Eastwood attacks Japan war myths

The Observer (U.K.) ^ | 05/28/06 | Justin McCurry

[Pokey78]

Two new movies based on a bloody 1945 battle are stirring up memories and forcing both sides to re-examine their history

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More than 60 years after it became one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Second World War, Iwo Jima's tragic history retains the power to overwhelm. As his plane prepared to land on the isolated Japanese island last month, the actor Ken Watanabe found he could not hold back the tears. Accompanying Watanabe, who shot to stardom playing a feudal warlord opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, was another hard man of Hollywood whose time on Iwo Jima would lead to something of a professional epiphany.

When Clint Eastwood's two films about Iwo Jima, one of the darkest periods of the Pacific War, reach cinemas this year, audiences could be excused for forgetting the man behind them was once the trigger-happy Dirty Harry.

The 75-year-old director has promised Flags Of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned the island into a flattened wasteland.

[gunnyg]

And there is a photo of a letter from Lou Lowery to Ray Jacobs, on Leatherneck letterhead stationery, dated September, 1947. It reads as follows. "Dear Raymond: I am always very glad to hear from any of the Marines who were on the original flag raising. You fellows did all the dirty work and the ones who were on Rosenthal's picture got all the credit. Up until the September issue my pictures and the correct story of the flag raising have been held in secret because the flag shot of Rosenthal's, although a phony, was a great picture and did much to publicize the Marine Corps. It is a darn shame that the men who actually were on the first patrol never received the credit they deserved. I am returning the clippings you enclosed as we have duplicates and some originals from the pics we used in the story. If you ever have occasion to visit Washington be sure and pay me a visit. Best wishes, /s/ Lou Lowery"

[Wombat101]

As far as I know, the only WWII "War Criminal" who actually served out his entire sentence (without suffering a heart attack or falling to disease, taking his own life, "falling in the shower" at the hands of a guard, etc) was Rudolph Hess.

The fact of the matter is that many of the war criminals were given leniency or clemency for a variety of reasons, primarily amongst them because the Allied War Crimes Tribunal really had no (international)legal standing to stage trials or hand out sentences in the first place, because some (by no means all) were falsely accused or had dubious evidence arrayed against them, or because of the post-War power shift (West vs. USSR). Many were used in or near their old capacities in the new governments of West Germany and Japan. In this capacity, many German and Japanese military leaders avoided the gallows or a life sentence because their experience was required to rebuild the governments and armed forces of these countries quickly and efficiently,or because they had particularly useful skills and information.

The best examples I can give of this last phenomenon would be Reinhardt(?) Gehlen, Werner Von Braun, Karl Doenitz, and the Japanese scientists who conducted germ warfare experiments in China and Manchuria. Quite frankly, the idea of a War Crimes Tribunal of any kind strikes me as patently ridiculous, especially when it's staged and enforced by triumphant Western nations who invented the concept of the Total War of Annhiliation, and who themselves had engaged in many of the same activities as the accused (extra-judicial execution of prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions, indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, unrestricted submarine warfare, use of proscribed weapons on the battlefield, etc).

[Wombat101]

If I can clarify my last post a bit before some nitpicker pulls it apart;

The Allies were just as guilty in some respects as the Germans and Japanese when it comes to activities that fell under the categories of "War Crimes"or "Crimes Against HUmanity".

For example, the Japanese commanders responsible for the Rape of Nanking were tried and convicted (not all of them, of course), yet there is very little difference, in my mind, between Nanking and the mass slaughters, rapes and theft that took place across Eastern Europe as the Red Army advanced into Germany.

We tried and convicted the Germans responsible for the massacre of Americans at Malmedy and civilians at Stavelot, but somehow,the Russians who perpetrated an even greater slaughter at Katyn Forest were never brought to justice in the name of "Allied Unity", even while the slaughter took place when the USSR was an ALLY OF GERMANY BY TREATY!

Curtis LeMay's firebombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities and the destruction of Dresden were, in my opinion, no different than the Germans marching people in their millions to the gas chambers. In either case, people were sentenced to death simply because they fell into a convenient category; "sub-human" for the Germans, simply "enemy" for our side.

