Letters from Iwo Jima
by Spencer Warren

According to Clint Eastwood’s film Letters from Iwo Jima, the Japanese who fought us and our British, Commonwealth and Dutch allies with such ferocious savagery in World War II were really just like us. The average soldier shouldn’t be blamed for the few bad apples in authority. After all, we had bad apples too.

This account of the February-March 1945 battle, from the Japanese point of view, is Eastwood’s companion piece to his Flags of Our Fathers, recently reviewed here. http://acuf.org/issues/issue73/061211med.asp It is based in part on letters to his family by the commanding general, Kuribayashi. The general is portrayed as a sensitive man of honor, who had been stationed in the U.S. in the 1920’s and admired America. He is proud to be an officer in what he calls his “honorable” Imperial Japanese Army. The other protagonist is portrayed as a Japanese G.I .Joe, a hapless sort of fellow who naturally yearns for his young wife and struggles desperately to survive the nightmare. Both men know they are doomed, and Eastwood sympathizes with their plight.

These two soldiers have no involvement in the bayonet practice their comrades practice on a helpless American prisoner (standard procedure for the “honorable” Imperial Japanese Army from the Rape of Nanking in 1937-38 to the Bataan Death March in 1942 to Iwo Jima). And, anyway, some Americans were no better. Right? Two GI’s are seen in the film murdering two Japanese prisoners because they didn’t want to be bothered standing guard over them. This scene immediately follows one in which a Japanese colonel, Baron Nishi, gives his unit’s last supply of morphine to a wounded young G.I. – you see, the Japanese could be the good ones and the Americans the bad! But to close his circle of moral equivalence, Eastwood ends the film with his G.I. Joe, now a wounded prisoner, being cared for by the Americans.

Like the much acclaimed Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Flags of Our Fathers, this film is centered on the personal experience of a small number of characters. Typical of the reductionism of our more “sophisticated” age, we see only the subjective perspective of individuals, disconnected from the objective moral and historical context. This makes it hard to understand how these average Japanese guys could have murdered 250,000 – 300,000 people, many of them women and children, in their orgy of destruction in Nanking between December 1937 and March 1938. Observers estimated about 20,000 women were raped and there were widespread reports of people being hacked to death and used for bayonet “practice,” and of babies cut out of their mothers’ wombs and carried aloft on bayonets. During its fourteen year war inside China, the “honorable” Imperial Japanese Army killed an estimated 10-20 million civilians and more than 5 million Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded.

Eastwood’s film also makes it hard to understand how these regular guys worked to death an estimated 12,000 Allied POWs and 90,000 native laborers in Auschwitz-like conditions during construction of the Burma-Thailand railway (highly sanitized and falsified in the over-rated Oscar-winning Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a film which has been roundly condemned by the survivors). Or how they could have committed the Banka Island Massacre in February 1942, murdering dozens of civilians who had fled Singapore, including 21 Australian nurses who were machine-gunned after being ordered to march into the ocean. Or how they could have treated Allied POWs worse than cattle by crushing them with little food, water or sanitary facilities into the infamous “Hell Ships” for transport inside their empire of conquest, without the markings required by the Geneva Convention, which resulted in some being sunk by our aircraft or submarines. Or how could they have brutalized the tens or hundreds of thousands of Korean “comfort women” who were made sex slaves in the brothels of Kuribayashi’s “honorable” army. Or how they could have committed cannibalism on the bodies of Australian and American POWs.

It must have been just a few bad apples, like the ones who, in retaliation for the stunning Doolittle Raid on Tokyo and other cities in April 1942, just four months after Pearl Harbor, slaughtered an estimated quarter of a million Chinese civilians in the area where the crews of our sixteen B-25’s parachuted after successfully completing the attack; of the eight airmen captured, three were executed, one died from mistreatment, and the remainder endured forty months of torture and solitary confinement. It also must have been a few bad apples who dropped anthrax bombs on Chinese villages and poisoned their wells with bubonic plague (developed at the Auschwitz-like Unit 731 facility in Manchuria); they were planning to drop plague weapons on the U.S. from balloons when the atomic bombs finally made their emperor raise the white flag. Or a few bad apples who told their own civilians on Saipan and Okinawa that the Americans would rape and torture their women and children (wonder where they got that idea), leading to thousands of these women killing themselves and their children, some by jumping off a cliff on Saipan (preserved on film by our military photographers). Or a few who, early in 1942, did the following to two Dutch civilian administrators captured on Borneo, according to this eyewitness account: “Suddenly, the [Japanese] officer drew his sword and hacked off both the Dutchman’s arms just above the elbows, and then both legs above the knees. The trunk of his body was then tied to a coconut tree and bayoneted until life was extinct. The Japanese officer then turned his attention to the Dutch policeman, who had his arms and legs hewed off in like manner. The policeman struggled on to the stumps of his legs and managed to shout ‘God save the Queen’. He then fell dead, a bayonet through his heart.” This is similar to the torture of Private Ralph Ignatowski, age 19, on Iwo Jima. Who could it have been who left his body hacked to pieces, with his penis forced into his mouth?

