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Harry Crosby:
Bremen was the toughest mission of the war for me. It was the heaviest flak I'd ever experienced. A shell fragment the size of a football crashed through the nose of our fort, nearly decapitating me and Douglas. Our left wing caught fire and we lost all electrical power, but somehow Ev Blakely got us back to England.
I also saw Major Cleven's plane take a direct hit and go down. From the day I joined the 100th, Buck Cleven was our leader. We thought he was invincible. If Gale Cleven couldn't make it, who could?

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome to Making Masters of the Air, a podcast from the National World War II Museum. Joining me now are directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

Anna Boden:
Hi. Thank you for having us.

Kirk Saduski:
We just watched episode five and one of the challenges you guys had is that our key relationship between Majors Cleven and Egan, but starting in episode five, half of that relationship is absent, and yet we still need that relationship to help drive the story. That's a big challenge for a director or directors. How did you guys meet that challenge? What was your plan?

Anna Boden:
That's a really interesting question and a good question. And even though we only see John Egan in this episode five, it's still their friendship that is so centrally the driving force of everything he does. It's like the animating force of everything he's feeling in this whole episode. And we hope that that's kind of what keeps it alive and what kind of keeps us propulsively moving through it.
And it's why we decided early on, when we were in prep on the show, is in this mission, in the Munster mission, we stay so close with his fort in this. We really truly try to stay completely almost in the perspective of his fort throughout the entire mission. Instead of jumping around and really understanding what's happening in the mission as a whole, it's really the perspective of John Egan and what does this mission mean to him? It's such a personal mission and it's because it takes on this revenge kind of feeling because he feels that he's lost his best friend.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. I mean, look, we were prepping the episodes while the first four were being shot and we had the dailies to look at, and so we didn't have a whole lot of time to get to know the actors prior to shooting, but we got to know those characters by watching the dailies, take after take. And sometimes you see a little bit what goes on before action and after cut and it was fun to see how the actors worked.
But yeah, I mean, I think what was great about working with Callum is that shift that you're talking about. He is such a wild character. He is such an unpredictable character. That scene on the wing with Biddick, that's just so raw.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, episode two.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. It's just so raw and emotional and unexpected and I love that. And then like you say, you get him in the air and he's all business, but he's also driven. It's complex because is he out for vengeance for his friend or does he have true patriotic motivations at heart? It's complicated and I think that's what makes that character so rich.

Anna Boden:
And also, this is a turning point in the series where you start to see him, I think his idea of what it means to be a leader and like him coming into his own as a leader. And there is a turning point in the series where all these men are starting to figure out what it means to be a leader in their own right and what it means for them to be a leader.
And in a way, we kind of approached episodes five and six, episode five, he's like... There is a certain Egan that's in his comfort zone surrounded by his men, surrounded by his crew, and up in the air and protected. And then that question of what happens when that same person that is able to have that certain amount of bravado when they are protected in their comfort zone, what happens when they're pulled away from that? Which is what happens at the end of episode five for Egan.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, let's turn to Rosie. In episode five, he really emerges as one of our lead characters. And in the episode, we see him on his first mission, the crucial mission to Munster. The Munster mission that they're on was horrendous, hundreds of many casualties. And we really begin to see Rosie's leadership when he kind of... At first, you wonder what is he doing? But he starts to hum an Artie Shaw song and it seems to bring, again, to calm his crew down. Let's talk about that.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah, I don't know where to start. I mean, Nate Mann is just a tremendous actor and the camera loves him and we just love working with him. And he has that calming presence. I mean, he has that thing that Rosie has, which is just a natural leadership. He's not a hothead like Callum's character. He's calm and collected and he makes everyone around him calm and collected as well.
And so in that particular moment, which is a crap-your-pants moment, we're all alone up in the sky, everyone's freaking out a little bit on the inside, and he's able to just hum a tune. I don't know if he's intentionally doing it for everybody or if he's doing it for himself, or what do you think, Anna? Was that by design for everybody on the plane? Probably.

