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. 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 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.įighting 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.

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.

The Masters of the Air miniseries will be the companion to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers and The Pacific. 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 by Donald L. Miller