis, it is that place, that that generation, there's a lot of words for that generation or the greatest generation, et cetera, et cetera, all right, you could call them whatever you want, but they are the one generation in modern history that honestly was just waiting for their lives to continue. And it couldn't happen until the world war was over. I can't get past the sacrifices and just the living with the question, the Damocles hanging over one's head is when will this be over?

Donald Miller:
That's a key question. You lived inside a world of war. My mother was a Rosie the Riveter. She worked up at the local airplane factory and my grandfather was too old to serve, but he worked in local steel mill that manufactured the steel for the planes and things. And everybody that I knew was involved. And that indeterminacy really struck me and it didn't strike me, it came at me in a reverse way.
I was interviewing a couple of POWs and asking them what was the worst part of it. And that was the worst part of it. The one guy said, "I can go out and rob a 7-11, I'll get two to five. I know I'm getting out and my wife can put some money away," and things like that, and the aunt's going to take care of the kids. But we didn't know when it was going to end, if it was going to end and how it was going to end for us. And we didn't hear all these promises about GI bills and things like that. Our promise was if the Soviets got to the camp in time and then it could be horrible.

Tom Hanks:
Yeah, who knew what would happen?

Donald Miller:
Yeah. Everybody I talked to said that was the worst part of prison camp, not knowing when it was going to end one day after the other.

Tom Hanks:
Now, can we talk about the prison camp? Because everybody who flew on a B17 was either a sergeant or higher. And that was so if they got shot down, a non-commissioned officer would have a slightly better living condition than an enlisted man. And if you were an officer, you had a slightly better one. So someone is thinking so far down the food chain there, he says, "Well, let's make sure every machine gunner and every ball turret gunner and every radio operator has three stripes on their uniform, so they'll get a little bit more soup if they get shot down." Right?

Donald Miller:
Yeah, if they got shot down.

Tom Hanks:
I was at an airfield in Salina, Kansas. I was flying with somebody and they needed to refuel, and we had some time and some people went in to make phone calls, but I saw a B17 that was part of the Confederate Air Force that was just parked way down there. And so I walked a quarter of a mile down the tarmac and there was somebody climbing around on this thing. And I stuck my head into the fuselage and said, "Excuse me, I'm Tom Hanks. I'm a famous movie star. Can I climb around inside this B17 of yours?" And he said, "Yeah, sure, if you want." So that was the first time I saw the inside of the B17. And listen, until you're crawling around that physical space, you have no idea how small it is. You could stick a Phillips head screwdriver through the fuselage of that thing without any difficulty.
There's no heating, there's no insulation, and there's just a million places to bump your head. Now, add that to traveling 300 miles an hour up so high that you have to breathe oxygen and you will freeze to death if you're not in wrapped up in layers and layers and layers of sheepskin. And that was the first time I had a bonafide tactile understanding about this other aspect of the war that always gets us, that daily human cost. Every single day, those soldiers and the sailors, airman and all the women that were... Everybody had to get up in the morning and say, "What do I have to do in order to make it through this day?" And for these guys, they had to climb into this corrugated aluminum thing with gasoline engines and hydraulic fuel and enough machine guns to maybe fight off the enemy if they-

Donald Miller:
And you were attached to it. You were attached to the machine, whatever happened to the machine happened to you.

Tom Hanks:
You just said something that I never thought about. No place to hide. No foxhole.

Kirk Saduski:
No foxhole on a B17.

Tom Hanks:
No cover.

Donald Miller:
No cover. It always struck my-

Tom Hanks:
The people don't understand that. They see these black clouds go off. What is that black cloud? Well, that black cloud is a collection of razor sharp shrapnel that is flying faster than a bullet that will pierce anything that it happens to touch. And that's all over the place. Every time I see them fly through anti-aircraft fire. I said, "Didn't that just knock them all down? Didn't they all get killed?"

Kirk Saduski:
And Don, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't most of the guys say they feared flack more than they feared the fighters?

Donald Miller:
Well, only because at the end of the war, of course, the Air Force had been attrited somewhat and the fighters weren't as much of a threat as Flak, but you're flying through tremendous fields of Flak and you can't take evasive action. And that in itself is a paralyzing thought.

Kirk Saduski:
Let me interrupt for one second because you've said that guys were actually, talk about paralyzing thought, they would actually shoot at the Flak.

Donald Miller:
They would. It's the inactivity that was the killer. In Bert Stiles book, a wonderful book, Bert Stiles being a Mustang pilot who transitioned Mustangs from B17s, and he said, "We lost control of our crews, that is the togetherness started to disappear. The comrade ship wasn't there because we weren't calling out 12 o'clock high, 11 o'clock high. We weren't acting in unison as the Luftwaffe came in as a unit. We just had to sit there and take it." He said, "One of the guys described it as somebody breaks into your house, straps you to a chair, puts a shotgun in your face, sits in front of you in a chair like I'm sitting in and said, I might kill you or I might not. It's all up to caprice. It's all up to Lady Luck."
Just like that German woman sitting with her six kids in a coal cellar in Berlin, whether a string of bombs hits or not, it's all luck. And that sense of helplessness is the paralyzing thought that these guys had. That's why they hated Flak so much. They couldn't do a thing about... Well, talk to Sledge and those guys in the Marines, artillery is the thing, artillery man-

Tom Hanks:
In the Pacific.

Donald Miller:
Yeah.

Tom Hanks:
What you did for us as the producers of this thing who are always looking for the way just to start with the material and condense, condense, condense down, so it becomes on a human level. You took the history of the Eighth Air Force and brought it in by way of the Bloody 100th, one unit, one bomb group with enough people that we could start identifying with.
And Beirne Lay in, I believe in... I saw Regensburg destroyed Twelve O'Clock High, he wrote about these missions that when I saw them, read them in your book, and we made them as four hours of utter boredom and then one hour of sheer hell in the sky. If you're lucky, it's only one hour of sheer hell in the sky that you were able to bring it down to this unlucky, the Bloody 100th, it was called, so that we could understand how many planes there are, what it means when three of them don't come back. That's a full complement of a platoon from some of the other... That's three platoons gone just because three planes didn't come back and am I wrong? In the odds of 50/50, you had a 50% chance of not coming back.

