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 ...
Just as it was for Watanabe. 'As we went through this film, we realised that until now we haven't really looked at Japan's past. We kind of looked away from it,' he said. 'But we have to look at it and accept the fact that this is what our fathers and grandfathers have done. Accepting the reality is the first step.'
Doesn't sound like a reaction to political correctness to me.
LeMay certainly was a character in a day and age where characters were prominent in war (Patton, McA and Montgomery, pop immediately to mind in this regard. Norman Schwartzkopf, for example, hardly strikes one as being of the same mold).
But he was perfectly aware of what he was doing and what he was ordering his men to do,particularly in the switch from high-explosive ordnance to incendiaries. I don't know of any commander worth his salt who wouldn't know the difference.
I guess the conditions under which that particular war were waged dictated the collapse of civilized behavior by both sides. It's just a shame it had to happen.
Have you read the script? Do you know for fact that this is what is going to be portrayed?
Why doesn't everyone just hold their judgements for when further details come out? From the reaction of the actor in the article, it sounds like the film is showing the reality of the brutal Japanese army. If you didn't read the article, click on the link and do it.
Has little to do with Christ and his whereabouts, my friend.
It's a simple question: how far is a civilized society willing to go in terms of destruction? In recent years, the question has been answered fairly certanly: we now use GPS, laser and computer-guided munitions. We take pains to NOT hit civilian targets.
Some will pooh-pooh this sense of care about what we hiot as mere public relations. I'd like to think that having witnessed firsthand the damage that was done to civil society by indiscriminate bombing, that westerners have taken the moral aspects of war into account in a way their forebears certainly did not.
I can't disagree with your last post (concerning the Luftwaffe and Japanese Air force dispositions due to bombing campaigns), but on the whole, there are very few situations late in the war where that airpower which had been redeployed could have had any dramtic impact on the war.
One of them was Normandy, certainly, others include was Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Had there ven been anything approaching German or Japanese parity in air forces, all of them would have been a disaster.
But, when faced with the fact that the Germans not only continued to produce FW-190's, Me-109's and the even better Me-262, they also continued to produce the V-1 and V-2, the Tiger Tank, the 88 mm gun, the Panzerfaust, improved U-Boats (all of which took quite a few lives on their own), and the steel, synthetic fuels, food supplies and ammunition for all of this right up until the last days of the war, has to tell you something: Strategic bombing campaigns designed to prevent the production of these weapons and commodities did no such thing, or at best, did so to only a limited extent.
And that campaign (against Germany) cost the USAAF 60,000 men and the British another 50,000 or so. When you weigh what was achieved by what it cost (in men, material and moral terms) it was hardly worth it. The very fact that there have been an entire host of reasons justifying it (we wore down the Luftwaffe, we devestated German production and transportation (not!), "they did it first", etc, etc), have all come after the fact, and after the realization that what was promised was not what was delivered with regards to long-range strategic bombing.
What eventually did Germany in was a war on multiple fronts, waged with unreliable allies, fought for obscure and often contradictory political aims, against similarly implaccable enemies with a greater freedom of movement and larger resources from which to draw from.
This movie should have been directed by John Milius and not Clint. This movie deserved a director like John Milius.
While I'm at it in response to your "you weren't there, so you couldn't know" argument; you seem to be under the impression that land warfare (as represented by the horrors faced by the infantryman) is far worse than the horrors to be experienced by sailors at war.
While I will never discount the bravery and skill required to face an enemy across a stretch of contested land and stand fast under fire, the analogy which you kind of allude to doesn't (no pun intended) hold water.
While an intfantryman does run the risk of being shot to pieces, shredded by artillery, blown up by a mine, stabbed to death, bleeding to death from minor but still incapacitating wounds before aid arrives, and a whole host of other horrors, so does the sailor. Enemy submarines, ships, aircraft, mines all wait to do him in, as well. The greatest danger to a sailor at war aboard a ship is fire.
