School of War - Ep 108: Donald L. Miller on Masters of the Air

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Donald L. Miller, historian and author of Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, the book behind Apple TV+’s Masters of the Air, joins the show to talk about the air war over Europe during WWII. ▪️  Times      •      01 :41 Introduction      •      02:12 Growing up “surrounded by the war”     •      15:35 Both sides are losing      •      25:23 Highest percentage of casualties     •      34:36 Mass vs mass      •      37:20 A new battlefield      •      42:49 “Almost nothing held up.”      •      44:46 Robert Rosenthal      •      48:57 Working with Tom Hanks      •      53:51 Recreating air combat      •      56:02 Gil Cohen, Greyhound, and Das Boot      •      59:44 Narrative choices     •     01:06:36 The stress of command Follow along  on Instagram Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack Buy the book here - Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany 

Today on the show, we've got Donald Miller, historian and author of the book, Masters of the Air. I think this is one of the best interviews we've recorded for School of War. It was certainly one of my favorite conversations yet, combining as it did discussions about strategy, the evolution of warfare, combat itself, the Second World War, and of course the making of the show, Masters of the Air, which listeners know is something that I've been eagerly anticipating. The show's now on the air at Apple TV, so let's get into its genesis. and the nature of the savage war in the skies that it depicts. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we'll fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall never surrender. For maps, videos, and images, follow us on Instagram,

and also feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Donald Miller. He's the New York Times best-selling author of 10 books, the John Henry McCracken Emeritus Professor of History at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania. And one of his books, Masters of the Air, is being made into a Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Limited series in the spirit of Band of Brothers and the Pacific,

which is a very exciting development. Donald, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It's a pleasure. Thank you. So I want to talk about the show to the extent that we can, given that it's not yet been released for recording this here at the start of October. And I want to talk mostly about the 8th Air Force and the 100th Bomb Group and the story that you document

in Masters of the Air. But before we get to that, maybe... Would you mind just tell us a bit about yourself? You know, how did you grow up? How did you become interested in history generally, but, you know, specifically the history of the Second World War and the Eighth Air Force? Well, as a youth, I was surrounded by World War II. I grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, a little railroad town.

And it's on the Monopoly Board. And we lived in an immigrant neighborhood. Every adult male I knew in that neighborhood served in World War II, So as a kid, I was surrounded by the war, and we lived after the war. I was born in November of 44, and so everyone was coming home. I don't have keen memories of that, but my father and mother and my mother's two sisters and their husbands all lived in the same house with their parents and a bunch of kids running around. But up in the attic, there are these storage chests and footlock.

of course. My uncle had served in the big red one, first to land, you know, in the first minute on the D-Day, and had another uncle that flew to be 29 to the Pacific and etc. So all that paraphernalia was up there, including one uncle who was a janitor and had gas masks and everything else. So we were playing Army and my dad was president of the local Catholic War veterans. There were little parades, gun salutes at the cemetery, things like that. It's all part of my life, you know. But I really didn't continue that. Once I got into a high school, I gravitated more toward other things, especially sports. And in college, I took some history courses, but I was primarily a philosophy major. And I still retained an interest in

World War II. It was kind of bread in the bones. But it wasn't until after my shift book, I did a book on Chicago, and it did pretty well. And that year, 1995, my father passed away. And he had served in the Air Force in World War II as a radio gunner on a B-17 and as a control tower operator, as they called them, an air traffic controller. And he helped to plot some of the southern route to Europe. They flew the bombers over two routes in Labrador and down, skirting Brazil over Africa. in that way.

And so you had into the Europeans theater. And I kind of felt guilty and that I had, you know, because this was so much part of everyone's lives where we lives. And not that the men talk directly about it with the children. My father rarely did that.

He was a typical veteran. But we'd all go down to the Catholic War veterans where my father was president and they'd bribe us with orange sodas and nickels and we'd play the slot machine. and things like that, so we wouldn't report where they were to my mother. And it was, it just seemed that I was missing autobiographically, you know, one of the key elements of my life.

I just remember coming out of 12 o'clock high, if my parents took me to him in an early age. And I thought, and my dad said, you know, that's a real story. I said, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. then. I remember seeing a Jimmy Stewart movie, the same sort of thing, you know, and Glenn Miller's story. And so I had a chance in the same year to interview Eugene Sledge and who wrote one of the great, kind of the catch 22 of Civil War, a World War II history. And a Syrian account, actually. And I was just transported by that book and that interview. He came up to interview Lou Rida.

who did a lot of documentaries and 50s and 60s and continuing on into the 80s. And this is the 90s when I interviewed sludge. I and three other readers associates. And I thought, this is great stuff. And I got to get into this war. And I did. I thought the best way to start would be since I knew so little about it except what I had read cursorily and seen on documentaries, you know, like Victory at Sea and things

like that. But I thought the best way to do it is to write a history and learn it, you know, as I wrote it. And so in the late 90s, I began a book that culminated in a volume called The Story of World War II. I borrowed the title from the Henry Steele Cominger book, but I didn't use Hardy Anya Commission's material. His was an anthology that was written during the war, and it described action in the various theaters from largely Yank and Stars and Strides' reporters. But I wanted to go much, much beyond that. And I wanted to tell the story of war through combat. And that has been a central theme of my work.

How do human beings hold up under the stress and strain of combat? With the 8th Air Force, how do the men get into the planes after a horrific, catastrophic mission? How does a guy, you know, go into a foxhole like my uncle did in the Ardennes and 12 hours in the middle of the night, you know, in the middle of that gloomy forest and wake up in the morning? and he's one of three in that foxhole and two of the other guys are dead. How do you assimilate that? How do you continue? And how do you move on? Does it continue to affect you later?

And I really got into this whole idea of a breakdown under combat. I was astonished by the number of men that were put on temporary leave, you know, for combat stress in North Africa. Over 30,000, if you believe that. It was a medical emergency, and they were calling in psychiatrists and psychologists from all across the country. And I came across this book called Men on Fire, and it was written by a Air Force combat surgeon. And it's just a compendium of firsthand accounts from this perspective. He's trying to cure these guys.

