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 ...
Oh, I'm sooooo sorry. I served but not at the same time or under the same circumstances so I couldn't POSSIBLY know what war is all about? I'm sure YOU were not ready to go ashore and invade Japan either, but somehow you have a better perspective than I do? Now who's engaging in sophistry?
And the history is NOT rewritten, I suggest you study more of it before you comment on it.
Understanding things does not mean you can change them. If those who were actually watching their buddies get killed by their enemies can forgive them why should I who never was shot at by them get on my high horse.
My dad spent three years in a hell hole called New Guinea and I do not disrespect his memory by learning about those trying to kill him.
There was a study conducted by the United States Navy in April of 1945, in which the Chief of Naval Operations Staff had determined that a continued naval and air blockade of Japan would result in the complete disintegration of Japan's war-making capability and civilian governance by mid-1946, at latest.
However, this study ran afoul of one particular that it could never quite enumerate to anyone's satisfaction: what effect would continued kamikaze attacks have upon the Pacific Fleet and, and what would they mean in terms of casualties? Those questions could not be answered, but it was assumed that eventually, the Japanese would run out of planes and pilots, and that at (then)current rates of attrition, both would run out relatively soon.
The Japanese merchant fleet was (mostly) on the bottom, ensuring that Japan, a country with no native raw materials of signifigance, would see it's war industries cease operations for lack of materials. The effects of the relentless unrestricted submarine warfare, mining of Japanese ports, air and naval blockade of Japanese home waters, were already having a telling effect. By the time of the invasion of Okinawa, Japan had little more than 6 months of oil reserves left with which to carry on the war.
Japan was cripppled. The sticking point, in terms of surrender, had nothing to do with continuing the fight for the sake of it; it had everything to do with the ridiculous notions of Unconditional Surrender put forth at Potsdam. One of the main bullet points of the Potsdam Declaration was that the head of state and the head of government would be tried for War Crimes (in this case, conspiring to engage in destructive war). In the case of Japan, the head of state andhead of government are the same person; Emperor Hirohito.
In the case of the Germans, the head of state and government was the same person (Admiral Doenitz, by the end of the war). Germany did not worship Doenitz, nor was Doenitz necessary to the reconstruction of the country. To the Japanese, this was Emperor Hirohito, and this would be like putting God on trial. There could BE no Japan without Hirohito, unlike a Germany without Doenitz, and he was sacred. So they continued to fight.
It was this refusal to bend on the sanctity of the Emperor that caused the fight to continue, and necessitated the atomic bombings of Japan. After the Japanese surrender, Hirohito was not tried in a court of law over anything, was he? So, was there an unconditional surrender at all? Hardly.
Japan kept it's emperor.
The purpose behind Unconditional Surrender and adherance to Potsdam was purely political; it was intended to keep a tenuous (at best) allied alliance together long enough to "win" the war. In Japan's attempt to wriggle free of Potsdam, the Japanese Prime Minister, Shigematsu (who had replaced Tojo near the end) specifically warned the Allies in public that if they did not drop the requirement to bow to Potsdam, the Japanese would begin the slaughter of 400,000 allied POW's (both military and civilian) in Japanese custody. This, incidentally, occured two days before the official surrender of Japan.
Obviously, the Emperor was not tried for war crimes, no ,mass execution of Allied POWs occurred in the very last days of the war. Potsdam didn't mean a thing. Without it, the rationale for both Japanese beligerence and Allied atomic bombings, is non-existant.
From this website:Click for the entire article
Excerpt
In 2000, for the first time in years, the government ordered a new supply of Purple Hearts. The old supply, manufactured in anticipation of the invasion of the home islands of Japan during World War II, had begun to run low.
The decoration, which goes to American troops wounded in battle and the families of those killed in action, had been only one of countless thousands of supplies produced for the planned 1945 invasion of Japan, which military leaders believed would last until almost 1947.
Fortunately, the invasion never took place. All the other implements of that war -- tanks and LSTs, bullets and K-rations -- have long since been sold, scrapped or used up, but these medals, struck for their grandfathers, are still being pinned on the chests of young soldiers.
The Purple Heart
Remarkably, some 120,000 Purple Hearts are still in the hands of the Armed Services and are not only stocked at military supply depots, but also kept with major combat units and at field hospitals so they can be awarded without delay.
But although great numbers of the World War II stock are still ready for use, the recent production of 9,000 new copies was ordered for the most simple of bureaucratic reasons. So many medals had been transferred to the Armed Services that the government organization responsible for supplying them had to replenish its own inventory.
In all, approximately 1,506,000 Purple Hearts were produced for the war effort with production reaching its peak as the Armed Services geared up for the invasion of Japan. Despite wastage, pilfering and items that were simply lost, the number of decorations was approximately 495,000 after the war.
Gee, four submarines capable of launching a dozen kamikazes at the Panama Canal was a serious threat to the United States and would have won the war for Japan? Be serious.
Japan was on it's last legs. It had run out of raw materials, oil, and the capacity to suppply or eveacuate the remnants of it's army scattered across the Pacific and Asian landmass.
Funny, but the original argument began between dsc and I on the efficacy of strategic bombing, that you have chimed in and completely missed the irony: The real damage to Japan was done at SEA: without a navy to defend the home islands, to protect merchant shipping, no hulls to bring raw materials home or to transport forces across vast distances, the Japanese were sitting ducks in an age of mobile warfare. Strategic bombing did very little to defeat the Japanese (except continue to kill mostly civilians until the end of the war) since they had already lost that war at sea.