Anna Boden:
Yeah, I think so. I think that he must have been doing it for everybody in a certain way, a way to break this tension and just a way to allow there to be a moment of calm, but also as a way... It was a way that he found to focus himself. And it's so nice when you can bring a moment of biography into a fictional portrayal. And Rosie was a person who really appreciated music and I think it's such a nice detail that you guys found to be able to find this really true detail of somebody, this love of music, and be able to bring it into the story and have it become metaphor for his own journey and his way of leading his crew. And so I just love that he's able to use that moment to lead his crew, but also to find his focus.
And it might be calming to some people, it might be flummoxing to other people and they kind of make fun of him for it later, but it's like a way of them all to be able to have a moment, a shared smile, whatever it is, and come together, and it's like that family kind of vibe for us.
That whole sequence started, I think, even a little bit earlier with realizing, again, like with Egan's plane, once we go to Rosie's plane, staying with Rosie's plane and staying completely from that perspective and just realizing that the haunting nature of discovering that you're alone in the sky and that you're the last fort from your entire bomb group left from your perspective. So we don't see it from an objective point of view. We don't see all of the other forts falling out of the sky or from an objective point of view. It's all from their point of view and we realize it with them. And starting with that kind of idea of the haunting, realizing that with them...

Audio:
Where is everybody?
Pilot to crew. Does anyone see any other ships from the 100th?
Top turret to pilot, negative.
Left waist gunner to pilot, negative.
Ball turret to pilot, negative.
Nose, negative.
Tail to pilot, negative.
Right waist gunner, negative.

Anna Boden:
And then from there, just kind of continuing that idea really as we were kind of boarding that whole sequence, yes, kind of thinking about all the ways that we were going to tell this story and staying within that subjective perspective and making sure that we were getting closeups of all the different guys and getting their reactions to every single moment. And when we were picking off the reactions for literally every single moment throughout that entire sequence, that was one of them, which was Rosie humming his tune.

Ryan Fleck:
Also, speaking of haunting ideas, for that, we didn't have the benefit of seeing the cuts of the previous episodes, so we only had the scripts and we were trying to think of how does this battle, how does this mission feel different from the ones we've seen prior? And the first episodes really felt like action sequences to us. You're dealing with a bunch of different planes. And for us, we were like, "Well, what if this was more of a horror film? What if we treated this like horror?"
So we actually played on set. When the guys are taxiing their planes out to the runway, we were playing The Shining, the opening music from The Shining score in the cockpit. So the guys had that sort of heavy vibe hanging over them as they were taking off into the sky, which I think was a nice touch, even though the music is quite different in the actual episodes, of course.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, let's expand on that, shooting in a very confined space.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah, it was challenging. I mean, I think that we were, even though the other episodes were in theory shot before us, I think we were among the first people, our episodes were on the volume simultaneously as the previous episodes, if not before. So we were all kind of learning on the fly.
There were great things about it and really challenging things about it. The great thing is that in traditional green screen, your actors aren't really reacting to anything. There's a PA or an AD running around with a tennis ball on a pole for eyelines, and you're like, "Now there's an explosion in the sky." And then they go, "Ah!" But they're not really seeing anything. And so here, they have the monitors to really see a rendition of planes around them in the sky. And so I think that that is extremely helpful for the actors to react to in real time.
There were challenges too, of course, which I've blocked from my memory. Anna perhaps can remind everyone what the difficulties were.

Kirk Saduski:
Anna, what do you think?

Anna Boden:
I mean, the challenges are just if anything isn't quite lining up or working, it takes a long time to fix it. If you can imagine a technical glitch that happens on your computer every now and then, think about that with a thousand computers all at once and trying to reboot them all. And so there were moments when things didn't work perfectly, but I think that, in a lot of ways, what Ryan's talking about are the benefits really outweighing the negatives because you really do, for those performances, have that feeling of the authenticity of them actually experiencing when it's going right, them actually getting a sense of this battle happening around them.
And I think that it was also very challenging to shoot inside these very small planes and trying to squeeze crew and cameras inside of them. But that also, I think, lends to some of that feeling of the authenticity and the feeling very constricted and the claustrophobia of it. And I think that it helps it feel... I don't know. I feel it when I watch those episodes and I'm rewatching them all with my partner who hasn't seen any of them yet, so I'm watching them as they're coming out too. And it's really fun. He's so tense when we're watching them together at home, and it's so fun to see him watch those sequences for the first time because he wasn't on set and I was. So to see somebody experience those things and it feels so real and tense to him, and I think it really speaks to being in that situation and having some of those elements of the volume stage that really lended authenticity.

