Letters from Iwo Jima
Image taken from wikipedia.org
In 2006, Clint Eastwood made a film about the Japanese side of World War Two. The story took place on the black sand island of Iwo Jima, where one of the worst battles of the war took place. The Japanese story was relatively unknown before this film was made. All that was known was that thousands of Japanese soldiers were told they had to fight to the death to keep the Americans from taking the island. But the intimate story of what these human beings were thinking as their friends died around them was the story Eastwood chose to bring to the screen.
By 1944, the Allied forces had crippled the Japanese military. The only island between the Americans and the Japanese home island was Iwo Jima. Thousands of young Japanese soldiers built an elaborate set of tunnels and caves under the island so that they could move without difficulty around American positions. The Japanese were told that no help was coming for them. They would have to fight and die there on the island. For many weeks, tired and weary Japanese soldiers took massive amounts of casualties but still fought with the ideology that Japan would still win the war. After all the killing, the Americans took the island and only a handful of Japanese soldiers managed to survive the battle.
