Customer Reviews

Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

5 star:		(81)
4 star:		(49)
3 star:		(37)
2 star:		(37)
1 star:		(45)

 

 

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.

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.

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."

I have viewed all the previous posted reviews of this book, and what I find surprising (and a little disturbing) is that no one has taken Mr. Bradley and his publisher to task for an untruth trumpeted both on the dustjacket and in Mr. Bradley's introductory text (also see the blurb above). There it is asserted that the events on Chichi Jima were a closely guarded government secret until the intrepid Mr. Bradley uncovered them. This is not just a distortion, it is a flat-out falsehood. For example, Bradley's own bibliography cites Robert Sherrod's history of Marine Corps aviation during World War II. Sherrod's book - published 45 years ago - features several pages on the appalling events on Chichi Jima, including footnotes indicating exactly where the information came from (in particular, the war crimes trial transcripts). As an archivist who works with World War II era military records every day, and a published scholar, I find the mendacious assertion that the book uncovered previously "hidden" material to be a breach of faith with the public it supposed to inform. Bradley may have done more work on the topic than those who came before him (and here he deserves credit), but he certainly did not dig up any "secrets." For shame.

Another reader here sees a pro-American bias to James Bradley's Flyboys. I saw something else-a sense of ethical confusion by Mr. Bradley. He seems to think American pilots bombing Japan were as morally guilty as the Japanese who tortured and cannibalized the Americans on Chi Chi Jima. Mr. Bradley makes this point very clearly, giving very detailed and very upsetting descriptions of burned Japanese bodies during the Tokyo fire raids. The author thinks that each side was equally evil during the war. This should offend any American who fought for his country during WWII.

Throughout the book, Mr. Bradley seems determined to establish moral equivalence between Japan's atrocities against Allied prisoners and the American bombing of Japan. One one hand he is out to make the "Flyboys" (why always in capitals?) into heroes, as he did in his much-better book, Flags of our Fathers. But on the other hand, he can't help himself from suggesting that these same pilots were, if not war criminals, then at least complicit in war crimes. This really started bothering me.

The author's scholarship on the Pacific war is in depth. But the story isn't as good. Overall the story doesn't have the emotional impact as Faith of our Fathers. If you have a weak stomach... beware. The book gives shocking details about cannibalism by Japanese military personel that will just turn your stomach. I wonder what the families of the captured American pilots think about that. Mr. Bradley should probably have left some of this awful stuff buried.

Technical note: The book is all about pilots who flew Avenger torpedo bombers. So why is there a Dauntless dive-bomber on the cover and inside? Mr. Bradley needs to do some boning up on aviation history.

Such a disappointment after the intelligent, measured, and compelling work in FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS (which I assign to my students each semester)! Here Bradley completely surrenders to revisionist history which contorts the past to place blame for every nation's sins on the United States, or the West in general. The breaking point for me occured when Bradley claimed that the unprecedented atrocities committted by the Japanese on innocent Chinese and Korean civilians, as well as POWs, was a result of what they had learned from Western expansionism! What nonsense! Japan had started down its own path of racial isolationism, intolerance, and barbaric treatment of the "outsider" centuries before the United States and colonialist Europe existed! The truth is that the Japanese in World War II committed human rights violations unparalleled by any state or regime in history (Unit 731, Palawan, Cabanatuan, starvation and torture all of the prison camps, Mitsubishi work camps, Rape of Nanking, comfort women,... and on and on and on), and the nation as a whole continues to deny its past atrocities. Bradley's book merely makes it easier for the Japanese to continue to rationalize and deny its war crimes, and this is an insult to all those who suffered--and died horrible deaths--at their hands.

Having thoroughly enjoyed James Bradley's well-written book about Iwo Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers," I picked up a copy of his newest book, "Flyboys," soon after it first became available. Without doubt, the central story of "Flyboys" (the Japanese army's butchery of 8 American POWs on the remote island of Chichi Jima and the narrow escape of then Navy pilot George Bush) is a compelling one and deserves the attention that the new book brings to it. The disappointment is that this book is far more diffuse and less focussed than the earlier Bradley book, and has some rather troublesome biases. (Perhaps this indicates that Bradley's co-author on the earlier book was more instrumental to its success than I had realized.) Because of the lack of focus, the portrayals of the 8 American POWs who were killed by the Japanese is far less captivating than that of the flag-raisers at Iwo Jima in Bradley's earlier book.

"Flyboys" offers important insights into the American-Japanese confrontation in the Pacific, going all the way back to Commodore Matthew Perry's "opening" of Japan to America in the 1850s. Reflecting the influence of John Dower, author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "Embracing Defeat" and a former professor of Bradley's, this book provides a sensitive analysis of the central influences that affected Japanese-American relations both prior to and during World War II.