Ryan Fleck:
Well, I remember in prep, we got a tour of the sets with the plane sets, and so we're walking through them and we were just completely freaked out. We were like, "Oh my God. How are we going to shoot in here? How can you get a camera in here?" They were built to scale, one-to-one scale, and we're like, "What? They couldn't have just built it a little bit bigger so we can play?"

Kirk Saduski:
No way, man.

Ryan Fleck:
The planes weren't designed... They were designed to drop bombs, they weren't designed to have a camera crew in them. But to your point, I think it was really hard to do. But in retrospect, I think that the actors are experiencing that claustrophobia, and you can see it on screen.

Kirk Saduski:
In episode five, we begin to explore the interior of our characters more than we have up to this point. And with Crosby, it's the first time we see a major character really lose a close friend and the impact that has on him. And of course I'm referring to when his fellow navigator, Bubbles, goes down.
I want to remind the audience that this is a true story. And Harry Crosby and Lieutenant Payne were very close and he did actually lose Lieutenant Payne. Let's talk about what the impact of losing Payne had on Harry Crosby.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. Anthony's just a fantastic actor. We hadn't worked with any of these guys before and they were all different. And Anthony has access to all the emotions. And so I think that it was just great to see what he started with and then have to sort of modulate his performance, make suggestions, because for instance, in the interrogation after the mission, they're the only crew there left and he's waiting to hear did Bubbles survive? And then he hears that his plane blew up. It's an emotional moment for him.
And in the early takes, he's actually crying in those takes. And we were like, "Oh, this is so great." And then we had to remind ourselves, "Well, the next scene is when he reads the letter and then he really falls apart. So we need to have him keep it together, keep it together in this scene, no crying, and just keep it inside. Keep it inside. You're still having the same emotions, but don't let everyone see it." And then when he sees that letter, he's finally able to release at the end of the episode, and I think it's just stunning and powerful.

Kirk Saduski:
I know you're coming back next week to discuss episode six, so I look forward to that very much. Thank you, Anna. Thank you, Ryan, very much.

Anna Boden:
Thanks for having us.

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome back my good friend, Don Miller.

Donald Miller:
Thank you very much.

Kirk Saduski:
Big events once again in this week's episode. We saw Major Egan shot down on, as you characterize, his vengeance mission to avenge his friend Gale Cleven. And that was over Munster, and the bombing of Munster signaled a strategic, maybe even a moral shift in the Eighth Air Force's approach to the air war. Explain to us why and how.

Donald Miller:
Well, they've been hammering submarine pens in the first year of the war along the Brittany coast. And they're made with reinforced concrete, bombs are bouncing off them like ping pong balls. The casualties are high over Saint-Nazaire and places like that, flak city and all that.
And now they've gone to another target. And that target just happens to be right in the center of cities. And the first raid is on a railroad yard in Munster very close to the Munster Cathedral, which ironically, the director, the bishop of the museum is one of Hitler's fiercest critics. And Munster is known for its opposition to Adolf Hitler, and Hitler hated the town of Munster for that reason because the Archbishop, I should say, is on him all the time.
So the guys get the word about Munster, and I think the Briefing does a good job in the film in explaining exactly what happens. They're going to go after the German transportation system, and particularly the rail system. And this is a railroad city, and they're going to do it actually by not hitting railroad yards centrally, but by hitting centrally workers' housing. There's neighborhoods around the rail yards close to the marshaling yards, close to the passenger stations that are filled with block housing, semi-detached homes, tower blocks, things like that, filled with railroad workers. And they're taking a cue here from Arthur Harris. This was always his idea to kill workers rather than machines.

Kirk Saduski:
Remind us who Arthur Harris was.

