A Book Report On James Bradley's 'Flags Of Our Fathers'

Emily Webb
APUSH Lee
7th Period
2 March 2015
Flags of Our Fathers Book Report The novel Flags of Our Fathers by James Bradley is a book written to inform and entertain the audience with a story about the picture of the raising of the American flag on Iwo Jima, also known as Sulfur Island. It is written from the point of view of the son of John Henry “Doc” Bradley, one of the flag raisers. In this novel James Bradley attempts to explain his father’s and his father’s friends’ lives and acknowledge their bravery as Marines. As John “Doc” Bradley said, “The real heroes of Iwo Jima are the guys who didn’t come back” (Bradley 7).
The author spent years researching the lives of the other men in the picture after he found a letter in 1994 written

Doc Bradley grew to distrust the press because of the picture. “The Action Report made no mention of a second flagraising. It was, after all, only a replacement flag,” (Bradley 16). Because of the misreporting of the fact that the picture was the second flag and not the first, Doc Bradley and the other five men were the ones immortalized and not the men in the first picture. This is the main reason Doc Bradley did not want to talk to his son about Iwo Jima; he learned to shut out the media and probably felt guilty that they remembered him and not the Marines who died. Doc Bradley felt as though America was idolizing the wrong people and did not want to be singled out from the rest; he felt like they thought he was a hero for all the wrong

The American Marines are taught that “Battles are won by teams working together, not by heroic individuals fighting on their own,” (Bradley 57). The Marines are taught that being a hero comes from working as a team to earn Americans’ freedom, and that trying to be a hero by yourself will just get your fellow Marines killed. In Japan, the “issen goren” (the cost of mailing a draft notice postcard at one yen, five rin) followed a very corrupt version of Bushido, or the “Way of the Warrior.” “Death in battle was portrayed as an honor to the family and a transcendent act on the part of the individual. Surrender was a disgrace to the soldier and his family,” (Bradley 55). During this time, a Japanese soldier was simply told to kill at least ten Americans before he died or that he would be dishonoring the Emperor.
This novel gives a great explanation as to how brutal the fighting on Iwo Jima really was. Before I had read this book, I had seen the famous picture but had no idea what Iwo Jima was and had little knowledge of why this picture was so important. Now that I’ve read the book, I feel as though I now know not only the historical context of the picture but also how brave the Marines were despite how afraid they may have felt during their time on Iwo