Bataan Death March
Me too. All these expressions of faux outrage are just attempts to get people to listen to his show. If Savage were as perpetually angry as he pretends to be, he would have died of a heart attack years ago. ;)
I have no doubt the majority of Japanese soldiers were forced to fight at swordpoint. An army full of psychopathic killers would not remain a a functional army for very long - and even if only one in a hundred Japanese officers was a brutal psychopath, that's more than enough to account for the harm done to our soldiers and POW's.
Eastwood has the perfect right to tell this story, even if it conflicts with some people's facile, shorthand way of looking at the world. It's the same "Nuke Mecca!" crowd that always gets upset.
Bataan Death March
>>It's the same "Nuke Mecca!" crowd that always gets upset.<<
I think you nailed it very will with that one sentence.
Perhaps you should read a book or two related to WWII in the Pacific. The Japanese military had a well deserved reputation for cruelty ... torture & beheading of prisoners was a form of sport.
Majority? I seriously doubt that. They were from a generation who had been propagandized their entire lives into doing whatever the "Emperor" commanded, without complaint or question.
You might want to read a couple of books by James Bradley before you make statements like this. James is a son of John Bradley [flagraiser from Iwo Jima]. He researched the battle of Iwo Jima and the soldiers on Chichi Jima [where George H W Bush was shot down].
James interviewed American soldiers and Japanese soldiers and he tells the truth. It was not a pretty picture from either side. He was sympathetic to soldiers from both sides when he could be.
Anyone who sees Clint Eastwood's movie ought to read "Flags of our Fathers" and "Flyboys".
If George H W Bush had been captured on Chichi Jima, they beheaded and practiced cannibalism on American flyers. The first captures were sent to prisoner of war camps, six later captures were all beaten and killed and eaten. There was a prisoner of war trial about those flyers who were killed. #41 probably would have been their dinner.
And on the American side, there was lots of napalm dropped on the home islands into heavily populated areas.
There were stories of individuals on both sides who were good to captured soldiers, but the scenes in the Eastwood movie weren't accurate as to what actually happened there. Those guys had nightmares when they came home for a reason. John Bradley was stoic and uncomplaining, but his wife said he cried in his sleep every night for four years.
It sounds like the movie was based on the truth from the title [Letters from Iwo Jima]. It ought to bear some semblance of the truth. I'm not appreciative of things fictionalized in this way. It isn't fair to the troops on either side.
"I have no doubt the majority of Japanese soldiers were forced to fight at swordpoint."
You sure about that? I had a friend who endured the Bataan death march, they broke all his fingers.
You might read "The Rape of Nanking". I'm not squeamish as a rule, but... wow.
I think some of the Japanese would find Eastwood's version inconsistent with their culture. Do you know anything about cultural anthropology? Of course you and everyone else in this country can come up with your own personal version of history; you are free to rewrite history as many times as you wish. Eastwood's version does a disservice to both the United States and Japan, IMO. His movie is evidence of Eastwood's lack of education and ignorance as noted by Savage. Savage is right on! The only thing Eastwood did not do was show some Amazon women performing superhuman feats.
You need to learn much more about what the Imperial Japanese did in Manchuria, how they treated British and American prisoners of war, how they treated conscript war labor in Malaysia and the Philippines, and who the kamikazes were and what they did before they got into their planes. The Bataan Death March was a coordinated effort of shocking brutality by thousands of Japanese soldiers working in concert - not the work of one or two bad officers. It was systematic savagery gleefully participated in enthusiastically by thousands of Japanese infantrymen.
The mindset of the Japanese soldier was not very different from the mindset of modern-day mujaheddin. The Japanese soldier simply had better discipline.
The fact that Michael Savage is a loudmouthed moron and the fact that other loudmouth morons scream out "Nuke Mecca!" does not excuse Clint Eastwood from the reality of what he has done: made two anti-American propaganda films in a row that belittle the US war effort in WWII, that portray Americans as fools, that portray America's fighting men as either dupes or savages, and that portray America's war aims as crass and corrupt.
Moreover, he has made these films in war time, when solidarity and support for our fighting forces is paramount.
Eastwood is a weasel and a liar - and not a liar who simply tells factual untruths (which he does) but a metaphysical liar who distorts and defames the great truths.
He is a debauched disgrace.
I'm glad the "nuke Hiroshima crowd" was in charge in 1945. I have heard revisionst stooges actually refer to Hiroshima and Dresden as "war crimes".
From the "Rape of Nanking" link posted by tribune7. Nanking was not unique, just on a larger scale, look into what the Japanese did in the Philippines.
"Their first concern was to eliminate any threat from the 90,000 Chinese soldiers who surrendered. To the Japanese, surrender was an unthinkable act of cowardice and the ultimate violation of the rigid code of military honor drilled into them from childhood onward. Thus they looked upon Chinese POWs with utter contempt, viewing them as less than human, unworthy of life.
