Customer Reviews

The Sky Rained Heroes: A Journey from War to Remembrance

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author's knowledge of Asian cultures is extensive. He seamlessly blends insights into both the Japanese and American WWII experiences against an easy-to-follow narrative line of two soldiers moving toward a climactic final encounter. The author's research on the training techniques of American fighter pilots and Japanese infantry is fascinating. But it is the moving story of the author's attempts to bring the soldiers' families together that makes this book so compelling. A really unusual and therefore interesting book.

The Sky Rained Heroes defies ready characterization. It's part family memoir, part dramatic narrative, part military history, part picaresque adventure tale. Anyone looking for an easy fit into one of these categories will be disappointed. But wherever you place the book, LaCroix accomplishes a remarkable piece of detective work in tracing from war letters and a captured battle flag the journey of two enemies through training to battle to eventual posthumous reconciliation. The narrative is enlivened with the author's own unusual, often amusing, experiences in Asia and extensive literary allusions. The writing is fluid and eloquent, if at times a little complex and eclectic. Chapters are short and punchy. The exhilaration of the story line carries the reader forward and more than amply rewards the investment of a little time.

A thoroughly researched work. Sadly, the author is extremely impressed with his own vocabulary, and his incesant quotation of scholarly tomes and ancient authors. This makes one lose track of what the reason the book exists, at least as far as being a WWII history goes. While one is trying to follow the story line being presented, the reader is constantly distracted by his arcane citations and obscure historians and philosphers.

As a Civil War and WW2 history buff I'm always on the lookout for new contributions with new angles and I thought this book was going to be just such a work. It is, but the author's over-reaching and academic writing style make for very tedious reading. He constantly breaks up the story line by quoting poetry and the book is full of sentences like this one: "Like any sprawling Japanese bureaucracy, public or corporate, its melodic unity spurns thematic improvisation, is impervious to tonal variation." What? His father's letters are very interesting to read, but interspaced with a lot of WW2 history that we already know and even sections about the author's own life that seem to have little or no link to the point of the book. I love good writing, but this author seems to go out of his way to try and impress his readers with "Look what grand sentences I can write" instead of just telling the story.

Frederick LaCroix, author of "The Sky Rained Heroes," is the son of a World War II fighter pilot who survived combat in the war's Pacific Theater despite being shot from the air on one occasion and barely surviving another mission. Captain Robert Edward LaCroix came home after the war to carve out his own piece of the American Dream, and it was only a short while before his death that the captain passed on to his son the Imperial battle flag he had been given to commemorate his significant role in a battle to push the Japanese out of the Philippines. When, a year after his father's death, LaCroix found a stack of his father's World War II correspondence, he decided to place the Imperial battle flag back into the hands of the family whose son lost his life defending that flag in 1945.

Frederick LaCroix was fortunate that his work took him to the same part of the world in which his father had seen so much combat during the war. This would allow him to spend six years retracing his father's wartime footsteps in the Pacific while searching for surviving family members of the Japanese soldier whose flag had been in LaCroix hands for more than 60 years. Despite the high odds against his success - and the frustrating dead-ends he encountered - LaCroix persevered long enough to see his search end in a moving Tokyo ceremony during which Lieutenant Ishizuka's family gratefully accepted the bloodied flag once carried into battle by their lost relative.

"The Sky Rained Heroes" ("The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth." - H.G. Wells, "The World Set Free" - 1914), is told largely through the war letters written by Captain LaCroix to his parents. LaCroix was a dedicated letter-writer and his letters set the perfect tone for his side of the World War II experience. It is, at times, difficult to remember that the letters were written by a young man barely into his twenties - except when he loses his struggle not to brag about the danger of his training and flight missions while in the next breath telling his parents there is no need to worry about him.

LaCroix researched Lieutenant Ishizuka's war record to such an extent that he is able to recreate the lieutenant's Philippine experiences right up to the fateful day on which he lost his life to shrapnel created by bombs being dropped on the Japanese by Captain LaCroix and his fellow fighter pilots. By alternating the book's chapters between the viewpoints of Lieutenant Ishizuka and Captain LaCroix, the author manages to put a human face on both men, treating them as the equals they were, two men caught up in the whirlwind of war.

"The Sky Rained Heroes" offers a brief history of the war's Pacific Theater but, more importantly, it is the story of how two families were brought together 60 years after the war to honor the memories of two brave men who fought that war from opposite sides of the battlefield. Frederick LaCroix has done his father and Lieutenant Ishizuka proud.

THE SKY RAINED HEROES is a personal story that I think people all over the world can relate to. It's real, emotional and shows that at the end of the day we are all affected by war.

In telling the story of his family, however, Lacroix also tells more about what happens sometime when we allow ourselves to get so pre-occupied by life. We love contact with each other and sometimes ourselves, and it's not until something dramatic happens that we are aware of it.

THE SKY RAINED HEROES is a testiment to the good that exists in all of us. It's just up to each individual to decide if we will use it.

When I picked this up, I thought "oh, no, another war book." But the cover and title were catching, so I took a gamble. Well worth the risk! Of course the book is ostensibly about two soldiers, an American fighter pilot (incidentally the author's father) and an officer in the Japanese Army, but it goes way beyond that. The history of the Second World War is almost secondary to the themes that intrigued me: the contradictions inherent in the simple act of remembrance, heroism as distinct from the worthiness of a cause, predators and prey as a framework for viewing historical development. Highly recommended!

A moving, larger than life epic journey of discovery and closure, eloquently retold through one son's accounting of a glimpse of World War II history. Spoke volumes of a hero's life--painful yet victorious at the end. An excellent read!

While this book has some good anecdotes about experiences during WWII in the Pacific, the author's inclusion of hundreds of literary quotes bogs down the reading, and makes his own writing seem very poor in comparison. If the author had stuck to his dad's experience in the war, and left out the trite sermons on Asian history and sociology, it could have been a good read.

I finished this Friday. Overall I liked the book. Frederick LaCroix does not provide a standard biography of his father, rather he juxtapositions chapters about his WWII fighter pilot father (Robert Edward LaCroix), a Japanese officer (Yasuyuki Ishizuka), and his own visits to lands where either Robert or Yasuyuki had spent time during WW II. At first this arrangement is disconcerting, but the multiple viewpoints adds to the story-telling with the culmination, not in a battle scene, but in a homecoming of Ishizuka's Kanji flag to his relatives. In the end, the book is not so much a biography as a meditation on relationships and the interaction (for good or ill) of people.