THEY CAME OVER BERLIN WITH ESCORTS. That convinced Hermann Goering that he truly could be called Mayer. That's only one of the multiple marvelous tidbits in Masters of the Air, billed as the story of the U.S. Army Air Forces "bomber boys" although most of the coverage is of the Eighth Air Force, based in England, which became the most destructive air force flying by war's end. I could make Book Review N^o. 24 into a midi-dissertation. There's insufficient time. Buy it. Read it. Enjoy it. Masters is a readable and comprehensive survey of all aspects of the air campaign, including the disagreements between the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army over proper bomber doctrine, the costs of the campaign, the lessons learned in blood, the experiences of the populations under the bombs, the effect on the German economy, and the suffering of the prisoners, particularly at war's end when the Germans couldn't work out whether the propaganda value of prisoners was greater as hostages, tokens for amnesty, or corpses. Economist Paul Baran, football coach Tom Landry, and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach make cameo appearances. Chuck Yeager escapes from prison to destroy a jet. The book makes the best effort I have seen to learn the fates of Joseph Kennedy the younger and Glenn Miller. Author Donald L. Miller scores an extra point by referring to John Kenneth Galbraith as "notoriously immodest." Professor Galbraith's strategic bombing survey comes in for some stick as well. Although neither British nor U.S. doctrine worked as intended, the combined weight of the air offensive sufficed to break Germany's economy, which, in addition to being based on plunder so as to minimize domestic sacrifices (even after the cities started burning), was still an early Machine Age economy based on coal and railroads. Author Miller suggests that more rapidly repeated visits to the rail centers would have aggravated Germany's logistical problems more rapidly. That's the luxury of victory. The bomber campaign did keep troops and artillery tied down in Germany and the occupied nations to the west of sufficient weight to have hampered the Soviet counterattacks and prolonged the war. Despite the bad weather and serious losses ("stop-loss" in World War II meant your tour that was supposed to end after 25 completed missions would then end after 30, or 35, or 40, and not many of the early crews returned home alive) the air-suppression and logistics campaigns did achieve their objectives in time for the invasions. And General Doolittle, who became the Eighth's commander in the Pacific, declined an opportunity to send his unit's new B-29s against Japan just before the surrender for bragging rights. The unit had nothing left to prove.