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

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

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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.

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all the best -- Dan Ford
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