Flyboys
By James Bradley
In Flyboys, the real horror of the book is war
itself, and the nature of war doesn't differ much on either side of the
conflict. Horrible things happen in war that's the way war is. Dwelling on the
crimes of one side or the other just feeds the fires of conflict, years after
the end of hostilities. Even the most terrible of war crimes, like what
happened to eight stranded American Navy, Marine and Army Air Corps flyers on
the remote Pacific island of Chichi Jima, must be understood as part of the
overall horrors of war.
This is a story of what happened to a group of
American naval aviators on the Japanese held island of Chichi Jima was a
long-held secret, buried within the flurry of war-crime trials. Chichi Jima was
a sideshow in the war, one of the Bonin Islands, near the vastly more famous
Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima had room for an airstrip; Chichi Jima only had room for a
huge radio station, sending intelligence data back to Tokyo. That made it a secondary
target. Were tasked to destroy it. Anti-aircraft fired form the island brought
some of the American planes down, and their surviving crew members parachuted
to the island as prisoners.
What happened to Jimmy Dye, Glenn Frazier, Floyd
Hall, Marve Mershon, Dick Woelhof, Grady York, Warren Earl Vaughan, and the anonymous
B-24 crewman who shared their fates is shocking so much so that even their
families could not know the whole truth. It was certainly a violation of the
Geneva Convention protecting the rights of prisoners of war. It was so awful
that most of the Japanese soldiers had to be ordered to participate.
This concludes my blog on Flyboys although I really
did not like the book it was just too boring and long for my liking. I felt
that draged on about the war and what happened to the pilots.
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