Why on EARTH would we have been nasty to the Japanese?
Posted on 05/27/2006 7:18:26 PM PDT by Pokey78
Two new movies based on a bloody 1945 battle are stirring up memories and forcing both sides to re-examine their history
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at observer.guardian.co.uk ...
Very well put. And your spelling of Hokkaido is correct.
.....I don't give a flying figg about the Japanese hardship on Iwo Jima and it is an embarassment that anyone does.......
I recognize the sentiment but there is a responsibility to history to record what happened. To not report on the Japaneese side of the battle would be doing history an injustice.
As a case directly to the point, I cite the movie "Tora, Tora, Tora". This movie is withoubt doubt the best of the many Pearl Harbor movies. The reason it is good is that it tells the whole story. It does not take a strong political stand.It clearly shows the events and weakness of both sides.It ends by quoting Admiral Yamamoto sagely predicting he had awakened a sleeping giant.
I am also mindful of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg who now get the credit for the best WWII movies in "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Band of Brothers". Neither Hanks nor Spielberg can be considered someone we conservatives would recognize as worthy of our personal association.
I am a serious Clint fan and admire his talents as both actor and director. Until I see the movie I will reserve judgement and trust that Clint will do for the Pacific Theater what Hanks and Speilberg did for Europe. We will see.....
It is commonly held that the Japanese soldiers were savage & barbaric...
And that was only 60 years ago.
Hmmm, that may be so. But if it is, it's only because there are a lot of spiritually immature Christians (and Chameleo-christians).
Regardless of hypotheticals, I think our society as a whole needs a real relationship with God (and Jesus is the only way to God) now.
Thanks for your prespective on this Bert. I appreciate it.
ping
fifty-year-old error
That would be sixty one years.
And while you're at it, quit carping on Memorial Day of all days and stick to the point -- the sublime bravery of the men like my father in law who fought at Iwo.
If your father is still alive ask him if a rifle is a gun, sweetheart.
The difference between REMFers and real warriors is knowing when detail matters and when it doesn't. The promotion boards never seem to be out where the shooting is going on, if you recall Bill Mauldin's cartoons about "that guy who put the orders out" and "one set of noncoms for combat, and one for town," they seem highly apropos here.
In the context, it is irrelevant, and it's certainly not worth being as obnoxious over as you apparently have felt called upon to be.
And it's even less relevant whether it's a half century or a little bit more since my father in law got blown up on Iwo. Not that he would care about your two-bit insults, but I care about his memory.
Why on EARTH would we have been nasty to the Japanese?
MacArthur's return(s) were indeed "photo ops" but they were not staged. The invasion of the Phillipines, like the Normandy invasion, took place at several beaches over a 20 mile stretch of coast. On the day of the landing, MacArthur inspected a number of those landing sites, including several where there was resistance. US Army Signal Corps photographers were at each of those beaches, hence the multiple images of MacAuthor wading ashore. It was not a thing of "lets do this again until it looks just right" as many of Mac's critics claim.
It wouldn't matter. As long as it wasn't filmed back in Australia or something cheezy like that.
Sorry it took so long to respond, been busy.
If I didn't know any better,you're argument runs something like this:
1. Germany and Japan were the epitome of evil (you'll get no argument this from me)
2. It was our responsibility to win, so that evil would not prosper
3. We won,even if the means by which we did so were not always exactly kosher
4. In the light of victory, therefore, the methods used do not really matter.
If you buy this line of reasoning, then you're probably one of the few who believes Janet Reno did a good thing when she burned down a church in Waco to "save the children". The ends do not always justify the means, dsc.
"Since you’re arbitrarily deciding what is murder and what is not, I don’t see why I shouldn’t arbitrarily decide anything I like."
In that case, then I can believe that a lot of what was done in the Second World War by the Allies was outside the bounds of what would be considered acceptable by a civilized society. That statement in NO WAY justifies what was done by the Axis, btw, it is just a statement of fact.
"Unfortunately, it is a rule of warfare that you don’t leave a dangerous enemy behind you as you advance. That said, the streams of casualties on those islands were finite, not endless."
Quite clearly, you haven't studied any of the campaigns of the Pacific War with anything approaching a critical eye. MacArthur ROUTINELY left "a dangerous enemy behind him as he advanced", or are not familair with the indirect approach taken by MacArthur to surround and bypass fortified bases which would be too costly to take by frontal assault? He called this "hitting them where they ain't". Nimitz often did likewise. Isolated Japanese garrisons on many islands (especially Rabaul and Taiwan) were routinely surrounded by American invasions of smaller islands and bases within air range, and then cut off from supply by a combination of air and sea power.
