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Rosie Rosenthal:
How could I sleep at night knowing I get to go home while the brass up their numbers mentor? And then I can't imagine some rookie coming to take my place, getting himself and his crew killed on their first mission, then he gets replaced by another replacement and over and over and over again. No sir. I can't go home. Not yet. Not until the job is done.

Kirk Saduski:
This is the Masters of the Air podcast from the National World War II Museum. In this week's podcast, we speak to Nate Mann and his role as Major Robert Rosie Rosenthal. Nate, it is a pleasure to have you with us.

Nate Mann:
It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

Kirk Saduski:
Major Robert Rosie Rosenthal, when we first meet him, he's a lieutenant and we eventually see him get up to Major. Who was the man that, I'm not going to ask you who Rosie was. I'm going to ask you who was the man as you saw him and you wanted to portray?

Nate Mann:
I was lucky in so far as not only is Don's depiction of Rosie in the book, so rich with life, and they got to know each other quite well throughout their time together and his research for the book, but also because there's a good amount of footage of Rosie that I got to watch and learn about him. And there were a few things that struck me when we began preparing for the series. And he talks about his time, not just during the war, but before and growing up in Brooklyn and talking about his family and his sister and his mother and down to playing piano in their parlor. And there's a point in an interview that it was the first time that it started to really become clear to me who this man was and how extraordinary he was. He talked about the values that his family had instilled to him as a kid, and he didn't just say, "Oh, here's what was important to us growing up in this area." But he listed them in this very clear and precise way.
He said what was important to us was hard work, loyalty and honesty. And the nobility of those values is one thing, but the way that he chose to list them and say, this is really who we were, imparted him with a kind of trustworthiness that I knew was going to be really important as we got whirling in the series. So there was that, and I learned more and more and different things kept coming up. And as I learned more about how people spoke about him, and also in Don's book, just the stories in there, it became clear that he's not just this, he's not only this very precise and very focused man, but a man of great warmth and grace. 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.

Kirk Saduski:
Everything that we've heard and read about him was that he was, you say the mission, but it really was for him in many ways, more so than maybe a lot of guys. We know guys who joined and it was their patriotic duty, and then ultimately they do it for the other guys. That's why they keep getting back into the plane. But you get a sense from Rosie that there really was almost some higher mission that he, as I think as he said, you can't let people bully other people. And he took that very seriously.

Nate Mann:
Absolutely. A few years ago, I think it was a year or two before we started shooting the series, I was with my dad and we were going through a bunch of his father's belongings, my grandfather's belongings, and just organizing them. We were in the house and just trying to get everything cleared up when we came across this letter that my grandfather had written. And we didn't know this letter existed. And the letter's, it was written in 1940, and it's when my granddad first got to college and it was addressed to his parents, my grandparents. And the letter was talking about how he was starting college and he was a little unhappy and he was trying to tell his parents why he was so unhappy. And there's a line in that letter that really jumped out at me, and he's talking about, "I'm unhappy because I feel this sense of responsibility and duty as a young man. And I feel the sense of responsibility to you, to my parents, to myself, and to the society that gives me, a Jew, a chance to live."
And I knew when I got cast in this series, there was a part of me that connected with my grandfather in such a way that I knew I needed that in order to connect with Rosie and to tell this story. And that's something that I carried with me, not only as, not to say the word responsibility too much, but it is really in a way, not just to him and to that time, but to my family.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, it almost sounds like that's a letter that Rosie could have written to his family.

Nate Mann:
Absolutely. And that what I mean to say by bringing that up is that that sense of responsibility is bone deep, right? It's deeper than bone deep. And I knew, I felt grateful in a way to have found that. And it became such a, I carried it with me kind of every day.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, speaking of your family, I read that you watched Band of Brothers and The Pacific with your family years ago. So talk about that a little bit. And again, now you are part of the trilogy yourself. You're playing a key character in that World War II trilogy that Playtone has been able to construct. I'd even say, could you ever have dreamed that you'd be one day part of this heritage? But that must be an extraordinary feeling.

Nate Mann:
I mean, Band of Brothers wasn't just something I had watched. I think it was the first TV show I watched in completion as a kid. And when I first knew that this was happening and that it was taking place in the air, I couldn't believe it. And then to be a cast, I mean, come on, it's a tremendous honor. And I also was just so excited because what stuck with me about that series and about The Pacific was that how focused it was on the work and the duty to these men. And I guess I try to play every character right with that sense of responsibility. I had a professor one time who said, "Play every characters, and if they're in the room with you." And not in a way that necessarily glorifies them or that they should be happy with it, but they should feel seen. And I think Band of Brothers does that very, very well. And so that's what made it so satisfying to work on.

Kirk Saduski:
And of course, unlike Band of Brothers, which so many of the men from Richard Winters down, I mean dozens of the men that we portrayed were alive, and the actors got to meet them. Damien Lewis got to meet Richard Winters. Frank John Hughes got to not only meet, but become very close friends with Bill Guarnere. And in The Pacific, and not as many, but a lot of the guys did get to meet the men they were portraying. In as you know Masters of the Air, you guys didn't get to meet the men you portray because they weren't alive. What was that like? I know how beneficial it was for the other actors to meet the men they were portraying, but was that in some ways maybe even freeing that you didn't get to meet, you'd have more creative license, or what was it like not actually being able to meet Robert Rosenthal?

Nate Mann:
Sure. I mean, there's always a balance between the TV show's kind of responsibility to all the characters and all the stories at once. And to my responsibilities for this one man I knew because these men are, there's so much documentation of their lives and their lives together that I knew. I mean, we couldn't have had a richer resource to pull from in order to get started. So there was a familiarity that started to creep in there. But of course, it's nothing like shaking the man's hand. I did get a chance to meet Rosie's son Dan, who's involved in the 100th Bomb Group and loved his father so, so much and-

Kirk Saduski:
And his grandson.

