About Masters of the Air


            In Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, celebrated historian Donald L. Miller—author of the widely praised The Story of World War II—has written a riveting account of the stoic courage of these men and boys of the Greatest Generation. Drawing on hundreds of oral history interviews with surviving airmen and civilians who were victims of the bombing campaigns in Great Britain and Europe, as well as unpublished diaries and letters and recently de-classified government documents, Miller recreates the shattering experience of bombing, in the air and on the ground. While his focus is on the boys in the bombers, his is one of the only books on the air war to document in compelling detail the physical and mental horrors of being under the bombs, in German cities.
            “The history of the American air war against Germany is the story of an experiment: the testing of a new idea of warfare,” Miller writes. “American bomber crews learned to fight the air war by experience and experiment, every mission a learning exercise. It was a special kind of experience, different from that of the ground forces.” Before joining the Air Force, most bomber crewmen had never even flown in a plane. In the first two years of bombing from their bases in eastern England, the Eighth Air Force sustained staggering losses on missions that had little impact on the German war economy. Miller’s deeply personal story captures the anxiety and terror on these flights, where frostbite, oxygen deprivation and psychological strain were even greater threats than enemy fighters and flak guns. In the early years of the war only one airman in four survived his required 25 missions.
            The story of the Eighth Air Force is one of equal parts bravery, terror, and glamour, with some of its men becoming the most celebrated personalities the war. Miller chronicles the heroic feats of Robert Morgan, pilot of the legendary Memphis Belle; of Paul Tibbets, who later would fly the Enola Gay on the A-bomb mission to Hiroshima; of Curtis LeMay, the most celebrated combat leader of the bomber war; and—one of the key figures of the book—of Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, leader of the Bloody Hundredth, who flew 52 combat missions, was shot down three times, and later became a member of the team of prosecuting attorneys at the Nuremberg Trials.
            The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany was the longest military campaign of the World War II, a war within a war. Until Allied troops crossed into Germany in the final months of the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland. But strategic bombing was not effective until the appearance in late 1943 of a miracle plane, the P-51 Mustang, a long-range fighter escort that helped the Allies achieve the air supremacy over Northern Europe. That, in turn, allowed the D-Day invasion to go forward and also opened the way for the destruction, through cataclysmic bombing, of the German war machine.
            The exploits of the Eighth Air Force were captured for the home front by the “Writing 69^th,” a group of war correspondents that included Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney. Flying on combat missions, these journalists sent home “you are there” dispatches about the Bomber Boys. Hollywood director William Wyler flew on Memphis Belle and made one of the most famous war documentaries ever filmed. Even movie stars joined the Eighth Air Force, among them Clark Gable, who eschewed any special treatment, and Jimmy Stewart, who become one its most decorated air commanders.
            This is not just a story of war in the air. Miller tells the stories of captured airmen in German prison camps, including Stalag Luft III, scene of the largest prison break of the war, later depicted in the movie The Great Escape, and Stalag 17, also made famous on film. POWs, evacuated from camps by the SS late in the war as the Red Army advanced, undertook grueling forced marches, dying in great numbers, and witnessing the devastation they had caused with their bombs. French and Belgian resistance fighters risked their lives rescuing downed airman—and were often executed for their efforts. One airman who was shot down in Nazi-occupied France and escaped across the Pyrenees with the help of these heroic leaders of the European Resistance was fighter pilot Chuck Yeager, who later gained fame as a test pilot.
            Masters of the Air is a story, as well, of life in wartime England, in bombed-out London, as well in the tiny hamlets these brash young Americans completely transformed. Many airmen fell in love with British girls they met in the local pubs, and over 45,000 American servicemen took English brides and brought them home after the war.
            Miller gives full coverage to the morality of strategic bombing. He argues that while the 8^th Air Force, as opposed to British Royal Air Force, concentrated on industrial targets and did not set city-consuming fires, as the RAF did at Dresden, it did conduct terror bombing—the indiscriminate bombing of non-combatants—in an effort to shorten the war in early 1945. Many bomber boys, and some 8^th Air Force commanders, including General Jimmy Doolittle, expressed strong moral reservations about these raids.
            Prominent journalists and historians have insisted that strategic bombing failed to curtail German production and that urban bombing actually strengthened the will of the German people to resist.  Miller argues differently.  He concludes that strategic bombing did not win the European war, but that the war could not have been won without it.


Main Characters in Masters of the Air

Gen. Hap Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces in World War II and the only  air commander ever to attain the five-star rank of “General of the Army.”

