Eastwood On 'Flags Of Our Fathers'

[thedrifter]

Posted on Thu, Oct. 19, 2006
Former Marines gather in Macon to recall Iwo Jima

By Matt Barnwell
TELEGRAPH STAFF WRITER

The U.S. Marine Corps tattoos inked into the forearms of some of the dozen men reminiscing Wednesday in a Macon hotel are reminders of their past, when they were young, when they made their mark in history.

Now the men, most of them octogenarians, wear thick glasses, have hunched-over postures or use walking canes to get around.

Just more than 60 years ago, these same men were among the Marines who stormed the southern tip of a tiny Pacific island halfway between Tokyo and Saipan.

These are the men of Iwo Jima.

"When that flag went up, it was like the Fourth of July," said Danny Thomas, who was at the base of Mount Suribachi when the American flag was raised above the island's highest peak. "You never heard such racket and whistles and horns blowing."

The image Thomas recalls was captured in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, and the story behind the flag raising is told in the film "Flags of our Fathers," which opens Friday.

Thomas and a handful of the remaining members of Charlie Company, of the 28th Marine Regiment, came to Macon's Crowne Plaza this week for a three-day reunion. The company, whose members come from across the country, has been reuniting in different cities each year since 1985.

The men gather to commemorate a late February morning in 1945, when 30,000 Marines flooded the beach of Iwo Jima, launching an attack that was supposed to last only three days. Charlie Company was among the first wave.

Iwo Jima, part of a chain of three volcanic islands, had become a central staging area for Japanese attacks on U.S. bombers. But in American hands, it would provide a base for fighter planes and an emergency landing field for B-29s returning from long-distance bombing raids.

In their youth, while World War II raged, the company's 250 men were refined into well-trained warriors at Camp Pendleton in California and then later while stationed in Hawaii. The veterans at the reunion all volunteered to serve in the Corps.

Still, they recalled, as they approached the precipice of invasion, the fear was difficult to control.

"They gave each one of us a shot of brandy - and they didn't ask how old we were either," said Thomas, who enlisted when he was 15. He graduated high school at 19 - after his military service.

Going into the battle, "the intelligence was terrible," Thomas said. Nobody knew that Japanese bunkers were connected to an underground network of tunnels wide enough for railroad cars.

Added Chick Davis: "There is not a man in here that was as scared as I was."

On the third day of fighting, the regiment wrote its way into the American story. Word was passed to Charlie Company Marines to hold their fire. From the base of Mount Suribachi, they watched as members of their sister company scaled the island's largest peak.

They reached the top, and hoisted the red, white and blue.

The flag was actually raised twice - the first time commanders deemed it too small to be seen easily from the beach. On the second try, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the iconic moment when six Marines planted the flag into Iwo Jima's ashy soil.

Three died before the battle was over.

The picture instantly became a symbol of patriotism to war-weary American citizens, and at the end of the battle, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the three surviving men home to accompany the picture on a nationwide tour to raise war bonds.

The human cost of taking Iwo Jima was immense. When the Marines arrived, nearly 20,000 Japanese were firmly entrenched. An operation that was scheduled to last a few days stretched longer than a month. Most of Charlie Company suffered casualties, and more than 6,000 Marines were killed. All but three attending the Macon reunion had been wounded in that battle.

Among those was Tony DeWendt. A runner for the company's lieutenant, he topped a ridge early in the battle and unexpectedly came face-to-face with the enemy.

"They shot my rifle out of one hand, my radio out of the other one," he said. "My total combat career lasted almost 30 minutes."

At another point during the fighting, Davis took a load of shrapnel to the face. It took three days to be taken from the middle of the island to the beach, and another three days to reach the hospital ship. When he finally got there, he recalled, the doctor looked at him and said "Ain't no use fooling with him - he's gonna die."

Another one of the injured, Al Eutsey, offered this assessment: "When you got wounded there, you were lucky. That was a ticket off the island."

Not all of the injured fared so well. Some Marines died from wounds that were not immediately life threatening, but later became infected and gangrenous. Medics where overwhelmed by mounting casualties, and simply could not attend to everyone fast enough.

"It was just a fiasco," said Vic McAtee.

Few recalled the fate of Japanese prisoners of war. More than 18,000 died, and more than 200 were captured.

"I didn't take any," McAtee said. "If they didn't stop running at me - and I gave 'em the sign - it was too late."

Iwo Jima ended as the only major battle of the war where Marines took on more casualties - 26,000 - than their enemy. But its capture allowed 2,000 bombers to land there during the next five months as they struck targets in Japan.

"The heroes did not leave that island," said Charlie Company member A.J. Shelley. "The heroes were left in the cemeteries."

To contact Matt Barnwell, call 744-4251, or e-mail mbarnwell@macontel.com.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Flying the flag for the reality of war
BY JAN STUART
Newsday Staff Writer

October 20, 2006

On Feb. 23, 1945, Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal snapped a war shot that would become an icon for American valor: five Marines and a Navy corpsman hoisting a heavy Japanese water pipe bearing the Stars and Stripes. Most of those who read the moment as a signal of victory, however, were indulging in a bit of collective wishful thinking.

The famous flag-lift occurred on only the fifth day of a fierce and protracted 30-day campaign for the sulfurous island of Iwo Jima. Within days of being immortalized by Rosenthal, three of the six soldiers were dead. But the Pulitzer Prize-winning image served to stem the rising cynicism in a U.S. bankrupted and weary from war. "Looking at it," says a witness in "Flags of Our Fathers," "you could believe the sacrifice wasn't a waste."

Any links one might infer between the needs of a nation limping toward the end of World War II and the anxieties of America deep in the soup with Iraq are purely intentional. As documentary filmmakers expose the chaos in Iraq with unflinching vigor, Clint Eastwood has chosen to address the miasma obliquely, not to say extravagantly, with an epic deconstruction of a symbol.

Adapted by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis from James Bradley's No. 1 bestseller, "Flags of Our Fathers" examines the fates of those six American idols, in particular the three survivors: Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Bradley's father Doc (Ryan Phillipe).

Still reeling from the trauma of Iwo Jima, Hayes, Gagnon and Bradley are pressed into service as public relations stooges for a war bonds tour. Reluctant to assume the heroic mantle foisted upon them by a military bureaucracy that knows a cash cow when it sees it, the trio stifles their embarrassment as they ascend paper mache Mount Suribachi's before adoring stadium crowds.

The tour takes its greatest toll on Hayes, an American Indian whose remorse for his fallen buddies is compounded by the racism he encounters at every turn. Eastwood and his scriptwriters err on the side of overselling Hayes' victimization at the expense of giving him multifaceted personal shadings, a flaw that reflects the lack of dimension in Gagnon and Bradley as well. Despite intensely felt performances, the men remain almost as faceless as film characters as they do photographic subjects.

The movie's overemphatic tendencies point up what has often seemed like a disconnect between Eastwood's minimalist acting style and the belabored, more-is-more bent of his directing: As a storyteller, Eastwood has rarely seen a period that he couldn't transform into an ellipsis or exclamation mark.

That propensity serves him well in the justifiably expansive staging of Iwo Jima, which rivals the Omaha Beach sequence in "Saving Private Ryan" (Steven Spielberg is a producer on "Flags") in communicating the incommunicable savagery of the battlefield. It betrays him in the film's sentimental windup, which attempts to heal a battered audience with one of those nick-of-time family reconciliation scenes that could only happen like that in the movies.

As with Eastwood's "Unforgiven," a revisionist Western that rebuked our hunger for violence and fed it at the same time, "Flags of Our Fathers" allows everyone to eat his cake and have it, too. It's not anti-war so much as anti-idolatry, a philosophical position that plays to both "stay-the-course" and "cut-and-run" camps without depriving war-movie lovers. When it comes to the art of compromise, Washington has nothing on Hollywood.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Capturing the flag
It's a meeting of American icons as director and quintessential U.S. hero Clint Eastwood turns his lens to the myths and the men behind the raising of Old Glory on Iwo Jima

Bob Thompson
National Post

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Clint Eastwood has nothing left to prove as a filmmaker, but a great deal to show for himself.

