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Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany
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 readers 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 U.S. air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943, an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps.
The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America -- white America, anyway. (African-Americans could not serve in the Eighth Air Force except in a support capacity.) 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.
Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise: the British flew under the cover of night while American bombers attacked by day, a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal.
Masters of the Air is a story, as well, 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.
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 U.S. air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943, an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps.
The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America -- white America, anyway. (African-Americans could not serve in the Eighth Air Force except in a support capacity.) 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.
Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise: the British flew under the cover of night while American bombers attacked by day, a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal.
Masters of the Air is a story, as well, 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.
671 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
About the author
Donald L. Miller
15 books183 followersDr. Miller is the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and an expert on World War II, among other topics in American history. Three of his eight books are on WWII: D-Days in the Pacific (2005), the story of the American re-conquest of the Pacific from Imperial Japan; Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany (2006); and The Story of World War II (2001), all published by Simon & Schuster.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 522 reviews
October 7, 2023
This is an extensive read regarding the guys that were in the 8th air force and helped liberate Europe, including my country. I was awed by their adventures, stories and experiences that they had to endure in order to defeat the German Reich, particular the Luftwaffe.
Donald L. Miller writes about a lot of things, the personal lives of the pilots, bombers and gunners, their relationship with the English people, their trips to Londen and the life in a German prison camp for example. All stories are accompanied by the personal tales of English and German people during the bomber campaign. An extra plus was for me the story about the way the Allies were treated in Switzerland (horribly) which I didn't know.
The end of the book was a little bit emotional for me, it tells about Operation Chowhound (or Manna) which saved my grandparents lives during the German occupation. It reminded me that if it wasn't for these brave young men, I wouldn't been able to read this book.
Thanks to all brave young men for liberating my country, and thank you mr. Miller for writing this beautiful book.
Donald L. Miller writes about a lot of things, the personal lives of the pilots, bombers and gunners, their relationship with the English people, their trips to Londen and the life in a German prison camp for example. All stories are accompanied by the personal tales of English and German people during the bomber campaign. An extra plus was for me the story about the way the Allies were treated in Switzerland (horribly) which I didn't know.
The end of the book was a little bit emotional for me, it tells about Operation Chowhound (or Manna) which saved my grandparents lives during the German occupation. It reminded me that if it wasn't for these brave young men, I wouldn't been able to read this book.
Thanks to all brave young men for liberating my country, and thank you mr. Miller for writing this beautiful book.
May 29, 2024
Audio ARC received from the Publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
"Don't get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous. You've got dirty work to do. And you might as well face the fact: you are going to be baby-killers and women-killers."
"There were two sets of victims in the European bomber war: those who were bombed and the men who bombed them."
Well, this was simply staggering: intense, haunting, informative, tense. For a non-fiction book it put me through the full-scale of emotions. I was touched, horrified, elated, overwhelmed, exhausted, depressed and thrilled.
Author Donald L. Miller presented such a comprehensive story of World War 2 through the lens of aerial, mostly US bomber, warfare in Europe that was both panoramic and close-cutting and utterly compelling that my ears were glued to my headphones as I went on listening.
The compassion that Miller showed towards both the bombed and the bombers while being able to present the facts in a clear, non-biased way made this book something special for me. This was difficult and harrowing, but an unforgettable read (listen) for me.
Before I started reading, I have to admit to a bit of wariness about the book, because of the title "Masters of the Air" that hinted at the possibility of glory and heroes, but my mind was soon put to rest.
At no stage of the book did Miller try and glorify war or the those fighting there. His tale is an honest description of all the sufferings, want, serious mental issues and physical injuries the bombers went through and afflicted on the bombed.
"Don't get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous. You've got dirty work to do. And you might as well face the fact: you are going to be baby-killers and women-killers."
"There were two sets of victims in the European bomber war: those who were bombed and the men who bombed them."
Well, this was simply staggering: intense, haunting, informative, tense. For a non-fiction book it put me through the full-scale of emotions. I was touched, horrified, elated, overwhelmed, exhausted, depressed and thrilled.
Author Donald L. Miller presented such a comprehensive story of World War 2 through the lens of aerial, mostly US bomber, warfare in Europe that was both panoramic and close-cutting and utterly compelling that my ears were glued to my headphones as I went on listening.
The compassion that Miller showed towards both the bombed and the bombers while being able to present the facts in a clear, non-biased way made this book something special for me. This was difficult and harrowing, but an unforgettable read (listen) for me.
Before I started reading, I have to admit to a bit of wariness about the book, because of the title "Masters of the Air" that hinted at the possibility of glory and heroes, but my mind was soon put to rest.
At no stage of the book did Miller try and glorify war or the those fighting there. His tale is an honest description of all the sufferings, want, serious mental issues and physical injuries the bombers went through and afflicted on the bombed.
June 8, 2013
This book did an impressive job of covering the air war in Europe, focusing on the US Eighth Air Force, based in England. The parts I most enjoyed were the experiences of the bomber crews, but he also covered strategic air theory going into the war, the debates and decisions of those higher up, American/British relationships, and the view from the German side.
Miller showed the ugly side of war—the results of fire-bombing, the intense mental strain the men were under, mistreatment of POWs and internees, and the huge cost of the air campaign. The statistic that most stood out to me was that the Eighth Air Force endured more fatalities than the entire US Marine Corp during the war. Miller also devoted time to questions of precision-bombing (well, trying to be precise) vs carpet bombing and the morality of bombing non-combatants.
Along with the ugly side of war and the hard questions, he also showed amazing examples of cooperation between crew-members, endurance during difficult circumstances, and tremendous bravery as the men still flying got into their planes again and again and again.
One of the questions raised is “was it worth it?” Early Air Corp leaders thought they could bomb Germany into submission, without an invasion. That theory was proved wrong, but I think it is fairly clear that the air war contributed significantly to the war’s end. It inhibited Germany’s ability to wage war, diverted German manpower and resources that would have otherwise been used elsewhere, and it’s doubtful D-day could have been pulled off if the Allies hadn’t achieved air superiority by June 1944.
Miller bounced around a bit—chronologically and up and down the command chain. For the most part, he did a good job with this, but there were a few times when I thought it was a little jarring. But even with that, this was the most comprehensive WWII ETO air war book I’ve ever read (not that I’ve read a ton on the subject, but this wasn’t my first air war book). If it’s a subject you’re interested in, this book is well worth picking up.
Miller showed the ugly side of war—the results of fire-bombing, the intense mental strain the men were under, mistreatment of POWs and internees, and the huge cost of the air campaign. The statistic that most stood out to me was that the Eighth Air Force endured more fatalities than the entire US Marine Corp during the war. Miller also devoted time to questions of precision-bombing (well, trying to be precise) vs carpet bombing and the morality of bombing non-combatants.
Along with the ugly side of war and the hard questions, he also showed amazing examples of cooperation between crew-members, endurance during difficult circumstances, and tremendous bravery as the men still flying got into their planes again and again and again.
One of the questions raised is “was it worth it?” Early Air Corp leaders thought they could bomb Germany into submission, without an invasion. That theory was proved wrong, but I think it is fairly clear that the air war contributed significantly to the war’s end. It inhibited Germany’s ability to wage war, diverted German manpower and resources that would have otherwise been used elsewhere, and it’s doubtful D-day could have been pulled off if the Allies hadn’t achieved air superiority by June 1944.
Miller bounced around a bit—chronologically and up and down the command chain. For the most part, he did a good job with this, but there were a few times when I thought it was a little jarring. But even with that, this was the most comprehensive WWII ETO air war book I’ve ever read (not that I’ve read a ton on the subject, but this wasn’t my first air war book). If it’s a subject you’re interested in, this book is well worth picking up.
March 6, 2013
How do we compare this new arena of warfare, especially in 1943, to other battles? In 1943, an Eighth Air Force crewman had an 80% chance of dying, being wounded, captured or going missing before completing 25 missions. The bombers always got through, never stopped by the German defenders. This book tells the story of the Eighth Air Force in WWII magnificently. 5 Battle Stars all the way!
If you want to understand the air war in WWII over Europe, this single volume will give you much of what you need. So many aspects of the war are covered, many areas I had little or no knowledge of. Mr. Miller keeps it interesting, never a dull moment. He begins with a concise explanation of the theories of this new dimension in warfare. Guilio Douhet and BGen Billy Mitchell are the famous proponents of airpower as a decisive new weapon, both men believed a sustained strategic campaign against the civilian infrastructure and population would mean a quicker victory and fewer casualties overall. Mr. Miller covers this theoretical grounding of airpower theory quickly and moves along to the important Air Corps Tactical School in Alabama. Here is where the theory of strategic bombing became dogma, where the foundation was laid for the “daylight precision bombing” campaign that would be so bloody.
Mitchell and Douhet theories:
Miller confronts the morality of the bombing campaign directly. The men knew what they were doing:
Perhaps some of the men remembered the warning that their first commander, Col. Darr H. “Pappy” Alkire, had given them back in the States, right after they completed flight training and received their wings. “Don’t get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous. You’ve got dirty work to do, and you might as well face the facts. You’re going to be baby-killers and women-killers.”
Before the Americans started, the British had already tried daylight bombing with disastrous results. Churchill realizes the RAF can’t continue daylight bombing raids so he has to go at night. But technology did not allow precision at night (yet). The moral question about killing civilians is not a factor for the leaders of the RAF, “Bomber” Harris, or the USAAF, Ira Eaker. Throughout the book, Miller shows us what the men thought about killing from four miles high.
“Berlin from the air was a huge, dark city,” recalled B-17 gunner Tommy LaMore, the descendant of a Cherokee family that had survived the Trail of Tears. “This was Hitler’s town. The big bad boys lived in this neighborhood....Go ahead, send the Luftwaffe up, go ahead, shoot at us with everything you’ve got, but here we are, blowing up your houses in front of your master-race eyeballs. I cheered when the bombs left the racks. ‘Hold on to your sauerkraut, Adolf!’ I yelled.”
There are many interesting areas in Miller’s history. He describes the quiet East Anglia countryside and what happens when the engineers flood the area, tearing up meadows, houses, hedges, etc to build the airstrips, bomb dumps and airbase facilities that will be needed. He also gives you a peek into the lives of the inhabitants of England and how their lives changed. Another area covered is how the USAAF black construction battalions were treated, racial incidents and how the English accepted the black Americans into their communities.
Mostly the book deals with the bomb groups and their daily experience. Here is how the officers and the enlisted men found out they were scheduled to fly:
Throughout the book you will meet Heroes:
Jimmy Stewart stands ever higher in my eyes, a true American hero. No Hollywood actor of today could ever approach the stature of Maj Stewart:
Life in the UK definitely changed with the massive influx of well paid airmen and GI’s on the prowl:
Life in the Stalags for airmen shot down and captured is covered in some detail. Not only in German camps but also what happened to the bomber crews who landed in Switzerland.
The book is packed with solid information, always presented in fascinating ways, about the course of the war. The Bomber Mafia over-promised and under-delivered at almost every step, destroying their credibility. Only late in the war, with fighters that could escort the bombers, did the air forces start to achieve success. Going after the transportation systems and oil production proved to be the most effective targeting. Terror bombing, straight from Douhet’s theories proved ineffective. Hitler tried it in the Blitz, then the RAF tried it, the Germans tried again with the V-1 and V-2, and even the Americans resorted to it in early 1945. It never worked.
At the end, the forces the Allies had were staggering to contemplate. And so were the losses:
Once the Anglo-American air forces reached full strength—a total of 28,000 combat aircraft—they were democracy’s terrible swift sword. Gathering in their immensity over the North Sea and the southern Alps, these air armadas released over two million tons of bombs on the Reich. The cost in lives lost was appalling. The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II. Taking the lower number, this was 12.3 percent of the 210,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen who flew in combat. Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent. In addition, an estimated 28,000 Eighth Air Force crewmembers were shot out of the sky and became prisoners of war. If they and the estimated 18,000 men who were wounded are added to the casualty list, the number of those lost in operations, not including untold numbers of psychological casualties, is at least 72,000, over 34 percent of those who experienced combat. This is the highest casualty rate in the American armed forces in World War II.”