Donald Miller:
Worse after a while.

Tom Hanks:
Worse after a while.

Donald Miller:
After 15 missions, your chances of surviving statistically were zero.

Tom Hanks:
So that means you have to get through 10 more, 25, in order to be done and no longer fly.

Donald Miller:
And then of course they upped it to 35.

Tom Hanks:
Yeah. Now, what in this world has a 50% failure rate outside of an at bat in baseball, which is not lethal as far as I am-

Donald Miller:
Exactly, depends on the pitcher.

Tom Hanks:
Well, there you go.

Donald Miller:
Well, Gale Cleven told me a great, not a story, but a way of looking at this, and it had to do with the compression that Tom talked about, the tightness of everything. As I understand it on the infantry line, guys were separated often by a mile, but when things happened there, they happened within 15 yards of one another. And he said, and he used the word, "Everything happened." So you had to make decisions. For example, well boom, all of a sudden 15 Focke-Wulfs are on your tail, firing cannon, rockets, et cetera. There goes the head of the pilot. Whoa, okay, maybe somebody in the back, that somebody in the back Cleven would call. Have they gone to flight training school? Flunked out? Can you handle this? I can fly with you. Okay, bring him up.
Well, wait a minute. That guy is tending to a buddy of his that just had his arm blown off and he's got a sucking wound and has to be held with his right hand. If he pulls that away, and Gale said he actually had an incident like that, if he pulls it away, the guy dies and maybe it's his best friend, but he has to save the other eight guys on the plane. Meanwhile, everything's flying around the cockpit and the smell of cordite, piss and shit and everything inside that plane. And it's shaking. It's shaking like hell. And they're pounding. And the noise captured in the film beautifully last night, the overwhelming noise. And then what do you do? And there's no training for this. They never ran them through exercises. Infantry guys always went out in the field and did exercises. These guys did flying exercises, formation exercises. They never simulated combat. They never even practiced bailing out. For everybody who bailed out, that was the first time-

Tom Hanks:
Is that right? They never so much as jumped off a tower or anything like that?

Donald Miller:
[?] airborne.

Kirk Saduski:
Why wouldn't they have done that? Is there some psychological reason?

Donald Miller:
There was so much attention paid to the machine and so little to the human being and the adaptability of a human being. Frostbite really caught them, inner ear infections caught them short, and they were destabilized.

Tom Hanks:
Because they are exposed to the cold for six hours at a shot.

Donald Miller:
Exactly right.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, let's say how cold? Not just cold.

Tom Hanks:
How cold?

Donald Miller:
Yeah. Well, I talked to a nurse who, she was a Red Cross nurse. She went back with a bunch of crippled up and injured and half dying airmen on an air cargo ship. And she said a couple of the guys had their eyes frozen into their sockets, into the skulls.

Kirk Saduski:
Like minus 40, minus 60?

Donald Miller:
Minus 40 degrees. Lucky was talking last night, Lucky Luckadoo, a pilot with the 100th Bomb Group said that occasionally it would hit 60 below and then it was almost impossible to function. And eventually they got these electrical suits, which always seemed to short out.

Tom Hanks:
But 1940s electricity, maybe not the best.

Kirk Saduski:
What could go wrong?

Tom Hanks:
Christmas trees caught on fire in the 1940s.

Donald Miller:
I always knew it was Christmas when my dad was swearing in the living room as he was putting up the Christmas tree.

Tom Hanks:
Don, okay, so the pilot, the copilot and, what, the navigator, they don't man machine guns when they're under fire, but everybody else on the plane does, everybody else in the crew does, seven machine guns?

Donald Miller:
Everybody does. The navigator has what originally they called a pop gun 30 cal, and they eventually gave him a 50 caliber machine gun like everybody else. The bombardier had one, and then they put dual turrets underneath the bombardier that he operated with his feet. And then, of course, there's the ball turret gunner who's sitting like the embryo and the egg upside down and there's no heat down there and he has to urinate, so he does it in his pants. And that's where the frostbite would set in, in the groin and thigh area.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's go back, and Tom, you'll remember when we first started this project a decade ago, and it was Masters of the Air, but specifically, yes, the 100th Bomb Group, but you start your book by talking about John Egan and Gale Cleven, and that was the key to us that we knew from that relationship, from that acorn, we could grow.

Tom Hanks:
If we have no people, we have no behavior and we have no procedure.

Kirk Saduski:
And so that was really the key. And you captured that personal part of war. I think, Don, you would agree that that's really maybe your greatest strength is to have us understand what is otherwise inexplicable to us. Tell us why you chose to open your book with John Egan and eventually transitioned to his friendship with Gale Cleven.

Donald Miller:
It was an accident. I had met Airman like Rosie Rosenthal at Savannah and was blown away by Rosenthal, by his dignity, his measured approach to everything and his absence of hysteria when he's talking about things. There's no wild metaphors and crazy stuff happening. He was a rock man. If Gregory Beck was a rock in this movie, this guy was unbelievable. And then I went into the records. I went over to Thorpe Abbotts. I was teaching at Oxford at the time, and Rose and I would drive over to the bases and we had a couple of guys from the neighborhood, uncles who served at various bases, and I got ahold of the records.
What the 100th has that not many other units have, maybe none of them as far as I know, I couldn't even find them at the World War Museum are really good personal records. Red Bowman, for example, was the operations officer. Red wrote a running account of the 100th Bomb Group, and it's written like a novel. It's not just we lost 17 planes. These are the numbers of crewmen who died. These are the number of crewmen who were in the hospital. He wrote about terror. He wrote about the combat physicians going on the planes to fly with the guys to understand their trauma and things like that. He talked about fear, he and Stover, these guys had incredible empathy. Tell us who

Kirk Saduski:
Tell us who Stover was.

Donald Miller:
The Air Force had medics and they had air surgeons. He was an air surgeon. So you didn't have to be a doctor, he was a doctor though.

Tom Hanks:
Smokey Stover, right?

Donald Miller:
Smokey Stover. Yeah, he was a doctor. Most of the bases simply had a highly trained doctor's assistant in today's terms and things like that. And if you got really banged up, they sent you to Oxford to the Air Force Hospital or something like that. Psychologically, of course, they had other places to put guys. One of the first guys I interviewed was a guy named Lou Loevsky. He got blown out of the sky to navigate on his first mission, Jewish kid from Jersey, tough guy. And he survived the war in a camp, so a lot of them did.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's go back to the Cleven and Egan of it though. You said you went to Thorpe Abbott because they had these great records.

Donald Miller:
They have these terrific records, personal records and letters and things like that, and they've collected them over the years. Guys, for example, they didn't have... One of the blessings was they all complained they didn't have our band of brothers, the annual reunions and things like that. Where do you have the reunion, at Regensburg-Schweinfurt? Where the hell is the reunion?

Tom Hanks:
Algeria.

Donald Miller:
So it started to dawn on them mostly because of Twelve O'Clock High, which is based on.

Kirk Saduski:
Beirne Lay.

Donald Miller:
Iliad Odyssey theme. And they thought, "Wow, some of these people in England, somebody found out are collecting things and they're starting to reconstruct these towers." And I was there pretty early when the Batley family was reconstructing the tower at Thorpe Abbotts and they were saving everything. And what started to happen is the guys started to come over, and it wasn't on the first visit, but the Batleys would say to them, "We got to decorate this place with your accomplishments. The pictures you're saving in your chest at home, bring them over here, letters, anything. We're going to build an archive here." And the guys would, the guys would contribute as well. And that's how it started. And Rosenthal and those guys really got that whole reunion thing going pretty strong.

Kirk Saduski:
As an author, though, you saw that the key to all of this is going to be the relationship between the men and as you said, tell us the line that I love and so many when they hear the line, the irony of-

Donald Miller:
Well, several airmen said that you can't have war without love and the first time you hear it, you go, "Ooh." And the kind of love that men feel for one another under stress. And one guy said, "I don't have to go out drinking with this guy every night. And he might've put a move on my girlfriend last night, but in that plane, he's a comrade and we can't survive without 10 working together, all doing their job." Not to deal in false flatter in this thing, but what I love about your movies is everybody's doing their jobs on a convoy, for example, but do you know the Navy had a real advantage and they did have doctrine.

Kirk Saduski:
In ground.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, that captain knew the rules and he knew what to do, even the cook did too. And that's what saved everybody. It saves everybody in Das Boot, the same sort of way, just do your job. But that had to be drilled into these guys and that's why the 100th was so wild at first. It's hard for a 19-year-old kid to understand that. He wants to go kill Germans or fly off on his own or do a little hotdog occasionally on the side or break the rules, but I really caught that in the film. I have to say that I caught that in the film.

Tom Hanks:
One of the tropes is that the bomb crew stayed together in the same plane all the time. This is simply not true.

Donald Miller:
No, it isn't.

Tom Hanks:
It was an ad hoc collection of who was available on any individual mission.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
Tom, I'm going to follow up on what Don was saying because I know how important that is to you in terms of behavior and procedure. Tell us, that's almost your commandment in terms of doing... Well, almost any of the movies we do, but World War II movies, in particular.

Tom Hanks:
You feather it in, I think, at every given opportunity, and for the movie that we saw last night, the very first opportunity we had is the checklist. You do not hop in a plane, turn on a couple of switch, start the engines and take off. How long does a checklist go? You got to do it step by step, bit by bit. It's a bunch of arcane stuff to the uninitiated. To the pilots themselves, they know exactly what each one of those things does and the run up to it is you then have to multiply that by every time they've climbed into the plane, prior to every mention. And once you establish that, it ends up being almost like a subtitles to the movie.

Pilot:
Ready for the checklist.

Co-pilot:
Form 1A.

Pilot:
Check.

Co-pilot:
Fuel transfer valves and switches.

Pilot:
Both transfer valves are off and switches off.

Co-pilot:
And the coolers are cold.

Pilot:
Gyros.

Co-pilot:
Fuel shut off switches.

Pilot:
All four open, cal flaps.
Open left and locked.

Co-pilot:
Throttles?

Pilot:
Throttles are closed.

Co-pilot:
Master and ignition switches?

Pilot:
Batteries on and check.

Co-pilot:
Booster pumps, pressure?

Pilot:
Pumps on. Fuel quantity good.
All right, lieutenant, ready to start engines?

Co-pilot:
Yes, sir.

Pilot:
Start one.

Co-pilot:
Good to have you with us, Colonel.

Tom Hanks:
It's part of it. You, as the viewer, realize that none of this is easy. It all came after an arcane procedure, in which nothing could happen. Another version of that is when they come in and say, "Okay, here's your target. Here's the map, turn off the lights, here's the slide, turn on the lights, here's the weather, turn on the lights." Somebody else comes in, talks about that. And that happened every time they went up in the air after they got woken up at 3:00 in the morning, after they went and had breakfast, after they had enough coffee and just before they put on all the gear, checked out all the weaponry and went off and ended. The hours of procedure that go into just getting the plane off the ground, that ends up being part of the DNA of the whole thing to begin with. So I am a huge fan of character first, but then you see that character blend in through the behavior that is required in order to get through the procedure and the behavior that is prompted by the procedure.

