Dan Snow's History Hit - Masters of the Air: WWII's Bloody 100th Bombers

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

Screenwriter John Orloff joins Dan to talk about the new WWII mini-series 'Masters of the Air'. It tells the true story of the 'Bloody Hundredth', an American bomb group stationed in England that fought in the skies over Nazi-occupied Europe.A decade in the making, John explains how the show works to faithfully recreate the story of these airmen and the trials that they faced.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Well, it's here. We've been talking about it for 10 years. The follow-up to Band of Brothers, the follow-up to the Pacific. It is Masters of the Air, made by many of the same team members who made the original Band of Brothers,

Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg. It's written by John Orloff, who wrote two of the episodes of Band of Brothers. It follows the fortunes of the 100th bomb group of the United States Army Air Force during the Second World War. They were known as the Bloody Hundred. They were everywhere. They bombed on D-Day. They bombed U-Boat Pence. They bombed Berlin. They bombed oil fields. And they suffered horrific casualties. In this episode of the podcast, I talked to John Orloff. It's great to have him back on the show. We've been in touch ever since he came on an episode a while ago now,

where we talked about Band of Brothers. And he tells me about the 10-year project he's just coming to the end of. The astonishing levels of detail that he's gone into. The months he spent plotting the raids themselves, what happened to what aircraft at what time, so that it could be accurately portrayed in this vast, vast TV series. Masters of the Air streams on Apple Plus on the 26th of January. I'm sure many listeners to this podcast will be pulling an all-nighter. And who knows, will it have the same extraordinary cultural impact that Band of Brothers had all those years ago. It was great talk John particularly in the aftermath of Napoleon which got the whole world

talking about historical accuracy and whether it mattered whether it makes a movie better or worse. As you'll hear John takes a pretty different view to Ridley Scott and some of the other dramatists I've had on this podcast. He believes that accuracy is like an essential ingredient really. Without that authenticity it can't be great TV or movie. Fascinating stuff.. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. John, so good to see you again, man. So great to be here. I am such a fan. I know I say this every time I reach out to you,

but the truth is you guys are the best. And I'm just so excited to be here. That's high praise coming from you because you're a man who's produced some of the best, most memorable TV and film of all time. So that's a huge praise. Are you happy with the idea this is the sequel of the kind of follow-up of Band of Brothers? Is that something you guys are happy with that description? Or is that something us, the public, are pushing on you? No, no, of course. It is part of the story of World War II as told by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.

And I've been fortunate enough to be a part of it for 20 some odd years now. And well, I'm not even flattering you. I'm saying the truth because you were in it from that's almost your first job out of school. It was crazy how you wrote for Band of Brothers. It was literally my first job, not quite out of school. I'd messed around trying to become a screenwriter and working in production and stuff. But yes, somehow I had managed to meet Tom Hanks and basically begged him to hire me on Band of Brothers. And episode two, Day of Days, was my first professional writing gig in Hollywood. Which is the great episode. It's D-Day itself. There's never a day that goes by

without someone citing it on some social media platform or someone re-watching it with tears in their eyes. It's a pretty crazy legacy. I'm really, really proud of it. And, you know, interestingly, it sort of informed the ethos of making Masters of the Air. If it's okay, if I just make a transition into Masters. Obviously. If it's okay if I just make a transition into masters. Obviously. When I worked on Band and did the D-Day episode, you know, I interviewed everybody who was alive that had been at Braycore Manor in 98. So I interviewed Dick Winters, Buck Compton, Malarkey, Lipton, whoever else was still alive.

And I wrote it all down and I figured it all out. And when I wrote the script, I mean, there was a map at the end of the script. I mean, it is shot by shot is in the script of what you see, because I knew what happened that day. For a small period of time, I was the world expert on Braycore Manor because nobody had heard of it in 1998. And it turns out Stephen Ambrose had gotten some stuff wrong in the book. And I made those corrections in the miniseries. And then obviously people have gotten obsessed with it and know a heck more than I do. But that kind of, okay, the detail has to be right. If we are making a show about aerial combat, then we need to make the aerial combat not just authentic, but accurate. And what do I mean by that? Well, the first thing I did when I was hired 10 years ago to write Masters was figure out, well, what's the show going to be?