But, as Eastwood shows with his balancing of atrocities on Iwo Jima, there really was no difference between the U.S. and Imperial Japan. Most of us were good, some bad. Both sides’ soldiers were victims: the Americans in Flags of Our Fathers exploited by their cynical president and War Department handlers on a war bond tour, the Japanese in Letters by their few bad apples. (Flags fabricates a scene to defame President Roosevelt; Hirohito, Tojo and the rest are absent from Letters.) The two sides must be treated equally. After all, what right have we to make a judgment about our enemy? Equality, “tolerance,” non-discrimination and relativism are the only truths in our post-modern world, are they not?

This film represents the nadir of moral equivalence. True, some of our troops committed atrocities. These were few, small in scale, the exceptions from the rule, and many were punished; Japanese atrocities, many on a mass scale, were the rule. Further, our boys were placed in these situations only as a result of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, facing an extraordinarily savage enemy whose ferocity is barely hinted at in the film. (5,931 American boys died and 17,372 were wounded in the five-week battle. On Okinawa, from April-June 1945, 7,613 infantry were killed and 31,807 wounded, plus more than 4,900 seamen killed and 4,824 wounded, mainly due to kamikaze attacks. The enemy’s fanatical fight-to-the-last man resistance contributed to the decision to drop the two atomic bombs in August.) Only by whiting out the historical record can Eastwood and his friends in Hollywood and the mainstream media slander our country by reducing us to Imperial Japan’s level.

It would be interesting to hear Eastwood explain why to this day Japan has never fully and properly apologized, much less paid compensation to its surviving victims (as West Germany did), and why Japan’s school textbooks continue to whitewash the truth, whereas the U.S. has apologized and paid compensation to its ethnic Japanese who only were interned in 1942. (This apology, approved by President Reagan, should never have been made; the internment was justified, as we know from the intelligence files described in Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment (2004), which were ignored by the commission that recommended the apology.) It also would be interesting to hear Eastwood explain why the Japanese Foreign Ministry official who participated in the surrender ceremony on the U.S.S. Missouri on September 2, 1945 later said that, as he stood on the deck abjectly facing Gen. MacArthur, Admiral Nimitz and the rest of the imposing cast of Allied military leaders who had brought his nation to its knees, he asked himself whether his side would have acted with the same magnanimity toward its conquered foe had the places been reversed. Maybe Eastwood would explain Japan’s refusal to face up to its past as “multiculturalism.”

The profound ignorance on which Letters from Iwo Jima is based is compounded by Eastwood’s characteristic nondescript, crude direction, which is, as ever, devoid of the slightest subtlety. He can never rise above the pedestrian: thus, his climactic shot, of the wounded Japanese G.I. Joe being laid on a stretcher beside a long row of our G.I.’s on the volcanic ash beach, is abrupt and trite rather than poetic. Equally abrupt and trite is his opening shot, of modern-day excavators digging up Kuribayshi’s papers, which dissolves into a shot of Japanese soldiers digging fortifications back in 1944. Typically, the film doesn’t have one memorable scene or image. The script, credited to the Japanese Iris Yamashita (with a story assist from the leftist Paul Haggis), is a patchwork of contrivances designed to advance the theme, rather than letting the theme grow organically. For example, Kuribayashi, wounded at the end of the battle, asks our ever-present Japanese G.I. Joe to finish him off with the handsome, white-handled gun his American hosts are seen giving him (in flashback) in the 1920’s. Oh! What pathos! For one representation of the waste of war, the allegedly humane Baron Nishi, who was an Olympian equestrian at the 1932 Los Angeles games, sees his horse killed by an air attack – with an awful (and typically gratuitous) shot of the poor dead horse. Here we have another suspension of moral judgment – what kind of man would bring his beloved sporting horse to a battlefield? Another trite contrivance, one that cheaply exploits the audience’s emotions, is a flashback scene where, back in Japan, one of the “good” Japanese refuses an order to kill a friendly dog, the house pet of a civilian family, so the “bad” officer does the shooting instead (off-screen, mercifully). Again, the film substitutes the personal for the history – why not show the two at the Rape of Nanking, for example? Among other shortcomings, like most films these days, the 140 minute picture is too long, and the special computer effects of the American armada, as in Flags, look cheesy and fake; such things often were done better even in the 1940’s.

