Boeing:
This podcast is presented by Boeing, building a brighter future for all. With the help of those who served. With support for hundreds of military and veteran specific programs, Boeing offers opportunities and resources for a career in aerospace. Veterans can use the skills gained during their service directly in their next mission. Leading teams in aerospace innovation, Boeing is proud to stand with and support those who served. Learn more about our veteran initiatives at boeing.com/veterans.

Harry Crosby:
We told each other all kinds of stories. Some of them were true, most were not. It didn't matter. Tall tales, music, laughter, good Irish whiskey. We all needed something to help us climb back into that plane and do it all again.

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome back to the Masters of the Air podcast from the National World War II Museum. This week we're speaking with Anthony Boyle and his portrayal of Major Harry Crosby. Welcome Anthony. Thank you for doing this.

Anthony Boyle:
Thanks, man.

Kirk Saduski:
Who was the man you intended to portray?

Anthony Boyle:
Harry Crosby. I first met him when I was sent a video clip, a 10-minute clip of him speaking in the nose of a B-17 when he was about 70 years old. And the first thing that struck me was he still had this childlike quality, this light behind his eyes. He seemed so self-deprecating, so full of love, so full of life that I just thought, "Oh God. I have to play this guy. I would love to spend a year playing this guy with him." And when I was reading the episodes, everyone seemed so cool. All the other characters seemed so cool, and Harry just seemed so relatable and a bit of a fuck up at times. And then when I read his book, I just completely fell in love with him.

Kirk Saduski:
And that's A Wing and a Prayer?

Anthony Boyle:
A Wing and a Prayer, yeah. A phenomenal book. If anyone's listening and want to read it, I would really recommend it. It's phenomenal.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, it was very informative to us throughout the show. Let's talk about Harry Crosby in the sense of he's the one character... And we'll get into this. He's the one character who is at Thorpe Abbotts from the beginning to the end. Cleven and Egan obviously get shot down and they're gone for a long time. Rosie comes in a little bit later, but Harry's there the entire time. So in a way, your character provides us a real dramatic through line throughout the entire series.

Anthony Boyle:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, when I was going through the scripts, I got nervous because when Cleven and Egan go to the POW camp, it's all very exciting. And I thought, are people really going to want to follow Harry just doing paperwork? Are people really going to want to stay with that story? But I feel like you guys have shot it and cut it and wrote it in such a way that you do really invest in Crosby, particularly when he goes off to Oxford and all that through line. It's really, really beautifully written and shot.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, and I think another thing that draws the audience to Crosby is the voiceover.

Anthony Boyle:
Yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's discuss and talk about the voiceover a little bit because once the decision was made to include a voiceover, there really was no other character that you could do it through. One, like I said, Harry was there the entire time, was based in England where most of the guys were. Let's talk about that and how did you as... The conceit of it is pretty much that this is Harry talking to us after the war because obviously we hear his voiceover and telling us things that he didn't personally witness like anything at the POW camp, obviously. So how did you differentiate your performance for the voiceover as opposed to any scene you actually had to play?

Anthony Boyle:
Well, I sort of felt it a bit like I wanted it to be Crosby, but also this kind of impartial omnipotent presence that was some sort of God-like figure just talking about what had happened as opposed to sort of being Crosby in the moment and being whatever the nervous energy would've been or whatever he would've been feeling at the time. I thought it would've been good to have performed it in such a way that it was a step back almost, as if it was him when he was 70 years old, retelling someone in a nursing home. Just this sort of like, here are the facts. And it's written in a way where the text isn't very emotional in those voiceovers. It's very just this is what happened. Here we are. The man would eat before they'd go off. They'd call it the Last Supper, just very here's the facts.

Kirk Saduski:
And by design because that's exactly how it was meant to be from the voice of God, from looking back so that it wasn't... But there's an element, also a little bit of element on a personal tip with Crosby, but it really is sort of our shepherd, if you will. The audience is shepherd through the story. I'm going to come back to the voiceover in a minute. But you mentioned that the other guys are so cool, but Harry's kind of a... He messes up on occasion, but there's a real trajectory, maybe more to Harry's character than any other because when we do meet him, he's almost... Not quite the first time we meet him, but he's thrown up into a paper bag. He's an airman and he has chronic air sickness. That's at the beginning, but he's quite a different man by the end of the series. Talk about Harry's trajectory through all the episodes.

Anthony Boyle:
Yeah. I just thought he was just the most incredible character and had the most amazing arc. When I first read for the show, someone had seen me in a show called The Plot Against America, and I played a sort of cocky young Jewish soldier who was kind of cool and they'd asked me to read for one of the different rules 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 were like, "No, we want you to do someone else." And I said, "Please let me go on tape for Harry Crosby." I'm obsessed with this guy after seeing the video and whatever. And for some reason, I just feel like I'd never seen him in an army show. I'd never seen him in a war drama.
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 God damn war. That's insanity. 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. He's throwing up every 30 seconds in a plane for eight hours and he manages to come through and become the biggest hero. It's just an incredible journey.

Kirk Saduski:
You've obviously had to think about who Harry Crosby was and why he did and how he did what he did. What have you concluded? As you said, quite a hero's journey.

Anthony Boyle:
You know what's amazing, man? When you meet veterans or you read about their experiences, when you try to give them glory and say, "Wow, how did you do it? Or Why did you do it?" They just say, "I just did it. I just did what needed to be done." And there's something in that in Crosby, he just did what needed to be done, but against air sickness and all odds and nervousness, but he just did it.

