Flyboys: A True Story of Courage
James Bradley. Boston: Little, Brown, 2003. 398 pp. Photos. Map. Bib. Index. $25.95.
Sorties into Hell: The Hidden War on Chichi Jima
Chester Hearn. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 226 pp. Photos. Maps. Notes. Bib. Index. $39.95.
Reviewed by John B. Lundstrom
In 1944-45, at least eight U.S. flyers, mostly carrier aviators, were taken prisoner and executed on the Japanese island of Chichi Jima, just north of Iwo Jima in the Bonin Islands. Some of their remains were desecrated by ritualistic cannibalism, and the Japanese perpetrators later were punished as war criminals. The grisly details, but not the identities of the victims, received wide publicity after the trials. Four decades later, the Chichi Jima horrors again came to notice with the election of President George H. W. Bush, who was shot down there in September 1944. Only a daring rescue by a submarine prevented him from becoming another victim. Two new books deal with the infamous Chichi Jima atrocities in very different ways.
James Bradley is the author, with Ron Powers, of the bestseller Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam, 2000), a warm tribute to Bradley’s father and the others who raised the flag on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi. Bradley approached the families and friends of some of those slain on Chichi Jima and also interviewed the last prisoner known to have left Chichi Jima alive. Japanese veterans who served on Chichi Jima provided Bradley valuable insights not only about the atrocities, but their own military.
The events on Chichi Jima, however, are for Bradley only a platform for a much wider discussion of the two competing cultures of the United States and Japan, whose expansionist visions collided in the vast Pacific. Embracing the controversial air power “prophet” Billy Mitchell, he resolves the Chichi Jima affair into a conflict between technologically advanced U.S. “fly- boys” and medieval- minded Japanese “spirit warriors” forced to skulk beneath them. Eager to appear balanced and fair, Bradley repeatedly seeks some sort of moral equivalence between the two sides by trying to match atrocity with atrocity, with dubious results. The United States repressed the Indians and conquered the Philippines; Japan invaded China. The attack on Pearl Harbor merely “targeted a military installation,” whereas the Doolittle raiders “bombed and strafed hospital patients, children, women, farmers, and fishermen.” Bradley dwells on the fire bombing of Japan, which had not reached its crescendo before the last prisoner of Chichi Jima was dead. Like others, Bradley ignores the difficulty of defeating an implacable foe who did not always fight by the rules. Moreover, many Japanese themselves considered the cannibalism at Chichi Jima a psychotic aberration. Bradley does enable seven of the fallen flyers to reemerge as real individuals rather than remain names on a war memorial. Unfortunately, he often does not give them the proper historical context, rarely mentioning their ranks, squadrons, or the specific circumstances that sent them to fight and die at Chichi Jima.
Popular writers must make extra efforts for historical accuracy because their audiences often do not know any better. Fly- boys stumbles badly in this regard, and it is riddled with errors. It is odd in other ways, beginning with its title. Navy and Marine aviators never were referred to as “Flyboys,” although that term—always capitalized—appears on nearly every page. Equally irritating are other personal conceits of Bradley’s. President Franklin Roosevelt is the “Dutchman,” and Emperor Hirohito is the “Boy Soldier” always in thrall to the memory of “Grandpa Meiji.” The Doolittle raiders flew B-25 bombers named after Billy Mitchell; hence, the crews and their aircraft are called “Billys.” Bradley writes that his “admiration for the Flyboys is boundless,” and that is evident. One only wishes he would have done a much more careful job expressing that admiration.
Well researched and tightly written, Sorties into Hell, by prolific historian Chester Hearn, is the book for those who want to know in detail what really occurred on Chichi Jima. Eschewing questionable moral judgments, Hearn concentrates on the facts in the case, beginning with the remarkable story of how the atrocities came to light. The guilty Japanese officers went to great lengths to hide their crimes, but Marine Colonel Presley M. Rixey conducted a careful investigation. He was aided by interpreter Frederick Savory, a Japanese citizen and great-grandson of one of the original 19-century U.S. residents of the Bonin Islands. With its extensive references to the trial transcripts and other documents, Hearn’s Sorties into Hell reveals the true nature of the maniacal evil behind the murders and cannibalism on Chichi Jima.
Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution
Paul A. Gilje. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. 352 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $29.95.