I have left out so many topics, “Big Week”, D-Day, “Black Week”, the advent of the jet, the new science of aerospace medicine, etc. You will find it all in this excellent history of the Mighty Eighth. Highest recommendation.
If you want to understand the air war in WWII over Europe, this single volume will give you much of what you need. So many aspects of the war are covered, many areas I had little or no knowledge of. Mr. Miller keeps it interesting, never a dull moment. He begins with a concise explanation of the theories of this new dimension in warfare. Guilio Douhet and BGen Billy Mitchell are the famous proponents of airpower as a decisive new weapon, both men believed a sustained strategic campaign against the civilian infrastructure and population would mean a quicker victory and fewer casualties overall. Mr. Miller covers this theoretical grounding of airpower theory quickly and moves along to the important Air Corps Tactical School in Alabama. Here is where the theory of strategic bombing became dogma, where the foundation was laid for the “daylight precision bombing” campaign that would be so bloody.
Mitchell and Douhet theories:
Miller confronts the morality of the bombing campaign directly. The men knew what they were doing:
Perhaps some of the men remembered the warning that their first commander, Col. Darr H. “Pappy” Alkire, had given them back in the States, right after they completed flight training and received their wings. “Don’t get the notion that your job is going to be glorious or glamorous. You’ve got dirty work to do, and you might as well face the facts. You’re going to be baby-killers and women-killers.”
Before the Americans started, the British had already tried daylight bombing with disastrous results. Churchill realizes the RAF can’t continue daylight bombing raids so he has to go at night. But technology did not allow precision at night (yet). The moral question about killing civilians is not a factor for the leaders of the RAF, “Bomber” Harris, or the USAAF, Ira Eaker. Throughout the book, Miller shows us what the men thought about killing from four miles high.
“Berlin from the air was a huge, dark city,” recalled B-17 gunner Tommy LaMore, the descendant of a Cherokee family that had survived the Trail of Tears. “This was Hitler’s town. The big bad boys lived in this neighborhood....Go ahead, send the Luftwaffe up, go ahead, shoot at us with everything you’ve got, but here we are, blowing up your houses in front of your master-race eyeballs. I cheered when the bombs left the racks. ‘Hold on to your sauerkraut, Adolf!’ I yelled.”
There are many interesting areas in Miller’s history. He describes the quiet East Anglia countryside and what happens when the engineers flood the area, tearing up meadows, houses, hedges, etc to build the airstrips, bomb dumps and airbase facilities that will be needed. He also gives you a peek into the lives of the inhabitants of England and how their lives changed. Another area covered is how the USAAF black construction battalions were treated, racial incidents and how the English accepted the black Americans into their communities.
Mostly the book deals with the bomb groups and their daily experience. Here is how the officers and the enlisted men found out they were scheduled to fly:
Throughout the book you will meet Heroes:
Jimmy Stewart stands ever higher in my eyes, a true American hero. No Hollywood actor of today could ever approach the stature of Maj Stewart:
Life in the UK definitely changed with the massive influx of well paid airmen and GI’s on the prowl:
Life in the Stalags for airmen shot down and captured is covered in some detail. Not only in German camps but also what happened to the bomber crews who landed in Switzerland.
The book is packed with solid information, always presented in fascinating ways, about the course of the war. The Bomber Mafia over-promised and under-delivered at almost every step, destroying their credibility. Only late in the war, with fighters that could escort the bombers, did the air forces start to achieve success. Going after the transportation systems and oil production proved to be the most effective targeting. Terror bombing, straight from Douhet’s theories proved ineffective. Hitler tried it in the Blitz, then the RAF tried it, the Germans tried again with the V-1 and V-2, and even the Americans resorted to it in early 1945. It never worked.
At the end, the forces the Allies had were staggering to contemplate. And so were the losses:
Once the Anglo-American air forces reached full strength—a total of 28,000 combat aircraft—they were democracy’s terrible swift sword. Gathering in their immensity over the North Sea and the southern Alps, these air armadas released over two million tons of bombs on the Reich. The cost in lives lost was appalling. The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II. Taking the lower number, this was 12.3 percent of the 210,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen who flew in combat. Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crews in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent. In addition, an estimated 28,000 Eighth Air Force crewmembers were shot out of the sky and became prisoners of war. If they and the estimated 18,000 men who were wounded are added to the casualty list, the number of those lost in operations, not including untold numbers of psychological casualties, is at least 72,000, over 34 percent of those who experienced combat. This is the highest casualty rate in the American armed forces in World War II.”
I have left out so many topics, “Big Week”, D-Day, “Black Week”, the advent of the jet, the new science of aerospace medicine, etc. You will find it all in this excellent history of the Mighty Eighth. Highest recommendation.
June 11, 2024
‘Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany’ by Donald L. Miller is a masterpiece! Well, it is if the reader is a nerdy fan of World War II warfare. I am a nerd, I strongly suspect. But I am not a fan, usually, of books which go into excruciating detail about troop placements requiring me to get maps and maybe little toy soldiers, ships and tanks to push around in order to understand how a battle was fought. Not that I actually have ever used toys, but I have had to get out maps if they weren’t included in the book. I had to quiet my inner demons of utter boredom, for example, when I read those parts of exacting troop movements and battles in War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, or Caesar: Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy. Of course, I admit I was richly rewarded with insight into the confusion of warfare, how much geography and weather matters, and the why of the effects of battles on characters invented by authors who very likely are using factual real-life stories, or real-life documents which tell the actual participants’ stories in diaries or written personal histories in non-fiction books. While Tolstoy’s book is fiction based on real history, Miller’s book is non-fiction packed full with personal stories of involved airmen as well as actual surveys, reports, military assessments, journalists’ articles and other related historical records. Instead of boredom, I often couldn’t put the book down! I can honestly say I knew nothing of the history of the airmen, the creation and World War II history of the U.S and British Air Forces, or their war experiences and vital contributions to the Western war effort in Europe. Everything in this book was new to me!
I have copied the book blurb:
”The inspiration for the major Apple TV+ series, premiering January 26, 2024!
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 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.”
Everything in the book blurb represents what the reader will learn! I was fascinated, horrified, and disgusted by turns. What these airmen endured is incredible. It took American and British generals and airplane engineers three years to iron out the bugs of fighting a war with bombers and fighters since it had never been done before.
Quotes:
”Winter weather was brutally difficult for fliers on both sides. After completing high-altitude missions in poorly heated cockpits, American fighter pilots were sometimes so frozen and weak that they had to be pulled from their planes by medical teams. Ice two inches thick built up on the windscreens of fighters and bombers, causing accidents. Fliers also had difficulty relieving themselves. There were only two toilet facilities on a four-engine bomber, a tin can and a ‘relief tube.’ Between the waist compartment and the tail there was a can with a lid on it, but as Jack Novey noted, “when you put your butt down on the toilet, the frozen metal would take part of your skin with it. So we just threw the damn thing out of the airplane.”
The author includes illustrations showing the architecture of a bomber, in which ten men would be squeezed inside. The skin of a bomber was very thin. Flak easily penetrated the airplanes, killing or maiming the men with horrifying injuries.
”But the Eighth Air Force had already done its indispensable duty. In the five-month battle for the air supremacy that made the invasion possible, the American Air Forces in Europe lost over 2,600 heavy bombers and 980 fighter planes and suffered 18,400 casualties, including 10,000 combat deaths over half as many men as the Eighth lost in all of 1942 and 1943. These airmen deserve on equal place in the national memory with the approximately 6,000 American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action ithe amphibious and airborne assault on D-Day.
”The slaughter at Falaise ended the eighty-day-long Battle of Normandy, the most decisive battle on the Western Front. The Germans lost over 400,000 combatants—killed, wounded, or captured—and the Allies suffered over 225,000 casualties, two-thirds of them Americans, among them 8,536 airmen killed and missing. The battle was a prelude to the liberation of Paris and the triumphant Allied drive across France to Germany’s western border, a campaign joined by Allied forces that landed on the coast of southern France on August 13.”
I quoted a paragraph about just one battle. The book seems to cover every bomber-involved battle in the book, each one told from personal narratives as well as how the bombing attack played out, and what the generals were thinking and the choices they made.
”…these air armadas released over two million tons of bombs on the Reich. The cost in lives lost was appalling. The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II. Taking the lower number, this was 12.3 percent of the 210,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen who flew in combat. Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crws in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent. In addition, an estimated 28,000 Eighth Air Force crew members were shot out of the sky and became prisoners of war. If they and the estimated 18,000 men who were wounded are added to the casualty list, the number of those lost in operations, not including untold numbers of psychological casualties, is at least 72,000, over 34 percent of those who experienced combat. This is the highest casualty rate in the American armed forces in World War II.”
I have quoted paragraphs near the end of the book which summarize the losses. The more individual stories as well as the history of how the American air force was slowly built up from a seven men and no airplanes to hundreds of thousands of men and airplanes, precede these paragraphs. What the individual pilots and crews felt in 1942 and 1943 when the airfields were being built in England, when the bombers were delivered, and how and what the generals were still arguing about in how best to deploy the bombers (night bombing or day bombing, with fighter support or none, synthetic oil plants or railroad marshaling yards, city centers or military targets), is gone into more detail.
”Eaker would increase the size of the Eighth Air Force in England from seven men and no planes in February 1942 to 185,000 men and 4,000 planes by December 1943.”
“In its first year of operations the Eighth Air Force’s greatest enemy was not flak or fighters, but weather and the elements. Good weather was a prerequisite for successful daylight bombing, but in the fall and winter of 1942, the weather over Northern Europe was unusually bad.”
“Unlike infantry, airmen could not get to the fight or stay in it without a highly complex technological support system—the bomber and its life-giving oxygen equipment. If it failed to function, which was often, they were helpless. Flying in the withering cold caused windows and gun sights to blur, bomb bay doors to ice over, and essential mechanical equipment to freeze and malfunction. Men also froze up and broke down. Flying in temperatures experienced on the ground only in the Arctic and Antarctic or on the peaks of immense mountains, frostbite did more damage than the enemy. In the Eighth’s first year of operations, 1,634 men were removed from flying duty for frostbite, over 400 more than were removed for combat wounds.”
“The whip-crack cold found most of its victims at exposed positions in the bombers: waist gunners at open windows, breasting heavy winds, and tail gunners who removed frozen canvas covers that impeded the movement of their guns. Ball turret gunners who were forced to remain the their turrets four hours over enemy territory urinated in their clothing, freezing their backs, buttocks and thighs “so badly muscles sloughed and bones were exposed.”
“At the end of every mission, men were hauled off planes with inflamed and swollen hands, feet, and faces. The wounds turned purple within a day or two, then a lurid black. One-third of the frostbite victims required hospitalization, mild cases kept men on the ground for up to two weeks.”
“Anoxia, or oxygen deprivation, was part of the “”aero-medical nightmare”” that afflicted the Eighth. Saliva or vomit from airsickness would get into the men’s molded rubber face masks and freeze, blocking the hose and causing men to pass out or even die.”
“Without oxygen at this altitude, you’re unconscious in thirty seconds. After two minutes you’re dead.”
“High-altitude aerial combat subjected bomber crews to emotional and physical stresses that human beings had never confronted before. Strange things happened to the human body when it entered the earth’s upper air. Men’s ears clogged up painfully, their minds and movements slowed down, and their stomachs and intestines expanded inordinately, a condition exacerbated by the gaseous food they had been fed at breakfast.”