Besides its lack of focus, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of "Flyboys" is Bradley's rather tortured attempt to give balance to his presentation by likening Japanese atrocities to the darker side of America's and her allies' behavior in the war. Certainly, neither side was blameless, but Bradley seems to overlook Japan's culpability in attacking Pearl Harbor, in committing racist barbarism toward the civilian populations of China and Korea, and in its unparalleled atrocities against Allied POWs.

Less bothersome but still objectionable is the rather strange slant Bradley's narrative presents on some major historic figures. He keeps referring to FDR as "the Dutchman"--a term I've never seen any other historian use--and insists on calling Gen. Curtis LeMay "Curtis" throughout the narrative.

All in all, the book is worth reading, but hardly measures up to "Flags of Our Fathers" and the other recent tours de force on World War II (including Hampton Sides' "Ghost Soldiers," Michael Beschloss's "The Conquerors," and Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking").

I purchased the book with great expectations, having enjoyed the author's previous work, Flags of Our Fathers, albeit with a few reservations such as his continuing insistence of calling military men "boys", which we take as pejorative. Nonetheless, I expected similar quality of background research and details.

This book mainly centers on World War II action in and around the island of Chichi Jima, near Iwo Jima and what happened to a number of pilots who were shot down there and taken prisoner by the Japanese. What I found in reading the book was a jumbled hodgepodge of some of the same good historical background as in Flags, jumbled with some rather skewed and outrageous personal opinion of the sort I would have expected to read from former WWII Japanese officers. Worse, he makes one of a historian's most egregious errors, that of judging events and people out of the context of the time in which they lived. In doing that, he tried to use inaccurate and incomplete historic accounts of a few events in past US history to somehow justify the repeated barbaric actions of the Japanese toward their prisoners of war during WWII.

If one wants to get a more accurate view of the Japanese actions and motivations one should read "The Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, or more broad and accurate coverage from "Prisoners of the Japanese : Pows of World War II in the Pacific" by Gavin Daws.

This author, instead seems to try and go out of his way to include what I would have to feel are insincere and untrue personal accounts from some of the former Japanese, all of whom seem to be trying to ameliorate their willing complicity in Japan's institutionalized policy of horrific war crimes in much the same manner as did former Nazi's when tried for war crimes. As a result, this book comes off looking like a laughable revisionist attempt by Japanese veterans groups to use a Westerner to promote their ridiculous denials and to white-wash the worst of Japanese atrocities; which, by-and-large, are some of the worst crimes committed in all of human history. It makes the author appear to be nothing more than a cloying apologist for some of history's most appalling unpunished crimes.

I've spent two decades of my life working at a government archives. I've seen first hand the relief and healing that truth, however awful, can bring to people who've lost loved ones to violence and spent years afterward wondering about details kept locked away in secret files. "It's better if they don't know what happened, because it's just too horrible," sounds like a bureaucratic kindness. But as the mother of one of this book's FLYBOYS says, "...it was not half as terrible as what I had imagined all these many years." All those almost 60 years, in that woman's case - and at least she lived long enough to hear the truth when it finally came out.

In 1945, eight U.S. airmen died in captivity on the Japanese-held island of Chichi Jima. By the time readers of FLYBOYS reach the chapters detailing the young flyers' ordeal in enemy hands, though, I'm afraid too many may have put the book aside. Fully half of its pages are dense with background material explaining the origins of Japanese militarism and the history of Japanese/U.S. relations leading up to World War II. When the men whose stories waited so long to be told finally take center stage, readers who expected just that - a story, not a history lesson - will be gone. While for those of us still turning pages, themes the author has taken great care to establish have been "pounded in" so often and so forcefully that a certain - well - numbness sets in. Just when that's the last thing that ought to be happening.

A book can do what Bradley attempts to do here, and succeed. Jon Krakauer's INTO THIN AIR, for example, blends personal stories of human tragedy with heavy-duty background while remaining utterly readable throughout. For its important content, I'd like to give FLYBOYS 5 stars. Since it manages to make some inherently fascinating material downright boring at times, though, I can't give it more than 4 stars overall.

What a catastrophic disappointment from Bradley. Why is it that so many 21st century authors feel it necessary to bash America? I just happened by this book at my local library and after reading the cover, decided it would be a good read. WRONG. After just four chapters, I'm done and will not waste another minute reading how America is/has been so evil. I came out to Amazon to read the reviews - which I wish I'd done in the first place - and agree 100% with all the one star reviews.