The elimination of the Chinese POWs began after they were transported by trucks to remote locations on the outskirts of Nanking. As soon as they were assembled, the savagery began, with young Japanese soldiers encouraged by their superiors to inflict maximum pain and suffering upon individual POWs as a way of toughening themselves up for future battles, and also to eradicate any civilized notions of mercy. Filmed footage and still photographs taken by the Japanese themselves document the brutality. Smiling soldiers can be seen conducting bayonet practice on live prisoners, decapitating them and displaying severed heads as souvenirs, and proudly standing among mutilated corpses. Some of the Chinese POWs were simply mowed down by machine-gun fire while others were tied-up, soaked with gasoline and burned alive.
After the destruction of the POWs, the soldiers turned their attention to the women of Nanking and an outright animalistic hunt ensued. Old women over the age of 70 as well as little girls under the age of 8 were dragged off to be sexually abused. More than 20,000 females (with some estimates as high as 80,000) were gang-raped by Japanese soldiers, then stabbed to death with bayonets or shot so they could never bear witness.
Pregnant women were not spared. In several instances, they were raped, then had their bellies slit open and the fetuses torn out. Sometimes, after storming into a house and encountering a whole family, the Japanese forced Chinese men to rape their own daughters, sons to rape their mothers, and brothers their sisters, while the rest of the family was made to watch.
Throughout the city of Nanking, random acts of murder occurred as soldiers frequently fired their rifles into panicked crowds of civilians, killing indiscriminately. Other soldiers killed shopkeepers, looted their stores, then set the buildings on fire after locking people of all ages inside. They took pleasure in the extraordinary suffering that ensued as the people desperately tried to escape the flames by climbing onto rooftops or leaping down onto the street.
The incredible carnage - citywide burnings, stabbings, drownings, strangulations, rapes, thefts, and massive property destruction - continued unabated for about six weeks, from mid-December 1937 through the beginning of February 1938. Young or old, male or female, anyone could be shot on a whim by any Japanese soldier for any reason. Corpses could be seen everywhere throughout the city. The streets of Nanking were said to literally have run red with blood.
Those who were not killed on the spot were taken to the outskirts of the city and forced to dig their own graves, large rectangular pits that would be filled with decapitated corpses resulting from killing contests the Japanese held among themselves. Other times, the Japanese forced the Chinese to bury each other alive in the dirt.
After this period of unprecedented violence, the Japanese eased off somewhat and settled in for the duration of the war. To pacify the population during the long occupation, highly addictive narcotics, including opium and heroin, were distributed by Japanese soldiers to the people of Nanking, regardless of age. An estimated 50,000 persons became addicted to heroin while many others lost themselves in the city's opium dens.
In addition, the notorious Comfort Women system was introduced which forced young Chinese women to become slave-prostitutes, existing solely for the sexual pleasure of Japanese soldiers."
"Eyewitness reports by Japanese military correspondents concerning the sufferings of the people of Nanking also appeared. They reflected a mentality in which the brutal dominance of subjugated or so-called inferior peoples was considered just. Incredibly, one paper, the Japan Advertiser, actually published a running count of the heads severed by two officers involved in a decapitation contest, as if it was some kind of a sporting match."
The WWII Japanese Armed forces may have been a conscript force but I doubt seriously there was any need to compel people at sword point to fight. A militarily aggressive, racially chauvinistic, Emporer worshiping, highly nationalistic culture isn't imposed from above and doesn't spring into being from thin air.
Imperialism, aggression and territorial expansion were popular in Japan (as in most times and places), going back to the wars against China and Russia at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries.
Bataan may have been aggravated by poor planning and incompetence, compounded by indifference, but the Rape of Nanking went on for six weeks.
The enslavement of "comfort women" was policy.
On Borneo the Japanese ate captives, ask the Australians.
I don't know who Michael Savage is aside from references here on FR, I don't listen to radio, talk or otherwise. I think many of the posters are deriding Eastwood's distortion of history to promote moral and cultural equivalency in the interests of selling theater tickets.
In Nanking, two officers competed to see who could lop off the most heads with a single stroke. The winner got his name in the Tokyo paper...
Japanese military tradition did not allow surrender. A Japanese POW was considered dead by his government AND his family. The first Japanese POW, one of the two crew on a midget sub that grounded on a beach while trying to sneak into Pearl Harbor, pleaded with his captors to shoot him, rather than let him live in dishonor.
Google the Goettge Patrol.
You've got a HUGE amount of reading and catching up to do.
You are wrong here. The Japanese were much more brutal to American Soldiers than anyone, even the Germans. The Mortality rate for Amercian Soldiers under the Germans was less than 10%. It was around 50% for our soliders who were caught by the Japanese.
The Japanese were not pyscho's as we say in our culture, they were following their own Warrior way inspired by their traditions fo the Samurai. This all equals one tough SOB to fight against. They considered surrender as a dishonor, and thus, treated our Soldiers who surrendered as lab rats. Any attempt to put a whitewash postive spin on the Japanese in WW II is an utter lie. Good thing that we won and that they are now making excellent cars and electronics instead of tanks and Navy boats. You can bet that the Chinese and Koreans are still fearful of them.
You have no concept of Japan pre WWII nor the power weilded by the emperor. The Japanese looked down on all others as inferior. Suicide was prefereably to surrender. As for treatment of Americans captured on Iwo read "Flags of our Fathers."
This is utter and total b.s.