Flags of Our Fathers Summary

Flags of Our Fathers

Summary of book

It is the quintessential image of World War II, showing six members of the Easy Company raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. This image was captured by photographer Joe Rosenthal, who eventually won the Pulitzer Prize. However, until the publication of James Bradley and Ron Powers' Flags of Our Fathers, few people knew the stories of those six men who battled in Iwo Jima and eventually raised the flag on Mount Suribachi.

Bradley is the son of John Bradley, a Navy corpsman, the only non-Marine who participated in the flag-raising. His approach is intimate, telling history through the lives of the men who were with his father. Bradley is not a military strategist nor a historian. As a result, Flags of Our Fathers reads as an intensely personal yet comprehensive account of the historic period that defined what Tom Brokaw has termed "the greatest generation."

Flags of Our Fathers is far from revisionist history. The author Bradley is never critical of the government and affirms American interests in the war. He also affirms President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, a maintaining that the "casualty figures from...other firebombing raids would be higher than those caused by the nuclear attacks" (133).

Instead of raising the obvious questions, Flags of Our Fathers examines war and empire-building through the lives of the six young men immortalized in the Iwo Jima picture. Bradley looks at their boyhood, and their training. The author further examines how they internalized the institutions of military and government, and how these loyalties helped them endure the horrors of World War II. What ties this book together is not a questioning of the necessity of war. Rather, the reader wonders whether we would be willing or able to do the same today, to take the same precautions and make the same military decisions. Today, will the United States be able to fight and win another Iwo Jima or another Normandy? Would we be willing to invest the same resources, namely American lives, towards attaining this nation's goal?

Towards answering these questions, Bradley turns to the "real stories" of the six flag raisers, including his father. The author begins by recounting his own happy and well-adjusted childhood, even though they were aware of the picture of Iwo Jima. He writes of feeling "deeply connected to our peaceful, tree-shaded town," and yet, aware that his father was a hero. The source of this awareness, however, was not John Bradley. Instead, James Bradley knew because "my third-grade schoolteacher said so; everybody said so" (3). Flags of Our Fathers grew out of the younger Bradley's hunger to know about the heroic side of his father. His father never spoke of the war years. It was therefore with great shock, recounts Jim Bradley, when after their father's death, the siblings found a letter wherein John refers to the flag rising as "one of the happiest moments of my life."

The heart of Flags of Our Fathers lies in the first five chapters, where Jim Bradley recounts the lives of the six flag raisers. Each of them comes from all walks of life. Only Bradley's father was a non-Marine, and only one of the six soldiers went on to become a career Marine officer. There was a "whooping young Texas cowboy; the watchful Indian; the happy-go-lucky Kentucky hillbilly; the serious Wisconsin small-towner; the handsome New Hampshire mill worker; the sturdy Czech immigrant" (10). Three of the men tragically lost their lives in subsequent battles, so they never learned of how they were immortalized in the picture. One of six soldiers was a Native American, who survived the war but later succumbed to alcoholism.

All of them, however, have very distinctive traits in common. They were all children who grew up in the Great Depression, and had thoroughly internalized the values of discipline, loyalty and the ability to sublimate their own personal interests for a greater cause. They were all strong believers in religion, and each had strong mother figures in their lives. They were strong believers in the old-fashioned American patriotism, and therefore never questioned the reasons behind the war. Moreover, each one of them was described as "quiet, shy boys." They were thus hardly the warmongers who were gung-ho to join the fray of battle.

The bombing of Pearl Harbor brings a new consciousness into American perceptions of the war. Until December 7, 1941, the War was with Adolf Hitler's troops across the Atlantic Ocean. Now, notes Bradley, Americans became aware of a war that had already been ongoing in Asia for almost a decade.

The next part of Flags of Our Fathers then chronicle how these six different yet similar young men were trained to meet America's War, which now raged across the Pacific as well as the Atlantic. For James Bradley, it was during World War II encounters that the Marines came into full force as a significant force in American military history. The all-American boys were therefore trained in combat skills. The soldiers also received comprehensive training in amphibious warfare. Bradley's approbation is evident in his descriptions of training and subsequent Marine battles such as the 1942 Battle of Guadalcanal, which called for "the best-trained amphibious warriors in the world" (33).

Interestingly, Bradley is not as generous to the other branches of the military. He scores the United States Navy for abandoning the Marines at Guadalcanal (33).

Unlike the Marines, the Army relied on draftees, whereas the Marines were staffed by volunteers who had to pass stringent physical requirements (35).

At the end of the book, James Bradley examines the "Common Virtue" that had underlined the lives of the men of Iwo Jima. Dave Severance, a fellow survivor who became a highly decorated career marine, took charge of compiling a list of Easy Company veterans in 1968. However, notes Bradley, while Iwo Jima would remain the defining moment of his life, his own father never went to a reunion, unable to deal with the burden of being an "immortal hero" (193).

By recounting his father's reluctance to discuss the war and even the image of Iwo Jima, Bradley creates a moving and poignant commentary on the after-effects of war, even one that was as necessary as World War II. When he finds an image of Iwo Jima in his textbook, Jim Bradley could not contain his excitement, and begs his father to give a "hero" speech to his class. He is crushed upon his father's refusal, and has never forgotten his father's words. First, John Bradley would state that he did not remember the events. Second, he would remind his son that "the heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn't come back" (195).

Flags of Our Fathers is thus bookended by James Bradley's very personal accounts. The author wonders what could sustain young all-American men through the horrors of non-stop combat, on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the end, Bradley states, what sustains them is not national allegiance or devotion to a nation's cause. Instead, it lies in values such as loyalty and devotion to friendships, values that are forged in little towns all across America.