Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany - A Review
"Without the B-17, we might have lost the war." — General Carl Spaatz, Commander, US Strategic Air Forces in Europe, 1944
Telling the harrowing story of the thousands of strategic (and ultimately devastating) bombing runs throughout Axis-Occupied Europe throughout World War II, historian Donald L. Miller’s “Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany” serves as the definitive history of the B-17 Flying Fortresses of the “Mighty 8th” Eighth Air Force established in February 1944. And a fascinating history it is.
It was the role of B-17 crews, not the Allied foot soldiers, that suffered the war’s highest casualties. Between 1942 and the successful bombing runs within Nazi Germany that leveled Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and dozens of other cities in 1945, some 4,750 B-17 bombers were lost at the hands of 88mm anti-aircraft guns on the ground and the firepower of Hermann Göring’s mighty Luftwaffe Air Command’s Messerschmitt BF 109’s. The Eighth Air Force lost more than 26,000 pilots and crew members in less than three years — only German U-Boat crews suffered higher casualty rates. More than 23,000 became prisoners of war. Crewmen were required to complete 25 deadly missions before being eligible to return home to the States, with odds of just one-in-four they would survive the first ten. The stress was unimaginable, the penchant for mental breakdowns always an extreme. But despite the losses, including damage to mind and body, the aerial campaigns over Europe and The Pacific were of immense success for the Allies.
Miller’s terrific book, adapted into the $300 million AppleTV+ limited series produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, tells the stories of the crews in their own words. It makes clear that air power alone did not win the war for the Allies. But the war could not have been won without the strategic air power annihilating the German war machine, which included ammunition and weapons factories, rail hubs and oil reserve sources throughout Germany and Poland.
Miller successfully brings readers into the thick of battle — the fear, the noise, the blood, the firepower, the freezing temperatures of 30,000 feet that dropped down to minus-60 degrees in oxygen-deprived unpressurized cabins. There are also the experiences of the POW’s in their miserable German “stalag” confines, including the infamous story of pilot Chuck Yeager’s escape from a POW camp into Spain with the help of the French Underground. Miller also successfully touches on the moral issues that plagued pilots and crews when it came to news of civilian casualties piling up from their “city busting” bombing runs.
“Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany” is a monumental history and deeply moving account of the world’s first and only bomber war. Stories abound not only about the Mighty Eighth, but of the men who lived and died in its honor — to win a war, to destroy global tyranny, to defend freedoms of democracy. A masterfully told and authoritative history of war at its worst and men at their most heroic.
