The information was not precisely hidden; there are photographs here of Tokyo nearly burned to the ground. But Flyboys suggests that the twin effects of patriotism and propaganda numbed Americans to the implications of such news.
These were times when newsreels could cheer over scenes of Japanese soldiers being killed. ("Bull's eye! And more Japs meet their ancestors. The show's over, boys.") Life magazine could comfortably run a photograph captioned, "Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Japanese skull he sent her." The book concludes that the killings of the pilots on Chichi Jima, however monstrous, cannot be dismissed as events taking place in a vacuum.
Still, it is difficult to appreciate the gravity of Bradley's arguments while being steamrollered by his excitable prose. In language that would give Stephen King the vapors, he envisions civilian casualties of a bombing raid: "People's heads exploded in the heat, the liquid brains in their burst skulls bubbling an eerie fluorescence. The feet of the fleeing masses scrunched eyeballs that had popped from sockets under pressure."
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