Donald Miller:
One of my favorite stories is Barbara Tuchman and she wrote a book about the Middle Ages, A Distant Mirror, and it has a great section about a night dressing for combat and how long it took, screwing here. But she goes through every detail and she doesn't say because she's not didactic, she doesn't say, "You have to understand this." But when you see the combat, you understand that it had to be done or they were enormously vulnerable if they weren't perfectly protected. And so that really brought that to life. And I heard her lecture one time and somebody asked her about the overabundance of detail. She said, "No such thing. No such thing." He said, "What about interpretation?" And she said, "If you got the details right, the interpretation will come around and tap you on the shoulder and say, here I am."

Kirk Saduski:
She sounds like she works at Playtone.

Tom Hanks:
True or false, Don, let's just say 98 out of a 100 guys who flew every single one of those missions never fastened into seatbelt.

Donald Miller:
Yeah.

Tom Hanks:
Maybe eventually there might've been a strap in for the copilot or the pilot or the bombardier, but by and large, those guys just climbed in, laid down, stood up, flew across the English Channel and maybe came back.

Donald Miller:
Well, that's a very good point. The gunners were always standing and moving around. The floor was slippery, especially during a fight because you're emitting all these hot shells and falling on the hot shells and your boots don't have a lot of traction in anything, so guys are bumping into each other all the time. There's no way to strap yourself into the plane and you're called upon to do all sorts of... Like the flight engineer standing behind the pilot.

Tom Hanks:
He's standing behind him.

Donald Miller:
Standing behind the pilot the whole trip. He's got stick his head up through a turret.

Kirk Saduski:
Because most of these people don't realize he isn't just the top turret gunner, he's the engineer of the plane.

Donald Miller:
If anything goes wrong, he has to know how to fix it and he has to know the plane like the back of his hand.

Tom Hanks:
Every cable, every fluid, every fluid, every tire, every plug.

Donald Miller:
And he has to be able to technically fly the plane as well, and also pass gunnery school. Everybody had to pass gunnery school. Even Andy Rooney and all those guys who covered the Air War, they had to go through gunnery school.

Kirk Saduski:
Tom, you and Steven are so well known, Playtone has been lucky enough to be part of. This is now the third of a trilogy. We started with Band of Brothers, we continued with the Pacific. This is very much in that lineage, and I've always thought, tell me what you think of this, that I think in some ways Band of Brothers is about the mythology of war, and I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, but it's the brotherhood of-

Tom Hanks:
You got Shakespeare.

Kirk Saduski:
Yes, we few, but the Pacific-

Tom Hanks:
We lucky few, yes.

Kirk Saduski:
With the Pacific, we were really trying to show war itself. What was combat itself? It was almost de-mythologizing, I think. I think Masters of the Air is a little bit of both. Would you agree with that?

Tom Hanks:
The new turf on Masters of the Air, again, does come down to the daily grind of your average member of an air crew. Here's what the reality was, they had warm beds more nights than they did not. They had hot food. They had the security of living in England. They were far away from being in harm's way. They had, dare we call it, a plethora or comforts to them that was available day in and day out except when they flew, in which case, a piece of red, hot razor sharp metal could pierce their body at any time and they had a 50% chance of living versus being captured, being wounded or being killed. The Pacific was all about, pardon my language here, where the fuck is Peleliu? Can you tell me?
We had a cab driver that was delivering one of the Marines home. He says, "Hey, listen, at least when I liberated, I was over in Europe, I got to have weakened passes in Paris and I ran around in London on my off time. You guys got to watch a movie on a coconut in the middle of absolutely nowhere." So it ends up coming around to the dichotomy of what that daily cost is. If you are in your third year of war and you signed up the year after you got out of high school on December 7th, the third year of war, you're 21 years old, you're 22 years old, and you're going to be dividing your time somewhere in the division of the Band of Brothers, paratroopers on the line, off the line on the line, off the line.
The Marines in the middle of hell are sitting around some smoky... Maybe you get to go and be with eight million other Marines in Melbourne, in which you're not the most unique human being on the planet. Or if you're one of these airmen, you're going back and forth between a warm bed and beers at night to maybe getting shot down over Regensburg and disappearing without a trace. That is where I think we get to discover that the broader panoply, if I'm using the word, of the experience of that generation, everybody, depending on where we were, had a different sort of skillset that was demanded of them just to get through the day.
I remember reading in Studs Terkel's The Good War that one of the guys in the first, he spent 110 days either walking, sleeping, or fighting. That's all he did, and at the end of it, his teeth rotted out because of the quality of the K-rations that he ate for the better part of three months. You don't forget those kind of details as much as you don't forget what happened as you're crossing the Maginot Line or something like that. That's where we dig in, as you probably know at Playtone, that's where we dig in the most and say, "Okay, we got it. We got the thing, we got the drama, we got the story. Where's the details here? What is that thing that we need to have in our pocket so that everybody can understand? It's like, "They eat such bad food that their teeth fell out after 110 days."

Kirk Saduski:
One of the things, I think, that separates Masters of the Air is that the guys had at least some semblance of what we portray, some semblance of a normal life because they're at Thorpe Abbotts, they can be in London, they can be in Norwich. Whereas in Band of Brothers, they're either in Normandy or at Bastogne or on the dike in Holland. They're either in Pacific Peleliu, Guadalcanal, et cetera. That's basically what these guys, as you said, and I think that brings it home in a way because you have to get into the plane. If you were in a Higgins boat and you were hitting the beach, you basically didn't have much of a choice but to get out. They didn't have a choice whether to get in the plane, they'd be prosecuted, but psychologically you had to climb back in there. You only had to hit the beach once on Omaha.

Tom Hanks:
Herb Suerth, Jr., who was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge right after joining Easy Company, I was talking to him and I said, "Well, when you first joined up, did you get razzed? Were you that new guy that everybody was pounding on because you hadn't been through Bastogne or Market Garden?" He says, "No, actually, no. They were really kind to me, but quite frankly, they all slept all day long." Because it was right after Market Garden and they were really tired. We have this concept of they're young men, they're coming off their lines. No, they were sleeping because, well, they just got their kicked in Operation Market Garden, but they were exhausted.