His first few examples of his new approach, 2003's Mystic River and 2004's Million Dollar Baby, received Oscar nods and decent box-office returns despite their bare-bones styles. Flags of Our Fathers is the third in the series, and it may be the most controversial.

Opening on Friday, the film profiles the events surrounding five U.S. Marines and one Navy corpsman who are immortalized in a Pulitzer Prize-winning Second World War picture of the American flag being raised during the bloody 35-day battle for the Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima.

Based on a best-selling book by the son of Navy corpsman James Bradley, the Eastwood version re-creates the author's modern-day quest to find the truth, along with the nasty Iwo Jima fighting and intermittent sequences of the three flag-raising survivors travelling stateside promoting a bond drive for the U.S. war effort.

While the ensemble includes Ryan Phillippe as the Navy corpsman, not to mention Jesse Bradford, Jamie Bell and Joseph Cross as three of the Marines, Vancouver's Barry Pepper has a pivotal part as a tough sergeant. Ottawa's Adam Beach, a Native Canadian, plays the key role of Marine Ira Hayes, a Native American who eventually succumbs to alcohol after being exploited as one of the flag-raising heroes.

Beach's Hayes is the emotional core of the film, serving to demythologize the events on the fundraising home tour and at the Iwo Jima front, where 7,000 U. S. Marines died and 20,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors lost their lives .

"The deconstruction of the hero?" says the 76-year-old director. "Yeah, that's very important in this movie."

Don't get Eastwood wrong. He's not belittling the battle or the men who fought there as the American forces pushed their way toward Japan. "It was the biggest Marine Corps invasion in history," he says. "But what intrigued me about it was the book and the fact that it wasn't really a war story, but a study of these people."

They were the reluctant ones, who were emotionally and physically scarred by war and unwilling or unable to verbalize it.

"I've talked to many vets, and the ones who were on the front lines are the quietest about their activities," says Eastwood, who was 15 at the time of Iwo Jima and never fought in a war. "It's a sure thing if you hear someone's braggadocio about their experiences in combat that they were probably a clerk typist in the rear echelon."

Besides, the filmmaker wasn't interested in making another war movie, anti- or otherwise. He had already acted in three -- Kelly's Heroes, Where Eagles Dare and Heartbreak Ridge. That said, he still needed to find battlefields to film, a challenge as the black-sand beaches of Iwo Jima were off limits.

"We looked all over the world, but especially next to The Four Seasons in Hawaii," he says smiling. Instead he eventually chose Iceland, which has the required beaches and a necessary starkness.

It was during that part of the shoot that the crew of young actors marvelled at Eastwood's strength, stamina and one-take artistry.

"He is a director like he's an actor: lean and minimalist," says Pepper. "First take is the take, so you have to be ready. I remember I had a pattern to run by explosions with machine-gun fire zippering down the field, and I said to him, 'Just to be clear ...' And he said, 'We've come this far, let's not ruin it by thinking.' "

And while their are graphic moments of violence, even Eastwood acknowledges he balances that with comments on the futility of war, a definite shift away from his 1970s Dirty Harry action persona.

"I just kind of go along with it as I've matured, which is essentially a way of saying ageing," Eastwood suggests. "But as I got to this stage in my life, I felt that it might be time to address things that are closer to me than the fantasy characters I've been involved with."

To that end, Eastwood is currently putting together Letters From Iwo Jima, set for release in February. It's a film account of the battle from the Japanese perspective, specifically the Iwo Jima commander, Lieutenant General Kuribayashi. Why do that? It seemed like the right thing.

After all, instinct led Eastwood to Flags Of Our Fathers in the first place. He did Mystic River and was ready to take some time off. "Then Million Dollar Baby came around and I thought, 'Ah, I have to do that,' " he recalls.

Then Steven Spielberg, who then owned the Flags Of Our Fathers film rights, spoke with Eastwood.

"He said 'Why don't you come over and direct this film?' " Eastwood says. "So I shook hands and said, 'Yes. I'll do that, too.' "

Lucky guy. After 50 years and more than 40 films, Eastwood couldn't agree more.

"I've been lucky enough to work in a profession I enjoy," he agrees. "I still enjoy it -- obviously so because I'm still doing it. And I don't seem to have any ambitions about retiring. Maybe I'll just wait until they retire me."bthompson@nationalpost.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Review: C-
Eastwood's 'Flags' doesn't measure up
By Michael Sragow
Sun Movie Critic
Originally published October 20, 2006
Flags of Our Fathers purports to tell the story of Marines raising Old Glory on Iwo Jima and the iconic photo that was snapped of the event during the battle to take the island during World War II. The film has all the coherence and lucidity of a fragmentation bomb.

Attempting to replicate the war-is-hell but soldiers-are-honorable mode of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg is one of the producers), it spews out cliches about the ambiguous nature of heroism - failed cliches, at that - and they fatally wound any authentic character or artistic notion that it has. Using a time-hopping technique that kills any momentum to the taking of the island, the movie mostly focuses on three men. The three survivors from the photo - Navy medical corpsman Doc Bradley (Ryan Philippe), "runner" Joe Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), a Pima Indian - go on a war-bond tour to raise morale as well as money as the war in the Pacific drags on. Two of the leads have little to do except embody modest virtue (Philippe's Bradley) and would-be opportunism (Bradford's Gagnon), while Beach's Ira Hayes at least gets to face down U.S. racism as he blubbers and drinks his way to tragedy. What they share is a sense that the truest heroes in war are the men who die in action - the men they left behind.

The movie is meant to show how the propaganda bazooka tore these three up inside almost as much as their war experience. Director Clint Eastwood and his screenwriters, William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis (who directed and co-wrote Crash and wrote Million Dollar Baby), say war is hard and real, selling it is hard and unreal. They hammer home the ironies of having the men perform the mounting of the flag on a football field and eat themselves as part of an ice-cream mold at a fundraiser.

The filmmakers are incredibly pompous about their "revelations." They make a big deal about two flags being raised on Mount Suribachi; when the first was lowered for safekeeping, photographer Joe Rosenthal took his historic photo of the second flag raising. Pop culture alert: That was never a secret. Even the specious 1949 smash, Sands of Iwo Jima, which won John Wayne an Oscar nomination, acknowledged in its opening credits that there was a previous flag.

Flags of Our Fathers makes an even bigger deal about the misidentification of the soldiers in the photograph. That would mean more to an audience if you could identify more people when they're not raising the flag. In this movie, you get to know too many good men only at the point of death. "Hey, Harlan!" Bang! Long close-up of Harlan's body. Oh, that was him.

Meanwhile, as if the film weren't already out of Eastwood's directorial control (or, worse yet, in it), there's a third strand of action involving Bradley's son, James (Tom McCarthy), interviewing witnesses to his father's wartime experiences. For all his ersatz realism and toughness, Eastwood uses this ploy to invoke the nostalgia for "the Greatest Generation" that permeated pre-Sept. 11 culture - and may now come back stronger than ever in the wake of disillusionment over the war in Iraq. Sure, Eastwood ups the ante with shots of carnage such as the remains of Japanese soldiers who've blown themselves up with grenades. But that makes our fighting men seem only more valorous.

Doubtless dozens of dime-store movie-critic philosophers are leaping at the chance to use their favorite quote from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to proclaim Eastwood's supposed brilliance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." But Flags of Our Fathers fails as fact or legend. It's woefully incompetent as narrative moviemaking. "If you can get a picture, the right picture, you can win a war," says a retired captain. Having already gotten a 21-gun salute from the newsweeklies and the trade papers, Flags of Our Fathers shows that if a revered director can get a subject, the right subject, he can win rave reviews without earning them.

