Canter Bridge

James Bradley has written a loving chronicle of a battle of almost unimaginable horror that took place on the unlikely volcanic island that has embedded its name in military and our national history as ‘Iwo Jima’. His father was caught up in the events that unfolded on that diminutive, blood-soaked island, but also in the well-intention civilian environment back home, where the War Bond campaign seemed noble enough to justify almost any means.

Anyone tempted to bury Iwo Jima in the impersonal language of great, inhuman forces that is characteristic of a historiography that scoffs at the idea that Great Men change history ought to read this book at least as carefully as Bradley has crafted it. Men and women, many whose names now require special effort if they are to be remembered, laid down an incalculable sacrifice to secure this island stepping-stone in the Second War’s Pacific Campaign. There was nothing romantic about the task they were asked to accomplish. In fact, it was Wartime Romance that disfigured the lives of several of Bradley’s protagonists.

Yet somehow, these warriors performed the actions that men with names far easier to remember required of them. Most of them would simply prefer to forget what they saw there on Iwo Jima.

They should be afforded that luxury. The rest of us should not.

Something salutatory happens when a nation remembers the sacrifices that made it what it has come to be, particularly when it does so without assigning heroic nobility to men and women who more accurately describe their work as simple duty. A reader, properly in awe of duty’s extreme measures, can still stand astonished by it.

This is their due and the responsibility of those of us who wish to be responsible remembrers.

James Bradley helps us on that way as few writers can.

He has written an awesome, astonishing, ennobling book.