Nate Mann:
Yeah, that's right. Sam. And to have their blessing, I can't imagine what it's like to meet someone who's going to play your father. I mean, I imagine that's surreal and bizarre and maybe a bit nerve wracking, but to have his blessing and to be able to say to him, "I want to do your father justice." And also to see them together, him and Sam, they love one another, and their sense of humor, I really got on with them. And I actually, I feel like I learned more about Rosie, seeing them together and seeing how their family, what their family was like, what their dynamic was like. Then perhaps some of the things I even read, there's just-

Kirk Saduski:
Of course, you're in the flesh.

Nate Mann:
Yeah, exactly.

Kirk Saduski:
There's a character through line in episode seven, which is a crucial episode for Rosie. And there's a character through line because we see him early on and there's a lot, but now we're in March of 1944 and there's been a certain amount of attrition for the 100th, and there's now replacements. And some of the officers are reluctant to get too close to the replacements because they don't expect them to be around very long. The exception, of course, is Rosie. He, and we show in the episode, Rosie is right there. But it's interesting in that episode, and he shepherds them, but he realizes by the end of the episode, shepherding these guys, it doesn't mean just showing them where the chow hall is. It means staying with them. And so he makes a momentous decision. Tell us about that and what that was like to try to-

Nate Mann:
I think that's absolutely right. I mean, the decision to re-up, right, I mean is extraordinary and almost it's puzzling, it's beguiling to look at the risk to look at what he had gone through and then for him to say, I need to stay around. I think you're right. I think he felt, I think he understood his value to the 100th. I think he understood that people looked up to him. I think he understood that when these young men were being flown over from the states and they knew that their commander was, that they were going to be in good hands, I think he understood that that's helpful in the air is to be in formation and say, okay, we know we're with someone with experience who's been up here and who's faced the fighters faced the flak done this. And when it came time for him to think about not being there for them, I think he knew that some of them would've lost confidence.
And it was such a pivotal time in the war that I think he knew that was valuable, not in a narcissistic way, like, "Oh, I need to stay around because I'm the big guy on campus," but more because he knew that's what would help them win the war. And then in another sense, and this is really how it kind of clicked for me, was there was a simplicity to it I think, for him, insofar as I don't think he saw going home as an option. 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 was an acceptable time.

Kirk Saduski:
As we discussed earlier, I mean, there was that sense of a larger mission. Don Miller who got to know Rosie very well, and one of the reasons he decided to write Masters of the Air after he met Rosie has said that many times that it was almost inconceivable that he would be anywhere else. So even though he could have gone home, so not just to protect and to help the replacements, but to see the mission through.

Nate Mann:
Exactly.

Kirk Saduski:
How important was it to you as an actor to have that much authenticity, that much attention to detail throughout the production? I know I've seen you a quote from you about how the B-17s were so accurate from the flight deck into the nose. How did that, and then Colleen, she was able to do with wardrobe and Chris Seagers and building him, but everything, the props, how did that authenticity help you as an actor?

Nate Mann:
The missions and when we were filming them, I mean, Rosie was an astonishing pilot. I mean, he was in control of that plane at all times. He knew how it worked. He knew all the inputs. He knew it back to front. He had flown so many hours even before he had gotten there. I knew that in order to have that sense of control in our scenes where these missions that are really the most harrowing, I knew that in order to feel like to do justice to the experience of driving through and maintaining that calm, collected control, I knew I needed to understand what was happening as best as I could.
And one thing that I think is amazing about the series is that we had so many military advisors who helped us do that properly. And so when you're in the moment, in the heat of the moment on that rig in front of all this extraordinary content and everything's moving very fast, and we're trying to capture the scale of this mission to be able to know precisely where to reach is actually, it's extremely helpful. And I also think it echoes the real experience, I hope somewhat in that at the end of the day, if you don't know what to do as a soldier, you rely on your training. And the training was this machine. So that's the, if you will, the nuts and bolts of the flying, isn't it?

Kirk Saduski:
The boot camps are always a topic of great interests for people. Your boot camp was a little bit different from The Pacific and from the Band of Brothers. You guys weren't thrown out in the field for a week. Thank God. But it was still with Captain Dale Dye. And I know that Captain Dye, one of his main, maybe perhaps his main purpose is to give you a military bearing to supply you with that. How important was that to you and the other guys, and also in the bonding experience of this is your boot camp, this is your training ground, not only technically and how to bear yourself, but in meeting and working together with these other guys.

Nate Mann:
I mean, Dale is of course a legend, and I mean, he's kind of the inventor of the field of military advisory. I think that's exactly right. I think it was really important for him to give us a sense of what a unit means. I mean the ranks and what it means to live life as a soldier and March as a soldier. There's a quality to that type of togetherness, to that type of hierarchy that he knew is especially important in a series like this.
And of course, when we all show up, I mean, this was very early in shooting, and we're all getting to know one another, and there's the kind of getting to know one another aspect, which was of course very real as well on these bases. Then we start marching in step, and at first it's like, okay, well, we're not marching in the plains. This isn't quite the same, but it is, especially to someone like Dale, because that's the unit is to give us a sense of what it means to fight together with one another for one another. And that it echoes in a way kind of the formation in the sky and coming together in the air. You got to be able to look over your shoulder and know who's right beside you.

Kirk Saduski:
We discovered that Rosie was a huge music fan, particularly the jazz of the era.

Nate Mann:
That's right.