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Hero worship

By JEFFREY WESTHOFF - sidetracks@nwnewsgroup.com

On Feb. 23, 1945, five Marines and one sailor planted a makeshift flagpole atop Mount Surabachi on the tiny isle of Iwo Jima.

Their effort lasted only seconds, but photographer Joe Rosenthal captured one of those seconds on film. That picture became not only the most evocative image of World War II, but perhaps the 20th century.

Back in the director’s chair, Clint Eastwood explores the reality and mythology of that famous photo in “Flags of Our Fathers,” based on James Bradley and Ron Powers’ book of oral history.

Admirable intentions stand at attention throughout the film, and Eastwood does not muddle the themes of patriotism and heroism the way Stephen Spielberg did in “Saving Private Ryan,” but Eastwood and screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis do muddle the storytelling in a major way.

Without a discernable pattern, the script cuts and pastes together events from several timelines, each featuring its own narrator (sometimes two).

Unless you have read the book or are a World War II history buff who knows the history of each of the six men in the picture, the film’s shifts in time will befuddle you at least once.

The two main story threads are the actual invasion of Iwo Jima and a war bond drive several months later featuring three of the flag raisers, John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). The other three flag raisers died in combat shortly after the picture was taken.

The film also jumps ahead to the 1990s, and we get little help figure out which of the young fighters are now the old men being interviewed by James Bradley (Tom McCarthy) as he researches his book. He is the son of Doc Bradley (played as an old man by George Grizzard), and decides to write the book shortly after his father dies.

Eastwood tries hard to construct “Flags of Our Fathers” as an art film.

Like the reporter in “Citizen Kane,” Bradley’s face is in shadows as he conducts his interviews.

The film would be more compelling if Eastwood limited his narrative to contrast the horrors of the invasion with the demeaning war bonds tour.

For instance, Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes are ordered to re-enact the flag raising on a papier-mâché mountaintop erected on the 20-yard line of Chicago’s Soldier Field.

The three men grimace each time they are introduced as “the heroes of Iwo Jima” because to them the real

heroes are the comrades who died there. Hayes eventually breaks down.

“I can’t take them calling me a hero,” he says. “All I did was try not to get shot.”

And though the military brass in charge of the bond drive call Hayes, a Native American, a hero, they don’t treat him like one. He must marshal every ounce of self-control every time some idiot calls him “Chief” or makes a degrading comment like, “I bet you went after them with your tomahawk.”

The most intriguing, and in some ways most courageous, aspect of “Flags” is how Eastwood deconstructs the use of the word “hero.” The film’s point is that those of use who remain home when wars are fought need to think of soldiers as heroes because it eases our own guilt.

The battle scenes are powerful, as well. Thankfully, Eastwood doesn’t

resort to the herky-jerky handheld cameras and quick-cut editing that have become the clichés of World War II battles ever since “Private Ryan.” He does use a similarly somber palette of desaturated colors, though.

Although I have seen it only once, I am certain “Flags of Our Fathers”

becomes a better film the second time you see it. How much better I don’t know, but I plan to find out.

“Flags Of Our Fathers”

3 stars

Rated R for language and sequences

of graphic war violence and carnage

Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes

Written by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford, Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Separating heroes from the hype

'Flags' explores myths of war

By Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News
October 20, 2006

Photographs don't get much more famous than the one in which five Marines and a Navy corpsman raised the American flag on Mount Suribachi during the battle for Iwo Jima. The photograph still stands as a defining image of World War II in the Pacific.

And, yes, it was a re-creation of an earlier moment. Photographer Joe Rosenthal took the picture shortly after the real event happened and the first flag had been removed from the scene.

In Flags of Our Fathers, a movie about the war and the propaganda that was generated to finance it, Clint Eastwood has taken an often-acute and ultimately moving look at what has been dubbed "the greatest generation." Eastwood pays his respects to those who fought in World War II by refusing to apply the lacquer of heroism to their stories.

At 76, Eastwood continues to turn his back on his early image as one of the screen's meanest butt-kickers. With Steven Spielberg as co-producer, Eastwood uses Flags of Our Fathers to explore the mythology of war. Although it may disappoint some moviegoers, Eastwood seems to be saying heroism is manufactured by propagandists for their purposes, while courage under fire is something mysteriously real and generally understood only by those in the horrifying thick of things.

In essence, Eastwood fuses two movies. The first involves a graphic, harrowing depiction of the 1945 battle for Iwo Jima, which was fierce, bloody and terrifying. American deaths numbered 6,891. More than 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed.

The second of Eastwood's stories expands on the first, showing how the battle was exploited (through use of the photograph) to sell war bonds. Eastwood doesn't seem to think that this was entirely wrong, only that we need to honor the reality of the lives of the men who fought, not the iconography that has built up around them.

Basing his script on a book by James Bradley, the son of Navy Corpsman John Bradley, one of the people in the famous photo, Eastwood takes us on tour. Three of the photo's flag-raisers are shuttled around the country as part of an effort to spur war-bond sales.

To tell this story, Eastwood employs a youthful cast that doesn't boast big names. Ryan Phillippe plays Doc Bradley, one of the flag-raisers. He's joined by Marines Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach), an American Indian who was overcome by guilt and alcoholism during a tour that both honored and used these men.

Ironies abound, particularly in the way that Hayes was patronized and insulted. His guilt had something to do with the fact that the PR show took place while the 35-day battle for Iwo Jima still raged and his comrades were dying.

The script by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis doesn't entirely solve the structural problems involved in switching perspectives from the battlefield to the home front. Structural problems are further complicated by the fact that Doc Bradley's grown son (Tom McCarthy) is occasionally seen interviewing people who knew his dad, small scenes that take place long after the war has ended.

To re-create the period, Eastwood has had to use some computer-generated images that have a slightly unreal look, but the battle sequences certainly drive home the horrors of war. The stark brutality of these images sometimes makes it difficult to tell the characters apart. That seems right because a major part of the Iwo Jima story involves chaotic slaughter. About 2,000 Americans died on the first day of the assault alone.

I've never thought of Eastwood as a social satirist, but he does capture the frenzy that swirled around the flag-raising image. He creates a particularly keen sense of absurdity at a massive event at Chicago's Soldier's Field; the men are asked to storm a mock Mount Suribachi.

So what's at the heart of war? Fear, devotion to buddies, more fear and killing that will forever haunt the sleep of those who must do it.

If the film occasionally falters, Eastwood ultimately brings us to a point of stillness, reflection and sorrow. During the movie's final credits, he shows us photographs of the real men who fought, of real battle scenes and of the real propaganda effort at home. But it's the faces of the Marines on Iwo Jima that stayed with me.

After Eastwood's movie, they no longer looked quite so jaunty. They looked like what they were, young men in a deadly situation from which far too many never returned.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Jesse Bradford: The kid stays in the picture
Actor Jesse Bradford hopes that 'Flags of Our Fathers' sets the record straight on a misunderstood Iwo Jima flag-raiser.

Jeff Strickler, Star Tribune
Of the six young men who took part in the legendary flag-raising on Iwo Jima, history has been particularly unkind to one. Rene Gagnon, a New Hampshire teenager who served as a message runner for the Marines, often is accused of trying to cash in on unearned fame. But Jesse Bradford, who plays him in "Flags of Our Fathers," doesn't think that's entirely fair.

"I hope that my portrayal treats him with a little more kindness," he said. "He wasn't a bad guy. He was just a kid trying to do what was right."

Gagnon, 18, was standing off to the side as five men struggled to raise the flag. They called for him to help, which he did, in the process ending up in one of the most famous photographs of the war.

A week after the picture's publication in virtually every newspaper in the country, the flag-raisers were ordered to return to the United States to promote war bond sales. Three of them already had been killed in action, and the other two, Ira Hayes and John Bradley, were reluctant participants in the bond drive. So the effervescent Gagnon stepped forward to become the primary spokesperson. Soon he was being heralded as a war hero, much to the others' irritation.

