This Mass Market Paperback Book item from Little, Brown and Company was reviewed on 4-Nov-2008.
Search ISBN:031610728X offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Flyboys: A True Story of Courage Reference Book. Classifications : General Biographies & Memoirs 4-for-3 Books Store Custom Stores Specialty Stores Books General Military Leaders & Notable People Biographies & Memoirs 4-for-3 Books Store Custom Stores Specialty Store . Click the following link to view the cover of Flyboys: A True Story of Courage. Related topics: General. 4-for-3 Books Store. Custom Stores. Specialty Stores. Books. General. Military. 4-for-3 Books Store. Custom Stores. Specialty Stores. requestid: 43055c44-d6fa-441a-bf04-2cef7dac11ad
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1) Mass Market Paperback Book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by Little, Brown and Company. A great book. I would have given it 5 stars but thought it was overwritten and too detailed at times. I´d previously thought Hirohito wasn´t so bad -- just a captive of the military. Not so. The extent of George Bush´s heroism was another revelation.¤ 2) Mass Market Paperback Book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by Little, Brown and Company. The book was a little too boardly based. It covers US and Japanese relations from the 1850s to the end of WWII. But it was wonderfully engaging and any history/WWII reader will greatly enjoy it.¤ 3) Mass Market Paperback Book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by Little, Brown and Company. My dad loves true military stories, and I got this for him for Christmas. The previous Christmas I had gotten him "Flags of our fathers." He loved it. My dad is a good reader, but he never reads for hours on end putting other stuff aside just to do so. But, this book had him reading for the better part of his Christmas break. He also said it was somewhat sad, but not overly.¤ 4) Mass Market Paperback Book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by Little, Brown and Company. I had seen the book but never made the connection to the author of The Flags of our Fathers. I decided to pick it up and give it a read after chatting with an older gentleman about the war. He said it was good.
I had never hear of Chichi Jima. A bypassed island which was overshadowed by the Battle of Iwo Jima. Chichi Jima was a communications center for the Japaneses. American pilots "flyboys" were assigned to try and take out the radio stations so they could not inform Japan that bombers were on the way. Bradley tells the story of what happened to the flyboys that were shot down. Their names were Dick Woellhof, Floyd Hall, Marve Mershon, Jimmy Dye, Grady York, Warren Earl Vaughn, the future President George HW Bush, Glenn Frazier, Bill Connell and an unnamed B-24 crewman. Only George Bush and Bill Connell would survive.
What I found interesting is the way Bradley tries to explain the two cultures and the history leading up to the war. The history mentioned ranges from the Samurai, the restoration of the Mejii, Perry and the rise of the Militaristic powers. Bradley made an attempt to explain the pseudo-Samurai culture that arose and the actions of the so called "Spirit Warriors" committed. Actions which the real Samurai would have never done.
Bradley makes no attempt to "white wash" the history and the wars that were fought. Bradeley tells of barbarous acts committed by Japan, the US, and even China throughout the years. Actions which at the time people thought they were the right thing to do and with future generations can question.
The clash of the two cultures does come into play. To the Japanese soldier the act of surrender was a shameful horrendous act. It basically made you the lowest of the low. Treatment of such men was horrible especially with the brutal thugs that ran the army.
War is about dehumanizing the enemy. It makes it easier to kill them. The US even practiced it with songs such as "I am going to slap that dirty little Jap" and the use of a parade float which showed scurrying yellow rats being bombed.
Hollywood likes to paint a noble John Wayneish view of the war and yet our boys could be a brutal as the enemy. As mentioned by flyboys who strafed Japanese soldiers and sailors. Bradley doesn´t try to paint an evil image of the US soldier. Simply that war can make decent people do bad things in war.
I knew prisoners were executed as I have seen the famous photo of the Australian soldier about to be beheaded. What I did not know was the acts cannibalism that went on.
Such acts happened to the flyboys that crashed and were captured on Chichi Jima. Such acts suggested the War Department thought it was not a good idea to tell the families of the flyboys as they were told they were MIA. It´s kind of sad hearing the mothers went to their graves not knowing what happened to their sons. Yet, would you want to tell a mother that her son was beheaded and partially eaten?
This story only made it to light because of Bill Doran felt the flyboys stories needed to be told and he contacted the author and told him about them. Bill Doran was present at the war crimes trials for the leaders and soldiers involved with the killings on Chichi Jima.
Bradley talked to endless people and even Japanese soldiers who were on the island an interacted with the flyboys. The cannibalistic commands were executed in 1947. The stories told about the flyboys facing their deaths is indeed courageous and noble. Depending on your viewpoints you can take it as true or simply soldiers making them honorable rather then what happened.
Bradley also visited the islands of Iwo Jima and Chichi Jima with President Bush. He asked the author if he knew anything about what happened to the two men he lost when he was shot down that day. President Bush stayed with his plane longer then he should have and even tried to turn it so they could get out safer. They didn´t make it even though it was thought two parachutes were seen.
President Bush said to this day he still thinks of them.