Maj. Gale “Buck” Cleven, Eighth Air Force Squadron commander, credited for giving the 100^th Bomb group its personality.

Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney, young war correspondents who flew with the bombers and covered life on the bomber bases. They were part of what was known as The Writing 69^th.

Clark Gable, an Eighth Air Force gunner, who joined the Air Force as a private after the tragic death of his wife, the actress Carol Lombard.

Lt. Gen James Doolittle, the first American to bomb Japan, and later commander of the Eighth Air Force, starting in 1942.

Gen. Ira Eaker, the man who built the Eighth Air Force in England and was its first bomber commander.

Maj. John Egan, commander in the Bloody 100^th who was Maj. Cleven’s best friend.

Irving P. Kirk, head of CalTech’s meteorological department. He projected long-range weather, for patrons, who included fruit growers and Hollywood movie directors. He would tell the Eighth commanders when the conditions were suitable to fly a mission.

Col. Bernie Lay, Jr., one of the founders of the Eighth Force, who co-authored with Cy Bartlett, another air force leader, Twelve O’ Clock High!, the finest novel and later dramatic film on the bomber war.  

Curtis LeMay, one of the most controversial figures in American military history. He changed the way the American bomber war was fought with more accurate bombing.
            Later, he was the model for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, urged the preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, tired to provoke a nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and urged Pres. Johnson to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.”

Cap. Glenn Miller, who toured the English bases with his Air Force band and died a mysterious death in a crash over the English Channel, a mystery that has recently been solved. 

Robert Morgan, pilot of the famous Memphis Belle, whose crew was among the first to survive the airmen’s required allotment of twenty-five missions.  

Lieutenant Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, the inspirational leader of the Bloody Hundredth, now 88, who enlisted on the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, and flew 52 combat missions and was shot down three times. In one bombing raid, over Munster, Germany, his was the only plane to return. A Jewish lawyer, Rosenthal became part of the team of prosecuting attorneys at the Nuremberg Trials.

Gen. Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, head of all American Air Force operations in Europe and the outstanding air commander of the war.

Jimmy Stewart, Hollywood actor and one of the most accomplished combat commanders in the Eighth Air Force.  

Paul Tibbets, leader of the first Eighth Air Force mission of the war, who was later transferred to the Pacific and dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 

Col. William Wyler, the director, who flew with Robert Morgan and filmed the story of the plane and its crew. He later directed the Oscar-winning Best Years of Our Lives, which featured Dana Andrews as a bombardier just home from the war.  

Chuck Yeager, an Eighth Air Force fighter pilot who was shot down over Nazi-occupied France and escaped across the Pyrenees with the help of the French Underground. He is the hero of the book and film The Right Stuff.


Staggering Statistics

 The Eighth Air Force was the most awesome destruction machine in the history of armed conflict up to that time—and one of the most vulnerable. Here are a few of the numbers:   

• The U.S. Marine Corps sustained nearly 20,000 fatal casualties in the war. The Eighth Air Force suffered over 26,000. An additional 28,000 of its airmen were shot down and made prisoners of war.
• Two-thirds of the men in the Eighth Air Force could expect to die, or be wounded in combat, or be captured by the enemy. 77% of the American boys who flew against the Reich before D-Day would wind up as casualties.
• 17% would either be wounded seriously, suffer a disabling mental breakdown, or die in a violent air accident over English soil.
• Only 14% of the fliers assigned to Maj. John Egan’s Bloody 100th Bomb Group in May 1943, made it to their 25^th mission. This is how 100^th Bomb Group got their bloody reputation and came to be known as the “Bloody Hundredth.”
• Most airmen flew 25 missions, and later, when the Air Force increased the number, 30 missions. Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, the inspirational leader of the 100^th Bomb Group flew 52!
• In ground combat, for every soldier killed, 3 or 4 were wounded. In the air forces, over 3 times as many men were killed as wounded.
• There were two victims in the bomber war: the boys in the planes and those they bombed—over half of them women and children. Masters of the Air tells both their stories. A total of 25 million Germans, almost a third of the nation’s wartime population and nearly half its industrial workforce, was bombed heavily. And somewhere between 500,000 and 600,000 noncombatants residing in the Reich, free and un-free, perished under the bombs. In World War II, 60 million people were killed, most were non-combatants.
  
