• Please take a moment and update your account profile. If you have an updated account profile with basic information on why you are on Air Warriors it will help other people respond to your posts. How do you update your profile you ask?

    Go here:

    Edit Account Details and Profile

Iwo Jima WW2

Fly Navy

...Great Job!
pilot
Super Moderator
Contributor
But, can you really quantify this stuff so as to compare it to what the Germans did?

Well, if you want to compare body counts, yeah you can do that. I don't have the figures on me though.
 

gaijin6423

Ask me about ninjas!
Nazi Germany v. Imperial Japan is actually a pretty interesting comparison. Both prided themselves on being neat, orderly societies, with emphasis on duty and obedience. Both focussed on technological, racial and religious superiority, as well as seeking to homogenize their respective populations. Had WW2 ended differently, I wonder how the two states would have dealt with one another.

And as long as we're talking sheer numbers, let's not forget what the Chinese did to their own population during the Great Leap Forward, the subsequent Great Leap Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. And then there's Stalin, of course.

Stalin, when the USSR and Germany were allied during the initial phase of WW2, arranged a visit from Hitler to a small city on the Volga that was populated by ethnic Germans. The USSR government provided them with all kinds of Nazi flags, banners, posters, etc., in order to promote an atmosphere of goodwill towards the Nazis. Then, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Stalin had the entire city leveled and the population executed for being pro-Nazi.
 

motiv8r

Registered User
Hollywood is run by Jews. They would not portray the Japanese atrocities as worse than Germany's, period.

To do that, they would have to make a movie which showed both German AND Japanese atrocities, while portraying Japanese atrocities as "worse". Hollywood is not a single cohesive identity with a unified opinion on any given subject; watch "Schindler's List", "Swing Kids", "Max" and "Downfall" one after the other, and you'll see how apparent this is even in relation to the Holocaust. In other words, there is no exact Hollywood "position" on how to depict the Nazis; thus, there is no point at which the Jews who supposedly "control Hollywood" would be able to say, "we can't make the Japanese look worse than the Nazis".

I highly doubt there would be any resistance to making a movie that showed the Japanese acting more brutally than, say, the Germans in "Saving Private Ryan." At any rate, as DocT noted before, this is a somewhat moot discussion, because the movie in question deals with Iwo Jima, which is not really known because of Japanese atrocities. If it were a movie about Nanking or the Bataan Death March, on the other hand, it would be very interesting to see Hollywood's depiction of what the Japanese did there.
 

SteveG75

Retired and starting that second career
None
Go check out "The Great Raid". It didn't get much of a run in theaters but did show the Japanese brutality to Allied POW's fairly accurately.
 

riley

Registered User
Let's see.... death rate of American POWs in German POW camps around 1%. Death rate of American POWs in Japanese POW camps is 38% to 40% based on which study you reference.

Read "Flyboys" it will give you a better impression of the Japanese culture - much different than the German culture.
 

plc67

Active Member
pilot
There were significant differences. You would never find the Japanese surrendering en masse when the battle was a lost cause. I believe their mantra was"death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than a mountain." They, almost without exception, fought to the death or committed suicide. Japanese soldiers who surrendered during WWII are still treated with disrespect today, if you're to believe some of the documentaries that have been presented. As previously noted there was a very heavy death rate among Japanese POWs; they thought you behaved dishonorably if you surrendered so you weren't entitled to any courtesies. One of my step father's friends was captured in the Phillipines, participated in the Bataan Death March and was a POW till the war ended. He was extremely malnourished when freed and never fully recovered, but managed to put 30 years in the Corps and died at 90.
I also knew a retired Air Force pilot who became a POW in Germany when his B-17 was shot down. He said his treatment wasn't all that bad. I believe the Luftwaffe ran his camp and they were of a different ilk than the Death's Head SS. Jewish POWs weren't singled out if I recall correctly. It wasn't Club Med by any means but it wasn't unsurvivable.
How Clint's movie that addresses the Japanese perspective will be interesting. Hopefully he won't go down the revisionist path that states we shouldn't have nuked them because they would've seen the error of their ways and thrown down their arms.
This movie and "Flyboys" are on my must see list.
 

PSno23

GEAUX TIGERS
pilot
This movie and "Flyboys" are on my must see list.

"Flyboys?" Really? After seeing previews for Annapolis, I simply can't see James Franco in any military movie. When I first heard about it, I thought it was screen adaptation of Bradley's second book, but apparently this one is about WWI. Good thing, I suppose, I don't think you could do "Flyboys" the book into a movie unless you toned it down quite a bit, which would completely take away from the theme of it.
 

Fly Navy

...Great Job!
pilot
Super Moderator
Contributor
Yeah, Flyboys looks a bit suckage to me. Looks like another Pearl Harbor.
 

MattWSU

Well-Known Member
pilot
Contributor
Movie looks well done. Pictured it as focusing more on the Battle of Iwo Jima than the photograph though.
 

plc67

Active Member
pilot
If it's about airplanes I usually watch it. If it sucks then I don't buy the DVD,
like I did with Pearl Harbor.
 

Brett327

Well-Known Member
None
Super Moderator
Contributor
A quick thought: If he's making a second movie from the Japanese perspective, it's going to be a pretty depressing movie. Didn't all but about three Japanese die on the island?

No Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah? Maybe the Earl of Funk or the Duke of Cool? I hope Profile doesn't die in this one.

I'm hoping for an appearance from The Swede.

Brett
 

bunk22

Super *********
pilot
Super Moderator
In just 36 days of fighting, over 6,000 Americans were killed, 5,000+ were Marines. Sad but awesome site when you see those hulking transports and amphibs sticking out of the water and black sand. Thought they were orange rocks at first but of coures ended up being rusted equipment from the invasion.
 
Top