Posted on 02/15/2007 4:07:26 PM PST by CDB
For those Forum Members who have expressed an opinion on the movie Letters from Iwo Jima, please allow me to share how I re-acted to this film. For lack of a better way to begin, let me say, What “Nice Guys” the Japanese Soldiers Were.
It was obvious to me that the Japanese soldiers who fought the Americans on Iwo Jima were not the same soldiers who fought the Americans on Bataan, or were they?
As a survivor of the Bataan Death March, I can tell you for certainty, the Japanese depicted in “Letters From Iwo Jima” were in no way similar to the soldiers I encountered on the Bataan Death March. So what does that prove? Well, unless you truly believe that the Japanese soldiers fighting in the Philippines earlier in the war, were different than the soldiers on Iwo Jima, then you must come to the conclusion that the director, Clint Eastwood, was overcome by Japanese propaganda. Eastwood tried to “humanize” the Japanese soldier, and wanted to have the audience see the Japanese as nice guys fighting a war they didn’t want to fight, in a place they didn’t want to be.
The film "Letters From Iwo Jima," has been nominated for an Academy Award, which it may richly deserve for the quality of its acting, but the fact remains that as a historical movie, it’s a failure, it instead tries to show the enemy as the nice guys in the war and “so much like we Americans.”
Critics have praised the film because it "humanized" the enemy, but was it their humanity that caused the Japanese soldiers on Bataan to shoot and behead those men who were unable to keep up with the rest of the men on the Bataan March. The same Japanese soldiers, who fought on Iwo Jima and were depicted as being nice guys, were notoriously cruel and savage to prisoners of war. On the Bataan Death March, if you didn’t walk fast enough or didn’t bow low enough you were singled out and tortured, beaten and killed, all at the whim of the Japanese soldier, a private, a corporal, a sergeant or an officer.
Out of 12,000 American soldiers and more than 36,000 Filipino soldiers on the march, less than half of them returned home. In addition to the thousands that died on the March, thousands more died due to brutal barbaric treatment while in POW camps, unarmed and without any means of defense, were tortured and put to death.
This is the film where Clint Eastwood wants to portray the Japanese soldier as being, “just like the rest of us”: Sensitive, caring and concerned for our fellow man. Don’t you believe it!
Japanese soldiers, who were medical officers, carried out biological experiments on prisoners of war. The opening scene in "The Great Raid" movie showing Japanese soldiers burning American POWs alive is not fiction. It is reality.
The record of the atrocities inflicted by the Japanese soldiers on the American and Filipino civilians is numbered in the thousands. In Manila alone, as the war was winding down and the Japanese knew the end was near, they slaughtered more than 100,000 men, women and children.
The brilliant book "The Rape of Nanking" written by the late Iris Chang, chronicles the appalling savagery of the Japanese army during the 1930s. Ms. Chang uncovered the history of more than 360,000 Chinese men, women and children who were massacred by Japanese soldiers; some were, no doubt, the same “nice guys” on Iwo Jima.
It was the Japanese who attacked the United States: It was the Japanese soldier who savagely killed thousands of unarmed POWs, It was the Japanese soldier who placed POWs into bomb shelters and set them on fire so that no one could escape: and it was the Japanese soldiers who refused the offer of surrender when made, while knowing that to continue fighting meant death to hundreds of thousands of their own people,
There were one or two nice guys, but that’s about all. Yet the main thrust of the film was “The Japanese soldier is similar to the American soldier.” I personally knew of no “nice guy” within the enemy soldiers, and I offer this information as fact, not fiction. But the director, Clint Eastwood, along with the Japanese would want you to believe it was “fact”.
The above is my reaction to the film, sorry if I hurt some Forum members feelings.
Lester Tenney, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus Arizona State University Former POW and survivor of the Bataan Death March
I understand that the Japanese troops on Iwo Jima were the cream of the crop and the toughest the Japanese had. No old men and young kids like Hitler used in Berlin.
Are you saying the movie seems to have that premise?
Interesting. If true, the film is misleading.
I'll reword it. I didn't accept a point of view that they were just like us.
That's what I saw, too. Maybe there should have been less of a focus on the younger, nicer guys -- if it's true, as one poster says, that the Iwo troops were really hard-asses. But in any case, a good movie. Strict historical accuracy, although both desirable and achievable, is very rare in movies. However, there are worse things than inaccuracy. I believe Eastwood made not only a riveting film, but a basically honest one.
When I watched it, I kept thinking it would be a good double bill with "Downfall", the German movie about the last days in Hitler's bunker. Both had that sense of "we're all going to die."
I don't think that's the point of view the film put across. The relationship of those soldiers to their Officers and to their job was copmletely different from the way it's depicted in American war films about Americans.
Any such point of view would definitely be wrong.
Personally, I didn't pick up that sense of "just like us." But I do think it's true that their better features were stressed -- in most, though not all, major characters.
At one point, they read a letter from home from the soldier who was captured. It mirrored some of the words of the soldiers who had written to their own homes. A comparison was being made that the Japanese soldiers were like the American soldiers.
I agree. Many American soldiers were far from admirable, but this is utterly different from the "culture of evil" that (you rightly say) had a powerful role in the Axis militaries.
I did not see "Flags of Our Fathers" because I figured it might well be unfair to our boys -- our fathers.
In this limited respect, though, they may have been very similar.
The real reason the libs hate the Nazis is not because of the Holocaust but because they stabbed their good buddies the Commies in the back, after using the security achieved by the Hitler-Stalin Pact to launch the war in the first place. For years and years and years and years we've heard about how the poor Russians bore the brunt of Nazi brutality and did the job while ee-vil racist America was fighting quaint, non-western Japanese. They don't seem to recall how the wonderful, beautiful commies split Poland with the Nazis and used the Pact to conquer the Baltic countries, not to mention wage a war of aggression against Finland. And if Hitler hadn't stabbed Stalin in the back, the Commies would have probably spent the entire war as his allies.
If the atomic bomb had been dropped on Germany, or been dropped by FDR (whom liberals conveniently forget hated the Japanese, just like his cousin Theodore), we wouldn't hear a word about it.
It has been a while since I read the book, but Iwo Jima was the last outlying bastion the Japanese had before the "Home Islands" and it was very important that they hold it. It is spelled out by James Bradley, but I can't remember the details. I do remember the details of what the Japanese did to the poor American Medic they caprured and tortured for 3 days. Sickening, to say the least.
I've never heard of "Downfall." Do you recommend it?
That was a terrible scene that should have axed. It's atpyical of the film as a whole though.
Yes, I liked "The Great Raid" too. One friend (of our same political views) thought it was awful, but I strongly disagree.
I suspect you're right -- few liberals (some, but few) would have complained about use of the A-bomb on Germany. Most are real hypocrites.
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