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The Blackened Canteen

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OK, I am the author's son, so you know you are going to read a good review here. But with a very well balanced eye, I will tell you that this is a remarkable book. It is a remarkable book for many reasons, but the main reason is that the story is true. Towards the end of a World War, after being bombed by the enemy, one man had the courage to honor all men as equal. He wanted to give a decent burial to the pilots that just bombed his city. This symbolizes the universality and Divinity of us all. Of course, his fellow townspeople drove him out of his city, but his act remained and his gesture became a symbol for a whole country to reflect on the deeper meaning of life.

My father writes his emotions on his sleeve, so you will be drawn into the book quickly.

For those looking for a story about the nobility of us all, look no further. And after you read the book, drop my father a line. He will appreciate hearing from you on how you liked the book.

Set during World War II, The Blackened Canteen is a search for understanding in a time of institutionalized intolerance and fear. One man, Fukumatsu Itoh, saw beyond cultural, national, and racial borders in order to honor the souls of the people attacking his city. A year ago I lived near Shizuoka prefecture, where the bombing in this story took place. When I was in Japan I remember the anniversary of Hiroshima. The students who were usually lively and talkative became very sober and thoughtful. They had not forgotten that time. We sometimes talked about Japan getting its own military again, but most Japanese people did not want to risk the prospect of war again.

Author Jerry Yellin explores voices American and Japanese, telling his story from the perspective of soldiers, government officials and civilians, tearing down national and cultural barriers to expose the generosity and dignity of the human spirit in everyone. The Blackened Canteen strives to close the gap between people at war. I think that message is relevant to Americans who are confronted with our own war crisis in Iraq. I think the sentiment of forgiveness and peace between nations is a message everyone would want to hear. Although The Blackened Canteen is set during a war, it is truly a story of peace: making peace with the past and shining a light towards a peaceful future.

Jerry Yellin has accomplished something here...a book of extraordinary depth and resonance.

I was mesmerized...at times unnerved...and continually found myself re-examining my thoughts.

Dialogue made it very easy for me to connect with the characters. The book brought to life parts of history I remember being told to me by my father and uncles who served in World War II. It prompts a renewed and profound appreciation of life.

I loved how music, entertainers, food, Iwo Jima, Mt. Fuji, Roosevelt, Churchill....a plethora of information...were all brought to life and intertwined with the personal lives of the soldiers. The incredible courage and caring nature of Mr. Itoh was so moving, along with Dr. Sugano using the blackened canteen as a vehicle of honor and remembrance on top of Mt. Shizuhata.

I've heard it said about nature that trees bend low with ripened fruit, clouds bend down with gentle rain, and noble men bow graciously...this is the way of generous things. This is the way of my friend and neighbor, Jerry Yellin.

I trust that through his book a spark of human kindness will ignite in all of us and peace in the world will prevail!

The Blackened Canteen was written by American Vet Jerry Yellin, a WW II fighter pilot who survived to honor his comrades and the supposed Japanese enemies. He captures many voices. It is clear that he has heard those voices and embraces the cultures of his own birthland and that of his son's adopted culture. He has come to terms with the heartache of losing comrades to those he had always considered the hated enemy.

The most revealing part of this tale is captured in the person of Rev. Itoh whose letter home tells about the futility of the war that Japan is about to enter, and how it has come about due to its economic need and lack of resources. I was touched personally by the particular message for those in my generation, born during the WW II era, who had vague notions about what their Japanese American families had experienced,but no opportunity to question the adults who had to make a living after grueling internment period, but whose resilience set the pace for their progeny who eventually prosper. It is a book for all students of American history to understand ourselves.


The Blackened Canteen portrays the potential for all men to be humane. It tell us that we all owe a debt of gratitude to those who came before us and that lines of communication must be kept open at the highest levels of government. Its message is that we must conduct ourselves in the now such that future generations can enjoy the luxuries that we have today. Its essence is to say that we need to be true to ourselves when we point fingers at what we call an "enemy."

Judy Niizawa
President (1980-1981)
San Jose Japanese American Citizens League

I have read many academic and historical fiction texts about Japanese history as a long time student of the subject. Rarely have I found historical fiction to have as many history lessons as in 'The Blackened Canteen.' Yellin does an excellent job of providing not only the experiences of Japanese and Americans in WWII, but also factual historical perspective. The characters in 'The Blackened Canteen' aren't simply sympathetic figures in an historically significant story, their thoughts also provide insightful analysis of the events that shaped the war in the Pacific.

Yellin's descriptions of the American airmen's thoughts are particularly credible because of the author's personal experience as the pilot of a P-51. His descriptions of the Japanese civilians' thoughts may provide an even deeper perspective on the thinking of an American World War II Veteran.

