Donald L. Miller spent years tracking down the men of the Eighth Air Force; haunting reunion halls, poring over diaries at England’s Mass Observation Archive, and sifting through declassified records at Maxwell Air Force Base. He wasn’t thinking about slipcovers or gilt-blocked cloth bindings. He was thinking about the 25-year-olds who climbed into B-17 Flying Fortresses at 25,000 feet, without long-range fighter escort, and somehow kept doing it until they had flown 25 missions or died trying.
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That obsessive fidelity to the human record is what made “Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine” a phenomenon when it was first published. It became a New York Times bestseller in both hardback and paperback, and eventually the source material for the Apple TV+ miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.
Now, The Folio Society is giving Miller’s account the physical form it has long deserved: a 728-page deluxe hardback edition available exclusively through the London publisher’s website.
“This is a treasure for devotees of the air war,” Miller told We Are the Mighty, “as a hardback edition of the book is no longer available. The quality of the book is unsurpassed; it’s one of a kind, and I am as proud of it as I am of the television series and documentary film we made from it.”
Miller, the John Henry MacCracken Professor of History Emeritus at Lafayette College and the author of ten books, spent decades translating primary sources into narrative history. For “Masters of the Air,” his central figures were men like Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, a Brooklyn lawyer turned bomber pilot who flew 52 combat missions, survived two crash landings behind enemy lines, and returned home to serve as a prosecutor at Nuremberg; and Harry Crosby, the 100th Bomb Group’s navigation officer whose diary gave Miller an intimate window into the psychology of men under sustained aerial combat.
“What set Rosie apart,” Miller said, “was not just the missions. It was the fact that he refused to leave. Other men rotated home. Rosie kept volunteering to go back.”
The 100th Bombardment Group, also known as the “Bloody Hundredth,” earned its grim nickname through staggering attrition. Over 22 months of combat, the unit lost 732 airmen killed and 923 taken prisoner, with 177 aircraft shot down. At one point, the group lost 86% of its original complement of 30 B-17s.
Miller’s research pulled those numbers into human focus through letters, diaries, and hours of recorded interviews with veterans before they were gone.
His connection to Spielberg and Hanks dates to 2000, when the two filmmakers, fresh from “Band of Brothers” and already developing “The Pacific,” began exploring the air war as the third installment of their World War II trilogy.
The project moved slowly, spending years at HBO before Hanks’ Playtone production company brought it to Apple TV+. The nine-episode series, starring Austin Butler as Maj. Gale “Buck” Cleven, premiered Jan. 26, 2024, and ran through March 15 of that year, introducing the Eighth Air Force to an audience that grew up watching “Band of Brothers” on DVD.
The Folio Society Edition
The Folio Society—a London-based independent publisher that has operated as an Employee Ownership Trust since 2021—has built its identity around producing premium illustrated editions sold directly to consumers. Its catalog includes Jane Austen, George R.R. Martin, Ian Fleming, and Kazuo Ishiguro. With “Masters of the Air,” it brings the same treatment to military history.
The new edition is bound in printed and blocked cloth, housed in a slipcase bearing the shield of the Eighth Air Force. The enhancements go well beyond aesthetics. More than 60 archival photographs (with several never previously published) are included throughout the volume, all captioned by Miller himself.
A full-color B-17 Flying Fortress cutaway, reproduced from a rare 1940s combat manual, is stored in a separate pouch. A reproduction of a painting by noted aviation artist Gil Cohen, depicting Rosenthal addressing his crew before a mission, adds an artistic dimension that the original edition lacked. Graphic combat maps and new introductions by Hanks and series co-producer Kirk Saduski round out the additions.
The Monument and the Mission
Miller’s investment in the Eighth Air Force story did not end with the book or the series. He spearheaded the erection of a monument at Lafayette College (positioned symbolically at Utah Beach) honoring the men of the Mighty Eighth.
The monument includes statues of Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, Rosenthal, Col. Don Blakesley, and enlisted Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Maynard “Snuffy” Smith. For Miller, these were not abstractions. They were men he had interviewed, whose letters he had read, whose voices he carried into the writing.
“The bombers didn’t just break down the Nazi war machine,” Miller said. “They broke themselves doing it. That’s the story.”
That story, now available in its most complete physical form, belongs alongside the Folio Society’s other wartime volumes, like “Band of Brothers” by Stephen E. Ambrose and “Dispatches” by Michael Herr, all benchmark editions of essential war literature.
For readers who came to “Masters of the Air” through Apple TV+, the Folio edition is an invitation to go deeper. The Folio Society edition of “Masters of the Air: How the Bomber Boys Broke Down the Nazi War Machine” is available now at The Folio Society website.
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