On June 27, 1945 in Philadelphia, my Mother was born. The same day, on the other side of the United States, B-29 45-MO 44-86292 left Wendover Army Air Field in Utah for Tinian Island in the South Pacific.
On August 5, 1945, after a month of training, B-29 45-MO 44-86292 was christened “Enola Gay” after the mother of the pilot. The next morning, “Enola Gay” set out to make history.
Three days after the Hiroshima blast, a different model A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
Despite the total destruction of two cities and the loss of hundreds of thousands of people the Japanese still dithered over surrender for another six days. The Japanese military even attempted to overthrow the Emperor to prevent the surrender.
Do not waste any tears on a people unwilling to listen to the pleas of humanity.
Which brings me to another interesting point. The Great Raid has been released after languishing in the system for a while. Despite the attention to detail and fidelity to the truth it seems to suffer from the standard disease of modern American filmmaking about the Pacific Theatre of World War II: it’s deadly boring. There have been several films made about the PTO since the success of Saving Private Ryan and all of them have sucked: Windtalkers, Pearl Harbor, The Thin Red Line. What’s the problem?
My best guess is that there’s something wrong in Hollywood. The Pacific Theatre was a no-holds-barred slugfest against some of the worst humanity has to offer. There was little glory in the heat and the muck. There were no great battles of maneuver with tanks and planes racing to encircle a beaten enemy as at Falaise. No great heroic moments of brittle victory as at Normandy. Instead, there were an infinite number of extremely personal fights as one army struggled forward and the other died in place.
And so Hollywood is stymied. How do you make a film about an individual’s place in war without making value judgements about the enemy? You can’t make a movie about the bonds between men, it wasn’t that sort of a war. You can make a movie about each man’s struggle with an inhuman enemy but then you’d have to actually portray the enemy. Notice how in all the pictures mentioned above, you almost never see the Japanese fighting man close up? You never hear of their unearthly determination or barbaric methods.
You cannot make the Japanese the heroes – like many like to do with the Viet Cong – because World War II is too well-remembered, so you have to leave them out of the story and try not to make the Americans too heroic. It might make filmmakers sleep better at night but it makes for a miserable goddamned film.
Here’s to the end of the war and to the men who won it: pilots, sailors, soldiers and marines. I’ll toast the dogfaces and squids even if it means I have to salute that pompous windbag MacArthur as well.