thedrifter
12-10-06, 08:25 AM
Whatever happened to the heroes?
The raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima in 1945 became an iconic image, but few people know the real history behind it, and how the returning Marines were first celebrated, then abandoned. Now, in two powerful films, Clint Eastwood retells the story from both the US and Japanese perspectives
Neal Ascherson
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Observer
A patrol of US Marines climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi. Nobody fired at them. In the fearsome month-long battle for the islet of Iwo Jima, there was a lull. The Marines had brought along an American flag, and six men tied it to a pole and stuck it on the summit. A photographer told them to horse around a bit, look fierce, as they raised the flag. From below them, and from the invasion fleet stretching to the horizon, they heard the cheering begin. It was 23 February 1945. Iwo Jima, 650 miles south of Tokyo, was the first outpost of the Japanese homeland to fall to the Americans.
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Flags of our Fathers, the new film directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Steven Spielberg, is about how a human deed can become an artefact, shrinking its actors into irrelevance. Over the next 20 years, the flag raising on Iwo Jima morphed into a stream of representations, each vaster and more alienating than the last.
The first repeat happened on the same day. Some officer down below wanted the flag for himself, so a new, bigger one was sent up. Six other Marines wrestled it into position, and as they did so, AP photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped them in a photograph that - marvellously composed by pure luck - went round the world and became, for Americans, the iconic picture of the Second World War.
Three of Rosenthal's flag raisers were killed in the next few days. The other three were brought home, to be used as hero figures leading a gigantic, States-wide campaign for war bonds. Soon they were putting on their helmets and carbines to scale papier-mache models of Mount Suribachi, planting Old Glory on the summit for the enjoyment of 50,000 ecstatic patriots.
By now the photograph had been on every front page. It hung on the office walls of senators and in the living rooms of millions of Americans. It generated paintings, models, postage stamps. It was no longer about six men but about collective heroism, patriotism, the cult of sacrifice. Details of the original moment began to peel away. It was written that the Marines had climbed the mountain under fire, fighting every inch of the way. One of the dead Marines was confused with another, who had not been at the flag raising, and when the three survivors protested, they were told to shut up. (The photograph shows only their backs, not their faces.) The image began to matter more than the individuals. An epic war movie, Sands of Iwo Jima, was made with John Wayne in 1949. Finally, in 1954, a colossal statuary group - 100 tons of bronze, each figure 30 feet high - was raised in Washington as the memorial of the United States Marine Corps. The three survivors were invited to the unveiling but the names of the flag raisers are not on the plinth. This was a monument to the power and triumph of a nation, not to them.
Flags of our Fathers belongs to the tradition of great American war movies. But in striking ways it turns away from that tradition and marks its limits. Clint Eastwood has used all the technical genius of Spielberg, his producer. And yet, as an old man, he looks down on war with a sovereign anger and pity. That feeling has always been lurking. 'I guess we all died a little in that damned war,' he says in The Outlaw Josie Wales. He sees that the genre of Vietnam movies - all concerned with what happens to Americans, but not to their adversaries - has run out of time. And so, astonishingly, his companion film - Letters from Iwo Jima - is about the Japanese experience in that fight, which cost nearly 7,000 American lives but killed almost all the 22,000 Japanese defenders. The film, which opens on 20 December in America, has already been named Best Picture of 2006 by the critics at the National Board of Review. (It will be released in the UK on 23 February.) Another departure is Eastwood's rebellion against the notion of heroes. In a time when any soldier in action is termed a 'hero' this was a sturdy line to take.
Still apparently a Republican, though presumably a pretty individual one, Eastwood shrugs off complaints that his film is anti-patriotic. In no way does the film play down the terrible courage shown by the Marines at Iwo Jima, who time and again risked and lost their lives when they might have stayed in cover and lived at least a little longer. But as soldiers do, they took those risks for their mates, not for their flag. Eastwood has one of the survivors say afterwards: 'They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends.' When they get a chance, the survivors on their war bond tour insist that it is the dead comrades they left behind, not they, who are the heroes. But few people want to hear that. As another character remarks: 'Heroes are something we create, something we need.'
