Flyboys

A True Story of Courage

By James Bradley

In the 1930s and 1940s, there were almost no gaijin in Japan. And outside of a few pockets in California, there were few Japanese on the U. S. mainland. So each side knew only caricatures of the other, not the real thing. Americans were devils with green blood and tails. Japanese wore thick glasses and had buckteeth. By the time they laid eyes on each other, they had been culturally programmed to view each other as repulsive.

(Flyboys: A True Story of Courage 2003, 135)

Five submariners threw Bush a line, pulled him alongside the sub, and helped the soaking-wet and exhausted Flyboy aboard.

George [H.W. Bush] managed just four words to his saviors: “Happy to be aboard.” George spent a month on the Finback, which gave him plenty of time to reflect on his brush with death. He would often stand the midnight-4 A. M. watch while the sub surfaced. Later, he recalled those reflective moments:

…

I had time to reflect, to go deep inside myself and search for answers.People talk about a kind of foxhole Christianity, where you’re in trouble and think you’re going to die, and so you want to make everything right with God and everybody else right there at the last minute.

But this was just the opposite of that. I had already faced death, and God had spared me. I had this very deep and profound gratitude and a sense of wonder. Sometimes when there is a disaster, people will pray, “Why me?” In an opposite way I had the same question: why had I been spared, and what did God have in store for me?

(Flyboys: A True Story of Courage 2003, 197)

Few people now reflect that samurai swords killed more people in WWII than atomic bombs. WWII veteran Paul Fussell wrote, “The degree to which Americans register shock and extraordinary shame about the Hiroshima bomb correlates closely with lack of information about the Pacific war.”

Marine veteran and historian William Manchester wrote, “You think of the lives which would have been lost in an invasion of Japan’s home islands – a staggering number of Americans but millions more of Japanese — and you thank God for the atomic bomb.” Winston Churchill told Parliament that the people who preferred invasion to dropping the atomic bomb seemed to have “no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves.”

Japanese pilot Mitsuo Fuchida led Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.In 1959, Fuchida told Paul Tibbets: “You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they’d die for the Emperor. . . .

Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary. .what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know.”

(Flyboys: A True Story of Courage 2003, 297-298)

On October 4, 1945, just one month after the surrender ceremony, a storm began to form in the Pacific. The winds started slowly in the Marianas, where Curtis’s B-29s had once taken off to strike Japan. As if in a revengeful fury, the storm gathered mass and strength as it blew northward. Navy weathermen tracked the storm for days and predicted it would sputter into China. But on October 9, the kaze seemed to change its mind and headed straight for where the Americans were massed on Okinawa.

By 2 P. M., the kaze was blowing ninety-five miles an hour.

… By 4 P. M., the kaze was blowing 115 miles an hour with gusts up to 140 miles an hour.

… When it was over, 12 ships lay on the bottom of the ocean and 222 were grounded. One hundred thirty-three of these were damaged beyond repair. Famed U. S. Navy historian Samuel Morison later concluded: “This was the most furious and lethal storm ever encountered by the United States Navy.”

In 1281, the kamikaze killed 150,000 Mongols who dared to attempt to invade the land of the gods. That typhoon left the Japanese mainland unscathed. It seemed to target the seaborne invaders.

The October 1945 typhoon also skipped the main islands of Japan.If the Flyboys had not brought Japan to its knees and it had continued with the war as the Spirit Warriors had insisted, the typhoon off Okinawa that day would have torn through a U. S. invasion fleet of thousands of ships and millions of American boys.

(Flyboys: A True Story of Courage 2003, 304-305)

… Months before the war ended, General MacArthur approved the plan to save the emperor, reasoning that “unlike Christians, the Japanese have no God with whom to commune,” that the Japanese needed Hirohito as a Christ-figure, and that “it would be a sacrilege to entertain the idea that the Emperor is on a level with the people or any governmental official. To try him as a war criminal would not only be blasphemous but a denial of spiritual freedom.” American officials wrote, “Hanging of the Emperor to them would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us.” MacArthur agreed: “You cannot remove their Emperor worship from these people by killing the Emperor …any more than you remove the godhead of Jesus and have any Christians left.”