Professor Donald Miller’s Upcoming Book Will be Released in October

The latest book from Donald L. Miller, John Henry MacCracken Professor of History, weaves the narrative power of fiction with recent interviews, oral histories, and accounts from American, British, and German archives into a deeply personal story about bomber crews during World War II.

Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany, which will be released Oct. 10 by Simon & Schuster, is Miller’s eighth published work and third WWII book.It will also be published in England by Aurum Press under the title Eighth Air Force: American Bomber Crews in Britain. The book examines the social and psychological effects of the war on bomber crews of the American Eighth Air Force, German citizens, and the English people.

Miller used 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with surviving airmen and civilians, who were victims of the bombing campaigns in Great Britain and Europe, as well as unpublished diaries and lettersand recently de-classified government documents, to paint a stunning picture of action both in the air and on the ground.

Some of the real life heroes chronicled in the work are Robert Morgan, pilot of the legendary Memphis Belle; Paul Tibbets, who later would fly the Enola Gay on the atomic bomb mission to Hiroshima; andRobert “Rosie” Rosenthal, leader of the famous Bloody Hundredth, who flew 52 combat missions and is one of the key figures in the book.

Masters of the Air also details the reporting of war correspondents Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney and even the war time heroics of movie stars Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart, who both flew in the Eighth Air Force.

“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,” says Miller. “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.”

The book has garnered a large amount of advance praise.

Historian David McCullough, author of 1776 and John Adams, says, “Donald L. Miller’s Masters of the Air is a stunning achievement. The compound effect of the book’s narrative vitality and attention to human detail is terrific in all the meanings of the word, terrifying, extraordinary, and highly admirable. What a story it is!”

“Miller’s work is always extraordinary but this large volume is especially remarkable for its valuable recovery of details, like all the psychiatric ruin of the many bomber boys assigned to kill German civilians. This is a rare account of the American Eighth Air Force, and with so many readers hoodwinked by fantasies of the Good War, it deserves wide acceptance and ultimate enshrinement as a classic,” says Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory.

James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers and Flyboys, says, “Over the first years of World War II, the only American casualties on European soil were flyboys shot out of the sky. Long before Normandy, America’s bomber boys waged the Allies’ longest WWII campaign and brought the war to Hitler. Now we are fortunate that the incomparable Donald Miller has brought the memory of these Masters of the Air back to us.”

“For sixty years we have waited for a history to equal the epic saga of the Eighth Air Force’s struggle with fighters, flak and weather on a battlefield moving at three miles per minute, five miles above the earth’s crust. Now it is here. With brilliant artistry, Don Miller paints the story from the pallet of the voices of the men who manned the planes or waited them out,” says Richard B. Frank, author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire.

Like many of Miller’s projects, students played a key role in the production of Masters of the Air. As part of Lafayette’s Community of Scholars initiative, Margarita Karasoulas ’08 (Harrison, N.Y.), a history and art double major; Trustee Scholar Alexandra Kenney ’06 (Springfield, Va.), who graduated with an A.B. with majors in history and economics & business; Jess Cygler ’07 (Scarsdale, N.Y.), an English and history double major; and Marisa Floriani ’07 (Wyckoff, N.J.), a history major, helped Miller with fact checking, proofreading, and critiquing.

Community of Scholars is supported by College funding and a $200,000 grant from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation. The three-year program allows faculty members from a variety of disciplines to work with students in small group settings.

Miller has won six awards for excellence in teaching, five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was a resident scholar at All Souls College, Oxford.

In 2003, PBS aired a four-hour American Experience series based on Miller’s book City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America, which won a Great Lakes Book Award. He played a multifaceted role in the production of “Ulysses S. Grant,” a four-hour American Experience program that premiered on PBS television in 2002. Miller was also lead scholar and on-air host of A Biography of America, a video series and telecourse that aired on PBS stations throughout the country in 2000-01. The 26 half-hour programs covered the sweep of American history, from the pre-Columbian beginnings to the present.

The PBS American Experience program, “Victory in the Pacific,” which was based in large part on Miller’s book The Story of World War II, has been nominated for three Emmy Awards. The awards will be held Sept. 25 in New York City.