Masters of the Air

America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

By: Donald L. Miller

Narrated by: Joe Barrett

Soon to be a major television event from Apple TV, Masters of the Air is the riveting history of the American Eighth Air Force in World War II, the story of the young men who flew the bombers that helped bring Nazi Germany to its knees, brilliantly told by historian and World War II expert Donald Miller.

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

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

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

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

Drawn from 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.

©2006 Donald L. Miller (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

Depth of Detail was incredible!

I picked this up as a companion to the newly released AppleTV dramatic series. I have to say I enjoyed this far more than the series. I think Hanks and Spielberg had a difficult challenge in bringing an unabridged 24hr + audio book and squeezing it into a 9 episode, 9 hour series. This book is not similar to Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers. While their are an incredible amount of personal accounts throughout, this book takes on the entire USAAF Bomber Command strategy. From it's very beginnings with the "Bomber Mafia" and their uncompromising belief in strategic bombing and it's implementation. The author does a masterful job of connecting these strategies all the way down to the human level, and the perspective of pilots and crews. He pulls back the curtain and cast the light on the devastating cost these strategies had on these young men. This book brings into sharp contrast the differing beliefs between RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF Bomber Command. Examining the difficulty in prosecuting total air war while attempting to apply morality at the same time. A great read!

The bombing statistics were alarming to me.

This book gave me new insight into the European theater bombing campaign. Very good book

Fantastic

Very well written and detailed account of the 8th AAF in the Germany campaign in WW2.

Very in-depth.

Wasn’t a fan of the narrator. Because of that I felt it really dragged on.

Epic telling of WW2 history

Loved every minute of it. Even the heart breaking moments were moving. Not a lot of people can truly understand the scope of suffering.

Incredible Listening

Be aware, you will here things never before realized. Common knowledge you've carried for a lifetime will get tested and reset.

Definitely worth the time and definitely mandatory reading for anyone wishing an understanding of the air war of WW2.

Amazing book.

Comprehensive and fair narration of the World War Two European bomber campaign. Entertaining and educational.

excellent review of the air war

This is a comprehensive well written history of the air war in Europe during World War II. A major distraction was the narrator's compulsion to imitate German and British accents let alone trying in vain to speak like Churchill.

TV show was good, this was better

fantastic writing! I love the level of detail the author goes in, paints such a vivid picture at times while listening, I actually felt the fear,anxiety and stress of the morning mission briefing when a tough target was revealed, I can almost taste the shot the fliers got as they entered the post mission debriefing. The author conveyed these feelings so profoundly that I could feel the fliers emotions reaching across 80 years as if I was seating next to them.

Excellent History in Story Form

Great background on a war that has hundreds of books on record.... Many new details I had never known. Many good sub+stories. The narrator's attempts at Brittish and German accents were not great, but other than that, he was good. The overall book could have been shorter I think. I have not seen the series.