Donald L. Miller > Quotes

“A human being has to look out for other human beings or else there’s no civilization.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Too many people here and in England hold to the view that the German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place—that only a few Nazi leaders are responsible. That unfortunately is not based on fact. The German people as a whole must have it driven home to them that the whole nation has been engaged in a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Through a policy of trial and error the Eighth Air Force eventually found the right targets, but it ignored one of extreme importance: Germany’s electric power network.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“The fact is that the Eighth Air Force did not have sufficient bombers in its first year of operations to seriously hurt Germany, no matter where it struck.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Thomas Mann had sent a dark warning to his countrymen, “Did Germany believe that she would never have to pay for the atrocities that her leap into barbarism seemed to allow?”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“The Kingdom of Heaven runs on righteousness, but the Kingdom of Earth runs on oil. ERNEST BEVIN, CHURCHILL’S MINISTER OF LABOUR AND NATIONAL SERVICE London,”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“In 1944, the German air defense system called on the services of 4.5 million workers and consumed a third of the nation’s total war resources.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Chicago was “the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the one common, avowed object of making money,”
― Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America

“Often the flak was so thick the men could smell it through their oxygen masks; and the concentrated barrages exploded with such force that the concussions would have driven the pilots through the roofs of their planes had they not been strapped in. On some planes, men sat on sheets of lead to protect their genitals. Helpless in the flak field, all they could do was sit and take it. This was when pilots and crewmen alike learned that it was possible to sweat at 40 degrees below zero. Bombardier Theodore Hallock was not a praying man, but when he was in a tight spot over the target he would whisper to himself, “God, you gotta. You gotta get me back. God, listen, you gotta.” Many of the men promised the Almighty that if they got through they’d swear off liquor and women. Hallock said he never promised that “because I figured that if God was really God he’d be bound to understand how men feel about liquor and women.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“and pressure of the pilots’ limp bodies. After a descent of nearly 15,000 feet, with enemy fighters pounding them even as they picked up speed, he pulled the plane out of its dive so suddenly, said wounded radio operator Thomas Sowell, “I felt my eyeballs were going to pop out through my cheek bones.” At this point, navigator Walter Truemper, a former accounting clerk from Aurora, Illinois, made his way up to the cockpit and Moore handed over control of the ship to him. A few minutes later, Scottish-born Archie”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“because of the noise of the wind. The crew tried to move Nelson so that Mathies could take the left seat, away from the shot-out window, but they stopped suddenly when they realized he was still alive, hanging by a thread. When they reached Polebrook, Truemper radioed the control tower. “The copilot is dead. The pilot we think is dead. The bombardier has jumped. I am the navigator, the only commissioned officer on board. What should we do?” Truemper said Mathies believed he could land the plane, and Col. Eugene Romig, the”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“alongside Ten Horsepower and talk it to the ground by radioing instructions to Mathies. With Mathies flying wildly, alternately climbing and diving, they were unable to get close enough to provide much assistance. After Mathies made a second unsuccessful pass, Romig told Mathies and Truemper to point the bomber out to sea, set the automatic pilot, and bail out. The two men replied that the pilot was still alive and could not be moved. They would not desert him. After failing to land at a neighboring field, Ten Horsepower veered out”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“And here is where World War II holds a lesson for humanity. The Nazis did not think of themselves as savages, and that made them irredeemable. But as Orwell wrote: “If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“In the Air Force, it was the skill and courage of small combat teams that made the difference in battle.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“John Steinbeck wrote in 1942, “Of all branches of the Service, the Air Force must act with the least precedent, the least tradition.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“storm of German fighters that had scored a direct hit on tail gunner George Buske. Vosler sat on the edge of the table in his radio compartment and blazed away with his flexible machine gun through the open hatch overhead until an exploding shell ripped his gun apart as he bent over it. Reaching up to where his eyes should have been, he felt a moist mass of loose flesh. Vosler saw blood streaming down the retina inside his eye. Thinking it was on the outside, he was certain he had lost a good part of his face. “I knew I was going to die,”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“My Story of the War,”
― Donald L. Miller, Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy

“merchant”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Lord Moran—later Churchill’s personal physician. “How is courage spent in war?” Moran asked in The Anatomy of Courage,”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“of control and crash-landed. Mathies and Truemper were killed instantly and were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. The wounded pilot they died trying to save survived for only another hour or so. Carl Moore, the last man to see his three dead crewmates, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. After the war, the Pittsburgh Coal Company renamed one of its mines for Archie Mathies, the air gunner from Stonehouse, Scotland, who had worked beside his father in a bituminous seam in Liberty, Pennsylvania, before”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“In an equally fought battle of attrition both sides sometimes believe they are losing. With Overlord planned for the spring of 1944, Allied leaders became increasingly worried that their air forces would not have sufficient time and strength to achieve, not just air superiority, but the air supremacy Eisenhower deemed essential for the success of the largest amphibious invasion in history. For this reason alone the bomber offensive could not have been officially suspended after Black Thursday; the entire invasion depended upon its success. In the grim calculus of total war, it was considered far better to lose a few hundred unprotected bombers than to have entire divisions slaughtered on the beaches of northern France.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Mathies, a Pennsylvania coal miner’s son who had a few hours’ flying experience, climbed out of his ball turret and joined Truemper in the cock-pit. The two men crouched in the narrow opening between the seats as they tried to decide what to do. Using their hands to manipulate the elevator and aileron controls, which were on the floor of the cockpit, they managed to keep the bomber airborne. Other crewmen pulled Bartley’s body out of the right seat and placed it in the crawlway below the cockpit. Truemper then handed the controls”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“On a return trip from Bremen on December 13, 1943, radio operator Forrest “Woody” Vosler, a former drill press operator from Livonia, New York, was hit where no man was protected. His plane, Jersey Bounce Jr. of the 303rd Bomb Group, “Hell’s Angels,” had two engines shot out and was still being assailed by a”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Epilogue The Eighth Air Force began its great movement back to the United States on May 19, 1945. The bomber boys flew their own planes; the ground echelons and fighter pilots”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Only relationships with people who might be dead tomorrow were important. It is a sort of wonderful state of mind. It’s too bad it takes a war to create such a condition among men.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“started to slide down the wing into the water.” Perched on top of the fuselage, with both eyes filled with blood, Vosler was still able to distinguish blurred shapes. “I knew Buske would be in the water in a fraction of a second. I would have to take action. So I jumped and held out my hand at the same time. I grabbed the antenna wire that runs from the top of the tail to just forward of the starboard radio compartment window. I prayed that it would hold, and I was able to grab Buske around his waist just as he was”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“As the country neared collapse, some discouraged workers became, in their fear and helplessness, more dependent on authority—that of the factory boss as well as the local Nazi hierarchy.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“decapitating co-pilot Ronald Bartley and knocking out pilot C. Richard Nelson. The limp bodies of both pilots slumped forward on the steering columns and, in an eerie parallel, Ten Horsepower went into the same kind of dive that nearly finished off William Lawley’s Fortress. The centrifugal force created by the spiraling dive immobilized every surviving crewman. “For the next few minutes it was like being inside of a spinning top. We were thrown against the fuselage and held there. We couldn’t move,” said waist gunner Russell”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Most of the war brides were either pregnant or with one or two small children when they finally received word in late December that immigration restrictions had been waived for them and ships were available to bring them to their new homes and husbands. “Operation Diaper Run,” as the press dubbed it, was launched from Southampton harbor on January 26, 1946. On board the SS Argentina were 452 war brides, 173 small children, and one war bridegroom. His wife, a Women’s Air Corps volunteer in England, had already been”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

“Every time we came back from a rough mission,” Bert Stiles wrote, “we had to shake up the line-up of [our softball team], and twice we had to find a whole new infield.”
― Donald L. Miller, Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany