American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within a war. 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. Actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber boy, and so was the “King of Hollywood,” Clark Gable. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors and a microcosm of America-white America, anyway African Americans could not serve in the Eighth Air Force except in a support capacity. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the US Marine Corps. In 1943 an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. 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.
Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes listeners 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.įighting at twenty-five thousand feet in thin, freezing air that no warriors had ever encountered before, bomber crews battled new kinds of assaults on body and mind.
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.
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