Masters of the air : : America's Bomber Boys who Fought the air war Against Nazi Germany

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	940.544 Mi	4-week checkout	On Hold Shelf
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / World War II / Miller, Donald L.	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024

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Best of the trilogy (treating Band of Brothers and The Pacific as its predecessors) submitted by dewittj on June 24, 2022, 1:54pm Masters of the Air discusses the 8th Air Force and the air war over Europe. In contrast to (the books) Band of Brothers and The Pacific, which strictly follow the experiences of the soldiers with very little authorial commentary, MotA strikes a different balance: while Miller still focuses on the experiences of the soldiers, there is extensive discussion on the prevailing (naive) theories of aerial warfare at the time, the political struggles to keep the US's air forces independent of the British RAF, and the decisions that the Air Force's leadership was making. Crucially however, these topics are not discussed just for their own sake. At every turn, Miller's discussion of these topics is used to explain the situations in which ordinary airmen found themselves.

Miller has a degree of sympathy for the Air Force's leadership, who, just four decades after the first airplanes were invented, struggled to figure out how air warfare would even work. At the end of the day, however, he doesn't pull his punches. The leadership repeatedly bungled the air war: ignoring the ways that radar would improve enemy defenses, failing to design fighters that had a range equal to their bombers, over-estimating the real-world accuracy of their bombers, and failing to develop an accurate model of the German economy that would have allowed them to attack with greater precision and effectiveness. At every turn, the airmen suffered the consequences of these decisions.

Along the way, Miller tackles a number of important topics that should be of general interest: racism in the US Military and in Britain, the frequently tense relationship between British civilians (not to mention the British military) and American military personnel, and the growing problem (and awareness) of PTSD. There's also a very interesting chapter about the bombing of Dresden that is worth reading for anyone who has read Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five."

By tying his discussions back to the experiences of the airmen, Miller is able to spin a nuanced and informative narrative. Well worth the read.