Book description
In this remarkably powerful book, James Bradley takes as his starting
point one of the most famous photographs of all time. In February
1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima and into a
hail of machine-gun and mortar fire from 22,000 Japanese. After
climbing through a hellish landscape and on to the island's highest
peak, six men were photographed raising the stars and stripes. One of
those soldiers was the author's father, John Bradley. He never spoke
to his family about the photograph or about the war, but after his
death in 1994, they discovered closed boxes of letters and photos
which James Bradley draws on to retrace the lives of his father and
his five companions.
Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, Bradley has written a
classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial
island - an island riddled with sixteen miles of tunnels and defended
by Japanese soldiers determined to fight to the death. In the
thirty-six days of fighting, almost fifty-thousand men lost their lives.
Above all a human - and personal - story, few books have captured so
brilliantly or so movingly the complexity of war and its aftermath and
the true meaning of heroism.
James Bradley is the son of John 'Doc' Bradley, one of the six men
who raised the flag. A speaker and a writer, he lives in Rye, New York.
Ron Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He is the author
of White Town Drowsing and Dangerous Water: A Biography of
the Boy Who Became Mark Twain. He lives in Vermont.
