James D. Bradley · 464 pages
Rating: (15.6K votes)
“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
James D. Bradley
Born place: in Wisconsin, The United States
Born date January 1, 1954
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“There is a proper way to greet the sentinels in Ceris, certain patterns and forms that you must observe when presented to Queen Islanzadí, and a hundred different manners in which to greet those around you, if it’s not better to just remain quiet.”
“With all your customs,” Eragon risked saying, “it seems as though you’ve only made it easier to offend people.”
A smile flickered across her lips. “Perhaps.”
― Christopher Paolini, quote from Eldest
“I was losing her, she wouldn’t listen to me, and I was about to fail my third quiz of the semester. Great.
By the way, can you simplify 7x – 2(4x – 6)?
I knew she could. She was already in Trig.
What does that have to do with anything?
Nothing. But I’m failing this quiz.
She sighed.
A Caster girlfriend had some perks.”
― Kami Garcia, quote from Beautiful Creatures
“They were close to the end of the beginning . . .”
― Stephen King, quote from The Gunslinger
“The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.”
― Jack London, quote from White Fang
“Villains!' I shrieked. 'Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!”
― Edgar Allan Poe, quote from The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Writings
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