Letters from Iwo Jima - The Real Story (film, scene, action)

[Mike from back east]

E-mail message received this date, from off the Milinet forum.....

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Attached Message

From: MAJUSMCRET@aol.com
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: MILINET: "Letters from Iwo Jima."--Lester Tenney, Ph.D.
Date: Sat, 24 Feb 2007 7:56 AM

Keep this in mind if you go to see "Letters from Iwo Jima."
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:02:25 -0800

I had the great privilege of personally conducting a digital video interview of Dr Lester Tenney, who at the beginning of WWII, was a member of the National Guard, as a Private in a tank unit in the Philippines.. and shortly thereafter fought the Japanese Imperial Army during the American and Filipino retreat into Bataan, and the surrender at Bataan.

The Death March to Camp San Fernando and later transported to Japan aboard slave ships and served Japanese corporations as a POW slave laborer in the coal mines of Japan near Hiroshima. His comments below are constrained compared to interviews I have conducted with Filipino and American POWs of the same era and area of the Pacific campaigns of WWII.

Ralph Roy Ramirez
LTC (CA) Retired

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For those Forum Members who expressed an opinion on the movie Letters from Iwo Jima, please allow me to share how I re-acted to this film. For lack of a better way to begin, let me say, What "Nice Guys" the Japanese Soldiers Were.

It was obvious to me that the Japanese soldiers who fought the Americans on Iwo Jima were not the same soldiers who fought the Americans on Bataan, or were they?

As a survivor of the Bataan Death March, I can tell you for certainty, the Japanese depicted in "Letters From Iwo Jima" were in no way similar to the soldiers I encountered on the Bataan Death March. So what does that prove? Well, unless you truly believe that the Japanese soldiers fighting in the Philippines earlier in the war, were different than the soldiers on Iwo Jima, then you must come to the conclusion that the director, Clint Eastwood, was overcome by Japanese propaganda. Eastwood tried to "humanize" the Japanese soldier, and wanted to have the audience see the Japanese as nice guys fighting a war they didn't want to fight, in a place they didn't want to be.

The film "Letters From Iwo Jima," has been nominated for an Academy Award, which it may richly deserve for the quality of its acting, but the fact remains that as a historical movie, it's a failure, it instead tries to show the enemy as the nice guys in the war and "so much like we Americans."

Critics have praised the film because it "humanized" the enemy, but was it their humanity that caused the Japanese soldiers on Bataan to shoot and behead those men who were unable to keep up with the rest of the men on the Bataan March? The same Japanese soldiers, who fought on Iwo Jima and were depicted as being nice guys, were notoriously cruel and savage to prisoners of war. On the Bataan Death March, if you didn't walk fast enough or didn't bow low enough you were singled out and tortured, beaten and killed, all at the whim of the Japanese soldier, a private, a corporal, a sergeant or an officer.

Out of 12,000 American soldiers and more than 36,000 Filipino soldiers on the march, less than half of them returned home. In addition to thousands that died on the March, thousands more died due to brutal barbaric treatment while in POW camps, unarmed and without any means of defense, were tortured and put to death.

This is a film where Clint Eastwood wants to portray Japanese soldiers as being, "just like the rest of us": Sensitive, caring and concerned for our fellow man. Don't you believe it! Japanese soldiers, who were medical officers, carried out biological experiments on prisoners of war. The opening scene in "The Great Raid" movie showing Japanese soldiers burning American POWs alive is not fiction. It is reality.

The record of atrocities inflicted by Japanese soldiers on American and Filipino civilians is numbered in the thousands. In Manila alone, as the war was winding down and the Japanese knew the end was near, they slaughtered more than 100,000 men, women and children.

The brilliant book "The Rape of Nanking" written by the late Iris Chang, chronicles the appalling savagery of the Japanese army during the 1930s. Ms. Chang uncovered the history of more than 360,000 Chinese men, women and children who were massacred by Japanese soldiers; some were, no doubt, the same "nice guys" on Iwo Jima.

It was Japan who attacked the United States: It was Japanese soldiers who savagely killed thousands of unarmed POWs, it was Japanese soldiers who placed POWs into bomb shelters and set them on fire so that no one could escape: it was Japanese soldiers who refused the offer of surrender when made, while knowing that to continue fighting meant death to hundreds of thousands of their own people.

