I don't know what came over me, but I recently read a flurry of WWII books. I guess I have a predilection for reading about harrowing ordeals and a fascination with the unimaginable extremes of the human experience. In this case during wartime. I've always thought it bonkers that we created these beautiful, graceful, elegant, powerful machines like planes and ships and then used them for destruction and killing and to get attacked and destroyed by some construct of "enemy". Well, no, not "and then used them for", but for the purpose of.

Ironically, the first book I read, Flyboys (2003) by James Bradley, is the one about which I'm most lukewarm. The premise was intriguing with the first chapter mentioning a recently declassified case regarding navy pilots who were shot down near a Pacific island not far from Iwo Jima and captured by the Japanese and executed. George H.W. Bush was shot down but was rescued by a U.S. sub before being captured.

It turns out it wasn't that extraordinary a story. It was just another incident of a wartime atrocity. Not to trivialize it, maybe all such stories should be told, but not all of them need an entire book for the telling. What was special about this story? What's the emotional take? Is anyone going to make a movie out of this story like Bradley's first book, Flags of Our Fathers? I doubt it.

Nothing really stands out except a future U.S. president participated in the mission and if he was captured and killed our history would be slightly different (he was a one-term president). This book would still have been written, with one less interview subject and his story as a victim would have been told in it, but we wouldn't know that he would become president, albeit one term, if he lived. I'm being snarky, as a navy flyer defending our country, I'm glad he survived.

(Holy shit! No, our history would be radically different because he wouldn't have spawned that idiot other Bush president who was probably the worst U.S. president ever at the time. Second worst now. Not only that, but I've always said that without Bush junior, there would be no Obama presidency. I had serious doubts that Obama could win because I knew how racist the U.S. is (NB: turns out it's even more racist than I thought it was), and I had trouble believing we'd elect a black man for president. But we did! That's how bad junior was!*)

To compensate for the lack of a book-length worthy story that tells itself, he writes about everything else he can to pad the book. He writes about the history of Japan-U.S. relations, Japan's modern history and militarization, the development of the U.S. air corp, U.S. aggression and racism, and more. It goes beyond just setting up context, but covers things only related with a huge stretch. I was waiting for a chapter on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the war. It never came, but considering everything he writes about, it was fair game.

The way he writes had me leaving the library always in a sour mood. I'll give him benefit of the doubt that everything he writes is sourced, but I felt he shaded the facts in a way that emphasized the worst, the most negative, unredeeming, gory aspects of war. Maybe he's antiwar, which I have no problem with. If I had to take a stance I'd probably be antiwar, but this book didn't make me feel antiwar. It just filled me with disgust in general, and not at anything.

I have no great love for FDR. I agree that he was among the greatest U.S. presidents, but he's also the one who signed the order to imprison all Japanese Americans on the west coast during the war, a clearly racist act as German Americans weren't subjected to similar treatment and Hawaiian Japanese were exempted because they were too many and it would have been "impracticable". But Bradley's referring to him as "the Dutchman" definitely betrays something about his attitude towards the wartime president. That is not a term of respect. It's like writing a book about killing Osama bin Laden and constantly referring to Obama as "the Muslim" (even if FDR is of Dutch descent (I personally don't know), he was, I imagine, as Dutch as Obama is Muslim, i.e., not at all).


Left For Dead (2003) interested me because it's about the U.S.S. Indianapolis, which I knew about already and many people recall from the movie "Jaws", which is mentioned in the book as a key inspiration for part of the story. One part of the story is, of course, what happened to the Indianapolis and how it was entrusted to deliver the Little Boy atomic bomb to Tinian Island and afterwards was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on its way to its next assignment. The tragedy was that no one came to rescue the survivors who floated three or four days, suffering death from exposure, shark attacks and hallucinations and delirium. Now that's a story that tells itself. No matter how you write it, it's harrowing and emotional.

The other part of the story is the redemption of Captain McVay who was court-martialed for the sinking and blamed for the deaths of his crew and committed suicide in 1968. His court-martial can be viewed as a big black eye on the face of the integrity of the U.S. Navy. It was the classic sacrificing a "lowly" captain to save the careers and egos of higher up generals. It shows the disgusting, shameful, cowardly effect of hubris of those in power who don't want to admit responsibility.

The book also dispelled a myth I held about the Indianapolis that the failure to be rescued was related to its top secret mission to deliver the atom bomb to Tinian. It simply was unrelated. That mission was completed and its next mission was just its next mission.


I found two books at one library that I ended up reading in tandem because they both involved B-17 raids in Europe in the second half of 1943. They sort of complemented each other, although one book was about a single mission involving many flight crews and its aftermath, and the other was about a single incident with the story surrounding one flight crew and one German fighter pilot.

