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.

(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. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America - white America, anyway. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. 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 U.S.

Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. 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. 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. 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.

Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller