Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima

It was a true story based on the "Letter From Iwo Jima" that the Japanese soldiers wrote. Was Eastwood supposed to change the story so that the Japanese won? Was he suppose to add in American soldiers, no that was the other movie. I am reminded here a little of Spike Lee's criticism Flags of Our Fathers because there were no blacks in the movie. (Hey Spike, there were no blacks in the movie because the army was segregated until the Korean War.) Neither movie was a rah-rah movie like those of John Wayne. They were movies that showed soldiers are normal people who don't try to be heroes. They live and fight for their fellow soldiers. Many of the real heroes don't survive.

Sinatra revived his career in From Here to Eternity. Another good war movie of his was Never So Few with Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson also in it.

Well both are war movies. When I was young, I used to watch the war movies of the late 40's and 50's whenever they were on TV. In many ways those movies are easier to watch than the newer war movies which are much more graphic and violent in nature. I thought Letters from Iwo Jima was a good movie because it did show the human side of the Japanese soldier. Because of culture and the Samurai code, they were much different in their beliefs than the American soldier. At the time of the battle, Japan had been fighting wars for around 50 years going back to the Russo-Japanese war. For 40 years they had run a string of victories taking over much of the Pacific and Asia. By the time of the attack on Iwo Jima, however, Japan had undergone a string of defeats and the soldiers on the island were ordered and left to die for their country. It was interesting to see that the commandant of the island had spent time in the United States and had been exposed to western thinking. Again he was shown to more human than what we would have expected. However, it should be noted that James Bradley (who wrote Flags of Our Fathers and is the son of "Doc Bradley") also wrote another book called Flyboys. Flyboys is about what happened to 6 American pilots who crashed by nearby Island Ichi Jima and were captured the Japanese their. The Japanese commandant of that island assigned a soldier to guard the captured pilots but allowed them to roam the island basically at will. But when it suited him, he would have a pilot killed and have his cook serve body parts for dinner without telling his guests what they were eating. The US government hushed this up for years, including the fact that they tried the commandant for war crimes. It took Bradley's investigation and his book to let the relatives of the pilots know what happened to them and that they were not just missing in action. As an aside, George Bush Sr. crashed near Ichi Jima but he was rescued by an American ship. (History might have been so different had he been captured.) After Flyboys came out, there was a TV documentary where Busgh Sr. toured Ichi Jima in the company of one of the guards who had been assigned to a pilot. You could tell that the guard had become friends with the pilot and after 50 years was still upset by the way the pilot was killed. War can do strange things to us and for some it can be hard to retain our humanity.