Clint's New Hat

Clint Eastwood's, "Letters From Iwo Jima," is a brilliantly made film that is up for Best Picture at the Academy Awards this Sunday. It has already won the Golden Globe for Best Picture. Nonetheless, it is a terribly misleading film.

Most people today do not realize that there were really two Holocausts of World War II. There was the one perpetrated by the Germans against the Jews. The lesser known one was committed by the Japanese against the Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans, and Vietnamese.

In this second Asian Holocaust, 17 million humans, most of them noncombatants, were slaughtered in ways not used since medieval times. These victims were exterminated by imposed starvation, slave labor, and brutal executions by Japanese soldiers. It's these Japanese soldiers that are the focus of the film.

Washed away with Mr. Eastwood's new vision is the fact that the Japanese were never attacked in this war but carried out their own war of unimaginable aggression across all of Asia. Washed clean is the fact that this was not a war committed by a small group of leaders, but a war that needed and received the unquestioning support of the entire Japanese society, which blindly followed its leaders. In Clint Eastwood's film, though, we see none of this.

Instead, we see the battle of Iwo Jima through the eyes of benign Japanese soldiers who wait in fear of the enormous American invasion force in bunkers and caves. More to the point, we hear their thoughts from the letters they wrote as last testaments with the knowledge that they would never see their families again.

Although there is great value in understanding the humanity of these Japanese soldiers, Mr. Eastwood misses the larger picture of what these men actually participated in. In an interview on National Public Radio's program "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, Mr. Eastwood described these soldiers as conscripts not unlike the young Americans who fought against them. "They didn't want to be there," Mr. Eastwood said, "any more than the American Marines wanted to be there."

No doubt many, if not most, Japanese defenders of the tiny island were loving husbands and sons who wanted nothing more than to be back home. We can imagine that within the large Japanese army there were saints and thugs … as there are in every army, including our own.

But any other similarities between the American military in World War II and the Japanese are very limited. Americans did not come from a death culture — the idea of committing suicide for Franklin Roosevelt when all was lost seems as implausible today as it did back then. Yet, Japanese casualty rates ran between 97% in Saipan and 99.7% in Tarawa, meaning very few Japanese ever surrendered.

As I look at a photo of Mr. Eastwood taken during the filming of "Letters from Iwo Jima," in which he dons a Japanese army hat from that era, I wonder if the director understands just what that hat represents to people throughout Asia above the age of 80? I also can't help but wonder if he would have worn a Nazi hat with a swastika if his film showed us D-Day from the German perspective. If that comparison sounds harsh, it only demonstrates an extreme lack of knowledge of the war.

In any month in the first half of 1945, upwards of a quarter-of-a-million Asian men, women, and children were dying at the hands of the Japanese. Many women were gang raped by Japanese troops before they were butchered. That's really no longer war. It's genocide.

But in September of 1945, the Asian death rate drops to zero … and stays at zero. When Japan is finally forced to halt its ambitions of conquest and when its army goes home, the entire orgy of death stops. It's that simple.

The end of this slaughter comes to a halt because of the 18- and 19-year-old Americans who stormed those awful beaches. Yes, there were teenagers on both sides. But they were not the same by any means. That is the ultimate lesson — the one that, sadly, is not taught by anyone anymore, including Mr. Eastwood.

Mr. Kozak contributes to The New York Sun and is working on a book on General Curtis LeMay.