There are little medical reports, but they're written eloquently, powerfully, almost novelistically. And I thought, you know, this is an entry. into the story, if I can begin with this sort of thing. So I sent out to write a book on the 8th Air Force, and you get a little overwhelmed because of the enormity of bibliography, which is so many books published on it. And so, but I didn't see anything that resembled the book I wanted to write. And I'm a trespasser. I don't stay too in academic claims. And I move around a lot. I was a philosophy major as an undergraduate. I wrote a history of Chicago and later a history of modern Manhattan and different kinds of books and a biography of a major American intellectual. So I had some

practice in moving into different periods of time and completely different genres. And I like that approach and I continue it because you come in so fresh, you transcend the historiography, you get over top of it and you write your own story. And because you're fresh, I think you have a lot of enthusiasm to the subject because you're just learning it yourself. And Ed Bars, who was a very famous Civil War story, and once told me when I first met him down at Vicksburg, I did a book on Vicksburg, Melissa Scrant. And he took me on a tour of the battlefield. And I knew nothing about Vicksburg. I was just exploring whether I was going to do the book. But the battlefield was as Ed throw it to life, it was transfixing.

So when we finished, Ed said, let's go get a drink. And he said, you know, Miller, why you're going to write the best book on Vicksburg? I said, no, Ed, I don't. He said, because you don't know a goddamn thing about it. I thought, well, okay. And he said, we're in here, you know, and in the forest and, you know, writing a tree by tree account. And maybe you can get, you know, above the forest and write a holistic kind of study.

And I thought, that would be interesting if I could write a book that dealt with all facets of a military outfit. That is, training, flight crews, combat surgeons, civilians left behind and civilians at the front. That is, those who were under the bombs as well as those were in the warmers. And the various dimensions of the Air Force, the kinds of targets they hit, target analysis. I was very interesting in the idea. It had become a cliche in the early part of around 9-11 in that decade. That bombing didn't work at all. And I'm always skeptical.

And so I thought, I'm going to actually read all 150-some volumes at the Strategic Bomb Survey. And when I read then, I found that the chief critic of bombing was actually a guy who wrote for the survey, John Kenneth Goldberts, very famous economist. It actually done an interesting thing, and it was, I thought it was unethical. He attacked the bombing in Vietnam, which was not working well, and he equated it with the ineffective dust of bombing, as he put it, in World War II. And I found that when I read through his volume in the strategic bomb survey, he actually says the bombing worked.

It's buried somewhere in the middle volume, but he makes a strong case that it did work. It was late working, but it did work. It made the D-Day invasion possible without a tritting German Luftwaffe. There is no invasion. It couldn't have been an invasion. When the Russian army takes on the Germans and the Germans run out of air support, their armies fighting without fighter support, and they get chewed up. And various other ways, particularly after D-Day,

when we defeat the Luftwaffe. Germany is still producing planes, but they don't have enough fuel because we start to hit their synthetic oil plants, and they don't have enough trained pilots because the whole A-D Air Force mission from the lead up to D-Day can only be described as a pilot-killing campaign.

We knew that we couldn't get out a lot of the production to sellings because some of either were underground or in forest factories that were hard to locate. but they just didn't have the hours in combat training to meet face to face and to in warrior situations in the sky, drug fights, things like that to really match up to the Air Force. I interviewed a number of Luftwaffe pilots, and one of them told me, look, he said, well, every time I pulled the canopy in my measure shemette closed, I felt I was closing.

It led to my coffin. I only had 16 hours of flight training. I'm fighting against guys that 116. We didn't stand a chance. But after that, after D-Day, we dropped about two-thirds of our ordinance on German production facilities. And we find two Achilles-Keel, the German war machine. One was oil, which we hadn't hit very hard before this. And instead of trying to knock out an oil facility in one rate, we now have.

in 44 and 45, the volume planes. There's this tremendous, as you know, buildup, that production buildup that affects all the forces, all the new fighting forces of the Allies around mid-44. And we have enough crews, enough planes, enough gas, United States controlled 88% of the petrol in the world, to really hammer the Germans and consecutive strikes. and we were able to do things late in the war we couldn't do earlier. For example, Albert Speer throws a job at the Americans in his autobiography, Speer being that

Hitler's head of war munitions. And he said, if the 8th Air Force after a famous raid at Regensburg-Schweinford in August of 43, if he had followed those raids up, those two twin ray, two more Schweinford's, and we were kaput. But what he didn't realize is we didn't have the forest structure to do it, even with the help of the British. But by 44 and 45, early 45, we do. And so we could knock out oil plants like Magdeburg and Leona. But it takes 12 to 13 strikes to do it. That's fascinating what you say about Spears' comment, because the Regensburg-Schindford, Ray, which you talk about at some length in the book, is this sort of a paradigmatic example.

and sort of the popular understanding of the 8th Air Force have failed, or if not failed, you know, early missions that are not extremely well conceived that are not achieving strategic objectives, right? Exactly. But Spears pointing out, like, actually, you guys are on the right track. Yeah, yeah, he thought so. There comes a time in any war when both sides are winning or losing at the same time. And at that time, Germany and the United States are losing.

We're taking calamitous losses in these raids. And the Germans are, it's a battle between destruction and construction, and the construction is winning it. The Germans are very quickly able to reconstruct plants, railroad, yards, train tracks and things like that. Over time, through, it's kind of death by a thousand blows. The air war is not about a trit. Tenpoint bombing, first of all, is an oxymoron. It doesn't exist. and the Air Force doesn't become effective until that sinks in, and they realize that they have pound targets repeatedly and unrelentlessly. This is the way Grant beat Lee, you know,

and finally in 44 he decides he's going to have coordinated, consistent, aggressive tactics, so you can't reinforce weak points along the line just because you have interior lines. And so we begin to fight Grant, like aerial warfare. And it's pretty effective. And also, we begin to hit marshalling yard.

Why take out the bomber barons flying, and the bomb aiming committees finally figure out that why take out an aircraft factory plant, electric power plant, the plant, you know, that's making rubber for tires and things like that. Why not hit the trains that assemble in marshalling yards to bring those products to the factory? and they're all there. And many of the marshalling yards,

we've already hit for D-Day to try to prevent the German army from coming up and blocking the invasion. And so we knew these kind of raids could be effective. So we start to pound major railroad yards and we destroy effectively the entire German transportation system. And as German generals,

and they're on record copiously in interviews and things like that, point out, you know, oils the blood of modern warfare. And if an army can't move, you know, it can't win. And volume is very important as well, simply outproducing the enemy. And we could no longer the Germans that we came to argue can do that. Even Schaeer admits that by January, he had planned to write a letter to the fewer saying,

this is it, we've had it. And we no longer have an industrial economy. And when the Air Force went in and assessed this situation, of course it's to their benefit to assess it positively because they're aiming to establish an independent Air Force after the war, and this is proof to the country. They think that air power may be that alone can win wars, which of course is nonsense.

But they do make a strong case that, The bombing begins to finally affect the battlefield situation. The Germans do run out of oil in the boat. They do run low in France. You know, they can't, you know, they can punch that huge hole in the Allied line, but they can't continue. They don't have the oil reserves or the manpower to do it. They're still a dangerous enemy, but then not so much. So bombing didn't work for a long time when we're trying to hit targets that are

almost impossible to knock out, like sub-pens. You know, if you go to San Dazar and some of the sub-pens on the Brittany Coast, I mean, they're masterpieces of concrete construction, you know, reinforced concrete, you know, three, four feet, you know, top to bottom. And no one ever knocked them down. They go down eight or nine levels under ground. So we're dropping 500-pound bombs on these things. and we're not getting to the or to the subs themselves

where the bombs are bouncing off the roofs like the ping pong balls. And at the same time, you know, there's very little attrition, you know, attritional damage at the Mid-Atlantic. And it's not until we pull those bombers at the very heavy urging of the British and start to fly B-17s on long-range

over-water missions to locate subs and then create 100 killers. teams. Merchantships, you put a flat top wall and turn them into a pocket carrier, put a couple of small planes on there and a boarding team and try to, A, sink a sub, and then before it completely, you know, sinks, get

its cones. And it's in this way, the slow way, and with this type of bombing, which bomber Harris and Britain resisted because he's trying to, he's trying to annihilate entire cities with fire bomb wing, and that's not going to work. It's very interesting to see when you get inside the infrastructure of the 8th Air Force by examining its records to see how this dynamic worked out. For example, down at Maxwell Field and Alabama, they have a great archive, and I was going

through some of the records of the bomber barons meeting together after large, so-called coordinated rage where the British are hitting it. The German targets at night, the Americans are hitting them in the day. And James Doolittle, who's now heading the 8th Air Force, is pounding on Harris and saying, pull off one of these small cities like Bertsburg, which is a university city, and isn't going to do us much good, and join us in heavy raids on oil. It works somewhat. They were able to apply some pressure on Harris, but it's not until we really be really begin to heavily hit those kinds of targets. The one problem with that kind of grading is the, if you hit an oil field, generally they're located pretty far from an urban infrastructure

where a lot of workers' housing is located. But if you hit a marshalling yard, I live next to a marshalling yard, ready, Pennsylvania. My uncle was a railroad worker. And there's a civilian housing all around. And we tried that at Mooster early in the war one time. killed a lot of civilians and some of the airmen were upset about it. But that was the moral conundrum of that type of bombing. The most effective type of bombing so far in the war easily, but also the one that kind of crossed the moral divide. The 8th, therefore, said it wouldn't cross

and expressly hit targets where you can almost anticipate large civilian casualties. But the moral issue I found never rose to the surface as that. The way it presented itself to the air chiefs was sheerly a matter of effectiveness, weighing the war. And so they're out after Harris, not because they think he's immoral, but because they think he's ineffective. And the problem again with this type of bombing is its effect on, and this is one of the things I deal with is the effect on the cruise.

And here I get into a lot of the things about the difference between fighting on the ground and fighting in the air. And the more I look at it, I found that fighting in the air is very similar to fighting on the ground. It's a canard to say that they didn't get close to the enemy. I mean, even at 24,000 feet in a closing, you know, fighter raid on a bomber commission, you can see the eyes as a pilot. This is close quarter fighting without fox. And then the capture rates, prisoners are very high, you know, about 80% of them are allied prisons up to D-Day in German prisons are earmen. So they see the enemy and through the guards and things like that. So their war bears some strong resemblance, I think, to the fighting on the ground.

But you go away. If you go into the differences, their fact. fascinating because a combat veteran on the line, like my uncle, was expected to last about 135 days before he could experience the beginnings of what the British called stupidly a moral breakdown. They thought that failure to fight aggressively or nervousness or quirkiness or anxiety was a moral failing and that they had missed it in the early. examination of the airmen. These are the guys who got through. And they called combat fatigue or post-traumatic stress disorder absence of moral fight. I mean, that's really cruel. When you consider

the bomber command, they had 105,000 guys flying in World War II in big heavies, and 55,000 are killed. It's not a casualty. So the staggering number of those casualties and how they're treated, became back to my main point, became an important scene in the book. Well, if I make, can I, I'll cite a statistic that you, that you cite in the book, that in the 8th Air Force alone, there are 26,000 men killed, which is a number greater. You made reference to Eugene Sledge earlier in our conversation. Yeah. Author of With the Old Breed, this is a number greater than all of the Marines killed in the war,

which is a stunning, stunning thing to reflect on. It is amazing. And recent research, I'm told, I'm going back to Maxwell to check on some of this stuff in a week or so, indicates that it was even higher than that. That so many of those, so many of the deaths up to 4,000 or 5,000 were unrecorded, lost in the records and things.

So, yeah, I mean, we were always told that the highest percentage of casualties were suffered by Ubo crews and Lufvapa pilots. But I found that the first to be upset was the idea of Uwool Croix, the Loppa pilots suffered a greater percentage of casualty. They almost all died. And the 8th Air Force comes in there as having just about the highest percentage of casualties. If you reach 11 missions, I worked this out with some mathematics, and my own family.

