Flags of Our Fathers
By: James Bradley
For the last couple of weeks I had been trying to find a good World War II book to read for my last book report. I’ve wanted to learn about WWII for a while since my grandfather served in the Air Force and flew many missions over Europe. I decided to read Flags of Our Fathers because I figured that the book must have been pretty good considering there was a movie made about it.
To be honest I thought that this book was going to be a lot different than I found it to be. I was actually a little disappointed by it. While reading, I found that this book is not a book that centered on the actual war or what happened Iwo Jima. It is a book about the six men that held up the replacement flag at the top of Mount Suribachi during the battle at Iwo Jima. The writer’s father was one of these men, and James Bradley (the author) tries to explain what life was like for the six men before during and after the war and how the war and the flag raising affected them and their families.
I found a couple of things very interesting in the book by Bradley. The first thing
was the way that the war affected everyone. One of the things that Bradley said that stuck with me the most was the way that soldiers sacrificed themselves to save their friends and fellow soldiers. The one example that I think I will always remember is when Jack Lucas threw himself on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers. James Bradley wrote:
Jack and three comrades were crawling through a trench when eight Japanese sprang in front of them. Jack shot one of them through the head. Then his riffle jammed. As he struggled with it a grenade landed at his feet. He yelled a warning to the others and rammed the grenade into the soft ash. Immediately, another rolled in. Jack Lucas, seventeen, fell on both grenades. “Luke, your gonna die,” he remembered thinking…When I asked him, fifty-three years after the event, “Mr. Lucas why did you jump...