Keep this in mind if you go to see "Letters from Iwo Jima."

Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:02:25 -0800

I have had the great privilege of personally conducting a digital video
interview of Dr Lester Tenney, who at the beginning of WWII, was a member of the National Guard.as a Private in a tank unit in the Philippines..and
shortly thereafter fought the Japanese Imperial Army during the American and
Filipino retreat into Bataan . and the surrender at Bataan.the Death
March to Camp San Fernando and later transported to Japan aboard
slave ships and served Japanese corporations as a POW slave laborer
in the coal mines of Japan near Hiroshima. His comments below are
constrained compared to interviews I have conducted with Filipino and
American POWs of the same era and area of the Pacific campaigns of
WWII.

Ralph Roy Ramirez
LTC (CA) Retired

For those who have expressed an opinion on the movie
Letters from Iwo Jima, please allow me to share how I re-acted to this
film. For lack of a better way to begin, let me say, What "Nice Guys" the Japanese Soldiers Were.

It was obvious to me that the Japanese soldiers who fought the Americans
on Iwo Jima were not the same soldiers who fought the Americans on
Bataan, or were they?

As a survivor of the Bataan Death March, I can tell you for certainty,
the Japanese depicted in "Letters From Iwo Jima" were in no way similar
to the soldiers I encountered on the Bataan Death March. So what does
that prove? Well, unless you truly believe that the Japanese soldiers
fighting in the Philippines earlier in the war, were different than the
soldiers on Iwo Jima, then you must come to the conclusion that the
director, Clint Eastwood, was overcome by Japanese propaganda. Eastwood
tried to "humanize" the Japanese soldier, and wanted to have the audience
see the Japanese as nice guys fighting a war they didn't want to fight,
in a place they didn't want to be.

The film "Letters From Iwo Jima," has been nominated for an Academy
Award, which it may richly deserve for the quality of its acting, but the
fact remains that as a historical movie, it's a failure, it instead tries
to show the enemy as the nice guys in the war and "so much like we
Americans."

Critics have praised the film because it "humanized" the enemy, but was
it their humanity that caused the Japanese soldiers on Bataan to shoot
and behead those men who were unable to keep up with the rest of the men
on the Bataan March. The same Japanese soldiers, who fought on Iwo Jima
and were depicted as being nice guys, were notoriously cruel and savage
to prisoners of war. On the Bataan Death March, if you didn't walk fast
enough or didn't bow low enough you were singled out and tortured, beaten
and killed, all at the whim of the Japanese soldier, a private, a
corporal, a sergeant or an officer.

Out of 12,000 American soldiers and more than 36,000 Filipino soldiers on
the march, less than half of them returned home. In addition to the
thousands that died on the March, thousands more died due to brutal
barbaric treatment while in POW camps, unarmed and without any means of
defense, were tortured and put to death.

This is the film where Clint Eastwood wants to portray the Japanese
soldier as being, "just like the rest of us": Sensitive, caring and
concerned for our fellow man. Don't you believe it! Japanese
soldiers, who were medical officers, carried out biological experiments
on prisoners of war. The opening scene in "The Great Raid" movie showing
Japanese soldiers burning American POWs alive is not fiction. It is
reality.

The record of the atrocities inflicted by the Japanese soldiers on the
American and Filipino civilians is numbered in the thousands. In Manila
alone, as the war was winding down and the Japanese knew the end was
near, they slaughtered more than 100,000 men, women and children.

The brilliant book "The Rape of Nanking" written by the late Iris Chang, chronicles the appalling savagery of the Japanese army during the
1930s. Ms. Chang uncovered the history of more than 360,000 Chinese men,
women and children who were massacred by Japanese soldiers; some were, no
doubt, the same "nice guys" on Iwo Jima.

It was the Japanese who attacked the United States: It was the Japanese
soldier who savagely killed thousands of unarmed POWs, It was the
Japanese soldier who placed POWs into bomb shelters and set them on fire
so that no one could escape: and it was the Japanese soldiers who refused
the offer of surrender when made, while knowing that to continue fighting
meant death to hundreds of thousands of their own people,

There were one or two nice guys, but that's about all. Yet the main
thrust of the film was "The Japanese soldier is similar to the American
soldier." I personally knew of no "nice guy" within the enemy soldiers,
and I offer this information as fact, not fiction. But the director,
Clint Eastwood, along with the Japanese would want you to believe it was
"fact".:(

The above is my reaction to the film.

Lester Tenney, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus Arizona State University
Former POW and survivor of the Bataan Death March

The flim showed Amercians and Japanese who commited atrocities and Amercians and Japanese who didn't.

It also showed how eJapan let their soldiers at Iwo become sitting ducks,hardly a ringing endorsemnt of Japan.

Iwo Jima was different from Battan in many ways,it was a honest film about what war does to everybody involved in it and the film is not political or propgandistic in any way,shape or form.

How the Japanese soldiers fought Iwo Jima was very simular to how the Confederate soldiers fought the Civil War,and like the Civil War you can respect how they fought the war without agreeing with them or with their cause.

One should actually see the film before passing judgement on it.

On a more personal note,my father fought in the South Pacific [not Japan] ,Letters From Iwo Jima and Eastwood's companion film Flags Of Our Fathers [which also showed Japanese atrocites ] gave me a better idea of what my Dad [and others like him] went through in that war.