Rating: 
Summary: Exploitation of the worst kind
Review: Something is inexcusably wrong with this book, something that goes beyond its obvious flaws.Several readers have noted the many factual inaccuracies in "Flyboys." Others have expressed disgust for the "moral equivalency" that Bradley seems to be selling-he sees the Japanese atrocities committed on American POWs as somehow offset by the Americans' firebombing of Tokyo and other cities. Both these criticisms have merit, but I think they are merely symptoms of a far more disturbing flaw in "Flyboys": a hollowness of purpose at the book's core. Reading "Flyboys," I was never convinced that either accuracy or historical judgment was the point of Mr. Bradley's interest in the cutely named Flyboys, or their war. The point, it seemed obvious to me, was that war writing gives Bradley a chance to showcase a fairly creepy fascination with human suffering. For some reason, he was able to suppress this impulse in "Flags of OUr Fathers," which emphasized brotherhood and the human spirit triumphing over war's horrors. But this book never seems more energized than when Bradley is indulging his taste for morbid descriptions of atrocity and torture, and the slow, sickening degradation of their victims that these evils accomplish. The fire-bombing sections may be about "moral equivalency." Or they may be in the book just so that Bradley can write a few more lurid scenes of exploding babies, and human matchsticks bursting into flame. You can almost hear Bradley lick his chops as he drags the reader through the rape, butchering and cannibalizing of a young Asian "comfort woman," the Allied firebombings that leave "screaming human torches" and children who lie on the pavement "like fried eels," the cracked skull of a groaning POW as he is beaten to death. These scenes are all one and the same to the non-combatant Mr. Bradley: raw material. Maybe he genuinely believes that his comic-book dialogue, hard-boiled prosewriting and scene upon scene upon scene of near-pornographic bloodletting and gut-spilling are what it takes to make people "get it" that war is very, very bad. Or maybe he's hoping that Quentin Tarantino will notice this book, and offer Bradley some big bucks for a splatter-movie that will be even more morbid than "Kill Bill": "Flyboys/Fryboys."
Rating:
Summary: MORE OF THE SAME--
Review: I spent a lot of time with military aviation and Naval aviation in particular and really don't understand where the author got the notion "Flyboys" is a term of general usages. The excessive usage of the term becomes a real distraction, much like a current teenagers neverending and excessive use of the word "like." The opening chapters are disorienting and distracting. If he wannts to write a treatise on US military and political misdeeds he should do so. To mix it upp with a narrow and focused story as he has done is a dis-serviice to all.
Rating: 
Summary: A tale that needed to be told.
Review: By uncovering this story and telling it to the world, James Bradley has done a great service to the families of the eight airmen who were brutely executed on the island of Chichi Jima in 1945. The story is perhaps made all the more poignet by the fact that these young men never became famous like President George H. W. Bush, who's own heroic tale is also covered in the book. They were everyday American boys who, like thousands of others, recognized their duty to their country and paid the ultimate price for that decision.
In the worthy spirit of historical balance, the tale of Japanese suffering on Chichi Jima is told as well, giving the reader some insight into what the enemy was experiening in their forsaken island fortress. Bradley reports the troubling take of those thousands of innocent non-combatants who died in the fire bombing of Tokyo as well.
However, Bradley does perhaps go a bit far in his understandable attempt to be unbiased. The inclusion of the story of American atrocities committed in the Philippine Islands at the turn of the 20th century is a bit off point and has the distinct, if not pleading ring of "Please don't get angry with me! I think we're just as evil as you are." to it. Not that I don't believe that that particular tale should go untold, far from it. With all certainty, it should be told. Yet, if Bradley feels so strongly about the subject than he should make it the focus of his next book project and I will look forward to reading it.
That quibble aside, Flyboys is a very good book, well researched and written, so I highly recommend it if you are a history buff or are just looking to learn something new about the war in the pacific.
Rating: 
Summary: Pop History with all its shortcomings
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Moral Equivalence - Bradley style
Review: I cried when I read Flags of Our Fathers. The stories in Flyboys are compelling, but the author gets in the way. James Bradley's story of his father and the other Iwo Jima flagraisers was remarkably free of the author's own biases. Flyboys is not. Mr. Bradley seeks to establish moral equivalence between Japanese and American pre-war behavior for about 100 pages before he gets to the supposed core of the book. He has a very Nippon-centric view of the world, and he seems particularly solicitous of Hirohito, recounting the young emperor's upbringing in a militaristic environment as though that excused the later atrocities committed in his name. This book should not be marketed as though it were a sequel to Flags of Our Fathers. It is at its heart an anti-war, even an anti-American book. While it praises individual pilots, it puts much of teh blame for the commencement of World War II on the U.S., with great sympathy shown for the Japanese. Save your money. Get it from the library if you must, but don't expect the drama and objectivity shown in Flags of Our Fathers.
Rating:
Summary: Agree with many others
Review: I think this book could have been much better and more historically appealing. Too much Japanese bashing in the first 150 or so pages. This is not the topic nor the theme. Anyone who knows anything at all about WWII would already be aware of what the Japanese did to people. Maybe this approach was a ploy to get the readers excited about the Flyboys doing their job and getting even. If so, this was a bad ploy. Perhaps Mr. Bradley should have intereviewed more people to get some better prime source material to validate the book's title.
Rating:
Summary: A Compelling Story That Needs Telling--Only Poorly Presented
Review: 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").
Rating:
Summary: Can we get to the supposed subject of the book someday?
Review: Aaaaaggghh! I am about 1/3rd of the way through the book now and I came to read these reviews to see if everyone else was getting the same feeling I was while reading "Flyboys." I wish I'd read them before I bought this book because most of the stuff in these reviews is right on. I thought I was buying a good story about the "Flyboys" who launched a raid against Chichi Jima. The dust jacket deceptively makes it sound as if that is what you're buying. Instead, I've suffered through 141 pages so far, consisting almost totally of James Bradley's reinterpretation of history in an attempt to suggest that American brutality was just as bad as Japanese brutality. The tone is almost unbearable. Even his own examples don't make his case well at all, but one senses a constant attempt to get his misguided point across. I can hardly take it anymore and I may have to ditch this book. Based on the dust jacket, I feel like I've gotten a total bait-and-switch with this book. I guess he wants to make the "America was just as brutal as Japan" case at all costs and knew he wouldn't sell many books if he was honest about that being the topic. Next time, stick to the story at hand, James, like Hampton Sides did in Ghost Soldiers. Now that was a good read with an interesting story and I didn't have to suffer along the way.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating Story, But Bias Seeps In Early
Review: I have to admit I am only about a third through the book by now, like one other reviewer, and this is a truly fascinating story. James Bradley does a good job of delving into the history of the Pacific, air power, the rise of the US, the rise of Japan, etc. all to set the stage for WWII. I was previously unaware of how interlinked these events were. But already the depths to which he goes to bookend even the slaughter of 30million chinese at the hands of Japanese with stories of American massacres against Indians and Filipinos, -and bogus comparisons to being greater than the deaths caused by Germany and Italy to boot- show a lazy intellectual dishonesty. Having read a bit more in depth about the US in the Philippines he has taken the true stories of the worst American attrocities there and painted them as the norm even though they were not. Building schools, roads and hospitals where none previously existed was a very large part of the US occupation that is conveniently left out. And it is flat out incorrect to state that American torture exceeded Spanish torture, because it didn't, even though it was sadly too common. He also tries far too hard to link nearly every act of Japanese brutality and aggressivenes to American treatment of the American Indian, which becomes a tired and futile exercise after a while. It's just disappointing and taints an otherwise great story told in Bradley's very easy, flowing and human technical style. There is indeed a large difference between a nation that has liberated most of the nations it fought in and actively strived to rebuild those it damaged in war versus one that has conquered every nation it fought in and pillaged to a degree unseen before or since in the history of war. I like Bradley and loved Flags of Our Fathers. Having just graduated UCLA I can only hope this is a well intentioned but misguided effort by him to fit in with modern academia, which has become a leftist, lazy and intellectually dishonest blame America club that falsely paints the world as idyllic and peaceful and prosperous everywhere until America rears its "ugly head." There is no moral distinction made between any civilization, and ridiculous comparisons must be made to make them all look equally responsible for WWII. Since the writing style is good and the story is so interesting reading this book has been like watching William Van Allen come up with the beauty of the Chrysler building, painstakingly adorn its details in Art Deco style, and then paint the whole thing hot pink with yellow, brown and orange polka dots.
Rating:
Summary: Good story but trying to rewrite history!
Review: James Bradley is a pretty good writer and he gives a fascinating and detailed account of the U.S. Navy flyers who were captured and murdered on the Japanese-held island of Chichi Jima during World War II. [P>All-in-all, this is a worthwhile read for history buffs, especially those interested in WWII in the Pacific theater. It would have been much better if the author didn't keep flashing back to some American atrocity, as if he was trying to give a balanced, objective view. His idiotic comparisons of Japan and the United States were neither balanced or objective.
| 