Kirk Saduski:
Having gotten to know, having spent all that time in England with you guys and sense, there is a bond that seems to have formed between the actors on the show, you and Callum and Austin and certainly Nate and so many other guys. And that just seems to be common. That was certainly the experience on Band of Brothers with the actors. To this day still, the actors from that show 22, 3 years later still have reunions.

Anthony Boyle:
Yes, it's beautiful.

Kirk Saduski:
We talk a lot about the authenticity of the show, but I think hopefully one of the most authentic things about our show is creating that sense of fraternity, comradeship between the men who had to do this. From your perspective, comment on that.

Anthony Boyle:
Well, from my perspective, I mean, look, it was during COVID, so we were starved of interaction. We were starved of contact. So going in every day and just having the crack with 250 lads was like, oh God, it was a godsend. We could go in and hang out. And the scenes were so fun at the beginning, these scenes in a bar and having fun and running around. And it was just a great experience. And we've all stayed so close afterwards. We see each other constantly and it's a beautiful thing.

Kirk Saduski:
It's almost as if you couldn't not do that after that kind of experience. I mean, it was a long shoot.

Anthony Boyle:
A year. Yeah, we shot that for a year, man.

Kirk Saduski:
And to be, again, 10 hours a day for a year and portraying what you're portraying, that's the other thing, you're not doing a romantic comedy. This is pretty serious stuff.

Anthony Boyle:
Yeah. And also we were in these... I don't know if anyone's talked about the planes, but we would jump in these... They were replicas of B-17 and they were on hydraulics, and we would go up 50 feet in the air and it took about half an hour to get the things up. So you had to pee beforehand, eat beforehand, then you were up for five hours and you couldn't come down because it's just so much time with so much money we were spending to come down for a pee break, half a million bucks or something. So you peed beforehand and you stayed in there and there was nothing else to do, but you'd done the scene.
And then you talk to each other, "Where'd you grow up? Where are you from? You got a girlfriend, why not? What's happening?" You just spent so much time in the cockpit or in these really cramped environments with each other that we all became really close. "What's your favorite song? All right, let's sing it." And we were up there for so long and it took so long to reset that we all became very close.

Kirk Saduski:
Yes, it's very obvious, even today seeing you guys together,

Anthony Boyle:
By the way, you were chatting about the family there. I met the family two nights ago and it was so emotional and I didn't expect it to be. I felt like you get lost in that you're playing a character and you're going, "I'm playing this character and what does the character want? Who is he?" And I met the family the other night and they told us, "Don't expect to see your father on screen. Don't expect it to be your father." And one of the kids looked me in the eyes and he said, "I feel like we've got our father back." And I was just so emotional to hear that. And they started to tell me about their lives and what they had got up to.
And when Crosby leaves, he's going back to his son. I've got a son, and I was looking at that son and he was telling me, "I've went off and I've done this and I've had kids and I've had this life." And I just couldn't believe it. It was just a real sobering moment, a full circle moment. I feel like the show was finished for me there personally. I was like, okay, I'm done with this. It was a really cathartic moment or something.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah. Just so our audience knows, so Harry and Jean Crosby had four children, two daughters and two sons, and Anthony got to meet all four of them a couple of nights ago at our premiere. So yes. And I will say, and I think you know that they were very helpful with us in trying to determine who Harry was and sharing photographs and letters, let alone being able to call them. Rebecca, his daughter, was extremely helpful to us, and John Orloff as we were trying to put this together. And who was your dad? They were wonderful. And what a great opportunity for you to meet them and for them to say that to you. Of course, I mean, that's the Emmy, man, in many ways. Was there a scene for you playing any particular scene throughout the series that had a more personal impact on you than maybe any of the others?

Anthony Boyle:
Yeah. The scene when I read Bubbles letter because I had two days off before it, and I just tried to build all these fake memories in my head. I got Louis, who plays the role to record that on WhatsApp, the letter, and I think he was out at a bar. I had two days off and I just sort of listened to it and walked around my apartment, walked around London creating these kind of fake memories of Bubbles and I trying to just build a friendship in my head or build that I love this person so much. And then when it came to shooting it, I was just overwhelmed with so much emotion that this person had died and it just let go. And it was a, yeah, very, very emotional scene to shoot. Yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
Yes. And it definitely plays that way on screen. Let's explore that a little bit in the sense of calling Louis and have him helping you. I've talked to so many of the actors, I observed it, but you guys, how much did you help each other? You mentioned you and Nate talking, I know Callum and Austin talked a lot. I know Josiah and Brandon talked a lot, support each other. Give us a sense of how all of you guys, how important that was to the actors to be able to rely on each other. You're in a unique position, none of us producers, directors, writers, anybody really has to understand it the way you guys understand it. So how did you help each other?

Anthony Boyle:
Well, you know what? I think everyone was so willing to do their best because of their prestige of the people behind it. Yourself, Gary Goatsman, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Band of Brothers, The Pacific. We sort of knew that this would be good if we didn't fuck it up. We got to throw everything at this because we're working with the best people. So I think everyone was just trying to be on their A game and be on their best behavior and really give themselves to the process as much as possible.

Kirk Saduski:
There's a scene in the first episode where one guy is helping another guy put on his equipment. And I think it's a similar kind of thing. And it's again, that bonding that this isn't just another movie. At the end of the day it's about brotherhood.

