Rating: 
Summary: Flyboys is an Excellent Book
Review: . Flyboys is an excellent book that contains an important
account that should be read. The genesis of Flyboys is about secret trials regarding
events hidden on Chichi Jima, not far from Iwo Jima,
during WWII. A number of Japanese officers on Chichi Jima are cannibals,
and their favorite cuisine were American prisoner of war
captives. The secret trials, held on Guam, doesn't make a lot
of sense unless taken into the broader context of WWII. George Bush, the 41st President of the United States, almost
ended up on their dinner table. The Pacific has a history of atrocities that propagate further
atrocities. The cycle of atrocities continues. It shouldn't be a surprise that Americans were involved in
various atrocities in the Pacific region. To say otherwise
is to lie when it is unnecessary. That is history. To call Japan's radical WWII military leadership "Spirit
Warriors" is justifiable, as they forgot lessons learned in
the previous war with Russia and they over-emphasized
the spirit in a modern industrial technological war. The false Bushido code practiced in Japan during WWII
carries a warning for many other societies now drunk with
power.
The book Flyboys 0316105848 deserves to be read more
than once. Other books that should be read along with Flyboys are:
Downfall 0141001461 and Flags of Our Fathers 0553111337.
Rating: 
Summary: a disappointing account of an atrocity
Review: I was hugely disappointed with this book. Jet fuel spills on carrier decks. Engines stall in mid-air. Singapore falls before China gets raped. B-25 bombers are called Billys. Roosevelt is called the Dutchman; Hirohito, the Boy Soldier; and American flyers of course are Flyboys, on almost every page. Casualties are confused with fatalities. Aerial warfare takes place in the third dimension, land warfare in the first, and naval warfare in the second. On page 141, 800 Japanese on Attu Island made a suicide charge upon American troops; on page 143, the number is 2,350. Japanese pilots become "another notch in a Flyboy's belt." Bradley's technique seems to have been to find the most startling book--in English--on a subject, then to borrow heavily from it. Often enough he doesn't bother to rewrite the excerpts; he throws quotation marks around them and inserts them into his text without saying where they're from. I generally read a book like this with my right index finger in the citations page; in this case, it's the only way to know whom he's quoting. He abuses statistics in a remarkable way: he says that American soldiers during the pacificiation of the Philippines earlier in the century killed 7,000 locals a month, then declares that "Hitler and Tojo combined, with all their mechanized weaponry, killed the same per month." Huh? Hitler and Tojo killed a *million* people a month, of whom 7,000 happened to be American. It's the same with his analogies: sure, the Japanese murdered a few prisoners, but what about Americans who sank Japanese transports, then machine-gunned the survivors in the water? To Bradley, these are similar atrocities, rather overlooking the fact that soldiers in the water become combatants if they got ashore. Killing them wasn't pretty, but it wasn't a war crime. Even the cannibalism on Chichi Jima isn't as unknown as he makes out. I read about it long ago in Lord Russell's *Knights of Bushido*. Indeed, the most eye-popping bit of evidence in *Flyboys* (a formal order to produce the flesh of an American pilot for a battalion feast) is lifted from Russell's book. Bradley did do some original research. He walked the ground on Chichi Jima--always a good idea, but one seldom pursued by historians--and best of all he interviewed some of the Japanese survivors, including one of the cannibals. Surely he could have made a book out of this material without the foolish Flyboys, Billys, and Dutchmen, and without the strained efforts to show that the Japanese, if no better than the Americans, were at least no worse. It might have been a shorter book, but it would have been a better one. -- Dan Ford
Rating:
Summary: Review of "Flyboys"
Review: A truly scholarly work. The author has done extensive research and combined the same into a spellbounding true story, with fascinating facts of which I was never before aware.
This is art at its best.
Rating:
Summary: Who's more vicious? U.S. or Japan? Japan wins by a mile!
Review: Author Bradley rightly reminds readers that America is not without historical sin. However, the barbaric nature of the Imperial Japanese "Spirit Warriors," and the fanatical, "die to the last man, woman, and child" attitude of the entire Japanese nation, leads me to the conclusion that napalming and nuking Japanese cities was the only way to stop the war that Japan started. How sad to read of the fate of the Flyboys of Chichi Jima. What brave men they were. And, what a great tribute this book is to former President George H. Bush.
Rating:
Summary: Who's more vicious? U.S. or Japan? Japan wins by a mile!
Review: Author Brady rightly reminds readers that America is not without historical sin. However, the barbaric nature of the Imperial Japanese "Spirit Warriors," and the fanatical, "die to the last man, woman, and child" attitude of the entire Japanese nation, leads me to the conclusion that napalming and nuking Japanese cities was the only way to stop the war that Japan started. How sad to read of the fate of the Flyboys of Chichi Jima. What brave men they were. And, what a great tribute this book is to former President George H. Bush.