The infantryman has options: he can often run away if he has to, he can hunker down in a foxhole to wait out an artillery barrage, and if worst comes to worst, he can surrender and hope his enemy is civilized, as slim a hope as that is these days. A sailor whose ship is hit or sunk can't run, and if he tries, the sea usually takes him if aid doesn't arrive quickly, he drowns, succumbs to his wounds or fatigue or gets eaten by any number of denizens of the deep.
If he stays at his post he runs the risk of being burned to death on his striken ship, being blown to bits by exploding ammunition, fuel and aircraft, is exposed to a whole host of toxic fumes that come from buring paint, solvents, fuels, wiring, etc.
The risks are just a great at sea as they are on land (sometimes worse), and in the face of concentrated Japanese kamikaze attacks it took just as much courage to stand and fight on a floating target as it did to stand in an open field.
And you know what? Just because we live in 2006 and not 1945, the risks are still the same to today's sailor as they were to the sailor of 1945.
I'm coinvinced it didn't need to happen.
You can be convinced that the sky is red for all I care.
Thanks.
With regards to your comment on Midway, once again, one of the tertiary aims of Operation MI was to force a surrender on terms favorable to Japan.
The Japanese never swayed from the belief that the West would negotiate. The initial campaigns of the war (Phillipines, Borneo, Malaya and Singapore, Hong Kong, et. al) were supposed ot demonstate Japanese superiority, and the allies were supposed to negotioate.
Didn't happen.
The destruction or at least the chasing of the Royal Navy from the Indian Ocean was supposed to give the allies pause to think about negotiation because there was now no way to secure the lines of communication to India with no British fleet in the region.
Didn't happen.
The capture of Port Morseby and Solomon Islands (precursors to Midway) were intended to cut off Australia from resupply from the United States. With Australia isolated, and untenable as a base of operations against Japan, the allies should negotiate.
Didn't happen.
At Midway, once the remnants of the US Pacific fleet were lured out and destroyed, Midway (the sentry of Hawaii) taken, and the Americans chased back to the West Coast, the allies should negotiate.
Didn't happen, because we won.
Later in the war, when Japan is clearly on the defensive, the strategy changes: now the Japanese, instead of making the allies see the logic of negotiating with a militarily superior Japan, will now be made to bleed so badly that they should, logically, negotiate with Japan.
Didn't happen.
The Japanese always included the possibility of a negotiated surrender in every stage of their planning and execution. The fact that even while victorious they were seeking a negotiated peace tells you something about the Japanese ability (as they saw it) to win a prolonged war.
The Japanese went to war with a very bad handicap: they had spent 70 years becoming a Western nation in terms of military force, industrial capacity, the collection of colonies and extra-territorial rights, so on and so forth, but they never really UNDERSTOOD the mentality that made those things possible in the first place. Japan APPEARED modern and Western but could not THINK in modern, Western terms.
This inability to see the reality of Western history through anything but Japanese-tinted lenses, was to ultimately lead Japan to defeat.
Western nations at war never surrender unless and until the situation is completely, obviously hopeless (see WWII Britain and Germany, for examples from both ends of the spectrum). Instead, they fight wars of annhiliation, willing to sacrifice everything, many times, in an effort to preserve their liberties and way of life. Negotiation was never a realistic hope after Pearl Harbor and the onslaught of the initial Pacific campaigns. Had the Japanese recognized this (and many did, including Admiral Yammamoto who planned the Pearl Harbor attack) they might never have gone to war with the West in the first place.
This caused the Japanese to continue to plan and execute military and political strategy with an Oriental flavor (surprise, shock, demonstration of cultural/racial superiority), but with what they considered somewhat equal means (modern navies, air forces and national, citizen armies). It turned out that the means were not similar: ours were the result of our peculiar way of thinking and an odd mix of customs that permeated the western war effort theirs a result of trying to forcibly blend the appearance of modernity with an ancient, inflexible culture unable to come to grips with the fact that they were, in practice, borrowing the entire apparatus of a race and culture they claimed was inferior to their own. This system could not survive the inherant contradictions in a time of war with the West.
Thank you for your courteous answer.
