This film harrowingly depicts the fanaticism of Japanese soldiers and how hellish war in general is. 21,000 Japanese elected to die rather than surrender that tiny island, and in the process made the Germans look almost like pacifists by comparison. Fellow blogger Bill Cork read the book on which the movie is based and speaks frankly:
I never really understood the War in the Pacific before I read this book. Oh, I understood the basic facts, and the strategic goals--but this is a story about knife fights in the dark, of atrocities committed by a fanatical enemy, of unrequited grief...To watch this movie is to make you long for a "3rd way", one that involved neither an invasion of Japan nor use of the atomic weapon. A Cincinnati newspaper considers Iwo Jima "a battle of choice waged on the basis of faulty intelligence and inadequate plans" but that "Americans back then had a greater appreciation for the ugly, unpredictable nature of combat." Others have said that an Iwo Jima wouldn't have happened under Gen. MacArthur, who tended to be more parsimonious with his soldiers' lives. Many say that Patton, operating in the other theatre, probably would've ended that side of the war sooner with less loss of life on both sides.
I only have one relative, a great-uncle, who fought in World War 2. He was a Seabee. I think some of my naive conversations with him about the war, about the Bomb, about Japan, must have struck him as the younger Bradley's arguments struck his dad. Both men chose not to argue. There was no way they could explain their own perspectives, rooted in their experiences, to someone who read only books. I have a new appreciation for these men, for the war they fought, for the attitudes they kept for decades about the enemy they fought, for their arguments about the necessity of the Bomb.
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