The Flag On Iwo Jima
Posted on 10/22/2006 10:37:13 PM PDT by jordan8
More appropriately, how many American Indians served during WW2?
At the time of Christopher Columbus ' arrival in the New World, the Native American population living in what is now the United States was estimated at about one million. By 1880, only 250,000 Indians remained and this gave rise to the "Vanishing American" theory. By 1940, this population had risen to about 350,000. During World War II more than 44,000 Native Americans saw military service. They served on all fronts in the conflict and were honored by receiving numerous Purple Hearts, Air Medals, Distinguished Flying Crosses, Bronze Stars, SilverStars, Distinguished Service Crosses, and three Congressional Medals of Honor. Indian participation in World War II was so extensive that it later became part of American folklore and popular culture.
And here's your Hispanics / Latinos..
Although the Department of Veterans Affairs does not know the exact number of Hispanics who fought in World War II it estimates that up to 500,000 served. The number includes 53,000 Puerto Ricans in the 65th Infantry Regiment from Puerto Rico. Hispanics earned 12 Medals of Honor during World War II, distinguishing themselves in the Philippines, North Africa, the Aleutian Islands, the Mediterranean and Europe. In fact, Hispanics have earned more Medals of Honor-39 in all-than any other ethnic group. After World War II, General Douglas Mac Arthur described the 158th Regimental Combat Team, comprised mostly of Mexican-Americans and Native Americans from Arizona, and known as the "Bushmasters," as "the greatest fighting combat team ever deployed for battle."
As for the Asian Americans we both know that they didn't serve in the pacific theatre due to the intense paranoia...
They all served (with honor) in the european theatre of operations..
And yes, it was racism..
3-04-02: Fact & Fiction
Patriotic Fervor and the Truth About Iwo Jima
By Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall
http://hnn.us/articles/599.html
Ms. Marling is professor of art history and American studies at the University of Minnesota. Mr. Wetenhall is executive director of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.
Editor's Note: Because Iwo Jima has been in the news, we decided to republish this piece, which first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1993.
IWO JIMA has a special place in our nation’s past. For many Americans it is a place where emotion merges with memory, where feeling and facts become one. It is a holy place in our civil religion, where emotions gather and linger--for generations. With our notes and books and claims of objectivity, we historians sometimes trespass--at our peril--upon this terrain where others have fought and died.
When we wrote about the commemoration of the World War II battle at Iwo Jima in Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (Harvard University Press, 1991), we, as outside observers, became part of the process of remembering deeds of war. But quite unintentionally, we were dragged into a vortex of misremembering, as hearsay and emotion quickly subsumed the truth.
On February 23rd, 1945, the fifth day of the bloody battle of Iwo Jima, Marines were ordered to take Mount Suribachi, the besieged Japanese stronghold. A 40-man patrol ascended the volcanic slope, attained the summit, and hoisted "Old Glory" on a makeshift flagpole. That was at 10:35 a.m., precisely. Horns blew. Bells tolled. Cheers rang out from American positions below. "Mopping up" skirmishes followed, but, within an hour, the men of Easy Company had declared Suirbachi secure.
Early that afternoon, some combat photographers circumvented security outposts and climbed up to the restricted position. They arrived at the top just in time to witness, and photograph, an impromptu ceremony as the first, historic flag was exchanged for a larger one.
Within a week, the Associated Press spread AP photographer Joe Rosenthal's triumphant picture across front pages nationwide, accompanied by stirring headlines detailing the capture of Suribachi. The image captivated war-weary America and was rapturously compared with Delacroix's painting "Liberty Leading the People," with Leutze's "Washington Crossing the Delaware," even with Leonardo's "Last Supper."
In the course of the next few weeks, the story of the first flag merged with the photo of the second one. The original flag-raisers faded into anonymity while the country became obsessed with the identities of the faceless heroes in Rosenthal's picture. The aesthetic power of the photo seemed to demand a full and revised explanation of how it became to be taken. So history was rewritten--not by conspiracy, but through partial truths, omissions, overstatements, and poetic license. Before long, the gallant men in Rosenthal's photograph--by now a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph--came to be considered the original heroes.