There were one or two nice guys, but that's about all. Yet the main thrust of the film was "The Japanese soldier is similar to the American soldier." I personally knew of no "nice guy" within the enemy soldiers, and I offer this information as fact, not fiction. But the director, Clint Eastwood, along with the Japanese would want you to believe it was "fact".

The above is my reaction to the film, sorry if I hurt some Forum members feelings.

Lester Tenney, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus Arizona State University
Former POW and survivor of the Bataan Death March

[BlueWillowPlate]

Of course Dr. Tenney might feel this way. I sympathize as best I can, having never experienced what he did.
And I have read of the horrific atrocities of Nanking as well as those of which happened to the flyboys on Chichi Jima. Then there are the "comfort women" of Korea.
But I have heard, by word of mouth and by reading books, of atrocities commited by US soldiers in WWII.
I dunno. I just don't think any country's hands are spotlessly clean during wartime.
Look at what's happened in Iraq.
But thank you for sharing, Dr. Tenney, and thank you for posting, Mike.

[fkeyes]

The following is part of David Ansen's review of Letters from Iwo Jima in Newsweek, 15 January 2007:

Superbly acted, unblinking and unhysterical, it looks beyond politics into the hearts and minds of the men we needed to call "the enemy," and lets us see ourselves.

Moderator cut: copyright protected article removed

[Tricky D]

My grandfather is a Christian native Indonesian who fought for the (Christian) Dutch in Indonesia.
Many of his family are non-Christians and he was not surprised to be betrayed by them, because his non-Christian side of the family was fighting with the Japanese for a cause of 'Asia for the Asians' (and not white occupiers).
So my grandfather has been a Japanese POW and since he studied Chinese Boxing (martial arts) he had to survive as some gladiator. There were many bets on these 'death-fight'. My grandfather took no pride in surviving these fights, because he had to kill to survive.
Anywayz, my grandfather has left WWII and the betrayal of his family behind him. He has forgiven his family and harbours no ill will against the Japanese. The way he sees it is that in war there are 2 sides, pick one of them then fight for it. The other side is doing the same.
I guess my grandfather is not a politician or a philosopher and more a survivor.
All I'm trying to say here is that in war atrocities are committed by both sides, because it is a war and not a movie.
Painting the other side as only savage beasts with no honour can only be untrue and thus propaganda.

[dthriller]

Mike,

Moderator cut: edit You've bought the propaganda, hook, line, and sinker.

Men like Dr. Tenney fought not only for this country, but for the Western civilization that you, Moderator cut: edit, now enjoy. The difference he points out is fundamental. Imperialist Japan did not, as a nation-state, value the individual the way we (you included) in America did and still do. Nor did they honor rules of armed combat by uniformed enemy forces captured in war, set out in the Hague Conventions of the turn of the century. The barbarous atrocities Dr. Tenney references were sanctioned, common practice by the Imperial forces of Japan. That is a far cry different from individual acts of cruelty by soldiers. That is not to excuse any individual cruelty that runs beyond the pale of acceptable conduct by legal combatants, but there is a fundamental distinction between indemic cruelty that was drilled into Japanese forces and isolated incidents of Allied acts.

As for your Moderator cut: edit comparison to U.S. operations in Iraq, your Moderator cut: edit continue to discredit you. If you cannot see the distinction between how America conducts wars (for example, note the pains and expense America goes to in order to use "smart" bombs designed to limit collateral damage, i.e., civilian casualties, rather than cheap "dumb" bombs used in saturation bombings) and how those who chose to act to destroy us and our way of life, (i.e., targeting civilians in order to cow the American public into submission), then I pity you.

And do not Moderator cut: edit assume that this email merely serves to whitewash American wrongdoing. You should know better than that. But think, man, before you spout off about which you do not know!

Enjoy your freedom, Mike--and your right to criticize America. But remember, it's been paid for dearly by Dr. Tenney, those who died marching alongside him, and hundreds of thousands more.

Thank you, Dr. Tenney for your service to this country. You have my gratitude and my sympathy for your fallen comrades.

God Bless America.