The film is based on the book by James Bradley, son of one of the flag raisers. Jack Bradley was a young Navy medic who stayed with the Marines, running and crawling to help the injured and dying, until he was wounded some weeks into the battle. Rene Gagnon was a handsome, rather spoiled boy from the New Hampshire textile mills. The third survivor, Ira Hayes, was a Native American from the Pima nation in Arizona, heavily built and silent. All six flag raisers were working-class boys, raised in the poverty of the Depression. The 'old man' among them was Mike Strank, their beloved sergeant, just 24 when he was killed.
James Bradley's book set out to rescue the six men whose personalities and feelings were obliterated under that bronze hulk in Arlington National Cemetery. All by then were dead. But Bradley unearthed not only their family backgrounds and the hour-by-hour course of the fighting and flag raising on Iwo Jima, but the agonising story of how Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes were displayed and exploited in the aftermath. Hayes, haunted by ghosts and humiliated by his own fame, became a lonely alcoholic; he was found dead on the Pima reservation, aged only 32. Gagnon got none of the opulent jobs promised to him by rich patriots during the war bond tour; he died in 1979, bullied by his wife and working as a janitor. Only Jack Bradley did what he wanted. He went back to his small town, started a successful funeral business just as he had always meant to, married his school sweetheart and raised eight children. He avoided talking about Iwo Jima to his family, who only found out after his death that he had been awarded the Navy Cross for extreme gallantry. For the first four years after the war, he wept in his sleep.
It was not that the trio were forgotten. Hayes carried a small flag in his pocket while he worked in the cotton fields, ready for the families who would drive up and ask to be photographed with him. Jack Bradley coached his family to say that Dad was on a fishing trip in Canada when reporters phoned.
Gagnon, drifting from job to job, made the most of small honours - dedicating a war memorial or appearing as mystery guest on local TV shows - but never understood why being a hero had not brought him wealth or a secure career. They were remembered because there was a statue of them, a photograph, but they were never understood.
I once read a postwar guide for American wives. It told them to make special allowances for a husband back from the war, but advised them to call a psychiatrist if bad dreams still persisted a month after his return. A month! Few civilians in those days understood survivor guilt. Out of 1,688 men of 'Easy' Company, to which both groups of flag raisers belonged, who landed, only 177 walked off the island. Bradley, Hayes and at times even Gagnon wondered what they had done wrong to find themselves alive when all the good guys were dead. As Hayes puts it in the film, weeping: 'They would be ashamed of me, to see me now ... All I did was try not to get killed.'
Eastwood's film is pretty loyal to James Bradley's book. Bradley told me: 'I sought emotional accuracy for the film. I don't look for exact accuracy. So my question was whether Mr Eastwood caught the emotional drift, gave a similar "emotional takeaway". My answer is yes. I am pleased and proud of the film.'
Its core is the bitter contrast between the ballyhoo of the 'heroes' tour and the bewilderment of the three men who remember - in fearsome flashbacks - what really happened on that island. They do their dutiful best to meet the public's expectations. But the stress of the contrast eats into them as the tour goes on.
Its most poignant moment comes at a giant New York reception in the Waldorf ballroom, as the three confront the Gold Star Mothers - the women whose sons helped to raise the flag or fought beside them and died in battle in the days that followed. Jack Bradley finds himself facing the mother of Hank Hansen, whose name has been wrongly added to the list of flag raisers. In the film (but perhaps not in reality) he reassures her that Hank was indeed one of the six, knowing that the family of the true sixth man, Harlon Block, have not been invited. Ira Hayes meets Mrs Strank, whose son had told his men - as good sergeants do - that he would get them all back to their mothers. He falls sobbing into her arms, clinging to her until the embarrassed tour organisers have to pull him away, and then goes out to get violently drunk.
Hayes, superbly played by Adam Beach, emerges as the central figure in the film. We see him gradually broken up by praise, racial humiliation and guilt. President Truman wrings his hand and tells him that he is the only true American in the group. But other dignitaries pretend not to see that outstretched hand; a barkeeper refuses to serve him because of his race, and when he gets so drunk that he has to be carried up the fake Suribachi by his comrades, the escorting publicity men curse him as a 'damned Indian'.