The acclaim heaped on Letters from Iwo Jima can only come from leftists who hate America and from others who are ignorant of history (as well as what makes a good, professional film). With regard to the ignorant, a few years ago I was talking with my dogs’ veterinary doctor during an appointment; she is Belgian and mentioned how her country had suffered under the Germans in both world wars. I mentioned that my father had fought in the Pacific in World War II and saw his best friend killed on a landing beach in the Solomons. Eventually, the discussion came around to Japan’s atrocities. The doctor’s nurse, an otherwise well-educated, non-ideological woman aged 26 at the time, then commented: “We did bad too.” When I asked if she knew about the Bataan Death March or Unit 731 in Manchuria, she answered no. In making her appalling comment, she likely had in mind our internment of the ethnic Japanese in 1942.

Perhaps the ignorant are not to blame. The veterinary nurse is a product of an education system that teaches little real history and often focuses more on our alleged shortcomings. At a veterans conference recently a Virginia high school student told me all they are taught about World War II is the internment (without reference to the Malkin findings, of course) and the atomic bombs (undoubtedly from the leftist perspective). Nothing about the more than 1000 sailors, including many pairs of brothers, entombed in the battleship Arizona beneath Pearl Harbor. And, needless to say, nothing about Ralph Ignatowski and the millions more.

The nurse did not know what she was saying, but the whiting out or misrepresenting of our history is a conscious tool in the left’s agenda of radical egalitarianism. Facts, even at the cost of our national pride in one of the two or three noblest chapters of our history, must give way to our embrace of the “Other” – whether it be our vicious enemy in World War II (the Drudge Report published a photograph of Eastwood on the set wearing a World War II Japanese army cap), or today’s flood of Third World immigrants (also supported by globalist business), or Islam (even if it threatens our safety), or radical homosexuals who want to destroy the family, or pedophiles who must be “understood” rather than segregated from children, and on and on. To the left the only “truth” is complete equality and non-discrimination, leading, via multiculturalism, to the deconstruction, dismemberment and erasure of our national identity and its replacement by an inchoate mass of atomized individuals who maximize their “freedom” to create their own personal and group identities as they please. In light of this “truth,” what right have we, the American majority, to make a judgment about the history of the war? That might make us seem better than – unequal and superior to -- our enemy. This was the thinking that lay behind the 1995 Smithsonian exhibition to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the atomic bombs. The exhibition’s plan to embrace our enemy and denigrate our part ignited such an uproar that it had to be canceled and replaced by a different exhibit.

In his two films on Iwo Jima, both greeted with wild acclaim by the New York Times and all the rest, Eastwood and Hollywood (Steven Spielberg is the producer) are leading a campaign – perhaps out of ignorance and stupidity as much or more than intent -- to white out the history of World War II. A people which lacks historical memory is a people with a shaky hold on its identity. In this connection, note that the upcoming 65th anniversaries of the Doolittle Raid (April 18th) and one of the most decisive naval victories in history, Midway (June 4th) at this writing appear to be gaining little public attention. True, in the 1990’s we saw a renewed interest in the war, leading to erection of the (uninspiring) memorial on the Mall. But, based on my own informal survey, I doubt more than one in twenty people under age 50 can identify either epic deed. Such topics obviously do not interest Hollywood’s “respected” filmmakers.

This film desecrates the memory of every American who fought in the Pacific theater during the Second World War. It is an affront to every patriotic citizen. It would be comparable to a film presenting a Nazi’s point of view. (Auschwitz guards and S.S. officers wrote letters home too.) For such a film – which is mediocre even on its own terms -- to be showered with critical acclaim and awards, possibly including the Oscar as best film of the year – demonstrates as clearly as anything that we are in a cultural civil war. I do not consider those who have embraced this film citizens of the same country.

Spencer Warren writes on film and culture for Conservative BattleLine. He is president of a public policy seminar program.