[DADoser]

Anyone have this and/or read it?

I was flipping channels on Xmas day and caught the author for an hour and a half on Book TV. His presentation/stories were very compelling - incredible really. I think he conveyed air warfare as it really was (in WWII)...just amazing. Also so of the individual stories he told...fascinating, really.

I believe he was speaking at the 8th Air force museum in Georgia, USA. If you have a chance to see this repeated - its well worth the time. If the book is as good as the author's presentation, this should be a classic.

(Original date of his/this presentation was in Oct. '06)

[DADoser]

On Monday, January 1 at 9:00 pm
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Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany
Donald Miller

Description: Historian Donald Miller discusses the sacrifices of American airmen serving in Europe during WWII. In his talk, given at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Poole, Georgia, Mr. Miller notes that by D-Day in June of 1944, over 10,000 U.S. airmen had been killed during bombing missions. Donald Miller discusses the effectiveness of the bombing, the techniques used, the extremely harsh conditions inside the bombers, and the decisions regarding bombing targets. Much of the author's research was done at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum.

Author Bio: Donald Miller is the author of eight books including "D-Days in the Pacific", "The Story of World War II: Revised, (expanded, and updated from the original text by Henry Steele Commanger)", and "City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America." Donald L. Miller is MacCracken Professor of History at Lafeyette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

[flyXwire]

Thanks for the heads up, Doser. I'll keep an eye out for this.

[Old Crow]

I just got this book for Christmas. I like the author a lot and I think this will be a great read.

[parsig9]

I received a gift card to a discount book seller and this was the only thing that looked interesting. Funny we're talking about it now. Have not really read much yet but will note this thread as I do.

[Cavtanker]

I saw this book at my local bookstore. I'll guess I'll have to get it now.

[admin]

Masters of the Air

America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany
By Donald L. Miller This Edition: Hardcover
Publication Date: 10/2006

Description

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.

Product Details

Simon & Schuster, October 2006
Hardcover, 688 pages
ISBN-10: 0-7432-3544-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-3544-0