Our book simply retold the facts of the battle and sorted out the confusion that followed. We traced the evolving myth of Iwo Jima from John Wayne's Sands of Iwo Jima, through the booze-soaked martyrdom of flag-raiser Ira Hayes (the hapless last figure in the Rosenthal photograph), to the oversized colossus of the Marine Corps Memorial near Washington. We ended with the somber memories of the men who fought the battle and their poignant reflections on the tragedy of war. Why did this matter? The truth was important to the men who were there, many of whom complained to us that their deeds had been revised for the sake of public relations. In a larger sense, it was values such as truth and justice for which World War II was fought, not half-truths and orchestrated sentiment.
Yes, we thought we had this story nailed: we would set the popular misconceptions straight once and for all. What we couldn't foresee was that our book would embroil us in a tragi-comical farce, all in the name of patriotism or outright nostalgia.
Shortly after publication, our account was blindsided by Richard Harwood, The Washington Post's ombudsman, in a review in that newspaper that expressed outrage that we had dared to broach the very subject of the first flag-raising. He accused us of criticizing Rosenthal's photo as "phony" and the men in it as "imposters." But we never wrote this. In fact, we went to considerable lengths to prove that the photo was legitimate, the men reluctant heroes who consistently said they had not dodged bullets to raise the flag, but had simply replaced one flag with another. Mr. Harwood assumed the true story somehow undermined the valor of those who participated (it did not), and he set us up as straw men for a conspiracy theory--that the deception was planned--that the book overtly disproves.
A few weeks later, The New York Times took the same tack under the headline: "Birth of an Icon, but an Illegitimate One." The review attributed to us--again falsely--allegations that the Iwo Jima icon was "illegitimate, a fraud, a dark hoax unworthy of the men who died in that battle."
The review in The Times touched off a barrage of letters to the editor. G. Greely Wells, the oft-proclaimed "man who carried the flag" to the foot of Suribachi, got three columns of space in The Times's op-ed page to rebut our book--space he used to recount, with pristine accuracy, facts that he might have read on our Page 42. (Mr. Wells hadn't read the book. We called him the day that his column appeared and offered to send him one. He replied that he had ordered one, but that it had not yet arrived.)
Undeterred, Mr. Wells took his crusade to National Public Radio, where Alex Chadwick of "Morning Edition" announced to the nation's breakfast tables that we had pronounced the Iwo Jima photo "staged propaganda." Had he bothered to read the book, he might have seen the photo and caption on Page 79 that asserts the "spontaneity" of Rosenthal's picture.
MORE ANGRY LETTERS followed in The Times, and other newspapers picked up the story--often assembling their opinions from misstatements contained in the Post and Times reviews. The best came from the West Coast: a column by William Endicott in The Sacramento Bee titled "Can an Icon Sue for Libel?" Mr. Endicott blasted us as leftist revisionists and tried to bury our account by invoking his venerable father: "My dad watched from a troop transport as the flag was hoisted, and he never forgot the sight for as long as he lived."
But the great moment that Endicott senior remembered was not the one in the Rosenthal photograph. That moment occurred, that flag was raised at 10:35 A.M. Photographed by Louis Lowery of Leatherneck magazine, it is a forgotten footnote in history.
Once begun, distortions spread by the news media are almost impossible to correct. The New York Times rejected no fewer than three rebuttal letters from us. Editors called us twice to negotiate what they might print: 100 words without reference to any error in the Times review. In the end, even though they had printed six columns of misdirected attacks inspired by their inaccurate review, the newspaper editors refused to publish anything from us.
Ironically, our experience demonstrates precisely how the process of patriotic myth-making works. It isn't a conspiracy; it isn't orchestrated. It is a series of assumptions, a few leaps of faith. A reviewer who's too busy, complacent, or lazy to read carefully and check the facts. An editor too pompous to concede that the "Fourth Estate" might have gotten something wrong. Over time, a story is crafted out of scraps and innuendo. This was the very process that had led to the convolution of the Iwo Jima story in the first place--the very web of half truths and hearsay that we had worked so hard to untangle.