“Grow and Col. Harry G. Armstrong, his cheif assistant in England, were pioneers in the new field of aviation medicine. In 1934 they had founded the Aero Medical Research Laboratory at Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, to study the effect of manned flight on the human organism. Shortly after the Eighth Air Force arrived in England, they established a small research center near High Wycombe, called the Central Medical Establishment. Headed by Armstrong, its mission was to develop training techniques and equipment to allow airmen to survive and perform to maximum efficiency in fhe first high-altitude war ever fought.”
“In its first year of operations, the Eighth had neither an air-sea rescue system nor a training program in ditching procedures.The inflatable dinghies and markers in its bombers were inadequate for the rigors of open sea survival, and the flares, K rations, and first aid packs all lacked waterproof protection. Nor were its bombers designed for easy egress in forced sea landings.”
“The Eighth Air Force would never find a way to bomb with maximum precision and maximum protection. This threw it into a conundrum that led irrevocably to carpet bombing, with some bombs hitting the target and the rest spilling all over the place.”
“While Rooney and some other reporters were waiting in front of a control tower for a squadron of bombers to return, word spread that a ball turret gunner was trapped in his plastic bubble underneath the plane…..””Just before landing, the Fortress’s hydraulic system, which was riddled with shell holes, malfunctioned, making it impossible for the pilot to put down the wheels. The emergency hand crank for operating the main landing gear has also been destroyed by enemy fire. The pilot would have to make a belly landing. “”There were eight minutes of gut-wrenching talk among the tower, the pilot, and the man trapped in the ball turret. He knew what comes down first when there are no wheels. We all watched in horror as it happened. We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.””
Rooney returned to London that evening, unable to write the most dramatic and ghastly story he had ever witnessed.”
It becomes obvious as readers follow the action from chapter to chapter, virtually EVERYTHING had never been done before in designing combat airplanes, and knowing how such airplanes would actually perform in combat. It doesn’t say so in the book, but it is clear the Air Forces of the Allies and the Axis were completely a beta experiment. They went from the drawing board straight into combat, with crossed fingers that what looked like it would work actually did. Also, pilots often were inexperienced in flying bombers as were their crews in handling their assigned tasks. It took many bombing runs to gain experience. Air Force crews learned best from surviving the bombing runs.
Needless to say, almost every airman suffered from what today we would call PTSD. They felt they KNEW they were going to die or be maimed everytime they took off on a bombing run.
”That winter [1943] there were distressing reports from flight surgeons and Air Force psychiatrists of abnormal behavior among the crewmen, as combat insidiously shook the moorings of the airmen’s self-control. Great numbers of fliers began to experience one or more of the symptoms of emotional disintegration: insomnia, irritability, sudden temper flashes, inability to concentrate, withdrawal from friends, nausea, weight loss, dizziness, blurring of vision, heart palpitations, Parkingson-like tremors, sexual impotence and aggressiveness, binge-drinking, and terrifying battle dreams, nightmares so alarmingly vivid that men screamed and shook, and a few of them fell out of their top bunks and shattered legs and arms.”
There is so much interesting, fascinating and awful information in this book, almost all of it I had absolutely no clue happened or had I ever before read about.
One chapter covers the how men from everywhere, all over America, Scotland, England, Wales, European countries confronted each other for the first time. Hint: it wasn’t all love and kisses despite fighting on the same side.
Another chapter is about the ground crews and how they maintained the airplanes, many of which came in on one engine with holes all over the body of the airplane.
There are chapters on the ‘art’ of bombing, where they bombed and what the results were. One such Blitz bombing which was ordered by commanders earned the name “Black Week” because of the horrible losses - 88 heavy bombers destroyed, 200 men lost. Before readers turn the last page, you will read of many many many types of Black Weeks. I am full of admiration at the cynical and black humor demonstrated by these brave fliers! The names the rank-and-file came up with to describe missions are really fun, if also incredibly bleak and a reminder of how little these guys expected to survive, as well as the grief of returning to barracks with bunks that only were filled by a third of the men who had left that morning.
There are chapters on what happened to the airmen who managed to bail out of their craft before it crashed. Some ended up in Switzerland, a supposedly neutral country (not, it was a country sympathetic to the Nazi’s, with Nazi’s working everywhere in important administrative jobs. One camp for prisoners was run by a particularly sadistic SS man.), or Sweden. Others ended up in horrible German camps, prisoners of war (POWs). While they were treated better than Jews and the Soviet (Russian) prisoners, they also starved, were covered in lice, and froze in poorly built barracks. If it wasn’t for once-a-week deliveries by the Red Cross, most would not have survived the war.
As it was, in one of the chapters the author describes how the Germans forced the airman POW camps to close when the war was near its end, and made the airmen do forced 500-mile marches to the west without food or water, in winter temperatures. At some point the marches would end, but then the Germans forced the men onto train cars without food, water or toilets, crammed shoulder to shoulder, barely room to sit with knees drawn up under chins. They were delivered to camps that were disgustingly filthy, smelling like cess pits, without maintenance, with guards that were not very focused on their care. By the time American infantry arrived, they were skeletal and in need of much medical care.
There is a lot of information in this book! So much more than I have written about above. For example, included are biographies of the many individuals who were involved with decisions, military leaders and politicians. There are photos, and extensive Notes, Bibiography and Index sections.
I highly recommend this book to everyone, but probably only the nerds will read it from cover to cover. But even if one only skims it for the bits they find interesting, it is of great value! As has been observed a trillion times, war is messy and awful. It is not a fight performed by superhumans that are all wise and good and humane in the prosecution of the war.
I have copied the book blurb:
”The inspiration for the major Apple TV+ series, premiering January 26, 2024!
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 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.”
Everything in the book blurb represents what the reader will learn! I was fascinated, horrified, and disgusted by turns. What these airmen endured is incredible. It took American and British generals and airplane engineers three years to iron out the bugs of fighting a war with bombers and fighters since it had never been done before.
Quotes:
”Winter weather was brutally difficult for fliers on both sides. After completing high-altitude missions in poorly heated cockpits, American fighter pilots were sometimes so frozen and weak that they had to be pulled from their planes by medical teams. Ice two inches thick built up on the windscreens of fighters and bombers, causing accidents. Fliers also had difficulty relieving themselves. There were only two toilet facilities on a four-engine bomber, a tin can and a ‘relief tube.’ Between the waist compartment and the tail there was a can with a lid on it, but as Jack Novey noted, “when you put your butt down on the toilet, the frozen metal would take part of your skin with it. So we just threw the damn thing out of the airplane.”
The author includes illustrations showing the architecture of a bomber, in which ten men would be squeezed inside. The skin of a bomber was very thin. Flak easily penetrated the airplanes, killing or maiming the men with horrifying injuries.
”But the Eighth Air Force had already done its indispensable duty. In the five-month battle for the air supremacy that made the invasion possible, the American Air Forces in Europe lost over 2,600 heavy bombers and 980 fighter planes and suffered 18,400 casualties, including 10,000 combat deaths over half as many men as the Eighth lost in all of 1942 and 1943. These airmen deserve on equal place in the national memory with the approximately 6,000 American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action ithe amphibious and airborne assault on D-Day.
”The slaughter at Falaise ended the eighty-day-long Battle of Normandy, the most decisive battle on the Western Front. The Germans lost over 400,000 combatants—killed, wounded, or captured—and the Allies suffered over 225,000 casualties, two-thirds of them Americans, among them 8,536 airmen killed and missing. The battle was a prelude to the liberation of Paris and the triumphant Allied drive across France to Germany’s western border, a campaign joined by Allied forces that landed on the coast of southern France on August 13.”
I quoted a paragraph about just one battle. The book seems to cover every bomber-involved battle in the book, each one told from personal narratives as well as how the bombing attack played out, and what the generals were thinking and the choices they made.
”…these air armadas released over two million tons of bombs on the Reich. The cost in lives lost was appalling. The Eighth Air Force, the largest aerial striking force in the war, sustained between 26,000 and 28,000 fatalities, roughly one-tenth of the Americans killed in World War II. Taking the lower number, this was 12.3 percent of the 210,000 Eighth Air Force crewmen who flew in combat. Of all branches of the American armed forces, only submarine crws in the Pacific had a higher fatality rate: almost 23 percent. In addition, an estimated 28,000 Eighth Air Force crew members were shot out of the sky and became prisoners of war. If they and the estimated 18,000 men who were wounded are added to the casualty list, the number of those lost in operations, not including untold numbers of psychological casualties, is at least 72,000, over 34 percent of those who experienced combat. This is the highest casualty rate in the American armed forces in World War II.”
I have quoted paragraphs near the end of the book which summarize the losses. The more individual stories as well as the history of how the American air force was slowly built up from a seven men and no airplanes to hundreds of thousands of men and airplanes, precede these paragraphs. What the individual pilots and crews felt in 1942 and 1943 when the airfields were being built in England, when the bombers were delivered, and how and what the generals were still arguing about in how best to deploy the bombers (night bombing or day bombing, with fighter support or none, synthetic oil plants or railroad marshaling yards, city centers or military targets), is gone into more detail.
”Eaker would increase the size of the Eighth Air Force in England from seven men and no planes in February 1942 to 185,000 men and 4,000 planes by December 1943.”
“In its first year of operations the Eighth Air Force’s greatest enemy was not flak or fighters, but weather and the elements. Good weather was a prerequisite for successful daylight bombing, but in the fall and winter of 1942, the weather over Northern Europe was unusually bad.”
“Unlike infantry, airmen could not get to the fight or stay in it without a highly complex technological support system—the bomber and its life-giving oxygen equipment. If it failed to function, which was often, they were helpless. Flying in the withering cold caused windows and gun sights to blur, bomb bay doors to ice over, and essential mechanical equipment to freeze and malfunction. Men also froze up and broke down. Flying in temperatures experienced on the ground only in the Arctic and Antarctic or on the peaks of immense mountains, frostbite did more damage than the enemy. In the Eighth’s first year of operations, 1,634 men were removed from flying duty for frostbite, over 400 more than were removed for combat wounds.”
“The whip-crack cold found most of its victims at exposed positions in the bombers: waist gunners at open windows, breasting heavy winds, and tail gunners who removed frozen canvas covers that impeded the movement of their guns. Ball turret gunners who were forced to remain the their turrets four hours over enemy territory urinated in their clothing, freezing their backs, buttocks and thighs “so badly muscles sloughed and bones were exposed.”
“At the end of every mission, men were hauled off planes with inflamed and swollen hands, feet, and faces. The wounds turned purple within a day or two, then a lurid black. One-third of the frostbite victims required hospitalization, mild cases kept men on the ground for up to two weeks.”
“Anoxia, or oxygen deprivation, was part of the “”aero-medical nightmare”” that afflicted the Eighth. Saliva or vomit from airsickness would get into the men’s molded rubber face masks and freeze, blocking the hose and causing men to pass out or even die.”
“Without oxygen at this altitude, you’re unconscious in thirty seconds. After two minutes you’re dead.”
“High-altitude aerial combat subjected bomber crews to emotional and physical stresses that human beings had never confronted before. Strange things happened to the human body when it entered the earth’s upper air. Men’s ears clogged up painfully, their minds and movements slowed down, and their stomachs and intestines expanded inordinately, a condition exacerbated by the gaseous food they had been fed at breakfast.”
“Grow and Col. Harry G. Armstrong, his cheif assistant in England, were pioneers in the new field of aviation medicine. In 1934 they had founded the Aero Medical Research Laboratory at Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, to study the effect of manned flight on the human organism. Shortly after the Eighth Air Force arrived in England, they established a small research center near High Wycombe, called the Central Medical Establishment. Headed by Armstrong, its mission was to develop training techniques and equipment to allow airmen to survive and perform to maximum efficiency in fhe first high-altitude war ever fought.”
“In its first year of operations, the Eighth had neither an air-sea rescue system nor a training program in ditching procedures.The inflatable dinghies and markers in its bombers were inadequate for the rigors of open sea survival, and the flares, K rations, and first aid packs all lacked waterproof protection. Nor were its bombers designed for easy egress in forced sea landings.”