Don Miller had written a terrific book, but it's all over the place. It's a history of the entire air war. And we needed to focus on one group and we ended up focusing on the 100th Bomber Group. And then it became about, well, what missions did they go on and what happened to them on these missions. And what I ended up doing was exactly what I did on band, which is I would analyze each battle. So let's take a famous one that you'll probably know our group is going to be on, which is the Regensburg Schweinfurt mission. And the 100th participated. And I knew where every single plane in the formation was for the whole mission. And I then tracked them in the script. We tracked them in special effects because of the way the Air

Force kept records. If you see a ship get hit by a rocket on its starboard wing, well, that's because that's what happened. If you see three ships camera left and it blows up, well, that's because that's what happened. If wing number four is smoking, that's what really happened on that plane on that mission. And so we tried to keep that same kind of dedication in these aerial combat scenes that we did on band in foxholes and such forth. So it's very specific and very true. The unbelievable creativity of that time span and presumably the big budget has allowed you, which is to get into that level of detail. I mean, as a writer, that's just unheard of because we spend most of our time like desperately trying to cut our cloth to tell the stories we want to tell.

But for you to do that, it's a dream, right? It was amazing. I wrote almost the whole show before we ever shot it, which is also very unusual. I wrote the first seven episodes before we were greenlit even. And as I was writing it, you know, I basically was told, don't even think about budget. Doesn't matter how much it costs. We'll figure that out later or we'll cut it late. You know, we'll, but just start at the place of how do we make the greatest World War II aerial movie ever? And the reason cost isn't the thing in this show is unlike Memphis Belle, right, where you follow one crew on one mission or two missions, I can't remember right now, but their final mission, obviously. We're following four characters through the whole show, and none of them are on the same crew. And we're showing the growth of the American

effort in World War II in every way possible, meaning the show starts in May of 43, and a maximum effort is 72 planes, right? Like, we are going to go bomb some German subpens, and we're going to bomb them with every plane we've got, and that's 72 airplanes. By the end of the show, when we're bombing Berlin, it's a thousand airplanes. And we see that because that's part of the story. You know, the story is the scale of this war, and that it cost all of this human life and all of this mechanical might being created. And that's what this war required. The interesting thing about being a writer is that obviously there's this great debate, isn't there, with CG versus live action versus writing. It's one thing to have the budget to show all that stuff, but there've been plenty of examples,

haven't there, in the last 10, 15, 20 years of historical epics, which have looked fabulous, but haven't had the writing chops and as a result haven't succeeded. So your role is still as important as if the CG didn't exist, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, every single battle is scripted out to the shot. It doesn't happen haphazardly. We see things because they're in the script and you're supposed to see them. Whatever's happening in the cockpit is not random. It's a very decision-based scene, right? Like that's all me. And in terms of the CG issue, again, I loved Dunkirk. Fine film. I ask you, Dan, is that an accurate portrayal of the air in Dunkirk? It was too empty, wasn't it? It was a bit lonely. Exactly. It's beautiful. It's

fantastic. But that's not what the guys experienced. Yeah. And so the double-edged sword is, well, there's only a few B-17s that can fly, and we're not going to be able to beat the crap out of them our way. So the only way to show the scope of the American effort in the air and daylight bombing is CG. There's just no other way to put 800 planes in the air and daylight bombing is CG. There's just no other way to put 800 planes in the air or even getting 36 on a runway to take off. And then it all has to be within the context of the truth, which is like the weird needle and thread that I have to figure out. Like, how do you create this real life event and make it not just reenactment?

That's the key. And part of it is choosing the right story. So let me give you a little story about Band of Brothers, episode two. I wrote that one, Day of Days. And it didn't have to be about what it is. Nobody told me that episode only can be about Dick Winters following him from the airplanes to the end of D-Day. That was my decision. And then, you know, it's how do you make that dramatic? And I had always said,

let's sit back for a second. And if you can't make a guy dropping into Nazi-occupied France in the middle of the night, landing on the ground with nothing but a trench knife, miles away from his objective. But by the end of the day, he makes that objective, captures and destroys four cannons shooting on Utah Beach. If you can't make that dramatic, get out of the way. You know what I mean? Like tell the story right, give it these little moments it needs and honor the guys. So choosing the right story and the right characters is like half the battle, you know? So the 100th Bomber Group is this extraordinary unit filled with extraordinary men, just like Easy Company and Band of Brothers. So that was half the battle.

