Bomber BoysBomber Boysis a narrative history of the bomber war in World War Two. The U.S. had two air forces conducting strategic bombing in Europe during the war, the Eighth and the Fifteenth. The Eighth was the more powerful and was the one that bombed Germany. Bomber Boys is 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. 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 Air Force suffered over 26,000 fatal casualties, more than the entire Marine Corps. An additional 23,000 flyers were made prisoners of war. In 1943 an airman's chance of surviving 25 missions - the number required to go home - were about one in four. And as Catch-22so cleverly suggested, many airmen suffered debilitating mental breakdowns. Despite all this, the bombing campaign was a success. 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. But starting in the spring of 1944, American bombers began punishing German oil and transportation targets, disrupting the Nazi war machine.

By January, 1945, before a single soldier had crossed the Rhine, the German economy was in ruins and defeat was inevitable. As Don Miller puts it, air power alone did not win the war, but the war could not have been won without air power.Bomber Boys, as its title suggests, focuses on the crews who flew the planes. It is based on over a thousand oral histories and an even greater number of unpublished letters and diaries. Bomber Boystakes readers into battle with the crews, freezing in the air in unheated, unpressurized aircraft. It takes readers to East Anglia, where nearly a quarter of a million Eighth Air Force personnel were stationed, many living among their English hosts. Air men had comforts unknown to the infantry: beds with clean sheets, nights at the local pubs. But they faced far worse odds than any other branch of the armed services.

The POW camps are an important part of this story. Among the captured airmen was Chuck Yeager, who escaped a POW camp across the Pyrenees to Spain, with the help of the French Underground. Many airmen spent most of the war in the stalags, where life was far grimmer than portrayed in movies and television. The book also grapples with the moral issue that has re-surfaced recently. Most of the air crews knew that they were bombing civilians. Some historians have argued that the bombing campaign failed to destroy the morale of the German people, but Miller makes clear that it succeeded. The problem was that the German people had no options but to continue to work and hope to survive, demoralized or not. The RAF believed strongly in "city busting," bombing civilians, but as Bomber Boysshows, bombing oil refineries, factories, and rail hubs was far more effective, even though these campaigns produced heavy civilian casualties, too.

All but a relative handful of the airmen had never flown in a plane in their lives until they joined the Eighth. Among those whose stories Miller tells are Robert Morgan, pilot of the famous Memphis Belle; Col. William Wyler, the director, who flew with Morgan and filmed the story of the plane and its crew; Clark Gable, an Eighth Air Force gunner, who made a little-known documentary about the Eighth (and later made the Oscar-winning Best Years of Our Lives, which featured Dana Andrews as a flyer just home from the war); Andy Rooney and Walter Cronkite, young war corresp.