In any of these cases, we bump up against the Western notion of "Just War" (Ius in Bello), which states that war might be a necessary evil in the uman condition but that it is the duty of all good Christians/men of conscience to ensure that their actions can be justified under the concept of "serving the greater good". This is somewhat, but not totally, nebulous: defeating the Japanese and German armies in the field in face-to-face combat is serving the greater good, but what happens when you stretch that concept to include the indiscrimate killing of civilians because they work in the factories that supply that army in the field? That's a question that Nuremburg and the other trials left unanswered, and which politics and human nature will never permit to be answered.

If the defense is "well, they did it first!", and the Germans and Japanese certainly did commit the first atrocities (Nanking, the "Manchurian Incident", Rotterdam, Warsaw, Coventry, the Death camps, etc) then, in my opinion, this defense holds no water. This is not a justifiable defense of anything, it is a schoolyard retort.

[dsc]

"We killed 1.2 million Philipinnes after the Spanish-American War."

Without conceding the accuracy of your number, the people we killed in the PI were mooselimb terrorists, much like the ones we're dealing with now.

Their presence made independence and democracy in the PI impossible. Luckily, we still knew how to deal with people like that back then.

[dsc]

"but what happens when you stretch that concept to include the indiscrimate killing of civilians because they work in the factories that supply that army in the field? That's a question that Nuremburg and the other trials left unanswered, and which politics and human nature will never permit to be answered."

On the contrary, it is answered, definitively and conclusively. Attempting to allege that the question remains open serves only The Evil One.

Those who oppose evil are not required to send an infinite stream of young men to their deaths on the battlefield when attacks on the enemy's capacity to make war can end the conflict.

[investigateworld]

I'll buy most of your argument, except for LeMay's actions.
These cities had ample warning via leaflets and radio as to there fate.

While the killing of noncombatants disgusts me, they did Choose to remain. The arguments as to should a child suffer for the bad choices of a parent? ... I'll leave that to the Jesuits.

[Wombat101]

"On the contrary, it is answered, definitively and conclusively. Attempting to allege that the question remains open serves only The Evil One."

It most certainly WAS not answered. I submit, that genocide is as old as homo sapiens, and yet, some genocides (that of European Jewry and Christian Armenians, for example) are somehow worse than, say, the genocide of Darfur, Rwanda or the attampt to ethnically cleanse Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro. Do we now arbitrarily decide that this murder is justified and that one not? On what basis do we make that determination? Or is "they are the enemy", or "we have no vital interests in that region", or "we can't get there to prevent it" justifiable excuses?

And please, stop with the simplistic notion that because I disagree with some of the methods used in the Second World War to bring about Allied victory that I somehow serve some sinister, evil purpose or worship the Devil. I've read, and often agreed, with many of your posts in this forum and such simplicity is beneath you, dsc.

"Those who oppose evil are not required to send an infinite stream of young men to their deaths on the battlefield when attacks on the enemy's capacity to make war can end the conflict."

Really? And if the way to put an end to evil IS to send an endless stream of young men into combat, are we to pull back from doing it simply because we're "not required to"? Quite frankly, the frontal assaults against the Japanese at places like Iwo Jima were just that: sending an endless stream of young men to their deaths, etc, etc. There was very little of the manuever warfare or surical precision many assume existed in the 1940's (at more or less the same levels as we have today) on tiny islands in the middle of a vast ocean. NBo sweeping manuever of envelopment was available for the Marines at Betio, Iwo or Peleliu, was it? They were sent head first into meat grinders because it was necessary to send and endless stream, etc, etc.

I don't disagree with the premise that success in warfare is usually due to the combination of multiple strategiies, and that warfare itself is a messy and chaotic business that unleashes the worst in human nature. Only an idiot would say this isn't so. All I'm saying is that people in glass houses shouldn'tthrow stones. I'm thinking in purely moral terms, not military ones; some of the very people (Hap Arnold, Jimmy Doolittle, Curtis LeMay, Bomber Harris, for example) who expounded upon the promises to end wars quickly and humanely with the use of "surgical, strategic" airpower, quickly found out that a) the technology couldn't deliver, b) their assumptions were grossly off base and c) that when faced with the embarrassments of a and b and the possible loss of the concept of independant air forces, rapidly reverted to barbarism and justified it in any way they could ("breaking civilian morale", or "every apartment building destroyed displaces half a dozen German workers with a resulting loss of productivity" (if it doesn't kill him outright), for example).

