The authors do an excellent job of showing how the Allies were able to use their material superiority to best advantage and defeat the Luftwaffe. Counterintuitively, the main advantage gained by the strategic bombing program was the defeat of the Luftwaffe. It was only when the bombers started hitting important targets in Germany accompanied by escort fighters that the German fighters had to fight at unequal terms.

Great description of how the air war was won.

If one wishes to learn about the contributions of the US ArmyAir Forces in Europe during World War II, the literature is repletewith books and articles about strategic precision daylight bombing. However, in To Command the Sky, the authors have broken from the strategic bombing mold to inform us of how air superiority was achieved, and how important that victory was to allow the Allied forces to not only carry out their strategic bombing mission, but also to prepare the battlefield for D-Day. Indeed, without air superiority over the landing areas, the D-Day invasion of the continent would have certainly been more costly, if not impossible to achieve. This excellent book recounts how the Luftwaffe was defeated through a combination of strategic bombing and, more importantly, attrition of the Luftwaffe planes and pilots. Although the book begins with a brief history of military aviation and doctrine, the highlight for this reviewer was the chapter dedicated to training, especially since the authors look at both the American and German programs. Flaws in the German training programs directly contributed to their aerial defeat in 1942 - 1944. Due to the prohibition to maintain a German air force by the Treaty of Versailles after WW I, the Luftwaffe started training its pilots in Russia and Italy during the 1920s and 1930s. By the time Hitler announced to the world the existence of the Luftwaffe in 1935, he had established a formidable force. For myriad reasons though, problems consistently nagged the Luftwaffe and ultimately led to its defeat. These included a lack of training planes, a lack of qualified instructor pilots, little instrument flying time, and shortages of aviation fuel. The authors develop these shortfalls throughout the book and keep coming back to the conclusion that inadequate training was a major factor in the Luftwaffe's demise. Two other aspects of the battle for air superiority that the authors examine are the realizations that fighter escort would be needed to defend the bombers on their strategic strikes, and attrition warfare would be needed to defeat the Luftwaffe. Despite the fact losses from attrition warfare were high, the Allied commanders were willing to accept them knowing that replacement aircraft and qualified pilots were readily available. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading To Command the Sky as I felt it gave a truly balanced account of how fighters and bombers were both needed to achieve air superiority and bring about the defeat of the Luftwaffe. Lastly, the authors' insight into some of the key commanders (Eaker, Doolittle, Spaatz, Arnold) thinking was especially enlightening and appreciated. It put the struggles they faced in commanding such a large force in perspective, especially with regard to the D-Day timeline under which they operated. I believe To Command the Sky is a must read for anyone wishing to study the air campaign against Germany during World War II.

Mr. McFarland needs to read the book The Legendary Norden Bombsight to get the full picture and history of the Norden. This book was published by a person that worked on the bombsight and managed the bombsight shop before and after World War II. This is the first book to detail the Norden Bombsight (NBS)

In the 1930s, the American air forces like most others believed that bombers were invincible. What's more, we convinced ourselves that with the proper bombsight we could "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 ft." McFarland describes the development of the Norden bombsight and how inevitable countermeasures--mostly the "German 88" flak cannon--drove the bombers up to 25,000 feet, from which altitude they were lucky to hit a city, never mind a pickle barrel

Meanwhile, the navy (which had dibs on the Norden bombsight) took the wiser course and depended on single-engine dive bombers, whose pilots essentially turned themselves into missile guidance systems.

The pursuit of precision bombing ended over Hiroshima, where the best bombardier in the USAAF with no flak, no fighters, and perfect weather managed to miss his target by 800 feet. But with the atomic bomb on board, what did it matter? A miss was literally as good as a mile, and Hiroshima vanished.

A good, stolid, valuable history.

The dry title suggests little more than an obscure scholarly monograph when, in fact, this is a fascinating and highly readable account.

Between the years 1942-45, hundreds of thousands of young Americans embarked on an unprecedented struggle: To destroy, from the air, an enemy nation's ability to wage war. This was the first trial of the untested theory of daylight precision bombing. In the event, the reality was often much less than precise. But thousands of lives were risked daily, and many lost, on this premise.

Precision aerial bombing was not a natural outgrowth of the new science of aviation. It was the result of competing and bitterly debated bodies of opinion, inter- and intra-service rivalries, the appalling legacy of the Great War, America's image of itself as reflected in its warmaking philosophy and, a central topic of this book, engineering genius.

The book traces the evolution of the science of aerial bombardment from its origins in WWI to the detonation of the first atomic weapons. Along the way, the author covers not only the technical challenges, but includes portraits of the many personalities, at all levels, involved in the struggle to perfect a force capable of precision destruction. Chief among these is Carl Norden, the inventor of what was, up until the Manhattan Project, America's most closely guarded military secret. A reticent, strong-willed, driven and intensely proud man, this Dutch immigrant who never attained American citizenship created the principal instrument upon which the entire American daylight precision bombing campaign of WWII was founded: the Norden bombsight.

Touted as being capable of putting a bomb in a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet, this precision instrument was the ultimate analog computer--a collection of gears, dials, electromechanical linkages and optics which could calculate the variables of airspeed, altitude, drift, ordnance weight and trajectory to place high explosives close enough to a target to effect its destruction. Almost entirely handmade in its early versions, it was a product of Old World craftsmanship, conceived in the New World, sent as a mechanism of destruction to that same Old World.

From the first crude attempts to design aerial bombsights and formulate tactics, to the service funding debates of the interwar years; from the competition between the Norden company and its rivals, to the procurement battles between the Navy and nascent Army Air Forces; from the manufacturing difficulties inherent in mass-producing a precision instrument, to the training of WWII bombardiers, and even going so far as to include a step-by-step guide to the operation of the Norden sight--this is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched and completely fascinating history. It is highly recommended to any reader of history and technology.