A couple of the kids that went on and got PhDs. And your chances of surviving were these. If you reached the 11th mission of 25, say, initially, which was expected and later booted up to 35, you reached the left, your chances of surviving and now we're now zero statistically. Now, guys made it, but they're beating the odds tremendously. That's at the height.

of the German raids. So, you know, those are just the numbers, but the thing is I wanted to put this all, look, I'm a storyteller, and I'm trying to write military history as a story, which I think it was, and using all of the elements of good storytelling, one of which is don't depend on hindsight.

Don't start assessing wars back to front. See so many books, how did Germany lose the war? how did the Allies win the war? We'll go inside the war to a point where they're not winning the war and show how they do it and pick up the story at a point

when it could have went either way. And then their decisions make sense. That is, they have fidelity. They are real-life decisions that they had to confront. Like, for example, after the Reagan at Berkshwine permission, there was a big mission at Stuttgart or the Air Force in September,

really got hammered. And there was talk about eliminating strategic bombing daylight. And folding the 8th Air Force, Churchill wanted this, into the bomber command. And Ira 8th or the head of the 8th Air Force actually re-equipped planes for night flights and flew a couple of night missions around Munich. So that was possible. And it was also possible to lose the air war because the morale among the crews,

in September, November, early December of 43 is at its Nadeer. And it's almost at a state where the Air Force is fearing mutinies. Men simply not fracking their opposite, but simply refusing to fly. So do you continue, you know, and I try to deal with real life situations like, why in the hell didn't they use escorts from the beginning? How can the most technologically sophisticated country in the world, how can its engineers believe that a plane like a Mustang is a statistical impossibility, that you can't build a fighter that can fly this high, this fast, and this nimble,

they can still deliver a lot of punch. If you overload it too heavily with munitions, it slows it down, if you put it up there real light, it's going to get slaughtered in aerial combat. But they did it. And it took a lot of stubbornness and a lot of luck. And the timing was just right. It really was fortunate that we got that plane in the war. It's the war-winning plane just in time to make the D-Day invasion possible.

Because by the time you get to the run-up to D-Day, we're telling the Germans. And we have this on record. I mean, we're telling the Germans where we're coming. We're flying dedicated missions where we're running into Germany on the same. same flight path as the previous mission. We're like saying, okay, here we come, try to stop us. And then the air crews now begin to see that they are being used as bait to bait the German plane. Hitler had to defend Berlin, which is a prestige target.

He had to send up the Luftwaffe. And Leoflophe was no match for these Mustangs since this pilot killing campaign, what I mentioned. And also, we pull off the escorts. from the bombers and say, your mission used to be to protect the bombers at all cost. Now, Doolittle says your mission will be to destroy the German Air Force in the air and on the ground, in the air on the way of the target on the ground by going on a low level, you know, strafhing grades on very dangerous. We lost most of our aces on strafing rates.

Yeah. So you've talked about the evolution of sort of strategic thinking of the strategic, air campaign and how we achieved better results towards the end of the war in terms of targeting. We talked a little bit about sort of our evolving tactics and, you know, the introduction of escorts and so forth. Talk about the German side of the equation, if you would. They don't defend in the same way in every year. Obviously, by the end, they are much less capable of defending. How does it evolve and then deeper? Well, there's hubris on both sides. We think we could fly about the flag and faster than the fighters. And we don't worry about

cloud cover. And, or the fact that the Germans have some of the best fighter planes in the world in 38 and 39. And the Germans in turn feel that their air defense systems are impenetrable. If you locate 16 or 17 major German air squadrons around, you know, a middle-sized city, like, well, Hamburg's more than middle-sized city. So you take a city even of that size and throw up. in tremendous numbers of flak guns, you're going to be effective. Hitler was caught in a dilemma, and Churchill pointed it out.

He had the same dilemma. The flak guns that the British were using, the anti-aircraft guns, are not effective. Churchill wanted to throw more of his budget into fighter production, but he found when he called off or reduced the amount of ordinance he's throwing into the sky against the Luftwaffe in 40 or 41, the people. the population protested. They wanted to hear those guns, and they believed those guns were protecting him.

And the Germans, you know, were in the same dilemma, knowing that it took an awful lot for a one flak battery to knock out a bomber. You had to throw a line of metal under the sky to do something like that. And the Germans, of course, get more desperate as the war goes on. They start to run suicide missions where they're actually diving in these are volunteer units, you know, inflamed nationalistic German fighters, pilots believe in the furor and the fatherland cause. And they're going to go up and not fly missions like the Japanese where they expect to die, but to hit the planes in a vulnerable spot, usually in a fuselage.

close to the tail and split the plane in two with their propellers. And then, can you believe, is bail out at that moment just after contact or just before contact and get in another plane and go up and do it again. These were heavily, these are slow, heavily armed former night fighters. But Germany is reduced to that. And, of course, after a while, because of our ponderance numbers in the sky, we just slaughtered these slower, you know, suicide outfits. But even into the last months of the war,

they're mounting these kinds of, these kinds of raids. But there's a period there in 19, I think it's 1940, well, early on, certainly in 43, where the Germans are developing tactics that are effective. I think it's the Munster Raid, actually, which you mentioned earlier, where in the book you discuss the Luftwaffe throwing, essentially mass fighter formations at the massed, you know,

the focusing in on particular. That was very effective. Why? Because they had more fighters. If you did the balance sheet after the battle or before the battle, the Germans looked to be, defenders look like they're going to win this thing because the numbers of planes and the way they flew,

they used to attack the tail, but they would try to psych out the crews by flying past them right and left on their flanks, get way out in front of them, loop around, and come in 10 and 12 abreast. And, of course, then you're hitting the really vulnerable targets. You're hitting the pilot and co-pilot. You're hitting the bombardier and navigator.