Anthony Boyle:
That's a great scene. It's Austin putting on [?]--

Kirk Saduski:
Yes, exactly. And just helping him because this is new. We haven't really done this before.

Anthony Boyle:
Yeah, yeah. It's a good thing. And that was us when we were trying to put the uniforms on. Dale Dye had made us put the uniforms on and we were all putting them on backwards and upside down, and he was laughing at us, calling us maggots and all sorts of stuff.

Kirk Saduski:
Of course he was. That's a great point, Anthony. Talk about the so-called boot camp. And Dale was there for more than... He was there throughout production. What did that give to you guys? The experience, the boot camp with Dale and his men and then Dale and his men were with us throughout reminding you guys that you're about to maintain a military bearing.

Anthony Boyle:
Yeah. Working with Dale Dye in the boot camp was such a unique experience that I'll never forget. And I loved it. I thought it was so funny. When we got there immediately, he would only call me Crosby or Harry Crosby. I once had my hands in my pockets and he said, "Crosby, get your dick skinners out of your pants." And I immediately just, "Sir, yes sir." Salute him because he's such a presence. We really bought into that who he was. We really gave ourselves to that process and listened to him so much so that when you'd see him on set four months later, you sat up right and you snapped up because we really bought into that, the process. He was brilliant. All his stories about Vietnam.
I tell you what, he made us do this thing. He made us march. And I remember marching and I was going to myself, "We don't even march in the show. Why are we doing this?" And then on the second or third day of marching, I stopped hearing us go... All over and we started to go... And we were marching in unison. And it was the first time that I thought, "oh, this is what it's like to be in group think, to be in the plane, relying on each other. We're all sharing the same breath. This is a symbiotic thing. This is how we should be. This is how a soldier should be. We can't be all over the place. We need to be unified." That was something I had to come to by myself. It wasn't something that someone could say, "You guys got to be unified." We had to go through the marching for hours to get that.

Kirk Saduski:
Hi, Don. How are you?

Donald Miller:
Good. Thank you, Kirk.

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome back to our Masters of the Year podcast.

Donald Miller:
All right.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's get into it. So Don, during the war, a number of, I'll say, aristocratic British families turned over their estates to the British government, which turned them over to the United States government for airmen to enjoy some R&R. They were called flak houses or flak farms, and they were run by the Red Cross. Tell us about the flak houses, what their purpose was, how effective they were and what the point was.

Donald Miller:
Well, as the butcher's bill increased, the number of casualties and calamitous air accidents and whatnot. The Air Force is looking for ways to give these guys a break from combat and so that they can retool them more or less in a humane way to get them back in the planes again, a complete break from war. So you went to one of these estates and the first thing you did is change your clothes. You took your uniform off, no uniforms allowed. Even the Red Cross girls dressed in sweaters and skirts and slacks and things like that, as did the guys. And the estates were sprawling, so you had running with the hounds and archery and punting on the stream nearby, tennis. The theory was to get you away psychologically from the trauma of combat, and they didn't work that well.
The Air Force does a lot of surveying on a number of their crewmen's attitudes on a number of issues. And in this case, the guys kind of said, you couldn't forget the war. Andy Rooney visited. Andy Rooney, a combat reporter as a young man. The Andy Rooney. He interviewed several of the men. He interviewed the director of one of the flak houses and he said, "By the second day the guys are playing war games." They're out on a stream punting, and they're pretending they're in B-17's and they're naming them after their home ship and things like that. And they're fighting out on the ponds and whatnot. And you see Rosenthal in our film, Rosie. He doesn't want to be there. He makes a very good point. He said, "I was actually rolling at that point. I was kind of getting used to it. I wanted to get through it. I was learning how to cope with it. Now I'm here and there's no danger. There's complete peace. And I'm a little worried about the jump back into the war."
And guys would sit around in the evening, especially when you get a little tired and melancholy and maybe have a few beers and they start talking about missions and things like that. So it didn't really pull you out of the war. It was too short. It was too short. And you were there knowing-

Kirk Saduski:
Because they were normally there for about a week, correct?

Donald Miller:
Yeah. You were there knowing that you were going to go back. It gave you time to think about two things, what had happened to you that got you there in the first place, and what's it going to be like when I get back.

Kirk Saduski:
You mentioned Rosie, and yes, we see Rosie and his crew at a flak house or a flak estate. And you, as we've discussed, you knew Rosie, you met Rosie and interviewed him for the book. Did he talk about this experience, his experience with the-

Donald Miller:
Not much. He mostly wanted to talk about his crew in combat, and he kept up with the crew and letters and visits and things like that. I asked him if he thought that they were effective and he didn't. He didn't interview the crew, but he said the general feeling was by the third day, oh, four more days, and we're right back into it again. So it's therapy that doesn't work. Nice try, but yeah.

Kirk Saduski:
There was a therapeutic purpose, but it wasn't to literally offer therapy. That was done somewhere else. Let's talk about the central medical establishment. You write a lot about it in the book. It's one of the more interesting aspects of the way the Air Force adapted to this unique form of warfare and what men were put under. And it was both psychological and physical therapy.