African-American actors have been taking leading roles in Hollywood for many years. But this is almost the first time that a Native American character has dominated a major movie, and has figured as a full, complex and modern personality. Adam Beach, a Salteaux Indian from Canada, has said: 'Here's a film that represents the true spirit of a human being who just happens to be Native American.'
But much of Flags of our Fathers is about battle. And here the big war movie genre seems to hit its limits. The realism of these scenes is shattering, even louder and more terrible than the famous Omaha Beach sequences in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. But better?
The majesty of the colossal invasion fleet, conjured up by Spielberg's wizardry, is unforgettable. The blast of the Japanese artillery shakes the auditorium until your ribs whirr. And it wakes you from the cinematic dream. Suddenly you become aware that's there's something wrong, that you are precisely not present in these close-up scenes of scrambling, screaming men, of ghastly wounds glimpsed and flaring shell bursts. The bubble that is the illusion of participation bursts. You are back in your seat, watching tricks with light.
The difficulty is that battle, like sex, is one of those things whose feel for the participants cannot be directly communicated to outsiders. After she had been in Sarajevo, Susan Sontag wrote: 'We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is, and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels.'
If this is true of war itself, it is even more true of close-quarters fighting or the unspeakable experience of being caught under a mortar barrage. Homo sapiens may be naturally violent and pugnacious. But modern battle is something else; the brain somehow registers that the human body and mind are not meant to take this, an attack on the senses that really is 'beyond anything'.
And this is why soldiers come home with blanks in the memory. The body has been to a place that cannot exist, and the mind says 'no'.
That is the one weakness of Flags of our Fathers, otherwise such a noble bit of work. From now on, surely, battle can't be shown in film close-ups that pretend that this is 'how it was'. It is a black sun that no eye or lens can look into directly. Maybe the spectacle of men killing and dying would be even more shocking in the middle distance.
Whatever the solution, war movies have hit a boundary wall, and film must update its artifice. Otherwise, every Mount Suribachi will turn into papier-mache before our eyes.
· Flags of our Fathers opens on 22 December. James Bradley's book is published by Pimlico, £8.99
Ellie
The raising of the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima in 1945 became an iconic image, but few people know the real history behind it, and how the returning Marines were first celebrated, then abandoned. Now, in two powerful films, Clint Eastwood retells the story from both the US and Japanese perspectives
Neal Ascherson
Sunday December 10, 2006
The Observer
A patrol of US Marines climbed to the top of Mount Suribachi. Nobody fired at them. In the fearsome month-long battle for the islet of Iwo Jima, there was a lull. The Marines had brought along an American flag, and six men tied it to a pole and stuck it on the summit. A photographer told them to horse around a bit, look fierce, as they raised the flag. From below them, and from the invasion fleet stretching to the horizon, they heard the cheering begin. It was 23 February 1945. Iwo Jima, 650 miles south of Tokyo, was the first outpost of the Japanese homeland to fall to the Americans.
Article continues
[AD]
Flags of our Fathers, the new film directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Steven Spielberg, is about how a human deed can become an artefact, shrinking its actors into irrelevance. Over the next 20 years, the flag raising on Iwo Jima morphed into a stream of representations, each vaster and more alienating than the last.
The first repeat happened on the same day. Some officer down below wanted the flag for himself, so a new, bigger one was sent up. Six other Marines wrestled it into position, and as they did so, AP photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped them in a photograph that - marvellously composed by pure luck - went round the world and became, for Americans, the iconic picture of the Second World War.
Three of Rosenthal's flag raisers were killed in the next few days. The other three were brought home, to be used as hero figures leading a gigantic, States-wide campaign for war bonds. Soon they were putting on their helmets and carbines to scale papier-mache models of Mount Suribachi, planting Old Glory on the summit for the enjoyment of 50,000 ecstatic patriots.
