Military historian Donald L. Miller has been intertwined with The National WWII Museum since it opened in 2000.
He has served on a museum advisory board, helped plan the international conferences on World War II and appeared at every conference as either a speaker or moderator. Miller is author of the best-selling book, “Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany.”
At this year’s conference, which begins on Dec. 7 and ends two days later, Miller will discuss the Apple TV mini-series that has been adapted from the book. The series, which counts Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks as executive producers, will begin airing in January in what is being billed as the air war’s version of the 2001 highly acclaimed mini-series, “Band of Brothers.”
Miller and Kirk Saduski, the senior executive producer of the upcoming series, will close out this year’s conference.
The three-day event is sold out, but people can register to watch it online for free.
On the first day, the conference will focus on the challenges in Europe and Asia once the war ended, tying into the new exhibit that opened at the museum in early November.
It aims “to amplify and illustrate the themes of the Liberation Pavilion: Finding hope in a world destroyed,” said Michael Bell, executive director of the museum’s Institute for the Study of War and Democracy.
A pivotal friendship
Miller said it was his friendship with the late Stephen Ambrose — the University of New Orleans historian, best-selling author and co-founder of the museum with Gordon “Nick” Mueller — that steered him into writing about World War II.
Miller wrote a book using Ambrose’s UNO archives that contained recollections of soldiers: “D-Days in the Pacific,” a title suggested by Ambrose.
Miller then turned to the air war.
“No one had ever flown this high,” Miller said in an interview. “No one had ever fought this high.”
The book highlighted the extreme danger that airmen faced during the early stages of the war.
“In October 1943,” Miller wrote, “two-thirds of the men could expect to die in combat or be captured by the enemy. Another 17 percent would either be wounded seriously, suffer a disabling mental breakdown or die in a violent air accident over English soil.”
‘The most dangerous job’
Miller concluded: “Along with German and American submarine crews and the Luftwaffe pilots they met in combat, American and British bomber boys had the most dangerous job in the war.”
Miller said that during his research for the book, he became especially interested in how the airmen could fly mission after mission in the face of enemy fighters and the artillery shells known as flak that produced the staggering casualties.
“A lot of people think of the bomber war as push-button warfare, you don’t see the enemy,” he said in an interview. “But it was a mind-shaking experience. I think the series will be an eye-opener for a lot of people — the fury of the combat. There were no foxholes in the sky.”
The upcoming Apple TV mini-series will explore these themes. Actors include Austin Butler and Barry Keoghan.
“PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) manifested itself in different ways for men in the air,” Miller said. “For the men on the ground, it was the duration of combat. For flyers, it was a single, shocking traumatic experience.”
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