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

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre [fictionalized bio of Jesse Livermore]

"History repeats itself all the time in Wall Street." A fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of history's most famous speculators. This is an enriching book, worth reading every decade or so across your investment career. And it's a genuinely fun read, conveying the free-wheeling investment culture of the days before the Securities and Exchange Act. When you're young and beginning to invest, this book thrills you with all the bravado of speculating. When you're older, after you've seen a few things and learned many of the manipulations and other techniques the investment industry uses to extract money from you, the book becomes more of a cautionary tale of things not to do, traps not to step in, things to avoid. This is the third time I've read this book (I'm now in my fourth decade as an investor, so I guess that makes me one reading behind schedule), and what struck me most this time around was Livermore's self-admitted weaknesses:...
Read more

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...
Read more

Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...
Read more