And you're hitting the fuel lines, which are in the wings. So everything essential is up front. The whole air war is an experiment. There's only one bomber war in history. There'll never be another one. This is sui generis, one of a kind. And there's no pattern to build upon. Infantry tactics, you can draw on Frederick the Great,

you can draw on Napoleon. You can draw on Grant and Lee. There's no received wisdom that can affect historical wisdom, that can affect strategy, air strategy, how it's done. And so everything that's tried is wholly experimental. And so we're learning how to fight in air war as we're fighting it. And it's lucky that we have the mass production facilities to be able to do something like that and the numbers as well in terms of flesh and bone.

Can I ask a question just that your observation there prompts for me because it's a live question, I think, for folks thinking about the shape of wars to come today, where there will be combat operations in space, for example, there will be a cyber dimension to things. There will be new developments in the wars to come potentially very soon that are simply that we have not experienced at any kind of scale. And, you know, people in real time are trying to think through the logic of these things. and they are trying to take history and combat that has occurred in other domains and think through how it applies in these new domains. How did that, you know, was there a sort of self-conscious, you mentioned mass on mass earlier. You know, that's a kind of, you know, paradigm of thinking about, you know, combat, right? Yeah.

Was there a self-conscious effort to apply what had happened in other kinds of fighting in the past to the logic of bombing tactics or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, or, how to conduct it. Not really. Not really. The Air Force is, it's a fresh outfit. It's just created after World War II. It has an alone and a philosophy of its own. And it's a pretty cocky outfit. And they just believe that worse, Billy Mitchell, who's really the founder of air power in World War I, he was over there in France, you know, observing trench warfare. It's a simple proposition, he said, why go through this mud and slaughter type of campaign when you can fly over the enemy army, not even engage it, and hit the civilian. They become the new target.

William Weiler, the filmmaker, figured this out early on in a book called Mrs. Minigar, where the chaplain in a small town that's been hit hard in a raid, a young woman has been killed, speaks to the congregation in a bombed-out church and says, look, why this young woman, why the postal clerk the day before? Because we are the targets now. And they're coming up. This is a people's war. And Churchill kept using that phrase. So it's just a different way of thinking, the idea that the bomber will always get through and all that sort of stuff. And again, you have to go back to the period, too, where in the 30s, the introduction of The four-engine bomber was like the atomic bomb.

We never had a weapon quite like this. We'd bomb Germany and Germany bombed. England and won, but, you know, with dirigibles and primitive type of aircraft. But to take a four-engine machine that can deliver 9,000 pounds of firearm over Berlin and get back is something to think about. And there was just, there was a constant feel. what the Air Force misunderstood is the resilience of the population. The early treatises when bomber warfare by Giulio Du Hay and a lot of the theorists of air war, pointed out that the mental capacity of the enemy, whether they're English or Italian,

that is, of those who are being bombed. Their psyches are fragile. And with this kind of shock in all warfare, which is brand new, And with the use of poison gas, dumping it into subways, source systems, things like that, will create enough mass panic for the population to revolt and demand, you know, withdrawal from war. That was too horrible even to think about. Most of these treatises, the bombers never looms. Right.

Because, you know, the psychological advantage that they possessed, it seemed that they were unstoppable forces. Yeah. And that's what led to the Air Force into, I think, into this diluted thinking that they could break morale. Yeah. The military history. I really made a contribution, it's morale thing, where I try to point out that bombing did destroy morale. It did.

It would be, come on, you know, we all lived through 9-11. You lost a lot of family members, you know, in 9-11. You don't have 190 9-11s city like Cologne, I know the exact number, but it's about that. And not have that seriously affect civilian morale and have an entire city, you know, turn to cinder and ash around you. And the Germans report that cardiac arrest inside the bomb shelters, hysteria, all these kinds of reactions. But what we went wrong on this is that because you could create this situation didn't mean it would it could redound to your side.

That is, when you're creating, when you're treading morale in a totalitarian state, what do the demoralized people do? They can't resist. And all it creates is atrophy. despondency, despair, things like that. And they can draw back and mentally separate themselves from the fewer and maybe mentally want a different kind of world without bombing and without war. They can't do much about it. They have to show up at work.

They have to show up on the line. And so destroying morale didn't really matter that much. What you had to do was destroy the German economy and destroy the German army. And the military history of the 20th century is unfortunately replete with examples of some new technology being heralded as something that will make war relatively bloodless and relatively swift. And even when you can achieve effects with the new technology, you make a strong case that the 8th Air Force does.

They're not necessarily decisive on the timeline or in certain respects at all unless it's in a longer timeline in combination with other means of warfare, right? Yeah. They don't win on their own. You look at theoretical buttressing as they went into the war. Their philosophy, they are fighting, for example, almost nothing held up. They're not accounting for the weather and the capriciousness of British and German weather. And yet they live in these countries, you know.

Cloud cover is almost perpetual in Germany in wintertime. And their planes and crews have a difficult time dealing with it. Frostbite. Nobody thought about it. Stomach disorders and, you know, peptic ulcers and things like that, some bad food they're eating, and then flying at 26,000 feet an hour later, all these sorts of things just weren't quite anticipated. And how you participate, you know, that you could actually go into a combat zone in a machine with 10 men tethered to it.

And it's a flying gas tank. And the portals on either side, the gun portals are open to the air, to the freezing blast, that you can believe that that's not going to affect physiologically and psychologically, the air gunner's in the rear of the plane. That's or the ball turret gunner and things like that. The last person's considered in this experiment, the guinea pigs. Elmer Bendettner wrote an excellent book on this, a fire himself. You know, he said, we were the ones, the guinea pigs,

the white lab rats, who were the last ones considered in this sort of thing, until, and unless, their breakdown affect the overall bombing effectiveness. And when that happened, these issues are addressed. You got to know some of these guys over the course of researching the book. That's part of doing the book. Yeah, I want to ask you about a few of them. So I understand from the knowledge of the book that your encounters with Robert Rosenthal we're sort of critical to the enterprise.