"in response to your "you weren't there, so you couldn't know" argument"
You're not discussing this with me. You are repeating earlier discussions with other people, and substituting the arguments they made for the ones I made.
I advanced no "you weren't there, so you couldn't know" argument."
"you seem to be under the impression that land warfare (as represented by the horrors faced by the infantryman) is far worse than the horrors to be experienced by sailors at war."
Hardly. Active and reserve I spent 25 years in Navy uniforms.
"While an intfantryman does run the risk of"
The guise in which death comes is irrelevant to my argument, which is that the guys in uniform in 1945 were derned glad to hear that there would be no invasion of the Japanese home islands. I figure I would have been glad, too.
The plague infected rats were dropped on CHINA, not the United States and the very ineffectiveness of that weapon precluded it's use against America (you can look that up in the transcripts of the IMT's for Japan, where this specific weapon was discussed as part of the trials of those involved in research and weaponization process).
Incendiary bombs dropped from paper balloons (a very inaccurate and unreliable weapon, at best)is not the same as a concerted effort to burn an entire civilization to the ground by massed waves of manned bombers, based upon the false premise that the Japanese started a war by underhanded means (another fallacy of the Second World War -- that the atomic bombings were justified by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor -- in the entire history of warfare you'll perhaps find about 2 dozen (at most 30) instances in which the commencement of hostilities was preceeded by a declaration of war, or a statement of intent. Our own president advocates a policy of "Pre-emptive strike", does he not? Or is it only "pre-emptive" if we announce beforehand that it will be done?).
You're engaging in a "they did it, too!" argument which is little more than a schoolyard taunt. Two wrongs don't make a right, and which was the greater wrong; the one that burned a few acres of forest land in a largely uninhabited area or the one in which inhabited areas were deliberately targeted for maximum terror effect in an attempt to "break the enemy's morale"?
The fact of the matter is the Japanese were attempting to negotiate a surrender prior to the Atomic bombs being dropped (through the Soviet Union, the Swedes and the Swiss), that collapse of the Japanese military and civil authority was a foregone conclusion prior to the Atomic bombings, and that Allied stupidity in standing full-force behind the Potsdam Declaration (and then failing to implement it in full) caused the continuation of the conflict, and that post-war arguments about lives saved and the imagined horrors of a largely-unneccessary invasion of Japan are all attempts to justify the unthinkable -- after the fact.
I do not say that the Japanese were any better or more decent than we are (or were), or more deserving of mercy and kindness, just that at some point one has to decide for oneself where this kind of barbaric behavior ends and where humanity reasserts itself.
P.S. Only SOME Japanese leadership was under the impression that after the reverses of 1942, Japan could still win the war by military means, even going as far as a total war of annhiliation (even to include plague and radiological bombs).
These leaders were predominantly from within the Japanese Army (like Premier Tojo), and which, unlike their mostly-non-political Naval colleagues, had not been up against any allied force capable of handing them a defeat (up until Guadalcanal, the Japanese Army had (mostly) defeated the Chinese Nationalists, the British, Canadians and Dutch in South-South East Asia, and the Americans in the Phillipines. They had bullied the Vichy French in Indochina. They had no concept of defeat on land, and therefore, the more hotheaded amongst them could not be expected to entertain the possibility of such (although many did).
We make several mistakes when dealing with Japan's history at this point in time. Prime amongst them is the practice of pretending that Japan was a Western nation and governed by western principles, simply because it appeared to be western. It makes it easier for us to think in those terms, but this was not the case. There are many times in the history of the Pacific War that many of us would ask "Why didn't they do this, that or the other, because that's what I would do?". the answer to this is simply because they don't think as we do (and they still don't in some ways).
No, he didn't say Nazis. Amazing that with all he went through he never got a scratch until the wreck as he was leaving.
It was amazing considering the outfit he was in. God bless him.
I hope he is well, tell him a Freeper says thank you next time you see him.
"there are no heroes, only ordinary people forced by circumstances to do heroic things"
let's not forget the Manhatten Death March.
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