But strategic bombing was not effective until the appearance in late 1943 of a miracle plane, the P-51 Mustang, a long-range fighter escort that helped the Allies achieve the air supremacy over Northern Europe. Until Allied troops crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of the World War II, a war within a war. Miller chron icles the heroic feats of Robert Morgan, pilot of the legendary Memphis Belle of Paul Tibbets, who later would fly the Enola Gay on the A-bomb mission to Hiroshima of Curtis LeMay, the most celebrated combat leader of the bomber war and-one of the key figures of the book-of Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, leader of the Bloody Hundredth, who flew 52 combat missions, wĪs shot down three times, and later became a member of the team of prosecuting attorneys at the Nuremberg Trials. The story of the Eighth Air Force is one of equal parts bravery, terror, and glamour, with some of its men becoming the most celebrated personalities the war. In the early years of the war only one airman in four survived his required 25 missions. Miller’s deeply personal story captures the anxiety and terror on these flights, where frostbite, oxygen deprivation and psychological strain were even greater threats than enemy fighters and flak guns. In the first two years of bombing from their bases in eastern England, the Eighth Air Force sustained staggering losses on missions that had little impact on the German war economy. It was a special kind of experience, different from that of the ground forces.” Before joining the Air Force, most bomber crewmen had never even flown in a plane. “American bomber crews learned to fight the air war by experience and experiment, every mission a learning exercise. “The history of the American air war against Germany is the story of an experiment: the testing of a new idea of warfare,” Miller writes. While his focus is on the boys in the bombers, his is one of the only books on the air war to document in compelling detail the physical and mental horrors of being under the bombs, in German cities. Drawing on hundreds of oral history interviews with surviving airmen and civilians who were victims of the bombing campaigns in Great Britain and Europe, as well as unpublished diaries and letters and recently de-classified government documents, Miller recreates the shattering experience of bombing, in the air and on the ground. Miller-author of the widely praised The Story of World War II-has written a riveting account of the stoic courage of these men and boys of the Greatest Generation.

In Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, celebrated historian Donald L.

Donald miller masters of the air