By now the photograph had been on every front page. It hung on the office walls of senators and in the living rooms of millions of Americans. It generated paintings, models, postage stamps. It was no longer about six men but about collective heroism, patriotism, the cult of sacrifice. Details of the original moment began to peel away. It was written that the Marines had climbed the mountain under fire, fighting every inch of the way. One of the dead Marines was confused with another, who had not been at the flag raising, and when the three survivors protested, they were told to shut up. (The photograph shows only their backs, not their faces.) The image began to matter more than the individuals. An epic war movie, Sands of Iwo Jima, was made with John Wayne in 1949. Finally, in 1954, a colossal statuary group - 100 tons of bronze, each figure 30 feet high - was raised in Washington as the memorial of the United States Marine Corps. The three survivors were invited to the unveiling but the names of the flag raisers are not on the plinth. This was a monument to the power and triumph of a nation, not to them.
Flags of our Fathers belongs to the tradition of great American war movies. But in striking ways it turns away from that tradition and marks its limits. Clint Eastwood has used all the technical genius of Spielberg, his producer. And yet, as an old man, he looks down on war with a sovereign anger and pity. That feeling has always been lurking. 'I guess we all died a little in that damned war,' he says in The Outlaw Josie Wales. He sees that the genre of Vietnam movies - all concerned with what happens to Americans, but not to their adversaries - has run out of time. And so, astonishingly, his companion film - Letters from Iwo Jima - is about the Japanese experience in that fight, which cost nearly 7,000 American lives but killed almost all the 22,000 Japanese defenders. The film, which opens on 20 December in America, has already been named Best Picture of 2006 by the critics at the National Board of Review. (It will be released in the UK on 23 February.) Another departure is Eastwood's rebellion against the notion of heroes. In a time when any soldier in action is termed a 'hero' this was a sturdy line to take.
Still apparently a Republican, though presumably a pretty individual one, Eastwood shrugs off complaints that his film is anti-patriotic. In no way does the film play down the terrible courage shown by the Marines at Iwo Jima, who time and again risked and lost their lives when they might have stayed in cover and lived at least a little longer. But as soldiers do, they took those risks for their mates, not for their flag. Eastwood has one of the survivors say afterwards: 'They may have fought for their country, but they died for their friends.' When they get a chance, the survivors on their war bond tour insist that it is the dead comrades they left behind, not they, who are the heroes. But few people want to hear that. As another character remarks: 'Heroes are something we create, something we need.'
The film is based on the book by James Bradley, son of one of the flag raisers. Jack Bradley was a young Navy medic who stayed with the Marines, running and crawling to help the injured and dying, until he was wounded some weeks into the battle. Rene Gagnon was a handsome, rather spoiled boy from the New Hampshire textile mills. The third survivor, Ira Hayes, was a Native American from the Pima nation in Arizona, heavily built and silent. All six flag raisers were working-class boys, raised in the poverty of the Depression. The 'old man' among them was Mike Strank, their beloved sergeant, just 24 when he was killed.
James Bradley's book set out to rescue the six men whose personalities and feelings were obliterated under that bronze hulk in Arlington National Cemetery. All by then were dead. But Bradley unearthed not only their family backgrounds and the hour-by-hour course of the fighting and flag raising on Iwo Jima, but the agonising story of how Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes were displayed and exploited in the aftermath. Hayes, haunted by ghosts and humiliated by his own fame, became a lonely alcoholic; he was found dead on the Pima reservation, aged only 32. Gagnon got none of the opulent jobs promised to him by rich patriots during the war bond tour; he died in 1979, bullied by his wife and working as a janitor. Only Jack Bradley did what he wanted. He went back to his small town, started a successful funeral business just as he had always meant to, married his school sweetheart and raised eight children. He avoided talking about Iwo Jima to his family, who only found out after his death that he had been awarded the Navy Cross for extreme gallantry. For the first four years after the war, he wept in his sleep.
It was not that the trio were forgotten. Hayes carried a small flag in his pocket while he worked in the cotton fields, ready for the families who would drive up and ask to be photographed with him. Jack Bradley coached his family to say that Dad was on a fishing trip in Canada when reporters phoned.
Gagnon, drifting from job to job, made the most of small honours - dedicating a war memorial or appearing as mystery guest on local TV shows - but never understood why being a hero had not brought him wealth or a secure career. They were remembered because there was a statue of them, a photograph, but they were never understood.