I want to come to 100, but I want to ask you a question. I'm like, in your head, when you're writing this stuff now, you should be thinking of the wider, most general audience, the general public, right? But sometimes you're like, are you thinking about the aviation bros from the World War II aviation bros? Or are you thinking about maybe the veterans and their generation, their families? Or is it seamless for you? Is it not a problem? Or do you occasionally think, oh, I don't know, like like I want to put something in here that I know the viewing public are going to enjoy, but maybe the aficionados won't approve of? Like, is that something that's going on for you? Not at first. Like the first versions of the scripts

were really just about the guys and telling their story as best as I could figure it out, you know, at that point. This is way more complicated than anything in Band or the Pacific. I mean, it's just enormous. You know, we have a cast of 300. There was a point when I asked our brilliant wardrobe stylist, Colleen Atwood, how many fittings she had done. And she said, oh, I stopped counting at 3,000. Oh my goodness. That means 3,000 actors had been costumed in this show, you know, extras

included. So the scale that was enormous. And so just figuring it all out was really a challenge. And what do you see and what don't you see was a real challenge. So that was like kind of the first thing. And then as we got into production and the scripts were revised and directors came on board and they had director ideas and so things would shift and change. And at that point, yeah, you have to think about, okay, well, is a regular person going to understand this moment that might be a little technical or procedural? So maybe we have to add a little bit of explanation in the dialogue about what this person's doing. So we would do that kind of stuff now and then. one of them. And I was a hawk on the shoot, you know, trying to make sure we got all the technical stuff as right as we could. And there are some things that got through the cracks, but that is

natural. Again, my guess is around 15,000 people worked on this show, you know, never on one day. Our average day was a huge amount of people, over a thousand people every day working on the show, you know, never on one day. Our average day was a huge amount of people, over a thousand people every day working on the show, but it wasn't the same thousand people. And then we had a special effects crew that is thousands because there's a huge amount of special effects in the show. Because again, we do examine the effects of aerial combat. We do examine PTSD and what it meant to be a pilot or an airman who had this very unique life of waking up in England, having a fabulous breakfast of eggs and potatoes and orange juice, even if it was powdered. But then they get in a plane and name your mission. But the average tour of duty length

was 11 missions. And past 11 missions, you were on borrowed time and they were all pretty brutal. And you'd fly back six hours later and have dinner, go to the bar, maybe meet a girl, maybe have a romantic evening. And that caused a lot of PTSD. And we absolutely examined that. But at its heart, like Banned, like the Pacific, this is an examination of men under combat. That's what this is about. And a very unique kind of combat that hasn't really been examined almost ever. The things you'll see in the show you've never seen before because the technology didn't exist to show it to you. You know, when they made 12 O'Clock High, which is a fabulous film,

not a lot of aerial combat in it. Similarly, as great as Memphis Belle is, you know, it's one mission. It's a small mission, not a lot of airplanes. I think they use a lot of actually real footage in some of the combat. So it's not the most helpful in trying to make you understand what it was like

to be up there at 25,000 feet, negative 30 below, with an oxygen mask, and people shooting at you, trying to kill you in a tin can with no protection. So let's talk a bit more. You mentioned that's crazy that they were supposed to buy 25 sorties and most of them never got past 11. That's sobering stuff. Well, I can tell you one really interesting thing, and I don't think I'm giving too much away. The 100th Bomber Group arrived in England with 34 B-17s in May of 1943. And by October 10th of 1943, it's like 12 weeks later, 34 out of 36 of the original crews were shot down in less than three months. And to put it in numbers, as I said to Tom Hanks, that's twice the amount of people in Easy Company. Gone. As you say, the drama is there. If you can't make that dramatic, get out of the way.

So they're arriving in the UK. They're flying these B-17s, the famous flying fortresses. There's 10 or so guys on board? There's 10 guys to a plane. A group is usually around 36 bombers, then split up into squadrons, four squadrons. You rotate crews so the crews aren't always on every mission. You know, some crews won't have to fly on that mission. They rotate it out. And as you said, they had a quota of 25 missions before they could go home. But they had this huge problem that nobody was making 25 missions. Nobody.