Donald Miller:
Well, I'm very interested in this and still am. It was one of the propelling factors that drew me to this story of the eighth Air Force. I was struck by the number of psychiatric casualties and how they were treated. Was going to center the entire book on that, actually, originally until I decided to do a more broad-scope treatment of the eighth. But it had pull for me because I learned a lot. You learn a lot about yourself. What is courage, how do you hold up under stressful conditions and treatments that were tried and failed and things like that. And if a guy started to experience signs of combat fatigue, as they called it World War II, it doesn't change the post-traumatic stress disorder until much later with Vietnam. You start to show the signs. Generally the combat surgeon on the base would try to pick them up and excessive drinking, sexual aggressiveness, guys getting into too many fistfights at dances and parties and things like that.
Guys that become almost comatose, not communicating, Parkinson's-like shakes, all these sorts of things. And then they would generally, a good combat surgeon who doesn't have a degree in psychology even, but would try to work with a guy with all the assurances he can offer. And sometimes they had available there sedatives that they'd give the guys and try to handle it that way. They were very reluctant to send them off base. Commanders like Curtis LeMay, for example. LeMay was really tough about this. On the one hand, if a guy really had a bad breakdown, LeMay would say, "Get him off the base right away. It's the old bad apple."
And then you've got a hundred bad apples. It kind of spreads. But generally, you didn't want a record as a group that had a lot of these combat breakdowns. And as a commander, it would affect the performance rates of your squadrons. And so it was kind of shoved under the carpet. And I've seen Air Force records that indicate from four to 7,000 guys broke down pretty badly. And I really think that it's a lot higher than that. Now what do I mean by breakdown badly? Well, that's when you can't be treated on the base and you become a problem. And maybe you're acting out or something like that. You can't fly and fight because you're not effective in the plane and you're jeopardizing other crewmen perhaps by your poor performance, so they got to make a move. So there was a place called the Central Medical Establishment, and that was born as a result of infantry experience in North Africa.
We had a tremendously high rate of combat breakdown, especially after Kasserine Pass as the first American real loss of the war. Well over 20,000 guys suffered from it and were diagnosed with it and it caused panic. And remember the Air Force is part of the army. It caused panic at army headquarters. And then they started to notice that the same thing was happening with this smaller group of airmen in England. Reports are coming in and they start talking about rotating the guys maybe on missions a little bit more. But how can you do that? We don't have enough guys here yet. Curtailing the number of missions they flew to 25. And somebody comes up with this idea that maybe we ought to establish a thing called a center for psychiatric care of airmen who express extreme reactions or have had extreme reactions to traumatic experiences.
Now generally, Air Force guys broke down in different ways than combat guys. Generally they broke down as a result of a single traumatic incident and the fear of that happening again. I talked to an airman, for example, who said that his co-pilot, where they began the mission, they flew over Holland, and that's where the first resistance came with a lot of anti-aircraft, and flak guns on the Dutch coast. He said his co-pilot would go blind. Again, this is a psychiatric reaction every time. And he said one time he went blind when he was actually flying the plane and he had to punch him. And when it got severe like this, the central medical establishment tried to do something with you. And generally what they did is the doctors were enamored of two drugs, sodium amytal and sodium pentothal. There's not a lot of difference between the two of them.
Both of them are a kind of a sleep-inducing truth serum. And what you would do is take the guy into a darkened room and inject him with, say, sodium pentothal, which is the stronger of the two. And the injection would cause him to go into a trance-like state where he could walk and talk. Although it slowed down your reactions a lot. And generally, they take the guys and ask them to lie prone flat on the floor, and there'd be a psychiatrist on one side of him and a psychiatrist on the other side of him. And they would then, this is Freudian depth psychology. We're going to pull the trauma out of the guys, release the demons by having the guy in the Freudian sense relive the thing that got him into the flak house and eventually into the central medical establishment.
And the Air Force filmed these things. I've seen them. And they're terrifying because the doctors would shout out things like, "Oh, fighters at 11 o'clock high. There's your buddy in an old orchard. Plane just above us. Whoa, plane just blew up. They're all gone. No parachutes. Gunner in the rear, lost part of his face. You know. Or were going to crash." And they'd scream this at him. And they had information very close and keen information about your particular trauma that got you there. It was on record. And they try to recreate that and guys would spin out of control. And a lot of guys started to get worse after a while. And eventually they kind of drift away because they got a new group of psychiatrists in from the University of Chicago, Berkeley and places like that who went to other different types of methods of doing this. Lighter dosages of sodium pentothal, things like that.
Longer stay in the hospitals and a lot more talk therapy where you become the father confessor and listen and support the guy and do a lot of really good kind of modern on-the-couch psychiatric care. Well, that didn't work that well either. And this became a problem because some psychiatrist, it started with the infantry, refused to treat guys anymore because of the quick turnaround. They'd go to Central Medical Establishment and they'd be there for maybe a week or maybe even as short a time as three days. Then it's time for a shower, a good pep talk, clean uniform, put them on a truck and send him back to the base and put him back in a plane. And one doctor I talked to called these guys ragmen because he said they were incapable of even protecting themselves, let alone killing the enemy. So that became a problem too. And they never solved it. I mean, they never solved it. And as to how you actually dealt with it.

Kirk Saduski:
I mean, I would assume that the, not solution, but the lessening of the problem would only occur as the Luftwaffe is increasingly less of a threat. I mean, Flak was always a threat of course, but as we were able to put more and more planes in the air.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, that's true. But then again, it seemed that flak was a lot worse than fighters in terms of the [?]. Because they couldn't defend themselves against flak. They had this feeling of helplessness. The gunners would fire on the flak. What's that going to do? But the whole idea of sitting there immobile and not being able to do anything except fly through the flak field, absolutely paralyzed with fear, and the inaction would add to the trauma. So they continued to have a lot of psychiatric casualties.

