LowCommand
Posts: 138
Joined: 8/14/2002
From: VA
Status: offline
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This is an odd book. In theory it is centered around Chichi Jima, most famous as the place where President Bush was shot down. It has numerous bits of information, quotes, and rants that are quite interesting. It is also painful in places. One example, he uses “Flyboys” in what seems like every sentence on one page. In another place he endlessly refers to the B25 “Mitchel” as a “Billy” saying that was the original nickname for the bomber from “Billy” Mitchel the great but greatly flawed aviation pioneer and bombing advocate. He goes on about all the good Mitchel did and completely misses the harm the man also did. Like the deep-seated Army Air Force belief throughout most of the war that violently maneuvering warships could be sunk by high level bombing.
On the good side, he has very interesting quotes, like, “more civilians were killed by samurai swords than atomic bombs,” as a result of Japan’s “Kill All, Burn All, Destroy All” (well really, “Loot All”) strategy against China.
He has a very long description of the M69 Incendiary bomb and explains why it worked so well.
He has a very long rant about how bombing cities was horrible as long as the enemy was doing it to us, but ok when we did it them.
He has lots of good descriptions about the Japanese “Warrior Spirit” and its weird logic and poetic descriptions of the fallen. I expect most of us have heard of Lotus Blossoms, but he adds Shattered Blood Jewels and other phrases. He goes into some detail about just how twisted their “logic” had gotten. For example, the Japanese Army high command seems to have been really, really serious about offering up all “100 million” (poetic license, it was more like 80 million) Japanese as Kamikazes. Yep, really seriously planning to send every last man, woman and child in the country charging into machine gun fire even if armed only with bamboo spears. I had always believed that they knew this was mostly hype. But, apparently, they actually believed that the idea would work. It never seems to have occurred to them that it might have just gotten them all killed. WWI showed how effective charging into machine gun fire with bayonets was. Doing it with “really sharp” bamboo spears? Yea, right.
This book doesn’t have much serious military history in it, but it does have lots and lots of interesting quotes and odd ways of looking at things. Probably its best and highest use is to get it cheap then mark-up, bookmark etc. the interesting parts.
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"Mines reported in the fairway,
"Warn all traffic and detain,
"'Sent up Unity, Cralibel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain."
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Printable Version
Slightly OT Flyboys - A True Story of Courage by James ... - 
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