Reviewed by Don Wallace
The thug in history is a sadly misunderstood fellow, none more so than the Jack Tars of the American waterfront who, from the mid-1760s through 1815, struck most of the first blows against British oppression. Today, books about the Founding Fathers abound, but none, until now, has taken more than a skittish peek at the culture of roughnecks that gave the Revolution its backbone.
Certainly few sixth-graders would feel confident of being rewarded with an A for getting up in class and giving a report on the drunken rabble whose outrages secured our liberty. This is our loss, as well as the classroom’s. You could do worse, as a strategy for keeping history alive, than shooting The Sons of Neptune as The Sopranos. Instead, our reliance on excessively prissy portraits of our colonial ancestors—men in tights with powdered wigs—has sent the next generation running for the exits.
One can only hope that Gen X-Y-Z makes the acquaintance of The Sons of Neptune, whose antics fill Paul Gilje’s provocative new book. Gilje (author of Rioting in America [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996] and The Road to Mobocracy [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987]) shows how a loosely organized, semiclandestine network of sailors, dock workers, and watermen served as the shock troops of their more celebrated, fastidious, and documented counterparts among the colonial bourgeoisie. If you wanted to liberate an impounded cargo of tea or burn a revenue sloop, The Sons, White Oaks, and other hearties were the ones you called.
We know, of course, about the Boston Tea Party. Where Gilje excels, in this overview of our country’s human maritime heritage, is showing how the idea of sailors’ liberty—the spree following a ship’s return to port after a voyage—evolved into that of Liberty, the byword of democracy. Gilje argues that Jack Tars’ “unlimited indulgence of appetite”—essentially a lifestyle choice, like following the Grateful Dead—allowed “men to misbehave and pursue sensual bliss” on land while, at sea, they were released from “shoreside attachments.”
Yes, Gilje says, there was a grim economic rationale behind the boom-and-bust life of a sailor, hut despite hardships unbearable by today’s standards it soon became a glorified existence. Sailors developed a sentimental loyalty to each other as a class, taking up collections for the shipwrecked and destitute, and scorning those who saved their wages instead of splurging on each other’s entertainment. As the waterfront became the front lines in the struggles against customs officers, tax collectors, and Royal Navy press gangs, this same solidarity, coupled with pragmatic self- interest, led them to hold dozens of Tea Parties and hundreds of other riotous actions: tar-and-featherings, beatings, burnings of warehouses, and mob assaults. (Three watermen were among the five men killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770.) Already thinking of themselves as heroes in lifestyle terms, they also grasped that rioting could protect their livelihood—much the same rationale of striking Teamsters attacking scab labor at the factory gates. During the war, sailors who were captured and held in England’s Dartmoor Prison maintained impressive discipline and showed an esprit reminiscent of Hollywood movies such as The Great Escape and Stalag 17. That is, when they were not agreeing to sign up to fight in the Royal Navy as a means of escaping imprisonment.
Self-interest has its limits, of course, particularly in military service. The moment a prize or warship struck her colors, sailors would loot quarters and break into the loser’s liquor supplies. And the nascent American Navy’s worst enemy in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812 was the competition of our own privateers. The riches to be gained by seizing prizes was a lure sailors simply could not ignore, and American officers struggled to recruit, keep, and control crewmembers. Gilje chronicles how sailors aborted naval missions (such as the Ranger's 1778 cruise) or forced the replacement of officers whose interests were strategic instead of economic. Within a week of defeating and taking the frigate HMS Serapis, for instance, 25 of John Paul Jones’s sailors deserted en masse.
This reckless disregard for finer motivations was the flip side of the coin, Gilje says, of relying on Jack Tars whose consciences were surprisingly modern in that they were formed by actual legal contracts—ships’ articles. Jacks had no reason to trust landlubbers, who swindled, robbed, and sold them out to press gangs. The sad truth was that, before the Stamp and Townshend acts, sailors were looked down on and even despised by the hierarchical colonial middle and upper classes. To coerce an entire closure of the Atlantic seaboard, though, required muscle and rude animal spirits, which only sailors and watermen could provide. With the success of the Revolution, and independence and egalitarianism enshrined as American virtues, sailors enjoyed a brief heyday as symbols of our freedom and wide-ranging enterprise. We even fought four wars in defense of Jack Tar’s honor: with France in 1799, the Barbary Pirates in 1801 and 1815, and with the British in 1812, over the Royal Navy’s high-handed impressment tactics.