Kirk Saduski:
And we have several scenes where Rosie, we see him enjoying music. He talks to Crosby about going to Minton's, and we determined he actually did go there before the war. How important was that? Did you incorporate any Rosie's love of music into how you built his character?

Nate Mann:
It seemed so essential to him from the start. I tried to figure out what exactly it was. I mean, we all love music. I love music too. And then to have, there's this kind of theme in the show of rhythm, and we kind of use the rhythm as this metaphor for what it is to be in the zone, to be able to stay focused on the job at hand. I think it was something like that. And it's also what I was saying earlier about his warmth and his generosity of spirit. He talked about how he really couldn't sing. He was like, "I'm a monotone," but his sister and his mother were musicians. His uncle was a great musician, and they would sit by the piano and his sister would play jazz, and he would sing at the top of his lungs, even though he knew it was probably-

Kirk Saduski:
It wasn't Frank Sinatra.

Nate Mann:
Yeah, exactly. And there's something about the vibrancy of that that I think he knew music was a way for them to enjoy themselves and to connect with one another, and that ends up working itself into the series in, I think a really beautiful way.

Kirk Saduski:
Was there any particular scene, the playing of which really had an impact on you?

Nate Mann:
The scene in episode five where we return from the Munster mission and we're the only plane to return, and we find ourselves in the interrogation room. Don Miller writes about this in the book, and I think Ryan and Anna captured this so beautifully. There was this sense of there's this big room that's usually filled with dozens of airmen, everyone who's able to come back. And on this day it's empty and they're the only ones, and there's this heaviness to their presence or their non-presence. And I remember sitting there and feeling the vastness of this room, this ghostly space all of a sudden, and it just made my hair stand up.

Kirk Saduski:
After three missions, because two of the three were so harrowing that the brass decided they better send Rosie and his crew to a so-called flak house and Rosie didn't want to go. We know in reality he didn't want to go, and he explains why to the doctor, but you explained to us why he didn't want to go there.

Nate Mann:
There was a frustration, and I understand this frustration, and it leans a little bit into that experience of being in the zone I was just talking about. He uses the metaphor of music. You don't take Gene Krupa as this amazing drummer out of his drum solo in the middle of it. He was also, it was important to mention that he was an athlete, he was a football player and a baseball player, and it was almost like it's the top of the ninth and he struck out two batters, and then he gets taken out before the third. And there was this frustration of, "Oh no, we're in the pocket here. We need to keep working. We need this momentum. If you lose momentum in something like this, then it can be disastrous." And the flak house felt, I think like a distraction. And then in the course of his time being there in our series, he realizes that this is important for his man, and that this is bigger than just him. And that when they get back, they needed this time in order to reconnect and then follow through.

Kirk Saduski:
And the doctor kind of points that out to him a little bit.

Nate Mann:
That's exactly right. Yeah, that's exactly right. Because he says, "What are we doing? Go fox hunting." Right? What are we playing games? I mean, Rosie in one of these interviews talks about hitting golf balls in the countryside, and there were all these old dirty golf balls, and then every now and then one would be like cow poop, and he would smack into it and it's explode. And he'd like, "What are we doing here?" And Tom-

Kirk Saduski:
He's on a mission and he doesn't, but I think the doctor points out to him that you have bigger responsibilities, not just about you. And obviously in some ways that's the theme for everyone. At the end of that episode, episode six, Rosie does have a little bit of a difficult time getting back into the plane. One of the themes of the show when we said of the series, and we said this so often, is how did those men keep getting back into the planes? Of course, they're ordered into the plane, but that's different. How did each individual man find it within himself to climb back up into the B-17? And we see for the first time that even Rosie is having the difficult time doing that. And this is based on what Rosie actually said. He said that there was one mission where, and it was after the flak house, that he gave it a little extra thought. Tell us about playing that scene.

Nate Mann:
I mean, there's an undeniable psychological component to the type of trauma we see in this series. I mean, you can think one thing, but the body is wiser in other ways. And if you go through something that harrowing and then you're asked to return to it, I mean, it only makes sense that it's not even a hesitation, it's a resistance. You have to fight through something like that. I think that's exactly it, right? I think he knew he needed to find that sense of purpose again. And this is something where the book Don Miller, I actually found very, very helpful to read about because he talks about the psychological extent of the impact on these men and how it was misunderstood at the time. Very different from our modern conceptions of what PTSD means and what it's like to live with.
But he says, what's maybe most remarkable about the Eighth is not the number of men who weren't able to get back in the plane, but the overwhelmingly larger number of men who did. And that says something to me just about human courage, right? I mean, that's beyond just the life of the soldier, but a life as a person that says no, anyone, when duty calls, people rise to the occasion in extraordinary ways, and I think Rosie was one of those people.

Kirk Saduski:
Any final things you want to tell us about who Robert Rosie Rosenthal was from your perspective?

Nate Mann:
I really enjoyed living with Rosie's warmth, and it's something that I try to and tried to carry with me even after we started filming his sense of just how he took care of those who were around him and how important he thought others were in any kind of environment. I wish I knew more about his life afterwards, and he went back into law, of course, when he came home and those years afterwards, I'm still super curious about what happened to him next.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, we may be able to find some of that out. We may know the people who can do that.

Nate Mann:
Yeah, I think so.

Kirk Saduski:
Nate, thank you so much. This was really a pleasure and an honor. Thank you so much. Joining us now, Academy Award-winning costume designer, Colleen Atwood. Colleen has won four Academy Awards and earned 12 nominations. How many Emmys, Colleen?

Colleen Atwood:
Two.

Kirk Saduski:
And two Emmys. And I know you're working on some Tonys and Grammys too, right?

Colleen Atwood:
Yeah. Right.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, thank you for joining us, Colleen. Masters of the Air. You have been the costume designer on many iconic films and have had a lot of challenges therefore. What were your biggest challenges on Masters of the Air?

Colleen Atwood:
I think on Masters of the Air to differentiate between a film and an episodic thing the scale of Masters was that on a film, I approached Masters, first of all as a film. But the thing that was different was that instead of shooting through it chronologically from A to B, that we were shooting different episodes, different parts of different episodes at the same time. So managing the costumes alone, which people sometimes had to share the odd jacket and stuff, but just the overview and the scope of it was huge. And then keeping moving through time to get to the German part at the end and the occupation and all that part was a huge sort of logistical thing. So your steam had to be up for a lot longer period of time than on a heavy feature.

Kirk Saduski:
And in the wardrobe department, steam being up can be literal as well.

Colleen Atwood:
It was steamy.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, you mentioned the German. There were so many elements of this because you think Masters of the Air, and you think American Airmen, the Eighth Air Force, et cetera, but you had an international palette that you had to deal with that also as you mentioned, had to go through time. So we were in England, we were in France, we were in Belgium, we were in Poland, and then you're also dressing. How many people did you actually have to address actors background, everything?

Colleen Atwood:
Well, what would be considered actors on our principle thing was even though some of them were had a sentence, it was around a thousand people. And then the background artists was vast because we had days probably of 350 a day continuously through times, and sometimes it overlapped and was split between Germans and Americans or prisoners of war and ground crew. We never knew quite exactly what was going to be coming at us. So it was a massive amount of clothing to pre-fit-fit and keep moving throughout the show.

Kirk Saduski:
Can you help us understand your process in doing all this? I mean, you first have to do, when you agreed to do the project with Gary and Tom, where did you begin? I mean, obviously an enormous amount of research. Tell us about your process.

Colleen Atwood:
When I began the film, there was a lot of research in place because the whole film had been researched quite thoroughly when I began because of the art department and other things, because I was behind there curve a little bit. And what I researched in the beginning was really what was around in the world that could help us, that we could actually use. It was a pretty small amount of stuff. The first step I had was manufacturing the leather stuff. I started really small in the beginning with two people during COVID and a factory that was managed to stay open in the UK named Eastman, who does a lot of reproductions leathers, and we manufactured all the flight clothes and getting the masks and starting buying from collectors all over the world the other bits and pieces.
In a parallel universe, I have a costume company in Poland that I use outside of Warsaw that supplied a lot of the uniforms for Europe. The American uniforms I began, they let me into Western during COVID and to CRC and stuff. And I went there and sort of did an overview of what really existed because there's nothing better than the real stuff. The costumes or the costumes, the uniforms that were made for the war, especially at the beginning of the war in all the nations involved were really beautifully made. There were quality fabrics made in quality factories. The government contracted out to more than one place. One place didn't make all the uniforms for the American Army Air Corps. I mean, they were made all over the country.
So it was interesting to see how things were made differently. And I kind of liked one style that Eastman didn't even have. And he's like, "Where'd you find that, because I found a real one," and it was made somewhere in the Midwest. So it was from a specific factory. They cut it a little differently. It was a nicer collar. There were things about it that I dialed into for my team. And Eastman had a lot of stuff, and I changed some of the specs on his because I found real stuff that was a little bit different. And it was interesting when you went into it to see all the different varieties because they'd all come from a different shop.

Kirk Saduski:
The 100th was kind of known as the big D because of the D on their tail fin. But it sounds like the big D for you was detail, going into that kind of detail, which was essential. We talked earlier to Nate and to Tony and I asked them how important was that kind of detail, whether it was wardrobe or props or whatever it might be to their performance. And they said it was crucial. Of course you're aware of that.

Colleen Atwood:
Well, each fitting was really exciting because from the outside you look in at these guys that come in one after another and they're putting on basically the same costume. But as you interpret it with their characters, like how they wore it, who they were, what their character was, you adapted it the way that people do in real life with a uniform when they're put in a uniform.

Kirk Saduski:
Can you tell us any specifics about in terms of Callum versus Austin, Tony versus Nate, Josiah versus Branden, anything or any of the actors in terms of how you would give them sort of subtle differences? Because as we keep saying, they were in uniforms, they're all supposed to look the same, but that doesn't work dramatically.

Colleen Atwood:
Well, even with Josiah and Branden, for instance, Macon was a super dandy, like all the research of him, he's very flamboyant with the scarf and the perfect glasses. He was definitely fly. And Branden's character was more kind of reticent, more reflective, more quiet, less kind of on the outside showing glamour. So as soon as they came in, they were so well-cast that the things that worked for the characters also worked for them as the actors just by nature. Nate's character came into the war later. So his character as opposed to Cleven and Eagans who sort of came into the war about the same time, and Anthony as well, his character came into the war later. So he never really, he had the leather bomber jacket, but the flight jacket that he had was developed later in the war. It was not leather, it was a new material nylon with fake shearling lining.
It was much lighter weight. If they went down in water, they could actually not sink like a rock. So there was things about it that were developed, and they were also developed and manufactured much more rapidly because they were running out of stuff the whole time. I mean, when we went into the war, they were borrowing British stuff when they got to England. Some of the boots vary, some of the life vests was a thing that was noted in I think in the story, but all those bits and pieces, so the guys combined different elements from the RIF into their uniforms in the beginning.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, it makes sense because the Air Force was, this was all new, and so what would make sense even in terms of what the men wore because they were figuring it out as they went along. How do you treat some of these wounds? How do you treat some of the psychological wounds, et cetera, et cetera. So it would make sense that how they dressed the men would evolve as well. You mentioned the flight jackets. It's almost like they take the leather jackets with the collars, almost take on a light or identity of their own. I mean that's become, and I think they're going to be with the show, so iconic, those flight jackets. Talk about that a little bit.