I would recommend this book to students of Japanese history. I have an M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis (in Japanese History and Foreign Policy), and in my entire study I never came across a book so entertaining and informative at the same time. I would also recommend this book to anyone looking for an interesting book for their book club. This book invites discussion! It is rare that a book about war ends up being so inspiring.

Imagine that your country is at war. It is nighttime and an enemy fleet of 123 bombers is firebombing your city. Over 2,000 men, women and children are killed, many are maimed, and your city is burning. As the bombers veer away, two of them collide in the skies above you, explode, and fall to earth. The pieces of the planes and the remains of the airmen scatter in your field. In the wreckage, you find a blackened canteen with the imprint of a human hand pressed into the metal. You pick it up, fitting your hand into the handprint, and wonder about the life just lost that it represents.

The Blackened Canteen is the extraordinary true story of what that canteen meant to a Japanese farmer and a 12-year-old boy and how it affected their lives from 1945 up to the present.

The Pacific theater of WW II was a vast arena of unspeakable brutality and loss. But even in that time and place, there were some people who took the longer view. This true story of an act of moral courage captured the imagination of Jerry Yellin, an octogenarian-humanitarian who knows firsthand the horrors of all-out war. As a decorated Army Air Corps fighter pilot, who flew 19 missions over Japan, the author is uniquely qualified to have researched and novelized the events described.

The book begins with the final mission of the doomed B-29s up to the moment of impact. Then the story flashes back to pre-war America, detailing the lives and hopes of the young men - really just kids -- before they joined the Army Air Corps. Peacetime in 1941 U.S. is a complete contrast to 1941 Japan, then in the grips of a nationalistic fervor fanned by its military leaders. After Pearl Harbor, the Americans enlist, and the story follows the various paths each took that led to their last mission. A full account of the complexity of the planes and the intensive training and responsibilities of a B-29 crew member testifies to the airmen's skills and bravery.

The author writes convincingly about Japanese life and customs, and some of the best passages in the book concern the enlightened farmer, Fukumatsu Itoh. The story of the boy, Hiroya Sugano -- now Dr. Sugano -- shows how the human heart can move away from hatred and the instinctive desire for revenge to embrace peace and understanding.

Jerry Yellin's important book speaks for peace. Read this book, and then get the young people in your life to read it, too.

2nd Lt. Jack O'Connor, one of the many heroes in The Blackened Canteen, was my brother-in-law. Unfortunately, I never had the pleasure of meeting him. Jack had already made the supreme sacrifice by the time I met his brother, George. Reading this book, through tears, brought Jack, and all those who gave their young lives serving their country, back to life, along with their families. Their fears, loyalty, and bravery deserve to be celebrated by every American. Medals are indeed an honor, but Jerry Yellin has given these heroes immortality in The Blackened Canteen. This book should be mandated reading for every high school student in America. God bless all those who served, their families, and Jerry Yellin for giving them back to us thru the pages of his incredible book. I only hope that someone in Hollywood picks up on this story. What a movie it would make!

Jerry Yellin is an amazing talent! At his age he should have many books on best seller lists. I submit that he would have if it were not for a minor little distraction -- WWII. Then, like the rest of his generation, he returned to lead a second-tier nation barely out of the depression and into the country we know today.

The book is at once a novelized history of WWII in the Pacific, a love story, and a poignant story of humanity in a world gone mad. Jerry has a gift for detail that is amazing. I felt as if I were actually in the nose of a B-29 - and I have actually been in the nose of a B-29! Jerry's description is better.

His narratives are about some participants in WWII both major and minor, American and Japanese. And they are sharp and clear. We get an intimate picture of Japanese and American individuals as they experience the war beginning with the depression for the Americans and the war in China for the Japanese.

I have already purchased another copy to send to a Japanese friend in Japan. This is a wonderful book and a must read, not just for WWII students but for everyone who enjoys a wonderful story well told.

123 B-29's departed from Guam to firebomb the Japanese city of Shizuoka. They burned up over two thirds of it and killed over 2000 of its population. Tragically, 2 of the planes accidentally ran together over the city and 22 American crewmen perished. 121 B-29's returned. Thus, the story revolves.

Having been exposed to a similar atmosphere in WWII, I was consumed by the story. It is great, fantastic, and wonderfull reading. An excellent text book. I can read my own experiences into it, e.g. The first horrendous fire bombing of Tokyo, 18 square miles in ashes, 100,000 killed. I have never talked about this Tokyo episode, but now have a reference for it. And there were many other cities. And there was the city of Himeji with its ancient 400 year old castle right in the center on a prominence. On July 3, 1945 we bombed the city, destroying 70% of it, and unknowingly didn't touch the castle. On July 3, 1995, a few of us were in Himeji, commemorating the 50th anniversary, as their guests. They had wondered if the Castle was saved on purpose or not.

