Hit the Target: Eight Men who Led The Eighth Air Force to Victory over the Luftwaffe

From Bill Yenne, author of the military histories Big Week and Aces High, comes the stirring true story of the Eighth Air Force in World War II. 

Barely a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Army formed its Eighth Air Force, the first bomber command on either side to commit to strategic daylight bombing, with the goal of defeating the Third Reich from the air. The men of the Eighth paid the price in both lives and blood. 

Hit the Target introduces readers to those who made the Eighth Air Force the formidable juggernaut it soon became. Men of all ranks, from General Tooey Spaatz, the hard-driving founding commander, to Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, the hero who led the first air raid on Japan, to Maynard “Snuffy” Smith, the irascible first airman in Europe to be awarded the Medal of Honor. 

The story of the Mighty Eighth is told through these men, whose careers paralleled the early history of aviation and who helped to revolutionize airborne warfare and win World War II.

INCLUDES PHOTOS

“Bill Yenne scores another bull’s-eye with Hit the Target...This is a story everyone should know.”—Robert Bruce Arnold is the co-author of Wilderness of Tigers, A Novel of Saigon and grandson of the Air Force’s only Five Star General, Hap Arnold

“The story of the mighty United States Eighth Air Force is one for the ages.”—Brian Sobel, author of The Fighting Pattons

Bill Yenne is the author of more than three dozen nonfiction books, especially on aviation and military history, including Big Week and Aces High. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.