Revealed At Last– The Secret Fate Of Eight Americans

One of the most heartrending books I have read in a long time is James Bradley’s Flyboys: A True Story of Courage (Little, Brown, $25.95). Bradley is the author of Flags of Our Fathers, a 2000 best-seller that told the story of the six Americans pictured in the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photo of Old Glory being raised over Iwo Jima. In his new book, the author again returns to a small island involved in the Pacific war and another group of American fighting men. But there the similarity ends. The nine men who appear in Flyboys were U.S. Navy and Marine aviators who had the misfortune to be shot down over the tiny island of Chichi Jima in February, 1945. Eight of them were taken prisoner by the Japanese; one managed to escape (more about him later).

The truth about the fate of the eight men remained a secret for almost 60 years at the order of the U.S. government, who felt that the details of their captivity and deaths were so gruesome that not even their families should be told what had happened. Now, with most of their relatives dead, Bradley has decided to tell the men’s story in all its grim detail. Without giving away the secret, suffice it to say that none of the Americans survived their internment at the hands of the Japanese. So horrific was their fate, in fact, that five of the officers responsible for it were later tried as war criminals and executed. A word of warning: the details of the men’s final days, which include torture, beheading and cannibalism, are extremely graphic and may be too much for some readers.

Read the entire article in the  March 2004 issue