|
Masters of the Air |
||
Subject: | History: Military: WWII |
|
Grade Level: | ||
Catalog # | HIST35257 | |
Regular Price: Your Price: You Save: | $35.00 $28.85 $6.15 (17.57%) | |
Author: |
Donald L Miller |
|
Binding: | Cloth | |
Copyright Year: | 2006 | |
|
|
|
Description: |
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 readers 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 U.S. air bases in England. But they had a much greater chance of dying than ground soldiers. In 1943, an American bomber crewman stood only a one-in-five chance of surviving his tour of duty, twenty-five missions. The Eighth Air Force lost more men in the war than the U.S. Marine Corps. The bomber crews were an elite group of warriors who were a microcosm of America -- white America, anyway. (African-Americans could not serve in the Eighth Air Force except in a support capacity.) 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. Strategic bombing did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without it. American airpower destroyed the rail facilities and oil refineries that supplied the German war machine. The bombing campaign was a shared enterprise: the British flew under the cover of night while American bombers attacked by day, a technique that British commanders thought was suicidal.
|
Comments to: castlemoyle.com
© Castlemoyle Books and Gifts
Office hours are 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. (Pacific Time)
We are closed weekends and U.S. Holidays
Castlemoyle Books
694 Main Street
PO Box 520
Pomeroy WA 99347
Direct and Cell Phones: 509-843-5009
Toll Free Orders 1-888-SPELL-86
Fax: 509-843-3183
email: info@castlemoyle.com