Let me tell us a bit about him and his life and time and the work. Yeah, I think every book, every book kind of needs a hook and, you know, writing is a lonely enterprise, you know, how it is you sit at a desk. You've got to create a world of your own. It's not World War II. It's your World War II. It takes some creativity, and that comes at a cost of isolation and things like that. So you need some motivating factors.

that gets you back to the book all the time. Great characters are one of these sorts of things. And Robert Rosenthal was one of those guys. I met him early on at the project, luckily, early on. I met him down in Savannah. There's a reunion down there, and I didn't know anybody. I just showed up. I wasn't speaking or anything like that,

but I had known Paul Tibbics. I had done something on him in the story of World War II. And so Paul introduced me to a lot of the, the guy that he moved from the 8th. He served briefly with the 8th Air Force. And he said, you ought to really meet this guy, Rosenthal. He's quite a character. And Rosie was there with his, Robert Rosenthal, with his family.

And in brief, he was the emotional, psychological, leader of the 8th Air Force, certainly one part of it, the 100th Bond Group and inspirational. And his story was tremendous. He comes from a Jewish-American immigrant family in the Bronx. He grew up near Evitzfield. He wrote for the Dodgers, went to Brooklyn College, graduated with honors, was All-American Baseball and football player. And all his high school career, he wanted to go to college and become a lawyer, got into a good law school, Brooklyn College law.

And just before Pearl Harbor, he gets his law degree and he gets a great job of the Manhattan firm, the lower Manhattan firm, and he thought he was in the cockbird seat. And then, of course, Pearl Harbor comes and he volunteers that Monday, Pearl Harbor Monday, and gets assigned to the Air Force and sent to England as a replacement, not with the original 100th bomb group, and gets there at the worst time in the Air War, in that it was called the Black October, where the Air Force begins to take absolutely murderous casualties and flies three consecutive missions, one of which he was the only plane from the 100th. is to return. So he was an inspirational character. He flew 52 missions. He didn't have to re-up

after 25. He didn't expect him to go home. And a lot of people, when they found out, he re-up, thought that the reason was because he was Jewish. And as he told me, and as he told several reporters during the war reporters for Yank magazine, no, it's humanity that's his sake here, not just you. He's a threat to all of civilized decency. And so he stays on. He shot down three times, the last time behind Russian lines and taken by the Russians, back to the mosque out, slowing back to the eighth.

And Thorpe Abbott's original base, tries to get back in the air war. But at that time, we dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki Air Ocean. And he then decides that. he's going to go and enlist as a volunteer. He's an attorney. So he hears about the Nornburg trials, and he gets assigned as a trial prosecutor. And meets his wife on the way over.

They get married. She's a prosecutor. She's a native attorney. They had a child over there, and he saw the last of the Nazi, the motinist Nazi leaders hanged and helped to bring cases against him. And he was a completely modest guy

and absolutely loved by his former crew and friends. So he was really, he's a real hero. You're a real hero. So to the extent that you can talk about it, what was it like to, you know, see your book set to film and to participate in the telling of the story that way, and the recreation of characters like Rosenthel? It was good.

And first of all, it's an honor and a thrill. And, you know, when you hear that you've been tapped for this, you know, when I got the phone call from, Spielberg's office, they're going to do this thing. It was a good night, you know. And I found working with Tom Hanks, who was really more the man on point, and one of his key assistants, Kurt Zedoski, really enthralling. Because from the beginning, Tom is a very passionate guy, and he throws himself into projects. and he told us at the beginning that unless we believe that this could be the best film ever made on war,

not just the best World War II film, he really thought we were wasting our time, putting ourselves into the project. And he wanted to do a cliche free movie and one that had fidelity that was close to the facts and stuck to the book. And it was fun to sit in. I had had one of my other books, Chicago, when Chicago done as a week-long PBS series. And it was fun to sit in and watch them reassemble the book in different ways. And sometimes you say, I wouldn't have done that or, wow, that's a great idea. I wish I would have thought of that. And I constantly, I was lucky in this film in that I was consulted a lot.

I wasn't just a bystander. And Dave McCullough, you know, a very close friend, God bless soul. know most of my life. Dave told me, he said, he called me actually from Plato and Hanks's studio and he found out he was out there by happenstance. And he said, I'll tell you what. He said, you're going to get pissed off at him because they're going to do things to your book that you just don't want done. And at the same time, he said, and they're going to steal from you. Well, I didn't find that. But there were junctures where you battle to get something

in and you lose and you just got to accept that. I thought maybe we should have done this, maybe we should have done that. But on balance, I think most of the differences in the film, places where the film varies a little bit from the book, I think, are enhancements. And in their enhancements, because we had a writer, John Orlock, who was immersed in the hundreds of bomb group. And John, it concomitant, with my own work, is not just writing about the hundreds, not just drawing from my book. With the help of a research historian, he's immersed in it, and he's doing his own independent research. He found out a lot of things that I had known and developed some characters I don't develop in my book. So for a long time, it was John, John Orlov, who I knew from Band of Brothers.

He wrote, I think, two of the most compelling scenes in episodes in that really good film. And so working with him and with his fellow Kurt Siddowski, who's kind of the showrunner, who's involved with all aspects of this thing, was really uplifting to know that they're running scripts by you. They don't have to listen to you because look, look, they buy the book. It's their book. It's Apple's book. Originally it was Playtone. And originally it was Playtone and, well, I'm not going to win that long story.

HBO, yeah. And I enjoyed working with HBO. But they got bought out by AT&T and so on. But, yeah, we were like the three musketeers just working this thing alone until finally, you get word. Yeah, they're going to really do it. And then you get the big word that it's being green. light. Yeah. So it was good. And meeting the actors and seeing the commitment of the actors, but even more importantly, I'd say this, seeing the commitment of the technicians and ground guys,

I called them, you know, the cameramen and the lighting guys and the design people, going to England and watching them build the sets and seeing guys who were over there for 13 months without a vacation, totally enthralled with the project, that whole soul commitment you look for, you know, that you bring to the project. And then luckily you say, my God, they've got the same kind of feeling. There was great a spree among the people who made this. Was there anything that you were worried about in terms of committing this to film that actually beat your expectations?