"Rene [pronounced RAIN-ee] never saw himself as a hero," Bradford said. He married his high-school sweetheart shortly after he returned stateside, and "she was the one who pushed him into the spotlight. When I talked to Rene Jr., I warned him that the movie's portrayal of his mother might not be very flattering. And his exact words were, 'Oh. Good.' "

Besides interviewing Gagnon's son, Bradford read extensively about the battle, starting with the book by Ron Powers and James Bradley [John Bradley's son] on which the movie is based.

"That book made me cry, and that's not something I can say about a lot of books -- about a lot anything, actually," Bradford said. "It had a lot of great information in it that I used. But I also read six other books, watched a number of documentaries and found several first-hand battle accounts."

Bradford ("Bring It On") didn't do any research on Gagnon until after he had the part.

"I was afraid that I was going to look up Rene and discover that he was blonde with blue eyes and looked nothing like me," he said. "I was shocked the first time I saw his picture. There is quite a bit of resemblance."

Director Clint Eastwood left it to the actors to build their characters, an approach Bradford appreciated.

"Clint trusts his actors tremendously, and that's a huge compliment," he said. "He's not one of those directors who tries to shove something down your throat. That's the way I like it: Let me do it; it's my job."

When Gagnon died in 1979, his family was denied permission to bury him in Arlington National Cemetery, the home of the Marine Corps War Memorial (the official name of the famous statue of the flag-raising). His wife appealed the decision, and two years later he was moved to Arlington.

Bradford doesn't think that the initial rejection had anything to do with backlash against his wartime activities.

"He was rejected on a technicality" that no longer exists, he said. "I've seen his grave. The headstone has a bronze plaque showing the statue."

Asked if the movie might change the way Gagnon is remembered, Bradford said he hopes so.

"I'm proud of the way Rene comes off in the movie," he said.

Jeff Strickler • 612-673-7392 • jstrickler@startribune.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Wisconsin Has Tie To Hollywood Feature Film

Fri Oct 20, 1:09 AM ET

The story behind the feature film "Flags of Our Fathers" began on a World War II battlefield 61 years ago, as well as in Wisconsin's northwoods.

Many say it's the most famous photograph in American history -- six American servicemen raising the American flag on a small Pacific Island, known as Iwo Jima. It was taken on Feb. 23, 1945, by an Associated Press photographer.

The man pictured second from right, the most visible, is Navy Corpsman John Henry "Doc" Bradley of Antigo, Wis.

Thursday afternoon, Bradley's widow and son Mark shared their story during an interview with News Three's Eric Franke in Wausau. They had just seen the movie for the first time -- at a special premiere in Antigo -- and spoke about the reluctant hero, the inspiration behind "Flags of our Fathers."

Sixty-three years ago, Betty Van Gorp went on her first date with the man she would marry seven months later. "It didn't take long at all for me to realize that this wasn't something he wanted to talk about, so we didn't," she said. "It wasn't something that was part of our daily life."

Betty Bradley said even their eight children would grow up, unaware of the story behind the photo.

"I never had one single in-depth conversation, about what that whole experience was," said son Mark Bradley, who is vice president of Wisconsin's Board of Regents. "I knew the bits and pieces, which was his standard line -- we were just standing there and somebody said, 'Grab that heavy pole, put that flag on it, and get it up in the air.'"

John Bradley died at age 70 in 1994. He was the last survivor of the famous photo and took with him many of the stories behind the famous photograph. The stories, though, began unraveling again soon after Bradley's death.

"We were looking for his will, and in the course of doing that looking through this closet and we found this box," said Mark Bradley, who explained it was his younger brother Jim who took it one step forward. "He looked at the box and said, 'Well, what are these things?' He then was very curious about my dad keeping those items, and yet always saying the event didn't mean anything."

Betty Bradley further explained: "What struck Jim was the letter home that [John] sent to his mother and dad. He wrote, 'By now you might have seen the flag raising picture in the paper. I had a little to do with that. It was the proudest day of my life.' Well, this stunned all of us, especially Jim. This was so out of character to say it was the proudest day of his life when he avoided all of that."

Jim Bradley spent five years digging up the details about his father and the five Marines pictured alongside him. The Bradley family told News Three it was Jim who, at the urging of former presidential candidate Ross Perot, decided to turn his research into a book. "He submitted that manuscript all over the East Coast, to all the publishing houses. He had 27 rejection letters," Mark Bradley said.

Eventually, a young assistant editor at Bantam Books took a chance and, after 43 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, "Flags of Our Fathers" caught the attention of director Clint Eastwood. The Bradleys believe he has masterfully adapted the story to the big screen. "I was very happy that he didn't make these people bigger than they were in real life. He just told the story of these kids who said, 'This is my duty to jump in and help,' and that's what the movie's all about," explained Mark Bradley.

Betty added, "I'm sure [John's] still with us in spirit, but he's thinking, 'If you wanna do that, you go right ahead; I don't want to be there to be embarrassed by the attention.'"

Mark Bradley laughed while adding: "He would say, 'Am I gonna have to answer any of these questions?"

The family also hopes the movie about the past has a modern-day message. "I would hope that every high school student would see this and see movies like 'Saving Private Ryan' because that tells the real story," said Betty Bradley. "They should see these movies and see what war's really like before they make that decision, and then, you know, if nobody would go and none of the enemies would sign up either, we wouldn't have war."

The movie "Flags of Our Fathers" opens in theaters nationwide on Friday. The role of John Bradley is portrayed by actor Ryan Phillippe. Betty Bradley said the family met Phillippe and Eastwood during a day of filming near Chicago last fall. Bradley said Phillippe did a great job and even wore the exact ring her husband wore in the 1940s.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

‘A Hell of a Job’
A Hawaii vet who took part in the Iwo Jima battle praises the film for its realism
» Heroes by chance

By Burl Burlingame
bburlingame@starbulletin.com

There was some question at the time whether the battle for Iwo Jima needed to be fought at all. But in the lull between the battle of Leyte Gulf and the planned invasion of Okinawa, the Army Air Force's B-29 bombers were operating at the extreme edge of their flight envelope, without fighter cover. A mid-ocean airfield was the answer and Iwo Jima fit the bill. The Navy and the Marines were sent to capture the island for the Army. The assault was expected to be vicious but short.

It instead became a horrifically drawn-out slugfest: nearly 20,000 Japanese troops killed, only a few hundred captured. The Allies had 26,000 casualties, with more than 6,000 killed. It was the only time the Marines suffered more casualties than the Japanese.

Twenty-seven Medals of Honor were awarded to Marines for the invasion of Iwo Jima, the most ever given in a single battle. The rest of the Marines never forgot the experience.

Donn Lewin, one of the few Iwo vets living in the islands, saw Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" last week at a viewing hosted by the Pacific War Memorial. A feisty old guy -- a professional wrestler in his postwar career -- he began the movie by chattering, but within a few minutes of the combat scenes, he quieted, eventually making a single shout-out. "Pull the damn trigger!" he yelled at one harrowing moment.

"I went expecting to see a Hollywood movie, but it was so real, it was like I was there," he said afterward. "They did a hell of a job, one hell of a job."

Private Donn Lewin, 18 years old, L Company, 3rd Division, 9th Marines, went ashore with the fourth wave, which was delayed until dawn, the second day of the landing. The Japanese defenders had allowed the initial waves to pool ashore before opening up on them with hidden artillery. The result was chaos and slaughter as the Marines hung on to a fragile toehold in the black sand. Within a few hours, only Lewin and one other from his squad were still uninjured.

"The movie likes to show people having nightmares about their combat experiences, but I've never had one, not one," he said. "But that doesn't mean I don't remember every detail. And I think every day about the boys we lost."

