World War II in the Pacific involved a lot of ground fighting for little bits of land, but it was ultimately the air offensive that defeated the Japanese. It was the first time in history this had happened.

A postwar U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey concluded ". . . even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion."

"Sufficient pressure" was an understatement. In one March 1945 firebomb attack on Tokyo alone, nearly 100,000 Japanese died - "the largest single-day killing in world history" at its time. The death toll even surpassed that of the nuclear-bomb attack on Nagasaki. Only Hiroshima would see more dead. Responsible for it all were the young, callow, often diminutive Americans known as "flyboys."

Flyboys begins and ends with the stories of nine fliers and their role in the air war against Japan, but James Bradley's sequel to the best-selling Flags of Our Fathers is much more comprehensive than that. Bradley tells a larger story about the histories of Japan and the United States. It's a story that some will find disturbing.

For starters, Bradley shows how subjugating other peoples was ingrained in the American psyche. (When Colonel John Chivington of Sand Creek Massacre fame displayed a pile of hacked Indian genitalia in a Denver theater, it brought applause from an approving crowd.) Whether it was aimed at Indians, Mexicans or Filipinos, America wrapped its imperialism in nobler motives.

Bradley also goes to some lengths to point out America's historic hypocrisy. For example, when the League of Nations passed a resolution calling for self-determination for countries and the end of colonialism, the United States exempted itself. To Japanese thinking, if the United States could take the Philippines and Hawaii "by bayonet," why couldn't Japan colonize China?

And if the United States insisted Japan get out of China, wouldn't it be equally proper for America to divest itself of California? As World War II approached, the United States called Japan's bombing of civilians "barbarous" - and then proceeded to do the same on a much grander, more lethal scale.

It would be up to the flyboys to carry that out. After giving historical context to the Pacific War, Bradley goes into the history of military aviation and the difficulties its proponents faced in the U.S. He then returns to the story of the flyboys themselves, specifically the nine who were shot down on Chichi Jima, the un-invaded sister island of Iwo Jima. Eight didn't survive the war. The ninth and most well-known of the flyboys did - he was George H.W. Bush.

Even Bush didn't know the details of the fates of his fellow fliers. Post-war politics trumped revealing the wartime atrocities that befell the Chichi Jima captives. It's at this point where we see that, although the United States and Japan were alike in many ways, they were equally different in others.

The most basic of those was that Americans had a will to live; the Japanese had a will to die. Their "Spirit Warrior" leaders pounded that will into their soldiers and then sent them off on a course that would ensure its fulfillment.

The Japanese considered it a victory that at Attu, 2,350 Japanese soldiers fought to the end, and just 29 became prisoners of war, a fatality rate of 98.8 percent. In November of 1943 at Tarawa, 99.7 percent of the imperial navy's force "stood in front of the marines' bullets rather than surrender." At Roi-Namur, the fatality rate was 98.5 percent, 98.4 percent at Kwajalein.

"Rational military minds might have advised peace talks," Bradley writes, yet after Kwajalein, the Japanese military leader Tojo told his government, "The real war is starting now."

In Flyboys, Bradley makes the reader understand why things happened the way they did between the United States and Japan, between victor and victim and between captor and captive. It makes for good history . . . and a good story.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.