Flyboys

In early 2001, author James Bradley obtains the transcript of a secret 1946 war crimes trial through retired Iowa lawyer Bill Doran, who had observed the proceedings on Guam under secrecy oaths as a Naval Academy graduate. The transcript reveals the fates of eight American airmen, or "Flyboys," shot down during World War II bombing runs against Chichi Jima, a small island north of Iwo Jima whose radio stations served as the critical communications link between Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo and Japanese forces across the Pacific. The U.S. government deemed the facts so horrific that it kept them secret, and all eight mothers died without knowing what happened to their sons.

Bradley spends the first half of the book constructing the historical context necessary to understand the Flyboys' fates. He traces American westward expansion through the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, then follows the Pacific whaling industry to Chichi Jima, where entrepreneur Nathaniel Savory established a supply outpost in 1830. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry claimed the island for the United States, then steamed into Tokyo Bay with four warships, forcing open a Japan that had been sealed for over 200 years under the Tokugawa shogunate.

Perry's arrival set Japan on a course of rapid militarization. Facing Western colonial powers, Japan's leaders reinvented the emperor as a unifying national symbol, drafted a constitution placing the military above civilian control, and emulated Western imperialism. After victories over China (1895) and Russia (1905), a second generation of military leaders whom Bradley calls "Spirit Warriors" distorted Bushido, the samurai warrior code, into a cult of death. They taught recruits that surrender was forbidden and that enemies were subhuman beasts, or kichiku. Brutal boot camps destroyed independent thought and produced men who obeyed orders reflexively. Emperor Hirohito, raised in a strictly militarized environment, provided the Spirit Warriors with divine legitimacy.

Bradley connects this history to Billy Mitchell, a U.S. Army officer who predicted in the 1920s that Japan would attack Hawaii with carrier-launched aircraft and that wars would be decided by airpower. Court-martialed for challenging military orthodoxy, Mitchell died discredited in 1936, but his vision was vindicated by the Pacific war.

Japan's invasion of China produced systematic atrocities: the "Three Alls" policy of "Kill All, Loot All, Burn All," massacres of prisoners, and the kidnapping of an estimated 200,000 Korean and Chinese girls forced into sexual slavery as "comfort women." Bradley documents these horrors through Japanese veterans' testimony, establishing the patterns of dehumanization that would shape the fate of captured Flyboys.

Escalating tensions led to the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt demanded the seemingly impossible: American bombers must strike Japan. Led by aviator Jimmy Doolittle, the April 1942 raid on Tokyo combined army B-25 bombers with a navy carrier, boosting morale but provoking devastating retaliation; Japan swept through eastern China, killing an estimated 250,000 civilians and unleashing biological warfare. Three of eight captured Raiders were executed, establishing a policy of killing captured airmen. The raid also prompted Japan to attack Midway Island, where in June 1942 U.S. dive-bombers sank four Japanese carriers, reversing the war's course.

Bradley introduces the eight Flyboys: George H. W. Bush, son of a Wall Street banker; Floyd Hall from small-town Missouri; Grady York, a devout Christian from Florida; Glenn Frazier, a Kansas farm boy; Dick Woellhof, raised by a widowed mother in Kansas; Warren Earl Vaughn, part Cherokee, who enlisted in the Marines; Jimmy Dye from New Jersey; and Marve Mershon, who joined at his brother Hoyt's urging. Products of Depression-era America, they trained for over a year as pilots, gunners, and radiomen before deploying to the Pacific in late 1944.

Bradley documents how mutual dehumanization intensified the war. Japanese propaganda branded Americans kichiku, while American propaganda depicted Japanese as vermin. Soldiers on both sides routinely killed prisoners. Against this backdrop, the Flyboys flew missions from aircraft carriers, living in comfort between sorties that could end in flaming death.

On July 4, 1944, Dick Woellhof's dive-bomber was hit over Chichi Jima. His pilot was killed, and Dick parachuted into the harbor, becoming the first Flyboy captured on the island. That same day, pilot Bill Connell was shot down and captured but was later transferred to a POW camp near Tokyo, making him the last American to leave Chichi Jima alive. On August 5, an unidentified crewman from a downed B-24 was also captured. The next day, General Yoshio Tachibana, the island's commander, ordered both Dick and the unknown airman bayoneted and beheaded.

On September 2, 1944, George Bush's torpedo bomber was hit during a run on the Mount Yoake radio station. Despite flames engulfing his plane, he dropped his bombs on target before bailing out and was rescued hours later by the submarine USS Finback. Neither of his crewmen survived.

The following February, as Marines invaded Iwo Jima to the south, six more Flyboys were shot down over Chichi Jima. Floyd Hall, Glenn Frazier, and Marve Mershon went down on February 18; Jimmy Dye and Grady York bailed out the same day. Warren Earl Vaughn was shot down on February 23, the day the flag was raised on Iwo Jima.

What followed was methodical killing. Glenn Frazier, after days hiding on a neighboring island, surrendered and was beaten to death. Marve Mershon was beheaded; his body was exhumed so that his liver and thigh could be cooked and eaten by Tachibana and Major Sueo Matoba, commander of the 308th Battalion, who declared one must have "enough fighting spirit to eat human flesh" (323). Grady York was tied to a pole and bayoneted; witnesses recalled he never cried out. Jimmy Dye was sent to the Mount Yoake radio station, where Captain Yoshii hoped he could help decode American messages; there Jimmy bonded with Petty Officer Fumio Tamamura, a San Francisco-born translator, before Yoshii ordered his execution. Warren Earl Vaughn spent weeks at the station, befriending Tamamura and Nobuaki Iwatake, a Hawaiian-born American citizen drafted into the Japanese army, before being beheaded on March 17. Floyd Hall, the last survivor, lived a month under Major Horie, a Japanese intelligence officer who opposed harming prisoners, before Matoba's order was carried out: Floyd was beheaded, and his flesh was served at an officers' party.

Bradley sets these executions against the war's endgame. General Curtis LeMay's B-29s, long-range bombers based in the Mariana Islands, firebombed Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945, killing approximately 100,000 people in the largest single-day mass killing in world history. The campaign destroyed 178 square miles of urban area and left 15 million homeless, yet the Spirit Warriors refused to surrender. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, combined with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, finally prompted Hirohito to end the war. Bradley cites Japanese leaders and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey in attributing surrender primarily to the B-29 campaign, vindicating Mitchell's vision that airpower could win wars.

In the aftermath, the Flyboys' families received only sanitized accounts claiming their sons were "killed by your own bombs in an air raid" (442). When Colonel Presley Rixey, the Marine officer sent to disarm Chichi Jima's Japanese garrison, uncovered the truth, 14 Japanese were tried at a secret tribunal on Guam; five, including Tachibana and Matoba, were hanged. Emperor Hirohito was shielded from prosecution by General Douglas MacArthur. The families never recovered: Warren Earl's mother Evi endured repeated breakdowns, Marve's parents drank themselves to death, and Jimmy's mother required lifelong medical care.

Bradley closes by recounting his 2002 trip to Chichi Jima with former President Bush, Connell, and Iwatake. At the site where Warren Earl was killed, the former enemies placed flowers together. Iwatake revealed his private tribute: After the war, he legally adopted the name "Warren."