Book Review

Flags Of Our Fathers

By Kris T

Flags of Our Fathers

By James Bradley with Ron Powers

Bantam Books

Price: Rs 270

Pages: 562

                The Battle of Iwo Jima was one of the most significant battles of the Second World War, a battle where more American and Japanese servicemen were killed in a relatively short span of time, than in any other battle in recent times. The island of Iwo Jima, an insignificant speck in the vastness of the Pacific, is an unseemly, barren, volcanic over hardly worth squabbling over. Yet the island saw some of the fiercest fighting in a no-holds barred battle that was one of the turning points of the Pacific war. Iwo Jima immediately brings to mind the iconic photo by Joe Rosenthal of marines raising an American flag.

                Written by the son of one of the flag raisers, John ‘Doc’ Bradley, then a Navy (medical) Corpsman, during the 35 day long battle, the book is the result of the son’s lifelong fascination with his father’s wartime past. James Bradley knew only vaguely that his father was a war hero and was one of the three flag-raisers who had survived Iwo Jima, however all his childhood attempts to find out more from his father were effectively stonewalled by the elder Bradley. John Bradley refused to give any importance to the battle, merely stating that he had only lent a hand in raising the flag because he was there, and the real heroes were those who didn’t return.

                However it was only after Doc died, that his son discovered memorabilia of the battle stuffed in three cardboard cartons. Among the items, James discovered a Navy Cross awarded to his father for gallantry while tending to wounded Marines under fire. With that, commenced his quest to find out more about the young John who, barely out of his teens had gone off to fight a war on a desolate island in the midst of the Pacific, far from home, along with hundreds of other young boys. Many of these boys did not return home, and of those who did, several had horrific wounds. Almost everyone was scarred by the terrible memories of the deaths of childhood friends and buddies who died in front of them. For the Corpsmen it was worse as they tended to the hideous injuries and in many cases helplessly watched men die in their arms, unable to provide them with any more comfort than a shot of morphine. Everyone dealt with the memories in his own way, some like the Pima Indian, Ira Hayes who hardly spoke, took to the bottle, to wipe out the nightmares and steadily went downhill, while others like Danny Thomas who frequently woke up screaming had to be hypnotized. Some complained of being a hero one minute and a “John Doe” the next. Some tried to capitalize, unsuccessfully, on their hero status and unable to face the realities of post-war USA, grew increasingly disillusioned.

                Hounded by the press and an American public thirsty for the gory details of war, Doc returns home to small town Wisconsin and sets up a successful funeral home. Determined to leave the past behind and get on with life, he removes all vestiges of his military service, instructs his children on the art of deflecting phone calls from newspapers, movie-makers and the general public, and, plunges headlong into community service, refusing to talk about his past. The story only unravels after his death when a driven James begins his equally determined search commencing with the lives of the other boys in the famous photo.

                The story takes the reader across small town rural America in the thirties, from the farms, factories and reservations into the homes of recently arrived European immigrants. The author describes the factors that motivated young boys across the length and breadth of USA to volunteer for military service en masse, as groups of friends and entire football teams decided to join up. Perhaps the war provided a distraction for America struggling to emerge from the crippling effects of Depression. The patriotic fervor generated provided the sorely needed heady feeling of euphoria, missing for so long in their lives. The author has also dealt with, in some detail, on the ethos behind the making of a Marine and why the people of USA placed so much faith in these fighting men, such that the phrase, “Send in the Marines”, is understood as a serious attempt to set the problem right. The importance that the American government attached to the Marines, can be gauged by the fact that the Commander-in-Chief, President Roosevelt himself, came to observe the training and preparations for the forthcoming operation on more than one occasion. The mission remained a closely guarded secret till the troops were actually on their way.

                The author lays bare the brutality of a war where any pretence of rules had been long abandoned by both sides and where the Japanese military’s scant concern for the lives of its foot soldiers indicated the level of savagery they were prepared to mete out to their enemies, as well as, the lengths they were prepared to go, to defend their homeland. It is a telling statement that of the 22000 Japanese defenders, only 212 could be taken alive. Iwo Jima had deaths on a scale that horrified USA. It was the first American victory where their casualties outnumbered the enemy’s. In fact, it was a strategy of the Japanese to make the cost of victory so high as to become unacceptable to the American public, who, could then be expected to put pressure on the government to avoid a full scale attack on the Japanese mainland.

                Iwo Jima was significant because it was for the first time in the war that an American flag was raised on Japanese soil and indeed was the first foreign flag to have been implanted in the Empire in nearly five centuries. The other significance was strategic. The island stood directly in the flight path from the Marianas to Japan and air squadrons based there could easily intercept the heavy B-29 bombers on their missions to Japan, being too far for their own fighter escorts to follow. Conversely, in American hands, it provided an ideal staging post for the B-29s to refuel and to base P-51 Mustang fighter escorts for the bombers.

                The other interesting feature of wartime USA was the 7^th Bond Tour, the “Mighty Seventh”, a method employed by the US Treasury to raise funds for the war by selling War Bonds to the general public. The three surviving flag-raisers, other war veterans and even Hollywood stars toured the countryside and raised a sum of $26.5 billion, far exceeding the target of $14 billion that the treasury had set.

                The author has been less than charitable about the role played by the US Navy in the operation, particularly the actions of the “naval chieftans”, initially Ray Spruance who reduced the Marines’ demand for a ten day naval bombardment to three, which got further diluted due to the weather, and later, Chester Nimitz who proclaimed the island to be conquered on March 14^th 1945, prompting a Marine to remark, “Who does the Admiral think he’s kidding? We’re still getting killed!” However, such things are typical in the fog of war, an atmosphere that the author has succeeding in creating.