Kirk Saduski:
Let me going back to Egan and Cleven for a moment we make, and I think it's a hallmark and we're proud of the authenticity we bring to every one of these things.

Tom Hanks:
We try to, yes.

Kirk Saduski:
that maybe the most authentic thing we've done in all three series, but we'll stay with Masters of the Air, is to show the brotherhood. At the end of the day in terms of procedure and behavior, it's the brotherhood. That's the most authentic thing. War is impossible without love.

Tom Hanks:
This is one of the things that we run into that is problematic of that. If you squint just a little bit and maybe go to the bathroom and avoid the really bad parts, it looks like all of these good-looking guys are on the best camping trip of their lives. And if any of us have been to summer camp, we know the bond that can happen with your bunk mates and the fun that you have. The bond on me, if I'm using that with the esprit decor that comes along, it's innate to the circumstances. They are together. Now, maybe they didn't all like each other, I'm sure, but sooner or later it's someone showing a guy how to do a magic trick, someone else is showing a guy had to carve something with a pocket knife. The other guy doesn't have to do it. Somebody else is saying, "You think that's good jazz? I have a record. Let me put on this other thing that's good jazz. Where are you from?"
And they end up being this kind of thing. And part of it is because, and this is the thing particularly about Masters of the Air that I think is so great, is that they had downtime. They had downtime in which you can only play so much volleyball and you can only go to the opera club and drink yourself into oblivion so much. Sooner or later, all of these guys, and we've shown it again and again, open themselves up because I will say again is that they are in it for the duration. They do not go away unless they get wounded or they get killed or they get transferred. So there is a type of familiarity that is, I don't want to use the word glamorous, but there is some glamour to it because they are all a part of something bigger than themselves, and by and large, they all volunteered for it.
These guys on the air crew, they had to sign up for a flight school and not wash out. So they are accomplished and they are proud of that accomplishment of getting their wings. And then they're all together. So every now and again, you hear about somebody who went home and they never heard from them again. I could tell you a couple of stories about that very thing is that you thought they were the tightest in the world and as soon as they stepped off the train, they disappeared for the next 25 years because who knows what ghosts and demons come along with you. I'm going to say that how many great friends does a man have in the course of his life? 17, 14, whatever it is, those guys who got to know each other and had that love for another man because they were part of something and they relied on each other and something was much, much bigger than themselves, that is a powerful bond that dare we say that it could be only comes about in wartime with people under combat serving together.

Donald Miller:
A lot of times this began most of the time in training. And when my brother and I crawled up into my grandfather's attic and went through the trunks of my uncles that had served in the war that were stored there, because everybody lived together after the war, and all I saw were pictures of training, guys forming pyramids, guys playing volleyball, guys in wrestling matches, guys stupid little faces and things like that. And I asked my dad, he said, "Well, I grew up in Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, population 68. I'd never been west of the Susquehanna River. I'm meeting all these guys, these neat guys and things like that, that have aspirations to do different things that I never thought about doing, and maybe the army will do me some good in something like that." But that's when the togetherness starts to build.

Tom Hanks:
Is there any way in this podcast you could play the audio of Jimmy Stewart's, hey, join the enlistment. And literally it's Jimmy Stewart for crying out loud.

Jimmy Stewart:
Right now, the greatest mass mobilization in the history of the world has taken place. Men from cities, towns, farms, married man and single men, brothers, sweethearts, husbands, fathers and sons, businessmen and workers from the factories and students from colleges and high schools all over America, they're mobilizing, joining up or having their numbers pulled out of a fishbowl and this war we're fighting today and tomorrow and the next day until we win is a war of the air.

Tom Hanks:
I'll just tell this brief story. We have in the movie, Austin, flies his first mission in a plane called Wild Cargo. And evidently some unit photographer snapped a shot of Austin. In front of it just said Ild Cargo in this photograph. And a fellow who works for me got a call from a buddy of his and said, "Hey, I just saw this picture of Elvis in front of an airplane." That's one thing he said. He said, "Is that that thing your boss is doing?" What are you talking... Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, yeah, Masters of the Air, yeah. He said, "Would you tell him that Wild Cargo was my dad's plane?" And he was in the 100th and there was some mission where only Wild Cargo came back and he said, "Well, you must have amazing stories and a lot of great memorabilia from the war." He said, "My dad came home, packed everything up in a foot locker, put it up in the attic, and never talked about it for the rest of his life." How about that?

Kirk Saduski:
You will hear more from Tom Hanks after the final episode of Masters of the Air. But now, Don Miller and I take a step back to discuss episodes one and two of the series. Don, let's talk about these first two episodes. And I would ask first, Don, because this all started with you, so why did you decide to write? You've written about the army, you've written so many books about World War II, the Civil War, so many things, why did you choose to write about the Eighth Air Force?

Donald Miller:
Well, my first five books were not on military affairs. I had never taken a military history course, ta-da, nothing. And first book on World War II was the story of World War II, big sprawling thing on combat, and then did a book on the Pacific and then this. The first two books really center on people at the point of the spear in combat. And to get in the book, to get in the door, you have to have experienced combat. That means being under the bombs, as well as dropping the bombs. So I dealt with civilians as well, and I was particularly interested in fear. What is it? What is courage? How do people hold up under pressures like this? The thing that grabbed me right away were the numbers that these guys lost, up to 27,000 to 28,000 killed. That's compared to 18,500 Marines from Okinawa all the way down to Guadalcanal and numbers were staggering, 77% of the guys who flew were casualties. So how do you get in a plane knowing these numbers? They weren't hidden from the guys.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, and I think the numbers are going to play a key role in our entire series. So we'll come back to a lot of those and put them into context because they are staggering. And I think surprising when we reveal some of the numbers that the guys lost in various aspects of the campaign, I think, and cumulatively. I think they'll be surprised.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, and the stories behind the numbers. I had happened upon a book by a guy named Roy Grinker. He was a combat surgeon who tended to the victims of post-traumatic stress disorder as we call it today. And it was a tone, it was about 500 pages and it's not the kind of book a layman would read, but it was case studies, one after the other of guys breaking down in combat and how they were treated, how the Air Force got them back in the planes flying again or didn't.

Kirk Saduski:
We are talking about the 100th Bomb Group, and I do want to get into that a little bit and talk about them from our perspective of Playtone. And we had done the Marines and we had done the Army, of course, in Band of Brothers, but we had not done the Air Force. Familiar with your book, we had already worked together on some of the DVD extras on the Pacific with you. When we read your book, it was very clear, very early where the story was because as you said, you've written this big book that covers many topics, but where do we find a containable story, a dramatic, coherent story that an audience can understand with characters that you can grab onto early and stay with and care about? You open your book with the story of Egan and Cleven. You open your book by giving us at least an introduction to the 100th Bomb Group.
And that was what grabbed us right away. The world that you painted is so compelling, so dramatic and so unexpected. And I think that, of course, drew us in. But then it was the way you were able to paint these characters, and particularly the relationship with Cleven and Egan. We'll get into that further throughout the entire series because it's the key to the series, the Cleven and Egan relationship. But your starting in your portrayal of the 100th Bomb Group was really our way in. It was our easy company. It was our way into this sprawling story.

Donald Miller:
I'm always looking for a story to open a book and to carry it through because I write like a novelist. I'm looking for personality, drama, momentum, surprise, contingency, all the kinds of things you find in a good piece of fiction. And I found that with the 100th Bomb Group, they're wild and reckless group. They almost didn't get accredited to fly to Europe. Most of the show takes place inside the plane. That's where the major drama takes place. In so many films that deal with aerial warfare, it's the dog fights and the action outside the plane. But you really get into the psychodrama of war and how people hold up or don't hold up under combat inside a plane and how they perform their jobs, the jobs that keep them focused like in one of my favorite movies, Das Boot, where each man goes about his job inside a German U-boat and it keeps him focused at the same time.
And there is the togetherness, but the togetherness is not just romantic, it's functional. Everybody has to work together inside the plane. Everybody has a unique job to perform and no one can quite perform it the way that person is doing it. And if one guy is hit or two guys are hit, the plane becomes dysfunctional and there's a lot of chaos inside who's going to take over. In some cases, gunners who might have gone through some flight training and then got washed out, had some training flying a plane, took over the plane and brought it back to base. Someone would look at that and say, "That's mythologizing in the worst sense, that never happened." Well, it happened again and again and again in warfare. So I think there's that.
The stories, you didn't see them in combat reports, real dispassionate combat reports that take place when the guys are debriefed and things like that. You wouldn't quite believe it if it were fictionalized. You just wouldn't quite believe that that could happen. So there's a sense of unbelievability about the whole thing. And what else I think that it's done very well in here is the guys, as you asked before, do have very different motivations. Some of them it's sublime and they want to fight for freedom, and they believe in it and they believe in it very strongly. Other guys are a little more cynical. They just want to finish. It's not necessarily cynical, it's the survival.

Kirk Saduski:
It's almost more practical. Our series begins in late May, early June 1943. John Egan comes over first and then the rest of the bomb group. Well, their arrival at Thorpe Abbotts coincides with Operation Pointblank and the combined bomber offensive. That's not coincidental. That's where our story begins. Please explain why we started there and what the combined bomber offensive was.

Donald Miller:
Well, the combined bomber offensive, the idea was hatched at the Casablanca Conference that winter. And Churchill liked the idea, he wasn't convinced at first of bombing at night and followed by bombing in the daytime, and he loved that idea of round the clock bombing. And so that was the theory, but, in fact, the British did bomb at night and the Americans did bomb in the day, but they didn't coordinate their bombing or it would've been much, much more effective. To get to the heart of your question, I'm not too big on turning points in history, but this is a turning point because we now have decided we're going to land in Normandy and we're probably going to do it in May '44. They were thinking May rather than June, and now the clock's running, the D-Day clock. And that's the idea that I wanted to create in my book and the film.

Kirk Saduski:
When Playtone read your book and we read about the 100th, and you purposefully opened your book on John Egan and John Egan pretty quickly develops into John Egan and Gale Cleven. And this is what I mean by mythology. I remember when we read it and the relationship between Cleven and Egan reminded us very much of the Greek mythological pair Damon and Pythias, probably the most famous male friendship in Greek mythology. And that's why we knew that if we could capture that, it's a perennial, how men bond in the face of danger, particularly in the face of danger in a good cause. And so that's what I mean by mythology. Talk to us a little bit. Why did you open the book with John Egan and why did you open and so quickly and it becomes obvious, the most important relationship in your book and therefore in our film?

Donald Miller:
Well, that's just it. It is the most important relationship in the plane. Everyone will tell you what's a good crew, what's a bad crew. And the answer to the question is, a good crew is tight-knit. They might not drink together all the time or have the same interests in life or root for the same baseball team or whatever, but they have a very strong emotional commitment to one another. And it's based on trust. I know that guy sitting next to me is going to perform to his maximum, and I know if I get hit, he's going to care for me. And you have to have that feeling that somebody's going to come. And if you're hit, you get a light wound, they put you in the floor of the plane. There's no medics up there. You can't scream corpsman medic or anything like that.
You go to the frozen floor of the plane and maybe he has some morphine. A lot of the guys carried morphine. Some of them stole the morphine. Some of them were given the morphine. Give him a shot of morphine, the guy on the cold floor of the plane, put a cover over him, a blanket and hope he gets back. You have to believe that somebody's going to do that for you. And that only comes through friendship. You know who your friends are, the tightest friends that'll stand in for you. You don't have to make one of those superhuman pacts that I described where you're going to go, "We will go down with the plane together." But I sense that they had that when I read about them, largely through Red Bowman's accounts of them.