“The Eighth Air Force would never find a way to bomb with maximum precision and maximum protection. This threw it into a conundrum that led irrevocably to carpet bombing, with some bombs hitting the target and the rest spilling all over the place.”
“While Rooney and some other reporters were waiting in front of a control tower for a squadron of bombers to return, word spread that a ball turret gunner was trapped in his plastic bubble underneath the plane…..””Just before landing, the Fortress’s hydraulic system, which was riddled with shell holes, malfunctioned, making it impossible for the pilot to put down the wheels. The emergency hand crank for operating the main landing gear has also been destroyed by enemy fire. The pilot would have to make a belly landing. “”There were eight minutes of gut-wrenching talk among the tower, the pilot, and the man trapped in the ball turret. He knew what comes down first when there are no wheels. We all watched in horror as it happened. We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.””
Rooney returned to London that evening, unable to write the most dramatic and ghastly story he had ever witnessed.”
It becomes obvious as readers follow the action from chapter to chapter, virtually EVERYTHING had never been done before in designing combat airplanes, and knowing how such airplanes would actually perform in combat. It doesn’t say so in the book, but it is clear the Air Forces of the Allies and the Axis were completely a beta experiment. They went from the drawing board straight into combat, with crossed fingers that what looked like it would work actually did. Also, pilots often were inexperienced in flying bombers as were their crews in handling their assigned tasks. It took many bombing runs to gain experience. Air Force crews learned best from surviving the bombing runs.
Needless to say, almost every airman suffered from what today we would call PTSD. They felt they KNEW they were going to die or be maimed everytime they took off on a bombing run.
”That winter [1943] there were distressing reports from flight surgeons and Air Force psychiatrists of abnormal behavior among the crewmen, as combat insidiously shook the moorings of the airmen’s self-control. Great numbers of fliers began to experience one or more of the symptoms of emotional disintegration: insomnia, irritability, sudden temper flashes, inability to concentrate, withdrawal from friends, nausea, weight loss, dizziness, blurring of vision, heart palpitations, Parkingson-like tremors, sexual impotence and aggressiveness, binge-drinking, and terrifying battle dreams, nightmares so alarmingly vivid that men screamed and shook, and a few of them fell out of their top bunks and shattered legs and arms.”
There is so much interesting, fascinating and awful information in this book, almost all of it I had absolutely no clue happened or had I ever before read about.
One chapter covers the how men from everywhere, all over America, Scotland, England, Wales, European countries confronted each other for the first time. Hint: it wasn’t all love and kisses despite fighting on the same side.
Another chapter is about the ground crews and how they maintained the airplanes, many of which came in on one engine with holes all over the body of the airplane.
There are chapters on the ‘art’ of bombing, where they bombed and what the results were. One such Blitz bombing which was ordered by commanders earned the name “Black Week” because of the horrible losses - 88 heavy bombers destroyed, 200 men lost. Before readers turn the last page, you will read of many many many types of Black Weeks. I am full of admiration at the cynical and black humor demonstrated by these brave fliers! The names the rank-and-file came up with to describe missions are really fun, if also incredibly bleak and a reminder of how little these guys expected to survive, as well as the grief of returning to barracks with bunks that only were filled by a third of the men who had left that morning.
There are chapters on what happened to the airmen who managed to bail out of their craft before it crashed. Some ended up in Switzerland, a supposedly neutral country (not, it was a country sympathetic to the Nazi’s, with Nazi’s working everywhere in important administrative jobs. One camp for prisoners was run by a particularly sadistic SS man.), or Sweden. Others ended up in horrible German camps, prisoners of war (POWs). While they were treated better than Jews and the Soviet (Russian) prisoners, they also starved, were covered in lice, and froze in poorly built barracks. If it wasn’t for once-a-week deliveries by the Red Cross, most would not have survived the war.
As it was, in one of the chapters the author describes how the Germans forced the airman POW camps to close when the war was near its end, and made the airmen do forced 500-mile marches to the west without food or water, in winter temperatures. At some point the marches would end, but then the Germans forced the men onto train cars without food, water or toilets, crammed shoulder to shoulder, barely room to sit with knees drawn up under chins. They were delivered to camps that were disgustingly filthy, smelling like cess pits, without maintenance, with guards that were not very focused on their care. By the time American infantry arrived, they were skeletal and in need of much medical care.
There is a lot of information in this book! So much more than I have written about above. For example, included are biographies of the many individuals who were involved with decisions, military leaders and politicians. There are photos, and extensive Notes, Bibiography and Index sections.
I highly recommend this book to everyone, but probably only the nerds will read it from cover to cover. But even if one only skims it for the bits they find interesting, it is of great value! As has been observed a trillion times, war is messy and awful. It is not a fight performed by superhumans that are all wise and good and humane in the prosecution of the war.
April 18, 2021
Excellent collection of first hand accounts of the men who served aboard bombers in WWII. No punches pulled. Visceral.
December 28, 2023
I first read this book some years ago, probably shortly after it was published in 2006. Whenever I read it it was before I became a GR member and definitely before I started to take the time to write in depth book reviews. My initial review merely recorded the fact that I thought the book was an excellent history and that I enjoyed reading it. After my second reading my opinion of the book remains the same. My second reading was prompted, however, by my participation in a public broadcast Zoom interview conducted with the author about 2 weeks ago. The interview took place at the WWII Museum in New Orleans and was done in conjunction with the promotion of an Apple TV series starting in January and based on Miller's book. The series has been created by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and is being touted as the air war version of Ambrose's Band of Brothers which I had just recently read. Spielberg and Hanks have done some really good work together but my recollection of this book compared to Brothers had me shaking my head in wonder. Ambrose's book was about the WWII experiences of a specific Airborne infantry unit with specific named members and their individual stories. My recollection of Miller's book was that it was an excellent history. It occasionally mentioned individuals and recounted anecdotes of these people but the these men and their stories were not the focus of the narrative. What had me wondering further was Miller's discussion of how the series centered on the men of the 100th Bombardment Group and their history of bad breaks and hard luck. I couldn't recall this group or its members from my first reading and my curiosity lead me to a second reading of Masters. Was Masters an air war version of Brothers or is this series going to take liberties with an excellent history of the WWII air war in Europe? The series is definitely not going to be a documentary so I'm hoping whatever it is Spielberg and Hanks handle it well. But enough about this series what about the book?
As I have already stated this is an excellent history. I can't imagine you'd be able to find a better treatment of the Allied air war in WWII Europe. What is even better is that the book tracks the evolution of the Air Force from an obscure branch of the Army Signal Corps to its ultimate recognition as an independent branch of our armed services. The war brought on a metamorphosis of this under valued underfunded branch of the Army into the only American fighting force on the European continent until D-Day in June, 1944. For 2 1/2 years the only Americans fighting in Europe were flyers and the only stories to be told of that time were those of the Air Force. Miller does an admirable job of weaving the facts and figures of this metamorphosis with the horrors of air combat and the people that experienced these horrors. Not only are the material logistical issues reported but so are the medical and especially the mental health issues. This book is about as good an informative as well as entertaining a history that you can find. I have read other books by Miller and his writing talent holds true in all of his books that I have read. Now that I have finished this second reading of this book my curiosity has been satisfied. I have concluded that Masters and Brothers are entirely different kinds of books with different points of view. I now fear that the only thing this vaunted TV series and this book will have in common will be the title. Spielberg and Hanks do manage to do good work together so maybe I will be wrong which does happen...quite a bit actually. Enjoy.
As I have already stated this is an excellent history. I can't imagine you'd be able to find a better treatment of the Allied air war in WWII Europe. What is even better is that the book tracks the evolution of the Air Force from an obscure branch of the Army Signal Corps to its ultimate recognition as an independent branch of our armed services. The war brought on a metamorphosis of this under valued underfunded branch of the Army into the only American fighting force on the European continent until D-Day in June, 1944. For 2 1/2 years the only Americans fighting in Europe were flyers and the only stories to be told of that time were those of the Air Force. Miller does an admirable job of weaving the facts and figures of this metamorphosis with the horrors of air combat and the people that experienced these horrors. Not only are the material logistical issues reported but so are the medical and especially the mental health issues. This book is about as good an informative as well as entertaining a history that you can find. I have read other books by Miller and his writing talent holds true in all of his books that I have read. Now that I have finished this second reading of this book my curiosity has been satisfied. I have concluded that Masters and Brothers are entirely different kinds of books with different points of view. I now fear that the only thing this vaunted TV series and this book will have in common will be the title. Spielberg and Hanks do manage to do good work together so maybe I will be wrong which does happen...quite a bit actually. Enjoy.
April 25, 2017
After sitting on my shelf for a few years, I finally decided to read this. Having read many books on the 8th AF over the years, I was hoping this wouldn't be a rehashing of what I'd previously read. I'm happy to say it wasn't.
The book concentrates solely on the bombers of the 8th AF, with very little attention paid to the fighters or the other American air forces in Europe, although they all do get a little bit of a mention here and there. Some units, such as the 100th BG, get a bit more ink than others, but that's to be expected--not every group can get the same amount of coverage. There is a great amount of personal recollections in the book, and not just from pilots but from aircrew and groundcrew as well.
Designed to be a force of daylight, high-altitude precision bombers, the 8th went through some very painful growing pains. High losses and the unlikely odds of actually completing a combat tour of 25 missions lead to questions of morale, leadership and the very concept of daylight precision bombing. All of these topics are discussed in detail, and although hindsight is 20/20, I feel the author did a good job of presenting things fairly and showing the historical context of the situations. There are really good chapters on the POW experience and the issue of 8th AF bombers landing in neutral countries such as Sweden and Switzerland.
A comparison of the British bombing campaign and leadership with that of the Americans is a common thread throughout the book. Both sides wished to defeat the Germans, but had very different ideas about how to do it. The British preferred to bomb by night and they put a fair amount of pressure upon the Americans to join them, but the Americans stuck to daylight bombing and in the end received vindication of their efforts.
The book concludes with an examination of tactics and results, especially those found by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey conducted after the war and from interviews conducted with several high-ranking Germans such as Erhard Milch, Albert Speer, Herman Goering and Adolf Galland.
A very enjoyable book which gives a good overall picture of the war fought by the bombers of the 8th AF, along with a fair amount of detail. Definitely worth adding to any aviation or World War II library.
The book concentrates solely on the bombers of the 8th AF, with very little attention paid to the fighters or the other American air forces in Europe, although they all do get a little bit of a mention here and there. Some units, such as the 100th BG, get a bit more ink than others, but that's to be expected--not every group can get the same amount of coverage. There is a great amount of personal recollections in the book, and not just from pilots but from aircrew and groundcrew as well.
Designed to be a force of daylight, high-altitude precision bombers, the 8th went through some very painful growing pains. High losses and the unlikely odds of actually completing a combat tour of 25 missions lead to questions of morale, leadership and the very concept of daylight precision bombing. All of these topics are discussed in detail, and although hindsight is 20/20, I feel the author did a good job of presenting things fairly and showing the historical context of the situations. There are really good chapters on the POW experience and the issue of 8th AF bombers landing in neutral countries such as Sweden and Switzerland.
A comparison of the British bombing campaign and leadership with that of the Americans is a common thread throughout the book. Both sides wished to defeat the Germans, but had very different ideas about how to do it. The British preferred to bomb by night and they put a fair amount of pressure upon the Americans to join them, but the Americans stuck to daylight bombing and in the end received vindication of their efforts.
The book concludes with an examination of tactics and results, especially those found by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey conducted after the war and from interviews conducted with several high-ranking Germans such as Erhard Milch, Albert Speer, Herman Goering and Adolf Galland.
A very enjoyable book which gives a good overall picture of the war fought by the bombers of the 8th AF, along with a fair amount of detail. Definitely worth adding to any aviation or World War II library.
April 3, 2019
The losses of men and aircraft and the destruction of cities is incredible. Hindsight is of course a wonderful thing but some of the tactical decisions made are troubling.
