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. The Masters of the Air miniseries will be
the companion to Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's Band of Brothers and
The Pacific.
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. 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.
Fighting 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. Air combat was deadly but intermittent: periods of inactivity
and anxiety were followed by short bursts of fire and fear. 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. But they had a much greater chance
of dying than ground soldiers.
The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of
America--white America, anyway. The actor Jimmy Stewart was a bomber
boy, and so was the "King of Hollywood," Clark Gable. And the air war
was filmed by Oscar-winning director William Wyler and covered by
reporters like Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, all of whom flew combat
missions with the men. The Anglo-American bombing campaign against Nazi
Germany was the longest military campaign of World War II, a war within
a war. Until Allied soldiers crossed into Germany in the final months of
the war, it was the only battle fought inside the German homeland.
Masters of the Air is a story of life in wartime England and in the
German prison camps, where tens of thousands of airmen spent part of the
war. It ends with a vivid description of the grisly hunger marches
captured airmen were forced to make near the end of the war through the
country their bombs destroyed.
Drawn from recent interviews, oral histories, and American, British,
German, and other archives, Masters of the Air is an authoritative,
deeply moving account of the world's first and only bomber war.