Donald Miller:
They're taking a cue from Bomber Harris, who's head of Bomber Command, the British bomber force. It's in this war a little bit earlier than we are, and bombing primarily at night. And Harris always argued that, "I'm out to kill not German industries, I'm out to kill Germans." The Eighth Air Force succumbs to this for this particular mission. They think these railroad workers are indispensable and almost irreplaceable. And some of the skill shops where they manufacture, it's not just a rail city, it's a place where they manufacture locomotives and things like that.
And the bombing takes place very, very close. They're told that they're aiming point. They go to a place called the initial point first where the bombers gather together in their combat boxes and then begin to go over the target and go into the flak field and then do their bombing. And they're told to aim for the steeple of the Munster Cathedral.
When that happens, and we have testimony from guys, it's not in official records, but it's testimony from guys who were in the briefing room that day, they said that there was an uproar, and rarely would a guy stand up and speak at the top of his voice. "This is murder, cold-blooded murder. There are families in these homes. We have families at home." These are all young guys, maybe just had children and things like that, and, "Do they deserve it?"
And Egan goes right back at them on this, and he gets up and gives a fiery speech that they're all part of it. There's no difference between the housewife and the railroad worker. And they don't talk about crossing moral divide, they just talk about killing. And with him, it's revenge. And the others kind of bought into the idea that, "Yeah, well, maybe we should be hitting these workers. Maybe it will shorten the war."

Audio:
You saw how close that cathedral is to the MPI. We're hitting it right when everyone's coming out of mass.
And?
There'll be a lot of people in that cathedral or in their houses and not just railroad workers either.
They're all a part of it.
Never had a target this close to the city center before.
Oh, Jesus Christ, Crank. It's a war. We're here to drop bombs.
On women and kids?
Well, this won't end until we hit them where it hurts. Better now before every fucking guy we've ever shared a bunk with is either dead or MIA.

Donald Miller:
So the Eighth Air Force runs the mission. It's a tremendously violent air mission. And the bombing's pretty successful actually, despite all the air opposition. And interestingly, the Air Force pulled away from that for a time. There wasn't a lot of uproar. Later in the war, there be in the press after two candid interviews with some Air Force intelligence officers that admit that we're kind of doing this sort of thing as we started to do later in the war. But at this point, there's none of that. But the Air Chiefs decide that, "We're not going to do it again for a long time," and they didn't do it again for a long time.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, there's another-

Donald Miller:
So it's not a permanent divide in a sense, but it is crossing, as you say, a moral threshold.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, and it's also, let's talk about the compression of time here because what we watched in episode four, which was the bombing of Bremen, and when we lost Major Cleven, the raid against Munster was just, I think, two days later.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, it was.

Kirk Saduski:
And there was a mission in between. And as we show, these are... We're getting hammered, as you say.

Donald Miller:
We're losing the air war, and I think panic enters this decision.

Kirk Saduski:
And this is all within-

Donald Miller:
We have to show results. We have to show results. And for the Air Force, it's very survival. And the Air Force constantly throughout the war is thinking about its legacy and thinking about the fact that it wants to be, desperately desires to be, and an independent force, it's part of the army. You sign up with the army and it's a branch of the United States Army.

Kirk Saduski:
This period of time is really early October. It's essentially a week when Bremen is bombed, Munster is bombed and others, and it goes down in lore. It's known in Eighth Air Force lore as what?

Donald Miller:
Black Week, this is when Rosie flies his three missions. And on that third mission, of course, he's the only plane from the 100th Bomb group to return, and flies them all within one week. And the war's in the balance here. I think there is in warfare a time in many wars where neither side is winning.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the characters we haven't spoken about too much yet is Harry Crosby. And tell us, because again, he's somebody else you got to know when you were writing your book, tell us a little bit about Harry Crosby, who plays a very important role in our show. Harry Crosby wrote a book called A Wing and a Prayer. And one of the reasons that he became... We've mentioned why Rosie and why Cleven and Egan are such major characters, but the primary reason that we focus so heavily on Harry Crosby is that he was the one guy who was of the original 100th and was there from the beginning to the end at Thorpe Abbotts.

Donald Miller:
Crosby, that's a wonderful book. Can you write an upbeat book about the Eighth Air Force? Well, he did it, despite all the calamities and catastrophes and personal setbacks that he suffered, but it's a confessional book too. He admits that he got air sick. We deal with that vividly in the film. And he admits that he was a pretty bad navigator.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, at first.