Lewin also praised the film's dramatic construction, although he isn't sympathetic to Adam Beach's (possibly Oscar-nominated) portrayal of Ira Hayes. "Look, I'm sure he had problems. Not because of his experience or because he was an Indian, but because he was a ... drunk. Never saw but one of my guys become a crybaby. Threw down his rifle and ran away screaming he wanted to go home. Had to chase him down and pound some sense into his head. Crybaby!"

Eastwood has filmed a companion film, "Letters From Iwo Jima," showing the Japanese point of view, and Lewin wonders "how cleaned-up it will be."

"We didn't see many live Japanese," he said. "They were underground. Every once in a while, they'd pull one of their idiotic banzai charges and the next morning there would be nothing but dead Japanese as far as you could see. They wouldn't surrender. Sometimes I think the human race is out to destroy itself."

Iwo Jima, in the North Pacific, was cold at night and warm during the day, said Lewin, and the movie accurately shows that. "I think old Clint looked at all the footage of the battle and did his best to reflect that. I think some of it was real newsreel footage, but I'm not sure.

"What he got dead right was the behavior of the Marines. I guarantee you Eastwood had a brass Marine or two there to make sure they did it right. The battles were -- it was like I was there again. My god. Not Hollywood at all."

Marines today are no different than those who stormed Suribachi, said Lewin, who was wounded three times in a half-dozen Pacific campaigns. "It's a different mindset. We know there's a battle going on and our buddies are in it, we want to be there. That's why you see our guys going back to Iraq, back to Afghanistan. Wish I could go, too. There are no ex-Marines, only Marines."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Inspected & approved

Filmmakers often march in review to get military cooperation
By James Hebert
UNION-TRIBUNE ARTS WRITER

October 20, 2006

As Marines invade Iwo Jima in the new World War II film “Flags of Our Fathers,” some of them hit the beach on a vintage landing craft borrowed for the shoot from Camp Pendleton.

The military has something of its own riding on the Clint Eastwood movie: the public's understanding of one of the Marine Corps' most famous battles, a bloody struggle that yielded the iconic image of six men raising the American flag above Mount Suribachi.

So when the producers asked the Defense Department for help in making the movie, the military agreed to pitch in not only with technical expertise and equipment – such as the LVT-5 from Pendleton's World War II and Korea LVT Museum – but also with a contingent of 50 Marine extras from the historic “8th and I” barracks in Washington, D.C.

Cooperation, though, came with a catch or two: The military got to review the script, ask for changes and station an adviser on set to ensure authenticity and monitor any straying from the two parties' formal agreement.

Any moviemakers hoping for the Pentagon's help and seal of approval, from “Pearl Harbor” to “War of the Worlds” to “Star Trek IV,” have to accept that kind of trade-off. For moviemakers who need resources they won't find in the studio prop department, it can be the only way to get hold of the goods.

“Where can you get an aircraft carrier? I mean, hey,” points out Maj. Jeff Nyhart, who heads the Marine Corps film and TV liaison office in Los Angeles. “Or submarines, that type of stuff.”

And for the military, such pacts can offer powerful leverage over how the armed services are portrayed on the big screen.

“It's a great deal for both sides,” says David L. Robb, author of the book “Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the Movies” and a former reporter for Variety. “And for Hollywood, the only thing they like better than a good movie is a good deal.”

While “Flags of Our Fathers” did land the military's help, it turned out to play a minor role in getting the picture made.

“There wasn't a terrible amount they could do for us, being that this was a period picture,” says Robert Lorenz, who produced the film with Steven Spielberg and Eastwood, the director. “They didn't have all the equipment and uniforms and so forth that we needed.

“We definitely wanted (cooperation), and appreciated it. But from a practical standpoint, securing equipment and uniforms and personnel, we ended up having to go to private individuals anyway to get it.”

That fact may have lent the producers more leeway in negotiating with the military. Lorenz says that while the Pentagon's reps “respectfully asked for several (script changes), a few of which we accommodated,” they did not insist on any.

“I will say there was some concern on their part as to how some of the historical figures, some of the Marine brass were portrayed,” he adds. “But ultimately, they were respectful of the fact this was Clint, and this was a story they wanted to be told.”

It's a story that looms huge in Marine Corps lore. The image of the five Marines and one Navy hospital corpsman hoisting the flag on Iwo Jima, as captured by the late photographer Joe Rosenthal, has become the very personification of “Semper Fi.”

“Flags of Our Fathers” is based on the book by James Bradley, whose father, John, was the corpsman immortalized in the picture. The movie takes aim at the mythology surrounding the flag-raising and is unstinting in its depictions of combat casualties.

Iwo Jima was one of Japan's last strongholds in the Pacific when the Marines invaded in February 1945. The heavily fortified island bristled with hidden bunkers, and nearly 7,000 Americans died in its taking, including three of those who had raised the flag.

That hoisting of the colors actually was the second to take place; the movie depicts the almost offhanded way it was organized so that a high government official could have the first flag as a souvenir.

Once Rosenthal's photo gets publicized, the three survivors are taken off the island and trotted around the United States on a hokey war-bonds PR tour. They're conflicted over the adulation, saying the real heroes are the men who died on the island. One of the three, Cpl. Ira Hayes, eventually drinks himself to death.

The military's guidelines on movie cooperation cite the impact on recruiting and retention as a potential factor in deciding whether to assist a film. It's hard to imagine a would-be enlistee feeling gung-ho about war after seeing the battle scenes in “Flags.”

But Marine Maj. Stewart Upton, a Department of Defense spokesman in Washington (movie agreements have to be approved first by a branch of service and then by the Pentagon), says films about past wars aren't considered as crucial to recruiting. It helps, he adds, if displays of courage counterbalance the carnage.

“You would hope the film, even though it's very graphic, accurately depicts those who fought valiantly in the battles of our history,” Upton says. “And the Iwo Jima flag-raising was one of them.”

If you're a filmmaker, of course, it also helps to be named Eastwood or Spielberg.

“There's a level of trust here,” Upton says. “Those are two very well-known and respected names in the industry.”

But even for Eastwood, who has been on an Oscar-winning run from “Unforgiven” to “Million Dollar Baby,” it hasn't always been so easy to get a helping hand from the Pentagon.

As Robb details in the book, the director first landed the support of the Marines for his 1986 movie “Heartbreak Ridge,” then saw it yanked by the military after he screened the film.

Eastwood had grudgingly removed a reference to the 1983 terrorist bombing in Beirut that killed 221 Marines (the highest single-day death toll for the Corps since Iwo Jima) because the military feared it would be linked in viewers' minds to the Grenada invasion dramatized in the movie.

But the relationship fell apart over other conflicts after the screening, and the Pentagon refused to grant its imprimatur or screen the film on military bases.

That case is one of many Robb cites in which the military withheld its help over the content of a movie, or provided it only after getting the filmmakers to agree to significant changes.

Among them is “Space Cowboys,” the 2000 comedy that Eastwood directed and starred in and on which Lorenz served as an assistant director. The Air Force declined to support the film because of the way it portrayed some pilots as reckless and lacking in decorum, Robb says.

Even an innocuous comedy like “Stripes” has been through the mill; Robb quotes memos from military archives to chronicle how the 1980 movie was rewritten, altering everything from drug references to the makeup of Army recruiting ads to the behavior of a drill sergeant.

But beyond changing the shape of movies that do get made, Robb argues that the military's power to grant or withhold these taxpayer-funded resources also leads to self-censorship, discouraging some projects from being undertaken at all.

“When the government has its thumb on the scale and they're rewarding pro-military and pro-war projects, there's going to be a natural tendency for Hollywood to make more of those,” says Robb.

“You have to compete in the marketplace, and if you're making an anti-war film, you're competing against films that are essentially subsidized by the government.”

The military holds that its requests for changes to movies have more to do with fidelity to facts than to ideology, although Upton acknowledges the power of the medium to influence public opinion.

