Flyboys: A True Story of Courage [Large Print] [Hardcover]

James Bradley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2003

FLYBOYS is the true story of young American airmen who were shot down over Chichi Jima. Eight of these young men were captured by Japanese troops and taken prisoner. Another was rescued by an American submarine and went on to become president. The reality of what happened to the eight prisoners has remained a secret for almost 60 years. After the war, the American and Japanese governments conspired to cover up the shocking truth. Not even the families of the airmen were informed what had happened to their sons. It has remained a mystery--until now. Critics called James Bradley's last book "the best book on battle ever written." FLYBOYS is even better: more ambitious, more powerful, and more moving. On the island of Chichi Jima those young men would face the ultimate test. Their story--a tale of courage and daring, of war and of death, of men and of hope--will make you proud, and it will break your heart.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of Flags of Our Fathers achieves considerable but not equal success in this new Pacific War-themed history. Again he approaches the conflict focused on a small group of men: nine American Navy and Marine aviators who were shot down off the Japanese-held island of Chichi Jima in February 1945. All of them were eventually executed by the Japanese; several of the guilty parties were tried and condemned as war criminals. When the book keeps its eye on the aviators-growing up under a variety of conditions before the war, entering service, serving as the U. S. Navy's spearhead aboard the fast carriers, or facing captivity and death-it is as compelling as its predecessor. However, a chapter on prewar aviation is an uncritical panegyric to WWI aerial bombing advocate Billy Mitchell, who was eventually court-martialed for criticizing armed forces brass. More problematic is that Bradley tries to encompass not only the whole history of the Pacific War, but the whole history of the cultures of the two opposing countries that led to the racial attitudes which both sides brought to the war. Those attitudes, Bradley argues, played a large role in the brutal training of the Japanese army, which led to atrocities that in turn sharpened already keen American hostility. Some readers' hackles will rise at the discussion of the guilt of both sides, but, despite some missteps, Bradley attempts to strike an informed balance with the perspective of more than half a century.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Bradley's phenomenal best-seller, Flags of Our Fathers (2000), was rejected by about 20 publishing houses before Bantam took a chance. His new publisher is not leaving the popularity of the encore to chance, launching it with an intense promotional campaign. Structured similarly to Flags, which concerned the flag-raisers of Iwo Jima, this work reconstructs the lives of several young men at war. Eight pilots and airmen were shot down by the Japanese military at Chichi Jima in 1944-45, George H. W. Bush among them. A well-known part of his political biography, Bush's story of escape is recounted somberly (Bush's crewmates died). The fates of the others shot down, who were captured, Bradley gathered in part from a source that was secret until a few years ago: records of a war-crimes trial of Japanese officers in command at Chichi Jima. Bradley sensitively builds the trial's unpleasant evidence (concealed, presumably, to spare pain to the airmen's relatives) into the narrative, which he frames with a portrayal of the Japanese military mind-set, which condoned the commission of atrocities. There are many brutally graphic passages about the torture and slaying of the American prisoners, which may prove too daunting for some readers, but Bradley succeeds in restoring dignity to the American airmen. Sure to command a large audience. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316743798
• ISBN-13: 978-0316743792
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.5 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (249 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,084,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in Wisconsin surrounded by a loving family of ten and loved swimming in cold lakes. When I was a boy I read an article by former president Harry Truman recommending historical biographies for young readers. His reasoning was that it was easy to follow the storyline of someone's life, and they would absorb the history of the times on the journey. History soon became my favorite subject and I have been an active reader all my life.

When I was thirteen years old I read an article by James Michener in Reader's Digest which I paraphrase: "When you're twenty-two and graduate from college, people will ask you, 'What do you want to do?' It's a good question, but you should answer it when you're thirty-five." Michener went on to write that his experiences wandering the globe as a young man later inspired his works on Afghanistan, Spain, Japan and other places.

When I was nineteen years old, I lived and studied in Tokyo for one year. I later brought my Japanese friends home to Wisconsin. My father, John Bradley, had helped raise an American flag on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima and had shot a Japanese soldier dead. My dad warmly welcomed my Japanese buddies.

I traveled around the world when I was twenty-one, from the U.S. to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, France, Germany, Italy, England and back to the United States.

At twenty-three I graduated with a degree in East Asian history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

For the next twenty years I worked in the corporate communications industry in the United States, Japan, England and South Africa.

In my late thirties I took a year off to go around the world again. On this trip I made it to base camp on Mt. Everest and walked among lions in Africa.

My father died when I was forty years old. My search to find out why he didn't speak about Iwo Jima led me to write Flags of Our Fathers and establish the James Bradley Peace Foundation.

Flags of Our Fathers went on to be a bestseller and a movie, but few saw its potential at first. In fact, as this New York Times article documents, twenty-seven publishers turned the book down over a period of twenty-five months. This difficult and humbling birthing process inspired my live presentation Doing the Impossible.

In 2001 a WWII veteran of the Pacific revealed to me that the U.S. government had kept secret the beheading deaths of eight American airmen on the Japanese island of Chichi Jima, next door to Iwo Jima. After researching their deaths, I informed the eight families and the world of the unknown facts in my book second book Flyboys. (One flyboy got away. His name was George Herbert Walker Bush.)

After writing two books about WWII in the Pacific, I began to wonder about the origins of America's involvement in that war. The inferno that followed Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor had consumed countless lives, and believing there's usually smoke before a fire, I set off to search Asia for the original irritants. The result of that search is my third book, The Imperial Cruise.

I am working on my fourth book, about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and China.

Above my desk are the framed words of James Michener:

"Just because you wrote a few books, the world is not going to change. You will find that you will go to sleep and awaken as the same son-of-a-bitch you were the day before."

For the past ten years, the James Bradley Peace Foundation and Youth For Understanding have sent American students to live with families overseas. Perhaps in the future when we debate whether to fight it out or talk it out, one of these Americans might make a difference.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

304 of 368 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Pop History with all its shortcomings, November 6, 2003

By 

David W. Nicholas (Van Nuys, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flyboys: A True Story of Courage (Hardcover)

What an odd book. Flyboys is the story of several air raids flown against the island of Chichi Jima, north of Iwo Jima, during 1944-45, by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, and more specifically it's the story of what happened to those airmen who were shot down over the island. The author, to write this story, uses extensive interviews he conducted with participants from both sides, survivors in their late 70s and 80s. This is all well and good, and if the book stopped at that, I suspect I'd be giving it a higher rating than I am.

What cripples the book is the author's belief that he has to give you a history lesson. As a result, he starts his account of the raids on the island by describing Japan prior to Admiral Perry's arrival in 1852. He takes a sort of anecdotal approach to things, recounting various events in American and Japanese history. His reason for doing this, apparently, is to give the events of the subject of the book context.

And that brings us to the main difficulty with the book. The author has a rather skewed view of American history, one that's decidedly more critical of it than is warranted, at least in my view. Further, his recounting of fact is at times inaccurate and incomplete. There is one good thing he doesn't do: he doesn't attempt to minimize Japanese atrocities in WW2. What he does instead is insist that the Americans committed crimes just as terrible, the implication being that the Japanese were punished because they lost the war.

Let me go over these accusations in some detail, so I'm not misunderstood and we're all clear. In the chapter dealing with America's 19th century history, he recounts the Mexican-American War and the Indian Wars and then tells you that they are instances of American war crimes that the Japanese took as proper behavior for a western country, and that this meant that if the Japanese became regarded as civilized they could do these things too. The difficulty comes in the recounting of the wars themselves.

The Mexican war is dismissed in a few paragraphs, mostly recounting U.S. Grant's opinion that the war was sinful and wrong. He also said (in the same passage in his autobiography) that he thought the U.S. Civil War was punishment for the Mexican-American War, but that's left out of Bradley's summary of what Grant said.

Bradley then recounts the Indian Wars by telling you of the Sand Creek massacre. Sand Creek was probably the most egregious and senseless murder of Indians during the Indian Wars. Using it as an emblem for the whole is similar to using O.J. as an example of how all football players treat their wives. While the U.S. was harsh and unfair with American Indians in the 19th century, it wasn't universally so, and the depth of the unfairness varied depending on where they were or lived or other factors. Bradley ignores all of this.

Then Bradley really goes off the reservation, so to speak. Many people know the history (at least in outline) of the Mexican-American War and the Indian War, but the insurrection in the Philippines is by contrast very obscure. Bradley's recounting of the U.S. experience there is almost entirely from one source, one book called Benevolent Assimilation. I have a book called The Philippine War, which includes a critical bibliography. In it the author dismisses two other books on the war, then labels Benevolent Assimilation "even more factually inaccurate" than those two books. Bradley relied on this book almost completely for his account of the war. He should know that if you're going to write the history of something, you consult more than one source.

The author also has a goofy habit of referring to people in an eccentric fashion in the book. This starts with the term Flyboys, which he insists on using (capitalized) as if it were a title or rank, when he refers to American and British aviators from the War. He refers to President Roosevelt as "the Dutchman" repeatedly, calls Curtis LeMay "Curtis", and sarcastically labels Japan's military leadership "Spirit Warriors" and their emperor the "Boy Soldier" (because he was educated in part by generals). It's all very weird, and a bit juvenile.

What does all of this lead to? The author seems to have a feeling that all war leads to war crimes which all sides commit, and that the one way to prevent this is to prevent wars. There's a sense of moral equivalency running through the book that's annoying when faint and insulting when he gets more insistent about it. There's also, as a side annoyance, the pro-Marine bias that's so common in books that deal with them in contrast with the army (check out my review of Martin Russ' book Breakout if you want to learn my opinion of this in more detail). It's not stated much here, the one outrageous comment implying that the Normandy invasion was a cakewalk.

The oral history part of the book is very valuable, however, and the author, to his credit, doesn't flinch in recounting the Japanese war crimes or their aftermath. For this I commend him, and give him the two stars he gets above the one minimum one. I would recommend this book, but only very guardedly, given the inaccuracy of the backstory in the early chapters.

44 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, September 18, 2004

By 

Ferd Burfle - See all my reviews

This review is from: Flyboys: A True Story of Courage (Hardcover)

In more than 50 years of reading voraciously about World War 2 I don't think I have read a more disappointing book. After reading Mr. Bradley's excellent "Flag Of Our Fathers" I was expecting something a lot better from him.

As many others have mentioned here, I was expecting the book to be a thoughtful examination of Naval aviation in general and the suffering of some captured fliers in particular. Unfortunately Mr. Bradley couldn't resist inserting his own view of history i.e. that Western Imperialism drove the poor Japanese to behave so badly. He devotes the first 75 pages to drawing a moral equivalency between the U. S. and Japan.

The book seems to have been written either for or by someone with only a superficial knowledge of the war and, in my opinion, denigrates the suffering and bravery of the Americans who fought it. Bradley's irritating insistance on referring to air crewmen of all types as "flyboys" is puzzling because that term was often used derisively by non-flying personnel jealous of those they perceived to be a "priviledged class". And, in my many years of reading, I have never before seen the B-25 medium bomber called a "Billy". Silly!

As the World War 2 generation fades away from us, we can expect to see more such revisionist history come forth with politically-correct versions of the war. I don't recommend this one.

102 of 125 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating but a little too PC, October 11, 2003

By 

Grimmy "Grimmy" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Flyboys: A True Story of Courage (Hardcover)

Filled with fascinating information about the Japanese WW2 mind and the accomplishments of the Flyboys, but too many attempts at moral equivalence for my taste; while describing the horror perpetrated by the Japanese, the author constantly points a finger at the US either in blame or charging hypocrisy (though his description of Japanese inhumanity eventually overwhelms).

While there may be some validity to these charges - and the author provides many examples of American butchery, all the way from the Native Americans to the Phillipines - some attempts are somewhat sickening. After describing the appalling butchery of POWs and other horrors practiced by the Japanese, and the outrage such savagery provoked here in the US, he describes some take-no-prisoners incidents perpetrated by the US, and wags his finger: "When U.S. prisoners were killed, it was 'murder ...' But when Americans murdered Others, 'they had it coming to them.'" Er ... excuse me, Bozo, but didn't you read what you just wrote?

To wit, the behavior of the Japanese. Did it not occur to the author that their rejection of the Geneva Convention, brutal treatment (rape, murder and torture) of civilians, and other scummy actions, such as this:

"The wounded wait until [US] men come up to examine them ... and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade" (p. 143)

could somehow lead American soldiers to regard their enemies as subhuman monsters? I dunno, I think it's possible. Sure, they look different ... but they also behave different, and that's the key.

How about slicing open living POWs and removing their lungs or stomachs, without anesthesia? Poking around in their brains with a knife and twisting to see what body parts jerk?

When an enemy not only murders your POWs as a matter of policy and in explicit disregard of the rules of war, but has demonstrated that they will not surrender, will blow you to bits if you show compassion or try to help them, and have no regard whatsoever for any human life, not even civilians (not even their own), what do they expect? What does the author expect? Yet he constantly attempts to suggest that either side was just as bad.

Elsewhere he reports that the Japanese justifiably regarded the American firebombers as devils. Yes, the napalming of Tokyo was horrible, but what did they expect after their sons' killing sprees - hacking hundreds of thousands of non-Japanese (Chinese, for example) to pieces, raping and killing and sometimes eating daughters of civilians, forcing children to become "comfort women", the dishonorable attack on Pearl Harbor, practicing bayoneting on live prisoners, spraying typhoid, etc. etc.? Does the glee American soldiers and the American public felt over killing such a subhuman enemy - proven so by their actions - become more understandable? Do the complaints of firebombing Japanese civilians seem to recede into the distance of their hypocrisy?

The crucial difference is that these most of the Japanese atrocities were a matter of official policy or direct orders, as opposed to the visceral hatred engendered in individual American soldiers by witnessing the inhumanity of the Japanese military.

It is well written, though, and you do get a sense of the heroism of the American military, warts and all - and the author does try to show us as many warts as he can. He is also candid about the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese, not only upon Others, but upon themselves. The analysis of how the Japanese got locked into a couple of different mindsets and how that led to their defeat is also interesting. And we learn a little more about the amazing heroism of pilots like George Bush Sr. When I was less informed (still naively reading TIME, Newsweek, and the Washington Post for "news" ... thank God I happened upon the Media Research Center), I chuckled with Oliphant's baseless ridiculing of Bush's war record. After reading this book, I cannot help but cheer him as a true hero.

I would like to have given this book four stars or more but due to the above, which may further encourage Japan's whitewashing of their brutal history. (I don't have to worry about America's history being whitewashed; too much white guilt and self-loathing around here for that.) It is definitely worth a read, in spite of the author's attempts to be sensitive. Fortunately, these are infrequent. Yes, neither side is guiltless ... but neither do both sides bear equal guilt, by any means. The Japanese are so ashamed of their history that they have to rewrite it; they understand this. And, strangely, so does the author, quoting Paul Fussell after reminding us that more people were killed with samurai swords than atomic bombs:

"The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war."