  

Q&A with the Author

Q: There are so many stories from the Second World War. What prompted you to tell the story of the Eighth Air Force?
DM: The saga of the Eighth Air Force, in its completeness, is one of the untold stories of World War II, a story full of drama and moral meaning, and peopled by an incredible cast of characters, college-age flyboys who took the war directly to Hitler’s doorstep. Masters of the Air deals not only with combat in the sky, but with life in the German prison camps, life on the run—trying to escape the Gestapo—in Occupied Europe, life on the air bases in England and in war-torn London, the most exciting city on the planet in World War II. It delves into controversial subjects like racism and revenge and the morality of urban bombing. 

I’m a cultural historian, not a trained military historian, and I’m interested in how people react under the extreme pressures of total war. I take readers to the face of battle, in the fire-filled skies over the Third Reich, but I also describe the plight of human beings under the bombs in German cities, where the primary victims were women with young children, many of whom wrote searing accounts of their experiences. I want to give readers an understanding of how war “felt,” as Stephen Crane did in The Red Badge of Courage. Masters of the Air aimed at general readers, men as well as women, not just those interested in blood and thunder stories. And it is, I think, a book that resonates with meaning for our own times, for we live, unfortunately, in a world at war.

Q: You write about how most of the “Bomber Boys” had never even been in an airplane before they started training. How did these callow young men end up in this elite force?

DM: These were boys who grew up in the Golden Age of flight. They knew about the Wright brothers, had thrilled at Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight, and had gone out to local fairgrounds to watch the aerial acrobatics of touring barnstormers and stunt flyers. They built model planes out of balsa wood and watched the first Hollywood movies about the wonders of flight. Flying was romance, but they were also seduced by the recruiting campaign of the Army Air Force, which told them they would be joining an elite, all-volunteer outfit, the cream of the crop. By the time they completed their rigorous flight training, they knew this was true. They flew to war, like all innocents do, with blazing confidence.

Q: The Eighth Air Force suffered over 26,000 fatal casualties—more than the entire Marine Corps. How did the crewmen handle their fears, carrying on in the face of such dismal odds?

DM: It was love, not hatred of the enemy, that held them together. Men kept fighting and dying because they didn’t want to let their fellow crewmates down. The reporter Andy Rooney, who covered the ground and the air war, said that he had never seen so many instances of sacrificial comradeship as he saw in the Eighth Air Force. It is one of the ironies of history that wars could not be fought without love, the thing that sustains men under fire and allows them to go on killing for their country.

Q: The picture you paint of the realities of the missions is brutal—frostbite, oxygen deprivation, claustrophobia, not to mention the possibility of mental breakdown. Did many crewmen succumb to these conditions even before the Germans could get them?

DM: Weather was a greater threat than the enemy. Planes took off and flew to their targets in atmospheric conditions that would shut down an airport in peacetime; and there were hundreds of horrific accidents, accidents in which bombers collided in mid-air and exploded, leaving no survivors.

At 25,000 feet the cold kills and the air is un-breathable. Bombers were un-pressurized and their gun ports let in the freezing air, dropping temperatures inside to plane to 50 degrees below zero. The paralyzing cold froze men’s extremities, even their eyeballs, and it froze the equipment of survival: oxygen masks, electric suits and gloves, even the plane’s engines, guns, and hydraulic system.

And men’s minds froze and snapped in combat. As Joseph Heller points out in his novel Catch-22, there were far more cases of mental breakdown than the Air Force admitted. Some of these traumatized boys feared the airplane, their own plane, more than enemy fire. Masters of the Air reveals the aero-medical disaster the Air Force faced in World War II, and describes the mental torture the men went through and the harsh treatment that psychological casualties received in battlefront hospitals and on bomber bases. Men also broke down because they had trouble killing, a problem we are seeing in Iraq today.

Q: One of the sensitive issues you examine in MASTERS OF THE AIR is how the airmen knew their strategic bombing was responsible for the deaths of many civilians, half of them women and children. How did these young men deal with this disturbing truth?

DM: There is a myth about these Bomber Boys—that they were automatons, warriors who killed from long distance, without seeing the faces of their victims, and hence that they had no feelings for those their bombs destroyed. Some of the airmen fit this description; most do not. The Air Force ran its own secret surveys during the war. They are now de-classified and reveal that thousands of the men were deeply troubled by what they were doing, especially when they were sent against targets in densely populated cities, “women and children treatment,” the men called it.   

           But even the strongest dissenters believed in the correctness of their cause and realized that in total war the innocent would have to suffer along with the guilty. Most believed that Hitler and the German people had brought this scourge upon themselves and would have to take responsibility for the slaughter of their own children.

And while the airmen never thought of themselves as innocents, they, too, were suffering.