Kirk Saduski:
I want to shift gears a little bit. And you in the book have a whole chapter called The Wire. A big part of our series takes place at Stalag Luft III. Main POW camp in Germany. Help us try to understand what that experience must have been like for those men.

Donald Miller:
Well, that was a new experience for me as an historian dealing with that subject. And it surprised me how much I devoted to it. But then it shouldn't surprise me because serendipitously, a lot of the first guys I talked to had been captured and wanted to talk about it. There was a fellow named Louis Lovsky, for example, and he's one of the first guys I met. And I met him down at Savannah and he came to my hotel room. He might've been the first guy I interviewed. I don't want to make it dramatic or anything, but he's a small guy, wiry guy, about 5'5" and in great shape. I had never met him before. He was recommended to me by someone else as a good interview subject. And he came bounding into the room. I was sitting on the edge of the bed and he said, "My name's Louis Lovsky, and I can do a hundred push-ups." Jesus Christ.

Kirk Saduski:
Can you do a hundred push-ups, Don?

Donald Miller:
Right. I said, "That's great." And so he said [?]. He goes on the floor between the beds, "Move out of the way," and he does a hundred push-ups. And I'm like, "Holy Christ." The guy's 89. And he's doing these push-ups. And then he says he's the head of the POW. There's a veterans organization of POWs. And the first thing he tells me is what we had to overcome is shame. We were ashamed to have been POWs. Kurt Vonnegut told me that too. I was very close with Kurt Vonnegut and did a film with him. And he threw his gun away, his rifle away and put his hands up and surrendered.

Kirk Saduski:
He was in the army?

Donald Miller:
He was in the army. Yeah. And in Dresden when it was bombed in the meat locker. Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut told me the same thing. I said, What do you mean?" He said, "I have a picture. If I tell a guy I was a POW, they're going to think..." This is Lovsky talking. "They're going to think I parachuted out of the plane. I tried to evade the local Luftwaffe police. As soon as they spotted me, I put my hands up in the air and I surrendered and I caved in. I caved in instead of fighting." And he said, "We kind of all felt like that." And that shocked me, absolutely shocked me. Because I told him, "I feel doubly for you having gone through what you did."
And then he said something really interesting to me that I had never thought of before, and this is a little off the topic, but it was searing actually. He said, "You know what nobody ever talks about?" I said, "No." He said, "Everybody in the camp..." Stalag Luft III, for example, where he was with a hundred guys. He said, "Everybody in there was a victim of an air crash." Now when you read about an air crash in the newspaper, man, it's big news. Continental Airlines lost a thing. And all of a sudden you're in a formation of planes and 17 of them go down. 170 guys are victims of an air crash. And if they're not dead, they're pretty damn banged up. And if they're not banged up physically, they're banged up mentally.
And so he said, "This really made the first days in the camp very, very difficult, especially if you were physically hurt because the Germans just..." It wasn't that they were diabolical, but they just didn't have the medicine and the medical care to be able to handle guys who had serious injuries, broken legs, bodies would get septic. And he said the place was filled with invalids.

Kirk Saduski:
One of the things that happened, and you write about it in the book, after being captured, a lot of the down flyers were transported first to Dulag Luft where they were interrogated. But before they got there, and this happened, and again, you reference it in Masters of the air, that they saw some things. They were in trains, they were stuffed into boxcars, stuffed into boxcars like other people were being stuffed into boxcars. And quite often our guys saw those people. Talk about that phenomenon and what some of our guys saw.

Donald Miller:
Well, everything's in motion toward the end of the war. The Russians are coming this way, the Americans are coming this way, they're going to collide. It's displaced prisoners, orphaned children, it's a whirlpool of disaster. And as part of this, they were transporting the Jews, of course, to the killing camps to finish the job. And sometimes they would pull their trains off to a railroad site to allow a military train to get through. And some of the guys from the hundreds saw the prisoners hanging from the cattle cars, which weren't completely enclosed in many cases, and are wondering who these people are. In other incidents I have in the book where these guys are being marched from Stalag XVII A in Austria, and they're moving along the road. And I talked to this one guy, Hoffman, and he said he saw ahead of him, he said, "I could smell him from almost 200 yards. I could smell them. It was so rank." And they were dressed in striped pajamas. And I thought, who are these people?
And Hoffman's a Jew himself, "Who are these people?" And they passed each other on the road. And when they passed, the Americans prisoners started shouting out, "Who are you? Where are you going?" And the Germans had machine pistols and shot them in the air to shut everybody up. And then one guy responded, one Jewish prisoner responds and they gun him down. And Hoffman said it was the worst moment in my life seeing it, but more awful not doing anything about it, having to stand there and watch that guy get shot down like a dog and we couldn't do anything about it. And then of course, we later learned that night they spent the night in an abandoned camp, and there were bodies all over the place. So they're seeing at the end of the war, because the Russian push, the Americans or prisoners are being moved from camps and Barth on the Baltic from Zagan in Poland, from Silesia.

Kirk Saduski:
Zagan was in Germany at the time.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, it was. It was.

Kirk Saduski:
German, but it's Poland now.

Donald Miller:
Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was German. And a pine forest little village. They had a big prison camp. And so they're being moved to larger camps, catch basins, really. And the Germans are trying to figure out themselves at the time, The Führer was trying to figure out what he's going to do with them. He's going to use them as human shields or whatever.