January 14, 2022
A levegő urai a háborús szakmunkák azon csoportjába tartozik, amelyek a háború egy erősen behatárolt szeletét veszik górcső alá, de azt aztán végtelenül kimerítően. Miller kötete az amerikai 8. Légi Hadsereget vizsgálja, a szövetséges haderő legnagyobb légi csapásmérő egységét, amelynek feladatai közé a kontinens (elsősorban Németország, amint el tudtak jutni odáig) bombázása tartozott*. Ezen belül aztán szinte semmi sem kerüli el a figyelmét: a bombázószemélyzet lehetséges mentális és fizikai betegségei (mint amilyen a végtagok fagyása 6000 méteren, vagy a flakk okozta sérülések) éppúgy szóba kerülnek, mint a repülősök szórakozási lehetőségei a háborús Londonban. Az angolszász hagyományoknak megfelelően Miller szívesen szólíttatja meg a résztvevőket is, gyakran idéz a velük folytatott beszélgetésekből éppúgy, mint a fennmaradt naplókból, hogy minél erősebben átérezzük az egész atmoszférát. (Talán kicsit túl sokat is – néha mintha túlságosan elmerülne a véres részletekben…) Külön piros pont jár azért, hogy több eszméletlenül elborzasztó passzusban mutatja be azt a szenvedést is, amit a bombázott németek átéltek – hát, ha ezektől a soroktól nem megy el valakinek a kedve a háborúktól, akkor szerintem ideje elbeszélgetnie a pszichiáterével. De legalább a patikusával. És naná, hogy sok szót ejt a bombázás eszméjének születéséről.
A légi csapások teoretikusai, mint például az olasz Giulio Douhet, vagy szellemi örököse, az amerikai William Mitchell tulajdonképpen Clausewitz elméletének megcsúfolását tűzték ki célul. A vén német ugyanis abból az alapvetésből indult ki, hogy az ellenség haderejét kell elpusztítani ahhoz, hogy egy háborút megnyerjünk – ők viszont abban hittek, hogy ha a háborút közvetlenül a hátországba teleportáljuk, akkor összességében kevesebb saját veszteséggel úszhatjuk meg az egészet. (Ők meg ebben Sherman tábornok módszerét másolták, aki az amerikai polgárháborúban átmasírozott a konföderált Délen, és felgyújtott mindent, amit ért. Aminek Margaret Mitchell örülhetett a legjobban, mert nagyon sikeres könyvet írt az eseményekből**.) Az, hogy egy olasz fasiszta nem rettent vissza a civilek kiirtásától, mondjuk érthető, de hogy egy amerikai demokrata is erre a következtetésre jutott, kissé morbid. Mentségükre szolgáljon, az amik annyit finomítottak a dolgon, hogy konkrétan az ellenség ipari kapacitását akarták kiiktatni. Az elmélet szerint egy fejtett ipari társadalom olyan érzékeny, összetett valami, hogy bizonyos elemeinek kiiktatása után összeomlik szépen, csendesen, úgyhogy bátor fiaink vérveszteség nélkül masírozhatnak be egy legyőzött országba. Nos, nem lett igazuk. A „bombabárók” nagy hangon vallották, hogy a nácikat pusztán a levegőből térdre tudják majd kényszeríteni, de ebben csúfos kudarcot vallottak – olyannyira, hogy a szövetségesek közül ők szedték össze közben a legnagyobb véres veszteséget. Ám sajátos módon, bár első számú céljukat nem tudták teljesíteni, de közvetve, szinte tudatlanul ők teremtették meg a partraszállás feltételeit: a Németország fölött vívott felőrlő háborúkban ugyanis úgy leamortizálták a Luftwaffét, hogy a D-napon (írd és mondd!) összesen két darab német vadászgép volt képes közvetlenül támadni az inváziós haderőt.
Amitől számomra a bombázóháború a II. világháború egyik legizgalmasabb eseménysorozata, az az, hogy itt jelenik meg legbrutálisabban, mennyire kilátástalan egy ilyen esetben megőrizni valamiféle morális tisztességet. Minden háborúban létrejön az erkölccsel szemben egy abszolútum, amit úgy hívnak, katonai szükségszerűség. Arra az elvre épül, hogy saját állampolgáraink felé nagyobb felelősséggel tartozunk, mint egy ellenséges ország állampolgárai felé – ilyen értelemben ha egy pályaudvar legyalulása vélhetően megment X db amerikai katonát, akkor azt a pályaudvart le kell gyalulni, még ha várhatóan meg is hal emiatt Y db civil. A katonai szükségszerűség a háború velejárója***, nincs olyan fegyveres konfliktus, amiben mellőzhető. Ahogy Orwell meglehetősen karcosan megfogalmazta: „Van valami egészen undorító abban, ha valaki elfogadja a háborút mint eszközt, ugyanakkor el akarja sunnyogni az annak nyilvánvalóan barbár vonásaival járó felelősséget”. Ami számomra nem azt jelenti, hogy a terrorbombázás elfogadható, hanem hogy maga a háború kell elfogadhatatlan legyen. Felejtsük el ezt a lovagias küzdelem dolgot, ahol vitéz huszárjaink szinte békebeli focimeccseket idéző sportszerűséggel kaszabolják az ellenséget. A modern háború egész egyszerűen nem ilyen (megjegyzem: már a focimeccsek sem ilyenek), úgyhogy aki elvállalja a hadüzenet felelősségét (mert van, hogy el kell vállalnia, attól félek), annak el kell vállalnia a bűnt is, amit ezzel magára vesz. Persze megkísérelheti (meg kell kísérelje) mérsékelni az óhatatlan károkat, amihez józan belátásra és empátiára van szükség. Ami azonban nem a tábornokok legfőbb tulajdonsága, amint azt a huszadik század fényesen bizonyította. És igen, azt hiszem, a második világháború röviden összefoglalható így is: a nácik próbára tették a nyugati szövetségeseket, hogy képesek-e tartani magukat az általuk hangoztatott magasztos erkölcsi elvekhez. Nos, nem voltak képesek. Szívás.
* Itt idejekorán leszögezném, hogy Hamburgot, Drezdát, Kölnt vagy Berlint nem ők bombázták szecskává – azok a britek, a RAF éjszakai bombázói voltak. Az amerikaiak a háború utolsó pár hetéig megtartóztatták magukat a terrorbombázástól, és a nappali „precíziós” bombavetésben hittek, amivel az ellenség gazdaságát igyekeztek elpusztítani. Ez, figyelembe véve a találati pontosságukat, a gyakorlatban azt jelentette, hogy amíg a britek direkt bombáztak civileket, addig az amerikaiak véletlenül. Ettől függetlenül ez egy lényeges különbség.
** Ez egy Vonnegut-mondás szemérmetlen ellopása és parafrazeálása. Kurt Drezda felégetéséről jegyezte meg szellemesen, hogy egyetlen embernek hajtott hasznot: neki, mert írt belőle egy könyvet, amiből szépen keresett.
*** Persze a „szükségszerűség” fogalma békeidőben is felmerülhet, ám ilyenkor nem vérre megy, így kisebb hatásfokkal lehet alkalmazni. Ennek áthidalására találták ki azt fineszes*** politikusaink, hogy nem-háborús eseményeket háborúként próbálnak meg rátukmálni a jónépre (sikerrel), mert akkor már a jóval combosabb katonai szükségszerűségre hivatkozhatnak.
A légi csapások teoretikusai, mint például az olasz Giulio Douhet, vagy szellemi örököse, az amerikai William Mitchell tulajdonképpen Clausewitz elméletének megcsúfolását tűzték ki célul. A vén német ugyanis abból az alapvetésből indult ki, hogy az ellenség haderejét kell elpusztítani ahhoz, hogy egy háborút megnyerjünk – ők viszont abban hittek, hogy ha a háborút közvetlenül a hátországba teleportáljuk, akkor összességében kevesebb saját veszteséggel úszhatjuk meg az egészet. (Ők meg ebben Sherman tábornok módszerét másolták, aki az amerikai polgárháborúban átmasírozott a konföderált Délen, és felgyújtott mindent, amit ért. Aminek Margaret Mitchell örülhetett a legjobban, mert nagyon sikeres könyvet írt az eseményekből**.) Az, hogy egy olasz fasiszta nem rettent vissza a civilek kiirtásától, mondjuk érthető, de hogy egy amerikai demokrata is erre a következtetésre jutott, kissé morbid. Mentségükre szolgáljon, az amik annyit finomítottak a dolgon, hogy konkrétan az ellenség ipari kapacitását akarták kiiktatni. Az elmélet szerint egy fejtett ipari társadalom olyan érzékeny, összetett valami, hogy bizonyos elemeinek kiiktatása után összeomlik szépen, csendesen, úgyhogy bátor fiaink vérveszteség nélkül masírozhatnak be egy legyőzött országba. Nos, nem lett igazuk. A „bombabárók” nagy hangon vallották, hogy a nácikat pusztán a levegőből térdre tudják majd kényszeríteni, de ebben csúfos kudarcot vallottak – olyannyira, hogy a szövetségesek közül ők szedték össze közben a legnagyobb véres veszteséget. Ám sajátos módon, bár első számú céljukat nem tudták teljesíteni, de közvetve, szinte tudatlanul ők teremtették meg a partraszállás feltételeit: a Németország fölött vívott felőrlő háborúkban ugyanis úgy leamortizálták a Luftwaffét, hogy a D-napon (írd és mondd!) összesen két darab német vadászgép volt képes közvetlenül támadni az inváziós haderőt.
Amitől számomra a bombázóháború a II. világháború egyik legizgalmasabb eseménysorozata, az az, hogy itt jelenik meg legbrutálisabban, mennyire kilátástalan egy ilyen esetben megőrizni valamiféle morális tisztességet. Minden háborúban létrejön az erkölccsel szemben egy abszolútum, amit úgy hívnak, katonai szükségszerűség. Arra az elvre épül, hogy saját állampolgáraink felé nagyobb felelősséggel tartozunk, mint egy ellenséges ország állampolgárai felé – ilyen értelemben ha egy pályaudvar legyalulása vélhetően megment X db amerikai katonát, akkor azt a pályaudvart le kell gyalulni, még ha várhatóan meg is hal emiatt Y db civil. A katonai szükségszerűség a háború velejárója***, nincs olyan fegyveres konfliktus, amiben mellőzhető. Ahogy Orwell meglehetősen karcosan megfogalmazta: „Van valami egészen undorító abban, ha valaki elfogadja a háborút mint eszközt, ugyanakkor el akarja sunnyogni az annak nyilvánvalóan barbár vonásaival járó felelősséget”. Ami számomra nem azt jelenti, hogy a terrorbombázás elfogadható, hanem hogy maga a háború kell elfogadhatatlan legyen. Felejtsük el ezt a lovagias küzdelem dolgot, ahol vitéz huszárjaink szinte békebeli focimeccseket idéző sportszerűséggel kaszabolják az ellenséget. A modern háború egész egyszerűen nem ilyen (megjegyzem: már a focimeccsek sem ilyenek), úgyhogy aki elvállalja a hadüzenet felelősségét (mert van, hogy el kell vállalnia, attól félek), annak el kell vállalnia a bűnt is, amit ezzel magára vesz. Persze megkísérelheti (meg kell kísérelje) mérsékelni az óhatatlan károkat, amihez józan belátásra és empátiára van szükség. Ami azonban nem a tábornokok legfőbb tulajdonsága, amint azt a huszadik század fényesen bizonyította. És igen, azt hiszem, a második világháború röviden összefoglalható így is: a nácik próbára tették a nyugati szövetségeseket, hogy képesek-e tartani magukat az általuk hangoztatott magasztos erkölcsi elvekhez. Nos, nem voltak képesek. Szívás.