And with regards to leaving enemies behind (or unfought), nearly 70% of the Japanese army went unengaged by any Allied force of signifigance all over Asia, particularly in China, Indonesia, Indochina, Malaya, Burma, Manchuria, Korea and a hundred Pacific atolls. That's a fact. Look it up. Two milion Japanese troops alone in China basically spent the war standing around watching Chinese who would never fire a shot at them.
"And I’m saying you’re far too eager to assert that America is in a glass house."
Not at all. Never said any such thing. I only remarked that it's funny how human nature (and maybe patriotism?) allows for one atrocity to be considered as necessary for victory (when one's own side commits it) and another a prosecutable offense(when perpetrated by the other side) by a court of victors with no legal authority, except by right of conquest.
"One problem is calling what we did in WWII “barbaric.” Once you accept that falsehood, it becomes impossible to reason your way to the truth."
Sorry. I'm not ready to swallow the fiction that we were always the good guys in every conflict we've ever been in, and that should automatically give us a pass. Regardless of whether or not the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor or the Germans declared war on us first, it did not require the mass slaughter of unarmed civilians behind the lines to achieve victory, and certainly not by a method which has never been as effective as it's most rabid proponents have always assured us it was. The truth of the matter is that bombing civilians was the ONLY weapon available to the Western Allies that could take the fight to Germany before the invasion of France, and in the case of the Japanese, was little more than terrorism (we called it 'revenge for Pearl Harbor'). You can't excuse either one, even if you actually believe "strategic" bombing actually contributed to victory in any tangible sense (i.e. even being relentlessly and repeatedly bombed from the air between 1940 and 1945, Germany only surrendered when Germany itself was invaded. Either an air war requires a decade to achieve it's aims, or "strategic" bombing was an expensive, unnecessary lie. Take your pick).
It should be a maxim of warfare that while one is required to always study the methods of the past, one should also be prepared to study the moral implications of those methods.
"If I didn't know any better,you're argument runs something like this:
1. Germany and Japan were the epitome of evil (you'll get no argument this from me)
2. It was our responsibility to win, so that evil would not prosper
3. We won,even if the means by which we did so were not always exactly kosher
4. In the light of victory, therefore, the methods used do not really matter."
Nope, not even close.
"it did not require the mass slaughter of unarmed civilians behind the lines to achieve victory"
Wrongola. The alternative was hundreds of thousands of unnecessary casualties on our side, and possibly even allowing victory to escape our grasp.
Before you start arguing that those men should have been sent to their deaths, shoulder a musket and fall in with them.
"Before you start arguing that those men should have been sent to their deaths, shoulder a musket and fall in with them."
I have. In fact, I'm the fourth generation of Wombat's to have worn my country's uniform. In fact, I'm certain that the explosives I hung on the wings of A-6's, A-7's and F-14's were used to kill people, some of them (by no means all) innocent and unconnected in any way to the armed forces of their country, and many uninvolved in direct combat.
In that regard, I not only have the right, but the responsibility, to question how and by what means my country achievs military victory. Even moreso, because I have the blood of other people on my hands, regardless of whether I actually dropped a bomb or pulled a trigger. I'm just as responsible for their deaths as the pilots I armed.
The sanctity of civilians in war has been the subject of international accords, Geneva conventions, political and religious treatises, for near on 2,000 years. That such accords or premises are routinely violated (and grossly violated in the Second World War) has nothing to do with "hundreds of thousands of casualties" on our side; the defense of Japan was ultimately a naval problem and with the Japanese fleet on the bottom, Japan was a sitting duck; all that was required was time to allow nature take it's course. The defense of Germany was one of avoiding a war on multiple fronts which could not be won; Hitler took care of that all on his own. Hitler lost the war (realistically) at Dunkirk, not Stalingrad.
The Allies were unwilling to invest the time, especially with the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of the war and bleeding Germany white, and English and American public opinion clamoring for an immediate end to hostilities as quickly as possible. Even if that meant bombing women and children.
Strategic bombing was a mistake that, in retrospect, has been justified as having saved lives, worn down the Luftwaffe, or slowed down our enemy's ability to wage war. It did nothing of the sort. "We saved lives with strategic bombing" is a post-war justification for doing the unthinkable, and doing it with a weapon that promised much and delivered little. In fact, the most effective use of strategic bombers in the war was the Transportation Plan that effectively isolated Normandy from the rest of France. That involved bombing trains, rails, bridges, road nets and canals. Not factories full of civilians, nor apartment blocks full of the same.
One only has to look at the increased war production figures for Germany from 1942-45 to see how wrong the theories of strategic bombing were. Germany wa sproducing more weapons than ever before in those years, what it was missing was the trained men to utilize them. One only has to look at the corresponding declining numbers for Japan, as it's merchant fleet was sent to the bottom and it's reserves of raw materials, trained pilots and sailors also were attritted, to see the same thing.
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