Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

by Donald L. Miller

For over a century, military theorists in the Western world had been under the spell of the Prussian writer Carl von Clausewitz, who argued that the supreme objective of warfare is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Mitchell and Douhet challenged this iron dictum. A contemporary military observer has nicely encapsulated their thinking. “The history of civilized mankind shows us but three . . . revolutionary military inventions, or discoveries: discipline, gunpowder, and the airplane. . . . The airplane for the first time in the . . . history of human conflict, has given to warfare the means of striking . . . directly at the seat and source of [the enemy’s] power—at his citizenry, at his capital city, at his industrial, commercial, and political centers—without first having to overthrow the armed forces with which he seeks to protect them.”