* Itt idejekorán leszögezném, hogy Hamburgot, Drezdát, Kölnt vagy Berlint nem ők bombázták szecskává – azok a britek, a RAF éjszakai bombázói voltak. Az amerikaiak a háború utolsó pár hetéig megtartóztatták magukat a terrorbombázástól, és a nappali „precíziós” bombavetésben hittek, amivel az ellenség gazdaságát igyekeztek elpusztítani. Ez, figyelembe véve a találati pontosságukat, a gyakorlatban azt jelentette, hogy amíg a britek direkt bombáztak civileket, addig az amerikaiak véletlenül. Ettől függetlenül ez egy lényeges különbség.
** Ez egy Vonnegut-mondás szemérmetlen ellopása és parafrazeálása. Kurt Drezda felégetéséről jegyezte meg szellemesen, hogy egyetlen embernek hajtott hasznot: neki, mert írt belőle egy könyvet, amiből szépen keresett.
*** Persze a „szükségszerűség” fogalma békeidőben is felmerülhet, ám ilyenkor nem vérre megy, így kisebb hatásfokkal lehet alkalmazni. Ennek áthidalására találták ki azt fineszes*** politikusaink, hogy nem-háborús eseményeket háborúként próbálnak meg rátukmálni a jónépre (sikerrel), mert akkor már a jóval combosabb katonai szükségszerűségre hivatkozhatnak.
July 7, 2024
This book gave me a much better understanding of the air war over Europe. I thought I knew a lot about it but it’s almost like I was learning about it for the first time. Many parts are not suitable for youth but overall very very good.
March 20, 2019
Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany by Donald L. Miller is the story of the American bomber crews during world War II. There are lots of stories, and Miller seems compelled to tell every one of them. The book is long and seems to go on and on and on. I am a big fan of history and in particular World War II history. But the book seemed longer than the war itself. Miller could have improved the book greatly by doing a little editing. The other challenge I had with the book is that he seemed to be thrilled when a crew bombed a city full of women and children. I realize there are collateral damage during war, and that the American’s did not start the war, but did he have to be so thrilled at the endless killing of innocents. I found this book a challenge to read. It was far from enjoyable. It was not inspirational, which it should have been. There are better books out there on the air war of World War II. My recommendation, is to skip this gargantuan monstrosity.
June 4, 2024
A choppy timeline and an introduction of numerous men make it a little hard to follow at first, but this book has a lot of truly interesting information to offer - so be sure to stick with it! I learned so much and am shocked that with all the WWII books I’ve read thus far, I hadn’t heard some things before; including Switzerland not being as neutral as “history” would have you think.
Content Considerations: two f-words, a sprinkling of b*tch and b*st*rd. Some blasphemy. Mentions the men sleeping around, having sex etc. numerous times and in varying degrees of detail. Mentions rapes and prostitution. A man was raped multiple times by other men in a prison. There are some very graphic descriptions of war wounds and cruel treatment of prisoners. Drinking, drunkenness, and smoking are mentioned.
This book is for mature readers.
Content Considerations: two f-words, a sprinkling of b*tch and b*st*rd. Some blasphemy. Mentions the men sleeping around, having sex etc. numerous times and in varying degrees of detail. Mentions rapes and prostitution. A man was raped multiple times by other men in a prison. There are some very graphic descriptions of war wounds and cruel treatment of prisoners. Drinking, drunkenness, and smoking are mentioned.
This book is for mature readers.
March 11, 2024
I started watching the TV adaptation of this book and was interested in learning the details missing from the show. This book has quite a bit of crossover with Malcom Gladwell's Bomber Mafia. Where the show mostly follows the 100th, this book is a broader overview of the whole aerial bombardment of Germany.
I really enjoyed the sections about Clark Gable's enlistment into the Air Force. The descriptions of the POW camps and the fire bombing of Dresden are truly terrible and not top of my mind when considering the history of WWII.
I really enjoyed the sections about Clark Gable's enlistment into the Air Force. The descriptions of the POW camps and the fire bombing of Dresden are truly terrible and not top of my mind when considering the history of WWII.
December 29, 2015
Although the book contains many very interesting individual stories, it rambles too much from one place to another...from personal narrative to tactical second-guessing, to political perspective.
September 24, 2012
This book is one of the best I've read; on the American bombing campaign in Europe. This book contains almost anything you would want to know about the campaign. It has first person accounts; profiles on the planes; men; and equipment. It has sections on the beginnings of air medicine; and the psychological aspects of what the crews went through. From the supply services to the building of airfields. It's all here. The book is easy to read and keeps you interested throughout. I could go on; and on; but that would make my review to long. If you are interested in the air war over Europe; particularly from the American side this book is one of the best on the subject.
February 8, 2023
Although the book is very interesting with a ton of details and facts from all facets of the war that I was unaware of, the books lacks the personal storytelling of following some of the bomber crews which I was expecting from other WW2 history books. Not a fault of the book, just didn’t meet my expectations. This is a great history book, and less a collection of memoirs following the Bomber Boys
April 6, 2024
Learned a lot of new aspects of the war from this book. I must say it’s also a lot better than the series.
The moral part about bombing city’s with a lot of civilian casualties really opened my eyes. I knew Germany got bombed a lot during the war, but never knew it was this much. Till what extend can you fight ‘the’ enemy and telling yourself you’re doing a good job. Sad to that’s these thing are still happening.
The moral part about bombing city’s with a lot of civilian casualties really opened my eyes. I knew Germany got bombed a lot during the war, but never knew it was this much. Till what extend can you fight ‘the’ enemy and telling yourself you’re doing a good job. Sad to that’s these thing are still happening.
July 18, 2024
This is a really well-written book. I didn't end up finishing it because I got emotionally overwhelmed by the devastatingly sad stories of death and loss in it.
July 26, 2021
This was a masterful history of the Eighth Air Force, the lead element of the United States in the air war during World War II. While so much has been written about the ground war - not the least of which is Winston Churchill's six-volume "The Second World War," and the naval battles - such as Ian W. Toll's three volumes on the Pacific events (Pacific Crucible, The Conquering Tide, and Twilight of the Gods), it seems the air wars did not have as comprehensive coverage. Miller's book addresses that problem.
This tale is a hefty narrative weighing in at about 500 pages, but it covers a lot of ground from the establishment of the Eighth Air Force to the surrender of Germany in 1945. Miller does have the habit of wandering in his story a bit, but even that is engrossing. When the reader is done with this book they will have a grasp of what really went on in the skies over Europe, and a feel for the differences in the RAF and the U.S. approaches.
Miller's tale is very approachable, flows wonderfully, and can be put down and picked back up without having to read yourself back into the narrative. Highly recommended for those with little knowledge of the air wars over Europe.
This tale is a hefty narrative weighing in at about 500 pages, but it covers a lot of ground from the establishment of the Eighth Air Force to the surrender of Germany in 1945. Miller does have the habit of wandering in his story a bit, but even that is engrossing. When the reader is done with this book they will have a grasp of what really went on in the skies over Europe, and a feel for the differences in the RAF and the U.S. approaches.
Miller's tale is very approachable, flows wonderfully, and can be put down and picked back up without having to read yourself back into the narrative. Highly recommended for those with little knowledge of the air wars over Europe.
January 11, 2022
Buy.
Well done history of the Eighth Air Force and the key figures involved. A reminder of the devastation wrought by all sides of this gravest of conflicts.
Looking forward to the upcoming miniseries based on the Bloody Hundredth.
Well done history of the Eighth Air Force and the key figures involved. A reminder of the devastation wrought by all sides of this gravest of conflicts.
Looking forward to the upcoming miniseries based on the Bloody Hundredth.
September 3, 2018
Masters of the Air is an well-deserved classic of military history, focusing on the Eighth Air Force, the United States strategic bomber arm that was the first American unit to bring the war to Nazi Germany, and which pioneered the tactics and techniques of strategic bombing.
By all reason, the strategic air campaign should not have worked. Army Air Corps doctrine in the late 30s was built around three major pillars: the heavily armed B-17 Flying Fortress was 'self-escorting' and could fend off hostile fighters; the gyroscopic Norden bombsite could hit pinpoint targets with accuracy; and precision attacks on 'vital centers' of industry could cripple an enemy military without the need for battles of attrition. All three of these assumptions would be proven wrong in the skies over German, with deadly consequences for the men who had been trained and equipped on them.
The cloudless skies of test ranges over the American southwest were nothing like the weather over England and Germany. Men froze in the stratospheric slipstream, and bombers were lost in rapidly changing weather conditions. Flak and fighters ripped through the B-17 and B-24s, inflicting proportional casualties as high as any duty in the war, matched only by submarine crews. Nazi industry proved surprisingly resilient. Yet even if every specific of pre-war doctrine was wrong, the bombers succeeded in their most important tasks. Defense against bombers escorted by P-51s in the months leading up to Overlord deciminated the Luftwaffe, and the landings were unopposed from the air. The transport and oil campaigns feel short of paralyzing the Nazi war machine, but delay and friction impeded the panzers, and gave the Normandy beachhead time to stabilize and expand. And the thousands of heavy guns shooting at the sky, and not T-34s on the steppes, had some helpful effect on the Eastern Front.
Miller was inspired to write this book in part by his friendship with Lt. Col. Robert "Rosie" Rosenthal of the "Bloody 100th" Bombardment Wing, and this book shines in depicting the human side of the Eighth. It was a whole new kind of warfare. Crews would take off in English fog, endure hours of torment over Europe, return, and potentially be in London with a pretty girl by evening. War at the limits of technology was intensely dangerous. The first teams, dispatched in 1943, had a one in five chance of completing the required 25 missions. Frostbite, flak, and fighters were the three terrors of this aerial front. Showcase raids, like Schweinfurt–Regensburg and Ploesti, caused terrible losses for temporary results. The courage that it took to fly straight and level, holding formation through the worst, was like something out of Napoleonic warfare, standing in ranks to take fire. Bomber crews were teams as tightly knit as any on Earth. Along with the flying, there are stories about leaves around England, the traditions of the bases, and the devotion of the men to each other.
But the mission was murder. Thousands of the bomber boys died in combat, and many more were grievously wounded, or held captive in Nazi POW camps (this book does not neglect the POW perspective). And point military targets soon shifted to area targets like railyards and factories in German cities, and in the last months of the war 'morale bombings' to break the will of the German people, a campaign of terror through mass civilian death. Miller tries to draw a distinction between the goals of the Eight Air Force and the RAF's city-busting campaigns under "Bomber" Harris, but I'm not sure the Brits deserve that characterization. Area bombing against civilians is a war crime, and we can recognize that without the slide into the fallacy that there's no difference between the air campaign and the Holocaust.
In the end, strategic bombing failed in its goal of shorter, cleaner wars. Attrition moved from the trenches to the skies. But the men who flew those missions were a rare breed. There are damn few of them left. Both my grandfathers served in WW2, one in the Pacific, and one was never deployed. I'm a member of the Commemorative Air Force, which keeps a B-17, Sentimental Journey, flying. This book has deepened my appreciation of airpower, the mission, and especially the men.
By all reason, the strategic air campaign should not have worked. Army Air Corps doctrine in the late 30s was built around three major pillars: the heavily armed B-17 Flying Fortress was 'self-escorting' and could fend off hostile fighters; the gyroscopic Norden bombsite could hit pinpoint targets with accuracy; and precision attacks on 'vital centers' of industry could cripple an enemy military without the need for battles of attrition. All three of these assumptions would be proven wrong in the skies over German, with deadly consequences for the men who had been trained and equipped on them.
The cloudless skies of test ranges over the American southwest were nothing like the weather over England and Germany. Men froze in the stratospheric slipstream, and bombers were lost in rapidly changing weather conditions. Flak and fighters ripped through the B-17 and B-24s, inflicting proportional casualties as high as any duty in the war, matched only by submarine crews. Nazi industry proved surprisingly resilient. Yet even if every specific of pre-war doctrine was wrong, the bombers succeeded in their most important tasks. Defense against bombers escorted by P-51s in the months leading up to Overlord deciminated the Luftwaffe, and the landings were unopposed from the air. The transport and oil campaigns feel short of paralyzing the Nazi war machine, but delay and friction impeded the panzers, and gave the Normandy beachhead time to stabilize and expand. And the thousands of heavy guns shooting at the sky, and not T-34s on the steppes, had some helpful effect on the Eastern Front.
