Masters of the Air

The inspiration for the major Apple TV+ series, streaming now!

The riveting history of the American Eighth Air Force in World War II and the young men who flew the bombers that helped beat the Nazis and liberate Europe, brilliantly told by historian and World War II expert Donald L. Miller. The Masters of the Air streaming series stars Austin Butler and Callum Turner, and is produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, the legendary duo behind Band of Brothers and The Pacific.

Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes you on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over Berlin, Hanover, and Dresden and describes the terrible cost of bombing for the German people.

Fighting at 25,000 feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. Unlike infantrymen, bomber boys slept on clean sheets, drank beer in local pubs, and danced to the swing music of Glenn Miller's Air Force band, which toured US air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers.

The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America--white America, anyway. The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, and so was the "King of Hollywood," Clark Gable. And the air war was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland.

Masters of the Air is a story of life in wartime England and in the German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the country their bombs destroyed.

Drawn from recent interviews, oral histories, and American, British, German, and other archives, Masters of the Air is an authoritative, deeply moving account of the world's first and only bomber war.

“"When I learned that Don Miller had written a history of the air war against Germany, I knew that readers would be transported as virtual eye witnesses to this aerial battle field. His gripping reconstruction of what was happening in the planes is matched by the best account yet of what the bombings were doing to Germans on the ground. This book bears the Miller trademark: a strong narrative supported by solid history."-- Joseph E. Persico, author ofEleventh Month, Eleventh Day Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day 1918”

"Masters of the Air is a direct hit."
-- Allan R. Millett, Director, Eisenhower Center for American Studies, University of New Orleans
"Masters of the Air is a fresh new account of the incredible rise of the American air force from young men learning their trade on the job in combat to an irresistible force that swept the vaunted Luftwaffe from the skies. Author Donald L. Miller knits together the big events of the bombing campaign with illuminating individual human stories of the heroes who lived and died over Germany."

-- Walter J. Boyne, former director, National Air and Space Museum

"Masters of the Air is a piece of history that accurately and comprehensively tells the story of the Eighth Air Force going mano a mano against a tough and determined foe. The incredible cost to both sides is recounted in riveting detail. It left me shaken."

-- Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, USMC (Ret.) and coauthor of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq

"Masters of the Air is masterful narrative history, the elegantly interwoven story of the men and boys who first took the war to the heart of Germany. Vivid and meticulous, judicious but not judgmental, Donald L. Miller chronicles the air war over Europe in all its heroism and horror."

-- Geoffrey C. Ward, author of Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

"Donald L. Miller's Masters of the Air is a stunning achievement. The compound effect of the book's narrative vitality and attention to human detail is terrific in all the meanings of the word - terrifying, extraordinary, highly admirable. What a story it is!"
-- David McCullough
"For sixty years we have waited for a history to equal the epic saga of the Eighth Air Force's struggle with fighters, flak and weather on a battlefield moving at three miles per minute five miles above the earth's crust. Now it is here. With brilliant artistry, Don Miller paints the story from the pallet of the voices of the men who manned the planes or waited them out."
-- Richard B. Frank, author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire
"Miller's work is always extraordinary but this large volume is especially remarkable for its valuable recovery of details, like all the psychiactric ruin of the many bomber boys assigned to kill German civilians. This is a rare account of the American Eighth Air Force, and with so many readers hoodwinked by fantasies of The Good War, it deserves wide acceptance and ultimate enshrinement as a classic."

-- Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory

"Over the first years of World War II, the only American casualties on European soil were flyboys shot out of the sky. Long before Normandy, America's bomber boys waged the Allies' longest WWII campaign and brought the war to Hitler. Now we are fortunate that the incomparable Donald Miller has brought the memory of these Masters of the Air back to us."

-- James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys

"When I learned that Don Miller had written a history of the air war against Germany, I knew that readers would be transported as virtual eye witnesses to this aerial battle field. His gripping reconstruction of what was happening in the planes is matched by the best account yet of what the bombings were doing to Germans on the ground. This book bears the Miller trademark: a strong narrative supported by solid history."

-- Joseph E. Persico, author of Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day 1918

Donald L. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and author of ten books, including Vicksburg, and Masters of the Air, currently being made into a television series by Tom Hanks. He has hosted, coproduced, or served as historical consultant for more than thirty television documentaries and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other publications.

"Masters of the Air""""Masters of the Air" is a narrative history of the bomber war in World War Two. The U.S. had two air forces conducting strategic bombing in Europe during the war, the Eighth and the Fifteenth. The Eighth was the more powerful and was the one that bombed Germany. "Masters of the Air" is the story of the Eighth Air Force. The American bomber war began in the summer of 1942 with a strike by a dozen Flying Fortresses (B-17s), or "Forts," as they were called, against Rouen, then occupied by the Germans. It ended in the spring of 1945 with a succession of thousand-bomber terror attacks against Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and other cities in Germany.Of all the military services in World War Two, only the German U-boat crews suffered a higher casualty rate than the bomber crews. The Eighth Air Force suffered over 26,000 fatal casualties, "more than the entire Marine Corps," An additional 23,000 flyers were made prisoners of war. In 1943 an airman's chance of surviving 25 missions - the number required to go home - were about one in four. And as "Catch-22" so cleverly suggested, many airmen suffered debilitating mental breakdowns. Despite all this, the bombing campaign was a success. It took nearly two years for the commanders to figure out how to use the bombers most effectively, during which time the crews paid a horrible price for this new form of warfare. But starting in the spring of 1944, American bombers began punishing German oil and transportation targets, disrupting the Nazi war machine. By January, 1945, before a single soldier had crossed the Rhine, the German economy was in ruins and defeat was inevitable. As Don Miller puts it, air power alone didnot win the war, but the war could not have been won without air power."Masters of the Air," as its title suggests, focuses on the crews who flew the planes. It is based on over a thousand oral histories and an even greater number of unpublished letters and diaries. "Masters of the Air "takes readers into battle with the crews, freezing in the air in unheated, unpressurized aircraft. It takes readers to East Anglia, where nearly a quarter of a million Eighth Air Force personnel were stationed, many living among their English hosts. Air men had comforts unknown to the infantry: beds with clean sheets, nights at the local pubs. But they faced far worse odds than any other branch of the armed services. The POW camps are an important part of this story. Among the captured airmen was Chuck Yeager, who escaped a POW camp across the Pyrenees to Spain, with the help of the French Underground. Many airmen spent most of the war in the stalags, where life was far grimmer than portrayed in movies and television. The book also grapples with the moral issue that has re-surfaced recently. Most of the air crews knew that they were bombing civilians. Some historians have argued that the bombing campaign failed to destroy the morale of the German people, but Miller makes clear that it succeeded. The problem was that the German people had no options but to continue to work and hope to survive, demoralized or not. The RAF believed strongly in "city busting," bombing civilians, but as "Masters of the Air" shows, bombing oil refineries, factories, and rail hubs was far more effective, even though these campaigns produced heavy civilian casualties, too. All but a relative handful of the airmenhad never flown in a plane in their lives until they joined the Eighth. Among those whose stories Miller tells are Robert Morgan, pilot of the famous "Memphis Belle"; Col. William Wyler, the director, who flew with Morgan and filmed the story of the plane and its crew (and who later directed the Oscar-winning "Best Years of Our Lives," which featured Dana andrews as a bombardier just home from the war); Clark Gable, an Eighth Air Force gunner, who made a little-known documentary about the Eighth; Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, young war correspondents who flew in

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