The Devil's in the Details of a Hellish Account of War FLYBOYS: A True Story of Courage

"Flyboys" is the latest example of how easy it is to be ambushed by mainstream popular culture. This book may have hit best-seller lists, but its popularity is no guarantee of the benign. Think of all the budding book lovers who raced out to read "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," only to be regaled with a gruesome showdown at the end of the story. Think of the audiences who briefly made the hyper-gory "Kill Bill: Vol. 1" the nation's hottest movie, only to discover that it had all the wit of a falling brick.

And now look at James Bradley's gung-ho military history, in which the Greatest Generation takes to the skies over the South Pacific during World War II. It has all the earmarks of a nice gift for Dad: heroes, fighter planes, remarkable acts of derring-do. What is less immediately apparent is that this book breaks the Hannibal Lecter barrier in following its group of wholesome young pilots to their horrible fates.

As Mr. Bradley, author of "Flags of Our Fathers," returns to the vicinity of Iwo Jima, he now moves his attention to another small, strategic site of horrors: Chichi Jima, where nine American pilots were shot down. Eight became prisoners of the Japanese. One, lucky enough to be rescued, became president of the United States. Mr. Bradley recruits former President George H. W. Bush in part of the telling of this story.

"Flyboys" begins with considerable padding about the history of American relations with Japan, and with the occasional monstrous harbinger of what is to come. In typically hearty terms, Mr. Bradley also traces Japan's history with "the marauding Russian Bear," maintaining that "internally, the Russo-Japanese war became to Japan what football is to the University of Notre Dame." He also explores the pre-World War II Japanese atrocities in China. It was there, he says, that the soldiers who would torture American captives learned the tricks of their trade.

"Soldiers chopped off so many heads that their arms grew weak," writes Mr. Bradley about this campaign against China. At moments like these (and there are many of them) "Flyboys" gives the unavoidable impression that such details are being served up as much for entertainment value as for reasons of conscience. Much of this account has a B-movie luridness that cheapens the events described, even if the details are accurate: "Then the general smacked the two helpless boys, took a swig from a nearby sake bottle, and exclaimed, "I feel great. I am revenging the enemy!"

As readers go on to recoil over the unusual ingredients used to make sukiyaki on Chichi Jima, Mr. Bradley risks letting these hellish details obscure his book's larger point. His emphasis on atrocities against those jingoistically named Flyboys is so sickening that very basic questions almost go unanswered. Why were the families of these pilots never told what became of them? "The marine guards told me," says a lawyer involved in war crimes trials, "the Navy didn't want people back home to know that their sons were eaten."

What else went unremarked upon in Americans' perception of the Pacific war? It is here that Mr. Bradley finds material that is inflammatory, quite literally. He discusses the dropping of huge quantities of napalm on Japanese cities, noting that 99.5 percent of Toyama was destroyed, and that the number of casualties from an intensive 1945 bombing raid on Tokyo reached nearly 100,000. He quotes Paul Fussell, the historian and World War II veteran: "The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war."

The information was not precisely hidden; there are photographs here of Tokyo nearly burned to the ground. But "Flyboys" suggests that the twin effects of patriotism and propaganda numbed Americans to the implications of such news.

These were times when newsreels could cheer over scenes of Japanese soldiers being killed. ("Bull's eye! And more Japs meet their ancestors. The show's over, boys.") Life magazine could comfortably run a photograph captioned, "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Japanese skull he sent her." The book concludes that the killings of the pilots on Chichi Jima, however monstrous, cannot be dismissed as events taking place in a vacuum.

Still, it is difficult to appreciate the gravity of Mr. Bradley's arguments while being steamrollered by his excitable prose. In language that would give Stephen King the vapors, he envisions civilian casualties of a bombing raid: "People's heads exploded in the heat, the liquid brains in their burst skulls bubbling an eerie fluorescence. The feet of the fleeing masses scrunched eyeballs that had popped from sockets under pressure."

The issue of Japanese military dining on prisoners and each other during the final part of the Pacific War is one that has been swept under the carpet by both Japan and the US. However, it is now coming to the fore. For several years there has been (for Japan) an on-going scandel over several officers who appear to have survived in the Phillippines by eating a couple of thier enlisted personnel. Japanese soldiers cut off by the island hopping campaign or in parts of Luzon seem to have reverted to cannibalism quite frequently. On top of these grisly events are even more appalling acts such as described above in which Japanese military ate captured American fliers in an atavistic return to stone age attitudes in which eating the internal organs of an enemy meant that the victor had absorbed the strength of the foe into himself. Very strange behavior.

those jingoistically named Flyboys

What is "jingoistic" about the term "Flyboys"? The critic is as guilty of "excitable" prose as she claims the author to be. Not to mention in need of a dictionary.

I'm halfway through the book now. I keep reading in hopes that they will get past the PC moral relativism and get on with the story. According to the book, America and all the European coutries were Christian colonialist despots, and the poor Japanese were just following their expansionist example. After reading Flags of Our Fathers, I'd expected better of this author.

Well, welcome to war, Ms Maslin! As long as YOU are safe and comfortable at home, it really doesn't matter what happens "over there", does it? Read "With the Old Breed", or any of several dozen books and articles that were punlished soon after the war. Then think about what the world would look like had we lost it.

By the way, there was a very good article published in THE ATLANTIC by a Pacific War veteran around 1955 (I have it here somewhere, I'll try to find a link- but you can check the archives- the title was something like "What Kind of War did we REALLY fight in the Pacific". Pulled no punches, glossed over nothing (except that I don't recall that it mentioned a lot about the extreme cruelty of the Japanese to conquered people...)

I can't find that ATLANTIC article- and the old archives are all "pay-per-view" now. I downloaded it a couple of years ago, but it is at home. Anyway, just believe that if Janet Maslin read it, she would probably faint! (I wonder if she read "The Rape of Nanking"?)

I just finished the book. I was ignorant of the level of atrocity that occurred on the part of the Japanese in the WWII Pacific war.

It is a good book overall. At least it exposes outrages that had been kept secret. But Bradley engages in typical liberal-think moral relativism between the American and Japanese conduct during the war. There were atrocities on both sides, but those of our side pale, I repeat, pale, in comparison to the conduct of the murdering, torturing, raping "spirit warriors," as Bradley romantically labels them.

What's even worse is that Bradley seems to excuse much of the conduct, saying that these poor Japanese savages were raised to follow orders and they had no real choice but to chop off the heads of the captured American pilots. Sounds like the same excuse the Nazis made when they murdered Jews in Europe. Bradley doesn't seem to make this connection.

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