Q: Do you think there are any moral lessons about this civilian bombing that can be carried over to our own time of war?

DM: In warfare the violence must be not be excessive, beyond what is necessary to achieve a military victory. It must be proportionate to the military objective and not, as in the fire bombing of Dresden, disproportionate. There an entire city was obliterated although the main target was a rail yard. The indiscriminate bombing of women and children in World War II by both the Axis and the Allies led, finally, to the establishment of international codes, rules of war that outlaw the deliberate targeting of non-combatants. They will always be breached, but it is important that they are there, as ethical guideposts.

But toward the end of the war, in its impatience to force a speedy surrender, the Eighth Air Force resorted, for a brief period, to terror bombing. Terror bombing—using shock and awe tactics, to smash civilian morale in hopes that the people rise up against their government—was morally wrong and it didn’t work.

This is a lesson that has not been assimilated by modern air forces, including our own, as witnessed by “shock and awe” type campaigns in Vietnam and Iraq.

What made the story of the air war over German doubly interesting to me is that the moral questions it brings up are eternal, questions about ends and means, good and evil. What kind of behavior is morally justifiable to bring down a morally repugnant regime? When is force proportionate, and when is it disproportionate? Does the achievement of good, i.e. the eradication of evil, justify the killing of innocents? There are no easy answers but since we live in a world at war it is important to re-examine the gray areas, as well as subjects that aren’t often addressed.

Q: What else can we learn from the history terror bombing, especially when it’s so close to home today?

DM: In a recent essay in Time magazine, the noted historian Niall Ferguson says that 9/11 was the beginning of a “new style” war “because the enemy chose as its targets not masses of troops or military installation, as in traditional war, but U.S. civilians—ordinary people going about their business on planes, in tower blocks in government offices.”

But this “new style” war actually began in World War II. In that war 60 million people were killed; most of them were non-combatants—women, children, and the elderly, and hundreds of thousands of them died in bombing raids conducted against cities far behind the front lines. As Churchill told the people of England during the darkest days of The Blitz; “This is a new form of warfare and you are the targets. This is a war of the unknown soldiers.”

Masters of the Air takes the reader to the face of battle and shows war from the warrior’s point of view. It also takes you into the bomb shelters of Berlin, Hamburg, and Dresden and shows how war felt to distressed mothers and their children.

This is not for shock effect. If we’re going to continue to fight wars we need to know how appallingly destructive they can be, so we can avoid them unless our cause is absolutely right.

There is another lesson here. Since both sides in World War II conducted terror bombing, bombing aimed at civilians, and since this is the main weapon of the twenty-first century terrorist, a study of the world’s first bomber war provides an opportunity to scrutinize this method of warfare, its effectiveness as well as its morality. The objective of terror bombing is to break the will and spirit of its victims to the point where they are ready to give up the fight.  World War II shows clearly that terror bombing rarely accomplishes this. 

Q: How did the accomplishments of the Eighth Air Force change the way wars are fought? The Eighth Air Force was really inventing a new kind of war, utilizing new equipment and technologies as they never had been used before. Do you think there are any corollaries for what the military is encountering today in Iraq?

DM: Today there is a heavy American reliance on airpower. It is seen as a quick way to achieve military objectives, especially pacification. It was airpower that kept Saddam contained before the present war broke out, and airpower was effective in the first Gulf War, as well as in the Balkans.

           Wars fought from the sky, where America enjoys complete supremacy, are less costly in blood and treasure than ground wars; and with smart weapons, they can cut down on civilian casualties. That’s the theory, anyway. In Vietnam, bombing did not work. We bombed North Vietnam as if it was Germany, an industrial nation with a network of heavily populated cities, and this failed.

Victories achieved through airpower can also be illusionary. Boots on the ground are necessary to defeat insurgencies, as Americans are finding out in Iraq and the Israelis are discovering in southern Lebanon. Airpower is too often a quick, and ineffective, “fix,” appealing, as it was in the 1930s, to the American people, who do not like to fight long wars and sustain heavy casualties.

Q: Ultimately, did the strategic bombing of Germany and its occupied territories work?

DM: One of the longest-standing myths about World War II is that strategic bombing did not work. It didn’t win the war by itself, but the war could not have been won without it. Terror bombing, as I have said, did not work, but strategic bombing, the bombing of vital economic targets, did. The Allies could not have carried out the Normandy invasion without air supremacy over the English Channel and the Normandy beaches. And after D-Day, Allied bombers knocked out Germany’s entire transportation system and killed its synthetic oil industry. Bombing shortened the war, denying German armies the weapons and ammunition to conduct a final suicidal defense inside German borders. If Germany had been able to do that, it would have been the first nation to become the victim of an atomic attack.