After 1815, the sailors’ status dropped rapidly. Today, the image of the American at home and abroad is more likely to be that of the Western gunfighter going solo against a saloon full of hired thugs, with nary a drop of water to be seen. This is a pity, and a form of national amnesia that Paul Gilje largely corrects in this well- argued and often highly entertaining book.
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty
Caroline Alexander. New York: Viking Books, 2003. 491 pp. $27.95.
Reviewed by Don Walsh
It happened near Tahiti at dawn on 28 April 1789. The oft-told tale of the mutiny on HMS Bounty has become one of the classics in literature of the sea. It is a story that has taken the form of poetry, several books, three movies, and even a contemporaneous stage play in London. Until Caroline Alexander undertook a fresh look at these events, the definitive published account had been Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall’s Bounty Trilogy, published in 1932.
When the Bounty’s captain, 34-year-old Lieutenant William Bligh, made his way back to England he was lauded as a hero. With consummate navigation skills, he brought 18 loyal crewmembers to safety after being set adrift in a 23-foot boat by the mutineers’ leader, Fletcher Christian. The overloaded craft had only inches of freeboard, no charts, and minimal supplies of food and water. After a 48-day, 3,620- mile voyage, Bligh and his men arrived at Timor in the Malay Archipelago.
Once home, Bligh submitted a detailed report of the mutiny to the Admiralty. He then was court-martialed for the loss of his ship and exonerated. As soon as possible he returned to sea to complete the Bounty’s original mission: to collect thousands of breadfruit plants and deliver them to the British West Indies. He left England confident he had done his duty.
Meanwhile, HMS Pandora sailed to Polynesia to capture the mutineers. Several were found at Tahiti. They did not find Pitcairn Island, however, 1,200 miles away, where Christian and the other mutineers had sailed the Bounty and scuttled her. Some of the captured mutineers died en route to England when the Pandora foundered.
Six mutineers were court-martialed shipboard at Portsmouth in 1792. All were sentenced to death, but King George III pardoned two. The rest were hanged one by one from a ship’s yardarm. One of those pardoned was the “young gentleman, Midshipman Peter Heywood, who had been Bligh’s protege.
After the court-martial ended, the well- connected families of mutineers Christian and Heywood set in motion a disinformation campaign that was to cloud Bligh s reputation the remainder of his days. Subsequent accounts of the mutiny relied more on these corrupted sources than the official account carefully set down by Bligh.
More than 200 years later, Caroline Alexander gives us the true story. The thoroughness of her research is clearly evident at the back of the book, with some 37 closely spaced pages of sources and an 18-page listing of bibliographic references.
Alexander carefully sets a scene for the drama, describing both English society and life in the Royal Navy at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th. Into the scene she carefully places her players, ranging from the “My Lords of the Admiralty” to the lowest seaman on board the Bounty. All the major personalities are carefully defined as the narrative follows them from initial innocence to the final tragedy.
The Royal Navy leadership was not supportive of the Bounty's mission. The considerable political influence of Sir Joseph Banks, head of the Royal Society, made it happen. Bligh had impressed Banks with his excellent service record. Furthermore, Bligh had been sailing master on board HMS Resolution on Captain James Cook’s third voyage of exploration, and Banks had been a scientist on Cook’s second voyage.
By the standards of the day, Lieutenant Bligh was a good leader. He had a short temper, but harsh words are not the same as physical abuse. Compared to other captains, his use of flogging was moderate indeed. He was particularly dedicated to maintaining the health of his men through diet and exercise, lessons he learned from Cook.
The 85-foot-long, 220-ton Bounty was hardly adequate for a mission half a world away. The thousands of breadfruit plants meant extremely crowded living conditions for the crew of 46. Bligh was an ambitious man, however. If his expedition had been successful, it could have meant better things for him in the Navy.
It appeared this did happen. Captain Bligh, however, did command one of the warships at the Battle of Copenhagen under Admiral Horatio Nelson, who publicly commended him afterwards. As a rear admiral, Bligh was briefly governor of the New South Wales Territory in Australia. He finally retired as a vice admiral.
Whether a student of maritime history or an avid reader of the C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian genre novels, this book is hard to put down. This book will be the new reference standard for this great sea story. Truth is stranger than fiction, especially if it is really the truth.