Miller was inspired to write this book in part by his friendship with Lt. Col. Robert "Rosie" Rosenthal of the "Bloody 100th" Bombardment Wing, and this book shines in depicting the human side of the Eighth. It was a whole new kind of warfare. Crews would take off in English fog, endure hours of torment over Europe, return, and potentially be in London with a pretty girl by evening. War at the limits of technology was intensely dangerous. The first teams, dispatched in 1943, had a one in five chance of completing the required 25 missions. Frostbite, flak, and fighters were the three terrors of this aerial front. Showcase raids, like Schweinfurt–Regensburg and Ploesti, caused terrible losses for temporary results. The courage that it took to fly straight and level, holding formation through the worst, was like something out of Napoleonic warfare, standing in ranks to take fire. Bomber crews were teams as tightly knit as any on Earth. Along with the flying, there are stories about leaves around England, the traditions of the bases, and the devotion of the men to each other.
But the mission was murder. Thousands of the bomber boys died in combat, and many more were grievously wounded, or held captive in Nazi POW camps (this book does not neglect the POW perspective). And point military targets soon shifted to area targets like railyards and factories in German cities, and in the last months of the war 'morale bombings' to break the will of the German people, a campaign of terror through mass civilian death. Miller tries to draw a distinction between the goals of the Eight Air Force and the RAF's city-busting campaigns under "Bomber" Harris, but I'm not sure the Brits deserve that characterization. Area bombing against civilians is a war crime, and we can recognize that without the slide into the fallacy that there's no difference between the air campaign and the Holocaust.
In the end, strategic bombing failed in its goal of shorter, cleaner wars. Attrition moved from the trenches to the skies. But the men who flew those missions were a rare breed. There are damn few of them left. Both my grandfathers served in WW2, one in the Pacific, and one was never deployed. I'm a member of the Commemorative Air Force, which keeps a B-17, Sentimental Journey, flying. This book has deepened my appreciation of airpower, the mission, and especially the men.
October 2, 2019
Part of the title of this book “bomber boys“ seems a little strange to me. It is in a way flippant and dismissive of the men who flew the bombers in Europe in World War II. On the other hand the eight or 10 men on each crew were in many cases very young. And they apparently had a camaraderie that men in the army on the ground did not have as commonly.
This is a long book. 25 hours in the audible format. It covers the story of the bombers in Europe from the beginning of the war until the end. It is hard to imagine that we will have her have and air war like we had in World War II again. Are that we will ever have a land war like that again. Almost all the planes in World War II were propeller driven planes with jets only making a relatively small entrance in the German Air Force at the end of the war.
The book takes on all the controversial World War II bombing issues in a relatively straightforward way both looking at what people thought at the time, how the views changed with experience and a more retrospective review after the war. While clearly leaning in the direction of favoring the United States point of view, the author seemed willing to make some difficult judgment calls based on his own research and knowledge. He is willing to acknowledge propaganda when he sees it and to realize that vital information was sometimes publicly misrepresented at the time. Civilian bomb casualties is a major issue and it is dealt with with apparent reasonable thoroughness and integrity. This is not clearly a pro or anti-war book. There is much recognition that war is a messy and complicated situation with not much being obvious other than it would be better to avoid them if possible. Hitler and the Nazi‘s are not given many excuses in this book for their actions.
It was fascinating for me to read about some of the events involving the neutral countries of Switzerland and Sweden. Switzerland particularly remained a major trading partner with the Nazi regime and held a considerable number of American pilots who were forced down in Switzerland in very poor conditions.
My evaluation of the book is that it made a serious effort to analyze the experience of those involved with the bombing aspect of the war. It was an extraordinarily major part of that event and there were definitely different ideas about how to carry it out and those ideas changed with the experience of the war. The men in the airplanes we’re fire more frequently killed rather than wounded. When the plane was destroyed or went down it most often impacted everyone on the plane. Flying conditions were relatively primitive by today’s standards Even when everything went very well. End it often did not go very well. This book is fairly explicit in its descriptions of the lives of the bomber boys.
This is a long book. 25 hours in the audible format. It covers the story of the bombers in Europe from the beginning of the war until the end. It is hard to imagine that we will have her have and air war like we had in World War II again. Are that we will ever have a land war like that again. Almost all the planes in World War II were propeller driven planes with jets only making a relatively small entrance in the German Air Force at the end of the war.
The book takes on all the controversial World War II bombing issues in a relatively straightforward way both looking at what people thought at the time, how the views changed with experience and a more retrospective review after the war. While clearly leaning in the direction of favoring the United States point of view, the author seemed willing to make some difficult judgment calls based on his own research and knowledge. He is willing to acknowledge propaganda when he sees it and to realize that vital information was sometimes publicly misrepresented at the time. Civilian bomb casualties is a major issue and it is dealt with with apparent reasonable thoroughness and integrity. This is not clearly a pro or anti-war book. There is much recognition that war is a messy and complicated situation with not much being obvious other than it would be better to avoid them if possible. Hitler and the Nazi‘s are not given many excuses in this book for their actions.
It was fascinating for me to read about some of the events involving the neutral countries of Switzerland and Sweden. Switzerland particularly remained a major trading partner with the Nazi regime and held a considerable number of American pilots who were forced down in Switzerland in very poor conditions.
My evaluation of the book is that it made a serious effort to analyze the experience of those involved with the bombing aspect of the war. It was an extraordinarily major part of that event and there were definitely different ideas about how to carry it out and those ideas changed with the experience of the war. The men in the airplanes we’re fire more frequently killed rather than wounded. When the plane was destroyed or went down it most often impacted everyone on the plane. Flying conditions were relatively primitive by today’s standards Even when everything went very well. End it often did not go very well. This book is fairly explicit in its descriptions of the lives of the bomber boys.
August 15, 2009
I read the subtitle of this book and assumed it was a collection of war stories from 8th Air Force crewmen. I'm not a huge fan of oral history but decided to give it a shot anyway. Wow was I pleasantly surprised. It is much, much more than an oral history. MASTERS OF THE AIR examines the entire experience of the 8th AF from POWs to its portrayal in movies and books to race relations to the effect of the American air bases on the social fabric of the English countryside to the whole question of the viability of strategic bombardment. Miller is incredibly well read on a vast amount of literature relating to the air campaign over Europe and draws on many of these sources to produce a rich first-rate history. There is something in MASTERS for any fan of history.
I particularly enjoyed his handling of the sticky question of whether strategic bombing was a success. From the point of view of the pre-war bomber barons the answer is "no". Heavy bombers alone were not able to defeat Germany. But the more important question is whether the damage they did inflict was worth the effort put forth and the answer to that is a resounding "yes".
Miller does a fine job though of making clear that the strategic bombing was not the sole mission of the 8th. Throughout late 1943 and early 1944 the main mission of the 8th was too break the Luftwaffe fighter force by hitting targets the Jagdwaffe would be force to defend and then shooting down the German fighters. Destruction of the Luftwaffe was a pre-requisite for Operation Overlord and the 8th was the only force able to carry it out. German fighter routinely avoided combat with Allied fighters- it took attacks on key targets by bombers to bring them out where American escorts could get them.
Coincidently this campaign against German airpower also paved the way for later campaigns against oil and transportation targets in Germany. This is where strategic bombing came into it's own. It was never able to win the war alone but it severely curtailed German production efforts in the last months of the war and shortened the war by months.
I'm only touching the surface of what MASTERS offers. If you have any interest in the air war over Europe or the 8th Air Force I strongly recommend this book. It is sure to be the standard history of the 8th.
I particularly enjoyed his handling of the sticky question of whether strategic bombing was a success. From the point of view of the pre-war bomber barons the answer is "no". Heavy bombers alone were not able to defeat Germany. But the more important question is whether the damage they did inflict was worth the effort put forth and the answer to that is a resounding "yes".
Miller does a fine job though of making clear that the strategic bombing was not the sole mission of the 8th. Throughout late 1943 and early 1944 the main mission of the 8th was too break the Luftwaffe fighter force by hitting targets the Jagdwaffe would be force to defend and then shooting down the German fighters. Destruction of the Luftwaffe was a pre-requisite for Operation Overlord and the 8th was the only force able to carry it out. German fighter routinely avoided combat with Allied fighters- it took attacks on key targets by bombers to bring them out where American escorts could get them.
Coincidently this campaign against German airpower also paved the way for later campaigns against oil and transportation targets in Germany. This is where strategic bombing came into it's own. It was never able to win the war alone but it severely curtailed German production efforts in the last months of the war and shortened the war by months.
I'm only touching the surface of what MASTERS offers. If you have any interest in the air war over Europe or the 8th Air Force I strongly recommend this book. It is sure to be the standard history of the 8th.
March 5, 2021
Books about World War II are often difficult projects to tackle. The scope of what happened during that conflict is so staggeringly enormous that rendering it imaginable to the amateur historian is nearly impossible. Donald L. Miller's "Master of the Air" is no different. This is a tough read from a technical perspective. Either you take months to pore over all the names, places, dates, and numbers present, or you skim a bit and find the narratives. There really is no middle ground.
I chose the latter strategy, often finding my eyes glazing over a bit as my brain searched for the connective-tissue humanity as opposed to the logistics of the story. Taking such an approach, the entertainment value of the overall read waxed and waned frequently. Some sections held me riveted, while others I glossed over a bit more.
In terms of education, however, Miller's tome is top-notch. I came into the book with very little knowledge of how the Air Force shaped WWII, but I left with a much better understanding of and appreciation for the pilots and their machines/tactics. While certainly a more glamorous (at least from the outside looking in) position than, say, an Army land-dweller, the attrition rate in terms of lost pilots was almost astonishingly, obscenely high. That is also to say nothing of the psychological toll flying in wartime conditions took on countless others. It was truly fascinating (and sometimes heartbreaking) to read about such stories.
So, in terms of pure information, "Masters of the Air" is a no-question 5/5 stars. But for overall reader enjoyment (unless WWII history is one's preferred material)? Probably more like a 3.5/5.
A final interesting tidbit: This story is being adapted (currently filming!) into a miniseries by no less luminaries than Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. I have absolutely no doubt that they will be able to turn the story of WWII's air war into television every bit as compelling as Band of Brothers. It's all here, just waiting to be streamlined for all audiences to enjoy.
I chose the latter strategy, often finding my eyes glazing over a bit as my brain searched for the connective-tissue humanity as opposed to the logistics of the story. Taking such an approach, the entertainment value of the overall read waxed and waned frequently. Some sections held me riveted, while others I glossed over a bit more.
In terms of education, however, Miller's tome is top-notch. I came into the book with very little knowledge of how the Air Force shaped WWII, but I left with a much better understanding of and appreciation for the pilots and their machines/tactics. While certainly a more glamorous (at least from the outside looking in) position than, say, an Army land-dweller, the attrition rate in terms of lost pilots was almost astonishingly, obscenely high. That is also to say nothing of the psychological toll flying in wartime conditions took on countless others. It was truly fascinating (and sometimes heartbreaking) to read about such stories.
So, in terms of pure information, "Masters of the Air" is a no-question 5/5 stars. But for overall reader enjoyment (unless WWII history is one's preferred material)? Probably more like a 3.5/5.
A final interesting tidbit: This story is being adapted (currently filming!) into a miniseries by no less luminaries than Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. I have absolutely no doubt that they will be able to turn the story of WWII's air war into television every bit as compelling as Band of Brothers. It's all here, just waiting to be streamlined for all audiences to enjoy.
