A-Bomb, Justified .?!

I'd be interested in other opinions of "Flyboys"

Okay, Michael, you asked for it! Herewith my opinion:

*******************************************

I was hugely disappointed with this book.

First, the howlers: jet fuel spilling on carrier decks; engines
stalling in mid-air; Singapore falling before China gets raped. B-25
bombers are misnamed Billys. The book refers to Roosevelt as the
Dutchman; Hirohito as the Boy Soldier; the 20th Air Force commander as
Curtis; and American flyers of course as Flyboys. Casualties are
confused with fatalities. Aerial warfare takes place in the third
dimension, land warfare in the first, and naval warfare in the second.
On page 141, eight hundred Japanese on Attu Island made a suicide
charge against American troops; on page 143, the number is 2,350.
Japanese pilots become "another notch in a Flyboy's belt."

Second, the historical research: Bradley's technique seems to have
been to find the most startling book--in English--on a subject, then
to borrow heavily from it. Often enough he doesn't bother to rewrite
the excerpts; he throws quotation marks around them and inserts them
into his text without saying where they're from. I generally read a
book like this with my right index finger in the citations page; in
this case, it's the only way to know whom he's quoting.

Third, the faulty reasoning: He says that American soldiers during the
pacificiation of the Philippines earlier in the century killed 7,000
locals a month, then declares that "Hitler and Tojo combined, with all
their mechanized weaponry, killed the same per month." Huh? Hitler and
Tojo killed a million people a month, of whom 7,000 happened to be
American servicemen.

It's the same with his analogies: sure, the Japanese murdered a few
prisoners, but what about Americans who sank Japanese transports, then
machine-gunned the survivors in the water? To Bradley, these are
similar atrocities, rather overlooking the fact that soldiers in the
water haven't surrendered and will become combatants if they get
ashore. Killing them wasn't pretty, but it wasn't a war crime.

Even the cannibalism on Chichi Jima isn't as unknown as he makes out.
I read about it long ago in Lord Russell's Knights of Bushido. Indeed,
the most eye-popping bit of evidence in Flyboys (a formal order to
produce the flesh of an American pilot for a battalion feast) is
lifted from Russell's book.

Bradley did do some original research. He walked the ground on Chichi
Jima--always a good idea, but one seldom pursued by historians--and
best of all he interviewed some of the Japanese survivors, including
one of the cannibals. Surely he could have made a book out of this
material without the foolish Flyboys, Billys, and Dutchmen, and
without the strained efforts to show that the Japanese, if no better
than the Americans, were at least no worse. It would have been a
shorter book and a better one.

***********************************************



all the best -- Dan Ford
email:

see the Warbird's Forum at www.warbirdforum.com
and the Piper Cub Forum at www.pipercubforum.com

On Wed, 24 Dec 2003 06:25:22 -0500, Cub Driver
wrote:


It's the same with his analogies: sure, the Japanese murdered a few
prisoners, but what about Americans who sank Japanese transports, then
machine-gunned the survivors in the water? To Bradley, these are
similar atrocities, rather overlooking the fact that soldiers in the
water haven't surrendered and will become combatants if they get
ashore. Killing them wasn't pretty, but it wasn't a war crime.

That would be the battle of the bismarck sea.

http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/remembering1942/bismark/


"One B17 was bought down by escorting Zero fighters from New Britain and
they were seen to machine gun the crew in their parachutes or life vests."



greg


--
Once you try my burger baby,you'll grow a new thyroid gland.
I said just eat my burger, baby,make you smart as Charlie Chan.
You say the hot sauce can't be beat. Sit back and open wide.

From: Charles Gray cgra

He also cites the poor treatment Philippinos got
by American forces after the Spanish occupation. Bradley says the
Japanese were not doing anything different than Americans
had done in the west.

andwhile there were arguable atrocities by American soldiers, it
should also be noted that this occured during a very ugly guerrilla
war-- but that civilians not-involved in such hostilities were by and
large not simply left alone, but actively aided by the American
authorities.

Two points about this: 1)the atrocities were real and terrible; 2)Americans
were appalled by them _at the time_. The US Senate investigated atrocities in
the Philippines _while the war was going on_ issuing a full report in 1902.
Essentially all attacks on US actions in the Philippines in the decades since
the war have relied on contemporary condemnatory _American_ coverage.
The general American view of the war in the Philippines can be summed up in
this line from William Vaughan Moody's popular poem of the day, "On a Soldier
Fallen in the Philippines":

"Let him never dream that his bullet's scream went wide of its island mark,
Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the
dark."

The poem, "The Charge of the Wood Brigade" about the the Massacre of Mount
Dajo, where 600 civilians were
slaughtered by US troops, was written by Rep. John Sharp Williams (D-Miss.) and
read by him in the House of Representatives, in 1906, shortly after the news of
the atrocity reached the US. It contains such stanzas as:

Chased them from everywhere,
Chased them all onward
Into the crater of death,
Drove them -- six hundred!
"Forward, the Wood Brigade;
Spare not a one," he said;
"Shoot all six hundred!"

("Wood" being Leonard Wood)

By the next year Theodore Roosevelt had concluded acquisition of the
Philippines was a mistake. And the US proceded to do good by the Philippines
and prepare it for genuine independence (not some puppet statehood, a la
Manchukuo).