Colleen Atwood:
Well, the flight jackets are always in a sense, they're what's different about the uniform from many other part of the military. The Navy had leather jackets that were very heavy in a different kind of thing, but these Air Force jackets are really beautiful and they look great on guys. They're almost like, to me, they're kind of like from the Old West or something. There's something, a romance to them that I think is unique and I think people will gravitate toward that style.

Kirk Saduski:
And of course, one of your challenges was that you had to, we spent a lot of time in Stalag Luft III. Those were tough conditions for those guys. How did that affect your approach and what you had to do dressing them for Stalag Luft III as opposed to at Thorpe Abbotts?

Colleen Atwood:
Well, dressing them for the Stalag was really different. The research, they got clothes from the Red Cross. They got a lot of clothes from Britain because it was the closest place to get clothes in from. So I gravitated toward a more British kind of sweater and things like that in their costumes. I had a lot of real stuff knit and stuff and manufactured for them for those scenes. It was a different way also to individualize them separate from their uniforms. There was a certain level of pride within the Stalags of still staying, trying to be as clean as possible, trying to present a military presence. You didn't become a homeless person. You really tried to maintain a certain level of military demeanor within the camps. The camps they were in were for people who were higher ranking officers, so they weren't in probably the worst of it. I mean it was certainly bad enough.

Kirk Saduski:
It was primitive, but they weren't really deprived, but it was difficult. It was cold. They didn't have sufficiency.

Colleen Atwood:
There was never enough food. They were not warm, so layering up and stuff. And there wasn't a lot of new stuff coming in once they were issued that, it was kind of like when you're issued something in the service, they don't just keep giving you new stuff unless you lose something. But they got whatever they had, they came in with what they had and they got sweaters and things like that. But it wasn't like they kind of got a new code or they had to layer up with all the things and improvise with the things that were kind of provided for them within the parameters of a prison.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, again, let's go back to the international nature of this because again, most people are going to think, okay, American Air Force, and then maybe a British village, but there's so much more. You had to dress Russian soldiers, you had to dress German soldiers, Polish civilians, French civilians. Again, how much research into the detail, that aspect of things did you get into?

Colleen Atwood:
Well, with the civilian world, I did photo research, mainly journalistic research of the streets of different cities within those countries and what they knew. I knew a little bit about it just from other things I've worked on. And so I just sort of separated each one in a cultural way as much as I could from the research I had. I had to reuse a lot of stuff that worked in different places, but the way you combine it and put it on people, it can look totally different. There's in the British rural community, there's sort of a style. There were the farm girls and there were all these people around that came from different parts of England that came around and gathered around the bases because they had work or they were supporting that place.

Kirk Saduski:
And doing that, again, providing that kind of accuracy and authenticity really, I mean creates the world here that the drama takes place in. But again, it's so varied. And also not only internationally, but as you just said, you had to go through time. So we opened in 1943, but 1943, no matter where we are, especially in England from 1945 and where we are in the show, there's an attrition, if you will, and even in terms of what the people are wearing, because now they've been at war for all these years and they're not making, maybe the American military is, but nobody else is making manufacturing clothing.

Colleen Atwood:
No, there wasn't cloth. There was a shortage of things. That's why skirts were shorter. I kind of known fact about the forties that they did pattern making and stuff to use less fabric to make clothing. So it was an economy of the times.

Kirk Saduski:
Which reflects the times of course.

Colleen Atwood:
And you know from the history of people that suffered through the war in England, they were deprived of a lot of foodstuffs. They were not always able to get the food that they liked to get.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, that brings up an interesting question. Do you have to help, because even our guys, when they're in the POW camp and the civilians, as the war goes on, they're getting thinner. Are you helping to convey that through costuming?

Colleen Atwood:
I think weight gain and loss through costuming is always in the telling of a story, a difficult thing to do. I mean, there's certain tricks that work sometimes on some frames. If somebody's tall, you can kind of get away with stuff being looser. If they're not tall, they just look fatter. So it sort of just depends on the person and the body shape, how to kind of convey that and sort of sell it. It wasn't an obsession of mine to do that. I feel like picking the crowd, which I looked at every picture, everybody that was in the show from every background artist, every kid, and looked at them with the idea of faces and bodies that looked the most like I could from the research that I had.

Kirk Saduski:
We talked so much, and in the show we show the cooperation that it took within a B-17, that crew of 10, they had to work together. Your department had to work very closely with hair and makeup, and I would assume, and with the art department, Chris Seagers and his crew. Talk about that crew.

Colleen Atwood:
And props.

Kirk Saduski:
And props. Thank you very much. Talk about that because that coordination, I don't want to compare it to a B-17, but you have to have that kind of coordination for successful mission.

Colleen Atwood:
No, it's a real team effort to create a film in any time period, but especially a heavy duty period piece like this to make sure that the hair department knows what's going on. The amount of aging on the clothes should also match the amount of dirt in the hair or the amount of cleanliness on the face and things like that. So it is always really seeing it together and sometimes and working on it together.
Props is a very, especially in a uniform movie where you have firearms and protective clothing and parachutes, and who does the parachutes, who does the masks? So it's a very complicated intermarriage, but we found a lot of stuff because we started a little bit before props, we found the real masks and a lot of stuff that they use that they backed into. Some of the beds that are in the barracks are from, even one of my guys had, because he was a collector, so he had all this stuff that props was able to utilize. But it's a network of people that we had on the show that are dedicated to this work on a certain level that really made it helpful and made the interaction between props, especially in my department key, I think.