June 12, 2024
Read for the 2024 PopSugar reading challenge. I'm calling this one "A book recommended by a bookseller" although in truth I haven't ventured into any bookseller to see it, but I feel it's safe to say it must have been given that the streaming Apple show recently released.
There's a meme lately that men are never far off from having thought about the Roman Empire. I thought this meme was just a joke for a long time and eventually was made aware that this is actually a real thing. I don't understand it. I don't think about Rome. I am, however, never far off from having thought about World War II, one of my most boomer traits that I'm at peace with, and the release of the Apple show (which I haven't even seen yet) seemed like a good enough excuse to read this book.
I think that you can fairly say this book is added to 2000's Band of Brothers (based on the same men from 1992's Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest) and 2010's The Pacific (based on three of the same men from 2009's The Pacific) to make up kind of a trilogy of modern WWII epic miniseries, with this one covering similar geographic territory to the men of Easy Company, just at a different altitude and over a longer timeframe.
Masters of the Air is also different from these other books because while Pacific involves a handful of individual men and the things they did, and Band of Brothers follows the whole of one company of men from around the start of the war to the end of the war, Masters is zoomed out on more big picture stuff and its focal point is the entirety of the Eighth Air Force, a formation that, counting its ground crews and support staff, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and whose fatalities across the war (the book emphasizes several times) exceeded that of the US Marine Corps during the war. When you think about Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Okinawa and their place in the narrative of major events of WW2, that's really something to think about. The bomber boys, as contemporary press took to calling them (a number of whom were embedded on planes for some real hairy missions from which not every reporter's plane safely returned,) bore a brunt for a long time.
This book does touch on a number of men and where they were over a period of years, but mostly it's about the unit in the aggregate. It's about how men who learned how to fly from the Wright Brothers eventually ended up in the war planning business in the early-to-mid 1930s and who convinced themselves that they had devised a theory of strategic bombing that would eliminate future threats without even needing a ground invasion. I could not help but think about how this same basic delusion, that you can win without boots on the ground, has been a recurring theme in American military planning.
The force commanders whose names come up again and again are heavy hitters: Hap Arnold, the only five-star general in Army Air Force history; Carl Spaatz, the first commanding general of an independent US Air Force; James Doolittle, who is famous to American military history for leading the raid on Tokyo to prove that the American military could strike at mainland Japan. Some of the pilots were just as famous for their non-military careers, and the blurb is not lying that you will get a sense of what Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart experienced as bomber pilots or even squadron commanders, and what reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite did, and what the famous after the war test pilot Chuck Yeager did during the war. These individual stories are almost incidentally mentioned in the middle of the big picture stuff, though. It's not just about going and dropping bombs. The POW experience is revisited at several different points in the war, and how things were different for downed airmen trying to evade capture. It's about what they did between missions, how the medical community tried (some more seriously than others) to keep men as functioning fighters/human beings while enduring wartime stresses that had never before been experienced. It's about the little villages that the American bomber bases were built in the middle of, about some of the Germans who were on the business end of the bombs, and about what some of the Nazi leaders had to say about all of this after the war and before they got tried at Nuremberg.
Many of the individual feats of flying fortitude seem almost unbelievable. I think it's fair to say this book has a healthy respect for the skill and heroism of the individual men who were sent out on the missions. It's not a hagiography of the Eighth Air Force as a whole or about Allied bombing campaigns during the war, however. Miller writes with enough distance in time, and with enough perspective from both sides of the conflict, that he can be, and is, critical of a number of the decisions that were made that ultimately cost a lot of lives. These included things like the aggressive bombing strategy based on a belief that formations of B-17 Fortresses could ward off enemy fighters all on their own, the differences in targeting practices and successes between the American and British bomber groups, the lack of civilian oversight over a variety of the large-picture bombing strategy, and eventually, how the American bomber strategy shifted to "terror bombing" even if they apparently refused to admit this at the time and altered some records to not acknowledge this afterwards either. Was there any ostensible military benefit to the firebombing of Dresden, or the costly campaigns against certain German industries? These are among the philosophical questions that Miller asks and attempts to answer. It's a thought-provoking book, if you are the kind of person with this boomer trait like I am.
There's a meme lately that men are never far off from having thought about the Roman Empire. I thought this meme was just a joke for a long time and eventually was made aware that this is actually a real thing. I don't understand it. I don't think about Rome. I am, however, never far off from having thought about World War II, one of my most boomer traits that I'm at peace with, and the release of the Apple show (which I haven't even seen yet) seemed like a good enough excuse to read this book.
I think that you can fairly say this book is added to 2000's Band of Brothers (based on the same men from 1992's Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest) and 2010's The Pacific (based on three of the same men from 2009's The Pacific) to make up kind of a trilogy of modern WWII epic miniseries, with this one covering similar geographic territory to the men of Easy Company, just at a different altitude and over a longer timeframe.
Masters of the Air is also different from these other books because while Pacific involves a handful of individual men and the things they did, and Band of Brothers follows the whole of one company of men from around the start of the war to the end of the war, Masters is zoomed out on more big picture stuff and its focal point is the entirety of the Eighth Air Force, a formation that, counting its ground crews and support staff, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, and whose fatalities across the war (the book emphasizes several times) exceeded that of the US Marine Corps during the war. When you think about Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima and Okinawa and their place in the narrative of major events of WW2, that's really something to think about. The bomber boys, as contemporary press took to calling them (a number of whom were embedded on planes for some real hairy missions from which not every reporter's plane safely returned,) bore a brunt for a long time.
This book does touch on a number of men and where they were over a period of years, but mostly it's about the unit in the aggregate. It's about how men who learned how to fly from the Wright Brothers eventually ended up in the war planning business in the early-to-mid 1930s and who convinced themselves that they had devised a theory of strategic bombing that would eliminate future threats without even needing a ground invasion. I could not help but think about how this same basic delusion, that you can win without boots on the ground, has been a recurring theme in American military planning.
The force commanders whose names come up again and again are heavy hitters: Hap Arnold, the only five-star general in Army Air Force history; Carl Spaatz, the first commanding general of an independent US Air Force; James Doolittle, who is famous to American military history for leading the raid on Tokyo to prove that the American military could strike at mainland Japan. Some of the pilots were just as famous for their non-military careers, and the blurb is not lying that you will get a sense of what Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart experienced as bomber pilots or even squadron commanders, and what reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite did, and what the famous after the war test pilot Chuck Yeager did during the war. These individual stories are almost incidentally mentioned in the middle of the big picture stuff, though. It's not just about going and dropping bombs. The POW experience is revisited at several different points in the war, and how things were different for downed airmen trying to evade capture. It's about what they did between missions, how the medical community tried (some more seriously than others) to keep men as functioning fighters/human beings while enduring wartime stresses that had never before been experienced. It's about the little villages that the American bomber bases were built in the middle of, about some of the Germans who were on the business end of the bombs, and about what some of the Nazi leaders had to say about all of this after the war and before they got tried at Nuremberg.
Many of the individual feats of flying fortitude seem almost unbelievable. I think it's fair to say this book has a healthy respect for the skill and heroism of the individual men who were sent out on the missions. It's not a hagiography of the Eighth Air Force as a whole or about Allied bombing campaigns during the war, however. Miller writes with enough distance in time, and with enough perspective from both sides of the conflict, that he can be, and is, critical of a number of the decisions that were made that ultimately cost a lot of lives. These included things like the aggressive bombing strategy based on a belief that formations of B-17 Fortresses could ward off enemy fighters all on their own, the differences in targeting practices and successes between the American and British bomber groups, the lack of civilian oversight over a variety of the large-picture bombing strategy, and eventually, how the American bomber strategy shifted to "terror bombing" even if they apparently refused to admit this at the time and altered some records to not acknowledge this afterwards either. Was there any ostensible military benefit to the firebombing of Dresden, or the costly campaigns against certain German industries? These are among the philosophical questions that Miller asks and attempts to answer. It's a thought-provoking book, if you are the kind of person with this boomer trait like I am.
January 11, 2013
I would strongly recommend reading this book only after one has read "A Few Good Captains" by Dewitt S. Copp. It certainly dove tails the development of the USAAF into the USAF and shows the many struggles of pilots of all sorts of Aircraft during WW II and their attempt at surviving especially the early days of the war in the ETO. I wished it would have done more to cover the air war in the PTO but this is the American Psyche - war in Europe was known because of the general knowledge of Americans and geographical locations on the globe. "Battle of Britain" or the "Battle of New Britain"? Which would you be most likely to recall from history? Herein lay the fundamental issues. Still this book is fascinating.
June 4, 2014
Easily one of the best things I've read on the "Mighty Eighth Air Force" in WWII -- but like The Monuments Men, I don't see how they (Spielberg, Hanks, and HBO) are going to make a miniseries out of it. Despite the inherent drama, there ain't much traditional plot -- but maybe that's why I'm not a screenwriter!
This will fascinate those interested in WWII history. There are anecdotes and personal histories galore, statistical analysis, strategic discussions and lots of parts where things get blown up.
This will fascinate those interested in WWII history. There are anecdotes and personal histories galore, statistical analysis, strategic discussions and lots of parts where things get blown up.
March 27, 2024
A bennem élő 14 éves másodikvilágháború rajongónak kedveskedve ugrottam bele a könyvbe, ami igazából pontosan azt hozta, mint amire számítani lehetett, egy relatíve érdekes körképet a bombázók nem feltétlenül túlságosan ismert világáról.
Sajnos a bombázós sztorik nem igazán változatosak, így miután megvan az első "a 19 éves mormon papcsaládból származó traktorgyári munkás Sgt. William "Babe" H. Newman az Ohio-i Toledo-ból szembesül azzal, hogy bombázás közben lövik fentről és lentről, és ez kifejezetten kellemetlen" történet, túl sok újdonságot a következő 300 már nem tud mondani. Ezt azért a szerző is megérzi, és igyekszik hol jobban, hol kevésbé meggyőzően kiterjeszteni a horizontot, és a konkrét harcon kívül sok-sok marginális témáról (angol feleségek, fekete kiegészítő egységek, hadifogoly-táborok) is írni. Ez a mozaikszerűség cserébe viszont a koherens narratívát öli meg, pláne, hogy az első néhány fejezetben valamiért görcsösen ragaszkodik a szerző ahhoz, hogy még véletlenül se próbáljon kronologikusan alkotni.
Becsülendő még, hogy a könyv második részében abszolúte nem kerüli ki a célpontok stratégiai kiválasztásának és a terrorbombázás létjogosultságának kérdéseit, de sajnos érdemi válaszokat nem igazán ad a felvetett kérdésekre - persze viszonyítási pont hiányában talán nem is kérhető ez számon.
Sajnos a bombázós sztorik nem igazán változatosak, így miután megvan az első "a 19 éves mormon papcsaládból származó traktorgyári munkás Sgt. William "Babe" H. Newman az Ohio-i Toledo-ból szembesül azzal, hogy bombázás közben lövik fentről és lentről, és ez kifejezetten kellemetlen" történet, túl sok újdonságot a következő 300 már nem tud mondani. Ezt azért a szerző is megérzi, és igyekszik hol jobban, hol kevésbé meggyőzően kiterjeszteni a horizontot, és a konkrét harcon kívül sok-sok marginális témáról (angol feleségek, fekete kiegészítő egységek, hadifogoly-táborok) is írni. Ez a mozaikszerűség cserébe viszont a koherens narratívát öli meg, pláne, hogy az első néhány fejezetben valamiért görcsösen ragaszkodik a szerző ahhoz, hogy még véletlenül se próbáljon kronologikusan alkotni.
Becsülendő még, hogy a könyv második részében abszolúte nem kerüli ki a célpontok stratégiai kiválasztásának és a terrorbombázás létjogosultságának kérdéseit, de sajnos érdemi válaszokat nem igazán ad a felvetett kérdésekre - persze viszonyítási pont hiányában talán nem is kérhető ez számon.
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