Kirk Saduski:
Don, you put so much time and effort and talent into writing your book, then you had to trust us with producing your book. We have a little bit of a history before this, but we knew and we were dedicated for many reasons to being as accurate in every possible detail as we could on the series, from actual the portrayal of who these men were, what they did, the missions they flew on, the relationships that they established, but also just the look of the series in terms of the way, how the hard stands looked, how the control tower looked, what did it look like inside the interior of a B17, the uniforms that they wore, what did they wear when they were in combat as opposed to what they wore when they were in the officer's club? How good did we do?

Donald Miller:
Amazing. And I was sitting at a desk, off-screen obviously, and on the desk there were files, looked like official Air Force files from the front. And I just paged through it and I went to the bottom file and it was a real Air Force file. And I thought, "There's about 250 files above that." And then I went through it and every one of them was an official one. You could have put things for Campbell's soup in there and you had that. And then I talked to the guys who built the planes and down to the last button and down to the last bulb, everything had to be absolutely right. The driving force of the whole production was fidelity, and that was thrilling to actually see it.
I talked to one of the technicians who worked on the plane and he said he'd been over in England for a long time, almost 13 months, and he hadn't been home and he was homesick and he had a family. And he said, "What keeps me here is the story that we're making here. I feel it's big." And then he said to see one of these planes, he said, "I'd seen B17 reconstructed down at the Smithsonian and stuff, but the fact that it's brand new is really cool because the bombers were delivered to the guys fresh from the factory. It was like a brand new car and you had the smell of a new car." And that struck me at first I thought, "That's fake, but wait a minute. No, that's the B17s that they flew in initially." And that caught my attention. It was fantastic.

Kirk Saduski:
There was so much research done on this, and we had a number of consultants that were so helpful to us, Mike Faley, Matt Mabe, who were involved with the 100th Bomb Group Foundation, Marilyn Walton, who is probably the expert on the prisoner of war experience, and they were tireless and they answered every call. And, of course, with the time difference in England. They're all in the states, we're in England, it didn't matter. The devotion ran up and down the chain of command, and it's one of the reasons, I think, we have got a successful series.
Turning to John Orloff. John's an old friend of Playtone. He was one of the screenwriters of Band of Brothers. We've had other projects with him as well. We know him very well, over 20 years. And so when we went to him to help us develop and hopefully produce Masters of the Air, and we gave him your book and he just dug in right away. And what's interesting, of course, is that your book is an entire world. It's about the entire Eighth Air Force. You focused to a large extent on the 100th, but there's so much more in there. But we needed more specifics on the 100th, and that's really where John jumped in. I think you told me recently that John Orloff probably knows more about the 100th Bomb Group than anybody in the world.

Donald Miller:
And Ron Batley, he and his wife Carol, they were in the forefront of recreating Thorpe Abbotts originally in the tower. The tower is a museum, the control tower is a museum. And they had to collect uniforms, guns, ammunition, every part of the plane, the Norden bombsite. So they knew the instruments, they knew the right uniforms, and they were crazy worried that you weren't going to get it right. And I think that's one of the reasons Ron broke down out at Alconbury when you took him out to the reconstructed base that you did get it right. They were so concerned about it.
And to get the guys right, the people right, I went over there and stayed with the Batleys originally. I had first stumbled upon the 100th Bomb Group when I was teaching at Oxford. My dad was in the Air Force in World War II. I'd take rides over to the bases and I met the Batleys and stayed with them a couple of times. And Ron's dedication to accuracy was amazing. But he said, "Someday somebody's going to do something on this, but they're going to hollywoodized it and it's going to make me crazy."

Kirk Saduski:
Well, instead it made him cry.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, instead it made me cry, yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
That's another thing. And again, there's so much to cover and luckily we have eight episodes to cover everything. But the experience I had in England in a few visits, and I think I was there for the entire production, but I've been there a few other times and you see the devotion, especially in East Anglia, the continued devotion and interest in the Eighth Air Force and that experience. There's something called the Friendly Invasion, I think it was called the Friendly Invasion even then, but certainly-

Donald Miller:
It was.

Kirk Saduski:
It's how it's referred to now. And what it is this influx of tens of thousands, ultimately hundreds of thousands of Americans, primarily-

Donald Miller:
Over a million.

Kirk Saduski:
Over a million, thank you, Don. And particularly in this one area, East Anglia, where all of the Eighth Air Force bases were established. And they're right, these bases were literally dropped in the middle of villages and farms. And so you couldn't have a closer cultural integration for everything that that means, conflict, but also good relations. And we try to get into that a little bit in the series, but as you're describing it, and I've experienced it, you've experienced it much more than I have, that even though it was 80 years ago, they're still the children, the grandchildren of the men who served and the people who live there is still a close relationship.
And when you see the devotion that Carol and Ron paid to Thorpe Abbotts, and I've been to a number of the other bases, and the devotion is equal. It's a special thing. And I know that after Band of Brothers, particularly after Saving Private Ryan, that was really the real instigator, but then after Band of Brothers, Normandy in France had an extraordinary influx of tourists from all over the world, but, of course, primarily from America. And I am hoping something like that happens in East Anglia because really to go over there and see, and as an American just to see where grandpa served, but also see how the people responded to grandpa.

Donald Miller:
One quick story I said to my English editor, they changed the title of my book when it was published in England. They called it Eighth Air Force. I said, "Why?" He said, "Well, everybody over here knows the Eighth Air Force, but nobody in the states would know the Eighth Air Force." He said, "This is a better seller with a title like that."

