Rating: 
Summary: Title is A Bit Mis-leading
Review: This is not a feel good book. But then again what book on war is a feel good book. This is a book about war, plain and simple and the brutalites on a grand scale (the fire bombing of Japan) and on a small scale (renagade Japanese officers engaged in crimes unspeakable), sprinkle in a bit of World History, lives of avaitors and you have The Flyboys. I leave the historical references to more educated reviewers than myself. Do not read this book after you ate, it is quite distrubing. The book is more brutal than the cover would indicate. I have given it three stars, but have not recommended it to any friends. I did recommend Flags of Our Fathers.
Rating: 
Summary: A balanced view of the horrors of war
Review: This book is an objective view of the horrors of the war in the South Pacific. While many of the intellectual elite condemn President Truman's decison to use the atomic bomb to end the war, this book tells of the fanatical Japanese and why the war needed to be ended in the air and not on the ground. The statistic that more died on one of the evening napalm raids than through the use of the A bomb may take some by surprise. The cruelty of the Japanese military does not as the picture of the Aussie POW being beheaded is a part of the history of WWII. My dad was in the South Pacific and was gearing up to go in the invasion of Japan. Now I know what those months must have been like and why he loved the Air Force. This book examines the morality of war in a balanced way, pointing out the initial American condemnation of the bombing of civilians and the reversal of that ethic when it became apparent that the only way to end the war ws to bomb the Japanese home islands. A must reading for any serious student of WWII. As good as Flag of Our Fathers, which is saying something.
Rating: 
Summary: Taking Credit Where None Is Due
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: First-person interviews enhance WWII history
Review: Mr. Bradley has written an excellent history of the Aviation war against Japan in WWII. His interviews with Japanese soldiers and American aviators enlighten us about their experiences during combat. Mr. Bradley presents a picture of the culture of Japan that was an important part of the reasons for Japan's involvement in the war. William Manchester wrote in "Goodby Darkness" about the savagery of the battles between Japan's imperial Marines and the American Marines on the occupied islands. After reading "Flyboys", I have a much better understanding of why this happened.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting read...
Review: This is a wonderful book when it is telling the stories of the American airmen who were shot down over the island of Chichi Jima during World War II. All of these flyers who were captured were later executed and tortured by the Japanese Army, and many of the remains were subject to cannibalism by Japanese soldiers. Unfortunately, the author is not content to simply recount the stories of Japanese barbarism. Instead, he believes it is necessary to morally equate the atomic and fire bombing campaigns against the Japanese with the individual treatment that they meted out to anyone with whom they came in contact. This bit of political correctness is ridiculous, as it serves absolutely no point in a story about American flyers. Regardless, the book is an enjoyable and informative read, and is recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A Fine Job Flawed
Review: FLYBOYS is an excellent retelling of one of the more tragic episodes of the Pacific War: The capture, and eventual execution of eight Naval aviators sent to destroy a communications installation on the island of Chichi Jima. James Bradley does an admirable job of memorializing the lives of these eight youngsters gone to war. His summation of Japanese history from the time of Perry until 1941 is enlightening. His central thesis of wartime Japanese behavior as an institutionalized perversion of the Bushido Code is also meaningful and well thought-out. FLYBOYS fails where it tries to preach moral equivalency. Bradley takes an almost pornographic delight in recounting episodes of rapine and pillage on the part of the Japanese (in China) and the Americans (on the frontier and in the Philippines). While there is no question that the American frontiersman brutalized the Native American population, and that horrific excesses occurred during the Huk Insurrection (as they do in any war), these brutalities arose not so much from a policy of state as from no policy at all. The habit and custom of collecting Indian scalps in the 19th century may be hideous in retrospect, but it is a far cry from a Japanese armed forces standard policy of eating prisoners of war in the 20th (other rations might or might not have been available to the Japanese troops). Likewise, Bradley's criticism of the firebombing of Japan as excessively destructive seems well-placed until the reader remembers the extraordinary tenacity of the average Japanese soldier when faced with an enemy. Although Bradley wants to put the word "fanatic" in quotes, it does not really belong there. An army whose officers and rank-and-file routinely brutalized conscripts and viciously executed (and ate) POWs is by definition an army of fanatics. A nation which could give rise to such an army is a nation of fanatics. Such a nation should be broken (and was). There is no requirement (as Bradley would have it) to take the Japanese nation out for an ice cream by way of recompense. What was, was. FLYBOYS recounts a terrible episode in the annals of war, and does so intelligently. I will agree that the U.S. doesn't deserve an ice cream either. The author's attempts to excuse or downplay the actions of the wartime Japanese by pointing up American actions of a stripe a half-century and more earlier only weakens his presentation of the tragedies of the first truly modern war.
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.
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