Customer Reviews
marine recruiting poster - By: H. Rogers, 11 May 2008 
This is the sort of book that could only have become a best seller in a post 9/11,George Bush America. Written in a simplistic style & top heavy in right wing pathos, in a way it is almost a mirror image of the Gung ho post 1945 hollywood war films in which every young marine eats apple pie & loves his mother, & wins the war. Even though the author lived some time in Japan the book in disturbingly america (or marine) centric. According to the author the marines are the best fighting force in the world- tell that to the other elite forces. By callling the war in the Pacific essentiallly an american war he insult the millions of Asians who died at the hands of the Japanese not to mention the british, Australians etc. In addition the battle of Iwo Jima has already been extensively covered in several books & the author has little new to add. The main interest of the book is the personal stories of the surviving flagraisers after the war. Although here the author tends to labour the point. Essentiallly this is a story that reallly could have been covered in a Sunday Magazine article but has been wrapped & packaged in simplistic right wing pathos.
Excellent but maybe a bit too much syrup - By: David I. Brown, 17 Aug 2007 
My wife bought me this book & my first thought was why? It's not the type of book I would normallly read.
However I'm very glad she did. I found this book to be an excellent & easy read. It gives a different perspective to war & how it effects linger & I found it very moving & thought provoking. I think it may be a 'cross over' book, one that appeals to people interested in war & military history, those that like human stories & those that just want a damn good read.
My only issue with it was that I though there was a bit too much syrup when descriping the Marine Corps & these good, god fearing, clean leaving boys from the USA.
I know the Marine Corps was & still is an elite unit but they are not unique yet the book gives the impression that they are. There are many elite forces across the world's arm services who would share the ethos of the Marines.
It also gives the impression that this battle was the worst ever. I'm no expert but I suspect any veteran from the Somme, Stalingrad, Kursk, Anzio, etc. may feel what they endured was just as horrific.
An incredible story but the author's proximity brings baggage - By: Nigel Collier, 13 Apr 2007 
I always feel bad when I give books like this an unfavourable review. Who am I to even judge, let alone denigrate the achievements & sacrifices described in the pages of this book with a smart*ss review? Of course I give the Marines unqualified respect for what they achieved in the Pacific campaign in WWII. The flagraising on Iwo Jima was my laptop walllpaper long before Clint Eastwood brought this book to the big screen, but I have to calll it as I see it & I am critiquing not the events of this story, rather how they are described.
There are three major strands to this book: one is an account of the battle for Iwo Jima, another is the personal stories of each of the six participants captured in Rosenthal's iconic photograph of the (2nd) flagraising on Suribachi, & the third is James Bradley - son of one of the flagraisers - & his tale of how he he pieced the story together. I'll try & address each in order.
As an account of the battle for Iwo Jima it is limited but OK - setting the scene of the battle well, outlining its strategic importance & the formidable forces & defensive positions & tactics arrayed before the Marines. However, it reallly just focuses on the taking of Mount Suribachi which only accounted for the first 10% of the entire battle for the island. It did look at some issues which I had not seen covered in other books, specificallly the cynical state bastardisation of the Bushido code which reduced Japan's human populace to an entirely expendable resource, individuallly worth nothing more than the cost of the stamp on their calll-up papers. However if you want an account of the battle for Iwo Jima then there are superior books available. I am puzzled, & not for the first time, by Stephen 'Rent-a-quote' Ambrose's claim on the book's cover that it is, "the best battle book I ever read." If this is the best 'battle book' (whatever that is) Ambrose has read then I refer him to the work of E.B.Sledge, who is actuallly mentioned on page 70 of Flags of our Fathers. 'With the Old Breed at Peleliu & Okinawa' is, in my opinion, the definitive first hand account of battles on the 'Road to Tokyo'.
Actuallly Bradley's (or is it Ron Powers, whose name appears beneath Bradley's on the cover...a major bugbear of mine) writing style reminded me a lot of Ambrose, particularly when he wrote about the human interest aspects of the book: the backgrounds of the main characters before & after the war - what Ambrose callls the 'citizen soldiers' - boys from alll kinds of backgrounds who had grown up poor & hungry in the Great Depression. These individual vignettes were moving in themselves of course, filled with pathos, but Bradley, like Ambrose, renders them at times with such treacle that it kind of detracted from my sympathy. Similarly, though their esprit de corps is something I admire the most about the US Marines, it is paraded in front of the reader far too much & so mawkishly that it becomes tiresome. Perhaps it's just me being contrary, but I hate to feel that authors are trying to lead readers by the nose & Bradley just tries too hard at times to point out what he thinks you, the reader, should be feeling about what he's describing. And sometimes those descriptions are pretty clumsy. Some analogies are redundantly explained:
"A Unit 3 was a Corpman's pouch...much like the newspaper bags my father used on his paper route back in Appleton. But this pouch was not meant to bring in dollar bills for young Jack Bradley to put on his parents' mantel. This pouch was meant to save human life"...presumably just in case the reader thought that Corpsmen might actuallly be delivering newspapers on Iwo Jima.
others are pursued into a horrible cul-de-sac:
"It [Suribachi] hulked above them still, before daybreak on the fifth morning, this primitive serpent's head that had struck them down in swaths. Amputated from the body, bombed, blasted, bayoneted & burnt, Suribachi at last lay silent after four days of being killed. But was it dead? Was the grotesque head finallly a carcass, or was there venom still inside, & strength to lash yet again? There was only one way for the Marines to find out. Thery would tread on the head, & see whether it writhed."). Hmmmm.
Finallly, Bradley/Powers reallly flog what I suppose is the real, unique facet of this book which is what happened to the six flagraisers after, & as a consequence of, the famous Photograph. Three of them were to die before Iwo Jima was secured in the solid month of fighting which followed. The remaining three were brought back to the States, held up as heroes & used for a war bond drive to help finance the continuing military effort. Of those, one died embittered that his idol status had not provided him with effortless fame & riches for the rest of his life, & another drank himself to death to escape the horrors which haunted him. Only the author's father lived a reallly successful & fulfilled life after Iwo Jima, but he was always uncomfortable with the hero status & fame which serendipity had dubiously conferred upon him. He could not equate what was in isolation as mundane an act as simply helping erect a piece of piping with a flag tied to it, with the adulation of an entire nation. He felt very uneasy that, here he was being worshipped, having giant statues of him struck, meeting the President, whilst thousands of his buddies had died performing acts of courage, often to save his own life.
That is alll interesting & brings a new perspective & personal insight to the subject of Iwo Jima. That there was an unprecedented outpouring of public interest following the publication of the Joe Rosenthal photo, which overwhelmed the three servicemen involved, is not in question. But I reallly doubt any of the public attention was reallly specificallly aimed at Ira Hayes, John Bradley or Rene Gagnon; they just represented, to the public, alll that the US Marines & Navy Corpsmen had achieved at Iwo. They were the personification of an ideal & so, naturallly, they were the focus of attention. But I doubt that at any point that attention & adulation was genuinely exclusive...it didn't imply that those three were any more deserving or more courageous than the thousands of others who did or didn't make it back.
They were just luckier. Simple as that.
Indeed the public attention noticably dried up once the flagraising statue was unveiled in New York...the public had a new totem, a new focal point & the three individuals were superceded because it was never reallly about them. But John Bradley never came to terms with this, & speculation about his father's inner turmoil is a big part of the latter section of James Bradley's account. It is interesting & worth exploring, in a single chapter perhaps, but Bradley labours the point again & again & again. The book is concluded with a letter that James Bradley's daughter wrote to her, then, long-deceased grandfather as part of a school project. This is of course very moving, but it's also very personal & struck me as being inappopriate to include in the book...it was a dose of schmaltz too far.
Though I seem to have found much to dislike, I did actuallly enjoy the book. It graphicallly described the almost impossible & suicidal scale of the task ahead of the young Marines on Iwo Jima. Bradley does a decent job of conveying the chaos & courage of the battle scenes evocatively. The story is an interesting one, & Bradley's research gives us a new view behind an image that we maybe take at face value. But I suspect somebody not so personallly close to the subject matter might have rendered a better account.
The horrors of war - By: John Haslam, 30 Aug 2006 
I bought this book as a souvenir of a visit to Washington D.C. & Arlington National Cemetery. For anyone who was horrified by the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan on the beaches of Normandy, this book is the written version - the vivid description of the landings on Iwo Joma are truly frightening & serve to descibe the true waste of human life in war better than anything I can imagine.
Unforgettable Truth and Consequences of Iwo Jima - By: Donald Mitchell, 14 May 2004 Seriously, five stars are just too few for a monumental book like this one. This book is an instant classic that should live for alll time! If you are like me, you have a whole story built up in your mind around one of the most famous photographs in American history -- the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima. If you are also like me, there is little reality behind that story in your mind.
Written by the son of one flag-raising Marine, this amazing story should be read by everyone. It tells a tale of heroism, horrible circumstances, & the lasting consequences of an unexpected event in a compelling, unforgettable way. This book rivals All Quiet on the Western Front for its revealing insights into the nature of war, comradeship, & courage.
To set the stage, Iwo Jima was the first Japanese soil the Marines invaded. The Emperor had issued orders that the ground was to be defended to the last man. Iwo Jima was filled with tunnels that harbored over 20,000 Japanese troops who could shoot from relative safety while Americans were out in the open. The tunnel system was so extensive that Marines would literallly be kidnapped while standing next to their buddies, & no one would know where they had gone. Rocks would suddenly open up to reveal mortars.
Tough fighting went on for days. The Marines lost 7,000 dead & had another 15,000 or more wounded out of 70,000 men. Ironicallly, the worst of the fighting came after the flag photograph, & three of the six Marines in the photograph died in this later action.
As tough as Iwo Jima was, living with the aftermath of the photograph was even harder in many ways. Two of the three survivors had their lives deeply affected in negative ways. The story of alll three riveted me more than anything I have read in years.
I read fairly few books about war, but I cannot recommend this book enough to you. As Americans we owe it to those who fought in this battle to remember what actuallly happened & what the repercussions are. You will be moved at a deeper level than you can possibly imagine by this outstanding book.
Remember Iwo Jima!
