The Bomber War in World War II was waghed by two forces: the Lancasters and Halifaxes of the RAF's Bomber Command, and the Flying fortresses and Liberators of the American Eighth Air Force. Thousands of young Americans flew hundreds of raids over Germany, bombing by day in huge formations, attacking industrial plants, oil refineries and cities, in desperately dangerous missions from which the numbers who never returned was appallingly high. But between Pearl Harbor and the Normandy landings the bomber war was the only way the Allies could take the way directly to Germany in Europe, making every town and factory the frontline. Donald Miller has now written a truly compelling and immensely moving history of the Eighth Air Force in Britain: the individual destinies, the famous and notorious raids like Schweinfurt-Regensburg and Dresden, the social transformation of sleepy East Anglian villages by an influx of hundreds of good-time young Yanks, the POW camps in which many of them ended up, and the endless controversy about the ethics of area and terror bombing. It is the ideal complement to books like Max Hastings' History on Bomber Command and patrick Bishop's Fighter Boys.