Kirk Saduski:
Production took place over nearly a year. So you were in England for quite a while and I was struck and I think, tell me what the dedication, you mentioned that you had a lot of people who were dedicated to this work, particularly because of the subject matter. I certainly found that to be the case. Tell me what your experience was.

Colleen Atwood:
I think because people had a history of their fathers and grandfathers being part of this world from their childhood, they'd inherited a love for the history of the time and really were so excited to be part of it. They were part of, in their youth, they'd been reenactors and sort of lived the dream in that way. So they were really engaged by it.
And I have to say the loyalty, not only of my crew, but the crew of the film, but also the loyalty of the guys that are in the extras in the movie was pretty great because they had to have a long commute to get there. That's like they don't all have cars. They're young guys. They're kind of like young soldiers really. And they're coming to work at 4:00 and 5:00 in the morning, and I see six of them piling out of an Uber together. It was really inspirational that they really showed up and they were replicating an uncomfortable time, especially in the camps and stuff. It wasn't warm, it was wet. They didn't really have heat when they were working all day long, but they were really dedicated and they were really engaged by what their part was in the story. I think on any job I've ever had, it was the most sort of connected group of actors across the board that I've ever worked with.

Kirk Saduski:
And again, I think it's a combination of factors, the professionalism of the departments, yourself, Chris, props, camera, I mean across the board. But also again, that subject matter and the fact, as you said, so many of these guys, their fathers, their grandfathers, their uncles, that for all of those reasons, getting up at 4:00 A.M. is not as onerous as it might be on another gig.

Colleen Atwood:
I think that's true. And I think that having a guy like Gary that shows up and having the producer, the head of the production come and show up and be engaged with people, say hello to them, know who they are, know people's names is so underestimated in today's world. All these people are inspired by someone like that, that actually comes and recognizes them and sees them for the work that they do, whether they're the newest prop person in the world to a background artist that you've seen for 50 days in a row. It's a really important part of production that I think made this special for people too.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, you're referring to Gary Goetzman who is, he's Tom Hanks partner and Playtone. Playtone is his company. So you don't normally get that level of attention on set on a daily basis on location, but that's required too. That's, like I said, it's combination of the professionalism from the top I think inspired the dedication.

Colleen Atwood:
I agree. And I also think that not only professionalism, but how the production treats the crew and how it respects everybody there is treated with respect in a way that's sort of the idea and the sort of idealism of a military operation.

Kirk Saduski:
But I want you to give the audience a sense of how large your operation was in terms of just the physical plant of it. I remember you had a warehouse that was like an airplane hanger full of costumes and-

Colleen Atwood:
Literally, it probably was the size of a small airplane hanger. But we probably carried, we probably had around 3000 costumes in that room when you break it down into all the different levels of the military. My crew, my main crew, I had two assistants on the job and an amazing wardrobe supervisor, and they were very key to keeping the balls rolling in all directions because they really had to control the budget. Where the clothes were at all times, I had an aging department of four or five people. I had six makers, and I also had outside vendors. Generally my set crew on a daily basis was around 50 or 60 people, depending on what we were doing, sometimes more if we had two or three units going at once. So it was a massive operation just to keep everything rolling into control the quantity and the quality of the work that everybody was doing.

Kirk Saduski:
When you say an aging crew, you don't mean they were getting older by the day, you mean?

Colleen Atwood:
Well, we were all doing that. But what I mean by an aging crew is, for instance, for all this stuff in the Stalags, we sprayed a liquid paraffin on the clothes to look like crusted mud and ice that was frozen. Things like that that people just think are there, take a lot of hours of somebody doing and we dress the people and then spray them as they walked out the door. It was pretty crazy.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, again, the big D, attention to detail. Is there anything in particular that any particular memory you have of production or the show itself that is particularly meaningful to you?

Colleen Atwood:
I think the idea of the show that's meaningful to me is that all of these young actors were so engaged by it and it inspired me as a designer to live up to their expectations as actors and performers.

Kirk Saduski:
And you see the respect that they had for you, and you could see the emotional support that you and your team gave them because in some ways you're on the front lines with them every day. And you could see how that, not just the inspiration, but the support that you gave, how important that was to those guys.

Colleen Atwood:
Well, that's nice to hear. You're the first friendly space they see at 5:00 in their morning throwing their clothes in the room with them.

Kirk Saduski:
Exactly right. Colleen, thank you so much. This has been wonderful.

Colleen Atwood:
Thank you.

Kirk Saduski:
Welcome back, Don, to Masters of the Air Podcast. How are you doing, my pal?

Donald Miller:
Great. It's great to be here again.

Kirk Saduski:
Great. Let's get right to it. I imagine if you're on just a flight, you're flying from Los Angeles to New York and it's horrendous. You drop 20,000 feet in 60 seconds and the turbulence is horrible and something happens on the plane, and what are the likelihood you're going to get on a plane voluntarily anytime soon after that? Well, these guys essentially didn't have a choice or they did have a choice. And what's amazing, and I'd like you to talk about it, is how few men refuse to get back in the plane. I mean, how few men actually took themselves out. Obviously they'd have to pay a price if they could be arrested, but talk about that. Why is it? From your perspective, what were the primary reasons that these men kept-