You know, what, if anything, surprised you in terms of what was captured well on the screen about the world that you heard about. I don't know how they can do combat. You know, I mean, you see it done a thousand ways. I mean, you know, 12 o'clock high does it well by not doing it at all. The action is on the ground. It's about the psychological, there's hardly any air combat, but it's a great air of movie.

And I think that was a good dodge. And I think the way these guys went about it, Gary Getsman, for example, was major influence here, I think, was to be. do the air war from inside the plane, we had specially built B-17s for this. They weren't flyable, but they were true to the original plane in every particular, every switch, everything. It was incredible the level of detail. But the plane wasn't wide enough to capture a lot of the in-plane, in-fuselade drama.

And I think that's where the drama takes place. in an air battle inside the plane among the 10 or 11 crewmen. And I don't know if we actually sun out to do that, but that's the way it worked out. And that really worked well because I just didn't want to see a bunch of planes flying around in one dog fight after another. Because then you'd have a certain kind of sameness to the whole thing, you know, and then avoided that.

You're kind of getting into it with this answer, but I want to ask you what's maybe a strange question, but obviously everyone is operating off of the extent that it's possible, the facts, the history that you have documented interviews with folks who fought there. But there's this whole other dimension of inputs, right, which is the art that already exists about the air war. Yeah.

We've talked about 12 o'clock high numerous times. There's William Weiler's Memphis Bell. There's the kind of, you know, it's William Weiler who does a documentary, right? And then there's the kind of 90s sort of storybook Memphis Bell But there's art that has been made about this war. What role did that art play? Was it like a baseline in Hanks and everyone wants to transcend it? You know, were the things consciously stolen from it?

How did that work? Well, probably the best artists of the Eighth Air Force is Gil Cohn. And Gil goes on. And Gil does magnificent paintings of aerial combat in World War II. And from the Reganburg-Schweig, Schwan, for mission, down to the actual mechanics and things like that. Gil has a studio close to where I live in Pennsylvania, in eastern Pennsylvania.

I visited in a studio a number of times. And I think I'm involved in a. I was supposed to interview Gil shortly, other than making it down, doing a documentary on Gil. And you can't. And he has a wonderful shot of Rose's crew and Rosie talking to the crew just before they're about to board the plane and go on missions and things like that.

I don't know how much that actually influenced us. It's inspirational. It really is. And you have to get your psyche up for that sort of stuff. But Hanks' message to us was to try to... One of the keys to understanding the film, I think, is if you watch Tom's movies about recent movies about the Convoys. Yeah.

Yeah, Greyhound, right? Greyhound is a key because it's a lot like Dustvote. the great German U-Book film, which a lot of us on the film, on this film, consider the template, you know, the platinum, you know, World War II, cinematography. Because it's about every man doing his job. And there's no superheroics, no guys dying on the floor of the sub, cigarette in hand, tell Molly the kids, you know, la-da-da. And Dom really mentioned that early on. He said, I'd like a film with that kind of authenticity and fidelity. I'd like a film, if we can do this, that is cliche free. And we really harped on that.

If something looked familiar, looked like you've seen it somewhere else, he cut it. Yeah. He cut it. Even some really terrific scenes and some terrific writing. So we're shooting for a muted look, but yet a look that conveys the understated courage of these guys. They're not barking about their courage and patriotism. And they're just doing their jobs in an efficient manner to stay alive and, you know, to win in Dospos case, you know, the Battle of the Atlantic, in their case, the Air War. So from the beginning, that was always a theme.

Well, and I don't want to step on anyone's toes here, but I'm an enormous fan of basically everything we've mentioned. I'm an enormous fan of Band of Brothers and the Pacific. But I have to say, and it pains me to say as a Marine, that I always preferred Band of Brothers to the Pacific, and the main reason that I preferred it, just as a work of art, the main reason that I preferred it is, you know, I'm a student, as any Marine is,

of the Marine Corps's war in the Pacific. And even I found it difficult to sort of follow, you know, where we were, which regiment we were with, you know, the story is just trying to do so much. Whereas with Band of Brothers by picking this one company and telling the story of the European War just through that company, I thought, was just much more narratively feasible. And it seems like here with the 100th bomb group, there's been a similar decision. And that that seems to me to be gratified that that seems to be the case. I don't know if you agree with that assessment. and I probably would upset a lot of people who worked very hard on the Pacific, which is a marvelous show.

Bingo, I think you hit it. I wasn't in on the conception of Pacific. I was called in, McCullough called me, he was out talking to Hanks and Kurt Zedosky. And this is the thing they were worried about. They were getting close to closure on making the film, at least in an original iteration. And the great poet Dante once said that hell is a place

where nothing connects. We thought we might be in hell because are we connecting Guadalcanal with Gloucester? Does the audience know why they move from Gloucester to Okinawa and what Okinawa means in the larger framework? You can't have Alenster Cook come in and sit in a leather chair and explain this from the Masterpiece Theater audience. Do you do it with some kind of Deiasex Machina?

But that was, I thought Pacific was terrific, and I thought it was better than Band of Brothers in its treatment of combat, the realities of combat. But there was that. Is there continuity? And in a way, it's confusion, not to defend the film, but but I will defend it. It's confusion does convey the confusion of the American public. You had boys writing from Coagelaine and asking their parents. to send them maps, where am I?

And why am I here? You know? And you just, as a grunt, you know, it was, you just didn't know that sort of thing, you know. And so, yeah, yeah. I think in this film, ipso facto, one of the strengths of the film is built in to the history itself. these guys had to know a lot about the big picture.

They were briefed about the big picture. They were told not only what they were going to bomb, but why they were bombing and how it would affect the German war machine. So they're in touch with this. They're in touch with the ground war. You have to know where the troops are, just to know where not to bomb.

