Alumnus Donald Miller a leading
voice in chronicling World War II
Story: Rob Biertempfel
Born in November 1944, only nine months before V-J Day, Don Miller is too young to have personal memories of World War II. Yet, as Miller grew up in his close-knit Slovak Irish neighborhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, the war was tucked away in his grandfather’s attic, waiting for him to discover it. Although Miller never experienced the far-flung battles or the sacrifices made by soldiers and civilians, he knew many who did. Miller’s father, Donald, was based stateside during the war in the Army Air Force and later became president of the Reading chapter of Catholic War Veterans. His uncle, John, stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day with the Big Red One, the First Division. His other uncle, Bill, flew B-29 bomber missions in the Pacific Theatre.
When Miller’s father and uncles returned home, they stowed their combat gear and other mementos in the attic. On rainy summer afternoons, Miller and his younger brother, Larry, would climb into the rafters of the row house on Laurel Street and explore the contents of those musty boxes and trunks. “There were gas masks, German daggers, Lugers, uniforms, and bomber jackets,” Miller remembered. “My mom used to hang up the wash and the bomber jackets. It was part of our lives.”
Nearly eighty years later, Miller, C’66, H’93, is a respected historian and educator who is sustaining the legacy of the Americans who fought in World War II. Last May, Miller talked about his craft with a group of Saint Vincent College alumni at the annual Bearcats in the Big Apple event in New York.
Miller's most recent book about the war, Masters of the Air, tells of the airmen who vanquished the Nazis in the skies over Europe. A New York Times bestseller, the book inspired a nine-part docuseries produced by Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and Gary Goetzman. The series debuted worldwide in February 2024 on Apple TV+ and has become the streaming service’s most-watched show.
Miller was a consultant for the Masters of the Air series. He also worked with Hanks, Spielberg, and Goetzman on the World War II miniseries The Pacific, which aired in 2010 on HBO.
“During the filmmaking process, we’d get pleading letters from [World War II veterans], saying, “Please finish this in my lifetime. I really want to see it.” We kept thinking about those guys and how much this means to them,” Miller said. “Not a day goes by when I don’t hear from someone, thanking us for making those movies. Some of the guys hadn’t talked much about the war, and it helped them to open up to their families about it. Or maybe it caused the families to go into their attics and pull out old letters and things and learn about what grandpa did during the war.”
Miller came to Saint Vincent to play football, but the program was disbanded in his freshman year. “I managed to get an academic scholarship and stuck it out,” he said with a chuckle. He majored in European history and philosophy and took only one American history course. “I wasn’t interested in military history back then because most of the military history I’d read was pretty dry,” Miller said.
That changed in 1990, when historian and filmmaker Ken Burns released The Civil War series on PBS and blew up the conventional storytelling process of miliary history. “Ken broadened the canvas and brought in African Americans, women, and the whole home front,” Miller said. “It was a cultural and social history of the war, and that interested me.”
A professor of history at Lafayette College, Miller’s newfound interest in military history sparked him to begin teaching courses on the Civil War and World War II. “The two became commingled because I was interested in the impact of heavy combat on human beings” Miller said. “The psychological aspect of it was the initial hook for me with World War II.” Miller’s books about World War II—The Story of World War II (2001), D-Days in the Pacific (2005), and Masters of the Air (2006)—have been published in ten languages and feted with more than a dozen literary awards.
Miller first met Hanks and Spielberg about twenty-five years ago at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. The two Hollywood heavyweights helped raise money to build the museum, which opened on June 6, 2000, the fifty-sixth anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy. When Hanks and Spielberg began mapping out The Pacific as a companion piece to their hugely successful HBO docuseries Band of Brothers (2001), they hired Miller as a consultant.
After The Pacific was released, Spielberg and Hanks began searching for a follow-up project. According to Miller, “Spielberg came into the offices at Playtone, that’s Hanks’ studio, and said, ‘I’ve just finished reading Masters of the Air, and that’s what we’re going to do next!’”
It took Miller about five years to write his Masters of the Air book. His research often resembled detective work, as Miller attended bomber group reunions and conferences, and interviewed dozens of veterans. “One guy would put me in touch with another one and that’s how it went,” Miller said. Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 Superfortress “Enola Gay” on its atomic bombing run on Hiroshima, Japan, suggested Miller talk to Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, who flew fifty-two missions over Europe with the Army’s Eighth Air Force.
“Rosie was an amazing figure,” said Miller, who developed a close friendship with Rosenthal and regularly drove from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley to New York for visits. “I was transfixed by his story. His modesty really stood out. There was no chest pounding or anything like that. He opened up about the war late in his life, although he didn’t write about it. Almost everything I gathered from him was oral testimony—interviews with him, some of his crew, and other members of the Hundredth.”
The 100th Bombardment Group was based at Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, England. It sustained such heavy losses during daytime raids in the summer and fall of 1943 that it became known as the “Bloody Hundredth.” On one particular mission over Münster, Germany, Rosenthal’s B-17, dubbed the “Royal Flush,” was the only Flying Fortress from its unit that made it back to England.
Although Miller’s book dealt with the entire Eighth Air Force, Hanks and Spielberg focused the miniseries on the Bloody Hundredth. “We decided to tell a lot of the story from inside the cockpit,” Miller said, “showing in depth the horror and heroism of combat in a high-altitude bomber at fifty degrees below zero.”
Don Miller (left) and Tom Hanks during an interview session at Lafayette College.
photo courtesy of lafayette college
Just as in Miller’s book, everything depicted in the miniseries happened in real life. No names were changed, no details were embellished. “Fidelity became our keynote,” Miller said. “We didn’t have to overdramatize it. Hanks kept saying, “We don’t have to make anything up. There’s enough real-life, action, drama, tension—all the good things that make a good movie—available to us in the real story.’”
The props crew built two B-17s from scratch—every rivet, every button was made exactly to Air Force specifications of 1943-45. The uniforms were handmade. Some of the shoes used original shoelaces. “All the booze in the officer’s club was vintage 1943 and ’44,” Miller said. “Everything was on point.”
In the series’ credits, Miller is listed as a consulting producer. “I don’t know what that means,” Miller said with a laugh. “I wasn’t a scriptwriter, but I was a script idea guy. I saw the scripts and we had regular conferences about them. We had a really good team. Hanks, Goetzman, and Kirk Sandusky, the main on-site producers, were very easy to work with—bright and demanding, but no screaming or yelling. They brought me into the making of the film and made me part of the creative team.”
Due to production delays and the pandemic, it took about ten years to complete the Masters of the Air docuseries. Toward the end of the process, Miller began writing a book about the Battle of Vicksburg, a key Union victory in the Civil War.
“Sometimes, you get your mind a little twisted because you’re thinking about the Civil War at the same time you’re doing World War II,” Miller said. “On the other hand, there are lots of lessons from the Civil War that can be applied to any combat. You read a book like The Red Badge of Courage, and it’s all about, ‘Will I fight, or will I run?’ Masters of the Air is about, ‘Will I get in the plane, or will I not?’ Those men didn’t have to fly those suicide missions. They were volunteers. They could have refused to fly and remained in the Air Force, reduced in rank but alive.”
