Flyboys: A True Story of Courage - By James Bradley

Biography:
James Bradley burst onto the national scene as an author in 2000 with his New York Times #1 bestseller book Flags of our Fathers. The New York Times called it "the surprise runaway nonfiction best seller of the season." Steven Spielberg acquired the movie rights.

Flags of our Fathers is about the six boys who raised the American flag on Iwo Jima. The photograph is the most reproduced photo in history. James' father, John Bradley, was one of the six Iwo Jima flagraisers.

James is President of the James Bradley Peace Foundation, which fosters understanding between America and Asia. The foundation sends American students to Japan and China to study.

On September 30, NBC's The Today Show will feature a live appearance by James as he introduces his second book, Flyboys, to the world. Then James will conduct a two-month, 25-city Flyboys book-tour.

Flyboys is the secret story of eight American flyboys who were beheaded on the island next to Iwo Jima in World War II. The ninth Flyboy got away. His name is George Bush.

James is also a professional motivational speaker who has delighted thousands of listeners all over the world.

James was raised in Wisconsin, studied at the University of Notre Dame, Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan and graduated with a degree in East Asian History from the University of Wisconsin. Before becoming an author James produced corporate films. He has traveled the world, living and working in more than 40 countries for nearly a decade. He has run companies in five countries. He has jumped out of airplanes at 15,000 feet, has scuba-dived in deep waters worldwide, trekked to Mount Everest's base camp and walked among lions in Africa. He is an avid reader of history, enjoys discovering exotic cuisine, cliff diving, golfing and snow skiing.

James is working on his third book The China Mirage (2007) and is probably in Shanghai as you read this.

Description:
Until author James Bradley began his investigation, even the families of these downed airmen knew little about their fate. The military did know but withheld the information for nearly 60 years to save families from the knowledge of the beheadings and cannibalism and gruesome tortures that had occurred after the airmen's capture.

In his highly acclaimed Flags of Our Fathers, Bradley told the story of the six men who raised the American flag at Iwo Jima. One of those men was his father. Like his earlier book, Flyboys provides highly personalized accounts of the savagery of the war in the Pacific and how it affected the people who took part in it.

Bradley's interest in researching the fate of the airmen began when a colleague suggested he contact a retired lawyer in Iowa who had some "interesting information." The lawyer had been a participant in a secret trial in 1946 in which the Japanese responsible for the deaths of the flyboys had been tried and convicted of war crimes. The man said he always had the nagging feeling that "these guys wanted their story told," and Bradley quickly agreed.

His research included an examination of recently declassified military documents regarding the flyboys' imprisonment as well as interviews with surviving family members and with former Japanese soldiers who had been with the Americans after their capture. When Bradley went to Chichi Jima to see where the Americans had been kept prisoner, he was accompanied by George H.W. Bush, the one flier who had been saved after being shot down.

Bradley is at his best when providing little vignettes that reveal the kinds of people who volunteered to go off to fight for their country while still in their teens. The Chichi Jima flyboys came from varied backgrounds, but their stories suggest that they all shared a basic decency. One particularly poignant story involved a Kansas mother celebrating the Fourth of July with her extended family at the very time her son was about to take off on his fateful flight.

But Flyboys is much more than a series of biographical sketches of nine American airmen who were shot down over a small island in the Pacific Ocean. Bradley tries to put their stories in a much larger context. This is an ambitious book that devotes its first hundred pages to tracing the history of Japanese-American relations from the time Commodore Perry first forced Japan to confront the rest of the world in 1853 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

When Japan was confronted with the growing presence of Western powers in the Far East, it felt threatened and decided that to defend itself against the rich and powerful nations of the West, it would need to become rich and powerful itself. Bradley writes that the Western model for becoming rich and powerful was to establish colonies, enslave their people and appropriate their resources, and that this was the model Japan set out to emulate.

Japan looked not just at the experiences of the European colonial powers but at the United States and the lands it had gotten from Mexico and the way it had subjugated Indians and the natives of the Philippines. Bradley provides painful examples of instances when Americans committed terrible atrocities against people they had convinced themselves were somehow less than fully human.

When Japan began to pursue its own empire, it discovered that the Western powers wanted it to abide by a different set of rules than they themselves had played by. Convinced of their own racial superiority, the Japanese were outraged to find themselves the victims of Western racism. The belief among the Japanese that theirs was a country of the gods and that foreigners were devils, Bradley argues, would play a large role in the brutal training of the Japanese army, which led to atrocities that in turn sharpened already keen American hostility.

Bradley devotes another major section of his book to examining how airpower has radically changed warfare. He devotes an entire chapter to Billy Mitchell and Mitchell's battles with the defense establishment during the 1920s over the military value of airplanes. Mitchell lost his fight but would eventually be vindicated as Franklin Roosevelt pursued just the sort of air strategy against Japan that Mitchell had advocated. Bradley makes the point that the defeat of Japan was the first time in history that a nation had been defeated through the air.

After the Americans were successful in knocking out the radar and communication facilities on Chichi Jima, Japan had no effective air defenses. By 1945 the United States had such complete control of the skies that it was safer to fly a mission over Japan in a B-29 than to fly a training mission back in the states.

Victory over Japan required more than the strategic bombing that Mitchell had argued would make warfare more humane. Bradley notes that few Americans realize that the United States killed more Japanese civilians than Japanese soldiers. To the Japanese, "airmen who dropped napalm on defenseless civilians living in paper houses were the scum of the earth." At least as awful as the book's descriptions of the beheadings and disembowelments of the American servicemen are the descriptions of the effect of the napalming. "[H]umans burst spontaneously into flames, blazing like matchsticks. People's heads exploded in the heat, the liquid brains in their burst skulls bubbling an eerie fluorescence."

Curtis LeMay, the general in charge of the napalming, acknowledged that had the United States lost the war he would most probably have been tried as a war criminal. The napalming brought far more death and devastation to Japan than the atom bombs did. Bradley even suggests that "perhaps the greatest lifesaving function served by the atom bombs was that they shortened LeMay's firebombing of Japan."

Bradley seems to accept the argument that given the fanaticism of the Japanese, many more lives would have been lost on both sides had the United States attempted a land invasion. Japanese military leaders were mobilizing the whole population to fight American "devils" to the death. Choosing death over surrender was seen as the way to prove Japan's moral superiority.

In the end Flyboys is not just a "true story of courage" but a frightening reminder of the savagery human beings are capable of and of the terrible moral choices nations at war must make. James D. Fairbanks is professor of political science and associate vice president for planning and policy at University of Houston-Downtown.