Review: The Blackened Canteen, by Jerry Yellin
Books of war rarely are books of hope. Greek tragedies often begin with a pronouncement of the end, a lament for the tragic event which has brought death to a hero or misery to a god. Aeschylus's dramatic trilogy of plays of the life of Achilles in the Trojan Wars portends for him "What is a seer? A man who with luck tells the truth sometimes, with frequent falsehoods, but when his luck deserts him, collapses then and there." Achilles will collapse and the ancients who attended the plays already knew it. The tragedy was not merely in Achilles' death foretold but also in the moral ambiguity of his rages, first against Troy, then against his continuing the war because of his questionable fury with Agamemnon, then back against Troy because of the death of Achilles' friend at the hands of Hector. The Iliad is not a book of hope - it is a tragedy.
Jerry Yellin also has written a tragedy. His book, The Blackened Canteen, is a non-fiction work that, by his admission, is fictive, written with an authorial completion of the known facts by the addition of the imagined thoughts and conversations of those who appear on his pages. His stage is the fire-bombing of Japan in 1945. Mr. Yellin begins with a pronouncement of the end, of the tragic death of Jack O'Connor and of twenty-four other men who died with him in a mid-air collision between two American B-29 bombers during a bomb run over Shizuoka. Far below, in Japan, in Mr. Yellin's Troy, some two thousand enemy housewives, schoolchildren, elderly, all die in an incendiary that is so intense that the heat and smoke make straight or level flight impossible.
Jack O'Connor is not Mr. Yellin's Achilles; he is, instead, Hector, a hero who endures a miserable death that should have been foretold by his and his aircrew's very first bomb mission months before. On that first mission, on March 10, 1945, O'Connor and his crew were in the trailing segment of a flight in the firebombing of Tokyo. The thermal winds from the fires below were so intense that they blew the plane off course and off altitude. "Bomber directly above with bomb doors open," was shouted over the intercommunications system; the flight commander emergently turned away, jettisoning the bomb load near the center of that particular inferno. As Yellin writes, "The return flight to Guam was uneventful...." Not so on the early morning of June 20, 1945, when a seemingly-identical convergence of O'Connor's B-29 and the airplane above destroyed both aircraft and their crews.
Mr. Yellin's book then departs from both the Greek tradition and from the familiar American story arc. Instead of a writing-school model of non-fiction biography or memoir, an account of victories that have slipped away or of painful revenge upon a difficult enemy, Mr. Yellin traces the startling closeness that in a different time might have joined those who instead became the crews of the B-29 and the Japanese below. The bodies of the American crew are not desecrated; they are, instead, found and buried by a local farmer and city councilman whose uncle, aunt, and cousins were Americans. He eventually became a Buddhist priest and erected a monument to the dead in a holy shrine. Each year he conducts a solemn memorial service for them and, in doing so, uses the only recognizable relic of the bombers, a blackened canteen. Mr. Yellin traces Mr. Itoh's struggles and losses in the war along with those of others in Shizuoka. He also follows Jack O'Connor and his crewmates, young fliers who had given up careers in professional baseball, developing radar, and raising families to dedicate themselves to defeating Japan. Mr. Yellin leads the reader down the separate paths of the crews above and the Japanese below whose lives and deaths become enmeshed in that battle.
Mr. Yellin has written a tragic and troubling account, not of battles and deaths and revenge but, instead, of the cost of war. His warriors and his anxious members of the respective home-fronts are as flawed as Achilles and as fearful as Aeschylus's grieving citizens, engulfed in a war that Mr. Yellin lays at the feet of the demand for oil and steel, surely no more noble a plunder than when Paris abducted Helen. Mr. Yellin's judgment is clear: war contravenes the purpose of life, and the purpose of life is to connect all of nature and all of humanity.
The Blackened Canteen, winner of the Branson Literary Award, is a cautionary tale, a book of foreboding about the destructive power of cultural imperatives. The book might as easily have been written about the wars of religion and terror that permeate the Middle East and, by extension, much of the world, a clash that continues because one side or another or both have so convinced themselves of the rightness of their cause that taking whatever they need from the enemy is not merely acceptable but honorable. Such wars of bombings, of suicide attacks, and of weariness are not new and, apparently, will continue as long as there is no connection between all of nature and all of humanity.
Mr. Yellin was himself a Spartan - he flew fighter escorts during the war over Japan. In doing so he strafed a city where now, more than six decades later, his own son lives with his Japanese wife and family, Mr. Yellin's daughter-in-law and grandchildren. His book, The Blackened Canteen, is of course a book of war. But, unlike Homer's Iliad, unlike Aeschylus's tragedies, Mr. Yellin's book also is a book of hope.


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Review by Jack Woodville London, Author of French Letters, Virginia's War.

French Letters Book One: Virginia's War