War has played a key role in the history of the United States, from the nation's founding

right down to the present. War made the U.S. independent, kept it together, increased its

size, and established it as a global superpower. Understanding America's wars is essential for understanding American history.

Welcome to Key Battles of American History,

a podcast in which we discuss American history through the lens of the most important battles of America's wars.

Here is your host, James Early.

Thank you. your host, James Early. Hello and welcome back to Key Battles of World War II in Europe, our 10,000-foot survey of the

Second World War in Europe and the areas around it.

I'm your host, James Early, as always.

And my co-host, as always, is Sean McIver.

In our last episode, we talked about the invasion of Sicily and Italy and the long, drawn-out battle to move up the Italian peninsula, to knock Italy out of the war, and eventually to defeat even the German forces that were

there. And we got all the way through the fall of Rome and the surrender of Italy. But now we're

going to go back in time and have another topical episode. We're going to go up in the air.

And we're going to talk about strategic and tactical air campaigns over Europe. So the title of

this episode is Masters of the Air.

We borrowed that from a well-known book that is very shortly to become a TV series on Apple TV Plus,

which I'm really looking forward to, and Sean is as well.

So shall we take off, Sean?

Into the Wild Blue. Let's do it. All right, let's see what happened. So, beside the Battle of the Atlantic, the Allied Strategic bombing campaign against

Germany was the longest of the war, and it still elicits controversy. The battle went through

different phases with different ebbs and flows, where theories of

warfare and evolving technologies were major parts of the battle's story.

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