Overall this is a great book to read and I highly recommend it.¤ 5) Mass Market Paperback Book Flyboys: A True Story of Courage by Little, Brown and Company. "Fly Boys" an incredible botch. The book promises to tell of American fliers shot down over Japanese-held Chichi Jima. Not far from Iwo Jima, scores of Japanese on Chichi could only watch impotent as a huge American force utterly devastated their nearby comrades, opening the door for fiery assaults against the Japanese home islands. The Japanese proved far better at amassing forces than maintaining them, effectively stranding troops across the Pacific. (Imperial doctrine called for troops to "provision" themselves - by stealing from local inhabitants or by subsisting on insects and flora.) As a result, islands like Chichi and Guadalcanal became home to thousands of starving Japanese troops barely able to bring the fight to the enemy. Desperation exacerbates the sort of hysteria already endemic to every level of the Japanese military when the war began, and the "Fly Boys" suffer their captors´ wrath.
Some reviews complain about Bradely´s use of "moral equivalence" (Bradley compares Imperial brutalities with those of an expansionist America from the post-Civil War era through the war in the Philippines) to anti-American effect. But those problems mask the book´s larger flaw: that it really isn´t about anything at all. What starts out a story of American prisoners, goes back to the dawn of Japanese-American relations, the birth of modern Japan and the road to war. Then there is the rise of American airpower, the battles of Coral Sea and Midway, and finally the landings at Iwo Jima and the firebombing of Japan. These historic events don´t simply form a backdrop to the story, but become the story, grabbing as much of Bradley´s focus as the plight of his downed airmen. Bradley never integrates these threads into a common historic theme, and never explains what they´re all doing in the same book. In a book about nothing in particular, everything is irrelevant.
For his research, or maybe because of it, Bradley loses his way almost immediately. Instead of learning about the downed Chichi fliers, Bradley begins with the historical roots of the Pacific war...and then works backward. We see how Commodore Perry "opened" the closed yet sophisticated and highly regimented Japanese society to the outside world. Japan´s honor system - epitomized by Bushido - was blameless for the barbarities of WWII. Instead, the modern combat experience of the Japanese demonstrates both compliance with that code and extraordinarily humane (Russians captured in the 1907 war received treatment little worse than that for guests). Bradley contrasts this with the aforementioned brutality of Americans in war.
Getting to WWII, Bradley barely touches on his subjects - instead rehashing more milestones already familiar to anybody with the least basic grasp of military history (or with basic cable). From the court martial of Billy Mitchell to Doolittle´s raid on Tokyo; from the Battle of Midway to the fire-bombing of the home islands of the Empire - Bradley gives some marginal insight, but again little bearing on the downed American fliers who become extras in their own story. Bradley not only forgets whom he´s writing about, but never clarifies whose perspective. (Bradley compares the cruelties perpetrated by Americans in giving some shape to those committed by the Imperial Japanese, but did the Japanese know of "Wounded Knee" during the Bataan March? Is Bradley is arguing for moral relativism, or merely demonstrating that the Japanese had done so?)
When it´s clear that Bradley is writing from his own perspective, the result is a soft concoction of history and euphemism, with little hard fact. This is especially true of the title - nothing in Bradley´s book gets to the meat of what it means to be one of the "Fly Boys", though he uses the term throughout. In that vein, "fly boys" may be an image, like the one used in "The Right Stuff" in which pilots were the lone shining knights of the nuclear powered space age. But Wolfe fleshed out his metaphors without being conquered by them (by the end of "Stuff", Wolfe´s America has matured beyond its need for such archaic heroes like the Mercury 7 - the era of the lone, shining and supersonic knight had come to an end). Bradley instead uses "Flyboys" to refer to fliers in general - ignoring much distinction between the fliers of different services. Instead, Bradley has "flyboys" as FDR´s one-word answer in the desperate early days of the war (was FDR such a fan of naval aviation?), without saying much about how FDR turned that answer into the force that won the war. Other glossed over points - the relative industrial might of America and Japan, and the exhaustion faced by Japan in China even before hostilities began with America. Bradley "shows" much, yet teaches little.
As to the problem of moral-equivalence touched upon by unfavorable reviewers, "Flyboys" engages in a sort of thematic shell-game. In turns, he eschews then embraces the sentimentality of American pluck over Imperial aggression. In a work that reveals the contrasting imagery that each side used for the other (uniformly hostile, of course), Bradley freely engages in imagery and sentimentality of his own - of spirit warriors and Samurai, of those betrayed the warrior´s honor code, and those who´ve inherited it. Bradley charts Japan´s ironic metamorphosis from honorable warrior to barbaric marauder, fleshing out the contrasting extremes for each. Yet having plumbed American atrocities, reverses direction for Americans without explanation, and makes them the heirs of the Bushido - a characterization (much like "Fly Boy") qualified or even defined. "Flyboys" is supposed to be an unflinching look at WWII as we haven´t seen before, yet its subtitle, offering a story of "courage" suggests he´s as much reliant on heroic and unreal imagery as those who written before him.¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 2-Dec-2008, 031610728X9780316107280, 8X0-330-410-5X0-400-550-4X0-8 
Flyboys: A True Story of Courage, Book, Image © Little, Brown and Company
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