Skip to main content

Flyboys by James Bradley

"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 readers can find in any of dozens of other books. It will be review material for anyone who knows their WWII history, but it's worth wading through it in order to get to the new ground that this book breaks--the stories of the airmen who were caught, tortured and killed on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere.

Sadly, what took place on this island was kept secret by the US military for decades. It's disturbing that the Navy knew all along what happened to these eight pilots, yet it chose to withhold this information from their families even to this day. Thanks to Bradley, who obtained access to these airmen's service records through a secret source inside the military, these soldiers' stories can now be told.

And since Stephen Ambrose's reputation has turned rotten under the heat of numerous plagiarism allegations, it's my view that James Bradley is staking out ground as one of the best current military history storytellers out there right now. Recommended.



Reading List for Flags of Our Fathers:
A note to new readers of this blog: I create reading lists from the books I read so if I choose to go deeper into the subject matter, I have a ready-made list of titles to choose from. I share these book lists with my readers in case they wish to do the same.

1) The Second World War by John Keegan (This is the first book I'd recommend to readers interested in an exceptional and comprehensive history of World War II)
2) Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert Bix
3) Looking Forward by George Bush with Victor Gould (long before he became President, George Bush senior was a Navy pilot who was shot down near Chichi Jima)
4) Tojo and the Coming of the War by Robert Butow
5) Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower (this is an exceptional book that I'm now reading)
6) American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur by William Manchester
Japan: A Modern History by James McClain
7) The Right Stuff by Tom Wolf (an entertaining and at times hilarious history of the early days of test-pilots and astronauts in the USA)
Labels:

More Posts

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huckleberry Finn is really two books: a good one and a bad one. The good one, the first fifteen or sixteen chapters, is engaging, original and beautiful. The second book, the bad one, is hackneyed, inorganic, farcical, and in places nearly unreadable.  It feels like the overall work was written by two different people, which in fact it more or less was: the Mark Twain of 1876, fresh off the tremendous success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and the Mark Twain of seven years later, cramped with financial stress and writer's block. Thus the back two-thirds of the book feels more like a collection of vaguely related short stories than a coherent novel, with random characters entering and exiting the stage to resuscitate an increasingly cadaverous plot. Twain is even forced to wedge Tom Sawyer back into the story late in the book, thanks to one of American literature's least plausible coincidences. It brings to mind Virginia Woolf's famously condescending remark about the no...
Read more

Understanding Human Nature by Alfred Adler

A difficult book, in part because Adler isn't all that good at expressing his ideas: he's a practitioner, not a writer, and it shows. Further, I believe Understanding Human Nature has more in direct value than direct value: the reader has to move from what the book teaches to a layer of second-order insights. I'll explain what I mean in a moment. First a quick summary of the book's core themes and ideas. According to Adler, we all have a psyche, formed and largely fixed in childhood, and that psyche has an ulterior psychological goal. For most of us, unfortunately, that goal takes the form of striving for power, control, attention, or superiority. Throughout the book Adler gives examples where peoples' psyche-driven strivings cause suffering, both for themselves as well as everyone else in their blast radius. Most of us will likely resist Adler's claim that to understand other people and their motivations you must first understand their psyches' "ulter...
Read more

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

Fun, engaging novel about a very intelligent--and very naughty--boy. If we're lucky, we will all have a little bit of Tom Sawyer in us: we all misbehave, we all show off, we all counted the interminable minutes until recess, and we all have our little schemes and connivances. Nobody remembers the boys who behave themselves all the time. There's some subtlety to Twain's writing too at times: we see a good example in Chapter 6, when Tom is late to school. [1] You have to read with fairly close attention to note that Tom sees an empty seat, the only empty seat, next to Becky Thatcher on the girls' side of the classroom. He was thinking several steps ahead, and this was exactly why he spontaneously admits to his teacher, loudly, that his tardiness was due to talking to the town's black sheep, Huck Finn. He did it because he knew the teacher would put him on the girls' side of the schoolroom, right next to Becky! [A quick affiliate link to Amazon for those readers...
Read more