Take two...

I talked to Jambo about this today, and I think he made an even clearer point in that discussion than he posted on the blog...

Hanks did say that the War in the Pacific, and thus his show, was a war of race. At first, this comment stuck in my gut... but think about it. This WAS a war of "race"... for and against the Japanese. Imperial Japan was every bit as "racist" as Nazi Germany, and caused millions of death because of that racism. I do not defend the racial slurs that we used in our propaganda during the war... but it was mirrored in the attitudes and propaganda of the Japanese soldiers that we were fighting against. Add to this the cultural gulf between American GIs and Marines and those of Japan, and you have a recipe for racist attitudes about the "enemy".

I still haven't seen either episode (I will... soon), but they have been described to me in some detail, and if I am not mistaken, the scene described by both Ryan and Jambo where the lone surviving Japanese soldier that was being given the "pot shots" was an event that was preceded by a "suicide" attack from a wounded Japanese soldier, right? A hand grenade hidden in a wounded soldier's hands until he was being helped... then BOOM. Did I get this right?

This being the case, I think it is a PERFECT example of what I am saying. The American's were taught, both by the Army/Marines AND by experience in the field and on the beach that the Japs were NOT GOING TO SURRENDER OR STOP FIGHTING. How many times would any of us have to watch our brothers in arms die at the hands of a booby-trapped soldiers pretending to surrender before we stopped asking for surrenders and just shot until everybody was dead?

This sort of mindset was completely alien to Americans encountering it for the first time, especially when they were encountering it across a battlefield. To counter the stress involved in this kind of combat environment, the US employed some graphic racism to portray the enemy as an animal rather than human, or to make them seem cartoon-like, rather than equals. These weren't the same techniques employed by the US for propaganda in Europe, you'll notice.

The Nazis were shown to be evil... dark, sinister people working from the shadows to subvert those they ruled into some kind of demonic hell. Japanese were shown to be monkey-like, cartoonish people with only rudimentary human features and figures. We taught GIs to say phrases like "Give up now" or "lay down your weapons" to the Germans we were fighting, but we didn't bother with that in the Pacific, did we? Was this because Japanese is harder to learn that German? Was this because the US was looking to kill each and every Jap soldiers, sailor or marine out there? Or was it because learning that phrase would force US troops to recognize the humanity of an enemy that didn't carry the same recognition for us?

I think it was because of the latter, and I think that it was a necessary evil in light of the effort we were making.