#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The perfect gift for Father's Day,
this 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 never spoke of the photograph or the war.
But after 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 famous
photograph 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.