“When we do that (request changes), most of the time it is for accuracy, and also for putting (forward) the proper perception” about military personnel and their actions, says Upton.

“Because when people go and see a movie, then all of a sudden that can become a perception.”

Upton says the military doesn't keep a tally of how many projects it accepts and how many it rejects.

“We receive dozens of requests each year for a wide variety of products and types of support requested,” he says. “And we probably end up working on fewer than half.”

In researching his book, Robb found the Marine Corps more open to talking to him and providing files than were the other branches of service.

He says he recalls a rep from the Marines' film office telling him, “We've got nothing to hide.”

Robb believes that “part of it is just fearlessness. They're not afraid of a little reporter. And the others are.”

Lorenz's experience seems to back up the perception of the differences among the branches.

“Some of the requests for changes actually came from the Navy, as I recollect, and not so much from the Marine Corps,” Lorenz says. “The Marine Corps really did embrace this project.

“I mean, it is their story. This is just my point of view, but I do get the sense the Marine Corps has a more down-to-earth, realistic point of view about these things.”

Lorenz believes that over time the military has become more open-minded about how it's portrayed on film.

“I think in terms of the media in general, there's much more awareness by folks in the government that it should be embraced and turned to an advantage, as opposed to (being adversarial),” says Lorenz.

But Robb is not so sure. He recalls Phil Strub, the civilian head of the Pentagon's film liaison office, telling him that today the military would never support a movie such as the 1953 classic “From Here to Eternity” because “it showed officers in a not-very-good light. And one guy hooked up with a prostitute.

“They would never (allow) that. So the standards have gotten stricter.”

When the military has cooperated on a movie project, there's generally a credit line at the conclusion, acknowledging the assistance. Robb says when he's at the movies, he likes to wait to that point, to see if the military gets thanked. But doing so isn't actually necessary, he maintains, to figure out if the filmmakers got a hand from the Pentagon.

“You can always tell,” Robb says. “If it's positive, they got it. If it's not, they didn't.”

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Hero worship

By JEFFREY WESTHOFF - sidetracks@nwnewsgroup.com

On Feb. 23, 1945, five Marines and one sailor planted a makeshift flagpole atop Mount Surabachi on the tiny isle of Iwo Jima.

Their effort lasted only seconds, but photographer Joe Rosenthal captured one of those seconds on film. That picture became not only the most evocative image of World War II, but perhaps the 20th century.

Back in the director’s chair, Clint Eastwood explores the reality and mythology of that famous photo in “Flags of Our Fathers,” based on James Bradley and Ron Powers’ book of oral history.

Admirable intentions stand at attention throughout the film, and Eastwood does not muddle the themes of patriotism and heroism the way Stephen Spielberg did in “Saving Private Ryan,” but Eastwood and screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis do muddle the storytelling in a major way.

Without a discernable pattern, the script cuts and pastes together events from several timelines, each featuring its own narrator (sometimes two).

Unless you have read the book or are a World War II history buff who knows the history of each of the six men in the picture, the film’s shifts in time will befuddle you at least once.

The two main story threads are the actual invasion of Iwo Jima and a war bond drive several months later featuring three of the flag raisers, John “Doc” Bradley (Ryan Phillippe), Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) and Ira Hayes (Adam Beach). The other three flag raisers died in combat shortly after the picture was taken.

The film also jumps ahead to the 1990s, and we get little help figure out which of the young fighters are now the old men being interviewed by James Bradley (Tom McCarthy) as he researches his book. He is the son of Doc Bradley (played as an old man by George Grizzard), and decides to write the book shortly after his father dies.

Eastwood tries hard to construct “Flags of Our Fathers” as an art film.

Like the reporter in “Citizen Kane,” Bradley’s face is in shadows as he conducts his interviews.

The film would be more compelling if Eastwood limited his narrative to contrast the horrors of the invasion with the demeaning war bonds tour.

For instance, Bradley, Gagnon and Hayes are ordered to re-enact the flag raising on a papier-mâché mountaintop erected on the 20-yard line of Chicago’s Soldier Field.

The three men grimace each time they are introduced as “the heroes of Iwo Jima” because to them the real

heroes are the comrades who died there. Hayes eventually breaks down.

“I can’t take them calling me a hero,” he says. “All I did was try not to get shot.”

And though the military brass in charge of the bond drive call Hayes, a Native American, a hero, they don’t treat him like one. He must marshal every ounce of self-control every time some idiot calls him “Chief” or makes a degrading comment like, “I bet you went after them with your tomahawk.”

The most intriguing, and in some ways most courageous, aspect of “Flags” is how Eastwood deconstructs the use of the word “hero.” The film’s point is that those of use who remain home when wars are fought need to think of soldiers as heroes because it eases our own guilt.

The battle scenes are powerful, as well. Thankfully, Eastwood doesn’t

resort to the herky-jerky handheld cameras and quick-cut editing that have become the clichés of World War II battles ever since “Private Ryan.” He does use a similarly somber palette of desaturated colors, though.

Although I have seen it only once, I am certain “Flags of Our Fathers”

becomes a better film the second time you see it. How much better I don’t know, but I plan to find out.

“Flags Of Our Fathers”

3 stars

Rated R for language and sequences

of graphic war violence and carnage

Running time: 2 hours, 12 minutes

Written by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis

Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring Ryan Phillippe, Adam Beach, Jesse Bradford, Barry Pepper, Jamie Bell

Ellie

[thedrifter]

With twin films, Japan and US let go of Iwo Jima scars

by Shaun Tandon
Fri Oct 20, 10:08 PM ET

As he took his first stroll in six decades on the sulfuric sands of this Pacific island, a blazing sun beating on his sturdy frame, Keith Renstrom knew he could finally let go.

In 1945, the last time he was in Iwo Jima, he was a 24-year-old US Marine gunning his way through a maze of Japanese trenches, fighting an enemy whose face was invisible -- in more ways than one.

On the 11th day of the bloody Battle of Iwo Jima, Renstrom at last had a clear view of an enemy soldier. The Japanese flung a hand grenade, pieces of which still remain in Renstrom's left arm and below his heart.

Returning to Iwo Jima, the former Marine Gunnery sergeant again saw a Japanese man waiting for him on the black sand where US forces had landed on February 16, 1945.

Except this time it was a Japanese television journalist in a coat and tie, eager to know why he came back to an island of such bitter memories.

Renstrom let out the words he had waited so long to utter on Iwo Jima.

"I used to hate your people. I used to hate them!" Renstrom, the passion raw in his voice, exclaimed to the Japanese camera crew, as one of his adult sons stood behind him, filming as well with a handheld recorder.

"But I have got that hate out of me. That is the code of the warrior," he said.

"I respected them because they would die doing what they believed in," he said of the Japanese.

Sitting at a memorial on the island -- which was immortalized in a photograph of battle-weary soldiers hoisting up the American flag in victory -- Japanese veteran Takeshi Arai has also overcome the scars of World War II.

"I could never imagine this would happen," Arai said.

"The way we had been taught and raised was that we would never be defeated," he said. "I am so happy that former enemies could become friends."

Those former combatants came together for one day earlier this year on a rare tour of Iwo Jima. After the war, the United States returned the island to Japan, which has transformed into one of its closest allies.

Now the two perspectives on one of World War II's bloodiest battles have also come to the cinema in films directed by Clint Eastwood.

In an unusual move, Eastwood has produced two films on the battle -- one from the US and the other from the Japanese point of view.

But instead of highlighting the differences between the two sides, Eastwood -- echoing veterans like Renstrom and Arai -- has thrown a spotlight on the common experience: the human toll of war and the emotional frailties of those ordered by their superiors to kill.

"In most war pictures in the past, the ones I grew up with, it was always one sided. There was a villain on one side and there were the good guys. Life isn't like that. And war isn't like that," Eastwood said.

"The results and the impact are the same on all warriors -- and people -- sent out there to defend their country," he said in Tokyo.