Donald Miller:
Well, they're myriad. I mean, with Rosie, without trying to romanticize it, he finished his 25 missions and everyone thought he was going to go home. And he said, "I don't want to make a big deal out of this, but if Hitler lives, I fly. And it has nothing to do with me being Jewish. It has to do with the inhumanity of fascism and it has to be killed as a system." And I'm sticking here with other guys that didn't go the second route, the next 25, they just wanted to get home. I mean, it was just getting the missions finished, getting them done. And that was a nerve-racking thing. So many missions were scrubbed on the tarmac. You'd get up at four o'clock in the morning, go through that whole rigmarole, put on all that equipment, get in the plane, it's pouring raining waiting for them to fly.
The nerves are got to be, am I going to die today? Well, you're not going to die. The mission's scrubbed. Well, I'll die tomorrow. Death is always there. Andy Rooney told me that the first time he was covering the war for Stars and Stripes, which is the Army magazine, and he had friends at another base other than the 100th, and he went to visit them, college friends. And he said, "I expected it to be like a college campus," 23, 24, 19-year-old guys. I got there and there was a volleyball game going on. I stood and watched because there was something eerie that was happening there. They played volleyball for 40 minutes and nobody uttered a word. He said it was the most morose and gloomy place he had ever been in his life. He said there was no, maybe if he went to one of the Glenn Miller parties or something like that, but on everyday life, this is an atmosphere that is just, it secretes death. It really is. And how do you do it?
Another thing is guys had terrific loyalty to each other and they wanted to finish together and not to, what is courage? Well, when that guy goes out, you go out with him. Stephen Crane talks about that in The Red Badge of Courage, that kind of, it's not so much peer pressure, it's peer loyalty. Because especially you talk about Band of Brothers, but truly a true Band of Brothers is inside a bomber plane where you have 10 guys tethered to the plane with their oxygen mask and their special suits and things like that, but they're tethered to each other with their little things called throat mics and things like that. And so everyone's interconnected and the pilot's checking on everybody up front. Now he's got to worry about the Germans on the ground and getting the target and working with the navigator, but he's checking on the gunners, especially if they've just been in a experience a burst of combat.
Because as you're breathing in the oxygen mass at 55 degrees below zero, and don't forget, these are unpressurized planes and it's 55 below inside the plane, and the plane is unheated. Okay. So they have these electrical suits that they plug into the plane and they often short it out, and there's no place to relieve yourself. So you pee in your pants and that freezes, and a lot of guys had frostbite all down their rear ends and down the sides, the backs of their legs and things like that. No relief from that. But what the pilot would have to check on is check gunner two, tail gunner. How's the tail gunner do? How's Frankie doing back there? Because in the chaos of combat, what happens is you get air sick. And one of our main characters, Crosby gets air sick a number of times as an navigator. You vomit into the mask and the vomit freezes and it prevents the oxygen from reaching the lungs.
And you don't know it because you're totally absorbed with surviving and controlling your gun. And all of a sudden after 30 seconds, you get anoxia, you lose it, and you pass out in two minutes, three minutes, you could be dead. So you check on guys all the time, are they hurt? Do they got the yips? Are they jittery? Pilots often assume godlike almost presence in this. You see that with Cleven and Eagan and Rosie and things like that. Tremendous respect for these guys. And because they have to take care. There's no foxholes in the skies. There's no commanders.
George Patton is in a plane. Patton can direct a combat operation. The drives of Bastogne and things like that, they don't have the Pattons in the planes. They have radio silence with the base. If they get in trouble, nobody's there to help them. They can't call general who and who or LeMay, how do I get out of here? Well, talk to your navigator.
So I don't think ever in the history of warfare, so much authority has been placed in the hands of people so young. They made all the decisions whether that city dies or lives, whether 100 thousand people die or live, whether the crew dies or lives, they make those decisions. What do you do with a guy that gets hit and he can't function? Maybe he's lost an arm. Do you wrap him in a parachute as they sometimes did, and dump him out the plane and hope that the Germans take care of him? Well, some guys did that. You have a friend who's caught underneath the plane, had a gun turret, a swirling gun turret underneath the plane and freezing in there. And sometimes guys would get trapped in there.
And one time they pulled a guy out, he had lost an arm, and his three comrades had made a decision before they flew that if one of them got in trouble, they'd stay with the other guy to the end, and the end was going to come because a pilot hit the bailout bell. And he said, everybody out. So there were witnesses to this. Five of the crew did bail out, but they saw those four guys, one guy who lost his arm and his three buddies went down with a plane and died because they'd made this pact. I don't know anything like that. I haven't seen anything like that in combat, but I saw lots of examples of it happening in the Eighth Air Force. The bonds were so strong.

Kirk Saduski:
That was one of the most affecting parts of your book. I remember it very well. Also, another part of your book that struck us pretty hard or had an impact is that that notion where you had several of testimony from several men that the hardest part was actually before they took off, is that if on the way to the plane, and then particularly if there was weather delay, which we see in episode three, that idea that you're living only with your own thoughts. That once you're in the air, I mean it's still terrifying of course, but you have a job to do. You have something to focus on. When you're on the tarmac waiting, it's just you and your thoughts. And that was, you quoted one fellow who said, "I used to think the loneliest sound in the world was a train whistle at midnight, but now I think it's a B-17 revving up on the tarmac."

Donald Miller:
A tarmac. Yeah. All he sleeping there. That experience was replicated later in the war when they had knocked out a lot of the Luftwaffe and the major danger was flak rather than fighters. And I talked to a lot of the pilots who said, crew morale was almost shot at that point because they couldn't bond together to yell 12 o'clock high, 13 plane coming in at six o'clock high. There wasn't that chatter inside the plane. All they could do is sit there and take it. Some guys would get so crazed, crazy actually that they'd shoot at the flak.

