Flyboys

War is hell. These three words summarize Flyboys, James Bradley’s extraordinary book on the Pacific air war with Japan. In turns gruesome (I skipped entire pages more than once) and mesmerizing, this book is consistently a page turner. Bradley does an excellent job of setting the stage for Pearl Harbor and the United States’ subsequent war with Japan by providing a history of (largely antagonistic) relations between the two nations dating from their first “meeting” in 1853. In doing so, he tackles the issues of expansionism and racism head-on, providing a balanced perspective on the atrocities nations – including the U.S. – had long perpetuated on one another well before World War II. The history of the American experience in the Philippines is especially harrowing and one I’m quite certain I never learned in school. (In short, we “facilitated” the Spanish exist from the archipelago owing to their brutal treatment of the native population, then employed equally brutal methods against these same people, including an official policy to kill every man, woman, and child over the age of ten.)

Bradley uses this history to explain the particular animosity the Japanese felt towards America on the eve of World War II, while also providing a rather fascinating picture of the early air forces. Ultimately, this book is the story of eight American fly boys who were captured and killed by the Japanese after being shot down over Chichi Jima. (A ninth was rescued by a U.S. submarine – that pilot, famously, was George H.W. Bush, who is portrayed warmly in the book by Bradley.) The fate that befell these eight men was so startling that the post-war war crimes prosecutor opened the trial by warning that what befell these men was “so revolting to the human mind that man long ago decided it unnecessary to legislate directly against” such treatment (p. 317). It is shocking.

Yet, in many ways, it is less shocking than Japan’s treatment of its own soldiers (poor provisioning meant cannibalism became de rigeur during the war), and in many ways it is no more shocking that the acts committed by American soldiers against the Japanese (strafing the shipwrecked survivors of a torpedoed transport carrier, for example). Or the napalming of dozens of Japanese cities, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Japanese civilians. In the context of the widespread firebombing campaign that was designed to bring Japan to its knees, but which was still insufficient to convince the country to surrender, the atomic bomb seems the only possible way for the war to end. As Bradley notes, in a perverse way, the atomic bombed actually saved far more lives than it extinguished, a fact that many of the Japanese survivors whose testimony is a strength of the book, acknowledge. War is hell. I think I’m done with war books for awhile.