Kirk Saduski:
Chris Segers, who was our production designer, did such a spectacular job, and his department was so dedicated. His researcher, Jessica Bradbury, did an extraordinary job. Well, I'm sure we brought you through that, the art department and showed you the numerous photographs, sketches, the diorama that they constructed in their office of the Stalag Luft III was so... I mean, it's a key element to our series. That way that looks that if you really feel like you were... This is what it was, this is as accurate as it could possibly be. And I remember there were times when even at the last minute, we'd find maybe it didn't look like that or there was a mistake. Well, then we would fix it. I mean, sometimes it would cost, but we would fix it.

Donald Miller:
I mean, I had heard that from you and I'd heard that from Tom, and I heard it from Dave McCullough, he described some wonderful anecdotal material about accuracy in the John Adams show and how impressed he was. And that immediately impressed me. Talking to you guys, seeing the first scripts was a big deal. But when I actually went there and I went to the Stalag-

Kirk Saduski:
The Stalag that we built.

Donald Miller:
Yeah, yeah. Stalag Luft III. And I was expecting one barracks building, and you multiply them with your cinematic tricks, but it's a whole Stalag. It is as big as a Stalag. And when I went into one of the compounds and, again, I looked at the shaving equipment, the razors, the photographs, and then I walked into the officer's clubs. I looked at the booze and all of it was from the period, and it was stored away in refrigerators, yet it was all '43, '44 stuff. It was pretty amazing. And the fact also that really interested me and what I wanted to do in the book and of course did, is it's based on real characters.
Now there are occasions when something happens, but it doesn't happen to exactly that character. But everything that happens in that film happened to a real character. And largely it happened to our guys, the guy that's portrayed there. And I thought that was fantastic. When we first met with Tom Hanks, he said, "Look, we don't have to make anything up. We don't have to do composite characters. There's enough here. We got a real war and we've got real terror, and we've got real joy and we've got every human emotion imaginable in warfare. And so we don't have to manufacture anything, so we're going to stick to the story, the war itself, and tell it happened as best we can.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, thank you. Because I mean, that's certainly what we attempted to do in Band of Brothers and then in The Pacific. First of all, the men who became our characters were so interesting, so fascinating, and they were put into... But they were just guys, but they were guys thrown into the most extraordinary circumstances. And how they responded, that's the story, that's the trauma. And how they cohered and all of that. But going back to the accuracy and the veracity of even the smallest detail was important for many reasons. And I remember with David, as you mentioned, David McCullough, when the first time we brought him to one of the sets for John Adams, and it was at John and Abigail's farm at Braintree, Massachusetts, and he and his wife, Rosalie, we turned this corner, we pull up, and he actually... And God rest his soul, I don't think he'd mind me telling you this story. He started to cry because it was so accurate.
And as you kind of just said, he could picture it. He had been thinking about this and writing it. And our art department and our production designer was able to recreate it in such detail that it was very moving experience to him. I had a similar experience on Masters of the Air where we brought Thorpe Abbots... And we're going to talk a little bit more about Thorpe Abbots later. But Thorpe Abbots was the air base in East Anglia England where the men were based. And that's still a going museum in East Anglia. It's run by a very dedicated team of people, all volunteers, and they've maintained the control tower very well as it was, and they have a little museum on site. Anyway, I've gotten to know some of those people pretty well.
We brought them out to one of our sets one day on location. And again, one gentleman, Ron, who had lived in the area since a child, he was a child. I think he was born right after the war, but he grew up right around the corner and he's a volunteer at the museum. Well, he broke down. I think we brought him into the briefing room, that same briefing room that you were in, and he broke down. Deborah Hubbard, who is essentially the person who runs the museum, was almost speechless. So the point being that that kind of veracity is followed, that kind of accuracy, for many reasons. And one main reason, and David got this right away on John Adams, is that it is inspirational to anybody who's working on the show. First of all, that's how they show their dedication. If you're the prop master, you're a scene painter, whatever, even a seamstress, let alone the wardrobe or the costume designer. Everybody from the heads of department to the people who have to then follow their creations-

Donald Miller:
Even got the shoelaces right.

Kirk Saduski:
But there's a point to it. There's a point to it because it allows them to be dedicated. That's their work. That's them doing their job, I dare say, in a B-17. But that's them doing their duty. And then it's also great because it's great for morale, it's great for the actors, it's great for everybody on set, whether you're a PA, a grip, or an actor, you're part of something bigger than yourself, which of course that's part of the experience at war. And the war is impossible without love aspect of it. You feel like you're part of something. And all of this effort is part of something bigger than yourself, so you have got to do your best. Joining us again, directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Welcome back, guys.

Ryan Fleck:
Hey, Kirk.

Kirk Saduski:
Last week we closed talking about Harry Crosby and the impact of losing Bubbles. Let's include Robert Rosie Rosenthal in a similar conversation. We see Harry Crosby at Oxford University and we see Rosie at a, so-called flak House. Let's start by talking about Harry Crosby at Oxford.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. I mean, look, for me, I'd never been to these places. We'd never shot in London. I'd never been to Oxford either. So when we were location scouting, my mind was blown by these places, and I just imagining putting myself in the shoes of these young soldiers who were sent there. Their minds must've been blown too. I mean, look, you walk around this medieval town and it's incredible. You're put into a time machine. And so we approached it similar to how we experienced it and wanting to shoot him walking around this town and seeing this place and meeting people as if it was us. And it's easy to do in that landscape with these buildings. And so we just wanted to make sure that he was surrounded by these images that we fell in love with on our location scouts. And these were the real places too. These were the places where he was sent.

