Flyboys Quotes

“The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States. What might have been for Warren Earl, Dick, Marve, Glenn, Floyd, Jimmy, the unidentified airman, and all the Others who had lost their lives?...And what might have been for those millions of doomed Japanese boys, abused and abandoned by their leaders? War is the tragedy of what might have been.”
― James Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“The American people will regret the day I was crucified by politics and bureaucracy."
Billy Mitchell”
― James Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Japan had held 132,134 western POWs and 35,756 of them died in detention, a death rate of 27 percent. In contrast, only 4 percent of the POWs held by the Germans and Italians died.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, "When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.”
― James Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“The airmen were considered the most important passengers on the carriers.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“When U.S. prisoners were killed, it was “murder in flagrant disregard of the Geneva Conventions.” But when Americans murdered Others, “they had it coming to them.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.” Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield. FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third. When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“I didn’t fully comprehend world affairs,” but he remembered distinctly having “the typical American reaction that we had better do something about this.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Japan was a closed book. Western ignorance of Japan was not the fault of the westerners but the design of the Japanese. For two hundred years, Japan had been shut tight. By national law, a Japanese could not leave Japan and no outsider was allowed in. Death sentences were meted out to any who gave foreigners information about the land of the gods. Almost no maps and no books existed in the English-speaking world describing the closed land.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“The four presidents depicted on Mount Rushmore had all supported the ethnic cleansing of the Indian.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Japan was taming her own Wild West as the Americans had theirs: by bringing the light of civilization through divine war against a barbaric enemy.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“As the last stage of their training, we made them bayonet a living human,”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“True combat power is arms multiplied by fighting spirit. If one of them is infinitely strong, you will succeed. —Asahi Shimbun newspaper, quoted in Japan at War: An Oral History”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“When asked to give his opinion as to why airpower was stillborn in the U.S., with little funding or interest coming from the navy or army, he replied: “Conservatism. . . . You see, the army and the navy are the oldest institutions we have. They place everything on precedent. You can’t do that in the air business. You have got to look ahead.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“I have forgiven the Japanese. I have Japanese friends. I make it clear that I have respect for the Japanese now because they have changed their attitude. I believe any culture can be indoctrinated into any attitude that the leaders want to teach them.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argues, “When you’re not at war you’re a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Many more Japanese civilians died from gasoline in the fire war than were killed by atomic energy.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“It is hard for non-pilots to understand the joy of a first solo flight,” Bush later commented.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, one of Japan’s top war strategists, later said, “Our candid ideas at the time were that the Americans, being merchants, would not continue for long with an unprofitable war, whereas we… could carry on a protracted war.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“The people of the European race in coming into the New World have not really sought to make friends of the native population, or to make adequate use of the plants, or the animals indigenous to this continent, but rather to exterminate everything they found here and to supplant it with plants and animals to which they were accustomed.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Japanese leaders believed that “Japanese spirit” was the key to beating back the barbarians at their door. They fought because they believed they could not lose.”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“Few people now reflect that samurai swords killed more people in WWII that 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.”
― James Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“U.S. and Australian WWII archives hold many files detailing numerous acts of Japanese army cannibalism. For example, of those 157,646 sons of Japan sent to New Guinea, only 10,072 survived. Allied bullets killed relatively few. The vast majority were felled by disease and starvation. General Aotsu was aware of the plight of his men. He wrote that incidents of cannibalism in New Guinea were "frequent". Japanese boys were starving and had to eat whatever they could find. Often, all they could find was one another.

Harumich Nogi, the chief of a Japanese naval police force stationed in the South Pacific, later recorded in his memoirs a story told to him by an army lieutenant:

"There was absolutely nothing to eat, and so we decided to draw lots. The one who lost would be killed and eaten. But the one who lost started to run away so we shot him. He was eaten. You probably think that many of us raped the local women. But women were not regarded as objects of sexual desire. They were regarded as the object of our hunger. ... I met some soldiers in the mountains who were carrying baked human arms and legs. It was not guerrillas but our own soldiers who we were frightened of.”
― James Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“happenstance”
― James D. Bradley, Flyboys: A True Story of Courage