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.

Masters of the Air by Donald L. Miller