Flags of Our Fathers Quotes

“Today the word "hero" has been diminished. confused with "celebrity." But in my father's generation the word meant something.
celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral content. Heroes are heroes because they have risked something to help others. Their actions involve courage. Often, those heroes have been indifferent to the public's attention. But at least, the hero could understand the focus of the emotion.”
― james bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“When I asked him, fifty-three years after the event, "Mr. Lucas, why did you jump on those grenades?" he did not hesitate with his answer: "To save my buddies.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“The battle of Iwo Jima would quickly turn into a primitive contest of gladiators: Japanese gladiators fighting from caves and tunnels like the catacombs of the Colosseum, and American gladiators aboveground, exposed on all sides, using liquid gasoline to burn their opponents out of their lethal hiding places.

All of this on an island five and a half miles long and two miles wide. An area smaller than Doc Bradley's hometown of Antigo, but bearing ten times the humanity. A car driving sixty miles an hour could cover its length in five and a half minutes. For the slogging, dying Marines, it would take more than a month.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“That is how we always keep our beloved dead alive, isn’t it? By telling stories about them; true stories.”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“This giant fleet of American warships – a modern armada – churns across the ocean day and night for a journey of four thousand miles. It moves with the inevitability of a railroad schedule. It stops for nothing, it deviates for nothing. The United States, having been surprised at Pearl Harbor and then raked in battle after battle by the onrushing forces of imperial Japan, has finally stabilized and gathered its strength. Now the American giant is fully awake and cold-eyed. It is stalking an ocean, rounding the curve of the earth, to crush its tormentor.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Celebrities seek fame. They take actions to get attention. Most often, the actions they take have no particular moral content.”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Later he would declare that “not getting hit was like running through rain and not getting wet.”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Late in his life, Rene complained of living a life of a celebrity one minute and a “John Doe” the next.”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Iwo Jima had become the number-one front-page story in newspapers across the country. And it had become the most heavily covered, written-about battle in World War II.”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Roughly fifty percent of procedure in a Marine basic-training program is about disconnecting the young American boy from his concept of himself as a unique individual, a lone operator.”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Like a moth, Rene was attracted to the flame of fame”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers

“Ohio,”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“Some people wonder all their lives if they’ve made a difference. The Marines don’t have that problem. —Ronald Reagan”
― James D. Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“It would be forty-four years before physicist Donald Olson would discover that D-Day at Tarawa occurred during one of only two days in 1943 when the moon's apogee coincided with a neap tide, resulting in a tidal range of only a few inches rather than several feet.

The actions of these Marines trapped on the reef would determine the outcome of the battle for Tarawa. If they hesitated or turned back, their buddies ashore would be decimated.

But they didn't hesitate. They were Marines. They jumped from their stranded landing crafts into chest-deep water holding their arms and ammunition above their heads.

In one of the bravest scenes in the history of warfare, these Marines slogged through the deep water into sheets of machine-gun bullets. There was nowhere to hide, as Japanese gunners raked the Marines at will. And the Marines, almost wholly submerged and their hands full of equipment, could not defend themselves. But they kept coming. Bullets ripped through their ranks, sending flesh and blood flying as screams pierced the air.

Japanese steel killed over 300 Marines in those long minutes as they struggled to the shore. As the survivors stumbled breathlessly onto shore their boots splashed in water that had turned bright red with blood.

This type of determination and valor among individual Marines overcame seemingly hopeless odds, and in three days of hellish fighting Tarawa was captured. The Marines suffered a shocking 4,400 casualties in just seventy-two hours of fighting as they wiped out the entire Japanese garrison of 5,000.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“December 1944. The last Christmas for too many young boys. Then off for the forty-day sail to Iwo Jima. The boys of Spearhead had been expertly trained for ten months. They were proficient in the techniques of war. But more important, they were a team, ready to fight for one another. These boys were bonded by feelings stronger than they would have for any other humans in their life.

The vast, specialized city of men — boys, really, but a functioning society of experts now, trained and coordinated and interdependent and ready for its mission — will move out upon the Pacific. Behind them, in safe America, Bing Crosby sang of a white Christmas, just like the ones he used to know. Ahead lay a hot island of black sand, where many of them would ensure a long future of Christmases in America by laying down their lives.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“For most of the young boys, it had not fully sunk in yet that the defenders were not on Iwo, they were in Iwo, prowling the sixteen miles of catacombs.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“Kenneth Milstead, a 2nd Platoon buddy of Mike, Ira, Franklin, and Harlon, had just dropped into a shallow foxhole he'd dug when a shell landed beside him and blew him out again. Blood streamed from the embedded fragments in his face. "I could have been evacuated," Milstead recalled, "but the Japanese had pissed me off. I went from being scared to being angry. That was the day I became a Marine.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“Some optimistically hoped the unprecedented bombing of the tiny island would make the conquest of Iwo Jima a two- to three-day job. But on the command ship USS Eldorado, Howlin' Mad shared none of this optimism. The general was studying reconnaissance photographs that showed every square inch of the island had been bombed. "The Seventh Air Force dropped 5,800 tons in 2,700 sorties. In one square mile of Iwo Jima, a photograph showed 5,000 bomb craters." Admiral Nimitz thought he was dropping bombs "sufficient to pulverize everything on the island." But incredibly, the enemy defenses were growing. There were 450 major defensive installations when the bombing began. Now there were over 750. Howlin' Mad observed: "We thought it would blast any island off the military map, level every defense, no matter how strong, and wipe out the garrison. But nothing of the kind happened. Like the worm, which becomes stronger the more you cut it up, Iwo Jima thrived on our bombardment.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“The Army Air Force was doing its part to soften up Iwo Jima for the Marines. Beginning December 8, B-29 Superforts and B-24 Liberators had been pummeling the island mercilessly. Iwo Jima would be bombed for seventy-two consecutive days, setting the record as the most heavily bombed target and the longest sustained bombardment in the Pacific War. One flyboy on Saipan confidently told Easy Company's Chuck Lindberg, "All you guys will have to do is clean up. No one could survive what we've been dropping.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“... the island had to be taken at almost any cost.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“The Army Air Force concluded after the war that Iwo Jima-based planes destroyed more B-29's on the ground, in raids on Tinian and Saipan, than were lost on all the bombing runs over Tokyo.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“Unlike all the other combatants in World War II, including the U.S. Army, Smith and his Marines never lost a battle.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“... [Howlin' Mad] Smith was the "Patton of the Pacific.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima

“There was reason to believe the battle for Iwo Jima would be even more ferocious than the others, reason to expect the Japanese defender would fight even more tenaciously.

In Japanese eyes the Sulfur Island was infinitely more precious than Tarawa, Guam, Tinian, Saipan, and the others. To the Japanese, Iwo Jima represented something more elemental: It was Japanese homeland. Sacred ground. In Shinto tradition, the island was part of the creation that burst forth from Mount Fuji at the dawn of history.... the island was part of a seamless sacred realm that had not been desecrated by an invader's foot for four thousand years.

Easy Company and the other Marines would be attempting nothing less than the invasion of Japan.”
― James Bradley, Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima