Episode 25 - “Suicide for Glory”

Summary

EP25 greatly resembles the “Iwo and Okinawa” episode Henry Salomon outlined in his initial 1951 prospectus for Victory. Though coverage of Iwo Jima's conquest was eventually shifted to EP23, the main topics of the early synopsis were otherwise retained: (1) Japan's Special Attack Unit kamikaze suicide planes, activated in the second half of 1944; (2) the Allies’ April 1945 sea, air, and land assault on Okinawa; and (3) President Roosevelt's 12 April 1945 passing.

All of Bennett's J-tunes but J-5a are heard; his musical re-uses are in total 9 minutes 23 seconds and comfortably parallel the action in the source episodes’ scenes: (1) Japan's EP2 Pearl Harbor assault music repurposed for kamikaze planes; (2) Japan's home front war materiel production borrowing from EP21's factory-work scoring; and (3) Roosevelt's funeral procession borrowing musically from an EP12 sailor's burial. EP25 is also the rare Victory episode with no SFX at all—leaving tympanic gunnery to Karl Glassman.

EP25 opens with one of Victory's periodic returns to Japan's home front, a tranquil travelogue of scenery and civilian activity with no initial indications of wartime. Bennett supplies a gentle new “Japan” tune [A] in flute and celeste, nearly two octaves in range. The narration begins with Emperor Hirohito's entry in his Imperial Court's 1938 New Year poetry contest: “Peaceful is morning in the shrine garden; world conditions, it is hoped, will also be peaceful.” Numerous American newspapers had printed it as a column-filler, a few of them chiding Japan for its decidedly un-peaceful 1930s aggression in Asia beginning in 1937. Here in EP25, at 2:04, narrator Leonard Graves acknowledges a cultural distinction: “Materially the Japanese emulate the west. but spiritually they belong to the east.” We hear J-3 and then J-4 at 2:16, followed by J-2 at 2:35.

At 2:56 the setting shifts to early 1945 in the western Pacific, accompanied by CARRIER. More than three years after Pearl Harbor, the Allies progressively close on mainland Japan, and now mass for an invasion of one of its own prefectures, Okinawa. The 3:47–4:38 music is the score's first re-use, originally written for EP13's Allied advances in New Guinea (21:08– 21:59—see [M] in EP13). The passage is another example of a lively, “tuneful” Bennett passage that stands on its own thematically before becoming the background for another melody—SONG-SEAS here.