Kirk Saduski:
Yeah, yeah. As you say, we actually shot at Oxford.

Anna Boden:
And just trying to imagine how he must've felt coming off of, as you said, his emotional experience at the end of episode five, and this being the place that he was escaping to. Crosby wrote about it as being such a mind-opening experience for him and intellectually expansive for himself. And you think about these young people leaving their homes for the first time, and now he'd spent sometime on A, in Thorpe Abbots, far away from home, but this was his first time now meeting all these other people from these other countries. And this was a place where all these people were getting together and talking about ideas. And so, yeah, he felt like it was both socially and intellectually such an eye-opening experience.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's talk more about Harry Crosby and his time at Oxford because it's at Oxford that our story shifts a bit. When, and Crosby wrote about this in his book, he met a British officer, a woman by the name of Londra Wingate. Now for a variety of reasons, we had to change her name to Sandra Westgate. Let's explore that relationship or talk about that relationship a little bit because it introduces a wartime or a potential, I should say, wartime romance into our series.

Anna Boden:
I think the way that I thought about it or approached it was what is it that these two people see each other and kind of provide for each other that they seek and that they need so much and not just chemistry? And certainly that's part of it. Certainly he is wanting to forget and escape a whole lot of stress and everything that he has been experiencing, but it's more than that. He has a wife at home who he can't relate everything that he's going through to, and he can't even tell her certain things that he's experiencing because he's not even allowed to. And he meets somebody and they just understand each other because they're both going through something at the same time. And there's a certain way that they can connect with each other that they're not able to connect with their people at home, their family, and Cosby with his wife.
And so there's just some kind of something that they need from each other in this moment that's drawing them together that is in addition to and beyond just the natural chemistry and fun that they have together. And so I guess that's kind of how we started to approach it. And then just working with these actors who just have so much life that they bring to the screen and so much joy that they bring to being on screen together. It was nice. And it was also just joyful to kind of have this element in the show that is a very kind of strange contrast to the other parts of the show that are butting up right against it. And so it was this really interesting challenge to have this element that we're kind of bringing into and weaving into the show and then trying to figure out how to intercut it with, let's say, what's happening with Egan in becoming a prisoner of war in Germany.

Ryan Fleck:
I mean, from a film reference perspective, this was our before sunrise, this was our brief encounter you brought to our attention. I really enjoyed watching that as well. But this was on a much tighter scale than a whole feature film. We had about 20 minutes of screen time to have these people walk around Oxford and encounter people and music and conversation in a really just beautiful, magical way. And shooting in that area in the summer, it stays light till really late. So we would be able to shoot these long magic hours at the end of the day, which was really a beautiful gift visually for us.

Anna Boden:
And reminding ourselves in these moments that the same people who are up in those planes dealing with near-death experiences all the time are young. They're kids who are falling in love and being silly and being shy and being... And so there is something like seeing that kind of youthful spark from Crosby. There was something nice about seeing that side of him.

Kirk Saduski:
Okay. Let's turn to Rosie. He's at something called the flak house. Basically aristocratic British families turned over their estates, estates like Downton Abbey, and turned them over to the British government who turned them over to the Americans that provided tennis and all kinds of recreation, tennis, boating, hunting, fishing, and a lot of American fliers were sent there when their commanders thought that they might be on the verge of breaking, but Rosie didn't want to be there. Tell us what Rosie was thinking.

Anna Boden:
He was scared of getting out of his rhythm.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. I mean, he says it in that scene with the doctor. You don't go fox hunting. You don't go talking about it, you don't go crying about it, you get back in the seat and you finish the damn. Job.
Three missions, three wheels down, and Gene Krupa, famous drummer from the era. You don't interrupt him in the middle of a solo, right? And tell him to pick it right back up three weeks later or whatever it is the line is. But yeah, I think he felt like he had a mission to accomplish and he was single-mindedly focused, maybe perhaps overly focused on it and needed some perspective and I think he got it there.

Kirk Saduski:
Let's discuss the juxtaposition of our storylines contrasting the relative luxury of the flak house to what Major Egan is experiencing now that he's in captivity.

Anna Boden:
Yeah. I think we touched on a little bit in our last week's discussion. He is really pulled away from all of everything that he knows. He no longer has his crew, he no longer has his men.And so you do see some of this personality that we've gotten to know with John Egan and some of his arrogance and some of his devil-may-care attitude is kind of sucked away from him. And he has this a little bit more of an intensity in this. He's got to make it through.
And it's interesting to see, I think he's kind of growth and shift over the course of this episode, you see him sit back and observe a lot more than we've ever seen over the course of the series. You see him watching and thinking and plotting his next move and starting to lead within when he's with that little group of other prisoners of war, other people who are starting to try and figure out, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to get through this together in a different way? Yeah. I thought that that was really fun to see Callum as John Egan using these different muscles.