So it was a huge, huge problem to keep the guys's morale up because nobody was making 25. And then in March of 44, they changed the rules to 30 missions. And then even later, it's 35 missions. By that time, the Luftwaffe is a lot more hurt and it's a little easier to survive, but not by that much. And you're following, like Band of Brothers, you're following people that actually existed, the characters you've identified, men who existed, or some of them amalgamations? No amalgamations ever in these shows. Sorry, man. Sorry, I had to ask. Okay. So it's all for real? It is all for real. You know, we changed a name or two to sort of protect the families

because we didn't want to embarrass the families of maybe a guy who didn't act well under fire. So we would change his name. I'm trying to think. No, not really. We really try to. I mean, it's like Band of Brothers. I mean, that was the idea. The only difference is these guys aren't alive.

Yeah. You didn't get to meet them this time, eh? Didn't get to meet them. And it makes a big difference. It makes a huge difference. You know, we could talk to other guys. You know, there are some great pilots that still live, barely. You know, they're in their 100, 101.

And boy, they're sharp as a tack. It's really interesting. An interesting thing about this, we like to laugh that on the show, it's not Garnier and Heffron, our characters. Our characters are not, you know, Philadelphia wise guys. Most of the nose of it. So a B-17 has four people in the nose, the pilot, the co-pilot, the navigator and the bombardier. to all be college educated because to fly a plane, you had to really understand math and navigation required, you know, all sorts of stuff. Because remember, there's no radar, there's no ship to ship communication. You have to really understand what you're doing to fly a plane. So those guys

tended to be really smart, really well educated. And then there was another six guys who tended to be the gunners, radio man, bottom turret, top turret, rear gunner, side gunners. Those tended to be non-coms, sergeants. So 10 guys to a plane. And they were doing everything. If anyone knows anything about the air war, they were doing it all. They were supporting D-Day. They were striking at oil. They were striking at U-boats, they were doing big city raids, munitions. Again, that's probably why he chose that unit, because of its remarkable presence throughout these great moments of the end of the Second World War. But that means that gave you as a writer enormous latitude, right? You could explore all the things that you wanted to. Yeah, exactly. And a really unknown fact about D-Day was D-Day couldn't happen unless the Luftwaffe was out of the sky.

So around February of 44, the decision was made that the mission had changed for the 8th Army Air Force. Prior to that, it was exactly what you said. It was hitting submarine pens and the rural valley and industrial sites. Starting in February, March of 44, the mission was bait. B-17s and the B-24s were bait to get the Luftwaffe's planes in the air so that the P-51s could come in and take them out. P-51s could come in and take them out. And nobody understands how many 8th Air Force men died doing just that so that D-Day could go with total air superiority by the Allies. But a lot of people died getting that to happen in the months just previous to D-Day. On D-Day, our group, in addition to many groups, was bombing all day long.

I think they did like 15 sorties that day. They just kept on bombing through the day. They started bombing, I think it was like a minute before the landings. I mean, that's what the precision was on D-Day. Our guys had to bomb little inland, like, you know, hundreds of yards inland. Machine gun nests and pillboxes minutes before the boats land.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. Talking to John Orloff, writer of Masters of the Air. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. To be continued... rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. John, I'm so interested, like, how do you think your writing has changed from Band of Brothers or any other show that you would have written perhaps 20 years ago? Has the war on terror,

as we could call it, Iraq, Afghanistan, has awareness of PTSD, although you guys were way ahead of the popular awareness because, you know, you featured that in Band of Brothers, but has that side of it kind of changed what we're about to see in this TV show, the way that you and perhaps your fellow Americans think about war? I don't mean to be an uninteresting answer, but I don't think so. Because I really do think Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg

come to this story with a very specific point of view. And it hasn't changed. come to this story with a very specific point of view. And it hasn't changed. It is to tell the stories of what these young men went through as realistically and viscerally and emotionally as we possibly can. And then you can make a determination of what the relevance is to write this moment, you know, in the world. I find relevance in it. I find that this thing is really relevant right now in a world where we see authoritarianism on the rise. I think this is a very relevant show to show everybody what it

