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Eastwood's War: The Battle of Iwo Jima

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 May 2025

Ian Buruma
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A common factor in conventional war movies, whether they are made by Americans, Europeans, or Asians, is the lack of visible enemies. They are there, in the way Indians were there in old westerns, as fodder for the guns on our side, screaming Banzai! or Achtung! or Come on! before falling to the ground in heaps. What is missing, with rare exceptions, is any sense of individual difference, of character, of humanity in the enemy. And even the exceptions tend to fall into familiar types: the bumbling or sinister German, hissing about ways to make you talk, the loud, crass American, the snarling Japanese.

Type
Research Article
Information
Asia-Pacific Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , February 2007 , e17
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2007

References

Notes

[1] Bradley, Gagnon, and Hayes actually played themselves, alongside John Wayne, in the 1949 movie Sands of Iwo Jima.

[2] John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon, 1986), p. 92.

[3] See, for example, Earl Ofari Hutchinson in The Huffington Post, October 24, 2006.

[4] “Gyokusai Soshireikan” no Etegami (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 2002).

[5] Quoted in Thomas J. Morgan, “Former Marines Remember the Most Dangerous Spot on the Planet,” The Providence Journal, June 28, 1999.