Reaper Leader: The Life of Jimmy Flatley Review

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(More customer reviews)After six decades as a superpower, it may be hard for Americans to remember what a terribly small band of warriors stood between the United States and those wishing to do us harm in 1941.
The entire Navy then had fewer than a thousand fighter planes, some of them useless in modern combat, and only a cadre of pilots. Fortunately, although the military had been starved of men, machines and money, the American system was flexible, expandable and resilient. Among its few superb leaders was Jimmy Flatley.
He didn't look intimidating. Overwork and cigarettes kept his weight down to 120 pounds for most of World War II. But he was a thinker, a fighter, a teacher and a leader. When he led his aviators into combat -- his most famous group was the Grim Reapers -- they were a team.
Though outnumbered, in the early days, by the superbly trained and greatly experienced Japanese aviators, the Americans proved superior overall, in large part because of their political and moral system.
While the Japanese created difficulties for themselves, the Americans were notable for working their way around difficulties placed in the way by others. In Flatley's career, the notable example was his debate with the other great fighter leader of the Pacific war, Jimmie Thach, over the four-plane or six-plane interceptor division.
Although the difference may appear to be trivial, aerial combat was a matter of thin advantages, and Thach's idea -- the famous "Thach weave" -- proved vital, especially during the period when the Americans flew slower, less handy planes.
Flatley initially doubted Thach, but, in what biographer Steve Ewing says was characteristic of his moral courage, once persuaded, he admitted he had been wrong -- very publicly wrong -- and worked to educate the rest of the Navy.
Flatley was a positive man in every way. He once wrote a friend that he had "some very definite ideas and . . . the confidence of my own convictions."
He was right more than he was wrong, but his promotion to admiral was delayed because some brass hats thought he talked too much.
In the early '50s, when the Navy was struggling to adapt to the jet age, it was Flatley who changed the Navy's attitude to aviation safety. As a result, deaths dropped from one every 18 hours to one every 18 weeks.
Ewing says some other officers considered Flatley had saved naval aviation and that his peacetime safety leadership was even more important than his wartime heroics.
At every turn, Ewing emphasizes not Flatley's exciting battles but the qualities that allowed Flatley to lead his men successfully through them.
Flatley's outlook was conventional, a walking version of the Boy Scout oath. He was intelligent but not much of a standout in the classroom, steady, honorable. Nobody ever thought him profound.
To the public, he was one of the best-known naval aviators, a tireless speaker and writer.
His career as a publicist portrayed the defects of his virtues. A sort of premature McCarthyite, his frequent lectures on geopolitics were half-baked. Ewing attributes his opinions to "reading prominent newspapers," but he must have picked up many of his ideas from Roman Catholic sermons, more bellicose in those days than what we hear today. Flatley was a Holy Joe, and Ewing says his men, even if not religiously inclined themselves, respected him for his forthright preaching.
Flatley made an appealing personality -- tireless, a genuine war hero, a faithful and sober family man, he was what the bishops were looking for but didn't get when they adopted Joe McCarthy. There is little doubt that he would have been offered help to a national political career after retirement from the Navy -- which would have placed him on the stage at the height of John Kennedy's popularity -- but the cigarettes caught up with him when he was only 52.
A gentle man personally, and adopted as a surrogate father by many sailors when he rose to command ranks, Flatley never flinched from the violence of his calling. He was the ultimate professional, at a time when his country needed professionals more than anything else.
As Ewing says in summing up, "Anyone who knew Jimmy recognized he was always at war."


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Although Jimmy Flatley had much to do with the U.S. victory over Japan, few outside the close-knit naval aviation community have heard his colorful story. A naval hero in every sense of the word according to former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral James L. Holloway III, Flatley was a formidable fighter pilot in combat, an inspiring leader, and a gifted operational planner. Flatley's combination of talents are fully examined in this biography and reveal why he was so vital to the war effort. Known to his squadron mates at Guadalcanal as "Reaper Leader," Flatley--with Jimmy Thach and Butch O'Hare--was instrumental in communicating tactical advice throughout naval aviation and changing the perception that the supposedly inferior F4F Wildcat fighter was actually superior to the Japanese Zero when properly utilized. His biographer, Steve Ewing, also explains how Flatley's combat experience established the credibility necessary for a middle grade officer to initiate sweeping changes in naval aviation both at the front and with the entrenched naval establishment.The author credits Flatley's persistence and credibility for successes at Guadalcanal, Leyte Gulf, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. In post-war years these same qualities helped him make naval aviation what it is today by again challenging the status quo and effecting sweeping and significant changes in naval aviation safety. This biography is the second in a planned naval aviation trilogy that when complete will include the three notable carrier fighter tacticians in the Pacific war--Thach, O'Hare, and Flatley.

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