Perhaps it's just me, and I'm not explaining myself correctly, but I don't see how we justify one barbaric act and prosecute another and call somehow ourselves fair and decent.

[Wombat101]

"These cities had ample warning via leaflets and radio as to there fate."

True, to a certain extent. It is the custom of Western militaries to often announce their intentions, whether by formal declaration of war (itself a rarity), or statements of policy distributed by the modern media. I'm not so sure, however, that had the Germans refrained from purposely bombing civilians that the British would have done likewise. That's a question that can never be answered, especially in an age where the airplane and guided missile blurred the distinction between war front and home front.

"While the killing of noncombatants disgusts me, they did Choose to remain"

Where were they supposed to go? Especially the Japanese who live on islands? Would it have been practical to evacuate all of France and move it to Morocco, for example, in the face of open conflict? What happens when you DON'T have a choice?

Again, I'm not arguing tactics or strategies,only the moral questions inherent in their application.

And by the way, I LEARNED that from the Jesuits (LOL!)

[Eric in the Ozarks]

We lived in Japan 1951-1961. I was an Army Brat.
Our maid, Masako, was a 10 year old girl in 1945 and was forced to work in a munitions plant in Yokohama. The building featured a large red cross on the roof.
After the city was destroyed by B-29s, some of the machinery was salvaged and production continued in the sandstone caves dug by Japanese a few years earlier. She said if it hadn't been for the A-bombs, the Imperialists would have never surrendered.

[Smokin' Joe]

Yep. Winning is the important part.

Maybe, (and I'm giving Eastwood the benefit of the doubt, considering political constraints on him) what he meant had to do with the fact that the individual grunt, regardless of whatever army he fought in, does the bleeding and dying. There is respect among warriors in peacetime, even former adversaries for this reason.

If one wants to focus on the brutality of the Japanese troops and officers during the war, there are ample opportunities, historically, especially from Manchuria to Burma, and in the prison camps.

What happened between the Marines and the Japanese during the invasion of the island was warfare, plain and brutal, no matter who you were.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind. Perhaps I'll take a look if the opportunity presents.

d1

[DoughtyOne]

Look, I appreciate your comments. I understand where they are coming from. I just can't get into that frame of mind. You'll have to forgive me.

I'm sure a great story could be told from the Devil's perspective after he's died in the final lake of fire, but I'm honestly not interested considering the devistating impact he's had on humanity.

6000 of our men died on Iwo Jima. That's all I need to know. That's where my interests focus. I simply couldn't care less about what people went through who caused those deaths.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate it.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks for the comments. That sums up my thoughts on the subject.

[GATOR NAVY]

The men on both sides were thrust into a horrible situation. As long as we don't make the Jap Army, as a whole, victims, it shouldn't be a problem. We weren't perfect, but we weren't the villians in this story either.

Excellent point.

[dfwgator]

The lesson is, "Wars are horrible things, don't start them." I think Japan has taken that lesson to heart since the end of WWII.

[investigateworld]

"..The Imperialists would have never surrendered.."

In my youth I lived next door to a very delicate, refined Japanese lady. The perfect picture of 'class'.
It would have been her assignment, should an invading force landed on Japanese soil to throw Molotov cocktails at our guys.

It was her belief that use of the A-Bombs, saved face for Japan so they could surrender with honor, so to speak.

[A.A. Cunningham]

The famous photo is a reenactment of the actual event.

Incorrect. That is a myth perpetuated by ignorant souls like yourself.

[A.A. Cunningham]

maybe because it was staged

Bull s***

[A.A. Cunningham]

holds the gun

Rifle, not a gun. A gun is a large caliber crew served weapon.