Rating:
Summary: Part Personal History: Part Anti-Western Civilization Lectur
Review: Reviewer David Nicholas hit the "nail on the head" with his review, "Pop History with all its Shortcomings". The individual histories of the American and Japanese servicemen were outstanding - as good as those presented in the author's earlier book, "Flags of Our Fathers". Few will be able to read the personal accounts of George H.W. Bush and others without crying! However, the author spent entirely too much energy explaining why the Japanese atrocities were somewhat justified by the (limited and exaggerated) western democracies' atrocities in the nineteenth century. The author also seemed to completely ignore that America's use of "total war" tactics late in WWII resulted more from the enemies' fanaticism then a national moral failure. This book is not for the faint-hearted. The details of real individual atrocities make "Silence of the Lambs" look like kid's stuff. Also there is a lot of Christian bashing that seems consistent with current American pop culture.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Stephen Ambrose?
Review: The recently declassified information regarding the Navy fliers downed at Chichi Jima is riveting but is not for the faint of heart. If you cannot watch the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan, this book is not for you. Former President Bush's Chichi Jima experience enhances the quality of the text although more information on his missing crewmen would have been interesting. The history lesson on pre-war Japan was too drawn out. Sure, Japanese culture is different from that of the West but we could have gotten a clear picture of this with most of this section edited down. Other key historical context on the air war was left out, for example the British aerial attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940 which convinced the Japanese that an attack at Pearl Harbor could be successful. Also, the German terror bombing of the English city of Coventry was only briefly mentioned. After this bombing, all the major powers in the war attacked civilian targets which is the major theme at the end of this book. Overall, the book is an interesting read for those who are students of WWII or of modern warfare. Maybe James Bradley will take over where Stephen Ambrose left off?
Rating:
Summary: "What matters is what side you're on"
Review: I am not as schooled in the history of US wars as some of the other reviewers of this book appear to be; perhaps for this reason I take less exception to the author's stance with respect to the barbarity of war in general and his examples of US atrocities (from the preemptive "philosophy" of Manifest Destiny forward) in particular. As Bradley's interview subjects seem to agree in the closing chapter, war drives humans to do dreadful things to one another, and "what matters is what side you're on." For me, the stories of the nine Flyboys provided an engaging frame of human reference for the air war in the Pacific, but I was equally engaged, if not more so, by Bradley's inclusion of addtional narrative layers. His crisp telling of how US airpower came to be such a decisive factor, his survey of barbarism among the various combatant cultures throughout their preceding history, and his documentation of the horror visited on the Japanese mainland by the calculated US firebombing of civilians were stories new to me, seemingly well-researched and end-noted. I learned a lot from the book, and took in a great deal of fodder for future reflection and conversation. I occasionally found myself aggravated at the author's repetition of detail, and at the amount of space he gave to details about the family members of the Flyboys. These are small quibbles, though. For me, the book was well worth my time.
Rating:
Summary: WOW
Review: This is an extraordinary book! I spent two weeks reading it, and I have just been blown away. I had no knowledge of what went on at Chichi Jima. The story in this book has just recently 1997 been declassified by the US government. I laughed, got mad, and cried reading this outstanding story of the flyboys. It will definately make you see the war through other peoples' eyes.
Rating:
Summary: While there are two sides to every story...
Review: that does not make them equal. James Bradley has written an excellent account of WWII in the Pacific, from the standpoint of the men who were the true instruments in the destruction of Japan's evil empire, if not it's emperor. If not for the sneaky suspicion that Mr. Bradley was making too great an attempt to distribute blame for the war in the Pacific - comparing U.S. & Western Imperialism, naked aggression against undeveloped countries, and just flat being a product of genocide (a couple hundred years prior to 1942), "Flyboys" is an otherwise excellent read. The persistent underlying tone in this book is one of terror-against-terror... In fact, General Curtis LeMay actually believed he would have been tried as a war criminal had the U.S. lost. The book's primary theme centered on the lives of a few kids who (including GHW Bush), after successfully surviving flight school, were sent to attack islands in the Pacific, in advance of heavy bombers sent to burn Japanese cities to the ground - to destroy the will of the Japanese. Oh, and to destroy the Japanese industrial complex, that was fully disbursed within the civilian population. The interesting (if grotesque) facts presented by Mr. Bradley (provided they are so), answered many long burning questions in my mind. I'd understood that the Japanese soldier was conditioned to fight-or-die, but I never understood the Japanese leadership mentality that was ultimately responsible for the deaths of more Japanese soldiers and civilians than any American. As history of the Pacific air campaign, in microcosm, I trust Mr. Bradley got it right. As a history of the bigger picture, I concede many points, but making the comparisons and semi-justifications, that he did, cannot have endeared him to many American readers. All in all, a book worth reading.
| 
