As Don Miller puts it, air power alone did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without air power.Masters of the Air, as its title suggests, focuses on the crews who flew the planes. By January, 1945, before a single soldier had crossed the Rhine, the German economy was in ruins and defeat was inevitable. But starting in the spring of 1944, American bombers began punishing German oil and transportation targets, disrupting the Nazi war machine.
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It took nearly two years for the commanders to figure out how to use the bombers most effectively, during which time the crews paid a horrible price for this new form of warfare. And asCatch-22so cleverly suggested, many airmen suffered debilitating mental breakdowns.Despite all this, the bombing campaign was a success.
In 1943 an airman's chance of surviving 25 missions - the number required to go home - were about one in four. An additional 23,000 flyers were made prisoners of war. The Eighth Air Force suffered over 26,000 fatal casualties,more than the entire Marine Corps. It ended in the spring of 1945 with a succession of thousand-bomber terror attacks against Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden and other cities in Germany.Of all the military services in World War Two, only the German U-boat crews suffered a higher casualty rate than the bomber crews. The Eighth was the more powerful and was the one that bombed Germany.Masters of the Airis the story of the Eighth Air Force.The American bomber war began in the summer of 1942 with a strike by a dozen Flying Fortresses (B-17s), or "Forts," as they were called, against Rouen, then occupied by the Germans. had two air forces conducting strategic bombing in Europe during the war, the Eighth and the Fifteenth.
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