IN THE END, though, we were the ones who were wrong. We underestimated the patriotic fervor that we had so carefully chronicled. It is an overwhelming reverence for the heroic feeling of the Iwo Jima myth that still renders the facts of its birth--to some people, at least--irrelevant. Americans want desperately for the real-life story of the heroes of Mount Suribachi to turn out like the Duke's heart-rending martyrdom in Sands of Iwo Jima, when his last vision was the raising of Old Glory amidst a shower of enemy fire. The famous War Bond poster--"Now All Together"--made Rosenthal's image look so real that it had to be true. And the Marine Corps Memorial stands proudly as the last great vestige of monumental realism in American sculpture--big, commanding, more real that reality. In the noble cause of celebrating our nation's reverence for truth and justice, Americans prefer to let reality slip by, to ignore inconvenient facts.
But Americans' yearning goes deeper than a willingness to believe Hollywood formula and fantasy. It involves the preservation of a passionate faith in the hero, a belief in the individual's ability to change the course of history (the valor of Delacroix's flag-waving "Liberty" and the resolve of Leutze's "Washington"), a faith now so distressingly contradicted by the 58,180 names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
We discovered an unusual phenomenon in the course of our research: the fake flag-raisers, people who insisted they had been in Rosenthal's picture and had helped hoist the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima. There were, and are, a lot of them.
Some Iwo vet, probably a fine Marine, spins a few Pacific yarns in a local tavern. Over the course of years, his story takes him from the D-Day landing, to the base of Suribachi, and on up its sulfurous slopes, until one unfortunate evening, he tells how he grabbed a length of metal pipe and helped his buddies hoist Old Glory in the Pacific breeze. Before he knows it, somebody at the next table tips off a reporter. An interview. A picture. A story in the hometown newspaper. Then the wire services. Another hero. And for the rest of his life, this unlucky hero will have to go on spinning his yarn to sustain his newfound glory.
And so what difference is there between getting caught up in a good story and creating a national myth?
Hardly any.
This piece first ran in The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 1993, and is reprinted with permission.
Remember That Flag On Iwo!
http://www.angelfire.com/ca/dickg/flagwtc.html
1. American units were segregated during the Second World War. It wasn't pretty or right, but that was the reality in 1945.
2. African-Americans served in antiaircraft and logistics service units, not front-line infantry units, therefore Eastwood would've had to make a real reach to include them in a story about direct combat on Iwo.
3. They were Marines, not soldiers.
My Uncle served as a P-51 pilot in the Army Air Forces on Iwo after the main battle was completed and described to me the conditions that he saw among the African-Americans that served there...they saw combat, as almost everyone that was on that island saw combat - the Japanese were everywhere, even after the island was "secured" - but no African-Americans were members of the rifle companies that had to root out the enemy in the close, vicious fights that were the center of that battle.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5967
Eastwood Stumbles with Flags
October 22nd, 2006
General George Patton once said that the best strategy ever devised can be quickly rendered useless by the application of lousy tactics, while a flawed strategy can be rescued by practicing sound tactical principals. In the case of moviemaking, the technological marvel of computer generated images (CGI) and the performers are the tactical tools used to accomplish the strategic objective of bringing a movie�s story and action to the screen. Unfortunately, the amazing CGI effects and the strength of the cast can�t entirely lift Clint Eastwood�s Flags of Our Fathers out of the realm of mediocrity.
The movie revolves around remembrances of the survivors of the six men who raised the US flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February of 1945. We see that informal interviews are being conducted about the battle and its aftermath, but don�t fully understand the connections until the end of the movie, when it�s finally revealed that the son of the Navy Corpsman accompanying the Marines, John �Doc� Bradley, has actually been visiting each of the surviving members of his father�s unit.
Right off the bat, viewers endure a clumsy and historically inaccurate attempt to weave in a comparison to the Vietnam War. During the first interview, Dave Severance, played by Harve Presnell (who portrayed Gen. George C. Marshall in Saving Private Ryan), says that from the moment the photo was published of a Vietnamese officer shooting a VC in the head, that the war was lost, and that �we just pretended otherwise� until our withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Likewise, he says, the Joe Rosenthal picture of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi won the war for the US.
This is simply propagandizing to a new generation of Americans without providing context or any modicum of historical accuracy. That the shooter was the town�s sheriff, who was understandably enraged that the VC he executed was part of a unit that had kidnapped and brutally murdered the sheriff�s family is never mentioned.