takes to defeat an appeased enemy. Well, that's a sobering thought. You mentioned viscerally there. Is there anything that's actually you think, I don't think we can show this stuff. I don't think we can go to this place. We can't touch that rail. It's just too awful. Yeah. Some of the combat,

some of the stuff that happened in those planes was really gruesome. Because also remember, they're in the plane for sometimes up to eight hours round trip. Let's say it's a six-hour trip to Munster. You go out, you're fine. You cross the channel. You got 15 minutes of flak, which is terrifying. You get through the flak. Now you get hit by some Messerschmitt 109s and maybe some JU-88s come in with bigger cannons and rockets and you get it through there.

What if you get injured? Your leg is cut off. You're bleeding out, right? Well, the mission's got three, four more hours to go. There's no hospital. There's no medic. You know, at least in Bastogne, there's a medic at least going from foxhole to foxhole. There's some attempt at putting you back together.

At 25,000 feet, you are on your own and you've got to fly back, you know, hours, hours of men wounded in these planes, you know, and dying on the way home. And there's terrible stories about people in belly turrets and yeah, just horrible, horrible, horrible stories. We show a couple of really sad events, but we don't belabor it. I'm so interested in the figure. And just as Dick Winters is now a household name, thanks to you guys. You know, Harry Crosby, right? You managed to find this navigator who served across the entire period in which they were deployed in Europe.

Is that right? That was one of my big ideas. So Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks had already sort of said, we want to make a show about the 100th bomber group. We really love these two guys, Buck Clevin and Bucky Egan. They joined up before the war. They were this kind of old style, romantic, you know, scarves. They joined up not to join the army. They joined up to fly airplanes, right? They're the core of the 100th. And Crosby is this young navigator also in the 100th. He joins up after Pearl Harbor, though, and he's a terrible navigator. He gets lost on the way to England. All true. He screws up his first mission, but manages to get them home OK by luck. But by the end of that 18 months, he becomes

the head navigator for the group of the hundredth. And he's the only guy who arrived in Thorpe Abbot in May of 43, and who is still there in May of 45. Everybody else has been shot down from that original group of people, or a couple have made it home. So you at home who's listening to this, I'm not telling you they all go. They don't all die. Some make it, but he's the only guy. So he became the glue between the first characters who arrive in England, which is Buck and Bucky, Austin Butler and Callum Turner, and the replacements, right? Because the war goes on. And one of the things that was thrilling about The 100th is they have

one of the greatest pilots to ever get into an airplane, who was a replacement who arrived at The 100th in September of 43 named Robert Rosenthal. There are a lot of great characters in this show. We don't meet Rosie until a little later on. He's not in the first episode or two because he's a replacement. Let me just tell you about Rosie. Mission one is October 8th, 1943. The 100th puts up, I think, 25 airplanes.

10 are shot down. That's day one. Day two is the very next day. It's a milk run. They only have 15 planes. 15 planes all return. So far, not bad. Now it's day three. They only have 15 airplanes. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Rosie is the only one to come back. He ends up making 25 missions. And right during Black Week, he makes his 25th mission, the hardest week where we're bombing Berlin for the first time. They lost 15 planes on one mission to Berlin, 150 men. After that mission, he re-ups for 30 missions because the rules have been changed. He ends up flying 52 missions. He shot down three times. And one of the things I love about Rosie is his name. Just like Dick Winters, you could not, as a writer, create a better name than Winters for Dick Winters. I mean, he's an amazing man, but he's not a warm and fuzzy guy, Dick. Rosie is the warmest, fuzziest guy you will ever meet. He was this Brooklyn Jew who loved, he was a lawyer. He loved jazz.