Some 21,900 Japanese and 6,821 Americans died in the Battle of Iwo Jima. For Americans, the hard-fought triumph brought the US military in crucial striking distance of the Japanese mainland, which US planes soon afterward firebombed.

The Japanese had prepared for a US invasion for months, turning the island 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) south of Tokyo into what they believed would be an invincible line of defense with soldiers in caves and underground trenches ready to die.

Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who was personally tasked by prime minister Hideki Tojo with defending Iwo Jima, died in a last-ditch charge as his men lost the island.

Kuribayashi is played in the Japanese film, entitled "Letters from Iwo Jima" and due for general release in Japan in December, by Ken Watanabe, the country's best-known actor overseas.

Despite giving his life to holding back the US military -- and contrary to many US troops' impression of an impossibly foreign enemy -- Kuribayashi had studied in the United States and had deep respect for Americans.

"I wanted to take part in this question of why the main character, Lieutenant General Kuribayashi, a man who adored the US and did not want to fight the US, nevertheless fought the US with everything he had," Watanabe said.

"Clint Eastwood's intention is to show the very struggle of this man, who ended up doing something that he wanted more than anything else not to do. He wanted to show the struggles of this man and of regular men who were sent to fight," Watanabe said.

To better understand the Japanese perspective, Eastwood sought the advice of Kuribayashi's grandson, Yo****aka Shindo, a member of the Japanese parliament who heads an Iwo Jima veterans group.

"This isn't just a war movie," Shindo said.

"What it tells you is why Japanese soldiers fought. It was for their family and for their country, the same as the Americans. They had the same thoughts but yet they had to fight," he said. "It will be rewarding for both sides to see."

-- 'We can make up' --

The US film, "Flags of Our Fathers," out in US cinemas on October 20, is based on James Bradley's best-selling book of the same name telling the stories of the five Marines and a Navy corpsman who raised the flag on Iwo Jima.

The soldiers in the iconic photograph relate the US story by their very backgrounds. They included a Slovakian immigrant, Michael Strank, and an American Indian, Ira Hayes.

James Bradley, the son of one of the six men in the photograph, John "Doc" Bradley, said his father was "just doing what he was trained to do."

"The men on Iwo Jima fought for each other. When you train with someone for six months and you land on a beach with them, you are concerned about your buddies, and they in turn are concerned about you," Bradley said.

On top of Mount Suribachi, at 166 meters (546 feet) the highest point on Iwo Jima, veterans and their families proudly restaged the raising of the flag, some kissing the Stars and Stripes as they took it down.

Few seemed to notice -- or care -- that nearby the commemorative flagpole lay a small shrine dedicated to Japan's notorious kamikaze suicide pilots.

"The guys who died down on that beach had to fight them," said Anthony DeFusco, an Iwo Jima veteran from Massachusetts. "But we can make up and be one. They're our strongest ally now."

Renstrom -- known affectionately by fellow Marines as "Gunny" -- recalled that the last time he walked the fabled beach he was in dread of a ruthless enemy.

Instead of a full-fledged attack on the US forces, the Japanese -- whose cry as they charged was "Banzai," or long live the emperor -- would pop out of their hiding spots, hoping to kill or maim.

"We had expected a banzai charge. But they never cracked. Never did they crack," he said.

After being evacuated for his injuries to Guam and then returning to his native Utah, he eventually learned another side of the Japanese. A Mormon, Renstrom worked as a missionary to the Japanese community in Hawaii.

He said he now understands his former enemy -- and even admires them.

"As a warrior, you are trained for one purpose and that's to go and kill 'the animal,'" he said.

"They were dedicated. They felt just like we did."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Posted on Sun, Oct. 22, 2006

Marine vet remembers service, sacrifice at Iwo Jima

DAVID ROGERS
Cox News Service


PALM BEACH - United States Marines, Joseph Dryer Jr. will tell you, are more than comrades in arms.

They are brothers, members of a close-knit, well-disciplined family. And members of that family make sacrifices to serve their country and protect one another.

Dryer, a 45-year resident of Palm Beach, is pleased that Clint Eastwood has directed a film that will educate generations unfamiliar with the World War II battle of Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest battles the Marines ever faced.

On the eve of the release of that film, "Flags of Our Fathers," Dryer could not share memories with any of his Marine buddies. Of the friends he landed with, all but Dryer and one other man were killed on that tiny island.

"Flags of Our Fathers," which opened Friday, tells the story of the battle and, in particular, of the six U.S. servicemen - five Marines and one Navy corpsman - who were immortalized by a single snap of a camera shutter.

Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal's Pulitzer Prize-winning image of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945, became an indelible symbol of the Marines' victory on the craggy, 8-square-mile island. The win was a key moment in the Pacific campaign and foreshadowed Japan's surrender Sept. 2, 1945.

From the invasion of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, through March 26 of that year, about 70,000 Marines scoured the island to rout an enemy that was frantic to defend its territory.

Operation Detachment, initiated by heavy Air Force and Navy shelling of the island, was waged to take control of Iwo Jima and its airfields. The island is about 670 miles south of Tokyo.

Capturing Iwo Jima would give U.S. fighter and bomber planes an emergency refueling site during long-range attacks on mainland Japan and also would knock out the Iwo Jima radar system.

Though the Japanese forces were outnumbered, their determination to hold Iwo Jima and prevent an invasion of Japan made them deadly opponents. They used the time before the American invasion to train, construct hundreds of protective concrete pillboxes, dig about three miles of tunnels, establish sniper sites and operations in caves, set mines on roads and stockpile food.

The offensive, fought yard by yard, cost the lives of 6,821 members of the 3rd, 4th and 5th Marine Divisions. Some 20,000 other Marines, including Dryer, were wounded. Of the more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers entrenched on the island, 18,000 died.

Twenty-two Marines and five sailors were awarded the Medal of Honor for their heroics on Iwo Jima, the most awarded to date for a single battle.

"It is the best example of the Marine Corps' combination of esprit de corps, brotherhood and training that I can think of," Dryer said.

Rosenthal's photograph made celebrities of the six U.S. servicemen who planted the flag on Mount Suribachi. But every Marine who fought in that battle made a tremendous sacrifice, Dryer said.

He recounted memories of Iwo Jima recently in the library of the large, welcoming home he shares with his wife, Nancy.

Though Dryer went on to become a hotel proprietor, stockbroker and automobile security company chairman, Iwo Jima remains a defining moment of his 85 years.

He was 23 when the amphibious units began their invasion. Many of the Marines in the platoon he led were very young, he recalled.

They were on edge day and night because the Japanese snipers were everywhere. Japanese soldiers also made nighttime incursions into the American camps, dropping grenades and firing machine guns. Their orders, Dryer said, were to fight to the death and not be taken captive.

"In the beginning, it takes time to get adjusted to the people you are losing, the friends you are losing," Dryer said.

Dryer says the thousands who died in the battle for Iwo Jima sacrificed their lives for the mission and each other.

"It's very hard to imagine someone in Palm Beach, West Palm Beach or Fort Lauderdale, if they saw a grenade, throwing themselves on top of it so nobody else would be hurt by it, but that was not uncommon" at Iwo Jima, he said. "It's the way people thought. It's training."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

10/22/2006
Film omits Genaust’s Iwo Jima effort
BY BILL WAGNER
STAFF WRITER

The motion picture “Flags of Our Father” contains some stirring scenes of patriotism and military derring-do as U.S. Marines wrest the island of Iwo Jima from Japanese during a bloody campaign in February 1945.

It’s what the film doesn’t show that bothers Bob Bolus, a Scranton businessman. He thinks there’s a real hero, his deeds unsung, still on the island.

The movie, which opened last week in theaters across the U.S., depicts an event that rallied American fighting men on Iwo Jima and cheered the hearts of people back home.