As to whether or not strategic bombing has ever worked, I found it fascinating yesterday when the Military Channel showed a documentary (Wings over the World) that dealt specifically with this argument. Did you know that Hamburg was bombed 170 times during the war? Berlin itself over 200?
We can assume (I can prolly dig the exact figures out given time) that the vast majority of German cities were similarly visited at least 50 times, too? Either strategic bombing in the 1940's had an extremely poor return on investment, required far more time than the span afforded by 1940-45, or was an outright fallacy in terms of an effective strategy, and merely an excuse to engage in terror.
One of the major problems with strategic bombing was that the allies consistently confused the results of a raid (i.e. sheer size of an area leveled or destroyed) with the effect (i.e. amount of real damage done to actual German war production). Some people are still maming that mistake, it seems.
Oh, and as for the Kwangtung Army, we're talking about an organization that had been in China since the early 1930's (actually, since 1921 in one permutation or another). It had been involved in sevral "Incidents" (well over 2,000 by between 1939-45) with the Soviet Union, the last major(and most important) being the Nomonhan Incident of 1939, in which the Japanese and Soviets engaged in military operations against each other that was comsidered by many to be a dress rehearsal for the wider Second World War (and which introduced Georgi Zhukov to the world stage, the General who finally defeated Germany).
The Japanese lost so badly that they concluded a Non-Aggression Pact with the Russians, which held until August 1945, when the Soviet Union rushed into Manchuria and Korea at the behest of the United States in a an effort to force the surrender of japan.
As for what was happening in Mainland China during the war years, except for the Flying Tigers, the 14th Air Force, and a few major operations by the Chinese Army (in connection with the British and American Armies) in Burma, the VAST MAJORITY of Japanese troops did nothing but sit in front of armed Chinese troops who were NOT going to engage in combat. The majority of the war 1941-45 in China was an armed stalemate in which the Nationalist Chinese would not jeopardize their position against their REAL enemies (Chinese Communists) by engaging the Japanese, and where the Japanese had belatedly come to the conclusion that in China they had bitten off more than they could chew, and who were in no position to press home any attack which might lead to the loss of what they had already taken, especially not with the Americans and British undefeated and at liberty to attack.
The Japanese ended the war in possession of almost a quarter of Chinese territory, so if you're about to tell me the Chinese took the fight to the Japanese in any way that begins to approximate to the meaning of "significant", I'll just be off over here laughing.
I don't feel any guilt about it at all, since I was not responsible for either the decision or the actual dropping of bombs. What I mean to ask is, at what point do we as civilized people begin to believe we've gone too far, even in war? And that having answered that question for myself, I intended to begin a debate on the question. Instead, I've been bombarded by a lot of crap that seems to go along the lines of "if you don't believe it was justified, then you're a commie pinko, possibly a liberal and probably engaged in a propaganda campaign to smear the brave Americans who firebombed people who lived in paper houses", only not in so many words.
But I thank you for your reasonable response, at least.
"On the subject of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you and I couldn't be more diametrically opposed."
Fine. Your perogative. I'm coinvinced it didn't need to happen.
Let me put it to you this way, investigateworld;
Had Japan won the war, despite American firebombing, and had gotten their hands on Curtis LeMay, what do you think they would have done with him? I doubt it would involve a trial.
The IMT's (International Military Tribunals) were a farce, a Potemkin display of "justice" and "fairness" imposed upon defeated nations by their CONQUERORS, and subject to having thei findings and sentences negated (or dictated by politics. Which is exactly what happened, anyway, in most cases.
What's next; a movie to explain both sides of the Battan death march?
LeMay himself said in his autobiography ... excellent read, BTW, he was an interesting man ... that he would've been tried as a war criminal if the Japanese had won. Also, I think I had my dates wrong on the bad raid on Tokyo, I think was in March not May.
Fine. Produce it. Better yet, produce the evidence that four submarines (even ones carrying aircraft and radiological bombs) would have allowed Japan to keep fighting or even to win the war on anything approaching favorable conditions. While you're at it, you can explain to me why the Japanese would even CONSIDER such a thing when they had already witnessed firsthand (in their home islands)the American reaction to a CONVENTIONAL attack on Pearl Harbor?
And YOU need to read more history (I have a master's degree in it); the same thread runs through ALL JAPANESE MILITARY STRATEGY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR: that the Western allies, having been surprised, humiliated,militarily defeated and stripped of their colonies and rights in East Asia, should negotiate a surrender on terms favorable to Japan. This is a cultural shorsightedness peculiar to most Oriental nations and peoples: that having once proven your superiority to an enemy, the enemy should gracefully bow out. Once the Japanese had acquired either an outright surrender or a recognition of their primacy in East Asia, the Japanese could go back to the business of finishing the war in China.
The American enemy not only refused to bow out gracefully, he struck back in ways that struck most Japanese as barbaric (i.e. outside the Bushido code of conduct, but which were obvious to any student of western warfare and history). I seriosuly doubt Japan (even if it had the capability) would have gone to such lengths knowing the Americans would respond in an overwhelming fashion, particularly not when the more serious and sober Japanese commanders and diplomats had already seen the handwriting on the wall as far as their prospects for a victory of any kind.
You assume that because SOME Japanese were willing to commit suicide in the war that the entire nation would. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Well the controversy is that it was a staged event (the official photo not that the marines did it) There is actually a "real" picture of the marines raising the first flag on IJ but it is not as ascetically pleasing as the "official" picture of the raising of the flag.
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