Kirk Saduski:
Two of the most harrowing scenes in the entire series are in episode six. Egan with a group of other downed American fliers are marched through a small German town that had been bombed the night before. And the people in the town assume that Egan and the others were the ones who did the bombing, and some horrific things occur. And this is based on a true incident. You had to build one of the most difficult sequences in the entire series. Tell us about it.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. I mean, again, great set building, that bombed out Village by Chris and the whole hard team. It was intense. Going back to the idea of these long magic hour evenings, right? It means it gets dark late. So we couldn't start shooting until it was dark out, 10 o'clock. 10:00 PM. And then the sun comes up really early, so we've only got about six hours of shooting time. But basically, again, it goes back to the idea of this horror story, this building tension. The train tracks have been bombed out. They have to get off the train and be walked to another section beyond the tracks.
And these villagers whose town has just been bombed and they've lost family members and babies. They see the Americans who they think have done it, and understandably, they're pissed off and they attack, and it's scary, it's freaky. And it was really challenging to shoot at a very limited amount of time. Thankfully, we got it and we got a little more time. We got to go back and finish it on another night, otherwise we wouldn't have had a completed scene. But yeah, that's a tough one to watch.

Anna Boden:
Chris Segers was our production designer, and he was, I mean, such an incredible collaborator on this project. He and his team built the entire base of Thorpe Abbotts. We're talking about buildings, all the entire interrogation building that you walked onto the base and it just felt like you were walking onto a real base. He also, like Ryan said, kind of built this little street, this bombed out street so that we shot on and walked down. And I mean, he did such an incredible job. I mean, not to mention later on in the series, you'll have the pleasure of seeing even bigger scale, huge sets that he created, but the entire time, I mean, he just had such an eye and he never said anything was impossible. He had this amazing ability to just say, oh, that's what you're dreaming of. We can do it.

Kirk Saduski:
And of course, the other harrowing scene is when we see our down flyers, including Major Egan being stuffed into a boxcar because we know, we have context for something like that. We know other people were stuffed into boxcars during World War II and where they were going. Let's talk about that scene.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. That was actually really tough and interesting. Whenever you're shooting something, you're on a tight schedule, you're trying to get it done. There's the sun that's out, it's going down. You've got your shot list, you're just trying to make the day. And so you're focused on getting through it. And then it got to that shot, and we did a take. And I wasn't prepared for it. When we were shooting it and watching it off the monitor, I got choked up and it was hard to do more of them. We did a few more, and I didn't realize how much I was going to struggle with shooting that material. And I think a lot of people were affected that day.

Anna Boden:
Yeah. Everybody was. Everybody was taken so by surprise at the power that that image would have of that train going by. We called it the Ghost Train because it kind of comes out of the fog. And the characters didn't know what was happening at the time. I think it's important to understand that it wasn't yet common knowledge that there were these death camps. People kind of knew what was happening a little, but it wasn't common knowledge that there were full-on death camps and concentration camps.
So when Egan saw with his own eyes and when these men saw with their own eyes these cars packed with men, women, and children and babies, crying, it affected them, and it affected all of us just seeing that image. And it kind of caught everybody by surprise. And then bark, bark soldiers saying, "Get back on, get back on." And all of a sudden the moment's kind of broken and they have to kind of just move on with what's going on and try to process what they just saw. And yeah, that was a very powerful scene. And just again, yeah, what you said, a reminder of why everybody's there and why everybody's fighting.

Kirk Saduski:
And finally, one of the seminal moments in the entire series is at the end of episode six. It's one of the emotional highlights of the entire show. And of course, I'm referring to that moment when Major Egan enters Stalag Luft III, and we realize Cleven is alive and Egan, more importantly, Egan realizes Cleven is alive and we see our two guys reunited.

Ryan Fleck:
Yeah. I think that was one of our last days of shooting actually for these two episodes. And Egan gets marched in with a bunch of other guys and all the prisoners come up to the gates and they're shouting out. They see their friends and they're both excited to be reunited with people who they thought might've been lost and asking about others. And Egan, of course, is asking about Buck. "Is he there?" And then there he is. And it was great for us because we hadn't worked with Austin Butler prior to that either. So it was fun to get off and on set and see that chemistry these two guys have and be reunited and get our nice big end of episode crane shot up and over the camp with some visual effect enhancements and end of episode right there.

Anna Boden:
Yeah. And that nice Austin Butler smile.

Ryan Fleck:
Well, it's great and it's old school. The music swells at that moment, and it's just old school, right? In a different movie, you might've thought, "Hey, we're going to take the music out and put something synthy under this." But it's that great orchestral emotional swell, and it works, and it's the vibe of the show, and it hits you. I love it.

Greg:
Bucky. Over here. Bucky. Over here, over here.

John Egan:
Greg.

Greg:
You made it.

John Egan:
Murph. Glenn.

Greg:
What about O'Neill?

John Egan:
Hey, do you know if Buck made it?

Greg:
What?

John Egan:
I said did Buck-

Gale Cleven:
John Egan your two o'clock.
What took you so long?

Kirk Saduski:
In the next podcast, Nate Mann on his role of Major Robert Rosie Rosenthal.

Nate Mann:
And for someone with such a warrior spirit, I knew I had to get that balance right between his tectonic courage and that grace and that warmth. And that's where I tried to lead him through the series. He was so compelled in his mission and his mission was the mission, the mission of the war, and that's really what drew me in and how I tried to play it from start to finish. I think he felt like, if I'm not here, then I can't help this effort. And if I can't help this effort, then what am I doing? And that wasn't acceptable to him.

Kirk Saduski:
Masters of the Air is an Apple original series from executive producer Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Getzman. 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.