欧宝娱乐

I don't give out 5 stars too often, and this one should get a six. The stories in this book had to be told, and they had to be told in a particular way. Bradley does a masterful job in relating the horrific details of what happened to 8 U.S. pilots on a speck of earth called Chichi Jima. The fact that this island is not a WWII household place name such as Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, or Dunkirk is by design: the tale was kept secret by the U.S. military. However, I'm surprised Bradley never revealed the best part: Chichi Jima means "tits island" (owing to its two prominent mountains)!

These stories, and the greater context in which they played out, will stay with me for a long, long time. I couldn't stop reading despite the rapid descent into unthinkable atrocities committed by nations and individuals on each other. Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does. I'll spare those details here. What is important is that Bradley is using primary sources. He interviews the individuals who witnessed, or even committed, the crimes related. This book is not propaganda based on 5th hand accounts of war crimes. These things happened and cannot be denied. I always try not to stand in judgment of things I did not witness especially when it's over 6 decades removed from the events. But that is a challenge with this one.

To be honest, when my dad first recommended this book to me and I read the covers, I thought great, more overly patriotic "America: World Police" as in what South Park creators poke fun at ("America, F- yeah! Gonna save the motherf-n' world yeah!"). On the contrary, Bradley gives insightful context and pulls no punches in his depiction of both the Japanese and Americans. He doesn't gloss over the strafing of schools and hospitals by U.S. pilots or the nightmarish details of firebombings of major cities (Bradley points out the British and American strongly condemned the Germans and Japanese for bombing city centers as uncivilized barbarism, then proceeded to do the same on a much larger scale and with complete air superiority under the euphemistic term "strategic bombing"). I'm still extremely disturbed and angered at my own ignorance of the American war on Filipinos from 1898-1902 which killed an estimated 250,000 civilians. To illustrate, one U.S. general ordered, "Kill everyone over ten years of age" as a policy for clearing villages in the Philippines. Throughout history when the West (U.S., Britain, France, etc.) wanted something (oil, sugar, labor, farm lands) they took it regardless of its lands being inhabited or if the "barbarous" locals had the audacity to rebel or reject the colonists' god (e.g. American Indians, Chinese, basically the entire African continent). Japan being a latecomer, felt they were only doing what others have done to build empire and why should the West complain? Their mistake was in being non-white.

This book has really left me torn. I had always been aware of the Japanese atrocities: Bataan death march, Rape of Nanking, horrendous death camps. But reading the first hand accounts was still shocking. I've always felt balanced. I have Japanese and haole ancestry. One great-uncle died for the U.S. while serving in his segregated unit, the AJA 100th Infantry Battalion. My other great-uncle survived the Bataan death march only to succumb to disease and starvation later on in the Japanese prison camp. I spent two and a half years living in Japan and met many veterans of the war. I've always held to the belief that these were extraordinary times and conscripted Japanese regulars were only slightly better off than their enemies or conquered subjects. But this book still shook my faith. Could the people I know have really done these things? On a broader level, how could the Japanese culture, even in its grotesquely twisted form as created by the militarists, have generated such horror? On the one hand I know the Japanese to be so simple and peaceful, just barely separated from our roots in nature (If have you seen Pom Poko, that anime film really captures that side of Japanese culture). Shinto is such beautiful and simple animism more akin to Native American and African religions than anything else in principle if not in practice. On the other hand are the tales in this book.

But there was something much worse for me in reading this book. I can't help but feel that equally horrendous things are occurring today right under our noses, and that these crimes will repeat themselves over and over again. Not until these terrible kinds of things happen again to people we care about (i.e. white Americans) will we ever hear about them. Knowledge of horror and survivor guilt will not be enough to prevent further acts of atrocity.