I once read a postwar guide for American wives. It told them to make special allowances for a husband back from the war, but advised them to call a psychiatrist if bad dreams still persisted a month after his return. A month! Few civilians in those days understood survivor guilt. Out of 1,688 men of 'Easy' Company, to which both groups of flag raisers belonged, who landed, only 177 walked off the island. Bradley, Hayes and at times even Gagnon wondered what they had done wrong to find themselves alive when all the good guys were dead. As Hayes puts it in the film, weeping: 'They would be ashamed of me, to see me now ... All I did was try not to get killed.'
Eastwood's film is pretty loyal to James Bradley's book. Bradley told me: 'I sought emotional accuracy for the film. I don't look for exact accuracy. So my question was whether Mr Eastwood caught the emotional drift, gave a similar "emotional takeaway". My answer is yes. I am pleased and proud of the film.'
Its core is the bitter contrast between the ballyhoo of the 'heroes' tour and the bewilderment of the three men who remember - in fearsome flashbacks - what really happened on that island. They do their dutiful best to meet the public's expectations. But the stress of the contrast eats into them as the tour goes on.
Its most poignant moment comes at a giant New York reception in the Waldorf ballroom, as the three confront the Gold Star Mothers - the women whose sons helped to raise the flag or fought beside them and died in battle in the days that followed. Jack Bradley finds himself facing the mother of Hank Hansen, whose name has been wrongly added to the list of flag raisers. In the film (but perhaps not in reality) he reassures her that Hank was indeed one of the six, knowing that the family of the true sixth man, Harlon Block, have not been invited. Ira Hayes meets Mrs Strank, whose son had told his men - as good sergeants do - that he would get them all back to their mothers. He falls sobbing into her arms, clinging to her until the embarrassed tour organisers have to pull him away, and then goes out to get violently drunk.
Hayes, superbly played by Adam Beach, emerges as the central figure in the film. We see him gradually broken up by praise, racial humiliation and guilt. President Truman wrings his hand and tells him that he is the only true American in the group. But other dignitaries pretend not to see that outstretched hand; a barkeeper refuses to serve him because of his race, and when he gets so drunk that he has to be carried up the fake Suribachi by his comrades, the escorting publicity men curse him as a 'damned Indian'.
African-American actors have been taking leading roles in Hollywood for many years. But this is almost the first time that a Native American character has dominated a major movie, and has figured as a full, complex and modern personality. Adam Beach, a Salteaux Indian from Canada, has said: 'Here's a film that represents the true spirit of a human being who just happens to be Native American.'
But much of Flags of our Fathers is about battle. And here the big war movie genre seems to hit its limits. The realism of these scenes is shattering, even louder and more terrible than the famous Omaha Beach sequences in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. But better?
The majesty of the colossal invasion fleet, conjured up by Spielberg's wizardry, is unforgettable. The blast of the Japanese artillery shakes the auditorium until your ribs whirr. And it wakes you from the cinematic dream. Suddenly you become aware that's there's something wrong, that you are precisely not present in these close-up scenes of scrambling, screaming men, of ghastly wounds glimpsed and flaring shell bursts. The bubble that is the illusion of participation bursts. You are back in your seat, watching tricks with light.
The difficulty is that battle, like sex, is one of those things whose feel for the participants cannot be directly communicated to outsiders. After she had been in Sarajevo, Susan Sontag wrote: 'We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is, and how normal it becomes. Can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels.'
If this is true of war itself, it is even more true of close-quarters fighting or the unspeakable experience of being caught under a mortar barrage. Homo sapiens may be naturally violent and pugnacious. But modern battle is something else; the brain somehow registers that the human body and mind are not meant to take this, an attack on the senses that really is 'beyond anything'.
And this is why soldiers come home with blanks in the memory. The body has been to a place that cannot exist, and the mind says 'no'.
That is the one weakness of Flags of our Fathers, otherwise such a noble bit of work. From now on, surely, battle can't be shown in film close-ups that pretend that this is 'how it was'. It is a black sun that no eye or lens can look into directly. Maybe the spectacle of men killing and dying would be even more shocking in the middle distance.
Whatever the solution, war movies have hit a boundary wall, and film must update its artifice. Otherwise, every Mount Suribachi will turn into papier-mache before our eyes.
· Flags of our Fathers opens on 22 December. James Bradley's book is published by Pimlico, £8.99
Ellie