It is odd then, that a movie ostensibly concerned with debunking myths and legends concerning the flag-raising on Iwo Jima would perpetuate a favorite myth of the 60s-era anti-war left without an iota of skepticism. But it�s maybe not so strange, when one of the screen writers turns out to be William Broyles, Jr., who also wrote the screenplay for Jarhead, another horribly inaccurate war movie that focused on the selfish needs of a lone, dysfunctional Marine.
At any rate, Joe Rosenthal�s famous picture on Iwo did not win WW II any more than one photo of a VC execution caused the US to lose the war in Vietnam. And for Eastwood and Broyles to draw such a flawed comparison, or to push the courage and determination of our service men and women to the fringe, is enough reason to avoid the movie altogether.
After the initial interview, the film is a confusing jumble of vignettes that leaves the audience busy trying to decipher a triple flashback format. But the real problem is that Eastwood can�t figure out if he wants a rehash of Saving Private Ryan, or if he wants a remake of The Outsider, which examined the psyche and post-war troubles of Ira Hayes in a far more straightforward and sober manner.
The most inane segments of the movie occur when the �non-heroes� return to the States to pump up war-weary Americans to buy War Bonds one more time or else, it is intimated, the entire war effort will collapse before final victory is achieved. The looming financial disaster of a wartime US, barely scraping by, is horribly overplayed in the film.
One might chalk it up to the exaggerations in the pep talk by the men�s handler prior to their appearances at the bond rallies. Yet, this notion is reinforced when they meet President Harry Truman, played by veteran character actor David Patrick Kelly. This is not one of his best outings. As Truman, he comes across as Ken Lay redux, the polite, firm, and somewhat greasy CEO-type, announcing that the country�s fate hangs in the balance if �you boys� don�t get Americans to pony up $14 billion dollars.
This is ludicrous on its face. The Manhattan Project had been going gangbusters and the US would detonate the world�s first A-bomb in a couple of months, all accomplished with the expenditure of many billions of dollars. Germany would surrender in a few short weeks, and troops, ships, tanks, and planes would start to converge on the Western Pacific as required. War manufacturing was at its peak, and showed no signs of letting up any time soon. And most of all, Harry Truman, who had assumed responsibility from FDR for carrying out the policy of unconditional surrender, who would later decide to drop two A-bombs on Japan to ensure victory, is now reduced in the movie to a nervous money-grubber, hatching some Rube Goldberg scheme to grab one last buck from tired American investors.
Anyone buying any of this dreck? Apparently, Clint Eastwood thinks you will.
The Corpsman�s son narration finally makes some sense of this mess, and it never hurts to remind Americans about the sacrifices of our service men and women both past and present. At this, Flags does very well, even if it saves this important message until the end.
Hollywood has, at least for the moment, seemingly lost its Germany/Hitler fixation and finally realized that we also fought a war in the Pacific. It was a fight against a far more brutal and inhumane enemy, who carried the Warrior Code to fanatical extremes. In this sense, The Great Raid and Flags of Our Fathers provide a necessary reality check by depicting the horror of battle in the Pacific against an enemy not unlike the jihadists of today.
Nevertheless, Flags simply has too much post-modern baggage to effectively and consistently convey what�s at stake when the US goes to war against an extremist and suicidal foe. For my tastes, I�ll stick with The Great Raid. Better yet, Eastwood might even consider a movie about the battles for Fallujah, Najaf, Kandahar, or� never mind. That�s probably in the too hard to do category.
Douglas Hanson is the national security correspondent of American Thinker.
Douglas Hanson
Re Bradley jr.
http://furl.net/item.jsp?id=5941900
And what, exactly is your point??
Are you agreeing or disagreeing..??
Sounds to me, you're just trying to pick a fight..
And probably for the wrong reasons..
I want history..
No fake football heroes taking out machine guns, but real, historical representation..
There was no need for Clint to artificially emphasize the participation of blacks, or latinos in the movie, but there was also no need to completely exclude them either..
Either way is wrong..
He was also quite the drunk and has gotten a little kooky in his old age as well. (I used to work for him.)
Thanks... Alot..
Bring it up to the ACLU....maybe there is a payout on the horizon....
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