Eastwood honored French President Jacques Chirac pins the medal of the Legion of Honor on the lapel of actor and director Clint Eastwood during a ceremony in Paris on Saturday. (AP photo by Remy de la Mauviniere) Feb 17, 2007
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
Good Lord, you may have discovered another primary source of information! Check with the man's survivors and question them about those historical photographs. They need to be compared against archived ones to see if they are perhaps unique.
A B-29 was more than the lives of the men on board. A B-29 was a valuable fist even with conventional bombs. The Dinah Mite was the first one to land there in an emergency. Over 30 followed.
Keep in mind too that there were certain other advantages in having the island cleared, the airfield operable, and como on the mountain.
Agreed.
However, I'm sure you agree that it is arguable whether saving 30 bombers and their crews justified the cost of 26,000 American casualties.
Hindsight, of course.
Were you aware that some American captives on Chichijima, an nearby island, were not only tortured but eaten?
GHW Bush was shot down in a raid on Chichijima, but was picked out of the water. So he narrowly escaped being eaten, in which case the world would have been spared that monster, his son. :)
My father too served as an air corps pilot in the Pacific. He said the atrocities committed by the Japanese were incomparable to that of the German soldier in Europe.
In the battle for Iwo Jima there were American soldiers that were captured in tunnels that honeycombed the island.
They were tortured and then killed.
Seems like all the "nice guys" were nowhere to be found.
War never solved anything except freedom from the English during the birth of our Country, conquest of the Great Lakes, the end of slavery, the end of Nazism, and Imperialism.
Clint Eastwood might consider doing a film one day about how the troops support each other even after wars. And so do their children.
There's an untold story here, which to date, has only been covered by such one-sided films as "Coming Home". That film made me so angry due its one-sidedness.
It's not just in Veteran Halls where and how our vets and their families are cared for, watched over.
There were over 300 B-29s that made emergency landings at Iwo after the Americans took control of the island. (My father piloting one of them.)
10 crew members to each plane = 3000 American Airmen.
It was a necessary battle.
The depiction of the Japanese is much less flattering in the Eastwood film than it is in Kwai.
Mr. Eastwood has turned PC. trying to get another oscar?
A friend of mine's uncle was one of those Filipinos on that death march. He survived, but he would not have called the Japanese soldiers, nice guys.
"Letters from Hiroshima" -- now THERE's a film I'd like to see!
I hope Mr Eastwood is tortured in the next life by all those souls tortured by the "Just the Same as You or I" Japanese in WWII. I knew two Bataan marchers. Neither would talk about their experiences and neither would allow anyone even remotely Asian in appearance take care of them.
Thank you
Thanks, I'll look into that.
That's a very nice story. Your dad is a good guy.
Yes, my dad is one of those evil military guys who cares about and for other people.
Eastwood honored French President Jacques Chirac pins the medal of the Legion of Honor on the lapel of actor and director Clint Eastwood during a ceremony in Paris on Saturday. (AP photo by Remy de la Mauviniere) Feb 17, 2007
My late uncle and father-in-law were both WWII vets from the Pacific Theater. They both HATED the Japs. They said they saw Americans hung upside down and gutted like cattle. There is a great book out there somewhere called:"Prisoner of the Japanese." All WWII stories. They were barbaric!
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