He was like the nicest guy in the world. And he is one of the most amazing people I have ever written about. Really amazing. And might've been the greatest man to ever fly a B-17. Whenever I talk to bomber command people or anyone in bombing rather than intercepting fighting, and I say, you know, why do you survive? Is it luck or is it skill? And I can never work out because they're always super modest to go, oh, no, pure luck, pure luck. I mean, you got under the skin of that. You thought about this

more than anyone else. It is both. It's both. Okay. It really is. But it's mostly luck, but it does at certain key moments, a good pilot can get you home when another one wouldn't. And that did happen all the time. One of the things that's so wonderful about a B-17 is it could take anything, unlike the B-24, which couldn't take the damage that a B-17 could and land. And so these pilots, when they really understood the B-17, they could get it home. And that was flying. That was serious flying. And then landing it. You know,

I mean, there's so many belly up landings that could have gone really bad really quickly. There's this one. It's not in our show that Harry Crosby, one of Harry's most interesting missions was actually one of the missions I just talked about where Rosie was on. They get hit over Bremen and they managed to get across the channel. They do a belly land. They landed in an RAF field because they couldn't make it home. The RAF people said there were 1,300 holes in the plane. 1,300 shrapnel holes, bullet holes, rocket holes in the plane and they got it home. And that's good flying. That is not luck.

Getting hit by flak, that's luck. This is the other thing that's really interesting to me about these guys, these B-17 guys or bomber guys, as opposed to fighter pilots or a paratrooper. The whole point of it is don't move. If you are in formation, you do not leave. You do not do anything. It's all about sticking to your guns, taking the damage that you're getting, and just going forward. Yeah, and then the pre-war dream, that formation itself would have a kind of strength, right?

Because there'd be interlocking fields of fire from machine guns. That's an extraordinary thought, isn't it? And that was true, by the way. The box formation did help. The idea was, just for your listeners, a single B-17, you have 10 guns coming out from all different places. But the Luftwaffe could pick a single B-17 off. It was not that hard for them to do. But if you had a dozen B-17s in a very specific three-dimensional box formation, you created a whole umbrella of defensive fire that was effective against the German fighters.

And also, you need that discipline because you want to drop the bombs in the right place, right? Exactly. I can't imagine what it must be like, John. Have you showed this to some of the veterans? No, the veterans haven't seen it. Are you just, have that anxiety attack? No, I'm actually a little worried. I'm not going to lie to you. I've actually thought about that because, you know, they're a hundred years old now and we have some combat sequences that are, I think, brilliant. I mean, I don't mean to sound, I'm really proud of them, not just because of me, but the hundreds and thousands of people that went into these battle sequences.

They're really intense and really visceral. I hope they'll be OK watching it. You know, I know it was hard for some of the guys in Band of Brothers to watch it. And I can imagine this will bring up some things. There's a couple of pilots who are going to be at the premiere. In fact, they're not at the premiere, in fact. They're not in the show, but they're part of the 100th.

And yeah, I'm a little, I hope everything's going to be okay because it's really intense what we show and really realistic. I just have to give a shout out. And I talked about the costume designer, Colleen Atwood. Equally important are the production designers, a guy named Chris Seegers,

who worked on Saving Private Ryan, but he also did everything on this show. And it is a time warp. We built Thorpe Abbots, which was station 139, which was our group's bomber station. And we built like a dozen Quonset huts, each one dedicated to that purpose. Normally, like in show business, you make a Quonset hut and on Monday, it's the hospital. And on Tuesday, it's the mess hall. And on Thursday, no, no, no. We had 13 whatever buildings. One of them was the mess hall.

It was the mess hall for 10 months. Another one was the hospital. It was the hospital for 10 months. And you could walk in there by yourself on your own time. And you would see little things that was marked penicillin, expires 10, 12, 43. The details were extraordinary. The planes, don't get me started on these replica planes.

It was unbelievable. And then equally, Steven Rosenbaum, who was in charge of our special effects, it was really interesting. Very early on, it's a massive effects show. You probably won't even know how many effects there are in the show. You won't notice it, hopefully, a lot of the time. And one of the things that he said that was really, really interesting was he did the special effects for the first Avatar.