Donald Miller:
At first, yeah. Yeah. And he always thought his promotions were... He thought he deserved them, but he thought others, maybe like Bubbles, deserved it a little more than he did. But he develops in the film, and I think you see it in the book. And I didn't have a great many conversations with him. He was very sick when we interviewed him. He was in a nursing home, but he would have these moments of tremendous clarity. And we caught that on film and used it in a film we did.
And he had this undying affection for Rosie Rosenthal and that whole gang that he... Rosenthal wasn't part of the original gang, but he became an adopted member. And Blakely and all those guys kept in touch with him. He kept the reunions alive. Crosby was always the first guy to respond to and to organize an effort to have a reunion. And talking to the people at the nursing home, they said, "Man, he's a trip to handle. He's trying to escape every day and flirting with the nurses and a great storyteller." And yet what you see in the film and what you see in the book and you see in the record is his increasing, not callousness, but toughness. He becomes a very tough guy.
He becomes a group navigator. Now, that's a hugely responsible position. You're the navigator for the whole wing. Okay, is the bombing going to be effective? It's all up to the navigator, whether they get to the target or not. I mean, taking them across the Atlantic initially, he, by mistake, flies over France. Everybody says, "Is that Ireland?" "Yeah, it looks like it." And then all of a sudden the gun starts shooting like, "God, it's England." It's not England either. It's Nazi-occupied France. But as he acquires skill and confidence, he also becomes a workaholic. A workaholic.
I talked to a lot of his students that had him for classes at Oxford, and they said he was a wonderful teacher and a real disciplinarian about writing. They thought, "Oh, give him a C, Crosby." But no, man, he was a light-spirited guy in the classroom. His jokes and stories, never talked about the war. Nobody knew he was a veteran even. But he's a tough grader and always stressing the thing that he was known for eventually in the Air Force that everybody prized, performance. That's what Egan prized. That's what Rosie prized. All the guys that we feature, the main characters, prized performance.

Kirk Saduski:
What do you mean by performance, Don?

Donald Miller:
Being able to do your job with extreme confidence and also competence, absolute competence. And that meant really drilling down on the job, extra hours of training, extra hours, flying. Egan took Rosie out, for example, and said, "Hey, I hear you're a hotshot flyer." And Rosie proved he was, but both of them, in a kind of competition, kept flying training exercises and again and again. They wanted to get really good, and Rosie was like that. He played tennis like that. He, I'm sure, worked like that. He was... They just thought that, "There's a job to be done and there's no heroes and we got to do it. And if everybody in the plane does their job, we have a pretty good chance, not a great chance, of surviving." That's all they're thinking about it.
Now, if you're thinking about survival, like you said in an earlier podcast, the key element here, the driving element was going home. Well, you got to live and you got to be able to fly tight formation. And that's what Rosie brought to the 100th bomb group. They were a loosely knit outfit in terms of their air performance. They didn't fly tight combat boxes. The combat boxes, you keep the planes very tight together. So close, Paul Tibbets told me when he was with the Eighth Air Force, that his wing would sometimes bump in to the fuselage of the plane beside him, and he said it was like driving a truck. And the other pilots used to kid the bomber pilots about being truck drivers.
Just holding onto that steering wheel, you have to be a really strong guy to do that in formation, but it allows you to get a lot of firepower to mask your firepower because you couldn't hit one-on-one an incoming fighter. It would have to be a lucky shot. So what you did is you hosed the air with bullets and everybody would try to congeal and hit a certain area if they could, they practiced this, and have the German pilots fly into that just as the Germans hope you flew into the flak because flak wasn't accurate either. But that was all about performance and being able to track the plane to the position where it's like shooting clays and you shoot ahead of the target and you have to be pretty proficient to do it.
And then not to lie about it too. And he was known, a lot of those guys, all of them were known for their fidelity and for their lack of exaggeration and things like that.

Kirk Saduski:
What do you mean by lie about it and to who?

Donald Miller:
Well, it wasn't quite lying. Sometimes it was lying, but you go into the briefing room and they ask, "How many bogeys did you get?"

Kirk Saduski:
Let me stop you there. You mean in the interrogation room?

Donald Miller:
You'd go to the interrogation room and you'd... Each crew would sit at a table and they'd have an operations officer there, and he'd question you about the mission, who was hit, who went down, were there parachutes? Et cetera. Did you hit slam the target? Did you do that? Et cetera.
"So how many Germans did you shoot down?" "Well, I think I got two." "Okay." And you go to the next table and somebody's saying, "Well, I got three." The next one, one, and maybe the number comes out to like 13. Then when we check after the war, go down to Maxwell Field to the records, well, they didn't get 13 that day. The Germans kept very scrupulously accurate records. They got six. What happens is three guys will hit the same plane and they'll record it as three separate kills. They don't know. They don't know. All they know is they smoked that thing. And so those records always have to be checked.
It was really hard to shoot down a fighter plane. It was really hard to do.

