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Bantam
August 2006
On Sale: August 21, 2006
576 pages
ISBN: 0553589342
EAN: 9780553589344
Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction | Historical
In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous
moment in American military history, James Bradley
has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak,
and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo
Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph
that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will
of America. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at
Iwo Jima--and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun
and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades,
they battled to the island's highest peak. And after
climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a
flag. Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a
powerful account of six very different young men who came
together in a moment that will live forever. To his family, John Bradley his death at age
seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and
photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James
Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives
of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these
men's paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a
classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most
crucial island--an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and
22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man. But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what
happened after the victory. The men in the photo--three
were killed during the battle--were proclaimed heroes and
flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them,
the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley's
father truly survived, displaying no copy of the
famousphotograph in his home, telling his son only: "The
real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn't come back." Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of
war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our
Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at
war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous
honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his
father. It is the story of the difference between truth and
myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the
human experience of war.
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