Kirk Saduski:
Well, you mentioned Rosie. So let's talk about Rosie here. Despite his anxiety that perhaps his anxiety over performance, and nevertheless, he flew his 25 missions, and by the spring of 1944, he could have gone home, but he didn't. He decided to re-enlist or re-up, I should say. And he did that for a number of reasons and a lot of it was because the job wasn't finished.

Donald Miller:
The job wasn't finished. Now, unlike a lot of guys, he was really politically astute in the '30s. He watched the newsreels in the New York film theater houses and things like that. He regularly read the Brooklyn Eagle and other papers and things. He followed the rise of Hitler. He was consumed with it and thought we should have been in the war earlier. So he came there with a high sense of consciousness about the war.
He said to me that when he got to London and saw, it was his first time entering the war, the barrage balloons, the camouflage, the wrecked buildings, how the British were shabbily dressed, and he thought they would be the shortages and the stores and things like that. He was in a war zone and knew it. And he said, "I was in the capital of World War II, the capital of the world." He said, "France, Paris was the capital of World War I, London was the capital of World War II. If London stood, democracy would stand, and we had to support them." And he said, "I was right where I belonged, right where I wanted to be. And that was a great feeling."

Kirk Saduski:
I remember, I think I either read or I heard an interview that Rosie had done years ago, and it may have been something with you where he also talked about the fact that in the spring of 44, they were bringing in so many replacement pilots and he thought, "For me to go home, now that I'm so well-trained, I have so much experience, for me to leave now would be to not take advantage of what I've learned, but also these guys are going to need a leader." So talk about-

Donald Miller:
Well, Rosie was a natural leader. I mean, he's the quarterback type, but I think guys listened to him because he didn't pontificate. He wasn't doctrinaire. He had a soothing way of talking to you. He puts you at ease immediately, even though he is another one of these guys that lights up the room when he goes in, but he could get you relaxed right away. He was not intimidating. He was respected but not intimidating. He was sui generis, one of a kind, really, and his ability to get guys to calm down and to get guys.
Like he said to me, the first thing you have to do is, yeah, you got to worry about how they react to flak into the enemy, but the first thing that has to happen is they have to trust you. If they don't trust you, they're not going to want to get in that plane and because they're going to know, every one of these guys is going to know knows in his heart of hearts whether it happens or not, that they're going to run into trouble somewhere along the way and it's going to be pretty damn bad. And who do you turn to in the plane? Who can get you out of this sort of thing?
I wanted guys to know, he said, that I was a good flyer. I wanted a reputation for that. I wanted a reputation as a disciplined flyer, a guy that kept combat formation and things like that. I wanted also a reputation as a guy that you could talk to. I didn't give pep talks outside the plane. I talked calmly to the guys about what we had to do. I talked about the target. He said, "You have to plant in their mind that what they're doing on any given mission is useful to the war effort. It's going to do something for the war effort. You're making a contribution here, and if we bomb correctly, we will shorten the war and your chances of going home are heightened as a result of this. But we have to keep our composure and be effective under extreme stress."
He'd never used the word stress, but that's the kind of thing he'd say. Or he'd often remind them if he got to know the crew really well of how they got through a really tough incident and he'd call back to an earlier mission and explain in lay terms what allowed the crew to get through, because everybody was cool. Everybody was talking to one another. He said, "When communication in the plane stops, that's bad. That's bad. You have to be thinking about what you're doing and talking to other guys about what they're doing because you're all working together." He's an extraordinary human being. I had gone to the doors of hell with him because he's the guy that goes like this waves, and you follow because you know he's going to stay in the lead and he's going to be of assistance because he's good at what he does.

Kirk Saduski:
He seemed to be good at everything he does.

Donald Miller:
He did. It's like being a number four hitter with number great number three hitter in front of him. Ruth and Gehrig. I mean, he just kind of knew.

Kirk Saduski:
He was the captain of the baseball team. Was it-

Donald Miller:
Columbia.

Kirk Saduski:
Columbia.

Donald Miller:
Yeah. And you kind of knew that, okay, Gehrig's going to get on and I'm going to hit home.

Kirk Saduski:
When meeting the easy company men and the men of the first Marine division from The Pacific, so often what they said, well, why did you fight to go home? I have to be here now, and what I want to do really is go home. And to do that, I have to do my job. As simple as that. It's not cynical, it's practical. I want to go home to my parents. I want to go home to my wife. I want to go home to my career.

Donald Miller:
I've done a lot of work on that, and you think about with how guys experience motivation, fighting for freedom and things like that, that doesn't set in in the actual existential experience of combat. That comes in afterwards. Afterwards when they realize what they were doing and things like that, and see the results of what they do. As a human being, you can't be thinking about that when your life's on the line, when you have to kill or be killed. Those thoughts aren't dancing in your head that this is about democracy and freedom. And because you don't see it necessarily in letters or in conversation doesn't mean it isn't there. I think our characters in the film are very well handled. They're not celebratory. There's no American triumphalism here. There's just this sense that, well, they did some nasty stuff and they're going to pay for it, and we got to get this thing over as fast as we can.

Kirk Saduski:
In the next podcast, Josiah Cross and Branden Cook joined together to discuss with us their roles as Tuskegee Airmen, Richard Macon and Alexander Jefferson.

Branden Cook:
I wanted to bring honor and respect to this hero that has gotten a bit of due, but not on this scale and this level. We are now a part of a lineage of great storytelling with great storytellers that are able to do it at a very high level and to now have the opportunity for Richard Macon, Alexander Jefferson to be a part of that, these real human beings. I just felt a lot of pressure and wanted to handle that with a lot of care. That's one of my biggest regrets that I wasn't able to meet him because my hope was just that I did him justice and he was able to liken and smile and say, I see myself in that young man that feels like me.

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.