Kirk Saduski:
You mentioned performance, and I think I'm convinced, from my reading of Cleven and Egan, that that was part of the attraction, that they recognized within each other that they were both very capable men and if they were going to survive, we talked earlier, another podcast, helping leading their boys through it, but they wanted to survive too. And I think that was part of... They recognized, "Maybe we can get each other through this," because they were so good at what they did.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, I think somebody like Joe Montana, the quarterback with his low-key kind of attitude toward everything, no hooray, hurrah, la la la. And they always talk about how cool he was in the huddle and things. He had that kind of temperament. Bomber pilots had that kind of temperament.
They're very different from fighter pilots. They did surveys. First of all, you had to pass the test to be able to fly, but then are you going to fly bombers or fighter pilots? Are you going to be a fighter pilot? And it's a lot... It's temperament. You're looking for steadiness, leadership qualities. Forget that with fighter pilots. They just wanted crazy guys, Chuck Yeagers, risk-takers, wild men. And so they're looking for a different kind of temperament. And Rosie had the skill of a fighter pilot, but he had the temperament of a guy who could handle not just a machine, but up to 10 and 12 men inside the machine because you had to be able to do that.
And when you think of those combat scenes, I think when I watch them, and they have so much verisimilitude, they're so real because you guys had the cameras inside the 17s, and I think the hardest thing to do would be to control the chaos. When guys start to get hit and bleed out, do you go to your gun? Because there's more planes coming in on you. Do you help the guy? Do you move to who he's your best buddy? There's another guy that's down the way that isn't your best buddy, but he's really bleeding out. Do you go to him? You should, but then you're abandoning your buddy. And meanwhile, the plane is noisy as hell and filled with cordite from the guns and things like that. There's smoke all over the place. It's very hard to see, and you might have drifted inside the flak field, you're in cloud cover and just like, "Are we going to die? Who's going to get us the hell out of this thing?" And that's where the pilot came in with leadership from the front. You know?

Kirk Saduski:
As we saw Rosie do with the Artie Shaw.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, yeah. They're all on top of one another, 12 guys in that thin little tube with all that activity going on and people dying all around you and seeing all that blood and how do you handle it? You're not a medic. All you have is a first aid kit. That's it.

Kirk Saduski:
There was something interesting, again, when we read it at Playtone, we spoke in a previous episode about Cleven and Egan being the Damon and Pythias of the story, and if you know anything about that mythological friendship, there is an element of one guy having to leave for the other and putting himself at risk for the other, which is what happens here.
Talk about that whole idea though of not just for Egan with Cleven, but when you heard a man was shot down, you didn't know if he was killed, captured, or wounded.

Donald Miller:
No.

Kirk Saduski:
You just got word they're not coming back. He's not coming back. That didn't mean that you knew his fate. You just knew he wasn't coming back. He could be captured or he could be killed. That must have been really tough on the guys.

Donald Miller:
The minute that they disappear from the record is the minute they get the word that the plane is down. And so nobody knows anything about the fate of these guys yet. As we portray in the film, they're clearing out lockers, they're stripping beds, and that must've been so traumatic.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, why did they do that? I mean, we do show that and almost immediately, and of course some of the guys resent it, and it leads to some awkward situations if they think you're missing, but you're not, you end up coming back the next day and your locker has been taken away and your bed has been stripped. But again, your best friend, you slept next to your best friend last night. You come back from a mission and there's no trace of him.

Donald Miller:
None, no closure. A lot of guys talked about that.

Kirk Saduski:
What was the Air Force's rationale for so quickly stripping the beds and removing the lockers? What was the rationale for that?

Donald Miller:
Well, I hate to say it, but they worried about theft. Maybe a guy, in a good-hearted way, tries to take a souvenir, a picture, something like that, and they just wanted to get everything back home as quickly as possible.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the things we haven't spoken about, and maybe we should talk about, are the mechanics. The men who worked on the planes who essentially set themselves up and lived next door, right next to the hardstands. One of our lead characters in the show is Corporal Ken Lemmons, who was a 19-year-old corporal who was a chief mechanic, which meant he had crews under him, and each crew was responsible for... How many planes was each crew responsible for?