And he said to me one day, he's like, John, that was easy. Nobody knows what a dragon looks like when its wings are out. You can make it do whatever you want. But when a B-17 is landing, it does very specific things. The wings move in a very specific way. And all of these things had to be figured out. And just like my passion and attention for detail in my responsibility sphere, so was theirs. And you will see things that have never been seen since 1944. And that really excites me, really excites me. And they will be shown pretty darn accurately. You know, every once in a while, some mistake will happen or maybe B-17s blow up a little more often

than they did in real life. But that's one of those things where you have to tell the audience, that plane's gone. But we take great care in showing everything accurately. You see, that's very interesting because I've been lucky enough on this podcast and TV shows to talk to Sam Mendes and Ridley Scott. And they say, look, at the end of the day, this is art, this is drama. I love the historian on the project, but I am within my rights to overrule

them. I'm like, okay. So if Steven Spielberg comes up to you like, I don't know, can we make this a little more dramatic at the end? They're like, sorry, buddy, didn't happen. Yeah. I mean, there were those fights. Wow. There were those fights on this show. Like there were on Band of Brothers too. I'm not going to tell a story out of school on band, but I do remember I was on set for an episode. The director of the episode got a phone call as we were shooting and he went away and it was Steven Spielberg telling him notes and saying, hey, I want to make sure that happens. And by God, that's what he did. He made the changes because what that director was doing that day or the day before was maybe pushing the drama more than the reality. And it is a constant push and pull. You know, in fairness,

there are some things in our show that are a little bit more creative license. It does happen. I think the difference is Band of Brothers set the tone for all 30 hours that follow in this epic, right? Band, the Pacific, and Masters. And it was always about the men and what they went through and that that was the story. And again, you come back to, well, we're telling the story of these really particular men. Let me give you a story. This happened a couple of times on the show, on Masters of the Air. The technical advisor on the aviation cockpit would come up to me and say, well, no, you can't do that in a B-17. That just couldn't have happened.

And I would go, well, actually, it really did. And here's a YouTube video of Rosie telling you that he did it. And here's the thing you have to remember. We're not making a show about the average B-17 pilot. We're making a show about the best people who ever flew B-17s. You're right. Most pilots can't do a lazy S in a B-17, but Rosie could. And we're going to do that. of doing this kind of historical drama? Where do you knit things and make them happen shorter? Like obviously Day of Days and Band of Brothers, it was a six, seven hour battle. You know, it happens in 25 minutes in the show.

So you've got to make time go faster. And that by its very nature, you're making dramatic choices that are ahistorical, right? The question is, is which of those choices do you make and how do you minimize it? And again, I am always going to try to figure out what happened really and what's the least amount I have to make up to make that work dramatically for the larger story that we're telling. You know, not a lot of people do it that way. And I've done it in other pieces too. A Mighty Heart, a Michael Winterbottom film from way back is a real story about the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl in 2001. He was the Wall Street Journal reporter. And again, a totally nonfiction piece. And the trick is to find the drama in a narrative three-act structure without manipulating the truth for artistic purposes.

I mean, I disagree with Ridley on that one. I imagine I will have some notes myself on Napoleon, but I'm hoping very few. We're all cheering for you because we always believe the best stories are true, right? Yeah, they really are. And this is an amazing story. And one of the things that really excites me is the scale of this story, because by definition, we're talking about strategic bombing. So by definition, we're at a much more strategic level than the tactical level that Band of Brothers is involved in, right, on the platoon level and the company level and seeing the war through that experience. Well, what this afforded us is a much larger tableau. You know, they end up in Africa, France, on the ground. The winter march of 45, you know, there were more people on the ground, the winter march of 45.

You know, there were more people on the roads in Europe than any time in history because all the Russians are moving west. All the Germans who have occupied all that territory, the civilians are fleeing Poland, fleeing Ukraine. Right. So they're all in there marching along. The POWs are all being force-marched. There's millions of people on the road during the middle of this war. The scale is enormous. And that's what the show's about, the scale of the war. Where on earth do you go from here, buddy? I don't know. I don't know. You know, I'm working on some things and some of them are historical based and some of them aren't. I will say this, nothing as ambitious as this.

This was really, really hard to make. And I think something small, something intimate. You know, there's 300 speaking roles in this show and about 280 of them are all real people that I found. You know, like when we start talking about guards in the POW camp, those guys were really there. There's this guy, Popeye, this real German guard because he had lost an eye in World War I. So he was squinting and the guys called him Popeye. this real German guard, because he had lost an eye in World War I. So he was squinting

and the guys called him Popeye. But yeah, intimate, little family drama or something. Well, we're looking forward to that, buddy. But we're looking forward to the meantime to Masters of the Air. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast and talking about it. Stay in touch, bud. You bet. Thank you so much, Dan. you