That was the raising of the American flag atop Mount Suribachi, the highest point on the island, from which the sight of Old Glory waving in the Pacific breeze was visible from one end of Iwo Jima to the other. It’s also a high point and the focus of the motion picture.

A photograph of that event made by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press thrilled readers when newspapers across the nation printed it. Mr. Rosenthal, who died only recently, received a lifetime of praise for his achievement.

But Mr. Rosenthal was not the only photographer recording the event, Mr. Bolus points out. A Marine sergeant, Bill Genaust, had his Bell & Howell motion picture camera trained on four fellow Marines and a sailor as they labored to raise the flag in the stiff breeze sweeping the hilltop.

Mr. Rosenthal returned home to little less than a hero’s welcome.

Genaust’s film went on to Hawaii for processing. He died two days later when he and a buddy encountered enemy troops in a cave. Marines cleared the cave with flamethrowers and bombs, then sealed the opening. Fearing booby traps, they did not recover Genaust’s body. He never saw the result of his work.

If Mr. Rosenthal’s picture cheered the folks back home, Genaust’s film caused a sensation. It was shown again and again in movie houses, being all the more effective because it provided a continuous record of the action. It still appears on televised historical programs.

“Credit was given to Joe Rosenthal, but the man we left behind never received his just recognition,” Mr. Bolus said. “That was a patriotic symbol that I watched as a child growing up. Very impressive.”

So impressed was he as a child that when he read an article about Genaust in The Sunday Times Parade magazine Feb. 20, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the battle, he decided, “That’s somebody who needs to come home.”

Since reading the Parade article, Mr. Bolus has tracked down every bit of information available to him about Genaust, corresponding with relatives and enlisting the support of the U.S. Department of Defense and the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command at Hickam Air Force Base, Oahu, Hawaii. Its mission is to achieve the fullest possible accounting of all Americans missing as a result of this nation’s conflicts.

He has submitted his recovery plan to the Defense Department and the joint accounting command. “They are now critiquing it for me.”

He was on Iwo Jima in March with a Marine remembrance tour and briefly explored the area around Hill 362A, where the Genaust cave is. Now he hopes to return, possibly in November, with a forensics team. “I’m totally confident we’re in the area now.”

He has requested a three-week bivouac area on the island, he said. Japan will not object “as long as we’re not running all over the island digging holes.”

“We’re just now finalizing the recovery plan,” he said. “I have my own medical people, demolition people, I have to have a geologist, a forensic anthropologist, a park surveyor.”

He said since he began his search, officials have checked a cemetery on Hawaii where Genaust’s remains would have been buried. DNA testing could be inconclusive, he was told, because chemicals used in embalming would have destroyed DNA.

“Flags of Our Fathers” may not show Genaust, but Mr. Bolus believes it can re-energize the search for his remains.

“They have now about 90 percent confirmed that Genaust is still in the cave on Iwo Jima,” Mr. Bolus said. He intends to find him. And bring him home.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Eastwood Stumbles with Flags
October 22nd, 2006

General George Patton once said that the best strategy ever devised can be quickly rendered useless by the application of lousy tactics, while a flawed strategy can be rescued by practicing sound tactical principals. In the case of moviemaking, the technological marvel of computer generated images (CGI) and the performers are the tactical tools used to accomplish the strategic objective of bringing a movie’s story and action to the screen. Unfortunately, the amazing CGI effects and the strength of the cast can’t entirely lift Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers out of the realm of mediocrity.

The movie revolves around remembrances of the survivors of the six men who raised the US flag on Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in February of 1945. We see that informal interviews are being conducted about the battle and its aftermath, but don’t fully understand the connections until the end of the movie, when it’s finally revealed that the son of the Navy Corpsman accompanying the Marines, John “Doc” Bradley, has actually been visiting each of the surviving members of his father’s unit.

Right off the bat, viewers endure a clumsy and historically inaccurate attempt to weave in a comparison to the Vietnam War. During the first interview, Dave Severance, played by Harve Presnell (who portrayed Gen. George C. Marshall in Saving Private Ryan), says that from the moment the photo was published of a Vietnamese officer shooting a VC in the head, that the war was lost, and that “we just pretended otherwise” until our withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Likewise, he says, the Joe Rosenthal picture of the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi won the war for the US.

This is simply propagandizing to a new generation of Americans without providing context or any modicum of historical accuracy. That the shooter was the town’s sheriff, who was understandably enraged that the VC he executed was part of a unit that had kidnapped and brutally murdered the sheriff’s family is never mentioned.

It is odd then, that a movie ostensibly concerned with debunking myths and legends concerning the flag-raising on Iwo Jima would perpetuate a favorite myth of the 60s-era anti-war left without an iota of skepticism. But it’s maybe not so strange, when one of the screen writers turns out to be William Broyles, Jr., who also wrote the screenplay for Jarhead, another horribly inaccurate war movie that focused on the selfish needs of a lone, dysfunctional Marine.

At any rate, Joe Rosenthal’s famous picture on Iwo did not win WW II any more than one photo of a VC execution caused the US to lose the war in Vietnam. And for Eastwood and Broyles to draw such a flawed comparison, or to push the courage and determination of our service men and women to the fringe, is enough reason to avoid the movie altogether.

After the initial interview, the film is a confusing jumble of vignettes that leaves the audience busy trying to decipher a triple flashback format. But the real problem is that Eastwood can’t figure out if he wants a rehash of Saving Private Ryan, or if he wants a remake of The Outsider, which examined the psyche and post-war troubles of Ira Hayes in a far more straightforward and sober manner.

The most inane segments of the movie occur when the “non-heroes” return to the States to pump up war-weary Americans to buy War Bonds one more time or else, it is intimated, the entire war effort will collapse before final victory is achieved. The looming financial disaster of a wartime US, barely scraping by, is horribly overplayed in the film.

One might chalk it up to the exaggerations in the pep talk by the men’s handler prior to their appearances at the bond rallies. Yet, this notion is reinforced when they meet President Harry Truman, played by veteran character actor David Patrick Kelly. This is not one of his best outings. As Truman, he comes across as Ken Lay redux, the polite, firm, and somewhat greasy CEO-type, announcing that the country’s fate hangs in the balance if “you boys” don’t get Americans to pony up $14 billion dollars.

This is ludicrous on its face. The Manhattan Project had been going gangbusters and the US would detonate the world’s first A-bomb in a couple of months, all accomplished with the expenditure of many billions of dollars. Germany would surrender in a few short weeks, and troops, ships, tanks, and planes would start to converge on the Western Pacific as required. War manufacturing was at its peak, and showed no signs of letting up any time soon. And most of all, Harry Truman, who had assumed responsibility from FDR for carrying out the policy of unconditional surrender, who would later decide to drop two A-bombs on Japan to ensure victory, is now reduced in the movie to a nervous money-grubber, hatching some Rube Goldberg scheme to grab one last buck from tired American investors.

Anyone buying any of this dreck? Apparently, Clint Eastwood thinks you will.

The Corpsman’s son narration finally makes some sense of this mess, and it never hurts to remind Americans about the sacrifices of our service men and women both past and present. At this, Flags does very well, even if it saves this important message until the end.

Hollywood has, at least for the moment, seemingly lost its Germany/Hitler fixation and finally realized that we also fought a war in the Pacific. It was a fight against a far more brutal and inhumane enemy, who carried the Warrior Code to fanatical extremes. In this sense, The Great Raid and Flags of Our Fathers provide a necessary reality check by depicting the horror of battle in the Pacific against an enemy not unlike the jihadists of today.

Nevertheless, Flags simply has too much post-modern baggage to effectively and consistently convey what’s at stake when the US goes to war against an extremist and suicidal foe. For my tastes, I’ll stick with The Great Raid. Better yet, Eastwood might even consider a movie about the battles for Fallujah, Najaf, Kandahar, or… never mind. That’s probably in the too hard to do category.

Douglas Hanson is the national security correspondent of American Thinker.


Douglas Hanson

Ellie