So you get a global picture of the war and the unfolding of World War II, you know, from the points in which we could have lost the war and you get that sensation that maybe we don't win this thing to the points where we start to win and why we start to win and that is, I think, better done in terms of comprehending what's at stake and why the wives of the war

than you do in the Pacific, as good as the Pacific, especially the acting is in the Pacific. So one of the jobs I had was to commend work on the website and work on the script to try to bring more of that connectiveness into the story. Because, you know, as Tom used to say, with the band of brothers, you just put out the Nazi flag and follow it in Germany, you know. And this is just a little different. It's, it's, it's, Ella Roosevelt called it the forgotten war and her son was in it.

And it was just a harder war to grasp, the stakes. the states and everything else. But I think this thing, you know, you're always, I'm not one who's most proud of my most recent work. I think some of my older books are better than so on, the later books, et cetera, et cetera. But in this case, this is the best to me of the three Band of Brothers Pacific Masters.

It is the best. I am chauvinistic about it, but also I have to admit that, as my wife said, I'm very picky and very uncritical, very too critical in times. Yeah. But I got to say, and I kept raising these criticisms, that this thing is absolutely terrific. It really is.

It gets you on the emotional level. It gets you as sheer drama. And the history is dead on. And we don't try to summarize history. I think when you summarize something, you kill it. You do it episodically. And through a series of connected stories, and I think we picked some really good ones and made the kind of connections where you see the story unfolding and in a way that is not foreordained. Yeah.

In a way that it's kind of has a lot of surprises and things like that. That's really hard to do. Gary Getsman was working with him. He's a real genius. and I think Tom and Hanks and Spielberg get all the credit. Gary was, I think, genius on this project. He was the one who, of those three, worked, and I'm going to get in trouble most consistently on the project

and was the most heavily involved day to day. Although the other, Spielberg is the guy who picked the book. I'm eternally grateful for him for that. He said, you know, to the guide, about to do this book next and was committed to it. And Hanks' contribution was beyond anything I expected. I just give you one little anecdote. I pick up at the airport here in the Middle East in Pennsylvania.

And let's get bigger. But he flew in on a wintry day and got off the plane. And he had, he's only going to stay a couple days, but he had two suitcases. I had, geez, you're going somewhere else. He said, no, really. He should one suitcase is just filled with the 20 latest books on German history. That's World War II history, not Air Force history. He wanted to get a sense of what's going on inside Germany,

the new debates that are taking place about German popular support for the war, not just getting cowed into support and Hitler and things like that, and wanted to talk through that issue. And that's the way he is. He keeps abreast of the latest reading on things. And, you know, it's, so there's a freshness to his work that you don't find with a lot of directors and an immersion intellectually in the project. I'll make a bold statement about Hanks's work, which is, I really think Greyhound is the finest depiction of, I guess 12 o'clock high would maybe be the tie.

The finest depiction of the burden of command, not combat per se, though obviously it's commanding combat. but actually the active command and the responsibility. I just thought it was phenomenal. And not many people have seen it. It somehow kind of slipped by without the world noticing. I saw a guy and I was waiting for a plane in England just a couple weeks ago, Heathrow. And the guy was sitting next to me and we were talking and he asked me what I did.

And he's a doctor. And I'm a student of combat or anything. He just couldn't stop talking about that song. Yeah. How he portrayed to him. some of the stresses of command of his decision as a hospital administrator, that his decision oftentimes, life or death decisions about patients and things like that and how you treat it.

He was just swept away by the emotional, the understated emotional power of that film. And I think you'll find that here. You don't have a lot of guys, rah-rah, and there's very little of that in the movie. Not that it's undramatic or anything like that, but it's it's it's it's paced really nicely. And it has a kind of a measured treatment of human, of the range of human emotions, all the human emotions. But a lot of them successfully, decisions successfully executed because they're done in a measured, thoughtful manner by people who have to make them under inordinate stress.

Yeah. Well, Donald, you've been extraordinarily generated. with your time today. I'm grateful to you for that. I'm also, I should just say, I'm grateful to you for all the work that you have done on the history of the Second World War and on this book. My dad as well was a, was a Second World War veteran. I was a very late arrival in his life. He fought with a third infantry division all the way from, yeah, North Africa, Italy, Anzio, Colmar. My uncle, as I said, was first division. Yeah. I was going to follow up with him, but I

wound up, you know, going to see a Marine enlistment station better than that one. But anyway, Like, you know, it was good doing this. Again, I just, I'm grateful to you, the book, and as our conversation, I think, just gives a peek at without, we obviously don't have time to read it to justice. A lot of the basics. Yeah, but you get into, I think, issues that are alive. It ought to be alive for people who are thinking about strategy today. And, you know, how do you integrate new technologies? What can you expect to, you know, what, how do you grapple with what you don't know?

How do these things tend to go wrong? And what is the human cost? And these are all real conversations. conversations that exist today. Three of us are going down to Alabama, to the original tax school, where we're meeting with 700 air leaders from around the world. Yeah. And they want to know what they can pull from these kinds of experiences.

It's interesting. And I'll be speaking out at the Air Force Academy on the same sort of thing. And while the book was being done, several chiefs of the Air Force invited me down to talk to his leadership teams about Cambodia. And things like that. And what the Air Force, not to wear an appointment, the Air Force was really concerned about

some of these air chiefs. Marines had this, as you know, and someone said to me, I gave a talk in an airbase recently in Macon, Georgia, and they said, well, if this were on it, it was also a Marine station, and said, if this was on a marine topic,

Utah, this place would be filled overflowing. Because the Marines know their history. They know the battles. You don't flip Pelham, Biden, and things like that. A lot of modern Air Force chiefs are out after is trying to get their guys to understand the legacy of the Eighth Air Force and what it accomplished in World War II and about some of these Plessty and some of these big raids

and things like that. They want the knowledge of that history, good from around, things like that. Yeah. Well, like I say, I'm grateful to you for the work you've done on the, on the sort of conceptual issues that are alive today, and also just for the way in which you're paying tribute to this generation,

which is meaningful to me on a personal level, and I think meaningful to a lot of people. So thank you, and thank you for the time today. I really appreciate you joining the show. It takes it off a lot. A great interviewer. You really are. Thank you, sir.

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