"Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture--and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants." After thoroughly enjoying James Bradley's book Flags of Our Fathers, a compelling history of the World War II battle for Iwo Jima, I was looking forward to reading his follow up book Flyboys, which tells the little-known story of Chichi Jima, a tiny island in the Pacific that literally--and figuratively--sits in Iwo Jima's shadow. Bradley's book tries to be quite a number of things, but at its core it's a history of a series of atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers on American airmen captured during bombing runs over the island. The atrocities were astonishing in their depravity, involving summary executions, decapitations and cannibalism. I'll state one minor weakness of the book up front: About a hundred or so pages covers historical background of the Pacific War that reader
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