To Kingdom Come (2011) is about the September 6, 1943 deep-penetration, daylight bombing mission on Stuttgart, Germany without fighter escort that one general thought was the road to winning the war. It was basically a "test of concept" mission. He was wrong, the mission was statistically a disaster and such missions would soon be abandoned until the development of the P-51 Mustang long-range fighter could be completed to provide escort all the way to targets and back.

The book is about the mission so it focuses on several crews who flew the mission and survived to tell the story, including crews that were downed and aided by the French Underground to get back to England. Extraordinary stories.

A Higher Call (2012) is centered on a bombing raid three months later in December 1943, so there is overlap between the stories of the two books (crews from To Kingdom Come were still trying to get back to England) as well as mention of same bomber groups. Some descriptions, such as bomber groups taking off and mustering in the sky, are virtually identical.

The subject incident in the book, the purpose for the book, is very simple. The subject B-17 was badly damaged in the bombing raid and against all odds managed to stay in flight. One German pilot was the last chance to make sure the enemy didn't get away, but he ended up deciding not to shoot them down and let them go over the English Channel, albeit certain they wouldn't make it all the way back to England. If the crew were able to see the damage that the German pilot saw, maybe they wouldn't have made it!

The rest of the book is all back story and aftermath, and like To Kingdom Come, which jumps from story to story, so does this book which made reading them in tandem feel perfect. And I have to admit I wasn't sure what to make of the author and his background, but it's a well-written book. Towards the beginning of the book he describes an incident of the German fighter pilot trying to find work after the war and then cuts it off to go into the back story. When he goes back to finish the incident much later in the book, I didn't need to go back and refresh myself what had happened. I remembered exactly what was happening and I attribute that to good writing.

The emotional take from this book was huge and profound. The pilots and surviving crew met decades later and it was amazing the gratitude of the descendants realizing if it weren't for this former Luftwaffe fighter pilot standing before them and his one act of mercy, none of them would be here.

No one forgets who they owe for their survival for generations. Even in To Kingdom Come, the B-17 crews remembered the brave French citizens who helped them survive, some of whom were later caught and executed by the Nazis. All of them doing their jobs and what they believe in. The German pilot didn't do his job, but did what he believed in, which is that you don't shoot a crippled, defenseless plane out of the sky.

This actually hearkens back to the book on the Armenian Genocide I read a few months ago. The granddaughter of the genocide survivor travels to Syria during her research to find the descendants of the Bedouin sheikh who saved her grandfather's life to thank them. They ask her how many people their father saved by saving her grandfather. She counts her relatives and replies 15, much to their dismay. Only 15? That's plenty for a U.S. lineage, but the sheikh's lineage was in the hundreds! It's still a funny anecdote.

It's crazy. The lives we lead are crazy. The world we live in is crazy. Who knows the effects of our actions? The Japanese narrowly missed killing two future U.S. presidents. But they illegally executed POWs whose future effect we'll never know. There's no way to judge it. It just is what it is. I say I'm glad Bush senior survived, but what if his spawn wasn't just a bungling moron and was a Hitler or a Trump? Then it becomes hard to say I wouldn't be glad he didn't survive. It's a conundrum that defies logic or morality. And that's the world we live in.


* more of my hare-brained political theory (a.k.a., the Busherfly Effect, yea I just made that up):

So if you believe what I said about Bush junior (you really shouldn't), the elder Bush's survival led to the historic first black president of the United States. And it doesn't end there. Americans slowly grew to realize how racist they were and white people who never considered themselves racist started subconsciously realizing how uncomfortable they were with a black man leading the country. During Obama's presidency, white cops shooting unarmed black men became epidemic, just a day at the office. How many since he stepped down? I haven't seen a single news article of a new shooting since. Coincidence? (update: March 21, two Sacramento police officers shoot an unarmed black man 20 times within two seconds in his backyard "believing" his cell phone was a gun. He could have been holding a banana and they still would have shot him dead).

Even further aside, as Hillary Clinton was predicted to win the election by everyone except the Russians, I was also predicting that there would be a rise in domestic violence cases against women and a new level of hostility towards women in certain levels of society would emerge, possibly minor and subconscious, but able to be documented. Sadly, my theory wouldn't be tested, but it ties into the next connection, which is that Trump, Russian interference notwithstanding, wouldn't have happened without Obama and the racist backlash.

Trump appealed to the latent racist in many white people and emboldened the patent racists to be more outspoken and make it "alright" to be racist. Clinton fits in because we just had eight years of a black man as president, are we willing to have a woman president for four to eight years? What madness is this? We institutionally don't pay women as much as we pay men for the same job, how is that going to pan out in the White House? But yes, I'm saying U.S. society is hard-wired sexist if not misogynistic. And all that led to Trump, a loathsome, foul-mouthed, racist, simpleton, sack full of shit as our president.

Poor Bush senior, I'm blaming him for his son, Obama and Trump. What if he had been captured and executed and had his liver eaten?