Donald Miller:
Usually part of a squadron of 12, but each... Lemmons would have three planes, I think. Well, he was a crew chief, but you'd be responsible for two or three bombers and you become part of the crew. You had a bunk on base and you had an English bike that you'd ride out to the hardstand in the morning, or to save time, they would pitch tents out there and they'd sleep close to the planes if you were running a lot of missions. Because you had to be pretty much in the plane greasing up the guns, getting the plane ready for the crews to arrive, you had to be up around four o'clock in the morning. And some of these guys, if the missions were run back to back or very close together, were working all night repairing planes, trying to save as many planes as you possibly can. And these guys were worshiped by the pilots and became very close to the crews because everything had to be just right. Oxygen system just right.
They wore electrical suits because of the extreme cold, and they were wired like the old-fashioned Christmas trees that I grew up with as a kid where one bulb went out and the whole thing shorted out on you. And what happened with a lot of the guys would sweat, enormous sweat, and get all... And so the whole suit would be wet and they'd throw it into a pile as they came out of the planes and they just lay on those piles, and so they were damp and wet and didn't function very well the next day on the missions.
They learned and they started to change that after a time. But again, the ground crew was kind of responsible for all that sort of stuff. The people who packed the parachutes and things like that, everybody's there kicking in at the base, but getting those bombers ready again, especially at the height of the air war before D-Day when your outfit is flying almost every day, patching those planes up is an all-night job.
And then all of a sudden, you see the crew off, and then you have the tremendously depressing experience of that plane not landing because the Lemmons and his gang would, again, get on their bikes. They knew when the mission was scheduled to come back and they'd ride their bikes down to the tower, to what we call the control tower, and everybody would sit there on the grass, including local villagers who had adopted the American airmen, and they would wait for them to come in. The villagers who adopted them knew their number, so they knew when they're coming in, whether their plane was landing or not.
There's a story that a local villager in Thorpe Abbotts told us, a true story, a lot of people verify it, where this one couple, farm couple, had two young children, early teens, and there was a knock at the door one afternoon and a farmer went and said, "Yeah?" And it was an airman dressed for combat. He had just been through a mission. And I talked to his son. He said, "You could always tell them because they look like raccoons," because of their glasses and the sunburn, frost and things like that on their faces. And he said, "I need a shave and I could use some hot water." So they invited him in and the family retires to the kitchen. It's only the kitchen and the so-called living room, and he went in the living room and they set a mirror up for him and he did his shave and things like that. And then he peeked his head into the kitchen and he said, "I lied to you. I didn't want to shave. I wanted a family."
And so they adopted him, and then the father, who was at first skeptical of the American airmen, again, he has a young daughter, and he starts taking the guy to the local pub and the guy meets a local girl, and he starts to bring her out with the family, and they'd have Sunday dinner together, and then one day, they'd fly and the plane is shot down and they think they've lost the whole crew. Actually, six of the crew lived, and they thought the kid who fell in love with the girl, the 19-year-old airman, they thought he bit the dust, but he came back to the village right after the war to marry the girl, but he found out that she had married somebody else, and this was a year and a half after the war, and they had a baby and they named the baby after him.
An incredible tale, you know?

Kirk Saduski:
In the next podcast, we talk to Anthony Boyle on his portrayal of Major Harry Crosby.

Anthony Boyle:
They'd asked me to read for one of the different roles in the show, and once they'd sent me the script and I had read Harry throwing up in episode one, I went, "I want to play that guy." And they're like, "No, we want you to do someone else." And I said, "Please let me go on tape for Harry Crosby, like I'm obsessed with this guy." He just seemed like the most unlikely guy to be there. You've got air sickness and you're flying in the plane and you became the best navigator of the whole goddamn war? That's insanity. Just the odds were just stacked against him at every turn.
And that, for me, is a true hero's journey. It's Greek in a way. He starts off at just the very bottom, the lowest of the low. He feels like a loser. He doesn't feel up to it, and he manages to come through and become the biggest hero. It's just an incredible journey.

Kirk Saduski:
Masters of the Air is an Apple Original series from executive producer Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman. Join us again next week after a new episode of Masters of the Air on Apple TV+, and be sure to join us each week on this podcast from the National World War II Museum.