Q: Who were the “Writing 69^th” and what part did they play in publicizing the exploits of the Eighth Air Force?

DM: They were a group of courageous young reporters, among them Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, who covered the Eighth Force and flew with the men on combat missions. Yet though they flew with the boys, they were not what we’d call “imbedded” correspondents. They had more journalistic independence than embedded reporters, even though they operated under rules of wartime censorship. They covered the stories they wanted to cover and were permitted to freely interview the air crews when they returned from missions. Then they returned to London, wrote their copy, and argued face to face with censors about what to leave in and what to leave out. And their stories have fidelity, because the only thing that was stricken was information about operations that might aid the enemy.

One of the Flying 69^th was the academy-award winning Hollywood director William Wyler, who produced the finest wartime documentary about the Eighth Air Force, Memphis Belle. Yes, it’s propaganda but it’s also a film of power and authenticity, one that brought home to American audiences the terror and peril of air combat.

Q: Who were some of the famous men of the day who joined the Eighth Air Force? Why do you think this particular part of the war effort attracted them?

DM: The two most prominent Hollywood movie stars of the day, Jimmy Stewart, and Clarke Gable, the “King of Hollywood,” were members of the Eighth Air Force. Gable flew with the boys and did a film about air gunners; and Stewart was one of the most decorated combat commanders in the war. Then there is the famed orchestra leader Glenn Miller, whose Army Air Force band toured the English bases of the Eighth and who was killed in an air accident over the English Channel. And, of course, a host of men who later became famous were with the Eighth Air Force, among them the football coach Tom Landry, the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and the test pilot Chuck Yeager, the hero of the book and film The Right Stuff.

Q: One little-written-of part of the story you tell involves the POW hunger marches that many of the captured airman endured. What did this “pageant of misery” entail?

DM: In the final months of the war in Europe, the Nazis moved tens of thousands of Allied airmen, including over 30,000 Americans, from prison camps in the path of the Red Army’s advance to camps in western German. The men had no idea where they being taken and Hitler, at one point, planned to use them as hostages to seek a separate peace with the Western Allies. There was even talk inside the Reich of assassinating them, as payback for Dresden.

These men put on forced marches, through brutal winter weather, and hundreds of men died of exposure and hunger. The airmen were on the ground, witnessing the damage they had done, but they found it hard to sympathize with victims who now attacked them physically and spit into the faces, because they witnessed starving, hollow-eyed Jews being marched to new death camps in the west, along the same roads they were traveling.   

Q: You touch upon racial prejudice in what was then a wholly segregated military. How did Jim Crow rear his ugly head vis-à-vis the Eighth Air Force?

DM: African-Americans were the only ethnic group excluded from bomber crews. The head of the 8^th Air Force, General Hap Arnold was a racist, and felt that having blacks on crews, many of them serving over white men, would be perilous to discipline. Blacks served in the Eighth, but they were relegated to ground duty, building air bases and hauling bombs on trucks.  They were not even permitted to work on crews that repaired the bombers.

Blacks were quartered in segregated facilities and were forced to eat and drink in separate bars and restaurants. There were even Black and White nights, when only airmen of a certain color where allowed off base, on leave.

Inevitably, there was racial violence, including a full-scale racial riot between black and white troops in a small town in eastern England called Bamber Bridge. Five men were shot, one of them—a black man—fatally. 

Black GIs, however, got along well with the English people, even though Britain was a racially homogeneous country with not more than 8,000 black residents.  Black American airmen found it liberating to be a country where there were no Jim Crow laws, except those instituted by the U.S. Army.

Q: You focus throughout Masters of the Air on the story of Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, inspirational leader of the Bloody Hundredth. Why?

DM: Rosenthal, still alive at age 88, is the lead character of the book. As a young Jewish law student, he had watched with growing alarm the newsreels of Hitler’s early campaigns against the Jews. He enlisted in the Air Force on Pearl Harbor Monday, determined to fly and fight until either he or Hitler was dead. A quiet, self-effacing star athlete at Brooklyn College, he flew 52 combat missions and was shot down three times, the last time behind Russian lines. On one of his first missions, his was the only plane from the Hundredth to survive the bombing of Munster. After the war, he became a prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. At the Trials, he interrogated Generals Goering and Keitel, and the experience of seeing justice catch up with these monsters brought his war to a morally satisfying end.