Kirk Saduski:
Well, I talk about what, to me, is the key to the book, and hopefully it will be the key to the series. Of course there's the action. And as people have seen in the first two episodes, what we're able to do now cinematically in terms of trying to convey what combat in the air was like, it's pretty extraordinary. But even still, the most important element of it, none of that will work, it's all just video games, unless you care about those characters, unless you can put yourself in the place in the flight deck, in the nose of the plane, in the tail gun position, any of the positions on the plane. And I think us, if we're able to capture that psychological drama, that key psychological drama it's because you captured it initially in the book so effectively. One of the themes of the entire series, and we talked about this so much, John and I talked about it, Gary and Tom, it's the question we hope the audience asks after every episode. How did those guys keep getting back on those planes?

Donald Miller:
That was a question that was on my mind as I wrote this thing. Again and again, I kept returning to that. You see a bomber explode. Well, that's the shortstop, third baseman and right fielder on your softball team. You just played a game with them yesterday. You just had breakfast with them in the morning. And young people don't think they're going to die. They're going to live forever. And I always say to my students at Lafayette, "Who's going to die here?" Nobody raises their hand. Nobody's going to die. Steinbeck has a scene like that in the invasion of Anzio where he returns to his soldiers in the landing boat and said, "It's a goddamn shame, isn't it?" All the guys on this boat that are going to go down.

Kirk Saduski:
You mentioned a lot in the book that the bombing campaign was unprecedented, unique, probably we'll never see it again. Hopefully that comes through in the series. Tell us about that. What was the impetus behind the bombing campaign? This new form of warfare, I know the technology was there, but what was intended by this dropping tons of bombs on Germany?

Donald Miller:
Well, it went back to World War I and avoiding the horror of the battlefield, the trench warfare, the going over the top, going into charging into machine gun nests, the mud, the squalor. There's never been warfare quite as bad as that, as World War I, the mustard gas and things like that. And a number of like-minded young Air Force pilots felt that maybe the way to do this air attaches is to fly over the battlefield. They do a lot of scout missions with two wing planes, just scout out German positions. They're basically artillery spotters. But that turns into the idea, why don't we fly over the army, and as cruel as it sounds, and hit the civilians initially, this is the argument. And the bombing will be so terrible that it will precipitate a quick call for surrender and an end to warfare. Make warfare so terrible that you want to end it quickly.
An Italian named Giulio Douhet developed this as a theory and it worked itself into Royal Air Force theory, and it worked itself into a group that was later called the Bomber Mafia that met down at Maxwell Field, and they developed the ideology before they had the technology. There was one piece of technology they had, they had an enclosed plane with a cockpit enclosed, and they had bought an instrument, the Norden bombsite, which was first used by the Navy, and supposedly you could drop bombs from 23,000 feet into a pickle barrel. Well, that turned out to be an oxymoron, pinpoint bombing, but it was believed.
Now they turned this theory, this initial theory around a little bit and added what looks like an altruistic motivation for it. And that is that if you can bomb with that kind of accuracy, you don't have to kill civilians, you can kill factories, you can drop leaflets and have people evacuate certain parts of the city that you're going to hit and you hit rail yards and mineheads and steel mills and things like that. Well, fact is, in warfare, morality rarely comes in and rarely comes into high strategy. It was thought by the Bomber Mafia that this type of bombing is more effective. It could be more humane. It's a byproduct, but that's not the original motivation. The original motivation is to knock out the war economy of the country, and a country runs on steel and it runs on oil, which is a blood of warfare.

Kirk Saduski:
Don, we've seen the first two episodes of Masters of the Air. Any scenes that particularly stand out to you in either episode that get to the heart of the matter, the heart of the matter of your book, the heart of the matter of what our series is all about?

Donald Miller:
Well, one thing we haven't talked about is that, and you mentioned it glancingly and well, that this is an experiment. And when they go up to Trondheim to bomb the sub pen there, they get lost. The navigator, Crosby, doesn't know what he's doing and by hook or crook, he gets them back. But there's confusion in the plane. The fact that pilot's listening to Crosby is amazing in the first place.

Harry Crosby:
Major.

Pilot:
Crosby.

Harry Crosby:
Major.
Major. I said, if we go two, four, four ahead for the Shetlands. When we're clear of Norway, we go to 4,500 feet, take cover in the clouds. When we hit Scotland, we go straight south. That way if we have to put her down, at least he's on land.

Pilot:
All right, that's a plan. Hey, hey two, four, four.

Harry Crosby:
Roger, two, four, four.

Donald Miller:
You do get the sense that these are neophytes and every day is going to be radically different from the day before as they learn how to fight and fly at the same time. And to handle the German opposition, to hit their targets accurately. That sense of this thing might not work, it just might not work. And just as I think a lot of people felt at the beginning of the war that this is a war that we could have lost, we could easily have lost.
And there was nothing that said that bombing was going to be a principle means of defeating Germany. Churchill had announced that in anger for the bombing of the east end in London. We don't have an army to land on the continent, but we can hit you with exterminating, you use that power from the air. And the Americans came with that idea, but they weren't able to execute it. So if you're flying like this... This is the theme of Twelve O'Clock High. That's the frustration. How do you keep men on the job flying when they know what they're doing is ineffective and also deadly dangerous. Harrison Salisbury, a young reporter then and later a giant at the New York Times said, "To be in the Eighth Air Force is to hold a ticket, a ticket to your own funeral." And so that's the feeling initially, and I got that sense in that episode.

Kirk Saduski:
Thank you, Don. Well, whether we win the war or not, I guess we're going to have to wait and see in subsequent episodes. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. This has been a lot of fun and we'll see you next time. In next week's podcast, we talk to Callum Turner on his starring role as major John Egan.

Callum Turner:
Oh, the thing about Austin is that he's just the most incredible actor, actually. And I had so much respect for him going in, and we just connected immediately. And there was this passion from both of us to do these guys justice. And then as we went along, we just were so open to each other. We supported each other for 10 months, the camera would be on him and then the camera would be on me. And 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.

Kirk Saduski:
Masters of the Air is an Apple original series from executive producer 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.