Quotes from Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

“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 D. Bradley, quote from Flyboys: A True Story of Courage

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

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

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

About the author

Popular quotes

“I took the easy way, and to an extent I regret that. Still, though, the way we did it was honest. We played it and sang it the way we felt it, and there's a lot to be said for that.”
― Johnny Cash, quote from Cash

“You have to be like a turtle, she thought; you have to figure out how to bring your home along with you.”
― Ann Brashares, quote from Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood

“I'm not going to sit here and spitball about hyperspatial reality theory with a psychopathic calculator. This conversation is over.”
― Amie Kaufman, quote from Gemina

“My temper began to rise -- always a bad sign. I would probably end up doing something stupid.”
― Jasper Fforde, quote from Lost in a Good Book

“With him big Phil from Notting Hill an old "face" from the sixties a pin up gangster with a "mars bar" weal scraping his left cheek and of course two "wag" slags in tow trussed up like French Poodles with "Bratz babe" stares and Gucci Handbags”
― Saira Viola, quote from Slide, a Modern Satire on the Excess of Greed

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.