I don't see any of this as comparable to what Japan did. When elements in the
US (principally the "Boston Imperialists") advocated the US become an Empire in
the classic European sense, the US made some tentative movements and then
domestic political resistance aborted the movement. There was no follow-up to
the Spanish-American War--no Franco-American War, no Anglo-American War (both
urged by the BIs)--and the entanglements ensuing from that war in the Caribbean
and Asia, echoing down to the Cuban Missle Crisis, at least, have been the
fodder for US domestic politics ever since, and inform attitudes and
discussions about the US role in the middle east today.

In contrast, Japan's domestic opposition to imperialism seems to have been weak
and obviously ineffective, leading Japan to embark on a monstrous era of savage
conquest ending only when the chickens came home to roost in the form of the
Enola Gay and Bock's Car. And it seems that since the war the Japanese have
not been as soul-searching about their own activities as the Americans have
always been (even extending to the Indian Wars, when it was Custer himself who
said of the red man that it was "cheaper to feed him than fight him").
The relentless, ruthless persecution of the war against Japan by the US is
really an aberration. The more typical US war is a sudden thrust, an
enthusiastic commitment confidently expecting swift resolution and lasting
good. This is followed almost immediately by self-doubt, hesitation, loss of
will. In large part this is due to the fact we are a democracy and opponents
of any war have free reign to express themselves and influence public opinion
and politics. Thus the US has long been a reluctant warrior, fighting only in
coalitions (even if weak ones such as the "Many Flags" program of the Vietnam
era).
However I look at the histories of the two countries, I cannot see moral
equivalence between the actions of America and Japan.



Chris Mark

Here's a summary of the Jolo incident as reported at the time, from the
Literary Digest 32, March 24, 1906.

"No one, to judge from the press comment, feels much elation over the
mountain-top battle in the island of Jolo a few days ago, in which 600 Moro
men, women, and children were killed by our troops under the command of Gen.
Leonard Wood. The President, it is true, speaks of it as "a most gallant and
soldierly feat," performed "in a way that confers added credit on the American
army," and one that entitles the soldiers to "the heartiest admiration and
praise of all those of their fellow-citizens who are glad to see the honor of
the flag upheld by the courage of the men wearing the American uniform." His
newspaper defenders, however, do not go further than to consider it a grim but
necessary bit of police work. His critics take the other extreme. It was "a
frightful atrocity," declares the New Orleans Times-Democrat (Dem.); and the
Boston Post (Ind. Dem.) exclaims that if this is "imperial expansion," "heaven
save us from any more!" A list of the papers that express their horror and
disgust at this thoroughgoing victory would include practically every
Democratic and "anti-imperialist" paper in the United States. In Congress the
Democrats have branded the affair as a "horrible massacre" and an
"assassination," and Representative Williams read a derisive poem on 'The
Charge of the Wood Brigade'
The battle is represented by General Wood as the storming of a Moro bandits'
nest in the crater of Mount Dajo, and the extermination of the bandits, who
fought fanatically to the death. The crater was almost unassailable, and the
artillery had to be hoisted by block and tackle up its well-nigh precipitous
sides. The American forces lost 18 killed and 52 wounded, while the Moros lost
600 killed. General Wood says in a despatch to the Secretary of War:

'I was present throughout practically entire action and inspected top of crater
after action was finished. Am convinced no man, woman, or child was wantonly
killed. A considerable number of women and children were killed in the fight --
number unknown, for the reason that they were actually in the works when
assaulted, and were unavoidably killed in the fierce hand-to-hand fighting
which took place in the narrow enclosed spaces. Moro women wore trousers and
were dressed and armed much like the men and charged with them. The children
were in many cases used by the men as shields while charging troops.'

This explanation is accepted as valid by the expansionist press. The
extermination of these outlaws "was a necessity, and, in the long run, it was
humanity," declares the Philadelphia Press (Rep.), for "it was a question
either of subjugating them or of enduring their savage attacks for an
indefinite period." "If Aguinaldo himself were ruler of Jolo," says the
Philadelphia Evening Telegraph (Rep.) to the anti-imperialists, "he would be
compelled to kill off these murdering Malays in order to protect peaceable
people from their wild raids." And the Louisville Courier-Journal, one of the
leading Democratic papers in the country, declares that "a band of outlaws in
the mountains of Kentucky or of Colorado or of Tennessee would have had to
contend with the agencies of law and order in the same way -- resistance would
have led in similar fashion to the shedding of blood." "Was there no
possibility of forcing these Moros to surrender by starving them out?" asks one
critic. To this the New York Tribune (Rep.) replies:

"Talk of starving them into submission and thus securing their capitulation
simply indicates lack of understanding. The probability is that if Mount Dajo
had been surrounded with an army of a hundred thousand men in unbroken ring, in
an attempt to starve the outlaws into surrender, at the last moment the men
would have come rushing from the crater to hurl themselves in fanatic fury
against their besiegers, and the end would have been the same, excepting at
much greater cost. On the other hand, the daring and extraordinary achievements
of our troops in scaling those heights which had been thought by the natives
inaccessible, and in storming a stronghold which had been thought impregnable,
must have a most valuable moral effect. The remaining outlaw bands will be
panic-striken when they hear of it, they will realize that there is no
stronghold or retreat in which they will be secure, and that the new forces for
law and order in the islands are irresistable."

Sounds like reporting from the Vietnam War and even the Iraq war. The more
things change....





Chris Mark